Anathem: (1) In Proto-Orth, a poetic or musical invocation of Our Mother Hylaea, which since the time of Adrakhones has been the climax of the daily liturgy (hence the Fluccish word Anthem meaning a song of great emotional resonance, esp. one that inspires listeners to sing along). Note: this sense is archaic, and used only in a ritual context where it is unlikely to be confused with the much more commonly used sense 2. (2) In New Orth, an aut by which an incorrigible fraa or suur is ejected from the math and his or her work sequestered (hence the Fluccish word Anathema meaning intolerable statements or ideas). See Throw-back.
— The Dictionary, 4th edition, A.R. 3000 (v)

Introduction

Anathem¹ is a 2008 speculative fiction novel by Neal Stephenson. By the time of its publication, Stephenson had developed a bit of a reputation in the literary world for marrying highbrow concepts with lowbrow genre fiction. His first breakout success, Snow Crash, is frequently mentioned alongside the works of William Gibson in the cyberpunk genre and holds the ignominious distinction of coining the term “metaverse.” His followup The Diamond Age is alternately described as post-cyberpunk or “nanopunk.” He then fused his dual interests in world history and cryptography in Cryptonomicon: a book set concurrently during World-War II and present-day 1999, and features code-making and breaking in both time periods. It’s not difficult to see the substantially more popular—and far less literate—output of Ernest Cline as a road not taken by Stephenson at the time when nerd culture was incipient.

Later at the writer’s conference, I introduced myself to someone who was responsible for organizing it, and she looked at me keenly and said, “Ah, yes, you’re the one who’s going to bring in our males 18-32.” And sure enough, when we got to the venue, there were the males 18-32, looking quite out of place compared to the baseline lit-festival crowd. They stood at long lines at the microphones and asked me one question after another while ignoring the [other] writers sitting at the table with me. Some of the males 18-32 were so out of place that they seemed to have warped in from the Land of Faerie, and had the organizers wondering whether they should summon the police. But in the end they were more or less reasonable people who just wanted to talk about books and were as mystified by the literary people as the literary people were by them.²

Stephenson’s oeuvre is discursive in both senses of the word, spanning many different topics and settings, but one thing remains relatively the same: his works are a radical synthesis of exoteric genre convention and an often extreme level of esoterica. What differs is the relative proportion of one to the other, and in Anathem we find the strongest bias towards the esoteric. To me, that is the defining feature of a Stephenson novel: the genre and plot are melodies played atop a much deeper undertone of whatever Stephenson finds fascinating, and the harmony between them can be very creative. Readers on the autism spectrum have often commented that his books’ odd fascinations (or we could say: special interests) are comfortably familiar,³ and he consistently introduces neurodivergence as either a neutral or positive trait in his characters. Anathem’s pseudo-monastic setting is no exception:

Barb and Lio are two quite different faces of the infinite polyhedron that is autism. Barb is a more overt, and dare I say stereotypical, character, placed into a setting where he is optimized and idealized. Lio is more hidden and subtle, and is thought of as a bit of a troublemaker, but is also recognized for his strengths, however obscure. Bringing both of them to light is Erasmas, a phenomenal ally who acts as a bridge between the “normal” world and that of his friends.⁴

I say the genre convention is exoteric because it plays the same role as Erasmus: a bridge from the familiar terrain of speculative fiction to the deep, esoteric fascinations that have been woven into the narrative. This driving force of deep interest never keeps Stephenson moored in one place for long; the glimpse of novel spaceflight we see in Anathem would soon be expanded into a millenia-spanning Seveneves.

I will not spend much time discussing the plot of this book. What interests me is the sort of review I would have wanted to read, but have never encountered: a deep-dive into the esoteric landscape of the story, and an analysis of some of its explicit and implicit themes.

In the Concent of Saunt Edhaur

Saunt: (1) In New Orth, a term of veneration applied to great thinkers, almost always posthumously. Note: this word was accepted only in the Millennial Orth Convox of A.R. 3000. Prior to then it was considered a misspelling of Savant. In stone, where only upper-case letters are used, this is rendered SAVANT […] a confusion between the letters U and V grew commonplace (the “lazy stonecarver problem”), and many began to mistake the word for SAUANT. This soon degenerated to saunt (now accepted) and even sant (still deprecated). In written form, St. may be used as an abbreviation for any of these. Within some traditional orders it is still pronounced “Savant” and obviously the same is probably true among Millenarians.
— The Dictionary, 4th edition, A.R. 3000 (13)

Anathem takes place in the world of Arbe, set in an alternate cosmos. Alongside this alternate history comes an entire vocabulary that is similar—but askew—from our own. Stephenson introduces this vocabulary over the course of the book via Dictionary epigraphs, and context clues. This is well-trod ground in speculative fiction, but Stephenson both avoids the fustian excesses of China Miéville and adds a twist to this convention that is even more audacious: as Arbe is an alternate world, he invents an entirely alternate history of science and philosophy, and this intellectual terrain serves as the focal point of the story’s intrigue.

For the better part of four thousand years, the intellectual class of avout have been cloistered behind stone walls of various concents and adhere to the Cartasian Discipline. Concents are structured around a central clock mechanism that is designed to run for 10,000 years,⁵ and they are further subdivided into maths. Each math represents an order of magnitude of time: Unarian, Decenarian, Centenarian, and Millenarian. The magnitude determines how long each math is sealed off from the outside world and each other. The only rituals, or “auts,” that they observe together outside of these periods of time take place around the great clock.

The book is narrated first-person by a young “fraa” named Erasmus, in what is essentially a bildungsroman. The structure of the plot reflects the theme of orders of magnitude: a slow introduction to the Decenarian math of Saunt Edhaur; the ten-year observance of Apert in which the Decenarians open their gate and co-mingle with the surrounding population; a globe-trotting adventure in search of a lost mentor; a long-shot excursion into Arbran orbit; a kaleidoscopic rummage through many possible world narratives.

The setting is a post-apocalyptic one, but the apocalypse is now so distant that the reconstruction afterward is recognizably modern. No record remains of the Terrible Events that collapsed civilization, but the people of Arbe are surrounded by artificially-constructed newmatter inventions that were left over. The people’s relationship to nature particularly illustrates the level of technological development that had been lost. The local flora contain a mood-enhancing substance that pacifies the people;⁶ genetically-engineered fuel trees are grown and harvested to supply the world’s energy needs (405); within the concent walls, some fraas and suurs cultivate the library grape—a sort of Russian Roulette of the vine:

The library grape had been sequenced by the avout of the Concent of the Lower Vrone in the days before the Second Sack. Every cell carried in its nucleus the genetic sequences, not just of a single species, but of every naturally occurring species of grape that the Vrone avout had ever heard of—and if those people hadn’t heard of a grape, it wasn’t worth knowing about. […] Each nucleus was an archive, vaster than the Great Library of Baz, storing codes for shaping almost every molecule nature had ever produced that left an impression on the human olfactory system. […] The library grape was legendary for its skill in penetrating the subterfuges of winemakers who were so arrogant as to believe they could trick it into being the same grape two seasons in a row. […] Developing a fruitful relationship with the library grape was left to fanatics like Fraa Orolo, who had made it his avocation. Of course, library grapes hated the conditions at Saunt Edhar, and were still reacting to an incident fifty years ago when Orolo’s predecessor had pruned the vines incorrectly, poisoning the soil with bad memories encoded in pheromones. The grapes chose to grow up small, pale, and bitter. The resulting wine was an acquired taste, and we didn’t even try to sell it (175–6).

These sorts of technological marvels are the exception within the walls of the concent: the avout are strictly forbidden from using technology of any kind not explicitly allowed under the Discipline. This stricture is enforced within the walls by the Hierarchs, and without by the Inquisition.

Avout live under a form of ascetic communism: the only personal property they are allowed to have are the bolt, chord, and sphere—vestments of the Discipline. So all labor duties are organized socially within the concent, and as such even awful work is performing a useful service. So, in order to devise a system of punishment under these circumstances, the Hierarchs use a novel solution called the Book:

There was no point at all to the Book, which is what made it an especially dreaded form of penance. It contained twelve chapters. Like the scale used to measure earthquakes, these got exponentially worse as they went on, so Chapter Six was ten times as bad as Chapter Five, and so on. Chapter One was just a taste, meted out to delinquent children, and usually completed in an hour or two. Two meant at least one overnight stay, though any self-respecting troublemaker could bang it out in a day. Five typically meant a stay of several weeks. Any sentence of Chapter Six or higher could be appealed to the Primate and then to the Inquisition. Chapter Twelve amounted to a sentence of life at hard labor in solitary confinement; only three avout had finished it in 3690 years, and all of them were profoundly insane. […] To complete your sentence and be granted permission to walk out of your cell, you had to master them just as thoroughly as, say, a student of quantum mechanics must know group theory. The punishment lay in knowing that you were putting all of that effort into letting a kind of intellectual poison infiltrate your brain to its very roots (156–7).

The Terrible Events have instilled in the people of Arbe a violent distrust of intellect, and this hostility resulted in the absolute separation of intellectual and manual labor. Anyone suspected of harboring too much curiosity is sent “to the clock” (76), especially if they were an atypical neurotype:

During the first two days of Apert, the son of Quin had attended almost every one of these tours. After memorizing every word that the guides said, he had begun to ask crippling numbers of questions. From there he’d moved on to correcting the fraas and suurs whenever they’d said something wrong, and amplifying their remarks when they were insufficiently long-winded. A couple of wily suurs had found other ways to keep him busy, but it was difficult to keep him focused for long and so he would still make occasional strafing runs. Quin and his ex-wife seemed content to give Barb the run of the concent at all hours, which was as good as telling us that they wanted him Collected. (119)

The separation is reciprocal: while every avout is expected to entertain an avocation, those who focus on this work over and above pure theory are considered failures.

There was another reason you needed an avocation: so that if you turned out to be incapable of doing anything else, you could give up on books and chalk halls and dialog and work as a sort of laborer for the rest of your life. It was called “falling back.” There were plenty of avout like that, making food, brewing beer, and carving stone, and it was no secret who they were. (189)

This separation is so total in the mind of the avout, that any necessary fusion of the two is seen with suspicion:

“In the present age, this continent is covered by a dense network of hard-surfaced roads replete with signs and other navigational aids,” I announced.
“Oh,” said Fraa Jad.
“Between that and this”—I waved the cartabla—“we can find our way to Saunt Tredegarh without having to design a sextant from first principles.”
Fraa Jad seemed a little put out by this. A minute later, though, we happened to pass an office supply store. I ran in and bought a protractor, then handed it to Fraa Jad to serve as the first component in his homemade sextant. He was deeply impressed. I realized that this was the first thing he’d seen extramuros that made sense to him.
“Is that a Temple of Adrakhones?” he asked, gazing at the store.
“No,” I said, and turned my back on it and walked away. “It is praxic. They need primitive trigonometry to build things like wheelchair ramps and doorstops.” (317–8)

Extramuros

Outside the concent walls (“extramuros”), the class composition of Arbe is more terrestrial. The “sline” (from “baseline”) class are proletarian; there is a community of artisans who perform specialized labor; there are a capitalist class of “burgers” who dominate the cities; and there are various nation-state governments, the leaders of which Fraa Orolo derisively calls “Panjandrums.” Lacking any identifying documents, Erasmus crosses a border in the company of several other illegal immigrants, which establishes dimensions of national oppression are present in Arbe (440ff).

Stephenson often employs a dry sarcasm via his protagonists’ millennial point-of-view to describe goings-on in the surrounding world:

We crossed the causeway between the twin fountains and entered into the burgers’ town. An old market had stood there until I’d been about six years old, when the authorities had renamed it the Olde Market, destroyed it, and built a new market devoted to selling T-shirts and other objects with pictures of the old market. Meanwhile, the people who had operated the little stalls in the old market had gone elsewhere and set up a thing on the edge of town that was now called the New Market even though it was actually the old market. (314)

Through moments such as these the central conceit of the book makes its appearance: the task of reinventing an entire world history is far too great, even for an author as eccentric as one who chooses to write thousand-page drafts with a fountain pen.⁷ Like the fountain pen, his approach to reinventing history was deliberately restrictive:

Earlier in my writing career, I really wanted to write fantasy and science fiction novels. I actually wrote one that never got published that had an extremely elaborate, carefully thought-out map, as well as timelines and histories and cultures — the whole bit. I enjoy making that kind of material up, and I’ve got a mind that’s geared that way. I did it even back in the days when I had to do it all with a typewriter and 3-by-5 cards. So working today with computers and 3D graphics and all of the tools at one’s disposal, I could see myself diving into such a project, and not emerging until ten years later, when I had complete topographic maps of the entire world, and all of that. But at this point in my life I know myself well enough to fear that outcome — and to fear the twelve-volume series of enormous novels that would fall out of that kind of project. [LAUGHS] So I made up my mind almost immediately with this one that I would refrain from coming up with a really detailed geography for Arbre, and refrain from filling in those 3,700 years of history that followed the planet’s “Terrible Events” with specific incidents and nations and wars and religions and all that.⁸

From this we can understand the alternate history of Arbe not as a blank slate, but rather a world-historical palimpsest. The reader is made to feel a sense of jamais vu in which all that is familiar about the world is made alien. The many socratic dialogues that take place are not constructing altogether original theses about the universe; like hiding a dog’s pill inside a piece of cheese, Stephenson is attempting to lead his (male, 18–32) audience from out of the walls of science-fiction and fantasy, and into the world of philosophy.

In many cases, one can perform a simple transposition of names. Adrakhones: Pythagoras; Protas: Plato; Thelenes: Socrates; Lesper: Descartes; Tredegarh: Lord Kelvin. “Gardan’s Steelyard” stands in for Occam’s Razor;⁹ Saunt Bucker’s Basket is a Faraday Cage (708). In describing the phenomenology of time, one character refers to Saunt Atamant’s treatise on a copper bowl that is certainly a reference to Husserl (697–705).¹⁰

A long dialogue between Fraa Arsibalt and a curious interlocutor reveals that one of the foundational philosophical beliefs held by avout—termed “Sconic thought”—is in fact an expression of Kant’s transcendental idealism:

“Sconic thought was a third way between two unacceptable alternatives. By then it was well understood that we do all of our thinking up here in our brains.” He tapped his head. “And that the brain gets its inputs from eyes, ears, and other sense organs. The naïve attitude is that your brain works directly with the real world. I look at this button on your control panel, I reach out and feel it with my hand—”
“Don’t touch that!” Beller warned.
“I see you seeing it and having thoughts about it, and I conclude that it’s really there, just as my eyes and fingers present it to me, and that when I think about it I’m thinking about the real thing.”
“That all seems pretty obvious,” Beller said. Then there was an awkward silence, which Beller finally broke by saying—in good humor—“I guess that’s why you called it naïve.”
“At the opposite extreme, there were those who argued that everything we think we know about the world outside of our skulls is an illusion.”
“Seems kind of smart-alecky more than anything else,” Beller said after considering it for a bit. “The Sconics didn’t much care for it either. As I said, they developed a third attitude. ‘When we think about the world—or about almost anything—’ they said, ‘what we are really thinking about is a bunch of data—givens—that have reached our brains from our eyes and ears and so forth.’ To go back to my example, I am given a visual image of that button and I am given a memory of what it felt like when I touched it, but that’s all I have to work with, as far as that button is concerned—it is impossible, unthinkable, for my brain to come to grips with the actual, physical button in and of itself because my brain simply does not have access to it. All that my brain can ever work with are the look and the feel—givens piped into our nerves.” (335–6)

At this moment, anyone who has studied Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach¹¹ will have interjected: “Reach out and press the button! Turns out it’s quite possible to come to grips with the actual, physical, thing-in-itself after all!” And here we begin to encounter the theses of this novel, some of which were surely intentional, and some which I will argue are probably not.

The Mind’s I

It was of white marble, double life size, though it seemed even bigger because it was up on a huge stone pedestal. It was Cnoüs, aged but muscular, with long wavy beard and hair, sprawled back against the gnarled roots of a tree, staring up in awe and astonishment. [Everyone] looked up to see what was having such an effect on poor old Cnoüs. The answer (at least, ever since the statue had been installed here) was an oculus, or a hole at the apex of the Rotunda dome, shaped like an isosceles triangle, and letting in a beam of sunlight.
— Anathem, pp. 120–1

A new light broke upon the first person who demonstrated the isosceles triangle
— Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

One of the major philosophical disagreements is the rupture between the Syntactic and Semantic Faculties, the Procians and the Halikaarnians respectively. This is surprisingly prescient considering the emergence of Large Language Models—and the notion that they represent intelligence—but it actually derives from 20th century philosophical debates over the nature of syntax and how it relates to consciousness.

The Procians express the viewpoint of Wittgenstein, that all of language are games played with syntax rules, and the only meaning you can ascribe to them comes from how they are employed according to the rules of the “game.” The Halikaarnians believe that syntax, language, is a social interface between humanity and the world but does not fully encompass the understanding in our minds. They adopt a position analogous to John Searle’s famous, if problematically formulated,¹² Chinese Room thought experiment: the formal system of syntax does not impart semantic content to the rules, that content is imposed from without the system.¹³

Sammann seemed a little shaky here, so I reminded him: “We’re speaking, remember, of Aboutness. You and I can think about things. Symbols in our brains have meanings. The question is, can a syntactic device think about things, or merely process digits that have no Aboutness—no meaning—”
“No semantic content,” Sammann said. (515)

This question is homologous to Kant’s distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements. Alfred Sohn-Rethel frames the problem thus:

We face the contradiction that concepts which are incontestably non-empirical – that is, not gleaned or reflected from nature – can nevertheless give such invaluable service in the investigation of nature. Whether or not the knowledge achieved is proved valid by experiment or by industrial or social practice is, of course, the vital question. But our concern is the possibility of such knowledge which, in order to be available for practical confirmation or refutation, depends on whether the concepts bear the necessary reference to nature at all. And how such reference is possible of concepts which are not taken from nature is the pivot of our enquiry. It can, without exaggeration, be called the particular epistemological riddle of exact science. It was asked by Kant as an enquiry into ’the possibility of pure mathematics and of pure science’. He saw no possible answer other than the one given in his ’transcendental idealism’, that, since our knowledge depends on concepts a priori not depicting nature as it really is, we can only understand nature as it corresponds to those concepts of ours.¹⁴

Kant resolved the “impossible, unthinkable” problem by dividing the universe in two: phenomena are the “givens piped into our nerves,” and noumena are the things-in-themselves that are unreachable by our brains. His ultimate motivation for this was to carve out a place for faith in his philosophical system.¹⁵ This is where the notion that cognition can be encompassed within the realm of syntax goes wrong;¹⁶ syntax really is bounded in a way similar to Kant’s transcendental idealism. The syntactic rules of language can form truth-claims about the world, but the correctness of the syntax does not imply truthfulness. It is only truthful to the degree that the world beyond conforms to it (even this is a fundamentally contingent state of affairs). This problem becomes even more evident—and ridiculous—in formal logics.¹⁷ Syntax has no immediate relationship to the things it describes so it is only capable of reflection, not action—and consequently Marx’s creative solution to this riddle is inaccessible to it. “Linguistics got me into this excellent mess—only physics can get me out” (751). Anathem takes Kant as its point of departure to reach a different conclusion; its explanation starts from what the philosophy of mind would term physicalism:

“Hold on, measurable? What kind of measurable are you talking about?” Lio asked. “You can’t weigh a triangle. You can’t pound in a nail with the Adrakhonic Theorem.”
“But you can think about those things,” Criscan said, “and thinking is a physical process that goes on in your nerve tissue.” (373)

The protagonists are semanticists, and seeking an answer to how non spatial-temporal thought-forms like isosceles triangles are not only able to enter our minds, but also tell us true things about the material world. They reject the absolute separateness of mind and matter; there is a fidelity to some sort of materialism here. The answer that is ultimately arrived at is that unlike a single one-to-one relationship, there is a complex thicket of information flow through many “causal domains”:

“The Wick is a fully generalized DAG,”¹⁸ Criscan said. “The Hylaean Flow moves through it from left to right—from more Protan to less Protan worlds—but here we are taking Analog Protism to its logical extreme in that no distinction is drawn between types of worlds.”
“I see ours there,” I said, pointing to the one labeled “Arbran Causal Domain.”
“Yes,” Criscan said, “I did that just to distinguish it from the others. But it’s no different in principle or in kind from any of the other cosmi in this diagram; here, all worlds are potentially habitable cosmi that would look similar to the one that we live in.” (934)

At no point does anyone think to ask why this information must only flow in one direction. The appendix in the book helpfully provides a visual aid, which resembles Hegel’s “self-realization of the Concept” rendered as a Powerpoint presentation. This flow takes place as quantum interference between cosmi, and organic brains evolved as amplifiers of this information. “There is no longer superposition. No wavefunction collapse. Just a lot of different copies of me—of my brain—each really existing in a different parallel cosmos. The cosmos model residing in each of those parallel brains is really, definitely in one state or another. And they interfere with one another” (546–8, 697ff).

This explanation is ultimately unsatisfying. Like Rey climbing down into the Mirror Cave in The Last Jedi, we have traveled the cosmos for an answer and are met with only infinite regress. But no matter—this solution to Kant’s dilemma was ultimately chosen for reasons of narrative, both within and without the diegesis. This much was an intentional creative decision by Stephenson, but now I want to turn my attention to aspects of this book which I don’t think were conscious decisions but are nonetheless interesting.

Against the “Beautiful Soul”

We have seen the disdain avout show for praxis. This separation was imposed on the Discipline by way of three Sacks General that took place throughout history; Stephenson references the “Great Library of Baz” to evoke in the reader the memory of the Library of Alexandria and its fate. Each Sack was triggered by paranoia that the avout’s scientific knowledge was producing capabilities too powerful for them to be trusted with: the First Sack followed the invention of newmatter, the Second genetic sequencing and manipulation. The Third Sack reacted to the nigh-supernatural mystique of Millenarians in popular culture, and the social practices that enabled institutional stability over thousand-year timelines. By the time this story begins, some 800 years later, there has been an absolute separation of intellectual and manual labor.

But somebody has to combine the two to keep the world functioning. A minor plot point revolves around the cross-pollination between mathic theory and the ruling class via the Unarian math. Because the Unarians separate from the outside world for just one year, they function as a sort of undergraduate college for wealthy students. An even more significant event in the story is “Voco. An aut where a fraa or suur is called out from the math—Evoked—and goes to do something praxic for the Panjandrums. We never see them again” (100). The situations where practice and theory may be combined, whether inside or outside a concent, are strictly controlled by the world governments.

Fraa Orolo describes the fate of his two mentors: Estemard renounced his vows and reentered the world; Paphlagon grew increasingly interested in metaphysics until he walked into the upper labyrinth and ascended to the Centenarian math (191). Two paths chosen: practice, and theory.

The occult thesis of the book is this: the more universal and less particular an idea, the more pure its expression; hence the farther away from practical activity you get, the more powerful you become. The exoteric Anathem is materialist; but underneath it is still really idealist. And this dualism was inevitable, because of its Kantian foundation. The retreat into concents, and higher maths, reflects the tendency that Hegel criticized in Kant as the “beautiful soul”:

It lacks the power to externalize itself, the power to make itself into a Thing, and to endure [mere] being. It lives in dread of besmirching the splendour of its inner being by action and an existence; and, in order to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with the actual world¹⁹

Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s morality is unfortunately no less relevant today: good intentions don’t matter if the intention-haver lacks the power to actualize them. Believing in a better world won’t make it so; it is incumbent on us to make it happen. This is what Hegel meant by “externalize,” and what Marx meant by “sensuous human activity.” Kantianism leads us to believe the opposite—a sort of spiritual homeopathy, where the farther we recede from actually doing something the more pure and good our souls become. Hence the liberal practice of petition for redress of grievance. “Whomever one seeks to persuade,” Marx once commented, “one acknowledges as master of the situation.”²⁰

But while Hegel correctly criticized Kant’s dualism, Marx departed from his predecessor in methodology:

My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian, but exactly opposite to it. For Hegel, the process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject, under the name of ’the Idea,’ is the creator of the real world, and the real world is only the external appearance of the idea. With me the reverse is true: the ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man, and translated into forms of thought.²¹

The answer to the riddle posed by these isosceles triangles was also well answered by Friedrich Engels in that

at every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside nature—but that we, with flesh, blood and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other beings of being able to know and correctly apply its laws.²²

On no account should we concede that isosceles triangles are non spatial-temporal entities. Our cognitive faculties are instantiated in brain tissue, and these physical nerve systems exist in a four-dimensional space. The purpose and function of reason is to derive real abstractions from our environment, and first and foremost among these are geometry. Any sufficiently complex conscious system existing in space and time will arrive at isosceles triangles as a concept because they are real abstractions of space and time. We do not stand outside of nature, we belong to nature and exist in its midst.

Thus all this talk of Platonic triangles falling from heaven is mystical nonsense. We can cut the Gordian Knot of dualism expressed by Kant with the simple observation that existence is monist. The implications are revolutionary.

Conclusion

I sincerely recommend this book, but not without trepidation. It’s nearly a thousand pages long. It introduces a ton of neologisms and cognates that you have to internalize (a small taste, one could say, of having the Book thrown at you). The philosophy of this book is dense; many of the turning points in the narrative stem from literal Socratic dialogues on topics as varied as the phenomenology of consciousness and the existence of pink, nerve gas-farting dragons. This book is a steep climb to a summit that doesn’t even afford that great of a view, since everything has been transliterated into foreign names. But the journey is worth the effort if you’ve found anything above interesting.

There is another side to Anathem beyond what I have discussed. In The Simple Art of Murder, Raymond Chandler described an adventure story as “this man’s adventure in search of a hidden-truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure.”²³ While Anathem is more of an ensemble than Chandler had in mind, I can’t think of a better way to describe the journey of Fraa Erasmus than this. It’s a tale that somehow manages to contain similarities with both Lawhead’s Byzantium, with a young monk’s journey through faraway, strange lands; and Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, with the speculative existence of artificially-intelligent machines, and the destructive potential of inanimate rods dropped from orbit.

But the highest praise I can give Anathem is that I have never stopped thinking about it in the seventeen years since I first read it. I have reread it several times, and have been rewarded for my persistence. But in so doing I have also transcended the philosophy of this book, and reached a higher understanding. Our task is not to use philosophy as a tool to contemplate the world; rather, it is “to make the world philosophical.”

Last modified on 2026-05-28