Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension

by Gaston de Pawlowski

  This is nothing but an optical illusion.

  Well, no, it is appropriate, especially in an era when forced Statism is even becoming revolutionary, to denounce more strongly than ever the absurd game of mirrors which, for the sake of analogy, makes us see in front of us what is in reality behind us. If only the great journey of humankind to the Land of the Fourth Dimension could be so quickly and so easily terminated, if Statism were the final terminus of our consciousness, if the Animal-State could fill the place that God has left vacant in the unknown immensity! Alas, though, the State of today is nothing other than the God of yesterday: a symbol of our desires rather than a reality, with the additional difference that yesterday’s symbol was above us, while today’s is beneath us.

  Let no one be deceived, in fact: if the Animal-State offers so many striking analogies with the human animal, it is quite simply because it was constructed by man in his image—and we shall have more to say in due course about the tendency to anthropomorphism that quite justly denotes the inferiority of human creations with regard to man.

  If the State were a being superior to man it would be more human than a thing. Now, not only is nothing superior to human intelligence evident in the State, but, quite obviously, we find nothing in the State but the basest organic needs of human nature.

  Love of one’s country applies to individuals and their works, not to the State.

  Let us finally take note, in this respect, that it is necessary to be wary of attributing to the State the beauties and individual virtues of the citizens that comprise it, these qualities being easily transmissible to another State—as one might suppose, for example, in the aftermath of some cataclysm causing the disappearance of all memories of the past and the emigration of the elite.

  Yes, certainly, it is the economic organization of the State that permits the elite to develop in total security, to endow the country with those masterpieces of art and intelligence whose value is rightly inverse to their economic utility, but those humble or marvelous flowers that we attribute to our country could germinate in any favorable terrain, and the State, by itself, only ever plays the subordinate role of a mere field for the cultivation of individuals.

  State organization has no other function than the diminution of forced labor.

  In a doctoral thesis entitled The Philosophy of Work, which I defended in 1901, I decided to illustrate this distinction between the individual and the state by demonstrating that an identical human endeavor—whether intellectual or material—represents, in every civilization, either forced labor or free labor, depending whether it responds to the needs of the State or the individual.

  The objective of all human life—the reason for the existence of any civilization—is to diminish or suppress by any means possible the sum of forced labor imposed by the needs of our physical nature, to acquire leisure—which is to say, the possibility of the free labor to which our moral being aspires.

  In all religions, the idea of redemption from terrestrial slavery symbolizes this desire.

  Thanks to such expedients as slaves working in mines, the hospitability of Piraeus, and so on, the social institution of slavery, Athens and Rome liberated their citizens from forced labor, leaving these recipients of State revenue entirely at leisure to occupy themselves freely. In our times, mechanization tends to the same result by means of the enslavement of matter, and, in all times, money represents forced labor negotiable in leisure.

  It is by labor—material or mental, sportive or speculative—freely accomplished external to any immediate necessity that man rises above his physical condition and attains the splendid useless work of art; it is by this reduction of general expense, by the greater economy of co-operative organization, that the State legitimizes its existence and its rights.

  One of the most evident social benefits of collective organization is the manner in which woman, the first object of the art of any civilization, lives in some way “outside the marketplace” in advanced societies. Let us only regret that the leisure afforded to the flowers of our civilization is equally afforded to its mushrooms—by which I mean idlers—but that is one of the faults of our legislation, which, unjustly socializing the benefits of the individual, has permitted inheritance.

  The State, in a civilized nation, must pay the role of an economic manager charged with assuring our material life at the best possible price. It can ask much of us when the house is in danger, but it can never legitimately ask more of us than the house is worth, or require that, in order to live, we must sacrifice all our reasons for living. To protect these reasons for living, it can ask us to risk our lives, but solely in cases of legitimate defense against barbaric States. That is both the justification of republics, which are the servants of all their citizens, and the condemnation of empires, personal or popular, in which all men are slaves for the redemption of a single individual or a caste.

  When the domestic State wishes to rise above matters of the hearth to govern salons and libraries—when, to ensure the forced labor of the community, it requisitions the free labor of the individual—we have a duty to renounce its services and leave it, to look after ourselves, as in the natural state.

  The Individual is the ultimate end of any society. He has the right to rebel against the tyranny of the State.

  The individual alone is king; nothing comes of anything but the individual; all social organization must ensure the liberty and the leisure of the individual, and when forced labor takes hold everywhere, we know that, either civilization can no longer bear fruit, or its fruits are in the hands of a group operating for its own profit. In that case, every individual has the right to break the contract, to rise up against the State, and to get rid of that evil servant. That is the history of all our public liberties, from the Panathenea of long ago, where Harmodios and Aristogiton were feted for killing the tyrant Hipparchus, to modern fascism.50 The old Aristotelian and theological theory of tyrannicide has certainly evolved since the Middle Ages. We are no longer at the stage of John of Salisbury, Archbishop of Chartres, who, in the twelfth century, authorized every citizen to kill a tyrant by any means save by poison, unknown in the Bible, nor that of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the murder of the usurper—the tyrannus absque titulo—since the death penalty has been theoretically suppressed in political matters, and Victor Hugo himself hesitated in his Châtiments. It remains no less true, though, that the superior right of the individual against the State—a descendant of private vengeance, the first barbaric form of the penal right that became the judiciary duel—remains the basis of the history of liberty and has developed along with it.

  From the theologian Jean Petit, justifying the murder of the Duc d’Orléans, to the theoreticians of liberty of the 16th century, we see the idea of national sovereignty forming, supported by the protestants for fear of the ruling power, by the Jesuits because of their hatred of any power outside the Holy See and by the ligueurs by virtue of their desire to seize power.51 From the assassination of the Guises, followed by that of their assassin, Henri III—a murder commended by the Sorbonne—until the execution of Charles I and the revolution of 1688 proclaimed national sovereignty in England, there was always the same notion of control of the ruling power which, crossing the line after the last Estates-General of 1614, brings us to the 18th century, with the Encyclopedists preparing the way for the Estates-General of 1789 and the Revolution.

  Scientific Tyranny must not replace Divine Right.

  This kind of control was relatively easy while it was exercised upon a man—a sovereign; in our times it has become particularly delicate because the State, renouncing the puerile protection of an out-of-date politics, is clever enough to impose itself on individuals as if it were an indisputable scientific necessity: a being superior to man, which surpasses and surrounds him.

  The Leviathan? It is at our door, it already floats above our heads! Let us hasten to remove the human mask from this fabulous dragon and demonstrate the puerile works of this infernal machine that
deceptive savants present to us as a living being.

  Today, it is no longer a matter of killing a tyrant but a false idea, and the enterprise is perilous in a different way. Is it even possible at this moment in time? That is doubtful, and we should not retain any illusion about the outcome of the mortal combat that has been engaged for some time between the Individual and the State.

  The world will soon be mechanized to the point that a simple grain of sand will be capable of stopping this formidable clock. Now, this grain of sand might be the most minimal individual attack occasioned by folly, hatred or despair. The simple rat of which we have spoken in one chapter of this book is symbolic of that.

  A burdensome social discipline will therefore impose itself on the mechanized world of tomorrow. It will be difficult, for a long time, to prevent it being mistaken for a superior morality.

  Next in the Journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension come chapters whose humorous character has not always been sufficiently understood, and eventually, in order for us to escape the scientific nightmare, the final pages open windows to the Golden Eagle that look out upon possible futures, towards a definitive liberation in a world in which relativity no longer exists.

  It is, I believe, the humorous aspect of certain chapters that most frequently gives rise to false interpretations, and that is a point I wish to stress. Few people today still understand the true role of humor, even though that mode of reasoning—for want of a better word—was employed a long time go, by the Eleatics and by Socrates, the first midwife of early thought.52

  Humor is the sense of relativity.

  This critical sense is applicable to the most elevated research.

  Humor is the exact sense of the relativity of everything, the constant criticism of that which is believed to be definitive, the open door to new possibilities, without which no intellectual progress would be possible. Humor does not imply any conclusion, for every conclusion is an intellectual death, and it is this negative aspect that displeases many people, but it indicates the limits of our certainty, and that is the greatest service that can be rendered to us.

  Imagine that no navigator had ever been able to set foot on the American continent, but that thousands of mariners, successively encountering different points of the coast, from which they took their bearings, had given us accounts of their findings. We would be able to construct, little by little, the exact contour of the unknown continent without ever having visited it. Humor fulfills an analogous role. Every time that man declares with satisfaction that he has established a certainty, whether in the scientific or moral domain, humor intervenes, in its mayoral manner, and, extrapolating the reasoning to its breaking-point, makes us see its relativity in a striking fashion.

  Humor is not only applicable, as some seem to believe, solely to the vanities of current social life, but, even better, to the most elevated quests of the mind. It is what shows us the limits of the “exact” sciences, just as it shows us, on an everyday basis, the limits of moral “certainties.” It does not guide us to a new world, but it proves to us that our world is limited and that something else must exist behind the wall that brings us to an abrupt halt.

  It is therefore wrong to see humor as a simple sterile diversion of the mind; in all probability, no other criticism is capable of greater profundity or as fecund in its results.

  The commonplace demands that we mistake it for apparent certainty.

  Are you being serious? That question, too often asked of the humorist, might seem excusable on the part of a woman or a mathematician, whose instincts demand concrete representations, but it has always seemed to me to be lamentable coming from an artist or a thinker.

  Speaking seriously, for the mass of men, is a matter of affirming gravely that one is getting to the bottom of things in every matter; it is to substitute for the sublime “What do I know?” of Montaigne the pitiful “I know everything” of today’s scientific primers; to speak seriously is to lie to oneself and to others by taking for certain and universal verities whose reality is proven by mere common sense.

  The Fine Arts Are Only Admitted as Diversions.

  Why not put the question to novelists who please you with fabulous stories, dramatists who move you with their fictions in canvas scenery, poets whose imagistic comparisons seduce you, or sages who present you with apologues or parables?

  The fact is that, from the silliest pun to the most beautiful poetic image, you vaguely sense the profound range of these analogies, comparisons, associations of ideas and rhymes, which operate as if lifting up a corner of the thick veil that conceals the mysterious relationships of things and the formidable continuity that is the world.

  But then, when it is a matter of art or literature, play has been admitted since ancient times, for it is imagined that it is nothing but a game, a social diversion that has nothing to do with “reality.”

  Humor is like a disturbing moral anarchy when attacking “serious things.”

  Humor, on the other hand, seems dangerous, because it insinuates itself into “serious things”—into the accepted reasoning that is the very foundation of human knowledge—in order to extrapolate them to absurdity, using them to prove their own relativity.

  Humor is not laughter. Laughter is a social tribunal that judges and condemns the ridiculous in comparing it to accepted verity that comprises law. Humor itself is not in the service of society but of the gods; it limits itself to marking the border between the known and the unknown.

  Humor is thus incapable of pleasing those who wallow proudly and complaisantly in their certainties; it is, on the contrary, the little frisson of an intelligence that wants to take flight—but that frisson is always painful, because, as it opens its wings, the mind hurts itself on the bars of its cage.

  The Idea of Genius is an Assault on Accepted Law.

  Are you being serious? But is genius serious when, in some folly of the imagination, it amuses itself by overturning all accepted laws, all experiments made 100 times over, all centuries-old reasoning, in order abruptly to oppose to all human certainty the divine lightning-flash of an entirely contradictory idea?

  Yes, undoubtedly, for the sake of human respect, the savant then follows every item with “the method that led him to his discovery,” just as the artist then searches for the material support that will permit him to present his idea “seriously”—but all of that is merely social cosmetics; the idea of genius bursts forth in an initial lightning-flash of contradiction.

  Achilles and the Tortoise.

  Was Zeno of Elea serious when, having opposed two runners—Achilles and a tortoise setting off a few paces ahead of him—he affirmed that Achilles could never overtake the tortoise, because, every time he covered the distance that separated them, the tortoise would have covered a further distance, however small it might be, in the meantime? Even the gravest textbooks of philosophy deign to re-raise this “joke” by a man of whom the dialogues of Plato make much.

  Zeno of Elea was the first to denounce the relativity of mathematics.

  Perhaps they are mistaken, as perhaps everyone is mistaken who sees nothing but a diversion of the mind in an attempted journey to the Land of the Fourth Dimension. Zeno, it is said, attempted thus to prove that motion does not exist, although movement proves itself by progressing…what poverty!

  Is it not evident, on the contrary, that Zeno, by means of this objection, summarized the incapacity that still prevents and always will prevent mathematics from attaining the entire truth by means of one final somersault?

  In the struggle that we must carry forward, in fact, under threat of intellectual death, against the pretended certainties that delight sleeping humanity, our first enemy is mathematical certainty, in the sense that it is commonly understood. It is to this certainty that man appears most attached—where would we be without it?—and it is with a shudder of terror that one greets any attack on Pythagoras, Euclid, Leibnitz or Newton, the protectors of human reason.

  Mathematics is a cl
ose relative of Capital.

  In the centuries-old labor of ideas, mathematics plays the same role as capital in the history of societies: it is crystallized intellectual labor, representing the wealth of which we are proud: hard-earned security. It can even serve as the basis and point of departure of new enterprises, but never takes part in the enterprises themselves.

  Philosophy, physics and the natural sciences, closely interrogating the continuity of life, attempt on a daily basis to discover new fragmentary relationships between beings and things, and whenever intuition reveals one of these relationships, they give mathematics the responsibility of fixing it in memory by means of a symbol, as one might ask an emotionless stenographer to record a moving speech.

  The progress of mathematics is merely a reflection of other kinds of progress.

  It is, therefore, illusory to speak of the progress of mathematics, but not to speak of the progress that it codifies, which is due to investigations of nature.

  In criticizing mathematics, we do not mean to demand its suppression any more than we would attempt to suppress the scaffolding necessary to the construction of a monument; we simply wish to say that the scaffolding is not the monument, as is commonly believed—that is all.

  Calculation is a key that permits the same door to be opened at will, but the key does not tell us what lies beyond the door.

  Public opinion, which blithely attributes an imprecise, dream-like quality to the questing of the mind and gives an ironic sense to the word “metaphysics,” follows a false path, just as it follows a false path in attributing a quality of reality to mathematics.