A Perfect Vacuum by Stanislaw Lem

Author:Stanislaw Lem [Lem, Stanislaw]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, General
ISBN: 9780547543758
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 1979-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Die Kultur als Fehler

Wilhelm Klopper

(Universitas Verlag, Berlin)

Civilization as Mistake by Privatdozent W. Klopper is a work without doubt remarkable—as an original hypothesis in anthropology. I cannot refrain, however, before I proceed to the discussion, from indulging in a comment as regards the form of the discourse. This book—only a German could have written it! A fondness for classification, for that scrupulous t-crossing and i-dotting that has begotten innumerable Handbücher, makes the German mind resemble a pigeonhole desk. When one beholds the consummate order displayed by the table of contents of this book, one cannot help thinking that if the Lord God had been of German blood our world would perhaps not necessarily have turned out better existentially, but would have for sure embodied a higher notion of discipline and method. The perfection of this orderliness quite overwhelms one, although it may arouse reservations of a substantive nature. I cannot here go into the question of whether that purely formal penchant for muster and array, for symmetry, for front-and-center and forward-march, might not have exerted a real influence also on certain conceptions that typify German philosophy —its ontology in particular. Hegel loved the Cosmos as a kind of Prussia, for in Prussia there was order! Even the esthetics-inflamed thinker that was Schopenhauer showed what an expository drill looks like in his treatise “Uber die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde.” And Fichte? But I must deny myself the pleasure of digression, which is all the more difficult for me in that I am not a German. To business, to business!

Klopper has provided his two-volume work with a foreword, a preface, and an introduction. (The ideal of form: a triad!) Going into the merits of the matter, he first takes up that understanding of civilization as mistake which he considers to be false. According to that misguided (says the author) view, typical of the Anglo-Saxon school and represented—notably—by Whistle and Sadbottham, any form of behavior of an organism that neither helps nor hinders the organism’s survival is a mistake. For the sole criterion of sensibleness of behavior is, in evolution, survivability. An animal that behaves in such a fashion that it survives more capably than others is behaving, in the light of this criterion, more sensibly than those that die out. Toothless herbivores are senseless evolutionarily, for hardly are they born before they must perish from hunger. Analogously, herbivores that indeed possess teeth but employ them to chew stones instead of grass are also evolutionarily without sense, for they, too, must disappear. Klopper goes on to quote Whistle’s famous example: let us suppose, says the English author, that in some herd of baboons a certain old male, the leader of the herd, by sheer accident acquires the habit of addressing the birds he devours from the left side. He had, say, an injured finger on the right hand, and when he brought the bird to his mouth he found it more comfortable to hold the prey by the left. The young

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