Three weeks ago, at a small ceremony in Baltimore that drew rather less attention than it deserved, the consortium operating the James Webb Space Telescope released a calibration image of the early universe. The image is, as a piece of physics, an event. As a piece of human culture, it is something stranger: an invitation to three different disciplines to read the same fact, in three incompatible languages, and to argue.
The image shows a cluster of galaxies as they were when the universe was approximately three percent of its present age. The arithmetic is the easy part. The hard part is what to do with the arithmetic — what kind of story it permits us to tell about who we are and how we came to be the kind of thing that asks the question.
That story is, this paper has long argued, three stories at once: a story about the cosmos (told by the empirical sciences), a story about the psyche (told by philosophy and psychology), and a story about the polis (told, when it is told well, by the architecture of international law). It is the contention of this issue that the three stories are the same story, told in registers that have, to the detriment of all of them, almost stopped speaking to each other.
1. The cosmos, measured
The Webb consortium's announcement is, in technical terms, an act of transmission spectroscopy — the measurement of the fingerprints starlight leaves in the atmospheres of distant worlds and the spectra of distant galaxies. The fingerprints in question, this week, are those of water vapour in the photosphere of an exoplanet in the TRAPPIST-1 system, and of un-modelled metal-poor populations in galaxies whose light has been travelling toward us for nearly thirteen billion years.
“The Paris framework assumes scarcity,” said Dr. Nadira Hossain, a co-author on the spectroscopy paper and former fellow of the Hague Academy. “The instrument has just measured abundance — of light, of time, of room.”
“The instrument has just measured abundance — of light, of time, of room.”
2. The psyche, examined
An image of the early universe is, of course, also an image of the human relationship to time. Sartre, writing in 1943, observed that the consciousness which apprehends a thing is never quite contemporaneous with it. To look at a galaxy is to look at a fact that is older than the act of looking; to read the looking is to insert a third party — the philosopher — who is older still.
This is not, as the existentialists liked to insist, a poetic flourish. It is a measured property of the universe and of the measurement. The deeper the field, the further behind us the moment of emission has become, and the more the act of seeing is a kind of archaeology — a self-portrait of the species written, against the species' will, in the past tense.
The Freudian inheritance, for its part, has had a difficult century. The clinical literature has narrowed; the cultural literature has metastasized. What remains useful, this paper has argued before, is the structural Freud rather than the speculative one — the insistence that selfhood is a negotiation among parties, none of which has a complete view of the room.
3. The polis, agreed
Which brings us, by a route that is not as oblique as it sounds, to international law. A treaty, in the strict sense, is a sentence that a group of states have agreed to keep saying to each other; the agreement is what makes it real. International law has, accordingly, been the most forthrightly fictional of the human disciplines — and, in its honest moments, the most useful.
| Category | Source | Impact |
|---|---|---|
| Pacta Sunt Servanda | Treaties freely entered into | Legal certainty among consenting states |
| Opinio Juris | Settled customary practice | Global norms, binding without consent |
| Jus Cogens | Peremptory non-derogable norms | Universal ethics — the floor below which sovereignty cannot lawfully sink |
The architecture is older than the United Nations, older than the League, older even than the Westphalian system whose name it now shares. It is a slow grammar, learned in the hard cases. The Webb instrument, by measuring abundance where the treaties assume scarcity, has handed the architecture a problem its drafters did not foresee.
The synthesis: a polymathic posture
This publication's working hypothesis — the polymathic one — is that the three disciplines are not, in fact, looking at three things. They are looking at one thing, from positions a few degrees of arc apart, and the parallax of their disagreement is the shape of the human condition.
We propose, modestly, to keep insisting on this in print. The cure for the ills of curiosity is, after all, more curiosity — and the cure for siloed disciplines is the patience to read across the grain. This issue is an attempt at exactly that.
Continued in this issue: Existentialism & AI (p. 4) · The Treaty Architecture (p. 12) · Decoding the Id (p. 16) · The Architecture of the Heart (p. 12).
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