A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis
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A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis
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Overview
Jean-Pierre Dupuy asks whether, from Lisbon to Sumatra, mankind has really learned nothing about evil. When moral crimes are unbearably great, he argues, our ability to judge evil is gravely impaired, and the temptation to regard human atrocity as an attack on the natural order of the world becomes irresistible. This impulse also suggests a kind of metaphysical ruse that makes it possible to convert evil into fate, only a fate that human beings may choose to avoid. Postponing an apocalyptic future will depend on embracing this paradox and regarding the future itself in a radically new way.
The American edition of Dupuy’s classic essay, first published in 2005, also includes a postscript on the 2011 nuclear accident that occurred in Japan, again as the result of a tsunami.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781628952445 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2015 |
| Series: | Studies in Violence, Mimesis & Culture |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis
By Jean-Pierre Dupuy, M. B. DeBevoise
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2015 Michigan State University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-62895-244-5
CHAPTER 1
Genesis
Only a god can save us now.
— Martin Heidegger
Now, at last, it has become plain that the same proud spirit of humanism that gives our world its astonishing and unprecedented dynamism also imperils the future of human society itself. We are living today in the shadow cast by the prospect of catastrophes that, separately or in combination, threaten to bring about the disappearance of the human race from the earth. Our responsibility is all the more enormous as we become more and more convinced that we are the sole cause of what will happen to us. And yet there is a danger that our sense of our own responsibility will increase, rather than diminish, the very arrogance that gave rise to it. Once we have persuaded ourselves that the salvation of the world is in our hands, that humanity owes it to itself to be its own savior, there is a risk we will rush headlong into the abyss. With every passing day, this panicked flight comes nearer to being the destiny of mankind.
Mourning for the Future
The German Jewish philosopher Günther Anders (1902–1992) was the most profound and the most daring of the many thinkers who contemplated the great catastrophes of the twentieth century. He is less well known than two of his classmates at Marburg, like him students of Heidegger: his future wife Hannah Arendt and his friend Hans Jonas. Anders's relative obscurity is a consequence not only of his own stubbornness, but also of the fragmented character of his writings. He abjured great systematic treatises in favor of topical investigations, and not infrequently resorted to parable. More than once, for example, he recounted the biblical tale of the flood in a distinctive and original way. Noah, in his telling, had grown tired of being a prophet of doom whom no one any longer took seriously, for he was forever announcing a catastrophe that never came. And so one day he clothed himself in sackcloth and covered his head with ashes:
Only a man who was mourning [the death of] a beloved child or his wife was allowed to do this. Clothed in the garb of truth, bearer of sorrow, he went back to the city, resolved to turn the curiosity, spitefulness, and superstition of its inhabitants to his advantage. Soon a small crowd of curious people had gathered around him. They asked him questions. They asked if someone had died, and who the dead person was. Noah replied to them that many had died, and then, to the great amusement of his listeners, said that they themselves were the dead of whom he spoke. When he was asked when this catastrophe had taken place, he replied to them: "Tomorrow." Profiting from their attention and confusion, Noah drew himself up to his full height and said these words: "The day after tomorrow, the flood will be something that will have been. And when the flood will have been, everything that is will never have existed. When the flood will have carried off everything that is, everything that will have been, it will be too late to remember, for there will no longer be anyone alive. And so there will no longer be any difference between the dead and those who mourn them. If I have come before you, it is in order to reverse time, to mourn tomorrow's dead today. The day after tomorrow it will be too late." With this he went back whence he had come, took off the sackcloth [that he wore], cleaned his face of the ashes that covered it, and went to his workshop. That evening Genesis a carpenter knocked on his door and said to him: "Let me help you build an ark, so that it may become false." Later a roofer joined them, saying: "It is raining over the mountains, let me help you, so that it may become false."
The tragedy that awaits anyone who dares to prophesy catastrophe is beautifully condensed in this magnificent parable, which nevertheless indicates to us the way out from an apparently paralyzing impasse.
The prophet of doom is not heard because his words, even if they issue from secure knowledge and true information, do not manage to penetrate the system of beliefs held by those to whom they are addressed. It is not enough to know in order to accept what one knows and then to act on it. This fundamental reality is foreign to the so-called precautionary principle, whose implicit premise is that we do not act in the face of catastrophe because we are not sure of knowing enough to act effectively. It is plain, however, that even when we know something with certainty, we may be incapable of believing what we know. The existence and dramatic consequences of global warming were known, and made known to the world, more than a quarter-century ago. But scientists were crying out in the wilderness. It is true that their predictions suffer from one great imprecision: nobody can exactly locate the average rise in global temperature, by the end of the twenty-first century, within a broad range of between two and six degrees Celsius (or about four and eleven degrees Fahrenheit). And yet it seems not to be generally understood that half of this uncertainty is the result of uncertainty about the type of action that will be taken to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Is it really because we do not know how we would react to a forecast of impending doom that we do not act? The suggestion is absurd. Moreover, there is this one thing of which we are quite certain: if China, India, and Brazil go on pursuing the course of development that we have given them as a model to be imitated, we will enter into a looking-glass world in which surprises (not only regarding the climate, but many other things as well) will be routine, the exception will be the rule, and our capacity to act in and on the world will have become a power of destruction.
Searching for the reason why many European Jews refused until the very end, even on the railway platform at Auschwitz-Birkenau, to believe in the reality of industrial extermination, Primo Levi quoted an old German adage: "Things whose existence is not morally possible cannot exist." Our ability not to see when faced with the obviousness of suffering and atrocities is the principal obstacle that the prophet of doom must at least find a way around, if he cannot actually overcome it.
The precautionary principle is ritually invoked not only in support of the view that more must be known, and therefore more research carried out, before we can act; it is also accompanied by an appeal to our sense of ethical obligation. But ethics, if it is to be of any help to us, must prompt us to call into question an idea that is so commonly accepted it has already become a cliché, namely, that we are obliged to answer to future generations for our actions.
The recourse to the language of rights, duties, and responsibility in examining our moral relationship to future generations presents conceptual difficulties that Western philosophy has, for the most part, proved incapable of clearing up. A recent and eloquent example of this failure may be found in John Rawls's magnum opus, A Theory of Justice, imagined by its author and his admirers to have both summed up and superseded all previous works of modern moral and political philosophy. Having rigorously stated and established, at least to his own satisfaction, the principles of justice that must order the basic institutions of a democratic society, Rawls nevertheless cannot avoid concluding that these principles do not apply to questions of intergenerational fairness. He is aware that this is a serious problem, but the remedy he proposes is vague and, at best, no more than provisional.
The source of Rawls's difficulty is the irreversibility of time. A theory of justice based on contractual obligation embodies, by definition, the ideal of reciprocity. But there can be no reciprocity between generations, at least not after some rather brief interval, for whereas later generations inherit the works of those who have gone before, they are unable to give anything in return. But the trouble goes deeper than this. In the Western perspective of linear time, itself inseparable from eighteenth-century ideas of progress, it is assumed that future generations will be happier and wiser than previous generations. But Rawls's theory of justice, precisely because it formalizes a fundamental moral intuition, that priority should be given to the most disadvantaged members of society, leads to the paradox that the first in a line of generations is the worst off and yet its members are the only ones able to confer benefits on those who come after them. Kant, who had already Genesis detected the problem in Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784), found it inconceivable (rätselhaft) that the course of human history could be imagined to resemble the construction of a home that only the last generation would have the privilege of inhabiting. And yet he was unable to free himself from the spell cast by a ruse of nature, or perhaps of history, by which prior generations are led to sacrifice themselves for later generations — the height of the very same instrumental conception of practical reason he rejected.
Our situation today is very different, for our main concern is how to avoid global catastrophe. Is this to say that we must substitute for the idea of human advancement one of decay and decline? Stating the matter in this way, as a choice between progress and decadence, is quite pointless. We can say altogether opposite things about the age in which we live and they will be equally true (for example, that our age is both the most exhilarating and the most frightening of all). We must keep two things in mind at once, the possibility of catastrophe and the possibly cosmic responsibility that falls to humanity of trying to avert this catastrophe. At the table where the parties to Rawls's social contract sit, all generations are equal: the claims of no one generation have greater weight than those of others. But plainly generations are not equal from the moral point of view. Ours and the ones that will follow us have considerably greater moral knowledge, as it were, than previous generations, of whom it may be said today, by contrast with ourselves, that they did not know what they were doing. We are now witnessing the emergence of humanity as a quasi-subject, the dawning awareness that its destiny is self-destruction, and the birth of an absolute responsibility to avoid this self-destruction.
As for our own responsibility, it is not addressed to future generations — these anonymous beings whose existence is purely virtual, and in whose happiness and welfare it will never be possible to believe that we shall have any reason at all to take a genuinely personal interest. To cast our responsibility in terms of a requirement to achieve distributive justice across generations lands us in a dead end.
It is in relation to the fate of humanity that our duty must be conceived, which is to say in relation to ourselves, here and now. Thus Dante, in the tenth canto of the Inferno:
So you understand how our awareness will die completely at the moment when the portal of the future has been shut.
If the door to the future were to close, as a result of our own actions, the very meaning of human history would be forever destroyed, not only in prospect but in retrospect as well: "The day after tomorrow, the flood will be something that has been. And when the flood will have been, everything that is will never have existed."
Can we find the conceptual resources we need by looking outside the Western tradition? Amerindian wisdom literature has bequeathed to us this very fine saying: "The earth is loaned to us by our children." It expresses a cyclical conception of time that seems strange to our way of thinking. And yet the maxim takes on even greater force in a linear perspective, I believe, once the necessary mental adjustment has been made. Notwithstanding that our children — that is, the children of our children, and their children, and so on indefinitely — have neither physical nor legal existence, we are enjoined to reverse the flight of time's arrow and imagine that it is they who bring us the earth — which is to say everything that we value. We do not own nature, we have only the usufruct of it. From whom have we received it? From the future! Anyone who objects, "But the future is not real!" will have done nothing more than draw our attention to the stumbling block that confronts every philosophy of looming catastrophe: we fail to recognize, or do not recognize as we should, and as we must, the reality of the future.
Notice that the maxim is not content to reverse time; it reconfigures time into a loop. The maxim invites us to project ourselves into the future and to look back at the present from a point of view that we will ourselves have created, since we are the ones who make our children, biologically and, above all, morally. Through this act of imagination, by splitting time into two parts and then joining them together in the form of conscious experience, it may perhaps be possible to establish the reciprocity between present and future that is wanting. Whether or not the future has any need of us, we, for our part, need the future, for it is the future that gives meaning to everything that we do.
Noah's purpose in Anders's parable is to devise just such a reciprocity. In mourning the death of those who are still alive, he collapses the future into the past and so, in effect, negates time by transforming it into an eternal present. But the doomsayer's misfortunes have not yet come to an end. Either his prophecy proves to be true, and yet we show him no gratitude for having given us warning (if we do not actually accuse him of being the cause of the calamity he has rightly foreseen); or his forecast goes unfulfilled, the predicted catastrophe does not take place, and afterward he is mocked and ridiculed for having struck the pose of a Cassandra. But it was Cassandra's fate that her prophecies were never to be heeded. It seems not to have occurred to anyone that, if a catastrophe does not take place, it may be because warning was given beforehand and the warning was heeded. "The prophecy of doom is made to avert its coming," Hans Jonas observes, "and it would be the height of injustice later to deride the 'alarmists' because 'it did not turn out [to be] so bad after all.' To have been wrong may have been their merit."
The paradox of doomsaying arises from the fact that the prospect of catastrophe can be made credible only if we can be persuaded first of its reality — of its existence as part of the future, which is itself a part of the ontological furniture of the world, in the jargon of analytic philosophers. In this conception, the predicted sufferings and deaths will inevitably occur; they are the unmistakable marks of an implacable destiny. The present preserves the memory of them, as it were, as a result of the mind's having projected itself into the time following the catastrophe, conceiving of the event in the future perfect tense: there exists a moment in the future that we may look forward to, and say of the prophesied catastrophe that at that moment it will have taken place; thus, for example, in Anders's parable, the flood is something that will have been, the day after tomorrow. If we succeed too well in doing this, however, we risk losing sight of our purpose, which is to heighten public awareness and bring about concerted action so that the catastrophe does not occur: "Let me help you build an ark, so that it may become false."
The same paradox is at the heart of a classic figure of literature and philosophy, the killer judge, who "neutralizes" all those of whom it is written that they shall commit a crime — with the result that their crimes will not be committed. Intuitively one feels that the paradox derives from the failure of the past prediction to be joined with the future event in a closed loop. But the very idea of such a loop makes no sense in our ordinary metaphysics, as the modal logic of prevention shows. Prevention consists in taking action to ensure that an unwanted action is relegated to the ontological realm of nonactualized possibilities. The catastrophe, even though it does not occur, retains the status of a possibility, not in the sense that it would still be possible for it to take place, but in the sense that it will forever remain true that it could have taken place. When one announces that a catastrophe is imminent, in order to avert it, this announcement does not possess the status of a prediction, in the strict sense of the term: one does not claim to say what the future will be, only what it would have been had preventive measures not been taken. There is no need for any loop to close here. The announced future does not have to coincide with the actual future, the forecast does not have to come true — for the announced "future" is not in fact the future at all, but a possible world that is, and will remain, nonactual. The figure illustrated by the killer judge makes sense to us because it corresponds to what might be called common-sense metaphysics, in which time assumes the form of a branching tree within which the actual path of events can be traced. Time is a garden of forking paths, to quote Jorge Luis Borges, the most metaphysical of poets and the most poetic of metaphysicians.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Short Treatise on the Metaphysics of Tsunamis by Jean-Pierre Dupuy, M. B. DeBevoise. Copyright © 2015 Michigan State University Press. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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