Philosophy: The Human Touch is a big book, not just in terms of its 500-plus pages but because of its theme, indicated by its sub-title, "our part in the creation of a universe". Versatile Michael Frayn, better known for his novels and plays, reverts here to philosophy, his original academic discipline, and provides an intriguing account of what he calls the world's oldest mystery.
Can we, he asks, know about things as they exist independently or does the knowable world consist purely of our experiences. We are sure that the world exists independently of us. But can anything be said or thought about it which is not the product of human consciousness? What can be seen of it that is not dependent upon a single point of view from which to see it?
Such investigation of the relationship between the world and human consciousness is usually a ponderous business. But as related by Frayn it is a dazzling and entertaining dialogue between himself and the reader. Difficult analysis is suddenly illuminated by humorous or outrageous viewpoint or supposition. (For example, the discussion whether the distance from Manchester to Newcastle is 178km or 224km. Or the discussion whether the division in most European languages of inanimate objects into male and female entitles knives and glasses to a place of their own from which spoons and forks are excluded.)
Developing his own view of the matter he proceeds, with frequent allusion to quantum physics, to systematically undermine our cherished assumptions. Things we firmly believe are demolished with Cartesian enthusiasm and revealed in their merely human perspectival relativity. What we take to be facts are shown to be products of our own fictions. The dependable substantiality of things is dissolved into a fleeting indeterminate flux. Macroscopic objects are only populations of quantum particles. The laws of nature are portrayed as human constructions. Causality, like everything else including space and time, involves human participation. Like the scientific laws it allegedly underpins it has reality only in the context of human thought and purposes. Likewise mathematics is rooted in our practical manipulation of our environment.
Our own inner life is no more stable and transparent than the world we inhabit. Our language is not regulated by universal deep grammar but learnt in a pretty haphazard way through analogy, imitation, and with a view to serving our needs and objectives. Our thinking, deciding, and our self-awareness are similarly fuzzy and indeterminate - constructed rather than disclosed. We are like Hamlet learning things we don't know from an ephemeral ghost but only through words with which we ourselves have endowed him. Our inner life is a fiction composed by ourselves.
At the heart of the author's investigation of the relationship between our knowledge and what is known is a conviction that what we assert to be the case about the world or ourselves is primarily a function of what we declare or decide to be so. All narration and description is indissolubly subjective involving selection, declarations and enactments made by us or already made by others. "There is no limit . . . to the layers of sense that can be read into something."
One can view this provocative book as grappling with a two-fold aspect of human knowledge. On the one hand it is a social product no more independent of its production than a chair or a film. On the other hand, knowledge is of things which we do not produce at all such as mountains, our neighbours, gravity.
Although the author seeks to maintain this bi-polar nature of knowledge, the whole thrust of his inquiry leads him to ascribe such overwhelming priority to the social production aspect that the trans-human intrinsic intelligibility of objects is attenuated almost to oblivion.
The upshot is the assertion of an asymmetry in favour of human creativity vis-à-vis the known world. He disarmingly informs us that his former professor of philosophy considers his central argument to be "anthropocentrism run amok". Indeed.
Finally, however, he acknowledges that the paradox of our knowledge of things remains unresolved. "This is what it comes down to in the end: the world has no form or substance without you and me to provide them, and you and I have no form or substance without the world to provide them in its turn. We are supporting the globe on our shoulders, like Atlas - and we are standing on the globe we are supporting . . ."
It would be interesting to continue the dialogue by considering things from the opposite, and for many a more compelling, perspective which affirms an asymmetry in favour of the inexhaustible intelligibility of what is known vis-à-vis our very limited creative capacity to know it. Meanwhile, however, we can appreciate and enjoy the brilliant and engaging manner in which Frayn develops, almost like a novel or a play, his philosophical anthropocentric argument.
Patrick Masterson is an emeritus professor of UCD and former president of UCD and of the European University Institute, Florence
The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe By Michael Frayn Faber & Faber, 505pp. £20