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Article Excerpt
The World of the Dead consists of a dim and desolate, endless plain populated by the ghosts of the dead: wispy cold vapors, material certainly, but barely the memory of a body, and capable only of whispers. Within this barren, never changing landscape, the dead shuffle and murmur eternally, in uncountable, infinitely increasing number, eventually forgetting the feel of the world, the joys of their lives, and even their own names. Only their sorrows and weaknesses do they remember, and these only because they are subject to the endless torment of the Harpies--foul, flying beasts who circle the ghosts, ceaselessly taunting them with the darkest secrets of their lives. Nothing but this happens here. Nothing but this has ever happened here. And nothing but this will ever happen here. Except, perhaps, that eventually, as years, decades, and centuries drag on, the terror and shame provoked by the Harpies' shrieks fades and blends in with the gray monotony and lifelessness of the terrain.
Mary Malone nearly collapses from the sight. Some distance from her modest hut ill the world of the mulefa, cut into the side of a hill she finds a window opening into another world. But it is not the window, or the existence of another world, that shocks Mary. She herself comes from our world and had passed through several such windows before settling in the world of the mulefa. No, what gives Mary the feeling that "the ground had given way beneath her mind" is what emerges from the window:
a procession of ghosts [...] old men and women, children, babes in arms, humans and other beings, too, more and more thickly they came out of the dark into the world of solid moonlight--and vanished. That was the strangest thing. They took a few steps in the world of grass and air and silver light, and looked around, their faces transformed with joy--Mary had never seen such joy--and held out their arms as if they were embracing the whole universe; and then, as if they were made of mist or smoke, they simply drifted away, becoming part of the earth and the dew and the night breeze. (AS 431-2)
Before vanishing, an old woman ghost approaches Mary and whispers the following cryptic advice: "Tell them stories. They need the truth. You must tell them true stories, and everything will be well. Just tell them stories" (AS 432).
What sort of a universe is this, in which the dead, consigned from time immemorial to a blank, barely material existence, should suddenly emerge into the moonlight, only to then transform and become part of the stuff of the world? And what sort of universe in which this seemingly miraculous turn of events, this passage from a World of the Dead to an animate, material World of Life, should be effected by the simple telling of true stories? It is the universe of Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials and, as I shall attempt to show in the pages that follow, it is a universe that rests upon a very particular vision of material spirit and of the practical and ethical implications of such a vision. (2) I have found it difficult to write straightforwardly about His Dark Materials, especially with the phrase "material spirit" in mind. In part, this difficulty stems from the dizzying richness of the narrative interconnections among the various characters, worlds, elements, and ideas that comprise the trilogy. But the difficulty also arises because nearly all of these elements in the trilogy relate in one way or another to material spirit, not to mention to a variety of visions of matter and of spirit and of their relation that have been elaborated over the past twenty-odd centuries of human history. Pullman enters subtly, and above all, narratively into a philosophical conversation with many voices.
In composing my meditations on the stimulating density of His Dark Materials and on its participation in key philosophical conversations, I have constrained myself in three ways--making my own text modestly experimental--by the example and vision of Pullman's text. First, I have structured my own text as a series of "stories" (rather than as a conventional expository argument) in order to attempt to follow what I take to be the central ethical implication of Pullman's universe: to tell true stories. Second, I have treated all the "characters," whether they come from the universe of His Dark Materials or from the history of philosophy in my universe, as if they existed on the same plane. Thus I have provided no more "background information" for Heidegger (who told a story about truth in our universe) than I have for Mrs. Coulter (who experiments on children in the trilogy's universe). What matters to me about these people are the stories they tell and the things they do and then, the things we can make of these. Third, I have sought to tell these stories in a way that will be comprehensible to an audience at least close to as broad as the one for Pullman's own narrative. In shedding, as much as possible, the conventions of expository argumentation and of a specialized technical vocabulary, it may be that some valuable elements of conventional academic writing--a certain abstract clarity, complexity, and nuance--have been lost as well. However, if these elements have been sacrificed, at least to some degree, it is a sacrifice worth making in order to honor Pullman's example of making discussion of profound philosophical and ethical issues--of what we and the world are made of, and of how best to live with that--accessible to an audience broader than that of professional philosophers or academics. If I am to write, in other words, about such questions as matter and spirit and what sort of life might be lived in a universe of matter and spirit, or of material spirit and spiritual matter, then--precisely because of the broad and fundamental relevance of such issues--it seems important to do so in a way that spells out more inclusively some of the densely packed shorthand language in which we and other academics are used to conducting our discussions of such issues. With all this in mind, I'd like to begin this little collection of true stories with a story about truth and about just what makes a story true within the universe of His Dark Materials. Following this, I will offer stories about what that universe is made of, what a self is made of, and then, finally, about two different kinds of equipment with which to operate in that universe.
1. The Alethiometer, or, What is Truth?
The Master of Jordan College, in the Oxford, England of Lyra's world, presents Lyra with what he calls an "alethiometer," explaining to her that it "tells you the truth" (GC 73). The alethiometer, "surprisingly heavy," looks like a "large watch or small clock: a thick disk of gold and crystal" (GC 73). Lyra will examine the instrument more closely and discover that
there were hands pointing to places around the dial, but instead of the hours or the points of the compass there were several little pictures, each of them painted with extraordinary precision. [...] There were three little knurled winding wheels [...] and each of them turned one of the three shorter hands, which moved around the dial in a series of smooth satisfying clicks. You could arrange them to point at any of the pictures, and once they had clicked into position, pointing exactly at the center of each one, they would not move. The fourth hand was longer and more slender, and seemed to be made of a duller metal than the other three. Lyra couldn't control its movement at all; it swung where it wanted to, like a compass needle, except that it didn't settle. (GC 78-9)
Lyra, a child just approaching the cusp of puberty, apparently an orphan raised with little education by the scholars of Jordan College, can only begin to surmise its workings, getting no farther than recalling that "meter means measure [...] like thermometer." Later she hears that the first half of the instrument's name comes from the Greek word aletheia, "which means truth" so that it is a "truth measure" (GC 125).
All that there is can be divided into two great realms. At least that is the story Socrates tells in Plato's long collection of conversations and stories called Republic. Socrates calls these two great realms "the visible" and "the intelligible" (Republic 509d). He imagines them as laid out on a line progressing from less real (the visible) to more real (the intelligible), and running alongside this line is another line progressing from less true approaches to what there is to more true approaches to what there is (510b). The most real and true is the realm of what he calls Ideas or Forms apprehended by reason, for example the Idea of Goodness. That is to say, not a good horse, or even something we might think of as good, like justice, but just plain old Goodness, existing eternally and unmixed with anything tangible or visible or material in any way at all, unmixed even with any other form. From there, we can move down one step to mathematical forms and entities (like a triangle, say) apprehended by thought. At this point, we encounter the bottom edge of the intelligible world and we move down the line, across into the visible world, where most of us would probably say we lived. At the top of the visible world are objects available to perception. For Socrates, these tangible objects we perceive are already mere copies of, and bear less reality than, their corresponding immaterial Idea. And then, the least real and least true: images (or reflections) of perceived objects conceived by the imagination, for these are copies of copies of reality.
Socrates goes on to imagine the World of the Living (the phrase is mine), the visible world, as a dim and desolate place tucked deep beneath the earth at the end of a long, steep, and perilous descent (Plato Republic 514-517c). I t is a world of shadows and of copies, and of copies of copies, of flickering, mutable shapes. Socrates likens the World of the Living, the world of the senses in which you and I live out our daily lives, to a darkened cave lit dimly by a fire that we cannot see. We sit shackled from birth with our backs to the fire, our necks and feet immobilized, staring at a wall. Meanwhile, a procession of individuals, carrying objects, parades along a walkway, all but the objects hidden by a low wall between the fire and our backs. The fire casts the shadows of these moving objects against the wall before our eyes. And we "deem reality [the Greek word here is "alethes"] to be nothing else than the shadows of the artificial objects" (Plato Republic 515c). The fire in the cave, Socrates explains, corresponds to our own sunshine, the shadows cast on the wall to the three-dimensional tangible objects we see every day by the light of the sun.
However, there is an alternative to this grim World of the Living. Socrates imagines a prisoner freed from his shackles and forced to turn his head away from the wall and toward the walkway and, beyond it, the fire. Upon seeing the objects carried on the walkway he would shrink away in disbelief: his shadows would be far more real (alethes) than these unfamiliar entities (516d). The light of the fire would sting his eyes and he would wish to return to his place among the other captives in the cave that is the World of the Living (516e). And if he should be forcibly dragged up the dangerous path toward the mouth of the cave and emerge into daylight, Socrates says, he would find it painful, resist it, and, upon exiting the cave would be nearly blind. He'd need to get used to the light, looking first at the more or less familiar shadows cast by the sun's rays, then at the reflections of things in water, and then at things themselves. Gradually, he would begin to study the night sky and then eventually the daytime sky before finally, being able to look upon the sun itself. In the end, he would conclude that the sun was the source of all that he had hitherto experienced. Socrates explains to Glaucon, who is listening to the story, that the sun outside the cave in his story corresponds to the Idea of the Good and that the rough ascent and process of gradual habituation corresponds to the process of education, a kind of turning away from illusion and toward the truth of the Idea (eidea): "The starting point of all" (511b), "mistress [...] that [...] bestows reality. (aletheia) and at the same time imparts apprehension" (517c).
At the beginning of the story, aletheia seems simply to refer to something like the portion of reality available from a certain perspective, such as that of the newly released prisoner who would deem his familiar shadows more real (alethes) than the objects that cast them. But by the end of the story, aletheia appears as an effect--literally the offspring--of the apprehension of the Idea through reason. The prisoners in the...
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