FRAYN on the UNIVERSE

The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of the Universe

by Michael Frayn

Admirers of Michael Frayn’s work, such as his sublime satire on journalism, Towards the End of the Morning, his theatrical study of moral ambiguity among physicists, Copenhagen, or the glorious farce Noises Off, may find The Human Touch a surprising, perhaps even unsettling, addition to his oeuvre.

It is a philosophical discourse, an extended soliloquy - penetrating, often whimsical and sometimes downright irritating - on the relationship between human consciousness and the nature of the universe.

The universe will still be there whether the human race exists or not, Frayn contends, before going on to question whether - without human minds to measure and wonder at its size and scale - the universe exists at all. The world only has form and substance, he suggests, because of our contribution: “We are active agents in the traffic, co-originators in it, autonomous members of the great co-operative.”

Put another way, Frayn’s essential question is: “Is the world in one way or another out there, or is it in here?” (his italics). This is a paradox that has puzzled thinkers for centuries, so it’s no surprise that even as clever a writer as Frayn comes up with no definitive answer.

The centrepiece of Frayn’s elaborate piece of intellectual architecture is that human awareness is based on analogy: we can comprehend the new only in terms of what we already know. Now take a deep breath: “If in the end,” he argues, “we come to understand something about the quarks that compose the protons and neutrons that compose the nuclei at the heart of the atoms that compose the molecules that compose the cells that compose the bacteria that keep us alive, or about the quasars that blaze in conditions entirely removed from any we have ever come across, even in the depth of our own galaxy, and upon principles which seem to subvert the physics of the world we know, at the very edge of the perceptible universe and the very beginning of reconstructable time, then that understanding comes at the end of a long chain of analogy which has its beginnings in our most humble dealings with the everyday world around us.” Phew! That’s a sentence that even Bernard Levin, master of the multiple-dependent clause, would have strained to emulate.

Fortunately, there are not too many sentences like that in The Human Touch, although Frayn is fond of ramming his points home with a kind of circumlocutory wilfulness which at times had me reaching for my metaphorical shotgun.

It’s reasonable to ask why such an accomplished writer should have chosen to write this provocative but difficult book. Perhaps there is a clue towards the end where Frayn, now 73, writes: “Soon I shall close my eyes not temporarily and experimentally, but permanently and in earnest. I shall cease to keep my eye on things - cease even to dream them. So it will be up to you to keep the whole performance going. “

Perhaps The Human Touch is Frayn’s testament, an expansion of thoughts about life, the universe and everything which cannot live within his books or plays. And a marker of that inevitable sadness which comes with the knowledge that no matter how much one reads or writes, no matter how far back in time the telescopes peer, no matter how we learn about the mechanism of the mind, the fundamental secrets of the universe will remain just out of reach. Frayn is passing the baton.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006

I think it was P.G. Wodehouse who observed that the English strike Americans as funny when they are just being English. Similarly, philosophers strike the laity as funny when they are just being philosophers, and that makes it hard to be as funny about them as they are when they’re left to their own devices. But Michael Frayn is among the honoured few who have succeeded. I fondly remember a piece of his from the 1960s (about fog) that purported to be a newly discovered fragment of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein generally writes with a transcendental pomposity that makes parody seem superfluous, not to say impossible. But Frayn pulled it off. For years Frayn’s Wittgenstein was to be found pinned to the bulletin boards of anglophone philosophy departments ! all round the world.

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