John Uphill, 1929-85
The following is an extract from The Royal Society of Mathematicians' Christmas Lecture, given by Rollo Sainsbury in December 1985. Sainsbury was responding to a published discussion of the Cambridge Calculus Group, in the previous year, made while Uphill was still alive. The Records of the ensuing debate between those Societies are in the Archives of that group, available online at www.ccgtexas.com/archive/index.html.
John Uphill’s Theory of Life Layers was first published in 1978, to general condemnation and protest. The London Times, whose review the previous day was headed ‘New book set to cast doubt on the religious nature of experience’, began the onslaught, labelling Uphill
…a disgrace. The circuitous events he narrates are not linked in any way. He describes his theory as ‘calculus in action’, yet any schoolboy will tell you that the mathematics of infinitesimal change in no way relates to the holistic experience we call life. He questions if we can ever know anything; instead our lives are to be spent, moment by moment, always searching for what is present, never sure what is past or to come. Revelation is gone, precogniscience gone; to Uphill chance is the seed from which we grow, the resulting existence overseen by the great gambler Fate.
This heavy approach was not original. In an earlier book by Uphill, The Future of Nothing, which also leans heavily on an existential bleakness, he prefigures his later theory in somnolent words; doom, unending, chance, fate, rub of the green: the prose style is tedious, the message laboured. That tome paved the way for the icy reception of his latest work; in this, however, the tedium is replaced by insight, and there is a freshness of words well chosen and ordered. Can this be the same Uphill of whom Connors, in her Religious Philosophy of Labourers said:
…his drunken style lurches from paradigm to paradigm…he is himself a model of pedantry…I urge you to ignore this book.
We can only wonder what prompted the change in style between one book and the next, as Uphill, of course, is not alive to illuminate us. Perhaps it was a revelation of some kind, a recognition that his theory was becoming less of a labour and more of an inspiration; less fragmented perhaps, more whole.
His theory is, essentially, that each individual life is nothing but a procession of moments and that each moment alone (loosely linked to memory) provides the impetus for the next. Memory is all we can hold on to, like a photo in a frame, but it is not real. Life is composed of a series of layers, each as fleeting as the last, as casual as the next. And here is the crunch: all that is gone is lost – events happen to the being in existence at that time; we cannot lay claim to the past, to being someone to whom certain events happened. The present life, or layer, is all that comprises us at any moment. It is quickly gone. I am not, for instance the same person who wrote that last sentence. As for the future, it is entirely unpredictable, therefore not even worthy of consideration.
It can be seen from even a cursory summary why Uphill’s inventive theory should cause such anger. Firstly, it negates religion. Belief in a God, or any universal order, since it has happened to a previous incarnation of the individual, (or layer), is disregarded. The individual would need to recreate, at every moment, within himself the nature of reflection or religion. The effort is deemed too exhausting.
Uphill suggests that we concentrate on the now, rather than the what if. Tufnell summarised it well, when he said:
They would have it that God is a phantom. I would say that if God is such, then so to are Uphill and his ‘disciples’.
Tufnell holds that we have as much right to our religion as Uphill has to his doom, and a theory is after all, just that.
Religion has moulded lives, formed society – its effects are tangible. The theories of Uphill are no more than wilful negation. History will swallow them as surely as it has consumed Sartre and Camus (only the French now think it fashionable to be ‘nauseous’, for heaven’s sake!). In short, my God will continue to inspire me; I pity Uphill his.
Secondly, since we cannot know ourselves, we cannot know anything else; hence there is no point in even trying. This is the more damaging aspect of his theory, and one I take offence to myself (although offence may be too strong a word). I want to learn, I want to write, I want to know, in common I suspect with the greater proportion of people. In this respect I view Uphill’s work as a puzzle, an interesting view of a philosophical problem; that of the nature of the self and the individual. I take it on board, but I don’t ‘sail with it’, to paraphrase a popular lyric.
Perhaps the last word should go to Gerald, our Society’s gardener, who is of West Country stock. I met him on the way to this meeting today.
“Marning Mr Thompson,” he said, greeting me at the gate as usual. “And ‘oo are we today?”
I wasn’t able to answer, because I am damned if I know.
References:
1/ The London Times, Editorial, 23rd October 1978.
2/ Sarah Connors, The Religious Philosophy of Labourers, Plimpton Press, 1975.
3/ T. Tufnell, Essay on Divine Contemplation, Holy Orders Stationery, Vol 25, 1981.