"Stanislaw Lem - His Masters Voice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

making. Not all public figures may be treated the same. Great artists, yes,
may be drawn in their pettiness, and some biographers even seem to think that
the soul of the artist is perforce a scurvy thing. For the great scientists,
however, the old stereotype is still mandatory. Artists we view as spirits
chained to the flesh; literary critics are free to discuss the homosexuality
of an Oscar Wilde, but it is hard to imagine any historian of science dealing
analogously with the creators of physics. We must have them incorruptible,
ideal, and the events of history are no more than local changes in the
circumstances of their lives. A politician may be a villain without ceasing to
be a great politician, whereas a villainous genius -- that is a contradiction
in terms. Villainy cancels genius. So demand the rules of today.
True, a group of psychoanalysts from Michigan did attempt to challenge
this state of affairs, but they fell into the sin of oversimplification. The
physicist's evident propensity to theorize, these scholars derived from sexual
repression. Psychoanalytic doctrine reveals the pig in man, a pig saddled with
a conscience; the disastrous result is that the pig is uncomfortable beneath
that pious rider, and the rider fares no better in the situation, since his
endeavor is not only to tame the pig but also to render it invisible. The
notion that we have within us an ancient Beast that carries upon its back a
modern Reason -- is a pastiche of primitive mythologies.
Psychoanalysis provides truth in an infantile, that is, a schoolboy
fashion: we learn from it, roughly and hurriedly, things that scandalize us
and thereby command our attention. It sometimes happens, and such is the case
here, that a simplification touching upon the truth, but cheaply, is of no
more value than a lie. Once again we are shown the demon and the angel, the
beast and the god locked in Manichean embrace, and once again man has been
pronounced, by himself, not culpable, as he is but the field of combat for
forces that have entered him, distended him, and hold sway inside his skin.
Thus psychoanalysis is, primarily, sophomoric. Shockers are to explain man to
us, and the whole drama of existence is played out between piggishness and the
sublimation into which civilized effort can transform it.
So I really ought to be thankful to Professor Yowitt, for maintaining my
likeness in the classical style and not borrowing the methods of the Michigan
psychologists. Not that I intend to speak better of myself than they would
speak; but there is, surely, a difference between a caricature and a portrait.
Which is not to say that I believe a man who is the subject of
biographies possesses any greater knowledge of himself than his biographers
do. Their position is more convenient, for uncertainties may be attributed to
a lack of data, which allows the supposition that the one described, were he
but alive and willing, could supply the needed information. The one described,
however, possesses nothing more than hypotheses on the subject of himself,
hypotheses that may be of interest as the products of his mind but that do not
necessarily serve as those missing pieces.
With sufficient imagination a man could write a whole series of versions
of his life; it would form a union of sets in which the facts would be the
only elements in common. People, even intelligent people, who are young, and
therefore inexperienced and na├пve, see only cynicism in such a possibility.
They are mistaken, because the problem is not moral but cognitive. The number
of metaphysical beliefs is no greater or less than the number of different
beliefs a man may entertain on the subject of himself -- sequentially, at