Beyond human concepts or ideas

VITHAL C NADKARNI

STEVEN Spielberg’s ET is an alien. So is Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris. But the two characters could not have been more different. Spielberg’s extra-terrestrial grew out of an autobiographical impulse to fill the void created by his parents’ divorce. ET was “a friend who could be the brother I never had and a father I didn’t feel I had anymore,” the film-maker said. In contrast, the Polish sci-fi writer believed that we can never understand the alien other: Solaris is a planet-sized organism with a ‘mind’ so inconceivably different from human consciousness that all attempts at communication are doomed. Cosmonauts who try to connect with the ‘ocean’ suffer bizarre hallucinations. Solaris is apparently manipulating their memories and inner traumas without revealing anything about itself. Solaris is presented and perceived by the protagonists as a God-like being beyond comprehension. Is it reflecting their collective subconscious? Does it represent a sort of universal record of all memories, every thought or event that has ever occurred? All Lem will say is that Solaris “cannot be reduced to human concepts, images, or ideas”. This may sound similar to the stance taken in Advaitic Vedanta and apophatic theology of Eastern Christianity. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, for example, students ask the Sage Yajnyavalkya to describe God. “The Divine is not this and it’s not that (neti, neti),” he replies. Thus, the Divine is not real as we are real, nor is it unreal. The Divine is not living in the sense that humans live; nor is it dead. It’s not compassionate in the sense we understand the term, nor is it uncompassionate and so on. If this sounds too nihilistic or escapist, the sages assure the seekers that their mantra neti, neti is not really a denial. It only asserts that human beings inevitably fail when they try to capture certain ‘realities’ in verbal nets. Contrast this with the position taken by the so-called ‘philosophy of the flesh’ propounded by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Mind and cognitive processes are inherently ‘embodied’ they argue; thought is mostly unconscious and abstract concepts are largely metaphorical. That reverses centuries of dualism in western culture that splits the mind from the body, reason from emotion and thought from feeling. But it also locates the limits to our conceptual understanding right into the core of our being.