"Stanislaw Lem - One Human Minute" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lem Stanislaw)

it is just in such cases that one feels -- at least I felt -- a kind of relief. This is a matter with
philosophical roots.
In an elite German literary periodical I came across a review of One Human Minute
written by an angry humanist. The book makes a monster out of mankind, he said, because it has
built a mountain of meat from bodies, blood, and sweat (the measurements include, beyond
excrement and menstrual bleeding, various kinds of sweat, since sweat from fear is different from
sweat from hard work), but it has amputated the heads. One cannot equate the life of the mind
with the number of books and newspapers that people read, or of the words they utter per minute
(an astronomical number). Comparing theater-attendance and television-audience figures with the
constants of death, ejaculation, etc., is not just misleading but a gross error. Neither orgasm nor
death is exclusively and specifically human. What is more, they are largely physiological in
character.
On the other hand, data that are specifically human, such as matters of intellect, are not
exhausted, but neither are they explained by the size of the editions of philosophical journals or
works. It is as if someone were to try to measure the heat of passion with a thermometer, or to
put, under the heading "Acts," both sex acts and acts of faith. This categorical chaos is no
accident, for the authors' intention was precisely to shock the reader with a satire made of
statistics -- to degrade us all under a hail of figures. To be a person means, first of all, to have a
life of the spirit, and not an anatomy subject to addition, division, and multiplication. The very
fact that the life of the spirit cannot be measured and put in statistical form refutes the authors'
claim to have produced a portrait of humanity. In this bookkeeper's breakdown of billions of
people into functional pieces to fit under headings, one sees the efficiency of a pathologist
dissecting a corpse. Perhaps there is even malice. Indeed, among the thousands of index entries
there is nothing at all resembling "human dignity."
Another critic also struck at the philosophical roots I mentioned. I have the impression (I
say this parenthetically) that One Human Minute threw the intellectuals into confusion. They felt
that they had the right to ignore such products of mass culture as the Guinness Book, but One
Human Minute confounded them. For the Johnsons -- whether they are cautious or only cunning -
- raised their work to a much higher level with a methodical, scholarly introduction. They
anticipated many objections, citing contemporary thinkers who call truth the prime value in
society. If that is so, then all truth, even the most depressing, is permissible and even necessary.
 The critic-philosopher put his foot in the stirrup held by the Johnsons and mounted that
high horse. First he praised them, then found fault with them. We have been treated -- he wrote in
Encounter -- almost literally the way Dostoevsky feared in his Notes from Underground.
Dostoevsky believed that we were threatened by scientifically proven determinism, which would
toss the sovereignty of the individual -- with its free will -- onto the garbage heap when science
became capable of predicting every decision and every emotion like the movements of a
mechanical switch. He saw no alternative, no escape from the cruel predictability that would
deprive us of our freedom, except madness. His Underground Man was prepared to lose his mind,
so that, released by madness, it would not succumb to triumphant determinism.
But now that flimsy determinism of the nineteenth-century rationalists has collapsed and
will rise no more; it was replaced, with unexpected success, by probability theory and statistics.
The fates of individuals are as unpredictable as the paths of individual particles of gas, but from
the great number of both emerge laws that pertain to all together, though the laws are not
concerned with individual molecules or persons. After the fall of determinism, therefore, science
executed a circling maneuver and attacked the Underground Man from another side.
Unfortunately, it is untrue that there is no hint of humanity's spiritual life in One Human
Minute. Locking up that life inside the head, so that it will manifest itself only in words, is an
understandable habit of professional literati and other intellectuals, who constitute (the book
informs us) a microscopic particle, a millionth, of humanity. The life of the spirit is displayed, by