Letter #289: Fifth Element, Sixth Sense

Leeloo Dallas Multipass!

Dad,

And all this time I thought the fifth element was Milica Jovović in that Bruce Willis movie. But I guess that was Leeloo Dallas Multipass, whose funny little voice is all I can think of when we start talking about quintessence, dusty or otherwise. It’s actually a pretty good movie—and relevant to our discussion, since the whole plot is driven by the question: where is she?

Where is the fifth element? What is it, this subtle flame of life coursing through all things? Plato and Aristotle talk sometimes as if it were a physical substance like earth, fire, water, and air—but one too thin to feel, too clear to see. And there’s the clever puzzle hidden in the system: how could something be material when no human sense could ever perceive it, even in principle? It forces the point you made last week, that everything we think of as raw matter is actually, by necessity, something in contact and relationship with human consciousness.

Many have tried to find some way of locating a physical fifth element—an ether, they called it, following Aristotle at least in that much. For a long while, scientists speculated that it was the lubricant of the universe through which everything moved, the cradle of planets and the medium of light. It was a major watershed when Albert Michelson and Edward Morley demonstrated for certain that something must be wrong with that idea. It set the stage for Einstein’s revolution in physics, which among other things was a radical new way of describing space and time without reference to any intangible soup for things to move through.

Many people took the end of ether to be another nail in the coffin of the human soul, proof that life couldn’t last after death. If the soul isn’t made of ether then it’s not made of everything, they thought, and so every piece of the body will one day unravel and rot. If our stitching and stuffing are chewed up into so much mulch, what can be left of the mind? This is when people start talking with derision about the “ghost in the machine,” the invisible nothing that the doctors had hunted for in their cadavers and found absent.

But of course they were looking in the wrong place, a little like the Soviet astronaut who said he had flown up into space and found no God there. The answer to Plato and Aristotle’s puzzle is that some modes of existence are known to us by other means than those of the body, and some knowledge is accessible by other means than those of experiment.

The modern insistence that no such means exist is a prejudice whose limits are now becoming painfully clear. You can send Bruce Willis hunting to the ends of the earth and he won’t find the fifth element unless he looks with other eyes. Or maybe with, you know…a sixth sense.

I’ll show myself out.

Love,
Spencer