I finally got around to starting Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction novel, The Left Hand of Darkness (find it here as a PDF). I’ve been wanting to read it since a professor of mine mentioned it in a class a year or two ago.
So far I’m only into the first few pages of the novel, but I would already recommend this book to anyone, if only for the brilliant introduction. It’s a wonderful contemplation of the goals and methods of science fiction and literature in general.
Le Guin says that there are two types of science fiction, those which are extrapolative and those which are thought-experiments. Le Guin isn’t interested in writing extrapolitive fiction–it only carries things to its logical extreme, and “almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing, if not carcinogenic.”
Instead, Le Guin wants to write thought-experiments. Contrary to popular belief, these thought experiments of science fiction don’t attempt to predict the future; rather, they describe the present, according to the experience and imagination of the author.
That’s what all fiction tries to do, she says: it describes the present reality. How? It attempts to tell the truth by creating a vast web of lies, invented people, places and events that never existed except in the mind of the author.
Later, Le Guin raises an interesting point regarding the supposed purpose of language. She says, “Our philosophers, some of them, would have us agree that a word (sentence, statement) has value only in so far as it has one single meaning, points to one fact which is comprehensible to the rational intellect, logically sound, and—ideally—quantifiable.”
This hints at an age-old philosophical debate, which asks if it is possible for language to truly express reality. For centuries, the entire field of rhetoric has been looked down upon because it would seem that this is not always the case. Plato, for example, distrusted rhetoric, believing it did not always lead to truth, but was more often could be used in the service of dishonesty and lies.
Underlying these assertions is the assumption that words should have a tight and unbreakable bond with what they refer to. The purpose of rhetoric, at least according to Plato’s Phaedrus, is to lead the soul to truth. Aristotle took up a related view, which is that there is a deep reality that underlies our varying experiences of it.
This created the “common sense” view that most people hold of reality: to most, it obviously exists “out there” in the external world. We can experience and know reality through our senses, and words are only useful in that they convey this deep reality to other people.
However, in this past century, the concept of a deep reality that exists objectively has come under fire. With the advances in quantum physics, we became aware that we cannot separate the measured from the measurer. The instrument used “creates” reality just as much as the object being observed.
This isn’t just abstract theory, fun to think about but impractical or even useless in the real world. It’s actually quite the opposite. Our epistemology is absolutely critical to the way we think about and respond to people and events around us. According to Robert Anton Wilson, Aristotelian certainty and assurance of an underlying, objective truth plays a huge factor in every single one of the major conflicts which have occurred in our world, are occurring now, and (most likely) will occur in the future.
Seems like a stretch? Think again. An epistemology that asserts an objective reality that has an independent existence is divisive: it splits the world into those who are “right” and those who are “wrong.” Religion and ideology depend upon us being right, with an accurate appraisal of the real, against those who are “wrong,” apparently either deluded fools or evil antagonists.
Wilson is brave enough to propose an alternative with disturbing ramifications (to many). If we accept a constructivist view of the world, where truth is created by the observer instead of being simply discovered, we might have to accept that our enemies have never been wrong the way we have always believed. When there is no deep reality, there is no “Truth” as commonly believed, only a variety of experiences of the world that vary according to who we are.
“We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” – Anais Nin
Going back to Left Hand‘s introduction, Wilson would probably join Le Guin in opposing those philosophers that are desperate to find certainty in language. Not only is there no certainty in language, there is (most likely) no certainty in what we know as reality, period. Le Guin invites us to be wary of those who need “one single meaning” from our words and our world.
Le Guin is on the side of the artist, the visionaries who intuit a different kind of truth, who have a flexible idea of what the fabric of this truth consists of. It is the artist who opens the way for a multiplicity of meanings, which gives us the freedom to claim our experience as valid and real for us as individuals.
Perhaps Wilson and Le Guin would agree that the world needs more artists, people who have the ability to cast doubt on our certainty and self-righteousness. If we ever hope to resolve our conflicts on any scale, we need this consciousness of the variety of truths that exist among us.
BONUS: Read this commencement address Ursula K. Le Guin delivered to Mills College in 1983! Discussed in this address are the differences between what the author calls “men’s language” and “women’s language.”
Men’s language is “the language of power,” of dominance. In other words, of certainty, of binaries of right/wrong (among others).
She calls on us to abandon our fear of women’s language. We need to be comfortable with uncertainty, and even failure. We need to find hope in the darkness: “What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.”
In sum, it’s a beautiful exploration of the different perspectives men and women tend to have, on two (of probably many) varieties of epistemology and their consequences.