Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Synapses Between the Seen and Unseen

Eifelheim presents an interesting paradigm of seen v. unseen knowledge, as discussed on the wiki page. I find it fascinating that both the scientific and religious discourses in the novel involve the unseen. One would typically associate science with the seen and religion with the unseen. However, the multi-dimension and light speed theories Sharon is concerned with are incredibly intangible. The irony of science, a discourse that relies on ‘immutable’ laws, is that when it comes to the most advanced areas like quantum mechanics and theory all the rules cease to apply. I think Flynn, through interweaving Pastor Dietrich’s remarkably ‘seen’ theology and experiential/sensible way of understanding the world and Sharon’s complex science, is making synaptic connections at the chasm between the realms of science and religion. In other words, the two discourses may be more inseparable than previously thought since they both occupy 'hypothetical' and 'real' space.

This “thought experiment” reminds me of the musings of French phenomenologist philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty had a notion of the ‘flesh,’ a term which denotes the multilayered connectedness of things, the depth and texture of existence. He describes it in his book The Visible and the Invisible as the miraculous “dehiscence of the seeing into the visible and of the visible into the seeing…the thin pellicle of the quale, the surface of the visible…doubled up over its whole extension with an invisible reserve.”

Through this concept Merleau-Ponty illustrates the mutual interplay between tangible beings and the mute realm of ideas and thoughts. For example, in his book he writes that “a visible is…the surface of a depth, a cross section upon a massive being” and that “pure ideality is itself not without flesh…it lives of them.” Similar to the symbolic the visible is a surface beneath which lies the semiotic, the invisible depth of being. Therefore the two facets, the visible and the invisible, give rise to our full experience of being.

It is fascinating that both science and religion can at once be considered ideas, invisible and tangible experience, visible. Accordingly, ambiguity is central to Eifelheim; reality is absent of concrete distinctions between entities, between the perceptions of the “scientific” Krenken and the “theological” humans.

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