Charles L. Harness’ 1950 short story “The New Reality” (Harness 1950) is about a scientific experiment that threatens to “destroy the Einsteinian universe.” Adam Prentiss Rogers, the story’s protagonist, is an “ontologist” working for the International Bureau of the Censor. His mission is to “keep reality as is,” by suppressing any scientific research that might “alter the shape of that reality.” But such research is actually being conducted by the story’s antagonist, Professor Luce. He has invented “a practical device – an actual machine – for the wholesale alteration of incoming sensoria,” the raw material of subjective experience. Once he runs this device, human beings will be bombarded with “novel sensoria” that “can’t be conformed to our present apperception mass.” That is to say, our minds will be traumatically overwhelmed by sensations that we are unable to process.
What can this mean? Kant famously warns us that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” Luce’s experiment threatens (and intends) to “blind” us, by producing “intuitions” (Kant’s word for sensations) to which our usual concepts cannot be applied. Reality will no longer fit into the shapes that we impose upon it, and through which we are able to parse it. Faced with such disruption, experience as we know it will fall apart. “Instead of a [space-time] continuum, our ‘reality’ would become a disconnected melange of three-dimensional objects. Time, if it existed, wouldn’t bear any relation to spatial things.” The vast majority of humankind will not be able to navigate such a new reality. The only people able to “get through,” to grasp the altered state of the world and function within it, will be “the two or three who understood advanced ontology”: Prentiss, Luce, and perhaps Prentiss’ boss and love interest, the woman known only as E. In a classic display of scientific hubris, familiar from so many science fiction stories, Luce promises that the two or three of them “will be gods,” finally able “to know all things” as they truly are.
One obvious way to take “The New Reality” is as an allegory of relentless scientific and technological progress. As George Zebrowski puts it, in his general introduction to Harness’ work, the story “takes its strength from the dynamic fact of human scientific development, by which the growth of our knowledge is linked to new ideas and imaginings.” For the last several centuries, new technologies have traumatically overwhelmed us, leaving us numb and alienated – a theme treated by such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Marshall McLuhan. More specifically, “The New Reality” anticipates what later came to be called future shock: as in the 1970 book of that title by Alvin Toffler, and John Brunner’s 1975 science fiction novel The Shockwave Rider. It is not for nothing that, in his day job, Harness was a patent lawyer; he was well positioned to see how the rapid pace of technological innovation might surpass our ability to adjust to it.
But “The New Reality” also warns us that the violent change it envisions is not just a matter of “something like the application of the quantum theory and relativity to the production of atomic energy, which of course has changed the shape of civilization.” The disruption goes much further than this. Beyond the pragmatic “application” of scientific theories, we must consider the basic ontology of the scientific process itself. The story anticipates, by more than a decade, Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shifts in the history of science (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). In the course of what Kuhn calls scientific revolutions, new models of reality are introduced. These new models do not just reflect the accumulation of additional empirical data; they are often flatly incompatible with the prevailing previous ones. The Einsteinian universe is quite different from the Newtonian universe that it replaced. As Zebrowski notes, people have historically found it difficult to accept and adapt to such changes in our world picture as “the dethroning of the Earth as the center of the universe” (Copernicus) and the theory of “evolution by natural selection” (Darwin).
“The New Reality” radicalizes the drama of scientific paradigm change by the simple expedient of taking it naively – which is to say, literally. The story’s basic premise is that our consensus reality is itself merely a historical construct. The physical universe has actually changed over the course of time, in tandem with the development of science. For instance, the story tells us that the world really was flat when people thought it was flat, prior to 500 BC; now it is actually round because our theories tell us that it must be. The “Late Greeks” inferred the spherical shape of the Earth from their observation “that [the] mast of [an] approaching ship appeared first, then [the] prow.” But if “earlier seafaring peoples” like the Minoans never made this observation, it is because there was no such phenomenon for them to observe. We should not think that they failed to notice because “they worked with childish premises and infantile instruments.” Rather, the Minoans were sophisticated in their own way; it is just that the curvature of the Earth didn’t exist yet. In 1000 BC, the mast of a distant ship did not appear any earlier than the prow. Five hundred years later, the Late Greeks observed this phenomenon because their metaphysics required evidence of roundness, which the Minoans’ earlier metaphysics had not.
Or, to give another example, today it is an established truth that the rocks making up the Earth’s crust are millions or billions of years old. But the story suggests that this was not the case in the seventeenth century, when everyone just knew that the Earth itself was only six thousand years old. At that time, the best scientists “studied chalk, gravel, marble, and even coal, without finding anything inconsistent with results to be expected from the Noachian Flood.” It was only during the course of the nineteenth century that these rocks retrospectively became much older. It’s a bit like the retcon (retroactive continuity) process sometimes found in comics, and in fantasy and science fiction stories. For instance, in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the character of Dawn is introduced at the start of the show’s fifth season; but subsequently, everyone in the story remembers her as having been there from the beginning. In a similar way, the nineteenth century needed ancient rocks, because it had invented deep geological time; and so the antiquity of the rocks was established by scientific study.
“The New Reality” suggests, therefore, that the “apparent universe” is “the work of man,” largely a product of “the omnipotent human mind.” Again and again, we come up with “theory first, then we alter ‘reality’ to fit.” Even at best, as Prentiss explains in the course of the story, reality as we know it is “nothing more than a working hypothesis in the mind of each of us, forever in a process of revision.” And basic scientific research – at least in times of what Kuhn calls revolutionary science – involves such revision on a grand scale. Kuhn himself holds back from claiming that “when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them” – though he comes close. But “The New Reality” takes this final step, and argues that paradigm shifts determine and produce actual physical shifts. What “man” (sic) imagines to be the result of “a broadened application of science and more precise methods of investigation” is actually the sign and the consequence of “his own mental quickening.”
“The New Reality” thus argues that we have largely made the world – or at least the “apparent” world – over in our own image. Science fiction commonly extrapolates from particular technological developments or social trends. But here, the extrapolation occurs on a meta-level. The story projects forward, not from any particular scientific innovation, but from the very fact that such innovation happens in the first place. Science is always revising our understanding of the world. One might be tempted to say, therefore, that “The New Reality” gives us a metaphor for scientific progress. But in fact, the story does the opposite of this. For it literalizes the metaphors that we generally use to describe the development of science. Indeed, at one point Prentiss explicitly denies that he is merely giving “a rhetorical description of scientific progress over the past centuries,” as when someone says “that modern transportation and communications have shrunk the earth.” Rather, Prentiss claims that our planet has literally changed from flat to round, and from relatively new to unimaginably ancient.
“The New Reality” justifies these outrageous claims by appealing to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. As Professor Luce writes of Kant in his journal: “it seemed incredible that this silent little man, who had never been outside of Königsberg, should hold the key to the universe.” And yet the Critique does provide this key. Kant tells us that external reality takes the shape it does only because it necessarily conforms to our minds: which is to say, to the ways that we organize and categorize “incoming sensoria” (i.e., empirical sense-data). Perception is never raw or unmediated. It is always already processed, shaped, and conceptualized by us. Experience comes predigested, as it were. This means that we do not ever encounter things as they truly are in themselves (noumena), but only things as they appear to us, in the ways that they have been organized by our own powers of understanding (phenomena).
Of course, “The New Reality” extrapolates far beyond anything that Kant himself actually said, or would have agreed to. According to Kant, even though the structures that govern the phenomenal world are our own imposition, they are not merely arbitrary. If we find the universe embedded in relations of time and space, and organized according to processes like cause and effect, this is because these relations and processes are necessary forms of the human understanding, dictated by the structure of rationality itself. We cannot change these forms and categories. We lack the ability to see things otherwise; cognition cannot work any other way.
But the story pushes relentlessly beyond these limits. As Professor Luce also remarks, despite Kant’s genius: “I doubt that even he realizes the ultimate portent of his teaching.” This “ultimate portent” is attained by radically historicizing Kant’s argument. This means transforming Kant’s necessary conditions into something like multiple, incommensurable Kuhnian paradigms; or like the different epistemes (a priori structures of understanding) that Michel Foucault posits for different social and historical periods (The Order of Things). “The New Reality” posits that our a priori assumptions have themselves evolved over the course of human history, as our minds have grown and changed. We find ourselves retrospectively rewriting both human history and natural history, because this is the only way to guarantee that phenomena will continue to correspond to our ideas about them.
In depicting Kant’s categories as subject to revision, the story raises the question of what has recently come to be known as correlationism. This term was coined by the contemporary French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux (After Finitude). Correlationism is “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other.” That is to say, for the correlationist reality can never be separated from our projections upon it; we only encounter phenomena. Meillassoux laments that, in the wake of what he calls the “Kantian catastrophe,” we are cut off from the “great outdoors” of “absolute reality,” and trapped within the narrow circle of our own all-too-human constructions. In this world of mere phenomena, our telescopes and microscopes do nothing more than reflect our own presuppositions back to us. Ontology (the study of the way things actually are) is ruled out of bounds by Kant and his successors, and replaced by phenomenology (the study of the way things appear to us) and epistemology (the study of how we are able to know the things we know).
According to Meillassoux, this impasse marks nearly all Western philosophy since Kant. Consider, for instance, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, published in 1945, just a few years before Harness’ story. Merleau-Ponty tells us that even the universally accepted scientific claim that “the world existed prior to human consciousnesses” is not an absolute truth; for this claim “presupposes our pre-scientific experience of the world, and this reference to the lived world contributes to constituting the valid signification of the statement.” That is to say, even when we recognize a reality that precedes our very existence, we continue to ground this recognition within the framework of our own experience of the world. Humankind remains the measure of all things. In Meillassoux’s sarcastic paraphrase, we do indeed accept the fact that the universe existed long before the emergence of human beings; but we add to this acknowledgment “a simple codicil” to the effect that even this anteriority is itself only a fact “for humans.” Harness’ story can easily be understood as a hyperbolic parody of this line of thought.
There is, however, a loophole in Meillassoux’s otherwise grim picture of correlationism. Though Meillassoux blames Kant for inventing correlationism, he also concedes that Kant is only a weak correlationist. This means that Kant retains a link to philosophical realism; he acknowledges that the “thing in itself” does in fact exist, even though (or better, precisely because) we cannot have any positive knowledge of it. For Kant, there has to be a primordial reality preceding our thought, and not just posited by it. Otherwise, there would be no ground upon which our mental categories could be imposed. We would be trapped in a fantasmal non-world of endless illusions and shadows. In rejecting such a fate, Kant stands in sharp contrast to most of his successors – including Hegel and many recent so-called “postmodern” thinkers. The latter are strong correlationists; they eliminate the realm of noumena altogether, relegating us inescapably to a world of phenomena tailored to our measure.
This difference is important. The persistence of the noumenon means that the universe is not just a human construction. The truth is out there; there is something that is not just ours. For all of its outrageous insistence that the Earth used to be flat, “The New Reality” never lets us forget this other side of Kant’s duality. For instance, at one point Prentiss explains that
by definition, “cosmos” or “reality” is simply man’s version of the ultimate noumenal universe. The “cosmos” arrives and departs with the mind of man. Consequently, the earth – as such – didn’t even exist before the advent of man.
But “the ultimate noumenal universe” is still there, behind the scenes, indifferent to our “version” of it. Professor Luce completes Prentiss’ argument with his counter-statement: “What has changed? Not the Thing-in-Itself we call the Earth. No, it is the mind of man that has changed.” In other words, the Earth is both a noumenal essence, a thing in itself, and a phenomenal human construction that is added to, and that overwrites, this essence. To quote Prentiss again, however much “man [sic] expanded his little world into its present vastness and incomprehensible intricacy solely by dint of imagination,” beneath this fantastic construction there always remains “some incredibly simple world – the original and true noumenon of our present universe.” For all the power of the human imagination, the noumenal world persists, impervious to its influence, and apparently beyond its reach.
Meillassoux seeks to escape from the self-validating closure of the “correlationist circle,” and return to the “great outdoors” of an unimaginable reality. His strategy consists in pushing correlationist logic all the way to its bitter end, in order to come out the other side. Meillassoux accepts the brute fact that our everyday experience – and the Kuhnian “normal science” that goes with it – is governed by an actually existing a priori order, such as Kant posited. But he discovers a fatal flaw at the heart of correlationism – the same flaw that is uncovered in the course of Harness’ story. This flaw lies precisely in what Meillassoux calls factiality: the existence of the human-constructed order that governs the realm of phenomena is indeed a brute fact – but it is nothing more than such a fact. Things just happen to be the way they are; contrary to Kant’s claim, they do not take their current form by virtue of any rational necessity. For Meillassoux – just as for the characters in Harness’ story – the phenomenal order as we know it is therefore merely contingent. It has a starting point and a history; it has changed over time, and it may well change again. Even if a scientific paradigm – for us, the Einsteinian and quantum mechanical one – is operating flawlessly, stably, and without exception at the present moment, this cannot guarantee that it will continue so to function for all time. Kuhn notes that we continually, if inadvertently, find ourselves stumbling upon “anomalies”: that is to say, “novelties of fact” that do not fit into the current scientific paradigm. Meillassoux, more radically, offers a logical demonstration that no given order of necessities can be necessary, on a meta-level, in its own right. At some future point, the paradigm we currently accept can change radically – or even totally collapse.
In “The New Reality,” Professor Luce – much like Meillassoux – welcomes, and strives to provoke, such a collapse. Like the great paradigm-shifting revolutionary scientists of the past – whom he cryptically refers to as his “family” and his “ancestors” – Professor Luce epitomizes “man’s [sic] insatiable hunger for change, novelty – for anything different from what he already has.” Unlike the practitioners of normal science, who simply engage in “puzzle-solving” (Kuhn), Luce actively seeks what he calls the “final realization of the final things.” Indeed, we are told that Luce “personified megalomania on a scale beyond anything [Prentiss] had previously encountered – or imagined possible.” And yet, Prentiss is compelled to admit that Luce is “very probably justified in his prospects (not delusions!) of grandeur.”
With his imperial ambitions, Professor Luce exemplifies the way that science – and especially revolutionary science – claims to disqualify all other forms of knowledge and belief. Remember, for instance, the way that Einstein proclaimed his new understanding of space-time as the only possible true account, dismissing Bergson’s attempt to retain a subjective, experiential understanding of time alongside it (Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher). Luce is the successor, not only of such actual scientists as Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, but also of fictional ones like Victor Frankenstein and Doctor Moreau. These latter figures personify the notion of physical science as a Promethean endeavor, an exertion of mastery over the external world. They turn the study of Nature into a weapon, a tool of domination. Their actions remind us of the metaphor – often attributed, though perhaps wrongly (Pesic, “Wrestling with Proteus”), to Francis Bacon – of torturing Nature in order to force it to reveal its secrets.
Indeed, early in the story, Professor Luce runs an experiment that involves torturing a rat. He pushes the animal to choose between two different paths. He then punishes it with a severe electric shock, no matter which of the forks it has selected. This experiment is a cruel and absurd parody of behavioral conditioning (the use of reward and punishment in order to induce learning). The rat eventually gives up and stops moving, no matter how hard it is prodded. It is utterly demoralized, “quiescent, in a near coma.” Unable to make decisions any more, the creature is, in effect, “no longer a rat” – as Luce puts it. We will later learn that this rat is a stand-in for the subatomic particles that are Luce’s ultimate targets. If he can torture a photon in the same way that he has tortured the rat, the entire phenomenal world will come to a standstill.
This is what makes Luce’s experiment such a threat. According to “The New Reality,” previous revisions of our understanding of the universe – even ones as momentous as those of Copernicus, Darwin, and Einstein – were more or less “slow and safe.” They were limited by the fact that “it [wa]s optional” for each individual person “to accept or reject the theory.” These theories were only adopted gradually. When he describes paradigm change, Kuhn quotes Max Planck to the effect that
a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.
However, this is no longer the case under modern conditions of accelerated change. Professor Luce’s experiment will not just result in the “publication of a new scientific theory” that might get him into trouble (like Galileo), but that sooner or later will come to be accepted. Rather, Luce intends to give us a traumatic shock, just as he did that rat. His experiment will cause “an instantaneous and total revision” of human experience. It will “change the perceptible universe, on a scale so vast that humanity [will] get lost in the shuffle.” As Prentiss puts it, Luce “is going to force an ungraspable reality upon our minds. It will not be optional” in the way that earlier paradigm changes were. We will not be able to deny the new paradigm or reject it – or even defer it until we have had the time to explore its consequences. Rather than biding time until its opponents pass away, Luce’s “new reality” will immediately extinguish anyone who is unable or unwilling to embrace it. Billions of us, “for all practical purposes, will be pleasantly dead.”
Luce personifies the ne plus ultra of scientific arrogance. He seeks not to master any particular phenomenon, nor even to revise phenomenal reality as other scientists have done previously – but rather to overturn the phenomenal order in its entirety. He accomplishes, through one concrete experiment, what Meillassoux claims to do by dint of reason alone. Luce’s apparatus works to puncture the edifice of “the Einstein space-time continuum,” in a manner much like “taking a tiny bite out of a balloon.” Instead of producing a new correlation, as previous exercises in revolutionary science have done, Luce’s experiment destroys the correlationist circle altogether. It brings the entire history of science to its end (by which I mean both its culmination, and its termination). Today, many physicists are searching for a “theory of everything,” that would allow them to grasp “the final laws of nature” governing everything (Weinberg 1993). They dismiss, or simply ignore, the suggestion that such a theory might well be a chimera. For Luce, epitomizing the dreams of modern (twentieth- and twenty-first-century) physics, such finality means brutally putting us “face-to-face with the true reality, the world of Things-in-Themselves – Kant’s noumena.” Ironically, the ultimate theory, or the ultimate triumph of the scientific imagination, consists in unveiling a “final reality untainted by theory or imagination.”
Harness describes Professor Luce’s experiment in considerable detail. Although this description involves a certain degree of hand-waving (as is nearly always the case even in so-called hard science fiction), it is nonetheless closely attentive to actual quantum physics. A light source is carefully calibrated so that it releases just a single photon. The photon then encounters a Nichol (polarizing) prism, “at an angle of exactly 45°.” At this angle, according to “Jordan’s law,” the photon stands an equal chance of being reflected or refracted. That is to say, if “streams of photons” were to encounter such a prism, at an angle of precisely 45°, half of them would be reflected and half would be refracted. But this result, like so much in quantum mechanics, is solely a matter of probability. It is only true “statistically,” not “individually.” There is no way to know in advance what a single photon will do, when it is by itself, and not part of a larger stream.
What can we make of this? The mention of “Jordan’s law” seems to be a reference to a 1934 article by the German physicist Pascual Jordan. The article shows that, when a beam of polarized light hits a polarized prism, the angle between the light beam’s plane of polarization and that of the prism determines how much of the light will be reflected and how much refracted. An angle of 45° is the point where these quantities are equal. “Jordan’s law” is a rather obscure bit of quantum physics. The original article is not easily available, and the only English-language reference to it that I have been able to find is a book called The Limits of Science, by the Polish philosopher Leon Chwistek, translated into English in 1948 (Chwistek 1948). Harness’ account of the “law” closely follows Chwistek’s wording, so it is likely that this was his source. After describing Jordan’s result, Chwistek goes on to note – crucially for Harness – that statistical predictions are meaningless when we try to apply them to a single instance, and that, therefore,
if a single light quantum is considered it is not possible to predict whether it passes through the prism or whether it will be reflected. It is clear that, no matter what a light quantum may be, a concrete experience is necessary to determine how it will behave.
(Chwistek 1948)
This uncertainty is at the heart of Professor Luce’s experiment. Quantum mechanics is often interpreted to imply that a singular quantum event is entirely indeterminate. Since the theory only speaks of statistical probabilities, we cannot know in advance what any single photon will do. According to the predominant Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, this represents an epistemological limit: a restriction in what it is possible for us to know. No conclusion is drawn about the nature of the quantum particles themselves.
Such a state of affairs has disturbed many physicists, starting with Einstein himself. Chwistek points out that “the fact that it is impossible to predict definite phenomena, does not prove that these phenomena are not determined.” And indeed, physicists have made many efforts over the years to discover “hidden variables” that would restore determinism to the quantum world, and make what is there knowable in principle. The question is still unsettled; but it is fair to say that, thus far, none of these hidden variable theories have been generally accepted.
At the other extreme, some researchers have sought to give quantum indeterminacy a positive ontological status, rather than regarding it negatively, as just an epistemological limit. We might compare this to the way that Meillassoux transforms Kant’s epistemological limit – the necessary unknowability of things in themselves – into a positive noumenal ontology, by “put[ting] back into the thing itself” the very unreason, or unavoidable contingency, that “we mistakenly took to be an incapacity in thought.” In this way, Meillassoux’s entire line of reasoning can be seen as a massive hyperbole of the argument for the positive ontological status of quantum indeterminacy. Most notably, John Conway and Simon Kochen propose a “Strong Free Will Theorem” of quantum mechanics, which
asserts, roughly, that if indeed we humans have free will, then elementary particles already have their own small share of this valuable commodity. More precisely, if the experimenter can freely choose the directions in which to orient his apparatus in a certain measurement, then the particle’s response (to be pedantic – the universe’s response near the particle) is not determined by the entire previous history of the universe.
(Conway and Kochen 2009)
Harness seems to anticipate this line of thought. If Professor Luce is free to set the angle of his Nichol prism at exactly 45°, then the photon he releases is free either to reflect or to refract. This parallel implies a certain degree of anthropomorphism: particles have precisely as much (or as little) “free will” as human beings do. Indeed, Prentiss notes that “I think it was Schrödinger who said that these physical particles were startlingly human in many of their aspects.” In any case, the premise of Luce’s experiment is that the photon, sent by itself through the apparatus, “will have no reason for selecting one [alternative] in preference to the other.” It will find itself in a situation where it has no grounds for action; its decision is entirely gratuitous. No antecedent cause can push it one way or the other, or give it any sort of motive. This could be called an existentialism of the quantum realm. And indeed, it seems that subatomic particles avoid making decisions in such circumstances, if this is at all possible. In the famous double-slit experiment, for instance, the photon evades the burden of choice by going through both slits at once. But in Luce’s experiment, there is no way to equivocate; the lone photon – unlike a whole swarm of photons – cannot be both reflected and refracted.
The question, therefore, is “how does a single photon make up its mind – or the photonic equivalent of a mind – when the probability of reflecting is exactly equal to the probability of refracting?” I presume that, if Luce’s experiment could actually be carried out, the photon would arbitrarily select one or the other of the two possibilities, despite the lack of any reason (or any physical cause) to do so. But in the story, the photon – like the rat in Luce’s earlier experiment – is not able to decide at all:
It will be a highly confused little photon … He’ll be puzzled; and trying to meet a situation for which he has no proper response, he’ll slow down. And when he does, he’ll cease to be a photon, which must travel at the speed of light or cease to exist. Like your rat, like many human beings, he solves the unsolvable by disintegrating.
(Harness 1950)
The photon, in effect, has a nervous breakdown. It is paralyzed. This demonstrates what Meillassoux calls the factiality, or contingency, of the correlation. Once even a single entity fails to correlate properly, the entire correlationist circle is ruptured. The law of the conservation of mass-energy is violated; and with that, the entire “Einstein space-time continuum” falls apart. Space and time (what Kant calls the “pure forms of sensible intuitions in general”) no longer cohere; organizing concepts like identity and causality (what Kant calls the Categories, or “pure forms of the understanding”) are no longer applicable:
Time had suddenly become a barricade rather than an endless road … Luce had separated this fleeting unseen dimension from the creatures and things that had flowed along it. There is no existence without change along a temporal continuum. and now the continuum had been shattered.
(Harness 1950)
What happens once the phenomenal world is broken into pieces, so that everything reverts to its noumenal essence? For Meillassoux, the “great outdoors” of things in themselves is “an absolute that is at once external to thought and in itself devoid of all subjectivity” as of all life: a materiality that is “dead through and through” (“Iteration, Reiteration”). The story could well have ended here, in the void, at a point of unresolved horror. But it doesn’t. Instead, Harness whimsically portrays the noumenal world as the Garden of Eden. Prentiss’ noumenal self is Adam (which is in fact his first name); his lover E, of course, is the noumenal Eve. As for Luce, he is revealed to be Lucifer, “a huge coiling serpent thing! … the noumenon, the essence, of Luce – was nothing human … and therefore never had been.”
Followers of Meillassoux might well protest that the Garden of Eden is itself an all-too-human, correlationist myth. It is a world supposedly created for its human inhabitants, and perfectly fitted to them. But that would be to forget both the absence of God in Harness’ scheme, and the inhuman presence of Luce, the serpent. “The New Reality” cannot be read in conventionally religious or moralistic terms. The story rather dramatizes a tug of war between two human tendencies: one that is “incorrigibly curious,” while the other is “incorrigibly, even neurotically, conservative.” The one side motivates scientific research, while the other is embodied in the Bureau of the Censor. The struggle between these two principles is unbalanced, however, by a third, inhuman element.
In the vision of “The New Reality,” therefore, science is driven by an unquenchable demand that is at best indifferent, and at worst inimical, to human existence. As the philosopher Ray Brassier puts it, “thinking has interests that do not coincide with those of living” (Nihil Unbound). Science pursues its inhuman interests whenever it seeks to explain the world, rather than just accepting it. The same Promethean impulse – an apocalyptic rage for unveiling – leads Luce and his “family” both to produce the ever-more convoluted and complexified structures of phenomenal reality, and to rupture those structures. Despite Kant, we are forced to recognize that phenomenal elaboration and noumenal unveiling are two sides of the same coin. With the serpent in the Garden, not to mention “the seductive scent of apple blossoms” with which the story ends, we can be sure that the correlationist cycle will start all over again. As the wise psychologist Speer remarks at one point in the story,
whenever man [sic] grows discontented with his present reality, he starts elaborating it … How long do you think [the inhabitants of the noumenal realm] can resist the temptation to alter it? If Prentiss is right, eventually they or their descendants will be living in a cosmos as intricate and unpleasant as the one they left.
(Harness 1950)