Stanislaw Lem’s “Solaris”
this is one of those books that put you in a special state of mind, and keep you in it for a long time. Solaris – The Other and The Alien, which – as such – bounces human mind back to itself literally.
“We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. [...] we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange. We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Humans. We don’t need other worlds. We need a mirror.”
Solaris comes as a mirror of humanity in two ways: on the one hand, reflecting human inability to understand The Alien, to grasp its life-form. If (in Wittgensteinian terms) language is a form of life, and if communication comes according to rules humans can hardly interpret, then this lack of communication shows the lack of understanding the life form of the other. The only language, the only life form present is the one humans see, the one humans always already see as. And the only kind of understanding emerging from it is the one which tells us something about ourselves and our understanding and our own mind. One the other hand, Solaris reproduces beings kept deep in our psyche, hidden in the deepest parts of our mind. In so far, it reflects human psyche in its entirety. Reflection of Solaris’ reflection is a reflection of ourselves. And the Kantian project comes here in the form: to understand Solaris and its life-form is to understand the condition of possibility of this understanding, that is, to understand ourselves, while the object of thought, the Ocean-in-itself, remains beyond our reach.
“[...] humanity now had to acknowledge the neighborhood, which even though being a billion miles of emptiness away, divided from us by a whole space of light years, still stands on the paths of its expansion, the neighborhood harder to grasp than the whole rest of the Universe.” (my translation)
Solaristics – a scientific discipline devoted to the research of Solaris has come to substantial problems. For (just as Laudan says), in order for a research question to become a recognized scientific problem, the possibility of its solution has to be granted: it has to be a solvable problem. The golden age of Solaristics was over once the possility of answering the crucial questions regarding Solaris started fading away. Mainly the possibility of the Contact. And when an empirical problem looses its status, it becomes a philosophical problem. Solaristics has accordingly become a degenerating research tradition, which bounces science back to epistemology, back to Kant. Something like a punch into the face of naive analytic philosophy?
