Lost in the Cosmos

Experiment: You are Sagan and you are monitoring the Cornell University radio telescope at Arecibo, Puerto Rico, when, after years of reception of random noise, you receive a signal which can only be interpreted as representing the prime numbers, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23 … Communication is established! The source of the transmission must be Alpha Centauri because of the direction and the transmission time: four years. Years pass. A code is agreed upon. But time is running out. You are growing old. What with the difficulties of encoding and decoding and the period of transmission, there is only time for five simple questions. Which questions would you ask, and how would you answer these five questions from Alpha Centauri?
    (1) Are you in continuity with other organisms on P-3, S-G2V (third planet = earth, star G2V = our sun)?
    (2) If not, what is nature of discontinuity?
    (3) Are you in trouble?
    (4) If so, specify.
    (5) What information do you need? (E.g., what can we do for you?)

(18) The Demoniac Self:
    Why it is the Autonomous Self becomes Possessed by the Spirit of the Erotic and the Secret Love of Violence, and how Unlucky it is that this should have Happened in the Nuclear Age

    SÖREN KIERKEGAARD MADE a very strange statement. He said that Christianity first brought the erotic spirit into the world. In his arcane style, which often seems designed as much to obfuscate as to enlighten the reader, he wrote: “Sensualism, viewed from the standpoint of Spirit, was first posited by Christianity.” Which is to say, not that sensuality had not existed in the world before in paganism, perhaps in its most perfect expression in Greece, “but not as a spiritual category.” It existed rather as an expression of harmony and unison. “In the Greek consciousness, the sensuous was under the control of the beautiful personality or, more rightly stated, it was not controlled, for it was not an enemy to be subjugated, not a dangerous rebel who should be held in check.” But in the Christian era the sensuous-erotic becomes “a qualified spirituality, that is to say, so qualified that the Spirit excludes it; if I imagine this principle concentrated in a single individual, then I have a concept of the sensuous-erotic genius. This is an idea which the Greeks did not have, which Christianity first brought into the world, even if only in an indirect sense.”
    The highest expression of the sensuous-erotic genius, in Kierkegaard’s view, was Mozart’s Don Giovanni: “Mozart is the greatest of classic composers and Don Giovanni deserves the highest place among all classic works of art.”
    What is arresting here is Kierkegaard’s view that the Don is to be understood not merely as a roué, a dirty old man reverted to his animal appetites, a sinner, or even as a good pagan, a Greek hedonist, but rather as “the inspiration of the flesh by the spirit of the flesh.”
    Nor is the “sensuous-erotic” to be understood in modern biological terms as the sex drive and need-satisfaction, but rather as the sensual “spirit” and therefore, in Kierkegaard’s word, as the “demoniac.”
    It is this “demoniac” spirit of the erotic which is “posited” by Christianity.
    Presumably, Kierkegaard would have no difficulty explaining that national characteristic which has astounded so many foreign visitors to this country: that the United States is at once the most Christian of nations (at least in numbers of churchgoers) and at the same time the most eroticized society in all of history.
    For our purposes, which is a much more modest and dialectically less sophisticated approach to such matters, there are two things of value in Kierkegaard’s notion of the “spirit of the sensuous-erotic,” and I acknowledge the debut fully aware that this particular passage from Kierkegaard was written under one of his pseudonyms and in “the esthetic stage of existence” and hence not necessarily approved by Kierkegaard writing in his “religious stage.”
    One thing of value is his setting aside the “sensuous-erotic” as a category to be examined in its own right, a category which not only is not to be dismissed as simply sinful but which can in fact produce works of the highest genius, in Kierkegaard’s term, “the musical-erotic genius” of Don Giovanni. Thus, we are dispensed from the necessity of uttering the usual denunciations of the present age, familiar from both Christian and non-Christian sources, and adducing