A Creation Myth
and its Complications
We all know about the primordial darkness: a demon, about which nothing could be said except that it was absolutely powerful over man, turned all truth false with the mere possibility of its power. Many have believed that a light shone forth, banishing the demon, and that the name of the light was I. At first, the light comprehended the possibility of the demon and trembled, then it comprehended the possibility of something greater—greater than all demons, and any other thing. Unable to comprehend anything greater than absolute greatness, the trembling light saw infernal possibility change to divine certainty and was calmed. Thus the minimal I joined with the maximal God, who placed the idea of Himself inside us so we would always know true from false.
This is not our story. Our messiah was never Descartes, whose eternal return might be diagnosed as heresy, defiance, repetition compulsion, cheap thrill–nothing, at any rate, that ever dims the candle enough to let the demon resubstantiate. Our saviour was always Locke, who raised up his own stigmatised palms and asked why the certainty of their reality should be diminished by an imperceptible phantasm. We remain small, of course: “[t]he workmanship of the all-wise and powerful God in the great fabric of the universe, and every part thereof, further exceeds the capacity and comprehension of the most inquisitive and intelligent man” (ECHU 2ed. 2:6s9). But how much smaller now is the demon, whose iron rule over the spiritual world of possibility could not resist the evidence of the senses? And how much greater is God, who refuses to cheat us of our freedom by stocking our minds with innate knowledge, instead showing Himself to us in every act of perception, as the donor of all knowable things and the gift of their knowability?
It was absurd, to Locke, that the weapon he used to kill the demon could also be an instrument of deicide. A procession of others (Hume, Darwin, Freud…) had to incrementally realise this potential, trailing the zigzagging obliteration of forms of life in which God was sociologically necessary. The latter, most of which probably went unrecorded, might fairly be called revolutions; the former were iterative and processual. Locke and his readers already knew that the animal operations of pain and pleasure were sufficient to build civilisations as well as ant colonies–natural selection supplied a missing piece, rather than overturning the table. Secularisation was the tentative discovery, field by field, that God’s self-evident omnipresence in the perceptible world was indistinguishable from his absence.
Past the pragmatic boundaries of disciplinary fields, however, where the recurring why plumbs unstable strata, we are reminded that the superintending position of God in Locke’s epistemology was no mere concession to history. In his scheme, objects are perceived, perceptions generate ideas, ideas are understood, and the understanding combines ideas and re-presents new ones. But without presupposing God’s benevolence, how do we verify the combinatory powers of the understanding? How do we know we have understood an idea? What is an idea’s relation to the perception that generated it? Is our perceptual apparatus reliable? What does that even mean? Are there objects out there for us to perceive?
Boring questions–not because the answers are obvious, but because only the most and least serious people care to answer them. For the rest of us, it’s mystery, theodicy, purgatory. This isn’t to suggest that secularisation never took place, as if atheists must necessarily harbour secret religious commitments. The solutions of religion aren’t any better, or more of us would go to church. What are interesting (and this can serve, for now, as an indication of the sort of thing I’ll be posting about) are the providential assumptions that nevertheless present themselves to us when we need to secure the relationship between objects, perceptions, ideas, and the ever-obscurer machinery of the understanding–not as survivals of an older religious thinking, but as moves in the game we’ve been playing since Locke threw innate ideas out with the Cartesian bathwater. Even more interesting is our relationship to those literary objects that endanger our providential securities, and the strange possibilities that emerge when these are damaged, mutated, and metamorphosed.