Vintage Reading (23 page)
Authors: Robert Kanigel
Kuhn could scarcely have imagined the reception his long essay would receive. Issued by a university publisher as part of a series—the other two dozen remain largely obscure—the book, now in its third edition, has sold upwards of 600,000 copies. Each year, hundreds of scholarly treatises cite it. One publisher came out with a collection of essays devoted exclusively to issues it raised. And while, narrowly speaking, the book deals only with the physical sciences, its ideas are, as one critic has put it, “so seductive” that scholars in economics, political science and sociology have applied them to their own fields.
What
really
happens in science, said Thomas Kuhn, is that some longprevailing view of nature undergoes, abruptly and sometimes distressingly, a “paradigm shift”—a revolution in form not so different from a political one.
Einstein, said Kuhn, changed the way we see the world: Relativity theory changed the kinds of experiments scientists perform, the instruments they use, the form of the questions they ask, even the types of problems considered important. Einstein ushered in a revolution. So did Newton, Lavoisier, Dalton.
While the old paradigm yet prevails, “normal science” is the rule. This he defines as “research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements ... that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice.”
The practitioners of normal science don’t run around, willy-nilly, gathering stray bits of data. Rather, all they do is based on some prior scientific pattern— for example, the phlogiston theory of combustion, or Newtonian dynamics, or relativity theory. They seek particular kinds of facts, to fit particular gaps of knowledge, employing particular kinds of scientific apparatus. Moreover, as Kuhn writes, “other problems (than those the paradigm deems relevant) are rejected as metaphysical, as the concern of another discipline, or sometimes as just too problematic to be worth the time. A paradigm can even insulate the community from ... socially important problems.”
Now this paradigm, whatever it is, is logically self-contained. It explains past experimental results. It leads to the successful solution of new problems. But from time to time, discrepancies arise. In the end, most of these “anomalous” results are successfully explained away or otherwise dismissed. But some are shoved into a back corner of the scientific enterprise, there to nag the minds of a few.
With enough such anomalous results, the particular science may be thrown into crisis. Theories contend. And the competing theories are not just mildly differing interpretations but rather radically different views of nature. They are—to use another of the half-dozen words that Kuhn’s essay gave a special flavor—“incommensurable.” Finally, out of this clash of theories is built a new scientific order, a new paradigm that all but die-hard champions of the old paradigm accept.
Kuhn cites a classic psychological experiment from the 1940s: An
experimenter briefly flashes upon a screen images of playing cards and asks the subject to say what he sees. Every so often, a black four of hearts, say, is substituted for the normal red one. At first, the subject is oblivious to the switch, continuing to see the kinds of cards for which all his previous experience prepared him. The conventional deck is his paradigm, the altered cards the anomaly he subconsciously dismisses. Ultimately, as exposure time to the cards increases, he may sense something wrong, perhaps experiencing great distress: He cannot discard his paradigm lightly.
Neither can scientists. But when they do, a wonderful moment arrives in the intellectual life of our species.
The Realm of Spirit
Holy and Human
The Razor’s Edge
— W. Somerset Maugham
The Seven Storey Mountain
— Thomas Merton
Death Be Not Proud
— John Gunther
The Bhagavad Gita
— Sanskrit poem
The Varieties of Religious Experience
— William James
_________________________________
Is there a God? Where is He when evil comes? Can the rational and logically reductive explain all that needs explaining, or do spiritual realms stand beside those of the intellect, revealing their own truths? What is the purpose of life? How ought we to live and die?
It’s easy to dismiss such questions as beyond us, or else laugh them off as the stuff of
Peanuts
cartoons. But sometimes, in the soul’s dark night, we seek answers — and in these books, ancient and more recent, may perhaps find them.
____________
Babylonian epic poem dating to
as early as third millennium B.C.
Gilgamesh is king in Babylonia, a brutal tyrant who has squandered any respect or love his people ever had for him. Into his life comes Enkidu, a half animal-half human nursed into manhood by a prostitute.
One day the king comes to town to select a temple virgin as his bed partner, only to find Enkidu blocking the way, acclaimed as new champion of the people.
They fell like wolves
At each other’s throats,
Like bulls bellowing,
And horses gasping for breath
That have run all day
Desperate for rest and water
But mysteriously, amid their struggle, they pause, look into each other’s eyes, and see some irreducible part of themselves alive in the other.
They become friends. Together they venture forth to kill Humbaba, powerful lord of the cedar forest. Each gives the other strength and will that, for the moment, the other may lack. In the end, the head of Humbaba is left swinging from a tree.
The goddess Ishtar, whose marriage proposal Gilgamesh has spurned, turns bitterly to her father, demanding a heavenly bull wreak revenge on humankind in general and Gilgamesh in particular. But Enkidu, kills the bull, hurling its thigh bone back at the enraged Ishtar.
The gods decree that one of them, Gilgamesh or Enkidu, must die, and
Enkidu wakes from a dream realizing it must be he. Weakened by his wounds, he slips away ...
Gilgamesh knew his friend was close to death.
He tried to recollect aloud their life together
That had been so brief, so empty of gestures
They never felt they had to make. Tears filled his own eyes
And here a story, at first blush a paean to the mindless violence and strutting of a barbarous age, seems transmuted, in the love between these two men, into something softer, gentler, more
modern
. Enkidu does die. Gilgamesh is left inconsolable, his grief so prolonged and sharp that no one who has felt cheated by similar loss can soon forget it.
Gilgamesh wept bitterly for his friend.
He felt himself now singled out for loss
Apart from everyone else. The word Enkidu
Roamed through every thought
Like a hungry animal through empty lairs
In search of food. The only nourishment
He knew was grief, endless in its hidden source
Yet never ending hunger.
With Enkidu’s death, the tone of the story shifts once more, now becoming a kind of spiritual mystery. For Gilgamesh doesn’t passively accept the death of his friend. Rather, he sets out to overturn the verdict rendered by the gods, venturing off alone into the country of the dead, trying to restore Enkidu to life.
This, then, is the story that comes down to us through text chiseled into stone tablets, unearthed in the last century from ruins in Nineveh, in Mesopotamia. (The verse transcribed above, by Herbert Mason, represents only one of many translations available, most of them much more literal.)
Gilgamesh displays no stiff upper lip in the face of his friend’s death. Many a therapist of today might judge the intensity of his response “inappropriate;” might suggest that. after some due period of mourning, he pick up the pieces of his life, set grief aside. Those of more guarded emotions, meanwhile, might even judge the intensity of his response unseemly or undignified.
And yet, for me, it is Gilgamesh’s response to the death of his friend that seems more authentic, more true to human nature, than the store-bought funeral etiquette of today that demands austere dignity in the face of loss too terrible to bear.
____________
By Saint Augustine
First appeared in 398 A.D.
Is there reason for any but a Christian theologian to read these
Confessions
of Aurelius Augustinus, whom the Catholic Church later called a saint? Are they more than just a long, extended prayer fit for a distinguished place in the religious literature but otherwise never to be read?
Augustine was born in North Africa in 354 A.D., son of a philandering, pagan father and pious Christian mother. Both strains run deep in him: The
Confessions
hold interest for modern, secular readers largely in the tension between the two warring elements of his nature.
In his lusty, irrepressible youth, his father’s example plainly ruled him. “I liked to score a fine win at sport or to have my ears tickled by the makebelieve of the stage, which only made them itch the more. As time went on my eyes shone more and more with the same eager curiosity, because I wanted to see the shows and sports which grown-ups enjoyed.”
Later, adult temptations proved equally irresistible. He succumbed frequently to the embrace of women. He may also have had at least one homosexual liaison; Augustine is not clear on the point, saying only that his relationship to a male friend “was sweeter to me than all the joys of life as I lived it then.” When his friend died, he grieved, even contemplated suicide: “I felt that our two souls had been as one, living in two bodies, and life to me was fearful because I did not want to live with half a soul.”
(Even after his conversion to Christianity when he was 33, he confesses, his appetites sometime overcame him: “There have been times when overeating has stolen upon your servant. By your mercy may you keep it far from me!”)
But the same “unholy curiosity” that led Augustine toward the pleasures
of this world also pushed him toward a search for Light and Truth. For years he was a devotee of a vegetarian cult called the Manichees, which pictured good and evil as forever at war, and left room only for a vestigial Christianity. He later grew sympathetic to the Skeptics, who held that one could be sure of nothing.
The ascetic side of Augustine warred with the hedonistic. Modern psychiatrists might be quick to see them as but two sides of a single coin— an extremist personality at odds with itself. Nonetheless, this clash of temperaments launched a soul-searching that, through the
Confessions
, still impresses with its insight and sincerity.
Swayed by intellectual and spiritual factors, but also plainly moved by the piety of his mother (who would later herself be canonized), Augustine was ultimately won over to the Church. The scene in the garden in which he finally breaks into anguished tears before his Lord is particularly moving. But even more so is the death of his mother: After she dies, Augustine writes, “I closed her eyes, and a great wave of sorrow surged into my heart ... It was because I was now bereft of all the comfort that I had had from her that my soul was wounded and my life seemed shattered, for her life and mine had been as one.”
One need hardly embrace the Catholic faith to find the story of Augustine’s search for higher truth uplifting—or, for that matter, to find the battle between his warring selves dramatic. For all of us with personal demons to exorcise or faced with a choice between the high road and the low, Augustine offers a lofty model.
“The eye is attracted by beautiful objects, by gold and silver and all such things. There is great pleasure, too, in feeling something agreeable to the touch, and material things have various qualities to please each of the other senses.” Yet one follows the path of sin, Augustine tells God, “when one love[s] the things you have created instead of loving you.”
____________
By Gustav Meyrink
First published in 1915
The stark terror of a Poe mystery and the existential torment of an early Ingmar Bergman film grafted onto a Isaac Bashevis Singer story: that, in crude outline, is
The Golem
, by Gustav Meyrink.
“Once in every generation a spiritual disturbance zigzags, like a flash of lightning, right through the Ghetto, taking possession of the souls of the living to some end we know not of, and rising in the form of a wraith that appears to our senses in the guise of a human entity.” This, as Meyrink relates the legend through a minor character’s monologue, is the Golem, an early Jewish predecessor of Frankenstein’s monster. Every 33 years, according to folklore, it roams the crowded alleys of the Prague ghetto, leaving terror and confusion in its wake.
Yet as befits a being first given human form, according to legend, by a 16th century rabbi, there is another, more spiritual side to the Golem. This slant-eyed creature, half human and half supernatural, confronts those it meets with the alien elements of their own personalities, provoking in them spiritual crisis. And that is the fate that befalls the protagonist of Meyrink’s bizarre tale, Athanasius Pernath.
Pernath, we learn, is a gem cutter whose past mental breakdown has left him with a great empty hole in the center of his memory. Now, in the days of the Golem’s return to Prague, the aching mystery of his own past threatens his composure. He dreams obsessively of a stone that is like a lump of fat. The Golem gives him a book whose words come to life as he reads them: “From an invisible mouth words were streaming forth, turning into living entities, and winging straight towards me. They twirled and paraded like gaily dressed
female slaves, only to sink on the floor or evaporate in iridescent mist.” Later, from the jail cell in which he is incarcerated for suspected murder, Pernath looks out to see a clock face without hands.