The Aristos

1 Where are we? What is this situation? Has it a master?

2 Matter in time appears to us, with our vested interest in survival, to be governed by two opposing principles: Law, or the organizing principle, and Chaos, or the disintegrating one. These two, the one to us sorting and erecting, the other to us demolishing and causing havoc, are in eternal conflict. This conflict is existence.

3 All that exists has, by existing and by not being the only thing that exists, individuality.

4 The known universe is uniform in its constituents and its laws. All in it, or each individual thing, has a birth and a death in time. This birth and this death are the insignia of individuality.

5 The forms of matter are finite, but matter is infinite. Form is a death sentence, matter is eternal life.

6 Individuality is necessary for both the sensation of pain and the feeling of pleasure. Pains and pleasures both serve the one end of the whole: survival of matter. All pains and pleasures are partly what they are because they are not shared; and because, being functions of an individual, they end.

7 Law and Chaos, the two processes that dominate existence, are equally indifferent to the individual. To Chaos, Law destroys; to Law, Chaos. They equally create, dictate to and destroy the individual.

8 In the whole, nothing is unjust. It may, to this or that individual, be unfortunate.

9 There can be no power or god in the whole that is concerned for any one thing, though there may be a power concerned for the whole.

10 The whole has no favourites.

THE WRECK AND THE RAFT

11 Humanity on its raft. The raft on the endless ocean. From his present dissatisfaction man reasons that there was some catastrophic wreck in the past, before which he was happy; some golden age, some Garden of Eden. He also reasons that somewhere ahead lies a promised land, a land without conflict. Meanwhile, he is miserably en passage; this myth lies deeper than religious faith.

12 Seven men inhabit the raft. The pessimist, for whom the good things of life are no more than lures to prolong suffering; the egocentric, whose motto is Carpe diem – enjoy today – and who does his best to get the most comfortable part of the raft for himself; the optimist, always scanning the horizon for the promised land; the observer, who finds it enough to write the logbook of the voyage and to note down the behaviour of the sea, the raft and his fellow-victims; the altruist, who finds his reason for being in the need to deny himself and to help others; the stoic, who believes in nothing but his own refusal to jump overboard and end it all; and finally the child, the one born, as some with perfect pitch, with perfect ignorance – the pitifully ubiquitous child, who believes that all will be explained in the end, the nightmare fade and the green shore rise.

13 But there was no wreck; there will be no promised land. If there ever were an ideal promised land, a Canaan, it would be uninhabitable to humans.

14 Man is a seeker of the agent. We seek an agent for this being in a blind wind, this being on a raft; the mysterious power, the causator, the god, the face behind the mysterious mask of being and not being. Some make an active god of their own better natures; a benevolent father, a gentle mother, a wise brother, a charming sister. Some make an active god from attributes: such desirable human attributes as mercy, concern and justice. Some make an active god of their own worse natures; a god who is sadistically cruel or profoundly absurd; a god who absconds; a black exploiter of the defenceless individual; the venomous tyrant of Genesis 3:16-17.

15 Between these tribes, the firm believers in an active good god and the firm believers in an active bad one, the great majority shift and surge, a milling herd caught between Pangloss and Job. They pay lip service to an empty image; or believe in nothing. In this century they have drifted towards Job. If there is an active good god he has, since 1914, paid very poor wages.*

16 Yet as man sees through one reason for living, another wells from the mysterious spring. It must be so, because he continues to exist. This inexplicable buoyancy irritates him. He exists, but he is abused.

17 Man is an everlack, an infinite withoutness, afloat on an apparently endless ocean of apparently endless indifference to individual things. Obscurely he sees catastrophes happening to other rafts, rafts that are too distant for him to determine whether they have other humans aboard, but too numerous and too identical for him to presume that they have not.

18 He lives in a survived yet always uncertainly surviving world. All that is has survived where it might not have survived. Every world is and will always be a Noah’s ark.

19 The old myth that his raft, his world, is especially favoured and protected now seems ridiculous. He has seen and understood the message from the distant supernovae; he knows the sun is growing larger and hotter and that his world will one day be a white-hot ball in a sea of flames; and he knows that the hydrogen bomb of the sun may burn up an already dead planet. There are other hydrogen bombs waiting and closer at hand. Inwards and outwards the prospect before him is terrifying.*

THE NECESSITY OF HAZARD

20 But mankind is in the best of all possible situations for mankind. It may not be the best possible for you or for me, for this or that individual; for this or that age; for this or that world.

21 It is the best possible for us because it is an infinite situation of finite hazard: that is, its fundamental principle will always be hazard, but a hazard within bounds. A hazard without bounds would be a universe without physical laws: that is, a perpetual and total chaos.

22 A god who revealed his will, who ‘heard’ us, who answered our prayers, who was propitiable, the kind of god simple people like to imagine would be desirable: such a god would destroy all our hazard, all our purpose and all our happiness.

23 Hazard has conditioned us to live in hazard. All our pleasures are dependent on it. Even though I arrange for a pleasure, and look forward to it, my eventual enjoyment of it is still a matter of hazard. Wherever time passes, there is hazard. You may die before you turn the next page.

24 I am is I was not, I might not have been, I may not be, I shall not be.

25 In order that we should have meaning, purpose and pleasure it has been, is, and always will be necessary that we live in a whole that is indifferent to every individual thing in it; and the precise form of its indifference is that the duration of being and the fortune during being of each individual thing are fundamentally but not unconditionally in hazard.

26 What we call suffering, death, disaster, misfortune, tragedy, we should call the price of freedom. The only alternative to this suffering freedom is an unsuffering unfreedom.

THE GODGAME

27 Imagine yourself a god, and lay down the laws of a universe. You then find yourself in the Divine Predicament: good governors must govern all equally, and all fairly. But no act of government can be fair to all, in all their different situations, except one.

28 The Divine Solution is to govern by not governing in any sense that the governed can call being governed; that is, to constitute a situation in which the governed must govern themselves.

29 If there had been a creator, his second act would have been to disappear.

30 Put dice on the table and leave the room; but make it seem possible to the players that you were never in the room.

31 The good human and so the good universal upbringing gives freedom to develop, or hazard, within fixed bounds.

32 The whole is not a pharaonic cosmos; a blind obsession with pyramids, assembling, slaves. Our pyramid has no apex; it is not a pyramid. We are not slaves who will never see the summit, because there is no summit. Life may be less imperfect in a hundred years’ time than it is today; but it will be even less imperfect a hundred years after that. Perfectibility is meaningless because wherever we enter the infinite processus we can look forward with a kind of nostalgia for the future, and imagine a better age. It is also evil, because a terminus of perfection breeds a cancer of now. For perfectibilitarians, perfect ends tomorrow justify very imperfect means today.

33 We build towards nothing; we build.

34 Our universe is the best possible because it can contain no Promised Land; no point where we could have all we imagine. We are designed to want: with nothing to want, we are like windmills in a world without wind.

35 Emily Dickinson: If summer were an axiom, what sorcery had snow?*

36 We are in the best possible situation because everywhere, below the surface, we do not know; we shall never know why; we shall never know tomorrow; we shall never know a god or if there is a god; we shall never even know ourselves. This mysterious wall round our world and our perception of it is not there to frustrate us but to train us back to the now, to life, to our time being.

FINITY AND INFINITY

37 The cosmos is an infinite proliferation of fire, atoms, forms, collisions, attractions, sports, mutations, all happening in the space-time continuum; only thus can Law survive against Chaos, and only thus can Chaos survive against Law.

38 Only in an infinitely proliferating cosmos can both order and disorder coexist infinitely; and the only purposeful cosmos must be one that proliferates infinitely. It was therefore not created, but was always.

39 A finite creation is incomprehensible. If a creator were not self-suincient, it would be absurd to suppose that there was both a time when he was aware of this and did nothing, and a time when he remedied his deficiency. What is easier to believe? That there was always something or that there was once nothing?

40 Christianity says that creation has a beginning, middle and end. The Greeks claimed that creation is a timeless processus. Both are correct. All that is created and is therefore individual has a beginning and an end; but there is no universal beginning and end.

41 Our universe may fall in on itself, the red shift change to a blue. All universes may be like an expanding and contracting heart, with the spores of humanity growing in the cool spaces between stars; then withering in the autumn collapse. Or they may expand eternally.

42 A phoenix infinity; or an infinite expansion. Whichever it is, the astrophysicists now know what Heraclitus guessed: that suns must grow in heat and finally consume their planetary systems. Look out of the window: everything you see is frozen fire in transit between fire and fire. Cities, equations, lovers, landscapes: all are hurtling towards the hydrogen crucible.*

43 Even if we could establish a definite point of genesis for our own universe, we could never establish the genesis of what may or may not lie beyond the limits of our observational power. It is convenient to behave in science as if what may lie beyond our present domain of knowledge does not exist; but the logical chances are even, and the practical probabilities all on my side.

44 Nothing is unique in its species, even a cosmos; though everything is unique in its own existing.

45 If a cosmos is infinite, it has no end. If it has no end, there can be no end it is serving. Its only end must lie in its means. It exists in order to exist.

46 Only one process allows all conscious beings to have equal importance: an infinite one. If there were any end to which evolution was tending, then you and I would be slaves of a pharaoh, a builder of pyramids. But if there is no end, and only in an infinite universe can there be no end, then you, from whatever world or age you come, and I are equal. For both of us the slope is the same, and reaches as far ahead and as far behind. This is the great proof that the whole is infinite. It was never created and it will never end, so that all that is may be equal in it.

‘GOD’

47 I put the word in inverted commas in order to except it from its common meanings; to purge it of all its human associations.

48 ‘God’ is a situation. Not a power, or a being, or an influence. Not a ‘he’ or a ‘she’, but an ‘it’. Not entity or non-entity, but the situation in which there can be both entity and non-entity.

49 Because people cannot understand that what is not can influence what is, they maintain that ‘God’ is and does. But our ignorence of ‘God’ and its motives will always remain infinite. To ask What is God? is as futile as to ask When does infinity begin and end?

50 Existence is ultimately or potentially knowable; ‘God’ is infinitely unknowable. The most we shall ever learn is why existence is as it is; why it requires such laws and such constituents to continue. We shall never learn ultimately why it is.

51 St Augustine: We know only what God is not. Existence is individual, therefore ‘God’ is not individual. Existence changes, therefore ‘God’ does not. Existence has power to intervene, therefore ‘God’ does not. Existence is finite, therefore ‘God’ is not. But ‘God’ is omnipresent, since all that exists (and is therefore individual) is not.*

52 ‘God’ is not; but its not-being is universally present, and universally affects. It cannot exist in any sense meaningful to material organisms; but that does not mean that this situation is meaningless to such organisms. If, for instance, you see two men fighting, but do not intervene (although you could have intervened), then in fact you intervene by not intervening; and it is so with ‘God’.

53 The whole is intrinsically a situation in which the principles and the events are all, and the individual thing is nothing. Since it is thus completely indifferent to the individual thing, ‘God’ must be totally sympathetic to the whole. But it expresses its sympathy by not being and by its total unknowability. It is wu wei and wu ming, without action and without name.

54 Tao Te Ching:

LXVII. If it resembled anything it would long before now have become insignificant

LVIL The sage says, I do nothing and the people change of themselves. I prefer stillness and the people correct themselves. I do not intervene and the people prosper by themselves,

LI. It gives the myriads life and yet claims no possession; it benefits them yet asks for no thanks; it looks after them yet exercises no authority.

X. Can you love the people and govern the state without resorting to action?*

55 If the individual thing suffers, it is so that the whole may not. This can happen only in a world of individualized matter, in which hazard, time and change are fundamental features.

THE CONTINGENCY OF MATTER

56 The concept of infinity bans any purpose except that of infinity. If we experience sensations of happiness, then it must be because matter in the form of human beings experiencing happiness serves the purpose of infinity, which is the maintenance of infinity. For to be happy to exist is to want to continue to exist.

57 But if the purpose of the whole is simply to prolong itself, what is the necessity of evolution, of causation, of complex physical laws? Why introduce the experience of pleasure, let alone the consciousness of pleasure? Why could not existence be an eternal stone in an eternal vacuum, or an infinite cloud of static atoms? To man the answer has always seemed simple. The gods wish their handiwork to be admired; they want libation, psalm and sacrifice. But this is the old and pernicious heresy of the anthropocentric universe, in which we humans are the Few and all the lower rest of creation, the Many. In such a universe we must assume a very active god; and one who is very much on our side, a suspiciously prejudiced figure to be in command of the whole.

58 Then why should matter exist at all? A single hydrogen atom must seem, if the sole purpose of infinity is infinity, a redundancy. But infinity cannot be of time alone. Time in itself, absolutely, does not exist; it is always relative to some observer or some object. Without a clock I say ‘I do not know the time’. Without matter, time itself is unknowable; and infinity does not exist.

59 Time is a function of matter; and matter therefore is the clock that makes infinity real. From our very special human standpoint some changes in the form of matter – such as the leap in anthropoid brain size, the appearance of self-consciousness, the discovery of tools, of language – are unmistakable evidence of some beneficent universal intention towards us. But all this might appear, to some hypothetical outside observer, a mere result of the effects of time on matter. He would not see it in terms of progress – the present complexity of matter might indeed seem to be a regress, a devolution, a superfluous ornamentation – but in terms of process.

60 To this outside observer all the special privileges we claim for our species, all the feathers in our cap, might seem as absurd as the exotic ceremonial finery of some primitive chieftain; of no more significance than the flowers in my garden for a surveyor. My flowers may mean a great deal to me; but I cannot assume that the purpose of evolution is to give them to me.

61 What we call evolutionary progress is so for nothing but ourselves. The very term ‘evolution’, with its assumption of development-from, is misleading. We are like the observer in sub-atomic physics who distorts the nature of the particle observed by the very act of observation.

62 This indifference of the process to the individual objects that constitute it, this ‘God’ which is a situation and not a person, which does not intervene, this blind obsession with the maintenance of infinity – all this may appear to leave our human world intolerably bare. But even here one can detect evidence of a universal sympathy. How can we not see? By not being in our sense of being, by not intervening, ‘God’ is a warning to us that Homo sapiens, like every other form of matter, is not necessary, but contingent. If our world is annihilated, and all of us with it, the whole will not suffer. It is madness, a delusion we inherit from our remotest ancestors, to suppose that thanksgiving can influence the course of events; that these man-like projections of our own wishful thinking can intervene on our behalf in the process.*

63 No one will save us but ourselves; and the final proof of the sympathy in ‘God’ lies in the fact that we are – or can by exercise become – free to choose courses of action and so at least combat some of the hostile results of the general indifference of the process to the individual.

64 Freedom of will is the highest human good; and it is impossible to have both that freedom and an intervening divinity. We, because we are a form of matter, are contingent; and this terrifying contingency allows our freedom.

MYSTERY

65 We shall never know finally why we are; why anything is, or needs to be. All our science, all our art, the whole vast edifice of matter, has its foundations in this meaninglessness; and the only assumptions we can make about it are that it is both necessary and sympathetic to the continuing existence of matter.

66 We want to be mastered, but we are masterless. We think always in a causative and hierarchical manner. The process and ‘God’ are co-infinite. Our finity cannot comprehend them, or their causelessness.

67 ‘God’ is caused by what it causes; is made necessary by what it necessitates; we cannot comprehend.

68 We go on living, in the final analysis, because we do not know why we are here to live. Unknowing, or hazard, is as vital to man as water.

69 We can imagine the non-existence of any existent object. Our belief that it does exist is partly assured by the fact that it might not have done so. Behind the shape, the mass, there stands always the absence; the ghost of non-existing.

70 Just as the atom is made of positive and negative particles, so is each thing made of its own existence and non-existence. Thus is ‘God’ present by being absent in every thing and every moment. It is the dark core, the mystery, the being-not-being of even the simplest objects.

71 Erigena: God is eternally partially self-ignorant. If he knew all of himself, he could define himself. If he could define himself, he would be finite. But all he knows of himself is what he has created. What is created is his knowledge, what is potential is his mystery: mysterious in him and to him.*

All this applies equally to man.

72 The ubiquitous absence of ‘God’ in ordinary life is this sense of non-existing, of mystery, of incalculable potentiality; this eternal doubt that hovers between the thing in itself and our perception of it; this dimension in and by which all other dimensions exist. The white paper that contains a drawing; the space that contains a building; the silence that contains a sonata; the passage of time that prevents a sensation or object continuing for ever; all these are ‘God’.

73 Mystery, or unknowing, is energy. As soon as a mystery is explained, it ceases to be a source of energy. If we question deep enough there comes a point where answers, if answers could be given, would kill. We may want to dam the river; but we dam the spring at our peril. In fact, since ‘God’ is unknowable, we cannot dam the spring of basic existential mystery. ‘God’ is the energy of all questions and questing; and so the ultimate source of all action and volition.

ATHEISM

74 I do not consider myself an atheist, yet this concept of ‘God’ and our necessary masterlessness obliges me to behave in all public matters as if I were.

75 Whatever sympathy I feel towards religions, whatever admiration for some of their adherents, whatever historical or biological necessity I see in them, whatever metaphorical truth, I cannot accept them as credible explanations of reality; and they are incredible to me in proportion to the degree that they require my belief in positive human attributes and intervenient powers in their divinities.

76 I live in hazard and infinity. The cosmos stretches around me, meadow on meadow of galaxies, reach on reach of dark space, steppes of stars, oceanic darkness and light. There is no amenable god in it, no particular concern or particular mercy. Yet everywhere I see a living balance, a rippling tension, an enormous yet mysterious simplicity, an endless breathing of light. And I comprehend that being is understanding that I must exist in hazard but that the whole is not in hazard. Seeing and knowing this is being conscious; accepting it is being human.