Albert Camus, Daniel Dennett, and Robert Musil Walk Into a Bar

In the first chapter of his book Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett quotes Albert Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus:

“And here are trees and I now their gnarled surface, water, and I feel its taste. These scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes - how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine. You describe it to me and you teach me classify it. You enumerate its laws and in my thirst for knowledge I admit that they are true. You take apart its mechanism and my hope increases …. What need had I of so many efforts? The soft lines of these hills and the head of evening on this troubled heart teach me much more.”

What catches me in this paragraph is not just the sentiment that the enumerations and classifications of science fail to be a substitute for experience, but that Camus is not the first author I have encountered expressing this sentiment. Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities is a novel characterised by its essayism, each chapter characterised by Montaigne-esque digressions which enable the author to explore an issue without commiting to a single analysis or perspective¹. As the omniscient narrator of the book tells us of Ulrich’s perspective on life:

“It was more or less in the way an essay, in the sequences of its paragraphs, explores a thing from many sides without wholly encompassing it - for a thing wholy encompassed suddenly loses its scope and melts down to a concept - that he believed he could most rightly survey and handle the world and his own life.”

Or as Alan Wall puts it in The Fortnightly Review

“It was Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities who propounded ‘Essayism’ as the necessary modern mode of thought. Essayism is characterised by an aversion to the axiomatic, a deliberated provisionality, an acceptance of uncertainty, an openness to the possibilities of intellectual adventure and discovery which Musil liked to call ‘possibilitarian’. In the face of the ruin or ossification of so many axiomatic schemata, so many ideologies, Musil asks, what is there left to us but provisionality, that testing of theory and practice which is conveyed by the word ‘essay’?”

Musil thus not only writes his narrative in an essayistic style, but frequently interrupts it with essay-like chapters. And in the seventy-second chapter, he expounds in particular on the topic of science. After the omnisicent narrator asserts that scholars “were people in whom a propensity for Evil crackled like fire under a caldron”, we are further told:

“any of our university professors in whose presence one attempted to assert it would probably counter that he was a humble servant of truth and progress and otherwise knew nothing about anything. That is his professional ideology. But high-mindedness is the mark of every professional ideology. Hunters, for instance, would never dream of calling themselves the butchers of wild game; they prefer to call themselves the duly licensed friends of nature and animals; just as businessmen uphold the principle of an honorable profit, while the businessman’s god, Mercury, that distinguished promoter of international relations, is also the god of thieves. So the image of a profession in the minds of its practitioners is not too reliable.” (emphasis mine)

So, for Musil/Ulrich/The Narrator, one cannot take the self-understanding of a particular profession at face value. We are soon told why there is a propensity for Evil behind the scientific mind:

“We can begin at once with the peculiar predilection of scientific thinking for mechanical, statistical, and physical explanations that have, as it were, the heart cut out of them. The scientific mind sees kindness only as a special form of egotism; brings emotions into line with glandular secretions, notes that eigh or nine tenths of a human being consists of water; explains our celebrated moral freedom as an automatic mental by-product of free trade; reduces beauty to good digestion and the proper distribution of fatty dtissue; graphs the annual statistical curves of births and suicides to show that our most intimate personal decisions are programmed behaviour; sees a connection beween ectasy and mental disease; equates the anus and the mout as the rectal and oral openings at either end of the same tube - such ideas, which expose the trick, as it were, behind the magic of human illusions, can always count on a kind of prejudice in their favour as being impeccably scientific. Certainly the demonstrate the love of truth. But surrounding the clear, shining love is a predilection for disillusionment, compulsiveness, ruthlessness, cold intimidation, and dry rebuke, a spiteful predilection, or at least an involuntary emanation of such a kind.” (emphasis mine)

This idea that with the truth of scientific knowledge comes disillusionment and the loss of human illusions (which, implicitly, we might have been happy to maintain) is the same which Camus expresses. I’m aware of C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” formulation, which asserts the existence of a gulf between scientists and literary intellectuals - but it is not nearly so often that one encounters such as stark example.

Dennett, for his part, does not attempt to challenge Camus’ claim - on the grounds of the questions that Camus is asking himself. Instead, in explaining why he wishes to demystify consciousness despite the Camus of the world whom prefer the mysteries of personal experience to scientific demystification, Dennett asserts that

“Science does not answer all good questions. Neither does philosophy … Sometimes people … are attracted to philosophical doctrines that offer one guarantee or another against such an invasion. The misgivings that motivate them are well founded, whatever the strengths and weakness of the doctrines; it indeed could happen that the demystification of consciousness would be a great loss. I will claim only that in fact this will not happen the losses, if any, are overriden by the gains in understanding - both scientific and social, both theoretical and moral - that a good theory of consciousness can provide.”

Dennett’s perspective is thus not to rubbish the humanistic perspective of Camus and Musil, but rather to assert that science can serve to produce a richer experience of the world, contra the aversion of both to its classifications and enumerations:

“Fiery gods driving golden chariots across the skies are simpleminded comic-book fare compared to the ravishing strangeness of contemporary cosmology, and the recursive intracies of the reproductive machinery of DNA make élan vital about as interesting as Superman’s dread kryptonite. When we understand consciousness - when there is no more mystery - consciousness will be different, but there will still be beauty, and more room than ever for awe.”

Foonotes