Nonsense

 My brain has never allowed me to hold onto a single grand theory of the world for long without undermining it in some fundamental way (there's a reason the title of one of Albert Hirschman's essay collections, A Propensity to Self-Subversion, speaks to me); but there was a stretch of a good few months at least—during my time in divinity school—when logical positivism seemed to me the last word in philosophy. 

I'd read a short essay by Rudolf Carnap, and it seemed to settle the hash of every metaphysician who ever scribbled. There were things that could be thought by human minds. And then there were things that even the believers in metaphysics confessed to be beyond the limits of human understanding and the human perceptual apparatus. Yet the metaphysicians undertook to make truth claims about this realm nonetheless. 

How could anyone formulate a thought in human speech, using a human brain, about something that had already been defined to be beyond the limits of the human capacity to conceive? Plainly, it was ridiculous. And so, inevitably, all this pontification about the numinous and the beyond had to be sheer hooey—"nonsense," in the nomenclature of Carnap and Ayer, et al. 

Thus, all at once, the world was made simple. There was sense, and there was nonsense. There were things which the human mind could apprehend, and then there were a bunch of empty philosophical riddles that purported to question whatever it was that might lie beyond these outer reaches of cognition, but which were in reality dead-ends. These questions were dead-ends, moreover, not because they were particularly profound insoluble mysteries—but because they weren't real questions to begin with. They were meaningless blather. 

I got several good months out of this conviction, as I say (it was certainly helpful in realizing that most of what there was available to read in divinity school would not amount to anything, in the end, and therefore need not be agonized over). But the first trouble for my newfound all-encompassing theory set in over the question of death. Applying the Carnapian method, I knew that personal immortality was nonsense, because eternity was unthinkable. But then I hit the snag: personal nonexistence seemed to be no less inconceivable, from within the conceptual apparatus of the existing creature in question. 

Thus, we seemed to hit an inconceivability either way we turned. Push to the outer limits in either direction—eternal existence, or eternal non-existence—and one seemed to reach something the human mind frankly could not grasp. Thus, the whole topic of death was nonsense! Yet, one had to make a choice between the two nonsenses. One would either exist or one wouldn't, and so the very structure of our thought—which we were supposed to regard as defining the limits of sense—was actually pushing us to embrace nonsense after all. 

It swiftly turned out that death was not the only problem like this. The structure of reality—our conceptual apparatus itself—was full of paradoxes of this sort, that forced us to deploy ideas that were nonsensical by the standards of that very apparatus. It turned out that nonsense was embedded in our perception of reality, and not merely in the empty speculations of metaphysical philosophers. Zeno's paradox would be another example, which is really just the problem of the continuum, and which is still debated by philosophers of science today as the question of whether space is discrete or continuous. 

I've found echoes of all these same ideas and puzzles in diverse reading (here's another post I devoted to the same subject), but the most recent place I've found it is in reading Cormac McCarthy's 2022 novel The Passenger. His protagonist, Bobby Western—a former student of physics much as McCarthy briefly was—summarizes the difficulty quite well. As another character repeats his former words back to him: "You also suggested [... t]hat the notion of the endlessly divisible in the world was attended by certain problems. While a discrete world on the other hand must raise the question as to what it is that connects it. [...] A bird trapped in a barn that moves through the slats of light bird by bird. Whose sum is one bird." 

This is really Zeno's paradox redivivus. The paradox of motion. If space is infinitely divisible (that is to say, continuous), then motion should be impossible. To move across any unit of space would actually be to move across an infinite number of subdivisions of that unit, each requiring some time to pass, however small, and crossing an infinite number of infinitesimals should require infinite time. Hence, motion across a continuum is an absurdity. 

On the other hand—for the reasons Western gives—motion through discrete space is no less impossible. One would need to skip from one discrete unit of space without passing through anything in between. Any motion would require a series of teleportations that nonetheless do not compromise the identity of the object thus mystically transported. A bird would need to appear and disappear in succession in different points of space while remaining one bird. Hence, a mystery. 

(Before reading McCarthy's novel, I had found a similar puzzle reflected in the pages of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. I summarized in the earlier post: "If space-time is not continuous after all, then is not movement through it no less paradoxical? Wouldn't motion then require leaps from one discrete instant or location to another, with no intermediate passage; thus, wouldn't our existence consist of a jerky succession of frozen states in different locations [...] How then is motion between these states possible, if nothing intervenes?" I flatter myself that I—or, perhaps, O'Brien—had foretold in some sense the appearance of Western's "bird trapped in a barn that moves through the slats of light bird by bird.")

Once again, then—as with death—we are therefore forced to embrace something nonsensical either way. We can't get out of the dilemma without resorting to metaphysics and the numinous, even as we recognize that our ideas about these realms must be absurd. 

McCarthy's book is full of such paradoxes. It is itself a truly strange novel. It sets up a fascinating mystery that it never solves—becoming maddening in the same way as, say, Picnic at Hanging Rock. It contains hints of esoteric conspiracy theories that we are troubled to think its somewhat reclusive author might actually believe in—prophecies (the novel, though published last year, is set in 1980, when McCarthy started writing it) of a coming form of "electronic money" that presage crypto currencies and blockchain technology, while folding them into an elaborate government plot to "track every transaction." Maybe, the novel also suggests, we are living in a computer simulation? Maybe the main character's dead sister is an unassimilable bug in the hardware à la Neo from the Matrix? (The word "anomaly" even gets thrown around). Maybe there were aliens involved? Maybe the Mafia killed Kennedy? 

Or maybe this deep dive into the psychology of American pop culture paranoia does not so much reflect the views of its author as it does a deliberate metaphor for the fact that human speculation—to the extent it tries to breach the outer boundaries of its own understanding—is forced to rely on nonsense and madness? The novel's protagonist is the son of one of the physicists who developed the atomic bomb, after all, and we find him in one scene discussing the history of quantum mechanics and the development of other twentieth century theories of reality. Most, Western notes, have the feature in common that they describe objects—mathematical entities resulting from their equations—that are nonsensical and inconceivable, according to the rules of our perceptual apparatus. Massless particles, and the like. In modern physics as in every other sphere of reality, therefore, we seemed to be forced to rely on nonsensical metaphysical notions in spite of ourselves. 

McCarthy's novel may itself not be entirely sensical. There is no coherent plot and no conventional resolution, as reviewers have bemoaned. There are mostly just long columns of hardboiled dialogue with minimalist punctuation, interspersed with improbable McCarthy vocabulary (people having dinner together will come out with phrases like "putrescent molluscs.") Such eccentricities were disastrous when committed to film, in the only McCarthy screenplay I ever saw produced. But in a novel, where they merely add color to the page, they work just fine. As ultimately, does the whole novel, in all its strangeness. (Well, did we really need all those pages toward the end of the book devoted to the Zapruder film and the question of whether or not Oswald acted alone? Aw, who am I kidding—I loved that part.)

It's a nonsensical book, that is to say, but if its theme is truly what I understand it to be—that the confrontation between our minds and reality—as well as between the present fact of our existence and the knowledge of our own eventual death as individuals and annihilation as a species—forces us to make use of nonsensical ideas, because we have no other, and because both the structure of that reality and the fact of our own eventual non-existence are riddled with inescapable inconceivabilities—then this too is all appropriate. Now I just have to read McCarthy's follow-up volume, Stella Maris, and see if it brings the matter back into the world of the sensical (though something tells me it will not).