Human beings are oppressed by their finitude, but can’t bear to think about this for too long, so they attempt not to mind, or to avoid being reminded of it at all. This is achieved through the cultivation of indifference to most of reality and obsessional interest in human society. As a result, when their frustration with being finite surfaces, it is expressed as hostility towards each other, rather than hostility towards the human condition itself.
That is the portrait of human nature running through three of the most neglected philosophical works of this century:
The Human Evasion, The Decline and Fall of Science, and Advice to Clever Children. I have never seen the ideas in these books engaged with, anywhere. They are not even controversial, they are simply unknown, a circumstance quite consistent with the theories of their author, Celia Green. (‘The human race’s favourite method for being in control of facts is to ignore them.’)
One could read these books as a trilogy: the study of a state of mind called ‘sanity’; the elaboration of its social and intellectual consequences; and the development of an alternative. In what follows I will try to provide a sketch of the worldview found in these books, but of course many more points are made than I can reproduce here, and I may have passed over many subtleties.
Sanity is first observed to be unmoved by certain facts which one might call corollaries of ‘the principle of total uncertainty’. As the skeptical philosophers discovered, one cannot be certain of the veridicality of one’s memories and perceptions, or of the accuracy of one’s reasoning. All the regularities of past experience in themselves prove nothing about the future (Hume), and for all we know everything could cease to exist right now. The perceived world might be pure hallucination (Descartes); perhaps yours is the only consciousness.
Sanity is indifferent or hostile to such considerations, and tends to confuse ‘reality’ with, say, ‘that portion of reality of which humans can conceive’, or even ‘that portion of reality with which humans have the opportunity to interact’. This confusion is held to be a side-effect, so to speak, of a general scheme of reality-evasion, put into practice for psychological reasons – to avoid confronting the frustrations of finitude, which is to say, the frustrations of having limited power and knowledge.
From the Deoxy Archive
