The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe [Hardcover]

Michael Frayn (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 6, 2007

What do we really know? What are we in relation to the world around us? Here, the acclaimed playwright and novelist takes on the great questions of his career--and of our lives

Humankind, scientists agree, is an insignificant speck in the impersonal vastness of the universe. But what would that universe be like if we were not here to say something about it? Would there be numbers if there were no one to count them? Would the universe even be vast, without the fact of our smallness to give it scale?
With wit, charm, and brilliance, this epic work of philosophy sets out to make sense of our place in the scheme of things. Our contact with the world around us, Michael Frayn shows, is always fleeting and indeterminate, yet we have nevertheless had to fashion a comprehensible universe in which action is possible. But how do we distinguish our subjective experience from what is objectively true and knowable? Surveying the spectrum of philosophical concerns from the existence of space and time to relativity and language, Frayn attempts to resolve what he calls "the oldest mystery": the world is what we make of it. In which case, though, what are we?

 

All of Frayn's novels and plays have grappled with these essential questions; in this book he confronts them head-on.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. British playwright and novelist Frayn has nursed a serious interest in philosophy since studying it at Cambridge in the 1950s, a fact that won't surprise fans of the writer best known for his 1982 farce, Noises Off, and award-winning 1998 drama, Copenhagen. This bold, original spin on the role of the human imagination in the construction of reality reflects the same robust intellectual curiosity, keen powers of observation and ingenious sense of humor that characterize all his work. Ranging over science, mathematics, philosophy, psychology and linguistics—with a grasp that would be admirable in a professional but is astounding in a self-confessed amateur—Frayn rigorously exposes the human scaffolding propping up what we like to see as a detached, neatly ordered universe. Gazing both outwardly at the indeterminate cosmos suggested by relativity and quantum mechanics, and inwardly at the slippery constructions of consciousness and our sense of self, he focuses on the narrative compulsion that arises from the continual "traffic" between human beings and their ever-changing, ephemeral surroundings. Frayn's dogged unraveling of determinist assumptions and the occasionally mind-bending minutiae of theories, arguments and counterarguments can get taxing, despite lucid and witty prose. But Frayn's ecstatic embrace of a human-made universe is a fascinatingly persuasive ride. (Feb.)
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From Bookmarks Magazine

In less-skilled hands, Michael Frayn's observations might strike the reader as self-indulgent and esoteric, or worse, inaccessible. After all, Frayn spans the range of human experience in this hefty tome—from the origin of consciousness to the infinity of the universe—in an attempt to describe "the great mutual balancing act." Overall, Frayn has a remarkable grasp of science, mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, and related disciplines, and he possesses an intuitive ability to connect with an audience (sharpened, no doubt, by his stage work, most notably in Noises Off and Copenhagen). Also, a keen sense of humor never hurts. The result recalls James Burke (he of the popular history-of-science series Connections) working on a higher plane and with a greater wealth of anecdotes.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 512 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books; 1st edition (February 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805081488
• ISBN-13: 978-0805081480
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,229,518 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Michael Frayn was born in London in 1933 and began his career as a journalist on the Guardian and the Observer. His novels include Towards the End of the Morning, The Trick of It and Landing on the Sun. Headlong (1999) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, while his most recent novel, Spies (2002), won the Whitbread Novel Award. His fifteen plays range from Noises Off to Copenhagen and most recently Afterlife.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 54 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mind bending assessment of the human role in the universe..., February 9, 2007

By 

Chaplain Stephen (Little Rock, AR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe (Hardcover)

Michael Frayn offers a thought provoking and suprisingly enjoyable treatise on humanity's role in the universe, showing a deft handle on subjects ranging from physics and cosmology, to the intricacies of language.

From beginning to end, Frayn has the wit and sensibility of a kinder and gentler Richard Dawkins (newly minted superstar author of the much more confrontational and intellectually arrogant (in my humble opinion) - "The God Delusion").

While Frayn is certainly no Christian theist, he offers some amazing insights into the central role humanity plays in the conscious understanding of the cosmos - an idea with some meaningful Biblical applications for those so inclined.

As both a philosophy professor and Christian pastor, I found Frayn's thoughts to be both strikingly original in their combinations and refeshingly coherent in their execution - think C.S. Lewis after a few weeks alone with Hawking's "A Brief History of Time."

Overall, I consider this book to be worthy reading as I found it both effective in expanding my horizons and being challenged in my assumptions.

- S.

** EDITED MINIMALLY FOR CLARITY OF GRAMMAR, SPELLING, AND PUNCTUATION **

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I kept reaching for a pencil, March 21, 2007

By 

Raphael Rubin (Merion Station, PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe (Hardcover)

Professional philosophers will have the same problem with this book as professional historians have with Paul Johnson (thus a few 4-stars will appear in an otherwise unassailable 5+-stars). As a non-professional philosopher (but professional scientist), I found this to be a remarkable work: An amalgam of physics, neuroscience, linguistics, and philosophy, brought to bear upon the issue of how we create the universe. Its an astonishing synthesis.

Frayn has a genius for accessibly posing the important questions. What is free will? What is consciousness? Does the universe exist (metaphorically) without us? Most important, do we have the language to even ask the right questions? Could we ever understand ourselves? Frayn has serious doubts, and the answers pour through our fingers like water. But our hands are left wet, and we thirst for more.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Big, Friendly Summary of Philosophy, April 22, 2007

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe (Hardcover)

Michael Frayn is well known as a playwright for the hilarious farce _Noises Off_ (film version good but less funny) and for _Copenhagen_, a drama about quantum physicists. He is also a novelist, translator, and journalist. When he was at Cambridge, though, he studied philosophy, and he might say that all his works have been offshoots of that particular endeavor. He returns to the big subject in _The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of a Universe_ (Metropolitan Books) with a suitably big book with lots of big and important topics and plenty of profound but lightly-expressed ideas. It has to be said that most of Frayn's ideas have to do with just how deep our wonderment ought to be and how few answers we have, but still, this is a genial guided tour of the issues that have consumed thinkers since before the days of Plato.

The paradox that Frayn looks at in many different ways is this: "The world has no form or substance without you and me to provide them, and you and I have no form or substance without the world to provide them in its turn." He also says that we have not even begun resolve the paradox. "The universe plainly exists independently of human consciousness," he writes, "but what can ever be said about it that has not been mediated through that consciousness?" We have come scientifically to understand a great deal of our universe, especially the planet we inhabit, but the amount compared to the mysteries that still remain is tiny. When we look closely at its complexity, it merely becomes more complex. Frayn, as you can imagine, thinks that numbers are invented. After all, we messed around with numbers for centuries without using a symbol for zero until that concept became part of the system. "Number, in short, is not something logically and mysteriously anterior to space and time, or to cause, or to the human presence in the world." Frayn examines the truth content of stories; how can we evaluate, for instance, the statement "Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street"? It is all less complicated than counterfactuals, which have been a puzzle for philosophers for centuries. All this is less puzzling than that of the old bogey of consciousness; Frayn writes, "About consciousness much has been said, and not a word of it that told us anything we didn't already know perfectly well from our own lifelong experience, which is nothing. We can't even say what _sort_ of a thing it is." Consciousness is plainly dependent on the mechanisms in the brain, but paradox again, no accounting of such mechanisms comes close to explaining what feeling and being aware are.

What meaning we get from the universe, too, is up to us. Frayn starts and ends his tour of paradox and how little we can really know with a Rashomon-like invitation: on a calm, clear night, just look up at the stars in wonder. It isn't enough for us humans, because we will start wondering about those lights, and their spectra, and their speed of emission, and on and on; it isn't enough, and then it is enough because it has to be. Frayn's deeply personal explanations of philosophical ideas expressed in an avuncular and amiable way is an engaging look at a broad range of important ideas. Despite his repeatedly showing how much of what we know for sure cannot really be known for sure, this is not a book of despair but an invitation to look with delight more deeply at the nature of things.