What Are We? Where Are We?

I WENT TO A VERY traditional boys’ boarding school. We rowed, we got fined if our top buttons were undone, and the most unmusical of us signed up to sing Messiah because girls from the local high school sang too. Prefects could carry silver-topped walking sticks, we were allowed to cycle after foxhounds at the weekends, and the honours boards picked out in gold the names of our ancestors who had carried the school’s flame gloriously at Cambridge or the Somme. We learned Greek, beekeeping, fly-fishing, and, on the rifle range, how to shoot a charging Russian through the heart before he broke through the lines to disrupt the status quo. We had compulsory classes in what was called ‘Community Wealth’, which was an unblushing apologia for trickle-down economics. ‘The best thing you can do for the poor,’ we were told, ‘is to become rich.’ True religion was to have GDP as your household god. Real altruism was self-advancement.

One day a curious figure, dressed all in orange, with a Rasputin beard down to his chest, slank in scuffed desert boots into the school. All credit to the school for letting him in. He was fresh from the Poona ashram of the discredited yogi, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, and wore the yogi’s photo on a string of beads around his neck. He’d been a boy at the school himself, had had a distinguished career at Oxford, and was a peerless sportsman. I suppose the school thought that anyone who’d made a century at Lord’s couldn’t be a bad egg.

His first move, after pledging to restore the flagging fortunes of the First XI, was to establish a brazen competitor to ‘Community Wealth’. It was called ‘Who Am I?’, and it was an instant and embarrassing success.

Every Wednesday morning, for forty-five minutes, twenty bemused, hopeful, hormonal boys in tweed jackets, striped ties and grey serge trousers sat cross-legged and closed-eyed on cushions in a room above the business studies department, chanting the Gāyatrī mantra, going on astral journeys far from the sacred playing fields, fascinated by the sensation of their breath moving up and down their chests, called out of reverie by the teacher saying gently, ‘Who is feeling that? Who is seeing that? No point in feeling it; no point in seeing it, unless you know who’s doing it, is there?’

He had an answer for everything, and it was usually, smilingly, ‘No idea at all.’

WHAT DOES IT MEAN to live well? Living well, that is, as a human. Living well as a hedgehog might involve some of the same things as living well as a human, but there are some important differences too. Hedgehogs like eating slugs and, so far as we know, don’t much appreciate string quartets.

To know how to live well as humans, we need to know what sort of creatures we are, and what sort of place we live in.

If we don’t know what we are, and to what we might and should aspire, we might (even if we’re content, or, more likely, because we’re content) be letting our lives go off half-cock. We might be wringing less out of our threescore and ten than we could, and might be doing ourselves harm. We might be designed to run on unleaded, but be filling ourselves up with diesel.

If we don’t know where we are, we might be responding inappropriately to the cosmos. We might be wandering round naked when it’s freezing cold, and saying that our frostbite is unavoidable wear and tear. We’ll be better off if we know it’s cold, and put on a coat. 

The study of humans is called anthropology. It is a strange subject, because it makes no attempt to say what humans are. Imagine a course on rodents that didn’t begin by defining ‘rodent’. And imagine a course on rodents in deserts that didn’t say what was meant by ‘desert’. Yet that’s what we do with the study of ourselves.

Perhaps I’m being unkind to anthropologists. Perhaps there isn’t a failure to define ‘human’, but a refusal. And perhaps there’s a refusal because anyone who looks closely at humans is struck dumb with awe by what we are, and realizes that any effort to say what we are will be confounded by our complexity, our variety, our goodness, our depravity, our sheer category-busting inconsistency, our vertiginous giganticness, and our piffling littleness.

When we have tried seriously to say what we are, we have, for most of our history, reached for theological language. But theology tends to be better at posing questions and giving ethical guidance than at solving ontological conundrums.

‘What is man, that thou art mindful of him?’ asked the Psalmist. A very good question. The writer purports to answer it, but doesn’t. God ‘made [Man] a little lower than the heavenly beings,’ he goes on, ‘and crowned him with glory and honour…’² It is no answer at all, for it says not what humans are, but where they are in the hierarchy of being.

It is useful, though. It tells us how to comport ourselves (with quasi-divine dignity) and how to behave towards other humans (you mustn’t see a creature crowned with glory and honour as an economic unit, or send it to work in a brothel or a merchant bank). That is worthwhile advice, to be sure, but it’s not ontological advice.

Similarly for the notion of the Imago Dei—the idea we are made in God’s image. Belief that I’m basically God-like will, if I have a respectful view of God, inhibit my self-denigration, make me denounce sweat shops, and keep me from a career in the oil industry. But since God is infinitely mysterious, to say that I am like Him tells me little about my nature except that I too am mysterious. That, mind you, is highly practical knowledge. Learning what to do with it is urgently important. Since creativity is one of God’s defining attributes, the Imago Dei perhaps means that we are foundationally creative creatures. That, again, is hardly an ontological answer, but it is worth having.

Apart from theologians, the other people who say that they can help define us are reductionists of many shades. Their approaches are various. Some say: ‘We are higher primates who share much of our DNA with flatworms.’ True, but unhelpful. To identify the branch of the evolutionary tree on which we perch just says where we are, not what we are.

If you get marks for answering the question the examiners set, the other type of reductionist answer scores rather better: ‘Humans are merely machines—cocktails of chemicals.’ This has the merit of clarity, but the demerit of being at odds with everything we know and feel about ourselves and the rest of the cosmos.

I’m going to suggest (I shudder at my hubris) what humans might be, at bottom. In doing so I’m going to talk about some human attributes. There is, or may be, a distinction between attributes and substance. This was recognized by Aristotle, and disinterred in the Middle Ages to defend the doctrine of transubstantiation. Were the Eucharistic bread and wine really the body and blood of Jesus? Yes. Then why did they taste like bread and wine rather than human flesh and blood? Because they retained the chemical attributes of bread and wine, while being in substance Jesus’s body and blood.

This distinction sometimes matters profoundly—in medical ethics, for example. We might be able to agree that practical reason is a defining attribute of humans, but does someone stop being human if dementia or traumatic brain injury robs her of that attribute? No: she is still wholly human. Is a toddler, adept with Lego but at sea with Logos, human? Yes.

We’ll return to this distinction, but for the moment let’s park the thought.

SYMBOLIZING AND THE USE OF METAPHOR

Walk along the human evolution galleries of any decent museum. Start walking along the cases towards us, but beginning before our beginning. Look particularly at the artefacts. They are really boring until you get to the Upper Palaeolithic—to us. You’ll know when we’ve arrived, because suddenly there’s art—an explosion of symbolism: of solid metaphors; metaphors you make with your hands and pass down to your children.

Just think of the valency, complexity, possibility and agency this injected into the world. If, sitting in a cave with your flint knife, you can turn that piece of mammoth ivory into a lion-headed man which, as well as being both a lion and a man, is still a piece of ivory, is anything impossible?³ With the edge of a knife you can make an infinite number of other edged things. Faces emerge from the ivory. Surely they were there all the time. If you scrape hard enough perhaps you’ll find your dead father inside.

You can make anything into anything else. The universe is an intrinsically alchemical place and we’re all alchemists. 

You’re a sort of god. Gods don’t die, and they can make company for themselves. Everything—not just your father—seems to be immanent in everything else. So is death itself such a big deal? Life might be huddled inside the grave.

The mammoth ivory is a piece of solid metaphor. We are obsessively metaphorizing animals.

If anything can be anything, there is an infinite number of edges.

Those first modern humans were far more modern—far edgier, more inherently restless—than us. They walked constantly. If they were in Europe, they lived on the edge of the ice. They were often on the edge of hunger, viability and comfort, always on the edge of life, and always on the edge of new ways of conceiving the world. The earliest art we have is the edgiest art of all: it depicts shamanic voyaging and shapeshifting. We are the children of lion-headed and horned men. We went to the caves, pressed our hands against the cave wall—pressing out from ourselves towards the world on the other side to which the shamans went—and blew red ochre all around our hands so that when we were gone part of us (the aspirant, out-pressing part) would survive as part of the rock.

THERE’S A FAIR DEGREE of agreement about what we need in order to thrive. Decent cultures recognize that agreement in their norms and laws.

Martha Nussbaum, following Aristotle and just about everyone who has wondered systematically about human flourishing, has identified ten core needs.

Life is the most fundamental—the bedrock on which all the others are contingent. The others are bodily health, bodily integrity, use of one’s senses, one’s thought and one’s imagination, emotion (including the ability to become attached to something other than oneself), practical reason (including knowing what is good and what is not, and cohabiting comfortably with one’s conscience), affiliation (including the ability to be empathetic and sympathetic), a relationship with other species in the world of which humans are just a part, play (life isn’t all about measurable productivity, and laughter has been hugely important in human evolution), and control over the environment (including political freedom and the ownership of adequate resources).⁴

Nussbaum casts her net wide. There is little she does not catch. While the list might seem rather trite, it provides, at the least, a set of pigeonholes in which to file our thoughts about the things we need to thrive. 

Her list is easily transformed into a set of defining human attributes (for surely we thrive best when we act in accordance with our true natures). Use it when next, at a party, someone asks who you are. Declare: I am an embodied, sensual, thinking, imaginative, emotional, moral, social, playful, controlling creature, and I have a crucial relationship with the non-human world.

Nussbaum’s list is often used in the academy. I’ve cited it hundreds of times, more or less unreflectively. But something odd set me thinking about it more seriously.

I was sitting in a snug church in Yorkshire. A property developer in a suit stretched by steak and kidney pie was reading, without embarrassment, the Sermon on the Mount. ‘Blessed are those who mourn,’ he boomed. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit.’⁵

I listened, bemused, as if hearing it for the first time. What on earth could it mean? Or perhaps it meant nothing at all on earth, but contained truths for another realm altogether. If it did, I thought that other realm was a desirable place.

The vicar, with an eye to the church roof fund, didn’t preach on the day’s text. Nor did he rudely mention the Magnificat’s insistence that the mighty would be put down from their seats, the hungry filled with good things, and the rich sent empty away. But I was horrified.

The dispossessed, apparently, were the only ones who possessed anything at all. The moral centre of the cosmos was in the shanty towns outside the financial and cultural centres, in the hospices, and amongst the children scavenging on the smoking dumps outside Fortaleza.

What would Martha Nussbaum make of it all? Here were categories (the mourners, the poor, and so on) who at first blush didn’t seem to be captured by her list. And not only were they said—with a shrillness that appalled and fascinated me—to be flourishing, but to be the only ones who were truly flourishing at all. I was back to that story about St Francis. Wasn’t it the profoundest sort of perversion to worship suffering and poverty? What sort of life-denying deviant makes the funeral parlour the normative human experience?

I walked away from the thought, as most of us walk from all important things. But the thought pursued me. It raised its insolent head whenever I was feeling comfortable and satisfied: at a good dinner; at a reassuring diagnosis; by a cosy fireside; when all was balm with the family; when someone said something nice about one of my books; when the bank account swelled. I resented it very much. It was stealing my joys and denigrating things I thought were good. I wanted Martha Nussbaum back.

Had the thought been only Christian, it would have been fine. I could and would have dismissed it as a hysterical artefact of febrile first-century apocalypticism. But it wasn’t. It was there, and strident, in the prophets of Israel, the mendicants of Hinduism and Buddhism, the scepticism of Lao Tzu, and in the sacrificial generosity enjoined by Islam. It was everywhere. And it was there too in my intuitions.

I didn’t like it at all.

Then things took a different turn. For another project I started to re-read lots of old stories—stories I knew from childhood and had read to my own children. And I began to see that I had often not seen the wood for the trees.

The old stories weren’t intended just to titillate or to make long winter evenings bearable. They were meant to say something fundamental about the sorts of creatures we are. They were meant to answer the Psalmist’s question; to do the work, but more fundamentally, that Nussbaum had begun.

I knew about this aspiration to answer the Psalmist’s question. I had assumed, without looking hard, that the old stories failed—really because the brief was such a big one. As I looked more closely, though, I wondered if the failure was as complete as I’d thought.

Many of the stories gave an account of origins and status. Many more described and applauded the qualities in Nussbaum’s list. But they did so not by enumerating desirable or quintessential characteristics; not by piling up propositions, but by telling stories.

So here was my great insight: stories tell stories, and by doing so they do something very different from simply distilling the principles from stories and filing them in a cognitive cabinet. This insight, which is blindingly obvious to small children and all intelligent readers, had passed me by. That’s what academia does to you.

Having seen this, there was no stopping me. Why could stories do what the distilled principles of stories could not? The stories, it seemed to me, were real in a way that principles were not—even if the stories concerned fanciful worlds and outlandish creatures. They had bodies and relationship at the core, and they moved through time. Stories, like us, have a beginning, a middle and an end (by now there was no limit to my excitement with the self-evident). They told us more about us than Nussbaum’s list because we ourselves are stories, and it takes one to know one.

But what did they tell us about us? That needed lots of re-re-re-reading, for I am fogged with presumption. But slowly the fog cleared in places. What I saw was very, very strange indeed.

There in the stories, as I’d already noticed, were Nussbaum’s characteristics, cheered on, expounded and advocated. We should all become heroes and avoid being anti-heroes. That was to be expected. I’d seen that all along. But where were those characteristics shown to their greatest effect?

On the actual and metaphorical edges of life. Knights went out from the comfort of courts and got lost in woods, and only there were they able to be properly knightly. When all was lost, and only when all was lost, were there great riches. It was all of a piece with those disturbing lines from the Sermon on the Mount. 

But surely, I thought, this was just a literary device? Stories have to be interesting to hold listeners’ attention, and extreme situations are more interesting than accounts of an OK day at work. But no, it wasn’t that—or certainly wasn’t just that. These old tales were saying something normative about what we are when all the pretension is stripped away, and so how we should act at all times.

They hinted strongly that, if we could only see it, we are always lost in a wood, or teetering on a precipice, or destitute, or the only one standing between a dragon and a fair maiden chained to a post, and we should behave accordingly.

My mind slipped to a moment years before in Varanasi, northern India, where an emaciated beggar in saffron robes held out his bowl to me, and when I’d walked past him without giving anything, screamed ‘I am you’; to my discomfort when a friend asked me to consider giving a kidney to a stranger; and to yet another snug northern church where the vicar told the story of the man who poured all his money into building bigger barns, only to learn that ‘this very night your life will be demanded of you’.⁶ ‘And God said to him: You fool!’ shouted the vicar, in a strong Blackburn accent, and I wanted to crawl out into the dark. I could see all too clearly what I was, and didn’t like it, and how I should thrive, and I wasn’t up to it.

Nussbaum’s list, then, was embedded in the old stories, but they said better than she did what we were, or at least identified better some of our attributes. One of the reasons for this was, as I’ve said, that the stories all involved relationship—with people, with places, with ideas, with malevolent lizards, with gods; with the world, that is, outside the heroes’ skulls. Nussbaum had identified engagement with that world as central to human thriving and human definition. We simply couldn’t consider humans (either as a species or as individuals) in isolation. We aren’t brains in vats or even mind–body–spirit unities in vats. We bleed into the world and the world into us. And so to know what we are, we need to know what is being transfused.

That’s a big ask. So big that few of us bother to ask—at least in a systematic way. The nature of reality: discuss. Did the old stories themselves have anything to say about it?

Indeed they did.

The very old stories and the very new stories said the same.

Here’s a new story.

Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr had a famous argument. In principle, said Einstein, we could formulate a theory that would predict how everything in the cosmos behaved. Not so, replied Bohr: the behaviour of everything is affected by the observer.

We now know that Bohr was right. It means that the cosmos is at bottom a relational place. It is one colossal conversation in which everything, from sub-atomic particle to planet, is speaking to everything else, listening to everything else, and being influenced by everything else. In that sense, everything is one.

We needn’t rest that conclusion on the language of mystics who, after years of meditation, talk about becoming one with the universe. We can derive it from the fact of quantum non-locality, demonstrated beyond doubt by clever people at CERN. If two bodies have been close to one another they will affect one another instantaneously, however far apart in time and space they are.⁷ That’s not because they send messages to one another, infinitely faster than the speed of light. It’s because they are part of the single great organism that we call the universe, or, if you prefer, reality. Why? Because of course, at the moment before the Big Bang, everything was close—infinitely close—to everything else. Relationship is a far more fundamental property of reality than the forces binding atoms together. Forces are themselves just examples of relationship.

But while everything in that sense is one, everything in another sense is many—as Iain McGilchrist has powerfully demonstrated.⁸ There is no contradiction here. Consider a magnet. It is an undivided whole: one magnet. But if one of its two poles is cut off, are you left with one pole? No: distinct north poles presuppose distinct south poles, and magnets demand both. Oneness depends on variegation.

We rightly insist that our experiences are our own. This declares our conviction that we are one in a universe of dazzling otherness. Our experience of beauty depends on variety. We might look up and say that the perfectly clear blue sky is beautiful, but if everything were an undifferentiated, seamless, contourless blue it wouldn’t be beautiful. Beautiful blueness depends on un-blueness for its beauty. The cosmos isn’t like a pint of homogenized milk. That’s not what oneness means. Still less is the cosmos like a typical British high street, identical to every other high street. It’s an incontinent generator of variety; it spews individuals.

Increase the number of individuals and you increase the total length of edge and the number of distinct viewpoints. 

The cosmos is an edge-generator, and so a viewpoint-multiplier. 

IF THE COSMOS is a conversation—a festival of otherness in a vast marquee of unity—then everything, from electrons to elephants and beyond, is on the edge of itself, looking over.

There is an obvious way to increase edginess. A little geometry and a little biology may help to explain. Why do big animals do well and small animals do badly in cold conditions? It is because the surface area of a sphere is 4πr². That squaring keeps shrews from the South Pole.

The greater the volume, the smaller the ratio of the surface area to volume, and so the smaller (relatively) the area over which vital heat can be lost. A musk ox has less surface relative to its volume than a shrew. A shrew is edgier than a musk ox. It impinges relatively more on the outside world. It is more vulnerable. Its surface relates more to everything that is outside. Its spleen is closer to everything that is not the shrew than the musk ox’s spleen is to everything that is not the musk ox. A shrew, then, is a more relational entity than a musk ox. If the cosmos is made of relationship, a shrew is more cosmic.

Edges facilitate vulnerability and relationship. If you want more relationship in your life, get to know lots of small things rather than a few big ones. And be a small thing yourself. If relationality is what the cosmos is really about, edges are a proxy and a prerequisite for relationality. And the greater the length of the frontier, the more possibilities for incursion there will be.

Everything we know that really matters—that goes to what we think we really are, and to what we truly value in the world—we know by encounter: by experience. Would you feel safe in the hands of a doctor who had read everything there was to read about lymph nodes but had never palpated one? Would you listen respectfully to a lecture on the Iliad from someone who had never walked through the Lion Gate at Mycenae? Phenomenology trumps every equation. Data give way to intuition. What’s between the lines is more important than what’s on them.

Scientists can tell us things like our weight, or our pulse rate, or the species of flower we’re admiring, or the origin of the rocks in the mountain we worship. But a complete accumulation of information about me, the flower or the mountain won’t begin to account for the value I ascribe to my life, or the flower, or the mountain. It won’t say what they are.

Recall Eustace, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. ‘In our world,’ he told Aslan, ‘a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.’ Not so, says Aslan. ‘Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of.’⁹

McGilchrist suggests that the palpable poverty of the Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy (a poverty which makes it aridly irrelevant to most of life) is a consequence of the absence in English of different words for ‘to know’. The French have savoir and connaître; the Germans wissen and kennen.¹⁰ But we Anglophones are forced to pretend that they are the same thing, which they obviously are not. Both are vital. Both should inform one another. But if I had to sit beside one of the verbs at dinner, let alone be married to one, give me connaître or kennen every time.

Connaître and kennen presuppose leaky borders.

McGILCHRIST TRIES very directly to answer the Psalmist’s question and to say what sort of place we inhabit in his immense book The Matter with Things, in which he breathes neurobiological life into Heraclitus and Hegel.¹¹ What appear to be things—entities—are (he argues) in fact processes. That includes us. Consider a wave: in a sense it is distinct from the sea.¹² It has its own shape. That shape is different from the shape of other waves. I can describe its discrete behaviour. Yet (without in any way denying its individual wave-ness) it is part of the sea. It is sea water. It is part of the history and the future of the sea; part of the way the sea is unfolding.

What we think of as ‘things’ are like waves: episodes of unfolding. This unfolding is not like the opening of a fan, which will expose the picture that has been on it all the time. There is plenty of room for contingency, agency and creativity.

McGilchrist contends that consciousness is ubiquitous, and not just a property of the aggregation of neurons. He is joined by a growing army of philosophers and physicists.

Here is the problem for the materialist: how can consciousness result from unconscious matter? The simplest response—which begs fewest questions—is to say that matter is not unconscious at all. Philosophers such as Alfred North Whitehead, Thomas Nagel and Galen Strawson have defended this position. Many physicists see this conclusion as an inevitable inference from Bohr’s demonstration of the influence of observers on all observed things and phenomena. If consciousness is everywhere, chatting with and sparking off other consciousnesses, poor old determinism is indeed dead—as our instincts always knew it was.

McGilchrist draws deeply on the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who saw time as like a snowball rolling down a hill, accumulating snow as it goes but taking the past with it.¹³ The past is immanent in the advancing ball, but there is nothing deterministic about the roll. I prefer Jenny Odell’s take on Bergson: time is like lava flow over relatively level ground; the leading edge of the flow is alive and dynamic.¹⁴

There’s no room in these conceptions of time for the debilitating notion of time as akin to a series of steadily chugging railway carriages, each carriage representing a moment; or as a line, with the past at one end, the future at the other, and the present at the middle. McGilchrist cites the physicist George Ellis, who (consonant with snowballs and lava flows) envisages an evolving universe of space–time whose volume grows as it rolls. The present is at the surface. Since we’re temporal animals, so are we. We’re at the edge of the snowball, at the edge of the lava flow, looking out into the void.¹⁵

This accords with our sense of our selves: with the precariousness we feel when we bother to consider our predicament seriously; with the scariness of looking up and out (the direction of gaze forced on us by our upright posture and our curious cognitive constitution and by the constitution of reality); with our feeling about the salience of the moment and our feeling that the past is always present; with our swashbuckling adventurousness and our timorous conservatism; and with every single one of the really good old stories about forests, mountain trolls, treasure troves and journeys to outlandish lands.

It accords, too, with our knowledge of ourselves as wanderers; with our consciousness and the individuation inherent in ‘I’ and ‘Thou’; with our sense that there are other worlds out there at the edges of this one, and that there is commerce between the worlds; with the suggestion that everything is composed of seams between worlds; and with the infinite individuation that comes from symbolism and metaphor.

WE SEE LIFE BEST from the edge of life and comfort and consciousness. The best literature is from the dispossessed. As we’ve seen, Salvador Dalí actively sought the zone at the edge of sleep and wakefulness where he found the visions which fill his paintings. We see the things that matter only at the edge of vision, and between, never on, the lines of poems and novels. In the Jewish tradition, the nation of Israel was redeemed and shaped by going over the Egyptian national boundary and surviving in the desert, well over the edges of probability. In the Christian tradition redemption is effected by the death of an edge-man—edgy from his conception onwards—on a hill outside the metropolis. The Prophet Muhammad had to flee Mecca and the established orthodoxies to establish the new religion. In the religions of the East, dispossession of the self is enlightenment.

And so I think I begin to see something of what those strange verses in the Sermon on the Mount might mean. 

Reepicheep, the gallant mouse in C. S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is excited when the sea water turns sweet, for it means the edge of the world is near. He refuses to go back with the others, but paddles furiously in his little coracle towards the edge. We last see him at the crest of a wave—a wave which, like time and reality itself, pushes on towards new possibility. It’s as if he’s become part of the wave. Bergson would approve.

Graham Greene, one of the supreme chroniclers of the human condition, who made a pretty fair stab himself at the Psalmist’s question, said he’d choose as the epigraph for his novels an observation in Browning’s ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’: ‘Our interest’s on the dangerous edge of things. The honest thief, the tender murderer, the superstitious atheist.’¹⁶ Greene was a great novelist because he knew that normal thieves are honest, normal murderers tender, and all atheists superstitious.

There’s nothing we can do about our edginess. It’s just the way it is. We live in a cosmos characterized by edges, constantly broadcasting and receiving over the boundaries of ourselves, for relationality is the fabric of reality. Edges are of the essence. The present we inhabit is a rolling edge with, within it, all the rolling edges of the past.

The sixth- and seventh-century theologian Maximus the Confessor, who went over the big edge in Georgia in 662 CE, not long after his tongue had been pulled out and his right hand hacked off for his supposed Christological heresies, gave the most complete answer I know to the Psalmist’s question. Each human was, he held, a microcosm of the entire universe. There’s a cosmos in each one of us. This explains our colossal moral significance. It chimes with the Talmudic dictum, made famous in Schindler’s List, that to save one life is to save the whole world. If, as I’ve argued, the cosmos is made of edges, we embody all the edges there are.¹⁷

Each of us is a cosmos. Each of us looks out at a multitude of cosmoses. What do we see? Do edges have anything to do with our view?

From The Edges of the World: At the Margins of Life, by Charles Foster, published by Doubleday. Copyright © Charles Foster 2026. Reprinted with permission.