I The Poet
should be free to write what he likes. He may open our eyes to true but uncomfortable realities that we wanted to keep at arm’s length because we—or government propaganda—feed us convenient lies to make life easier. But he may likewise whisk us away to possible worlds, into which we are only too happy to follow him, because everyday reality seems all too trivial, all too gray. Then he lets those distant shores of utopia shine before us—shores toward which, as Oscar Wilde said, humanity will always strive.
Literature, however, began in a completely different way,
namely with the glorification of power. The first writers were employed by the ruling classes and lived off their alms—or at least by their grace. The Iliad, the Odyssey, the Mahabharata, and a millennium and a half later, the Heike Monogatari are hymns of praise to a ruling aristocracy. They extol tyrants who transformed their power and cunning into divine attributes and continued to squabble in heaven—in the form of vengeful, lecherous, jealous gods hungry for sacrifices. This race of self-declared “supermen” has truly deserved its extinction – while outwardly shimmering with the fantastic splendor of peacocks, it tends to be inwardly hollow. It was to the credit of a woman from Japan to have discovered the semblance of a soul within such a hero—one radiant prince Genji—or rather breathed it into him through her own power. From this bold creation emerged the first great novel of world literature: the Genji Monogatari.
A little over two hundred years ago, an instrument of murder—the guillotine—gave us a pungent aftertaste of this now vanished race. At the public execution sites of the French Revolution, the aristocratic hero revealed himself to be a man who understood the art of dignity and courage—and of dying with splendor. One after another, before placing their heads under the guillotine, the aristocrats hurled a witty remark, a satirical verse, or a brazen challenge into the crowd of onlookers. No one has ever matched such a masterful exit.
At the beginning of the 14th century
Dante’s Divina Commedia also described the worldview of power—that is, of the most powerful institution of the era: the Church. But the focus was no longer on secular rulers and heroes; rather, it was on the Church as the link between the powerful and the people. Dante is both a glorifier of power and someone who had been relentlessly persecuted by it. On the one hand, he erects an encyclopedic monument to the prevailing worldview of the time; on the other, the Florentine is a daring whistleblower publicly bringing charges. He shows how some of the Church’s highest representatives trample on the teachings of Jesus—and for that, he condemns them to burn in hell. On earth, however, these dignitaries did not suffer. For the Church and the secular power realized early on that their rule was most secure when they supported one another. One secured its rule through brute force, while the other spread the doctrine that this force came by the grace of God. Except when secular power decided to appoint only bishops to its liking, or when, conversely, the Church strove for theocratic rule and forced the emperor to make a penitential pilgrimage to Canossa, this collaboration functioned remarkably well. Nevertheless, the ideology of the shepherds of souls was much more than mere oppression or the “opium of the people”—even if this aspect must by no means be ignored. Everything that human beings are capable of mustering in terms of empathy, love, generosity, compassion, and self-sacrifice, the Church has vividly brought before people’s eyes through poems, stories, paintings, and sculptures, thereby creating a meaning of life that provided the people with a sense of stability, even—and especially—in times of need.
In spiritual literature, as opposed to its secular counterpart, a unique phenomenon had, however, occurred with the founding of Christianity: the fusion of radical dissidence and a power that relentlessly persecuted all forms of heterodoxy. The early Christians and the very founder of their religion had been rebels against the ruling power—rebels treated as criminals. There would likely be no trace of them or their writings today had the oppressed not come to power in Rome. After the Church became the second most powerful organization after the secular ruler, it canonized some of the rebellious writings, elevating them to official doctrine and prevailing truth. In this way, the people were given a voice—even if only in their afterlife they could hope for a deliverance from oppression both by the state and the Church.
Three centuries after Dante, during the reign of Elizabeth I,
secular power was still embodied in the country’s nobility, and Shakespeare dedicated some of his most significant plays to its most powerful representatives. However, his heroes were no longer luminous figures who shone on the outside but were hollow within. Shakespeare was the first to make his heroes people like you and me by portraying them with every conceivable vice and villainy—but in an exaggerated form. Moreover, people from all walks of life appear on his stage. London was a major city, home to some two hundred thousand people—a city of artisans, merchants, lawyers, and civil servants—much like Florence, Rome, Milan, Pisa, and other Italian cities had been for centuries. One of the greatest poets of all time could afford to include even the despised common man in his plays, provided he did not make him a mouthpiece for rebellion.
Under the French Sun King, Louis XIV,
the glorification of power reached yet another peak. Unlike Shakespeare, however, Corneille and Racine depict an aristocracy that conceals its own tyranny behind a dazzlingly beautiful facade of art and education. But the art of these hero-worshippers was the swan song of a dying era, for in those years a new, modern epoch was already breaking through in Molière.
To the nobility, the “commoner” was still an inferior, mostly despised being, created solely for the purpose of being taxed by the aristocratic elite and kept as servants—a being upon whom one could pour buckets of scorn with impunity. This mockery is still present in Molière’s work—otherwise, the court would likely never have allowed the poet to speak at all—but Molière’s dissidence lies in the fact that the lower ninety percent, at least the bourgeoisie, already appear in his works as equal human beings.
A century after the French Sun King
Weimar Classicism, too, still stood in the shadow of power. German Classicism was to become the center of a new canon in which the focus was no longer on violence, but on education, beauty, and the Enlightenment. The actual history of the Germans, especially that of the Prussian Junker class, offered little material for heroic epics—just as little as English or French history. It was therefore a twist of fate that Johann Joachim Winkelmann had, shortly before, invented the noble and ideal human being and recommended that the Germans emulate him. Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, and an entire generation of Germans fervently believed in the dream of a refined Hellenism emerging anew in their homeland.
Social—and thus also literary—conditions
did not undergo a fundamental change until the Industrial Revolution. This led to a redistribution of power and, consequently, to its gradual democratization. From then on, the poet no longer needed to serve as the mouthpiece of the ruling class. Just as there was an increasingly private economy that eluded the control of those in power, there was now a private sphere of opinion, religion, and written expression, into which the state was permitted to intervene only if calls were made within it to overthrow the ruling order. The self-glorification of power was confined to the official party organs, which attracted fewer and fewer readers.
But this was by no means the end of an age-old tradition. Dictatorships and the states of “real existing socialism” gave rise to a new nomenklatura that, in the old manner, saw poets as nothing more than convenient tools for glorifying their own worldview and power. Anyone who did not submit to this dictate was persecuted or forced to leave the country. Putin, the Iranian regime, North Korea, and even China tolerate only fawning panegyrics and threaten any criticism with prison or death. The would-be dictator Donald Trump is prevented from adopting this approach only by his country’s democratic rules, which still function.
Such language regulations have astonishing effects. Nowhere else do politicians’ speeches and official propaganda ooze morality and noble sentiment as much as in the states of injustice—for example, in North Korea, in today’s Iran, or in Putin’s Russia. But even in the former GDR, the canon of what was “good” was set in stone; there was no need to argue about it—in fact, one wasn’t even allowed to argue about it! In North Korea, where a semi-enslaved population regularly pays for its supreme leader’s dreams of great power with famines, well-fed generals weep with emotion and tremble with enthusiasm when the dictator explains the world to them. The Nazi dictatorship, as the newsreels of the time vividly prove, evoked similar states of mind among its followers. In fact, in Nazi Germany, people were expected to laugh and sing at every opportunity; the Nazis exploited Germany’s magnificent choral tradition to conceal their crimes behind a facade of beautiful songs.
This tactic of tyranny has a clear motive. Prosperity, education, progress, and the satisfaction of a population cannot be enforced by decree; they result as long-term consequences of policies pursued purposefully and wisely over the years. But what and how people speak publicly about conditions in their country—which vocabulary is permitted and approved, and what is to be ostracized and banned as “fake”—that is something an authoritarian government can decree overnight. As the former Soviet Union and today’s Russia demonstrate, the artificially created facade ultimately has little in common with lived reality.
Democracies lack this beautiful facade of publicly displayed morality and noble sentiments—from the perspective of the masses, this is their weakness and their Achilles’ heel. To this day, disputes continue unabated on the political stage of the Federal Republic of Germany, as in any liberal state. If one were to rely solely on official proclamations of morality, it would seem as though the latter flourishes far more abundantly in states characterized by injustice and criminality than in those where a functioning legal system largely curtails inhumanity.
The distribution and democratization of power
finds its reflection in literature. The poet no longer had to obey the ruling powers of the day—the nobility of the Iliad, the Church in Rome, a Sun King, the nomenklatura, etc.—but must win the favor of the paying public, which either spurns or buys his works. But even in the age of the Industrial Revolution, people still want to be heroes, orienting themselves toward the prevailing ideals of their time—democracy has even promised each of them a right to happiness (the “pursuit of happiness”). Yet if everyone wants to win, there will inevitably be many losers. The great psychological novels of the second half of the 19th century—the works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann—no longer depict a class of heroes radically distinct from the masses, but rather ordinary people, each of whom, in their own way, strives for some kind of perfection, yet stumbles over thousands of obstacles along the way and all too often fails because of them. Hope is now countered by a second reality—one often described in even more vivid terms—that of failure—and even a descent into crime when society and fellow human beings stand in the way of one’s own happiness. Below the realm of such great literature, a new offering for the masses was soon emerging: a tsunami of more or less kitschy romance novels and bloodthirsty crime thrillers, where wayward souls are allowed to cathartically act out their own anger and, at times, perhaps even their own brutality.
The great poets of psychological literature had by no means renounced hope. The protagonists of their works are fighters who, if they understand the world correctly and act accordingly, can very well succeed. For the world described by the masters of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remains largely rational and explicable. The moral dimension of good and evil remains one of the unshakable cornerstones of their worldview. At the same time, however, a body of literature emerged that expresses horror at the radical incomprehensibility of the world. One of the earliest representatives of this genre is E.T.A. Hoffmann; its unsurpassed master is Franz Kafka. Albert Camus belongs to this tradition, as does Clemens Setz. For these poets, the world is no longer interpretable—it is a fascinating or repulsive, a mysterious or even terribly banal enigma. This literature reflects the general relativity of moral and aesthetic values, which are no longer subject to the commands of heroes—nor even to those of a god—but are determined by democratic consensus. Good and evil, once set in stone, are now constantly being renegotiated through compromise.
Wherever democracy flourishes unhindered,
the poet gives birth, for the first time, to a completely new, unprecedented literature. For the first time in history, he is free to say anything—almost anything. Whatever he may write, no one will persecute him as long as he does not seek to abolish democracy itself. The worst that can happen to him is, at most, that he sees his own voice fade away unheard.
In a certain sense, Clemens Setz, the poet from Graz, describes both the end and a climax of this development. An end, because, in his novel Monde vor der Landung, he demonstrates the general relativity of values applied both to people and events. The rising moon or a patch of dirt on the side of the road are described with the same meticulousness as a woman who sacrifices herself for others and a half-mad theorist of the hollow universe. Yet his literature also represents a climax because Setz celebrates this general theory of relativity with admirable linguistic mastery. In the past, the great masters of language—Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe—reserved their outstanding artistic talent for portraying extraordinary personalities and events; the modern chronicler from Graz describes with similar devotion the horrors and absurdities our world. He squanders his own mastery on the absurd and a truly inexhaustible arsenal of trivialities.
One might thus believe that the poets from Homer to Setz
are separated from one another by unbridgeable chasms. Yet that is not true; one commonality remains—and it unites the poets of all countries and ages. Poets breathe life into reality, often attributing a will to lifeless things. Homer: the rose-fingered dawn. Mahabharata: Prithvi, the Earth, appears as a personified cow. The Tale of Genji: In the chapter “Nowaki” (Autumn Storm), the fierce wind becomes a manifestation of the wrathful spirits of the former Crown Prince and Lady Rokujō.
In religious literature of all ages, the omnipotence of the will goes without saying—it is its fundamental principle. Where spirits and gods rule the world through their will, there are no “mechanistic” laws of nature, but only regularities as manifestations of their intentions—regularities that the pagan gods or a monotheistic one are also capable of suspending. Prayers and sacrifices have served since time immemorial as means to achieve precisely such temporal suspensions of causality.
This worldview was first challenged by the thinkers of the Renaissance. It replaced the “Dark Ages” with an interpretation of reality that promised humanity a unique and entirely new freedom as soon as it recognized nature as a force that could be mastered through knowledge—and not merely through submission to the Church. Since the Renaissance, there has been a gradual shift away from the religious interpretation of the world. In Shakespeare’s work, this interpretation is entirely absent (as none other than Leo Tolstoy indignantly noted). For the great English poet, God no longer seems to exist. Since that time, the animation of things—at least in secular literature—has increasingly shifted into the realm of metaphor, where it appeals to the reader’s emotions without challenging their understanding. In other words, it becomes a mere reminiscence—yet as such, it remains very much alive up to the present day.
Shakespeare (Henry IV): “Let heaven kiss earth.” Molière (Don Juan): The stone statue of the Commendatore drags Don Juan into hell. E. T. A. Hoffmann and Franz Kafka: In both authors’ works, people often behave like objects or puppets, while seemingly lifeless things take on a magical presence—animated by forces of will. Dostoevsky, The Idiot: In the face of Holbein’s Dead Christ, nature appears to Ippolit as a gigantic, silent, merciless beast or as a machine of the latest design that has senselessly seized, crushed, and devoured a priceless being. Tolstoy, War and Peace: Prince Andrei encounters the old, gnarled oak tree, which seems to defy spring with contempt and bitterness, as if to say that love and happiness are a deception. Proust, In Search of Lost Time: A single pastry—the madeleine—exudes a conjuring power capable of evoking the past of entire human lives. Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain: The high mountains appear as an indifferent yet alluring force that seeks to lull people to their deaths.
The Graz poet Clemens Setz
breaks with the gradual retreat from spiritual animation that the Renaissance had initiated. We are returning to a new, albeit radically altered, Middle Ages. It is as if five hundred years of the Enlightenment (which, in fact, began as early as the 15th century) had never existed, or as if the “mechanistically” disenchanted reality were no longer bearable for people today. For in Setz’s work, the artificial re-enchantment of the world—the animation of things—becomes a stylistic principle. Die Frequenzen /The Frequencies/: Running park benches, snow shovels that clear their throats, talking dogs. Stuck drawers remain closed like a child’s mouth. “Der Trost runder Dinge” /The Comfort of Round Things/: Trees move like dreaming giraffes. Monde vor der Landung /Moons Before Landing/: Here, the animation of objects becomes the novel’s central theme. Peter Bender’s cosmological worldview attributes unsettling intentions and abstruse purposes to celestial bodies and natural forces.
This new Middle Ages and its artificial re-enchantment, however, prove to be realms of desolation, hovering between the trivial and the absurd. Unlike the bygone Middle Ages, Setz does not celebrate a God who is mostly wrathful and rarely benevolent, but rather the folly of the trivial, without setting his sights on any ideals that might promise salvation to humankind. One admires this poet for his skill—and at the same moment feels unsettled: What is the point of such mastery?
II The Logician
is the antithesis of the poet. He presents us with a world without a will and without intentions. For the laws of nature consistently describe a mechanistic, machine-like process that unfolds independently of our own will or the will and desires of superhuman beings. The contrast between this new explanation of the world and all previous ones is most striking when one compares it with religious literature and its interpretation of reality. Then, one striking feature immediately catches the eye. The mastery of the world through the knowledge and application of natural laws has, on the one hand, radically restricted the realm of volition, but on the other hand, expanded it to immeasurable proportions.
The obvious restriction lies in the fact that no prayer—that is, neither human nor divine will—can override the effect of a law of nature. God may have created the world, but he can influence the forces of gravity no more than he can influence the effects of CO2 on the climate, nuclear contamination following a nuclear accident, or the slaughter wrought by the deadly flight of drones and ballistic missiles upon innocent victims. Here, all volition—even divine volition—bounces off, powerless. At the same time, however, an absolutely infinite field opens to human freedom—namely, through the application of these laws of nature. Scientific research is advancing on all fronts of reality—in the macrocosm of the starry sky as well as in the microcosm of the human genome—to discover laws everywhere that allow technicians to actively alter reality: such as sending rockets all the way to Mars or creating artificial beings through genetic manipulation.
While belief in the omnipotence of divine will
is waning—since the laws of nature apparently elude His jurisdiction—the new belief in human omnipotence has spread like wildfire across the globe—most strongly among American technology gurus and in today’s China. And this belief is by no means a figment of the imagination but is based on tangible evidence. Science has successfully conquered hundreds of dangerous diseases. And unlike the theologians of earlier times, we know what the hidden side of the moon looks like and what the sun is like inside. The sciences have amassed an almost immeasurable wealth of objective—that is, provable—knowledge. No previous worldview—nor any of its former gurus—ever achieved such pragmatic results.
Therefore logicians—physicists, chemists, technicians, engineers, computer scientists, etc.—seem to be on the verge of pushing poets together with religious worldviews to the margins. Indeed, this is what happens all over the globe. The methods, principles, and procedures of the (natural) sciences are the only ones that are spreading unchallenged across the planet and relegating all previous worldviews to museums—and they do so for an obvious reason: cell phones and bombs work even if you don’t believe in them.The consequences are obvious: The entire past—including its great literary works—no longer lives on in people’s minds, but only in the exhibition rooms of museums. Homer, Dante, even Shakespeare are now read only by specialists, and the fiction of our time serves most people merely as a means of relaxation from the more serious affairs of life—it no longer exerts a formative influence on the worldview of people today—and this applies just as much to the classics of religious literature.
Today, scientists are generally regarded as people
who are aware of their fallibility. A researcher’s findings are always reviewed by others; no one should have an advantage over others based on presumed authority. Popper elevated falsifiability to a fundamental principle, claims that cannot be refuted must be rejected as metaphysical—they lie beyond the realm of knowledge accessible by empirical means. This is one side of the coin: the democratic, tolerant side of science. But there is yet a second side, and this consists of a claim to total authority. Let’s not forget that the Enlightenment emerged in the struggle against the supremacy of religion. Religion pays homage to an omniscient God and attributes to His earthly representatives the ability to reliably interpret His Will. Science would never have won its struggle had it insisted, in all modesty, on its own fallibility. To stand alongside an omniscient God, it therefore claimed—from the very beginning, even if initially only in theory—the same omniscience for itself. Voltaire had admired Newton for discovering the eternal laws governing the orbits of the planets. Now all that remained was to uncover the eternal laws governing earthly phenomena in order to grant humankind the same absolute knowledge it had previously attributed solely to the gods. Right at the outset of the Enlightenment, and with the same tenacity that the dogmatists of religion had previously displayed, science, in turn, committed itself to dogma.
The logician first turned the hypothesis,
that all events have a natural—that is to say, law-governed—cause, into an effective working principle. This entitles him to examine every realm of reality for law-governed connections between cause and effect. Whereas in earlier times people had merely speculated—for example, by attributing a cow’s infertility or a lightning strike on the mayor’s house to the malicious intentions of a witch or the machinations of the devil—physicians and physicists have since discovered thousands of natural correlations. The success of this systematic search for natural causes and effects was and remains so great that the working hypothesis soon solidified into a postulate, namely, the empirically unprovable and therefore metaphysical assertion that absolutely all phenomena are subject to causality. If that is true—that is, if all events can be explained in a natural, or mechanistic, way—then the neurologist need only fully comprehend the physical reality of the human brain to expose the freedom of the will as a subjective illusion. And we would need only to investigate all relevant factors down to the last detail to be able to predict the behavior of living beings, including humans. In the end, the logician would have reduced even poetry to a product of natural—and, in principle, predictable—causes. Hippolyte Taine, the great 19th-century French historian, summed up this new view of reality—according to which nature and humanity are subject to universal causality—in a single sentence: “Vice and virtue are products just like vitriol and sugar,” reads the infamous sentence from the preface to Littérature anglaise.
III The Philosophers—the Link Between Logicians and Poets
Have the logicians thus won the battle for minds once and for all? Have they succeeded in turning the world into a soulless machine? Most scholars understandably answer this question in the affirmative. Nowhere in the formulas of physics, chemistry, or quantum mechanics do we find symbols for human or divine will. As for the poets, they generally do not concern themselves with such abstract questions; they prefer to rely on their intuition.
Philosophy—and German philosophy in particular—has always served as a bridge between the two: the abstract thinking of the former and the intuitive experience of the latter. It is therefore no wonder that, at least since the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, philosophy has intensively engaged with the problem of whether the world is governed by forces of will or is rather the product of a consistently operating causality.
Immanuel Kant expressed himself rather ambiguously on this subject in the Critique of Pure Reason: On the one hand, he states quite categorically: “…All human actions [are], in appearance, determined by one’s empirical character and the other contributing causes according to the order of nature: and if we could investigate all manifestations of human volition to their very roots, there would not be a single human action that we could not predict with certainty and recognize as necessary from its preceding conditions.” And elsewhere: “One can therefore concede that, if it were possible for us to gain such deep insight into a person’s way of thinking… that every motive, even the slightest, would become known to us… one could calculate a person’s future behavior with certainty, just as one would a lunar or solar eclipse…” On the other hand, Kant insists that this predictability applies only to appearance, for man’s freedom consists in the fact that he projects the principle of causality from within himself into reality. It is not external nature—not the thing-in-itself, about which we can know nothing—it is human beings themselves who are the cause of nature appearing to us as a predictable clockwork mechanism. In this way, Kant reintroduces freedom through the back door, but it is a useless and meaningless freedom. Since we experience ourselves and nature only as phenomena, the factual lack of freedom of both remains.
Although Fichte was ostracized by his master, he proved himself to be a dutiful student when he took this strange construct a step further—thereby reducing it to absurdity. If human beings are the cause that nature is what it is—namely, a mechanistic clockwork—must we not then declare it to be altogether a mere creation of the human brain? Basing himself on Kant, it was a strictly logical conclusion when Fichte declared the external world—in his terminology, the “non-self”—to be, in its entirety, a product of the “self” and thus of the human brain. Accordingly, the world we experience has no independent existence outside the perceiving subject.
Philosophers and scientists with a philosophical bent, such as Pierre-Simon de Laplace, Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, and Steven Pinker—did not take part in this great leap into the realm of the fantastic; yet the denial of freedom in nature—which, as none other than Bertrand Russell himself explicitly asserted, applies equally to human beings—remains a tacitly accepted dogma for some and an openly articulated one for others. It is a claim for scientific omniscience.
To the everyday person, who perceives their own actions
and the vicissitudes of life as largely unpredictable and, for precisely this reason, declares them to be “random,” such a worldview must seem fantastical. Two German philosophers have made their own the intuitive protest that has always been anchored in the religious worldview: Friedrich Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer. Both conceive of the world as governed by a power of will. Hegel declares a “world spirit” to be the ruling authority. Since pure reason is incarnated in this spirit, the world order it creates must be rational too. If evil exists, it is a stratagem of the world spirit, which sometime achieves its ends only through such detours. Hegel’s philosophy is secular Christianity—proposing a religion without a church, pastors, liturgy, or transcendent art and music, a religion made of abstract linguistic formulas requiring no ritual, no morality, and no active love of humanity.
As is well known, Schopenhauer despised and reviled Hegel and his philosophy; yet both agree completely that—like the religious worldviews of earlier times—they understand the active principle of the world’s creation and governance by analogy with the unpredictable human will, and not by analogy with a strictly predictable “mechanistic” clockwork. The difference between the two lies in the openly proclaimed optimism of one and the radical pessimism of the other. A rational world spirit can create only a rational world, according to Hegel. The paradise promised to Christians only in the afterlife is thus transferred by Hegel into earthly life—the rational world order. Christianity never reached such a level of optimism.
And Schopenhauer, of course, did not. When looking at reality, he perceives nothing better than utter meaninglessness and evil—the opposite of the rule of reason. The world as will becomes bearable only through representation, because only the act of contemplative representation—detached from all activity, that is, from all willing—redeems humanity from the bondage of evil. In Schopenhauer’s worldview, only a detached understanding of the world can provide humans with a kind of happiness. This, too, is an echo of a religious perspective—that of the Indian Vedanta.
IV The Paradox—How Logicians—Without Even Realizing It—Arrived at a Poetic Universe
While applied research encompasses every conceivable field without limit and surprises us daily with ever more gadgets—which drive some into a kind of technogenic drug addiction—there is astonishing news to report from basic research. The world becomes ever more enigmatic the further we probe its boundaries toward the very largest and the very smallest. The world, which appeared to the logician as an open book—of which he need only know the first few lines to fill in all the rest according to predetermined rules—has become a great mystery—greater than even the poets can imagine.
For in the meantime, the logicians’ worldview
has fundamentally changed. Chance—as the quintessentially inexplicable, derivable from no rule—was and remains an indisputable reality in the experience of every normal person; no one knows what will happen to them or through them tomorrow or in ten years. To this day, all scientific progress has not changed this elementary truth in the slightest. But everyday experience has never really counted in the eyes of dogmatists—whether they be religious or scientific. Chance was only taken seriously when it made its entry into quantum physics—with, so to speak, official sanction from experts. If he really said this, one must wholeheartedly agree with Anton Zeilinger that physics’ discovery of chance is the greatest invention of the 21st century. For the prediction of the future—which, from Voltaire to Bertrand Russell, has been a fundamental motif and principle—is logically incompatible with the existence of chance.
In fact, this contradiction
could have been recognized much earlier, for even the idea of evolution is incompatible with that of a thoroughly predictable universe.
From the perspective of modern cosmology, the “Big Bang” about 14 billion years ago gave rise to an undifferentiated primordial plasma—out of nothing, since no empirical statements can be made about what preceded it. In the course of evolution, this plasma gave rise to the elements and celestial bodies and—through an infinite number of intermediate stages—ultimately resulted in such fantastic things as bloodthirsty ticks, Mozart’s musical world, and a human consciousness that reflects the outward world. Today, we can model this process of self-differentiating orders through a potentially infinite knowledge, since it is capable of penetrating to any level of detail and, moreover, by no means ends with the present, because evolution can, after all, continue for an infinite length of time. However, we are only ever aware of the evolutionary process in hindsight. Neither can we calculate the primordial plasma out of nothing in advance nor derive from it the elements and celestial bodies—or even, at its provisional end, the bloodthirsty tick, Mozart’s wonderful Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, or human consciousness, in which the world would one day be reflected. And we certainly do not know what the species, ourselves, and this planet will look like in five hundred years (even if we are very well acquainted with individual developmental trajectories, such as the orbits of the planets). And this inability to deduce the future from the past applies not only to the creative process of evolution as a whole, but equally to each of its individual stages.
The world has thus once again become a creation
We ourselves are part of and agents in its becoming, even if only on an infinitely small globe floating through the cosmic void. It is up to us to turn this globe into a paradise or to blow ourselves up. We ourselves are thus an active force of evolution—and we do not even know how many other such active forces exist alongside us, or whether so-called dead matter itself is not also a creative force. And there is furthermore the idea of a creator of this cosmos, and it remains one of the greatest mysteries, for we would have to ask ourselves in the same breath: Who brought the creator into being?
Thus, logicians and poets are growing increasingly close today, even though both express themselves in radically different languages. For the poet, the world has always been a blissful, overwhelming, or sometimes a terrifying mystery. For a few clear-sighted logicians, it is becoming so to an increasing degree, for as the British philosopher A. C. Gray observes, “Scientific enquiry… generates a paradox: increasing knowledge increases our ignorance.”1
1 See my work: Creative Reason – A Philosophy of Freedom (dedicated to William James).