His Masters Voice

Preface

Though I may shock many readers with the words that follow, it is my duty, I am convinced, to speak them. I never before wrote a book like this; and, since it is not the custom for mathematicians to introduce their works with statements of a personal nature, I could have spared myself the trouble.

It was as a result of circumstances beyond my control that I became involved in the events that I wish to relate here. The reasons I preface the account with a kind of confession should become evident later on. In speaking of myself, I must choose some frame of reference; let this be the recent biography of me penned by Professor Harold Yowitt. Yowitt calls me a mind of the highest caliber, in that the problems that I attacked were always, among those currently available, the most difficult. He shows that my name was to be found wherever the heritage of science was in the process of being torn down and the edifice of new concepts raised — for example, in the mathematical revolution, in the field of physico-ethics, or in the Master’s Voice Project.

When I came, in my reading, to the place where the subject was destruction, I expected, after the mention of my iconoclastic inclinations, further, bolder inferences, and thought that at last I had found a biographer — which did not overjoy me, because it is one thing to strip oneself, and another, entirely, to be stripped. But Yowitt, as if frightened by his own acumen, then returned — inconsequently — to the accepted version of me as the persistent, modest genius, and even trotted out a few of the old-standby anecdotes about me.

So I could set this book on the shelf with my other biographies, calmly, little dreaming, at the time, that I would soon be entering the lists with my flattering portraitist. I noted, also, that not much space remained on the shelf, and recalled what I had once said to Yvor Baloyne, that I would die when the shelf was filled. He took it as a joke, and I did not insist, though I had expressed a genuine conviction, no less genuine for being absurd. And therefore — to return to Yowitt — once again I had succeeded, or, if you like, failed, in that at the age of sixty-two I had twenty-eight volumes devoted to my person and yet remained completely unknown. But am I being fair?

Professor Yowitt wrote about me in accordance with rules not of his making. Not all public figures may be treated the same. Great artists, yes, may be drawn in their pettiness, and some biographers even seem to think that the soul of the artist is perforce a scurvy thing. For the great scientists, however, the old stereotype is still mandatory. Artists we view as spirits chained to the flesh; literary critics are free to discuss the homosexuality of an Oscar Wilde, but it is hard to imagine any historian of science dealing analogously with the creators of physics. We must have them incorruptible, ideal, and the events of history are no more than local changes in the circumstances of their lives. A politician may be a villain without ceasing to be a great politician, whereas a villainous genius — that is a contradiction in terms. Villainy cancels genius. So demand the rules of today.

True, a group of psychoanalysts from Michigan did attempt to challenge this state of affairs, but they fell into the sin of oversimplification. The physicist’s evident propensity to theorize, these scholars derived from sexual repression. Psychoanalytic doctrine reveals the pig in man, a pig saddled with a conscience; the disastrous result is that the pig is uncomfortable beneath that pious rider, and the rider fares no better in the situation, since his endeavor is not only to tame the pig but also to render it invisible. The notion that we have within us an ancient Beast that carries upon its back a modern Reason — is a pastiche of primitive mythologies.

Psychoanalysis provides truth in an infantile, that is, a schoolboy fashion: we learn from it, roughly and hurriedly, things that scandalize us and thereby command our attention. It sometimes happens, and such is the case here, that a simplification touching upon the truth, but cheaply, is of no more value than a lie. Once again we are shown the demon and the angel, the beast and the god locked in Manichean embrace, and once again man has been pronounced, by himself, not culpable, as he is but the field of combat for forces that have entered him, distended him, and hold sway inside his skin. Thus psychoanalysis is, primarily, sophomoric. Shockers are to explain man to us, and the whole drama of existence is played out between piggishness and the sublimation into which civilized effort can transform it.

So I really ought to be thankful to Professor Yowitt, for maintaining my likeness in the classical style and not borrowing the methods of the Michigan psychologists. Not that I intend to speak better of myself than they would speak; but there is, surely, a difference between a caricature and a portrait.

Which is not to say that I believe a man who is the subject of biographies possesses any greater knowledge of himself than his biographers do. Their position is more convenient, for uncertainties may be attributed to a lack of data, which allows the supposition that the one described, were he but alive and willing, could supply the needed information. The one described, however, possesses nothing more than hypotheses on the subject of himself, hypotheses that may be of interest as the products of his mind but that do not necessarily serve as those missing pieces.

With sufficient imagination a man could write a whole series of versions of his life; it would form a union of sets in which the facts would be the only elements in common. People, even intelligent people, who are young, and therefore inexperienced and naïve, see only cynicism in such a possibility. They are mistaken, because the problem is not moral but cognitive. The number of metaphysical beliefs is no greater or less than the number of different beliefs a man may entertain on the subject of himself — sequentially, at various periods of his life, and occasionally even at the same time.

Therefore, I cannot claim to offer anything other than the notions of myself that I have formed over the space of roughly forty years, and their only singularity, it seems to me, is that they are not flattering. Nor is this uncomplimentariness limited to “the pulling off of the mask,” which is the only trick available to the psychoanalyst. To say, for example, of a genius that morally he was a bastard may not necessarily hit him in the place of his private shame. A mind that “reached the ceiling of the age,” as Yowitt puts it, will not be bothered by that type of diagnosis. The shame of a genius may be his intellectual futility, the knowledge of how uncertain is all that he has accomplished. And genius is, above all, constant doubting. Not one of the greats, however, bent beneath the pressure of society, has pulled down the monuments raised to him in his life, calling himself thereby into question.

As one whose genius has been duly certified by several dozen learned biographers, I think I may say a word or two on the topic of intellectual summits; which is simply that clarity of thought is a shining point in a vast expanse of unrelieved darkness. Genius is not so much a light as it is a constant awareness of the surrounding gloom, and its typical cowardice is to bathe in its own glow and avoid, as much as possible, looking out beyond its boundary. No matter how much genuine strength it may contain, there is also, inevitably, a considerable part that is only the pretense of that strength.

The fundamental traits of my character I consider to be cowardice, malice, and pride. As it turned out, this triumvirate had at its disposal a certain talent, which concealed it and ostensibly transformed it, and intelligence assisted in this — intelligence is one of life’s most effective instruments for masking inborn traits, once it decides that such a course is desirable. For forty-odd years I have been an obliging, modest individual, devoid of any sign of professional arrogance, because for a very long time and most persistently I schooled myself in precisely this behavior. But as far back into childhood as I can recall, I sought out evil, though of course I was unaware of it.

My evil was isotropic, unbiased, and totally disinterested. In places of veneration, such as churches, or in the company of particularly worthy persons, I liked to think forbidden thoughts. That the content of these thoughts was ludicrously puerile does not matter in the least. I was simply conducting experiments on a scale practically accessible to me. I do not remember when I began these experiments. I remember only the deep sense of injury, the anger, and the disappointment that came upon me some years later, when it turned out that a head filled with wickedness would never, not in any place nor in any company, be struck by lightning; that breaking free of and not participating in the Proper brought with it no — absolutely no — punishment.

If it is at all possible to speak thus of a child of less than ten, I wanted that lightning or some other form of dire retribution; I summoned it, challenged it, and grew to despise the world, the place of my existence, because it had demonstrated the futility of all action and thought, evil included. Thus I never tormented animals, or hurt even the grass underfoot; on the other hand, I lashed out at stones, the sand, I abused furniture, subjected water to torture, and mentally smashed the stars to pieces, to punish them for their indifference to me, and as I did so my fury became more and more helpless, for my understanding increased, of how ridiculous were the things I did.

Somewhat later on, with self-knowledge, I came to the realization that my condition was a kind of keen unhappiness that was utterly useless to me, because it could serve no purpose. I said before that my rancor was unbiased: I bestowed it first upon myself. The shape of my arms, of my legs, the features of my face, seen in the mirror, galled me in a way in which usually only the features of others cause us anger or impatience. When I grew a bit older, I saw that it was impossible to live like this; I determined, through a progression of decisions, exactly what I ought to be, and from then on strove — true, with variable results — to adhere to that established plan.

An autobiography that begins by listing cowardice, malice, and pride as the foundations of one’s psyche entails, from the deterministic point of view, a logical error. If one says that everything in us is predetermined, then predetermined also must have been my resistance to my inner meanness, and the difference between me and other, better people is then reduced to nothing but a variation in the localized source of the behavior. What those better people did voluntarily, at little cost, for they but followed their own natural inclination, I practiced in opposition to mine — hence, as it were, artificially. Yet since it was I who dictated conduct to myself, I was, in the overall balance — in this formulation — nevertheless predestined to be as good as gold. Like Demosthenes with the pebbles in his stammering mouth, I put iron deep in my soul, to straighten it.

But it is precisely in this equalizing that determinism reveals its absurdity. A phonograph record of angelic singing is not an iota better morally than one that reproduces, when played, a scream of murder. According to determinism, he who desired and was able to be better was no more or less fated beforehand than he who desired but was unable, or than he who did not even attempt to desire. This is a false image, for the sound of battle played on a record is not an actual battle. Knowing what it cost me, I can say that my struggle to be good was no semblance. Determinism simply deals with something altogether different; the forces that operate according to the calculus of physics have nothing whatever to do with the matter — just as a crime is not made innocent by its translation into the language of amplitudes of atomic probabilities.

About one thing Yowitt is definitely right: I always sought difficulty. Opportunities for me to give free rein to my natural malice I usually forwent, as too easy. It may sound strange, or even nonsensical, but I did not suppress my inclination to evil with my eyes fixed on the Good as a higher value; rather, I suppressed it for the precise reason that I felt so powerfully its presence in me. What counted for me was the calculus of resistance, which had nothing in common with the arithmetic of morality. Therefore I really cannot say what would have become of me had the principal trait of my nature been the inclination to do only good. As usual, reasoning that attempts to picture ourselves in a form other than what is given breaks the rules of logic and must quickly founder.

Once only did I not eschew evil; that memory is connected with the protracted and horrible death of my mother. I loved her, yet at the same time I followed with an unusually keen and avid attention the process of her destruction in the illness. I was nine then. She, the personification of tranquillity, of strength, of a composure almost sovereign, lay in a lingering agony, an agony prolonged by the doctors. I, at her side in the darkened bedroom filled with the stink of medicine, still kept a grip on myself; but when I left her, as soon as I had shut the door behind me and found myself alone, I stuck out my tongue joyfully in the direction of her bed, and, that being insufficient, ran to my room and breathlessly jumped up and down in front of the mirror, fists clenched, making faces and giggling with delight. With delight? I understood perfectly that my mother was dying; since that morning I had fallen into despair, and the despair was as real as my stifled giggling. I remember how the giggling frightened me, yet at the same time it took me beyond everything I had known, and in that transgression there was a dazzling revelation.

That night, lying alone, I tried to comprehend what had taken place; unable to do this, I worked up a befitting pity for myself and my mother, and tears flowed until I fell asleep. I considered these tears to be an expiation; but then, later, the whole thing repeated itself, when I overheard the doctors conveying worse and worse news to my father. I dared not go up to my room; deliberately I sought the company of others. Thus the first person I ever shrank from was myself.

After my mother’s death I gave myself up to a child’s despair that was untroubled by any qualms. The fascination ended with her last breath. With her died my anxiety. This incident is so confusing that I can only offer a hypothesis. I had witnessed the fall of the Absolute — it had been shown to be an illusion — and witnessed a shameful, obscene struggle, because in it Perfection had come apart like the most miserable rag. This was the trampling of life’s Order, and although people above me supplied the repertoire of that Order with special evasions even for so dismal an occasion, these additions failed to fit what had happened. One cannot, with dignity, with grace, howl in pain — any more than one can in ecstasy. In the messiness of loss I sensed a truth. Perhaps I saw, in that which disrupted, the stronger side, and so sided with that side, because it had the upper hand.

My hidden laughter had no connection with the actual suffering of my mother. I only feared that suffering; it was the unavoidable concomitant of the expiring that I could understand, and I would have delivered her from the pain had I been able. I desired neither her suffering nor her death. At a real murderer I would have thrown myself with tears and pleas, like any child, but since there was none, I could only absorb the cruel treachery of the blow. Her body, bloated, turned into a monstrous, mocking caricature of itself, and it writhed in that mockery. I had only one choice: either to be destroyed with her or to jeer at her. As a coward, then, I chose the laughter of betrayal.

I cannot say whether it really was this way. The first paroxysm of giggling seized me at the sight of the destruction; perhaps the experience would have skipped me had my mother met her end in a fashion more aesthetic, like quietly falling asleep, a form that is much favored by people. It was not like that, however, and, forced to believe my own eyes, I proved defenseless. In earlier times a chorus of hired mourners, brought in quickly, would have drowned out the groans of my mother. But the decline of tradition has reduced magical measures to the level of hairdressing, because the undertaker — and I overheard this — suggested to my father the various facial expressions into which her frozen grimace could be reworked. My father left the room then, and for a brief moment I felt a tremor of solidarity, because I understood him. Later I thought of that mortal agony many times.

The idea of my laughter as a betrayal seems incomplete. Betrayal is the result of conscious decision, but what causes us to be drawn to destruction? What black hope, in destruction, beckons man? Its utter inutility rules out any rational explanation. This hunger has been suppressed in vain by numerous civilizations. It is as irrevocably a part of us as two-leggedness. To him who seeks a reason but cannot abide any hypothesis of a design, whether in the form of Providence or of the Diabolical, there remains only the rationalist’s substitute for demonology — statistics. Thus it is from a darkened room filled with the smell of corruption that the trail leads to my mathematical anthropogenesis. With the formulae of stochastics I strove to undo the evil spell. But this, too, is only conjecture, therefore a self-defensive reflex of the mind.

I know that what I am writing here could be, with slight shifts in emphasis, turned to my favor — and that some future biographer will try to do this. He will show that with intellect I conquered my character, achieved a great victory, but defamed myself out of a desire to do penance. Such labor follows in the steps of Freud, who has become the Ptolemy of psychology, for now, with him, anyone can explain human phenomena, raising epicycles upon epicycles: that construction speaks to us, because it is aesthetic. He converted the pastoral model into one that was grotesque, unaware that he remained a prisoner of aesthetics. It was as if the purpose had been to replace the opera, in anthropology, with tragicomedy.

Let my posthumous biographer not trouble himself. I require no apologia; all my effort was born of curiosity, untouched by any feeling of guilt. I wanted to understand — only to understand, nothing more. For the disinterestedness of evil is the only support, in man, for the theological argument; theology answers the question where does a quality come from that has its origin neither in nature nor in culture. A mind immersed totally in the human experience, and therefore anthropocentric, might finally agree with the image of Creation as a somewhat sick joke.

It is an attractive idea, that of a Creator who merely amused Himself, but here we enter into a vicious circle: we imagine Him sadistic not because He made us that way, but because we are ourselves that way. Meanwhile the utter insignificance and smallness of man vis-à-vis the Universe, of which science informs us, makes the Manichean myth a concept so primitive as to be trivial. I will put it in another way: if a creation were to take place — which personally I cannot conceive — then the level of knowledge that it would require would be of such an order that there would be no place in it for silly jokes. Because — and this really is the whole credo of my faith — nothing like the wisdom of evil is possible. My reason tells me that a creator cannot be a petty scoundrel, a conjurer who toys ironically with what he has brought into being. What we hold to be the result of a malign intervention could only make sense as an ordinary miscalculation, as an error, but now we find ourselves in the realm of nonexistent theologies — that is, theologies of fallible gods. But the domain of their constructional practices is nothing other than the field of my lifework, i.e, statistics.

Every child unwittingly makes the discoveries from which have sprung the worlds of Gibbs and Boltzmann, because to a child reality appears as a multitude of possibilities, where each can be taken separately and developed so easily that it seems almost spontaneous. A child is surrounded by a great many virtual worlds; completely alien to him is the cosmos of Pascal, a rigid corpse with even, clocklike movements. The ossified order of maturity later destroys that primal richness. If this picture of childhood seems onesided, for example, in that the child owes his inner freedom to ignorance and not choice — well, but every picture is one-sided. With the demise of imagination I inherited its residue, a kind of permanent disagreement with reality, more like an anger, though, than a rejection. My laughter had already been a denial, and a more effective kind, perhaps, than suicide. I acknowledge it, at the age of sixty-two; and the mathematics was only a later consequence of this attitude. Mathematics was my second desertion.

I speak metaphorically — but hear me out. I had betrayed my dying mother, betrayed all people, opting, with the laughter, for a thing of power greater than theirs, however hideous it was, because I saw no other way out. Later I would learn that this enemy of ours — which was everything, which had built its nest in us as well — I could also betray, at least to a certain extent, because mathematics is independent of the world.

Time showed me that I had been doubly mistaken. Genuinely to opt for death, against life, and for mathematics, against the world, is not possible. The only true option is one’s own annihilation. Whatever we do, we do in life; and, as experience has demonstrated, neither is mathematics the perfect retreat, because its habitation is language. That informational plant has its roots in the world and in us. This comparison has always been with me, even before I was able to put it into the language of a proof.

In mathematics I searched for what I had valued in childhood, the multiplicity of worlds, which broke contact with the imposed world, but so gently that it was as if the latter had been stripped of its force — a force that lay within us as well, yet was hidden enough for us to forget its presence. Later, like every mathematician, I learned to my surprise how unpredictable and incredibly adaptable is that activity, which at first resembles a game. One enters into it proudly; without apologies and unequivocally one shuts out the world; with arbitrary propositions that rival, in their uncontestableness, Creation, one performs a definitive closure; this is to separate us from the vortex in which we are forced to live.

And lo, that denial, that most radical break, leads us precisely to the heart of things, and the flight turns out to have been an attainment, the desertion — an appreciation, and the break — a reconciliation. We make the discovery, then, that our escape was apparent only, since we have returned to the very thing we sought to flee. The enemy metamorphoses into an ally; we are purified; the world gives us to understand, silently, that only by means of it may we conquer it. Thus our fear is tamed and turns to joy, in that special refuge whose deepest interiors intersect the surface of the only world.

Mathematics never reveals man to the degree, never expresses him in the way, that any other field of human endeavor does: the extent of the negation of man’s corporeal self that mathematics achieves cannot be compared with anything. Whoever is interested in this subject I refer to my articles. Here I will say only that the world injected its patterns into human language at the very inception of that language; mathematics sleeps in every utterance, and can only be discovered, never invented.

What constitutes its crown may not be cut free from its roots, because it arose not in the course of the three hundred or eight hundred years of civilized history, but through the millennia of linguistic evolution: at the loci of man’s encounter with his environment, from the time of tribes and rivers. Language is wiser than the mind of any one of us, just as the body is wiser than the discernment of any of its units as it moves, self-aware and many-faceted, through the current of the life process. The inheritance of both evolutions, of living matter and of the matter of informational speech, has not yet been exhausted, but already we dream of stepping beyond the boundaries of both. These words of mine may make poor philosophizing, but that cannot be said of my proofs of the linguistic genesis of mathematical concepts, of the fact, in other words, that those concepts arose neither from the enumerability of things nor from the cleverness of reason.

The factors that contributed to my becoming a mathematician are complex, no doubt, but one major factor was talent, without which I could have accomplished in my profession no more than could a hunchback in a championship track-and-field competition. I do not know whether the factors that had to do with my character, rather than with my talent, played a role in the account I intend to give — but I should not rule out the possibility, for the importance of the affair itself is such that neither natural modesty nor pride ought to be considered.

As a rule, chroniclers become extremely honest when they feel that what they have to say about themselves is of monumental importance. I, on the contrary, with the premise of honesty arrive at the complete immaterialness of my person; that is, I am forced into an insufferable garrulity simply because I lack the ability to tell where the statistical caprice of personality composition leaves off and the rule of the behavior of the species begins.

In various fields one can acquire knowledge that is real, or the kind only that provides spiritual comfort, and the two need not agree. The differentiation of these two types of knowledge in anthropology borders on the impossible. If we know nothing so well as ourselves, it is surely for this reason: that we constantly renew our demand for nonexistent knowledge, i.e., information as to what created man, while ruling out in advance, without realizing it, the possibility of the union of pure accident with the most profound necessity.

I once wrote a program for an experiment of one of my friends. The idea was to simulate, in a computer, families of neutral beings; they would be homeostats, cognizant of their “environment” but possessing, initially, no “emotional” or “ethical” qualities. These beings multiplied — only in the machine, of course, therefore in a way that a layman would call “arithmetically” — and after a few dozen “generations” there continually appeared, over and over again, in each of the “specimens,” a characteristic that made no sense at all to us, a sort of equivalent of “aggression.” After many painstaking but fruitless checking calculations, my friend, at his wit’s end — really grasping at straws — began examining the most trivial circumstances of the experiment; and then it turned out that a certain relay had reacted to the changes of humidity in the air, and thus those changes had become the hidden producer of the deviation.

I cannot help thinking of that experiment as I write, for is it not possible that social evolution lifted us from the Animal Kingdom in an exponential curve — when we were fundamentally unprepared for the ascent? The socialization reaction began when the human atoms had barely given evidence of their first cohesiveness. Those atoms were a material strictly biological, a material made and prepared to satisfy typically biological criteria, but that sudden movement, that upward shove, seized us and carried us off into the space of civilization. How could such a start not have bound onto that biological material accidental convergences, much as a probe that, lowered to the ocean floor, scoops up from it, along with the desired object, debris and chance pieces of junk? I recall the damp relay in the sophisticated computer. And the process that engendered us — why, pray, must it have been in every respect perfect? Yet neither we nor our philosophers dare consider the idea that the finality and singularity of the existence of our species do not at all imply a perfection under whose aegis the species originated — just as such perfection is not present at the cradle of any individual.

It is a curious thing that the marks of our imperfection, which identify the species, have never been, not by any faith, recognized for what they simply are, that is, the results of uncertain processes; on the contrary, practically all religions agree in the conviction that man’s imperfection is the result of a demiurgic clash between two antagonistic perfections, each of which has damaged the other. The Light collided with the Dark, and man arose: thus runs their formula. My conception sounds ill-natured only if it is wrong — but we do not know that it is wrong. The friend whom I mentioned caricatured it; he said that according to Hogarth humanity is a hunchback who, in ignorance of the fact that it is possible not to be hunchbacked, for thousands of years has sought an indication of a Higher Necessity in his hump, because he will accept any theory but the one that says that his deformity is purely accidental, that no one bestowed it upon him as part of a master plan, that it serves absolutely no purpose, for the thing was determined by the twists and turns of anthropogenesis.

But I intended to speak about myself, not about the species. I do not know where it came from or what caused it, but even now, after all these years, I find within myself that malice, as vigorous as ever, because the energies of our most primitive impulses never age. Do I shock? Over many decades now, I have acted like a rectification column, producing a distillate composed of the pile of my articles as well as of the articles occasioned by them — hagiography. If you say that you are not interested in the inner workings of the apparatus which I unnecessarily bring out into the light, note that I, in the purity of the nourishment I have vouchsafed you, see the indelible signs of all my secrets.

Mathematics for me was no Arcadia; it was, rather, a court of last resort, a church that I entered, unbelieving, because it offered sanctuary. My principal metamathematical work has been called destructive, and not without reason. It was no accident that I called into question, irreversibly, the foundations of mathematical deduction and the concept of the analytic in logic. I turned the tools of statistics against these basic notions — until at last they crumbled. I could not be a devil underground and an angel in the light of day. I created, yes, but on ruins, and Yowitt is right: I took away more truths than I ever gave.

For this negative balance the epoch was held to account, not I; because I had followed in the steps of Russell and Gödel — after the former had discovered the cracks in the foundation of the Crystal Palace, and after the latter had shaken it. It was said that I had acted in the spirit of the time. Well, of course. But an emerald triangle does not cease to be an emerald triangle when it becomes a human eye in an arranged mosaic.

More than once I have wondered what would have become of me had I been born within any one of the four thousand cultures we call primitive, which preceded ours in that gulf of eighty thousand years that our lack of imagination contracts to the foreground, the foyer, of history proper. In some of them I would no doubt have languished; but in others, who knows, I might have found greater personal fulfillment, as one visited, as one creating new rites, new magic, thanks to the talent I brought into the world, that of combining elements. Perhaps, in the absence of a restraining curb, which in our culture is the relativism of every conceptual entity, I could have consecrated, with no trouble, orgies of havoc and debauchery, because in those ancient societies they practiced the custom of a temporary, periodic suspension of daily law, by dissolving their culture (it was the bedrock, the Constant, the Absolute of their lives, and yet, remarkably, they knew that even the Absolute required holes!) in order to give vent to the festering mass of excesses that could not be fitted into any codified system, and of which only a portion found expression in war masks and family masquerades, under the bit and bridle of morality.

They were sensible, rational, those severings of societal bonds and rules, the group madness, the pandemonium liberated, heightened by the narcotics of rhythm and poison. It was the opening of a safety valve, out of which poured the factor of destruction; through this particular invention barbarity was adapted to man. But the principle of a crime from which one could retire, of a reversible madness, of gaps rhythmically repeated in the social fabric, has been done away with, and now all those forces must go in harness, work treadmills, play roles that are too tight for them and always ill-suited. So they corrode everything quotidian; they hide in every place; for nowhere is it permitted them to emerge from anonymity. Each of us is, from childhood, fastened to some publicly allowed piece of himself, the part that was selected and schooled, and that has gained the consensus omnium; and now he cultivates that fragment, polishes it, perfects it, breathes on it alone, that it may develop as well as possible; and each of us, being a part, pretends to be a whole-like a stump that claims it is a limb.

As far back as I can remember, no ethics ever took root in my sensitivity. Cold-bloodedly I built myself an artificial ethics. But I needed to find a reason to do this, because setting up rules in a desert is like taking Communion without faith. I am not saying that I planned out my life in as theoretical a manner as I present it here. Nor did I attach axioms to my behavior retroactively. I proceeded always in the same way, at first unawares; the motivations I later guessed.

Had I considered myself a person who was basically good, I would have been quite unable to understand evil. I would have believed that people perpetrated it always with premeditation — that is, that they did what they had resolved to do — because I would have found no other source of vileness within my personal experience. But I had better knowledge; I was aware of my own inclinations, as well as of my blamelessness for them — blamelessness because I was, after all, the way I was to begin with, and no one had ever consulted me in the matter.

Now, for one slave to strangle another slave to satisfy the forces implanted in both; for one blamelessness to torture another if there existed any chance whatever to resist such a compulsion — to me this was an offense against reason. We are given to ourselves and it is fruitless for us to question what is given, but if there should open up the minutest chance to oppose the Way Things Are — how can one not seize it? Only such decisions and such actions are our exclusive human property, as is the possibility, also, of suicide. This is the sector of freedom where our unasked-for inheritance meets with contempt.

Please do not tell me I contradict myself — the self who saw in the Stone Age a time of dreams come true. Knowledge is irreversible; one cannot go back into the darkness of sweet ignorance. In that time I would have had no knowledge and would have been unable to obtain it. One must make use of the knowledge one possesses. I know that Chance fashioned us, put us together as we are — and what, am I to follow submissively all the directives drawn blindly in that endless lottery?

My principium humanitatis is curious in that if someone basically good wished to apply it to himself, he would be obliged — in keeping with the policy of “conquering one’s own nature” — to do evil in order to affirm his human freedom. My doctrine therefore is not suited for general application; but I do not see why I have to provide humanity with an ethical panacea. Diversity, heterogeneity, is a given in mankind; thus Kant’s declaration that the basis of individual actions could be made a general law means a varying violence done to people; in sacrificing the individual for a superior value — the culture — Kant dispenses injustice. But I am not saying that one is a man only to the extent that he is a self-chained monster. I have presented a purely private argument, my own strategy, which, however, has changed nothing in me. To this day my first reaction, upon hearing of someone’s misfortune, is a spark of pleasure, and I no longer even attempt to stifle such twitches, because I know that I cannot reach the place where that mindless chuckle lives. But I respond with resistance and act contrary to myself, for the reason that I am able to do so.

Had I truly intended to write my own biography — which would have turned out to be, in comparison with the volumes on my shelf, an antibiography — there would have been no need for me to justify these confessions. But my object is different. The adventure I am to relate boils down to this: humanity came upon a thing that beings belonging to another race had sent out into the darkness of the stars. A situation, the first of its kind in history, important enough, one would think, to merit the divulging, in greater detail than convention allows, of who it was, exactly, who represented our side in that encounter. All the more since neither my genius nor my mathematics alone sufficed to prevent it from bearing poison fruit.