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comprehend many aspects of the economy; it is just impossible to hold all
of them and their interrelations in consciousness at once. In the religious
context, in contrast, Beer reaches for a more absolute sense of unknowability,
invoking repeatedly “an irreducible mystery: that there is anything” (Beer
1965, 298). And this is where God comes in: “Here is another definition [of
God], which I would add to the scholastic list of superlative attributes:
God
is what explains the mystery
” (299). This is an odd kind of explanation, since
Beer could not offer any independent definition of the
explanans
. One mys-
tery, God, is simply defined here as that which explains another, existence. In
ordinary language, at least, there is no “gap” between the two terms, so I am
inclined to read Beer as saying here that matter and spirit are one, or that they
are two aspects of an underlying unity. This is part of what I want to get at in
describing Beer's appreciation of nature as hylozoist—the understanding that
nature is infused, one might say, by spirit.
At any rate, we can see here that the ontology of unknowability was a
straightforward point of linkage, almost of identity, between Beer's worldly cy-
bernetics and his spirituality: the correlated mysteries of existence and of God
are simply the mystery of exceedingly complex mundane systems taken to the
N
th degree, where
N
is infinite. And along with this ontological resonance,
we can find an epistemological one. I have remarked several times on Beer's
cybernetic suspicion of articulated knowledge and models, as a not necessar-
ily reliable detour away from performance, and he expressed this suspicion,
again to the
N
th degree, in relation to the spiritual (Beer 1965, 294-95, 298):
To people reared in the good liberal tradition, man is in principle infinitely
wise; he pursues knowledge to its ultimate. . . . To the cybernetician, man is
part of a control system. His input is grossly inadequate to the task of perceiv-
ing the universe. . . . There is no question of “ultimate” understanding. . . . It
is part of the cultural tradition that man's language expresses his thoughts. To
the cybernetician, language is a limiting code in which everything
has
to be
expressed—more's the pity, for the code is not nearly rich enough to cope. . . .
Will you tell me that science is going to deal with this mystery [of existence] in
due course? I reply that it cannot. The scientific reference frame is incompetent
to provide an existence theorem for existence. The layman may believe that
science will one day “explain everything away”; the scientist himself ought to
know better.
Epistemologically as well as ontologically, then, Beer's cybernetics crossed
over smoothly into a spiritually charged hylozoism. And we can follow the
