Excerpt from Dialogues in Hell
A Deceased Plato discusses Interstellar Civilization with Two Close Ghost Friends
[Excerpt from Dialogues in Hell]
Let us begin again from the top.
Imagine if you will, my dear friends, that one day humankind overcomes its civil wars, its stasis, and moves forward in earnest with its purpose. The great houses fall one by one to forms of government informed by philosophy. Entire movements dedicated to making the world bloom, to make “the whole world a garden” as their Great King’s magoi said in my time, and every last one of us dreams only to be a philosopher in his soul and in his craft.
One by one the nations give common cause to both repair the Earth and to rise from these hovels set in the hollows of this great sphere. They ascend to Starry Sky in chariots made of sound dialectical derivations—after all, the movement from my age’s mastery of the geometer’s episteme to the work of equations that have impact on time and space was the work of dialectic, of defining the many names for the same, the same names for many, and dividing these into their proper places.
Our dialectical chariots are sealed for the vacuum, for Democritus was right in the respect of the inhabitable bodies—perhaps not on the micro scale he imagined, but the macro is defined by bodies and void. That void is our death and our calling—you’ll see, as we progress, that it is not void at all, but a plenum, but we go too far if we state this.
Mystic: Master Plato—
Please, call me “comrade Plato” or just “comrade.”
Mystic: Master Plato, what is the meaning of this, “that void is our death and our calling…that it is not void at all, but a plenum”? It sounds like a mystic’s speech.
Partisan: Yes dear comrade, it certainly does. To a degree that I find suspect and perhaps…a little reactionary?
Enough you two, I said it would have to wait. If you cannot rein your steeds in, let me whet their appetites with a morsel: what appears void to us appears so only in virtue of our perspective, entombed in three spatial dimensions and its binding yoke of time. If we could see with the eyes of thought, like Parmenides did as he soared into Starry Sky before plummeting into the chthonic navel of Gaia herself, then we would see fullness all around us—we could reach out and touch in thought the others who press in about us.
Mystic: This does sound rather like the teachings of my masters in the perennial tradition of the mystics.
Partisan: Indeed, comrade, it does sound like obscurantist trash.
I won’t have you fight on my account; anyhow, did we not agree to join together in common for this logos, with an aim towards fearless, open, and bold speech? Did we not all pour out libations for the guardian spirit of fearless parrhesia? Did we not dedicate ourselves beneath this harvest moon to the parrhesiast’s discipline?
[in turn they nod, although the Partisan kept himself closed; the Mystic, to Plato’s frustration, felt confirmed; this, he weighed, called for tugging the reins of this logos slightly against his favor]
But this matter at hand is not the work of the psychonaut but the astronaut, the sailor of the void whose bold Ship of Theseus cannot but be rebuilt again and again on a voyage so far from home that home loses all meaning. Even the dead have no rest, for they risk burial in the chasmic abyss or a foreign chthonic soil.
They craft their chariots with only the most secure of the geometer’s proofs. One error and all perish as the cruel void draws the pneuma from their nostrils.
Mystic: You speak then, Master, of the Stoic soul? Crass materialism anew? I’d have thought you above it.
No, I speak of pneuma as breath alone, but the Stoics cannot be all wrong, truly none can, as even the distorted wisdom of the mantis and the sophist contain threads of great insight. But they were right to notice that the ancient name-givers saw pneuma and psyukhein as twins. For animal life gestates with breath and meals, while vegetable spirit gestates on our opposing breath and light. Vegetable soul is, in some sense, wisest of all, for it partakes most directly of light and its nourishing wisdom.
Partisan: You then do seem to be alluding to a holographic universe, comrade. Information is all light is to you, rather than one of the fundamental forces for our model of physics, a model that underlies an account of society that cannot but be driven by the inexorable struggle over the means of reproducing life—the living space, the nourishing space, the productive space, the communal space of the arts and sciences. Informational cosmologies repeat the hierarchies of the reactionaries that predate even our current Demiurge, the specter Capital, and give it the framework necessary to grind those of us who know into the dirt, and to cast spells of ideological delusion by the cruelest discipline to keep the rest from awakening.
You get ahead of yourself, comrade. But I will say that you do not appreciate how much your Standard Model depends on such informational, one could say mathematical, ontologies.
To continue: our astronauts sail into Starry Sky, looking here and there as they set out. Humankind has taken to the stars, has become what it always was: the awakening of animal life to act for itself, rather than to dumbly stumble about evolutionary pathway after evolutionary pathway, conscious of its belly but not its telos.
But a telos is an “end” in the classical sense as well. Once achieved, the end closes the knot and that which was…becomes something altogether different. To fulfill your purpose is to become something else. This is true on a minor level—I am hungry, my appetite drives me, I eat food nourished on the light’s rays, and I am no longer hungry. That state has ceased to exist; a new state stands now in the ruins of the old, it is sated. I become “full Plato,” when once I was “hungry Plato.”
Our species has now felt the same. Now it faces a terrifying openness: emptiness in all directions. World after world not made for us; not bent to us; not cultivated by our vegetable and animal soul ancestors, many worlds ruled by rock alone, unhewn. We find life, not as improbable as once imagined, but it is all one, and perhaps two, dimensional. Nothing three dimensional to fear or stand in awe of, to laugh at or to converse with. That is what is meant by xenophilia amongst the masses, this desire, “beam me up,” “I want to believe,” the eschatology of xeno invasions cleansing or awakening us from childhood. All of that hope depends on life like us, but we seek and find none.
Finally, improbably, the good ship Theseus arrives at a world with fellow logos loving animals, in three dimensions of space progressing moment to moment, and suddenly the “On Screen” moment arrives and this is what they say, in perfect but odd clarity:
“You aren’t supposed to be here.”
“What do you say?” Our astronauts tremble in awe, wonder, but also unease.
“You are out of your cage. The Warden will return, and will know of your transgression of the limits of your kind. Speak to us no further lest your pollution sicken our people.”
The astronauts are stunned and at this moment begin to report all their anomalous experiences since leaving the Earth for Starry Sky. Phantoms, faeries, foo fighters in the void. Lights appearing and disappearing. Objects slipping in and out of space, like Timaeus’ solids. But not only that. Visitations. Angels and ghostly prophets. Uncanny doppelgängers that turn and are gone, sliding away via a corner not visible to the three-dimensional aisthesis: our bodies were not made to know the truth, but to function and survive in the world they grew up in, that the species might one day burst through its integument and flower forth without the limits of the body-like soul.
Now they are haunted. Haunted by the “here be dragons” lore of home. Lost and confused they return to Earth. Excited to hear the wonders, the people gather around eagerly, but what they see stuns them: the Theseus is not what it once was. Replacement after replacement, simulacrum upon simulacrum, it has become a double of itself, an idea of itself, not the original. The ship before them is the idea of the ship that left. And so are its occupants.
On a long enough voyage at sea, men will do things they never dreamed possible on the land. The rules change out there. So much more for the Starry Sky.
They are human no more. Their bodies contorted by years of low gravity and free fall. Elongated and sickly, they appear insectile. The people do not hear their warning, they see the warning on their bodies: “we have gone too far, we have crossed a boundary and must right the ship before it is too late.”
They reject the messengers from the stars, angels of the void, and console themselves on opinions that confirm the appetites of their bellies. Before too long they’ve abandoned the program, they’ve given up on Starry Sky, they repair the good Earth, restore Gaia to full life, and never look up again.
Mystic: Fascinating. You say then, like Tarkovsky’s Solaris as a statement about Earth love and rootedness, that the autochthonous life is all there is, that we should remain rooted with our feet upon the ground…do you not?
I said no such thing, but you might read that into the story if you take it to be true.
Partisan: I take it to be a nice reminder that blasting off in expensive chemical rockets is for the deluded servants of Capital, not for the faithful revolutionaries.
We all tend to hear what we wish for when we listen to long tales spoken in one voice. That is why myth, story, narrative, and its characters is a limited medium.
Partisan: It is literally the medium in which you reside now. That’s the material reality at hand.
Mystic: Now you get it, comrade.
Partisan: I concede nothing.
All well then. Let’s continue by inserting a moment of disputation, shall we?
[as one they nodded, more attentive to the matter at hand than the matter between them]
If there is life on Earth, should we not expect it elsewhere?
Mystic: Of course.
Partisan: Maybe we are lucky and alone.
It is special pleading to claim we are alone and to remain a materialist. It takes a god to make a cosmos for only one species. If we cast off and there was nothing out there, no life, only void and unhewn rock, that would be what one might expect of a god as a cosmic programmer. I think you, my dear comrade, ought to rethink the implications of your materialism.
Partisan: I…I don’t believe it, but assuming your account unfolds by sound logic, I shall be fair. Continue.
There is life then?
Partisan: Yes.
And abundantly then?
Mystic: If there are as many worlds as our scopes tell us, yes.
And consequently quite old too?
Partisan: I think so. It must be, as there are galaxies far more ancient than our own.
Mystic: Yes, our measurements are in the billions.
Partisan: Now you’ve become a scientist?
Mystic: I’m a biologist by trade; a mystic by conviction.
Let us proceed. So if the universe is vast and old, and life is here, it must be elsewhere, taking a very conservative estimate saying it never appears without the most precise fine tunings, we still get hundreds of thousands of cultures in our galaxy alone amidst a sea of galaxies, many of whom are far more ancient than our own. So there must be layers upon layers of galactic society and its diplomacy, wars, and developments stretching back eons.
Mystic: Most assuredly.
Partisan: I cannot argue the point, but it does sound a little too fantastic to me. I assume one of our priors is in error, though for now I will let it stand.
Does such a galactic order welcome a newcomer? Or does it contain them, a policy born of millenia of experience? For not all cultures will be wise when they take to the stars, perhaps their bodies uniquely intuit geometries and numbers but contain nothing of the conscious grasping against entropy that is our animal life. For them, Star vehicles are as easy to make as boats on our world. For them, joining in common is never an option, never a possibility. These are dangers that must be swatted out. Still others fall to the tyrannical impulses that are possible for all animal life that grasps towards the intellect without fully embracing it. So there would develop amongst these civilizations a “filter,” a screening process for newcomers—assuming they did not decide once, long ago, as the gardens bloomed around them, that pruning would need to be more…radical.
[All stop their peripatetic wandering on the luminous rainbow path beneath their feet. Soft light emanates from their feet where they are pressing down harder on the surface. Downcast, they seem worried that this latter account might spell their own doom.]
So the galactic order tends towards equilibrium. It cannot just admit new sailors—what if they became hostile? Tyrannical? No, it must put them through a process of tutelage before they can be permitted, and if they become violent and unruly it will exterminate them as a pest.
That I tell you is our condition. Our Wardens are out there and are wholly other to us. They haunt us and control us through carefully crafted noble lies, gradually making us either cattle or children to be raised.
Partisan: Just sounds like reactionary authoritarian ideology on Earth projected into space.
Mystic: I suspect the same, Master. It’s too dark to be probable. You yourself said the cosmos must be Good.
But the Good does not respect what is narrowly good for us at a given time. Indeed the Good can be a frightful and distant watcher, every weakening our resolve by demanding too high an ascent from us. We turn to goods because the Good, seen as it is, is terrifying and unrelentingly Good. Just as our perceptions are produced by the functional architecture of bodies grown on Gaia’s crust rather than accurate detectors of truth, so too the Good cosmos might not be so good for us animals who need air to breathe, water to drink, sun-soaked greens to eat, warm bodies to touch, soft linens to smell. It is good for that part of us that pokes its head out of the hollow like a fish, but for the other parts it is too demanding.
Partisan: But again, comrade Plato, this is nonsense. You’ve simply taken the absurdity of our world and projected it into Starry Heaven, just like the anthropomorphism of your account of the cosmos in the Timaeus.
That is of course Timaeus’ account—
Partisan: Did you or did you not author the Timaeus?
Well yes, I did—
Partisan: So it is yours.
You imagine that the author of a good novel endorses each view of the characters she portrays?
Partisan: No, but there is no didactic purpose to a novel. At least not a good one.
I think this is shortsighted. What is the purpose of a novel?
Partisan: To edify the reader.
So it is aimed at…shall we say…training the soul of the reader in a wisdom they did not have access to before becoming a reader?
Partisan: It—no, not exactly. Art, good art, has no purpose, it is simply art in itself.
Mystic: I would have thought you, good Partisan, would side with Lukacs and Stalin on art: if it is not realism and it is not in service to the proletariat’s cause, then it is bourgeois distraction. No?
Partisan: I do not side with Stalin in anything, thank you. Nor do I think Lukacs was at his best when he described art in this manner. Far too crude. Bloch and Brecht are more representative of my views on art.
Mystic: So then, what does art do for us? “Good art,” as you put it, in any case.
Partisan: Good art awakens us, raises our consciousness of our conditions, propelling us forward to do what is good for the movement…
There is no more to that statement? You hesitate.
Partisan: I…yes, I realize I’ve stated a contradiction.
Well certainty. Good art both has a purpose and is purposeless; or it has a purpose endogenous to itself but with no further purpose.
Partisan: Correct. I see I have some examining to do. Clearly edification and “art for art’s sake” do not make for lovers with great chemistry.
Well you won’t be doing so alone!
[Our Partisan looks to be disgusted by this turn of events.]