The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God (71 page)

I am no more

than a spark from a beacon

Virginia Woolf, Robert Musil, Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett, too, have noted that moments of “being” can only ever be just that—moments. That the most we can hope for are brief experiences of heightened intensity. It is as if there are two realms of existence (as expressed by both Woolf and Musil, but also Rilke and Wittgenstein); to live a full life we must be alive to these two realms but not expect more than is there. There is no supernatural realm, only, as Woolf put it, brief holidays from our “cotton wool days.” George Santayana and Philip Roth shared this view. Santayana thought that well-being occurred in “reflective episodes of consummate joy that gave
point
to things”; that we need a “holiday life,” a time and place where we can get away from the workaday world and play, that the aim
of life should be “spontaneous affirmation” of what is lovely and lovable. Philip Roth’s “Mickey” Sabbath delighted in his “holiday” from rationality. Jonathan Lear, professor of philosophy at Chicago, says that life without the idea of the irrational “is incomplete.”

What is central to all this is the
size
of life, the parameters of living, and, as Joyce said, “living down to fact.” It is the very opposite of what we might call “cosmic consciousness,” which fuels so many religious feelings, and it is reinforced by the ideas of such figures as George Moore, Virginia Woolf and David Sloan Wilson, who suggest we “act locally,” intimately, with those closest to us. Moore thought that our most vivid experiences would be with close relations and friends; for Woolf, intimacy was as close to spiritual feeling as we are capable of, while Wilson thinks we are most likely to encounter enchantment in local activities. Here, too, it is the size of life that is being emphasized.

One reason for the episodic nature of experience is the allied idea that the personality is not fixed, that none of us is just one person. Richard Rorty reminds us that several philosophers have concluded “there is no structure of human existence.” For Santayana there was no core human nature, “which is merely a name for a group of qualities found by chance in certain tribes of animals, artificially foregrounded by us.” Gide thought he had a new self every day, and Czesław Miłosz wrote about how difficult it was “just to remain one person.” Yeats thought that “personality is a constantly renewed choice,” and Pound and Eliot said much the same. Goronwy Rees wrote, “[A]t no time in my life have I had the enviable sensation of constituting a continuous personality.” While for the British philosopher John Gray, “We cannot shake off the sense that we are enduring selves and yet we know we are not.” (He remarks of Rees’s life that it was not a novel but a series of short stories.)
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Eugene Goodheart of Brandeis University summed up this view: “The coherent person is not a seamless unity, but the representative of the will to self-mastery.”

In turn, unity has come under scrutiny—not just the lack of unity of the individual but of the universe, the cosmos—for what effect its breakdown has had on our thinking, in terms of metaphysics, transcendence and the very image of what God might be.

The one form of unity that holds fast is narrative, the narrative of
a life, made up of discrete episodes. Alasdair MacIntyre argues that action—behavior—becomes intelligible only within a narrative. As Gordon Graham puts it, “The key to living a life as opposed to merely existing . . . lies in an acquired, and increasingly sophisticated, ability to see and act in accordance with the requirements of narrative intelligibility.” He adds: “We learn to do this in part by imitation, but we are also enabled to forge such connections by the opportunities for understanding that fiction provides.” Life, by this account, is “a constant hermeneutic movement” guided by the “anticipation of the [narrative] whole.” Bruce Robbins, professor in the humanities at Columbia, says that secularism is itself a narrative of progress; and, in that, an improvement over religious belief.

This brings us back to there being no overbearing idea. One of the achievements, perhaps, of the twentieth century was the retreat from the idea of “wholeness,” “oneness,” the search for one all-encompassing meaning; the idea that meaning is a big thing, a security blanket, as Auden intimated. Which returns us to Wittgenstein, who believed that there are certain aspects of experience/the world that cannot be put into words, or be painted; that language gives us a feeling of the world as a whole, but a limited whole; and it is this sense of limits, and that there is something “beyond” those limits, that constitutes the mystical, the idea that there is something missing. There is an overlap here with Paul Valéry’s idea that the poet approaches the world “asymptotically,” that we get closer and closer to meaning without ever quite reaching it. There may be no boundary to language, George Steiner says, but—again—let us not expect more than there is. The Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn catches something of the same sense when he writes, “There always seem to be better words, if only we could find them, just over the horizon.” And goes on to echo Alasdair MacIntyre, “I believe the process of understanding the problems [of life] is itself a good.”
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Secularization, then, goes well beyond unbelief toward a new, and more or less coherent, way of approaching life. It teaches us how to look out upon the world, appreciating it detail by detail. We can’t all be artists, but we can all use the artistic approach; as Santayana said, art shows us “finite perfection” without a deity. Or, as summed up by Wallace Stevens: “We
never arrive intellectually. But emotionally we arrive constantly (as in poetry, happiness, high mountains, vistas).” There is in the world a superabundance of meaning, not just one security blanket.

•   •   •

There remains one major issue to consider. The approach followed here has identified a strong secondary side to secularization. In Stefan George’s opinion, science has not improved the world, but impoverished it. Eugene O’Neill believed science had been co-opted by capitalism, and so was diverted from more charitable aims. Virginia Woolf, though interested in psychology, thought that the other sciences had no part to play in our moral or aesthetic lives. For D. H. Lawrence, science, in eschewing contact with the irrational, was distancing itself from “life.” For George Steiner, science was and is contaminated because, as Heidegger said before him, it aims at mastery. Gordon Graham has said “science does not produce the sort of truths that one can live by. What it can do, and manifestly has done, is generate techniques for desire-satisfaction.” For Thomas Nagel, in his latest book, the reductive evolutionary narrative is “almost certainly” false.

Some of these arguments cannot be sustained. Their interest lies in their being evidence for the fact that the great rival “magisterium” to religion, as Stephen Jay Gould described the scientific worldview, has not found quite the universal acceptance that many of its adherents would wish. As we have seen, there is no shortage of people who do find science a perfectly adequate alternative to religion, who clearly
do
see in the details and processes of nature enough awe, beauty, enchantment and elevation to last a lifetime. And they are also finding science a help in understanding our moral lives, how we can live together for the greatest benefit of all.

And yet, there is no denying, either, that many other people do not share their view quite so enthusiastically. It is important to say that these other individuals are not necessarily “anti-science,” and they are often well-informed. But they are not
moved
by science as, for instance, Dawkins, Dennett and Levine so clearly are. For those others, science is not enough. Freud had a word for this—“intellection.” Early on, he believed that once his patients had “proper information” about their condition they would
be cured; later he realized that they had to “work through” it and come to terms with the “affective” elements.

Is something similar at work in the general response to science?
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“A WANT OF LIVING GLOW”

There are at least two possibilities. One is that the whole approach of science—its aim being not just ever more accurate descriptions of nature, but ever more abstract theories
about
nature, explaining more and more with fewer and fewer formulae—is too far removed from everyday life. It is
too
abstract, even too constricting. Abstraction, though exciting for many, may be just too dry, too uninvolving as an experience if you are not a direct participant. (Scientists are constantly telling us that more children should be persuaded to study science, that it offers an exciting, rewarding life. The fact that they keep doing it seems to suggest that their exhortations rarely work.)

Walt Whitman said evolution betrayed “a want of living glow, fondness, warmth.” Could this be why the phenomenological approach to life has been so successful in the time since Nietzsche had his say? Is it more than coincidence that Edmund Husserl set down his views at more or less the time Nietzsche did? The phenomenological approach, understanding life as an inexhaustible number of individual experiences, appreciating the individuality, concreteness and voluptuousness of objects, events and experiences, has remained strong and constant. Jean-Paul Sartre’s “lyrical phenomenology” catches it—singing about the sheer multiplicity of experience as the joy of being alive.

Dennett, Dawkins, Levine and the other evolutionary biologists would object to this way of seeing things and, to an extent, they would be right. Darwin himself was a great observer of detail; evolutionary theory depends on adaptation and variation, which are specific ways of showing how detail has profoundly affected our long-term history. As Dawkins
has said, we now have two ways of appreciating rainbows, poetically and scientifically.

Consider Mallarmé’s desire to name flowers “absent from all bouquets,” or these lines describing Stefan George:

The pain from some old cruelty

Etched in his cheeks

These lines may be saying no more than that poetry is different from science, though they may help explain why poetry appeals in a different way.
Engagement
with poetry is more immediate than engagement with science; the sharing that a poet offers is different from the sharing a scientist offers. Reading a poem, we enter more into the life of the poet than, when reading a scientific report, into the life of a scientist. We can follow Darwin on the
Beagle
, and the reasoning that led him to imagine natural selection, which we easily concede is an awesome achievement. Biologists say it moves them. (And Dawkins said Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.) We can also agree that when Niels Bohr realized that the outer orbits of the electrons in the atom explained chemical reactions—thereby linking physics and chemistry—something inside him and us clicked shut and broke open, as Seamus Heaney wrote of good poetry.

With poetry,
verification
becomes a pleasure for the reader, there is no need for a third party; and this is a crucial difference—the poet leaves something for readers to discover for themselves,
about
themselves. Phenomenology offers a way of being in the world, at home in the world, as Heidegger said, that science, for all its successes, does not.

The second reason why science has not had quite the impact some of its adherents anticipated is that, although the fundamental process of evolution and natural selection has to do with sexual reproduction, evolutionary biology is rather dry—bloodless, one might say—when it comes to the subject of desire. Eugene O’Neill wrote a lot about desire—the desire to avenge a wrong, the desire for social recognition, the greed for a piece of property, for power, the lust for another’s body. But desire for most people refers to this last: sexual desire, the most interesting, forceful and—well—
desirable form of desire there is. Anna Clark’s book
Desire
is subtitled
A History of European Sexuality
. Henry James, the Utopians, Sherwood Anderson in
Beyond Desire
, Tennessee Williams in
A Streetcar Named Desire
, all considered desire to be the greatest source of satisfaction
and
therefore the most disruptive element in life. So, too, did Stefan George, James Joyce and Philip Roth. Henry James thought that desire is at the root of all evil. Christopher Hitchens reminds us that the divorce of sex from fear and from religious tyranny was one of the great events of the twentieth century. Wilhelm Reich was convinced that “the ecstatic attitude is preferable to the analytic.”
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Valentine de Saint-Point had her “Manifesto of Lust” in 1913; Léger spoke of “the binding energy of desire transformed into rhythms of shape.” Milan Kundera wrote about the “tyranny” of desire, Michel Foucault about power and desire. Jacques Lacan said, accurately enough, that “desire repeats itself until it is recognized,” Jean-François Lyotard that “western man wants to conquer, not love” and that men feel “undone” when they love. The novel, as one critic put it, is “the repetitious discovery of sexual motive.” All religions have at their heart the control of desire, which, as often as not, the churches see as the pre-eminent basis of sin.

But Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman had it right, as the writers of another genre we might have included—utopian fiction—had it right when, to a man (Wells, Zamyatin, Hauptmann, Huxley), they saw desire as above all a
disruption
in life, the source of unruliness and subversion (Zuckerman abandons himself to uncensored desire). This is because, as John Gray—the Nietzsche of our day for his pithy and aphoristic style—says, “Sexual passion enables the species to reproduce; it cares nothing for individual well-being or personal autonomy.”
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Desire is without question the most important
irrational
aspect of life; as Eugene Goodheart states in
Desire and Its Discontents
, desire is a destabilizing force, disintegrating; it leads to extravagance and excesses of the will. All desires have a right to be fulfilled, but to experience desire, says Jonathan Lear, denotes a kind of lack in life. Ideals, he adds, give shape to desire, though at the same time “The pleasure principle is at loggerheads with the whole world.”
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Desire, too, of course, links to intimacy, mentioned earlier.