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People suggest that mathematics is the language of God, which aside from being blasphemous, if true, is true only in the sense that it gives us the power to grasp things intellectually and make use of them. It does not speak to the truth of humanity, of our emotions, of our suffering. Plato looked to geometry as his metric of truth because, as people say of classes you take in mathematics, there is a right and a wrong answer, unlike in classes in the humanities, where there’s a subjective element that creeps in because you’re writing essays instead of filling in multiple-choice questions.

If mathematics is the language of God, then language is the language of man. Mathematics we take to be a way of getting at things by looking at what lies behind them, the code, as it were, that determines how they function. One gets at the essence of a phenomenon by categorizing it mathematically, because then one can go through the motions, and get the phenomenon to repeat itself. One has the code, one has a formula. Hence we speak of the form of a thing; if you know how to produce the form, you know how to produce the thing itself – except it is missing the flesh and muscle, and is a merely skeletal reproduction, an outline of what is given naturally from some place outside of ourselves. We do not create the weather. No more do we birth ourselves. The flesh is not of our own choosing, and we must suffer through it, whether well or poorly a function partly of circumstance, and partly of our own effort.

This universality of suffering, Marx captured almost in his observation that it’s the investment of effort in the production of material goods that is a measure of their value. This is observed of factory labor, rather than artisanal labor. In a world taken over by mass production, everyone who labors does so by expenditure of effort, and it’s the amount of effort on average it takes to produce this or that manufacture as opposed to some other that determines what its price will be. But Marx exempted some from consideration as human on account of their suffering to get by, because they owned the factories, and so, to his way of thinking, did not have to work. Marx imagines the factory owner as an aristocrat of the feudal age, engaging in artistic pursuits because freed from travail by virtue of his station of birth, communing with beauty and sensuality, as though everyone in a position to enjoy money were capable of, or interested in, engaging in such pursuits. He did not imagine that there are men who like to pursue money and, as Kant put it, to feel the development of their native powers forced out of them by opposition of nature to their ease, the feeling of the workman at the end of the day when he says that it’s been a long day, and feels satisfied with his productivity; investment bankers and corporate lawyers choose to put in long hours because they want and value the money, the big house, the flashy car, things Marx held beneath himself because he was concerned above all with justice, redemption of the blood sacrifice of the laborers who were born into such a position that they had nothing to begin with, had to work for a living, and were paid a pittance for their efforts, so advanced nowhere, as we do not expect to be the case in the West today. It’s something of a myth that anything has changed, and it’s tragic when raw talent goes to waste because it does not attract notice, not being in a social position where it would, but the idea that suffering is limited to “the workers,” by which Marx means, exclusively, low-paid factory workers, misses the scenery of human endeavor for the sake of a revenge mentality that is not even vengeance for wrongs suffered to himself. Imaginative identification spurs him on to bellow for the blood of others to make up for the suffering of those who will never have the means to enjoy what only some can who do, even though the majority of them also couldn’t enjoy the thinking that Marx revels in as his own and mistakenly thinks everyone wants to engage in. It’s a very narrow-minded view to think that everyone is just like you.

Reflection on suffering such as Marx engages in must draw all humanity into the mix, and it’s religion from which he takes his cue in his violent opposition to its mythology in the name of a liberation of man that most men do not want. People like their sacramental wine and their Passover seders, and it’s a rather flimsy construction of an intellectual that relies on opposition to all this in the name of being smarter than everybody else. That religious authorities should have no political power is a good thing, and the separation of church and state is the high-water mark of the Enlightenment, but the right to call religious mythology by its proper name, which would – do not doubt it – be suppressed by priests if they were in charge, is something that college students enjoy because it makes them feel like they are learning something, and that those who stick with their studies and pass through to the other side recognize is a privilege not to be abused by going around and calling people stupid for believing in it; it is a kind of moral stupidity to lever yourself above the rest of suffering humanity, as though you are not a part, and it is the lesson that we are a part of suffering humanity, not immune to hurt, that religion imparts. When Nietzsche, who invites everyone to think himself his equal in his capacity to understand the depth of Western history, speaks of those who dismiss the difference between good and evil as a distinction introduced by the weak for the sake of control of the minds of the strong, he envisions a world in which people have no conscience, because they think themselves exempt from the suffering to which all are born, and practice their conviction of this by taking out their frustration on others. They’re wrong to think themselves exempt, but causing pain to others, putting them to the test, instead of building up a tolerance of their own, is a way of distracting themselves from having to come to this baleful conclusion. Christianity took off because of the truth from which it sprang, which accounts for its tenacity, and that of its parent faith, as over and against the spread of the modern idea that it is all a bunch of hocus-pocus. That element of falsehood is real, and perhaps the greater part, but the truth of our being a part of something larger than ourselves, a humanity we cannot evade, is communicated to us by the notion of a singular deity who is higher than any of us. This might be a fiction, but it is a productive one, and if a novel can be instructive of, if nothing else, how to communicate a feeling to others, this religion accomplishes, too, and is likewise fictional. As Freud says, love is the unwarranted overvaluation of some particular other; put differently, as the popular wisdom says, you have to have eyes half-closed to fall in love. And what both of these mean is the same, namely that, from a mathematical perspective, we are all exchangeable for one another, and there is no reason that one can give for why one loves another; this is so much so the case that we say that we come to love the loved one not in spite of their imperfections, but because of them. This is a complete inversion of what we are inclined to accept as a reason for doing something. And we live for the same reason, not because life is good, but because the reverse is worse, and through the rejection of it, a space opens up where time unfolds for us, in our own particular human being, unique, just like everyone else, which is a paradox with flesh on its bones.