Heavy hand

Michael Frayn may have weaved particle physics into a riveting drama but in The Human Touch he gets bogged down in trying to explain ‘life, the universe, and everything', says Max McGuinnessThe Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe. By Michael Frayn. Published by Faber & Faber, €25.99

Most philosophers cannot write. The philosophical world is divided into two intractable camps, each equally unreadable. On the one hand, followers of the likes of Adorno and Derrida celebrate high-flown opacity; on the other, earnest logicians combine complex formulae with lifeless, technical prose.
If anyone can transcend this stylistic quagmire, it is playwright and novelist Michael Frayn.
Frayn's last two plays, Copenhagen and Democracy, conjured riveting drama out of wilfully dull topics: particle physics and German coalition politics. Frayn's philosophical credentials are pretty sound too – he studied the subject at Cambridge and spent his early years as a columnist at the Guardian constructing endless Wittgensteinian puns.
Frayn addresses the challenge of reclaiming philosophy for clear, clean, Orwellian prose at the beginning of his new book, The Human Touch, invoking Richard Dawkin's Law of the Conservation of Difficulty. Dawkin stated: “Obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity.”
The near 500 pages which follow certainly feel like philosophy but Frayn wants to have his cake and eat it. He guardedly introduces his project by writing: “Is this really another attempt at philosophy? Not really. I shouldn't have the courage to make any such claim, because I can imagine how scornfully it would be dismissed by most professional philosophers.”
Frayn is concerned with what he considers the paradox of mankind's insignificance and importance. Since Copernicus, we have come to realise that we are cosmic small fry, yet we still have an awful lot of clever things to say about the big, bad universe out there. The Human Touch investigates the extent to which the latter constitute, in the words of the subtitle, a relevant and lasting “part in the creation of a universe”.
Frayn's energetic empiricism supports the view that men are not mere cosmic passengers. Empiricists reject the view that knowledge is inherent or somehow just there, waiting to be scooped up. For Frayn, all our knowledge of how the universe works has been painstakingly chiselled out of experience.
Mathematics and descriptive language are uniquely human triumphs, the fruit of an active engagement with our environment. “We did understand all these things, though, we did!” he declares excitedly.
Wittgenstein wrote in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: “The world is the totality of facts not things.” Similarly, Frayn wants to believe mankind is in charge of a conceptual universe.
But this anthropocentrism veers towards the daftness of Berkleyan idealism – which holds that nothing exists unless perceived – and Frayn hedges his bets again, finally concluding that humans are “merely a few fleeting eddies on the surface of the ocean”. In doing so, Frayn hardly justifies the vastness – a favourite term – of his work. Focusing exclusively on metaphysics and epistemology, he also regrettably omits to replicate the fascinating moral studies of his plays.
There are flashes of analytical and literary brilliance: a genuinely comprehensible account of Quantum theory and a mercurial, comic dismissal of Noam Chomsky's theory of deep grammar. But, like the super-intelligent aliens in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Frayn too often gets bogged down in trying to explain “life, the universe, and everything”. This, alas, is why most philosophers tend to write desiccated 10-page journal articles rather than garrulous 500-page hardbacks.