You may have heard of the radical exploits of Jurgen
Schulze. But I was his psychiatrist before he escaped from Borsa Castle, the
Transylvanian mental institution, and before he formed his infamous, bizarre
cult. “God is dead,” he told me in one of my weekly evaluations of his mental
condition. “Long live the gods,” he added, grinning at that gnomic remark. Only
after his unprecedented and mysterious escape did I read his actual German
writings, although by then mere scraps survived his attempt to burn the text;
apparently, he’d done so just prior to his escape. I found the singed remnants
in a corner of his residence, and judging by the pile of ashes, only a very
small portion of the whole remained legible, one of which is the title,
Lebending und Wach in der Totte Gott. Nevertheless, piecing these together with
his peculiar remarks in the interviews, I’ve reconstructed Schulze’s
philosophy. The public often prefers to demonize the mentally ill, on the basis
of its prejudices, but perhaps there’s an appetite abroad to warrant this
exposition of Schulze’s rather hair-raising worldview.
According to Schulze, the history of cosmology shows that
from the most naïve, parochial myths of ancient times, to the experimental,
objective theories of modern physics, explanations of nature approach the truth
as they become maximally ironic. This means that nature surprises any species
that searches for the ultimate truth, by anti-correlating intuitions with
facts. Intelligent creatures evolve to exploit a niche, a way of surviving in
an environment. Creatures that endure long enough to reach equilibrium with
their territory, because their genes have created winning uniformities in their
traits—and have built thus an adapted body-type or a species, as such—rely on
those innate abilities that allow them to succeed. In that respect, creatures
are inherently conservative in evaluating their intuitions, reflexes, and other
habits or traditions. Creatures that are interested solely in surviving under
those terms we call animals, while those that survive in virtue of their
rational powers of understanding become aware of more and more possibilities
until their sights are set on a universe that’s worlds apart from the locale in
which they’re evolutionarily suited to succeed. Had the universe been as large
only as the mythical Garden of Eden, or were there no life forms that could see
further than their neighbourhood or that could think other than in their
nakedly species-centric fashion, the pursuit of knowledge wouldn’t be ironic,
because there would have been no knowledge in the first place. But because it’s
evidently possible to be excluded from the Garden, as it were, for creatures to
ponder matters that are at best tangentially related to their biological life
cycle, so that there have arisen persons or independent agents, ultimate
knowledge is also theoretically possible—and that knowledge is necessarily not
just counterintuitive but fulsomely so. On these grounds which he expressed in
several of our sessions, Schulze declares in one of the intact fragments of his
philosophical writings, “This is why the more exquisite the humiliating
implications of a theory of the nature of reality, the greater the theory’s
chance of being true” (3a).
Cosmology began with religious myths which assume that there
are divine, perfect persons who create nature for our benefit. For Schulze,
this is the maximally naïve way of misunderstanding the universe, by means of
which we project our prejudices onto the wider world. The opposite, atheistic
scenario, however, isn’t necessarily the most ironic and thus the most
epistemically justified. Today, physics stops at the point of positing
objective causes and effects and other quantifiable phenomena, and so excludes
magic and the supernatural from its universe of discourse. Instead of being
created by God, nature creates itself from chaos according to laws, principles,
and free parameters which the physicist nevertheless inevitably smuggles into
the picture of the chaotic starting point. This is because whereas chaos or the
nonbeing out of which nature emerged has no need to conform to human reason,
physicists are methodologically bound to rational ideals which must guide their
explanations. But were the universe fundamentally material and objective, as
scientists understand it to be, cosmic irony would not be maximized, because
our expectations have adjusted after the Scientific Revolution. Schulze
therefore writes, “The ultimate theory of the world must confound both the
gullible, narrow-minded zealot and the cynical, self-abnegating scientist;
otherwise, cognitive progress might end in harmony between intuitions and
facts, which is contrary to the principle of irony that’s entailed by the
history of cosmology” (3b). The universe may or may not be harmonious from its
impersonal frame of reference, although this is technically an incoherent
figure of speech; certainly, though, the nature of the metaphysical facts
conflicts with any intelligent species that arises to attempt to explain them,
since such a species will pride itself on its dignity which the natural facts
are bound to drastically undercut. The perfected theory may prove adequate to
the facts, in some epistemological respect, but those facts will confound the
species as a whole, including its intuitions, preferred self-image, and
life-sustaining cultures.
