Watercooler bottles, London.

'Ghosts in the World Machine? Humility and its Alternatives,' by Rae Langton and Christopher Robichaux is a chapter in a book entitled New Waves in Metaphysics, edited by Allan Hazlett. It touches on an argument that would have been familiar to Solon, the hero of The Mystery of Healing. In a nutshell: acknowledging our inability to see the ultimate causal nature of reality whilst simultaneously acknowledging its agency should be a source of humility.   

To quote from Langton and Robichaux: 'There is a fundamental, intrinsic aspect of the world, and it is beyond us.'   

The writers take their first cue from the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724 - 1804) who makes the distinction between the world as it is in itself and the world as we know it through our senses. This distinction goes back to the followers of Plato. It begins with the foundational tenet of all rationalism: Nothing can be in the mind that hasn't been presented to the senses. Our senses pick up surface information and our mind interprets this contextually by comparing the information to surrounding bits of information and to what we already know. Accordingly, the most fundamental properties discoverable from observations and experience are relational not essential. We don't experience the world as it is in itself, nor do we see its true causes. This is equally true of language. A word is understood contextually, not essentially. Its meaning comes from being part of a sentence, a wider dialogue of which the word is a mere part. We know a particular thing or word from its relation to other things at a given moment in time and from its history of relations. This is a rich and complex process, but it means we can know nothing about what is beyond our senses and the resulting 'sorting' processes in our minds - no matter how much science we throw at it. We are limited by our human nature. We cannot know anything of the deeper, formal structure and causes of reality.   

Another quote from Langton and Robichaux: '...it seems there may indeed be ghosts in the world machine, properties that are in some sense non-physical, and hidden from view.'   

An obvious charge against this is to argue we cannot talk of a 'thing in itself' if it is not presented to our senses - given the central tenet of rationalism that knowledge must come from the senses. Consequently the Kantian argument turns in on itself in a self-negating way. Kant and the Platonists, however, would argue the thing-in-itself must be inferred because all the qualities we see must 'hang' on some first unseen-thing that is also the cause of what we see. (The coats must be on a hallway coat-hanger even if we can't see the coat-hanger, otherwise they would fall to the floor.) There must be metaphysical scaffolding. It is not for me to argue either way except to say that Solon accepts the Kantian/Platonic division between the seen and the unseen. I think he would argue that we must trust our intuitions that there is something underlying the flux.   

Langton and Robichoux maintain that acceptance of this division between the seen and the unseen, and holding that the unseen must have a reality, leads to humility because we are acknowledging what we cannot know. A mystery lies at the heart of existence. There is something bigger than us - and it will always be greater than us because we cannot have knowledge of it, only intimations. This humility can encourage a sense of wonder rather than cynicism because it is the complex riches of the world that reveal it. It is scepticism in its truest and most positive form. The unseen is approachable, yet reality becomes more mysterious. What seems like a small island becomes a continent that cannot be fully mapped. Furthermore (and I realise there are huge leaps in logic here that are not in Langton and Robichaux, only in the mind of an overly poetic storyteller) the unseen is a cauldron of mindfulness and agency. It drives time itself and pushes the inexorable and inescapable change we all experience.   

This is too pungent for many who hold that the real is too present to allow for anything other than what is known to our senses and what can be discovered in the future by the senses. For the novelist, these different modes of thinking are indicative of different character types. Solon is attracted to the unseen because there is a poetic side to him. Others have no feelings for the unseen. Conversely, there are those for whom the unseen is hyper-real; the source of both celestial and earthly conspiracies. The world of lived experience becomes a flawed, fallen shadow.   

For Solon, the unseen world is the world of the gods, science and the human. It is a foundational place that causes things happen in the seen world. It is the place our world emanates from. Firstly, it is a place of the gods because it is where the intentions of the unseen arise; where fate is forged. Secondly, it is science because it the place where natural processes begin. And thirdly It is the place where human character originates. Yet Solon knows that knowledge of it is an assumed/imagined place, and our imaginings contain many falsities. Langton and Robichaux's point is that everything we affirm of the unseen is wrong, except that it must exist. Solon doesn't quite go this far. He trusts some small degree of knowledge must be possible.   (Again, one can sympathise with the extreme sceptical view that it simply doesn't exist; and there are times when Solon feels this way, mostly when he has lost his optimism.)   

​By and large, Solon embodies the humility Langton and Robichaux speak of. And it extends to his fascination and empathy with his fellow humans. The human subject embodies a true mystery, for the very same reasons the universe itself is a mystery. It is a product of the same unseen heart. So too, the human is discoverable but becomes more mysterious when approached, for instance when he falls in love.   

But the unseen is also a place that can be manipulated by those who claim knowledge of it. This is especially true of the relationship between political power, religion and cults. It is a place of superstition, fear and falsities, ripe for powerful people to abuse. Solon fights this corrupt relationship because his scepticism gives him a sharp tool to dissect the false reasoning. He is not particularly tied to any one belief system, but he has a committed heart.