Light & Truth

IF THINE EYE OFFEND THEE (405 pp.) -- Heinrich Schirmbeck -- Simon & Schuster ($5.95).

Philosophers amuse themselves by attacking unities with metaphysical axes, splitting them into dualities, and then trying to glue the pieces together again.

Author Schirmbeck is a metaphysical novelist of considerable imagination and hubris who is desperately concerned with recementing the duality whose halves are customarily called reason and feeling, truth and grace, science and morality, or mathematics and poetry. A character in his novel--itself a disturbing duality, part murky hokum, part stark reality--expresses the wish to be the first poet of modern physics. Clearly he speaks for the author, a German science-journalist, and if Schirmbeck's book falls short of poetry and has some irritating left-wing political overtones, it is nevertheless an extraordinary novel of ideas.

The narrator, a tormented young European intellectual, is obsessed by light. His hero, Prince de Bary (suggested by the late famed French physicist, the Due de Broglie), has resolved the paradox of light with a theory that allows it to be considered both as waves and as particles. But the prince is a scientific dreamer who can illuminate both matter-energy and the puzzle of creation in the same vision: "If we give free rein to our fantasy, we may suppose that at the first beginning of time, light alone existed in the world, and by its gradual thickening brought into being the material universe that we are able to see with its aid. And perhaps some day, when time has fulfilled itself, the universe will rediscover its original purity and be again dissolved in light."

Electronics of the Soul. The vision evokes terror as well as beauty, plainly alluding to the blinding dissolution of an atomic war. Light is knowledge : can it be sin also? Can the physicists with their nucleonics and the cyberneticists with their computers wash themselves of culpability for the blinding light they have created? Is all new knowledge good? And if it is not, should scientists be controlled -- by the state, for the state's ends? So Schirmbeck's characters inquire, talking essays to each other the way Aldous Huxley's people used to, and enthusiastically fogging the main issues with wildly sprayed brilliance on such matters as the esthetics of the ballet and the narrator's Oedipus entanglements.

The Europe Schirmbeck draws is fantastic, but only slightly more so than the real one. Germany is called Armagnac; Paris, Sybaris; everyone is spied on by an agency of the Western alliance called the Office of Strategic Information. Science is a weapon for soldiers, not a tool of philosophers. A power-warped rationalist named Elliot, who strongly resembles the villainous Gletkin in Koestler's Darkness at Noon, speculates with pleasure on "the electronics of the soul"--soon, he promises, cyberneticists will know enough about mechanical brains to control human nerve cells with ease. "We are moving," someone says, "toward a new Middle Age," in which politician-scientists will be the fathers of a new church, decreeing what may be thought or known.

The Inward Eye. Politically, Schirmbeck is an annoying cafe neutralist; he indulges himself in an overcrude lampoon of U.S. Physicist Edward Teller, and solemnly puts forth the preposterous view that Atom Spies "Arthur and Edith Rosenbluth" were martyrs in the cause of freedom of information. But the author's principal concern is examined exhaustively and well: If the eye of science offends, should it be plucked out? The heroic Prince de Bary refuses to build war brains for the OSI, and retires to a life of contemplation. Subtly enough that the truth does not cloy, Schirmbeck answers his own question: Science must continue to see, but it must turn its gaze inward.

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