hot, soft, cold, hard

BY ANTONELLA GAMBOTTO-BURKE

Understanding the Present - Science and the Soul of Modern Man by Bryan Appleyard, published by Picador; A History of the Mind by Nicholas Humphrey, published by Chatto.

Holy Grand Unification Theory, Batman - the Me Generation is having another identity crisis! No longer certain whether we are Us, Them, or merely dense organizations of space time foam, our great thinkers have assigned themselves the Sisphyean task of defining - in whatever form they will, be it numerical or alphameric or with a series of alpenhorns, goddamn it - the human condition in all its apparent chaos and luminiferous loveliness. A task so grisly, so pedantic, so studded with sententiousness that only the bravest and most devoted dreamers need bother applying.

The dreamy Nicholas Humphrey is a distinguished theoretical psychologist who appreciates the uses of the indefinite article. A History of the Mind is a partial history of sensory consciousness, an unspeakably beautiful book with a partially conclusive conclusion about the nature of subjectivity and the blunt spade of perception. Humphrey’s distinctive prose is the golden bowl in which his ripe and shining theories are held.

His argument? That the "phenomenology of sensory experience" came before anything - and he means anything - else. Ergo, there were no volcanoes before there were beings who could perceive said volcanoes.

Without Us there is no When or How or Why; without Us there are no feelings or any physical events; without Us there is Nothing - or our definition and/or understanding of Nothing - which effectively means that from Nothing came Something which then created the concept of Nothing in order that Something have a counterpart. Simple as pie, and something like Darwin's view in The Origin of Species that flowers could not have existed before there were eyes to see them.

Humphrey postulates that consciousness is the activity of "being the author of reverberating cerebral sentiments", the latter term considered a "logical operation that is independent of what neural or other structures are involved", which is a little confusing given that any logical process is, by definition, dependent upon the neurons which create it. All a bit Cartesian, too much like duality and despite its lyricism, representative of the "scienticism" which so infuriates the hot-eyed English writer Bryan Appleyard.

Appleyard is no wistful scientist tippy-toeing over theoretical eggs but an enraged thunderbolt of testosterone - and boy, is this guy angry. He hates Science’s guts. He loathes it and detests it; he wants to see it disembowelled; he wants to tug its trousers down and viciously cane it; he wants Science to die.

To him, science is a catastrophic spider hiding in the out-house, waiting for us at our most vulnerable - when we are scared and frail and alone, when we doubt all, when we are engulfed by the fear of the void - in order that it sink its catastrophic spider fangs into the sunless sea of our smooth behinds, causing us to collapse - humilitating, sobbing for mama, our lives flashing before us, with our longjohns around our ankles and our souls hidden from priests, screaming for help - God! Save me and I will never again desire mentally impaired heretics! - but, no; all is lost, the world spirit has abandoned us, we deserve to die (scumbag petit-bourgeois melancholy pseudo-intellectual cynical empiricist heartless namby-pamby gutless knee-jerk liberal science-lovers that we are).

He begins innocuously enough. "I grew up in the shadow of science," he writes. This not-so-scary statement builds into a rage he sustains for the entire text. His is a Big Kabuki temper, and he is never shy of making an abstract branch of knowledge sound like a paedophile in all his morally brutal glory. Witness: "The cold simplifications of the laboratory" (p129), "the cold rigidity of classical science" (p145), "the cold heroic confrontation" (p82), "the cold-eyed awareness" (p73), "confronted by the cold vision of doubt" (p68), "the bleak, cold visions" (p60), "bleak, cold and empty" (p178), "the cold otherness of science" (p171), and "the cold shock of a meaningless universe" (p113).

Is Appleyard attempting to suggest something?

Eventually he tires of the c-word and opts for a more penetrating adjective: "The hard philosophical scepticism" (p57), "hard, aristocratic religion" (p83), "the hardest of hard classical science" (p151), and so on and so forth until the reader can, in her boredom, begin to create little stories from his sentences. "Hard science" (p195) and its "strictly hard and deterministic" (p178) mackintoshed practitioner, "the hard scientist" (p205) asking "cold" (p51) to marry him "in [all] his hard, pro-science polemic" (p151), whereupon the two words are united in all their pejorative splendour on page 191, the articles exchanged over: "A form of hard evidence that the world was not [a] cold, simple place."

Like the late physicist Richard Feynman, I don’t understand how science can subtract from the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower, but I do understand that its practitioners can come times be cold and, given the appropriate sense-data, hard. But to blame one’s blurred identity on a specialized branch of knowledge or to separate the mind from the brain or even better, consciousness from the physical self, is to impose a truly absurd and abstracted simplicity upon an unknowable and infinitely complex world.

*Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald