“We see ourselves as Knights of the Holy Contact. That’s another falsity. We’re not searching for anything except people. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. One world is enough, even there we feel stifled. We desire to find our own idealized image; they’re supposed to be globes, civilizations more perfect than ours; in other worlds we expect to find the image of our own primitive past.” (Lem, Location 1173 on Kindle)
Human cognition can be defined as the ability for humans to engage with complex ideas by achieving an understanding of them through experience or complex thoughts. Normally, this is how humans attempt to understand themselves and the world around them. However, Solaris presents a concept that is unrealistic to the point of being beyond human comprehension. Based on the passage, the belief in “the limits of human cognition” are restricted to human thinking itself. The philosophical question of the text being: what are the “limits” of human cognition. Human beings in Solaris are both in and of the world which limits their understanding and scope of possible thought while upon an alien planet. Human cognition is limited to a sense of geocentrism of human thinking because it is hard for human beings to think outside of ourselves and outside of our material environment. Humans are so intertwined with their own self and own environment that this image becomes the only thought we can produce when considering the existence of aliens and alien planets. Our cognition is limited to the familiarity that we feel with our own world. That is why we don’t need “other worlds”, but just “mirrors” (Lem Location 1173). We want to believe, as humans, that aliens and alien planets have evolved in the same fashion or are evolving in the same fashion that we are/did which essentially means that we are chasing this “idealized image” that mimics our “primitive past” (Lem Location 1173).
In regards to recognizing the possibility of alien life, we want to see lifeforms that mirror the image of the average human and mimics human society. What if we cannot see what is alien to us without seeing our mirror image? In Solaris, we are confronted with the limits of scientific rationality and the inability to see beyond what we can measure. Solaris is unfathomable to the scientists in the sense that it cannot be fully understood by human beings, no matter how much it is investigated or explored, and because it is the farthest thing away from appearing as a humanoid form. Even the existence of the guests that are presented in Solaris is impossible for the scientists to understand since they were supposed to be dead or since their images were horribly grotesque, like Gibarian’s guest. The moment where Chris examines Harey’s blood and comes to the stunning conclusion that everything about her blood is the same as a normal human’s but lacks atoms, then it really shows how incomprehensible this new world is to human understanding and science. If something can be constructed in the exact image of a human, how can it not be made from the basic structure of all living things? The inability to understand and comprehend the ocean in Solaris eventually just leads to insanity and futility. Only when Kelvin accepts to disregard any scientific thought concerning Solaris’ ocean, is when he is able to accept and love the simulacra of Harey that was manifested by the ocean simply because the image of his wife is familiar to him even though he knows that she is not real.
This novel is one of the most philosophically engaging works of science fiction that I have encountered. It emphasizes humanity’s immeasurable fear of the unknown. How do you comprehend something that is incomprehensible, or just so foreign to your perception of reality? In this light, I think that Lem’s work can also point to the acceptance of new ways to discover and formulate ideas for things that we currently do not understand, like alien life. Lem’s work exposes aspects of humanity that are arrogant and believe that they have the ability to comprehend the entire world around them. The “limits of human cognition” in the case of Lem is the inability of humans to think beyond themselves and their fixed perception of reality.
Works Cited:
- Lem, Stanislaw. Solaris. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987. Print.