You like the way Michael Frayn writes.
Michael Frayn likes to write about philosophy.
Therefore you might like the way Michael Frayn writes about philosophy.
This syllogism would appear to be the logic behind The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe. Frayn is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and translator who has reached a worldwide audience through two works in particular, the plays Noises Off and Copenhagen. He read philosophy at Cambridge in the 1950s and in the 1970s published a work of philosophy, Constructions. What's more, his writings often sport a philosophical turn of mind. Noises Off wasn't just a farce; it was a farce within a farce—a deconstruction of a farce. Copenhagen wasn't just a character study; it was a study of character in uncertainty—featuring the two physicists who gave the world the quantum concept of uncertainty. So, we might think, what more engaging guide to lead us non-philosophers on a tour of philosophy?
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In particular, Frayn proposes that he lead us through nothing less than the whole of our species' relationship to the universe, both in the 13.7-billion-years-old-and-born-in-a-Big-Bang and in the Michael-Frayn-chose-marmalade-over-honey-at-breakfast-this-morning senses of the word. He begins the tour with science, "a palace of thought," and in the first third of the book, he methodically walks us through rooms of an increasingly fundamental significance: first the laws of nature, then cause and effect, then space and time, and finally, the power of numbers to capture it all. At each stop he invites us to examine the tapestries on the walls, and then to look closer, and closer still, until we see not the pattern but the weave, not the weave but the thread, the now we can never definitively experience, the there that dissolves into Planck-scale discontinuity. Look closely enough, Frayn argues, and the laws of nature "have no existence independent of the concepts to which they relate," and "the supposedly universal causality on which the laws of nature depend has no more existence than the laws themselves," and so on, each subsequent seeming understanding of the universe finding expression "only in the context of human thought and human purposes."
And so we leave behind the halls of pure science for the more interdisciplinary throne room of the mind. Frayn guides us through motivations; decisions; the fictions we tell ourselves in an attempt to make sense of the outside world; the words, syntax, and analogies we use to tell those fictions; the thoughts that give rise to the words, syntax, and analogies; the question of "how does a thought get thought." Here, too, Frayn pauses at each stop just long enough to point out the illusions that support our sense of reality, until at last he is able to ask: What claim can we make for the universe, other than
that it exists in the mind, and vice versa?
The nature of the relationship between the mind and the universe is, as Frayn concedes, "the world's oldest mystery." And Frayn understands that he's no philosopher: "I shouldn't have the courage to make any such claim," he writes. "I can imagine how scornfully it would be dismissed by most professional philosophers." Instead, he compares The Human Touch to "the stories we read, or the pictures we look at, or the music we listen to. All these things are as important as you personally happen to find them, no less and no more."