The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Further, to-know in the scientific sense means, ultimately, to-have-power-over. To the degree that human beings are authentic persons, unique and self-creating, they cannot be scientifically known. But human beings are not pure persons like angels; they are also biological organisms, almost identical in their functioning, and, to a greater or lesser degree, they are neurotic, that is to say, less free than they imagine because of fears and desires of which they have no personal knowledge but could and ought to have. Hence, it is always possible to reduce human beings to the status of things which are com­pletely scientifically knowable and completely controllable.

This can be done by direct action on their bodies with drugs, Iobotomies, deprivation of sleep, etc. The difficulty about this method is that your victims will know that you are trying to enslave them and, since nobody wishes to be a slave, they will object, so that it can only be practiced upon minor? ties like prisoners and lunatics who are physically incapable of resisting.

The other method is to play on the fears and desires of which you are aware and they are not until they enslave them­selves. In this case, concealment of your real intention is not only possible but essential for, if people know they are being played upon, they will not believe what you say or do what you suggest. An advertisement based on snob appeal, for example, can only succeed with people who are unaware that they are snobs and that their snobbish feelings are being appealed to and to whom, therefore, your advertisement seems as honest as Iago seems to Othello.

lago's treatment of Othello conforms to Bacon's definition of scientific enquiry as putting Nature to the Question. If a member of the audince were to interrupt the play and ask him: "What are you doing?" could not Iago answer with a boyish giggle, "Nothing. I'm only trying to find out what Othello is really like"? And we must admit that his experiment is highly successful. By the end of the play he does know the scientific truth about the object to which he has reduced Othello. That is what makes his parting shot, "What you know, you know," so terrifying for, by then, Othello has be­come a thing, incapable of knowing anything.

And why shouldn't Iago do this? After all, he has certainly acquired knowledge. What makes it impossible for us to con­demn him self-righteously is that, in our culture, we have all accepted the notion that the right to know is absolute and un­limited. The gossip column is one side of the medal; the cobalt bomb the other. We are quite prepared to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intel­lectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to realize that correct knowledge and truth axe not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, "What can I know?" we ask, "What, at this moment, am I meant to know?"—to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge we can live up to—that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral. But, in that case, who are we to say to Iago—"No, you mustn't."

POSTSCRIPT: INFERNAL SCIENCE

JfS.

All exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. (bertrand russell

.) If so, then infernal science differs from human science in that it lacks the notion of approxima­tion: it believes its laws to be exact.

Ethics does not treat of the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world like logic, (wittgenstein.) On this God and the Evil One are agreed. It is a purely human illusion to imagine that the laws of the spiritual life are, like our legisla­tion, imposed laws which we can break. We may defy them, either by accident, i.e., out of ignorance, or by choice, but we can no more break them than we can break the laws of human physiology by getting drunk.

The Evil One is not interested in evil, for evil is, by definition, what he believes he already knows. To him, Auschwitz is a banal fact, like the date of the batde of Hastings. He is only interested in good, as that which he has so far failed to under­stand in terms of his absolute presuppositions; Goodness is his obsession.

The first anthropological axiom of the Evil One is not All men are evil, but All men are the same; and his second—Men do not act: they only behave.