One of the principal justifications for Western civilization believing itself, since the nineteenth century, to be the civilization par excellence is natural science. Based on the myth of this science, preceding civilizations were judged to be obscurantist and infantile; prey to superstitions and to metaphysical and religious whims. Apart from a few casual discoveries, they were ignorant of the path of true knowledge, which can be reached only with the positive, mathematical-experimental methods developed in the modern era. Science and knowledge have been made synonymous with experimental “positive science,” while the epithet “prescientific” has come to signify a disqualification beyond appeal of any other type of knowledge.
The apogee of the myth of physical science coincided with that of the bourgeois era, when positivist and materialist scientism was in favor. Then there was talk of a crisis of science, and an internal critique occurred, resulting in a new phase inaugurated by Einstein’s theory. As an offshoot of this, the scientistic myth has revived recently with an appraisal of scientific knowledge that in certain cases has had curious developments. Among them, it is claimed that the latest science, having now passed the phase of materialism and cleared the field of old, useless speculations, has reconciled its conclusions about the nature of the universe with metaphysics, presenting themes and views that agree with the certainties of philosophy, and for some, even of religion. Besides the popularizers of Reader’s Digest, certain scientists like Eddington, Planck, and even Einstein have made informal pronouncements of this kind. Hence there is a kind of euphoria, confirmed by the prospects of the atomic era and the “second industrial revolution,” whose very point of departure was modern physics.
All these are only developments of one of the great illusions of the modern world, one of the mirages of an epoch in which, in reality, the dissolving processes have besieged the field of knowledge itself. In order to realize this, it is enough to look beyond the façade. If it is not a matter of popularizers, but of the scientists themselves, and if it is not a case like the knowing smiles between mystifying augurs, which Cicero speaks of, it reveals a naïveté that only an unequaled limitation of horizons and intellectual interests could explain.
None of modern science has the slightest value as knowledge; rather, it bases itself on a formal renunciation of knowledge in the true sense. The driving and organizing force behind modern science derives nothing at all from the ideal of knowledge, but exclusively from practical necessity, and, I might add, from the will to power turned on things and on nature. I do not mean its technical and industrial applications, even though the masses attribute the prestige of modern science above all to them, because there they see irrefutable proof of its validity. It is a matter of the very nature of scientific methods even before their technical applications, in the phase known as “pure research.” In fact, the concept of “truth” in the traditional sense is already alien to modern science, which concerns itself solely with hypotheses and formulae that can predict with the best approximation the course of phenomena and relate them to a certain unity. And as it is not a question of “truth,” but a matter less of seeing than of touching, the concept of certainty in modern science is reduced to the “maximum probability.” That all scientific certainties have an essentially statistical character is openly recognized by every scientist, and more categorically than ever in recent subatomic physics. The system of science resembles a net that draws ever tighter around a something that, in itself, remains incomprehensible, with the sole intention of subduing it for practical ends.
These practical ends only secondarily concern the technical applications; they constitute the criterion in the very domain that belongs to pure knowledge, in the sense that here, too, the basic impulse is schematizing, an ordering of phenomena in a simpler and more manageable way. As was rightly noted, ever since that formula simplex sigillum veri (simplicity is the seal of the true), there has appeared a method that exchanges for truth (and knowledge) that which satisfies a practical, purely human need of the intellect. In the final analysis, the impulse to know is transformed into an impulse to dominate; and we owe to a scientist, Bertrand Russell, the recognition that science, from being a means to know the world, has become a means to change the world.
I will not dwell further on these commonplace considerations. Epistemology, that is, reflection applied to the methods of scientific research, has honestly recognized all of them already, with Bergson, Leroy, Poincaré, Meyerson, Brunschvicg, and many others, to say nothing of what Nietzsche himself had seen perfectly well. They have brought to light the altogether practical and pragmatic character of scientific methods. The more “comfortable” ideas and theories become “true,” in regard to the organization of the data of sensorial experience. A choice between such data is made consciously or instinctively, excluding systematically those that do not lend themselves to being controlled; thus also everything qualitative and unrepeatable that is not susceptible to being mathematized.
Scientific “objectivity” consists solely in being ready at any moment to abandon existing theories or hypotheses, as soon as the chance appears for the better control of reality. Thereupon it includes in the system of the already predictable and manageable those phenomena not yet considered, or seemingly irreducible; and that, without any principle that in itself, in its intrinsic nature, is valid once and for all. In the same way, he who can lay his hands on a modern long-range rifle is ready to give up a flintlock.
Based on the above, one can demonstrate that final form of dissolution of knowledge corresponding to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Only the profane, in hearing talk of relativity, could believe that the new theory had destroyed every certainty and almost sanctioned a kind of Pirandellian “thus it is, if you think so.” In fact, it is quite a different matter, in the sense that this theory has brought us even closer to absolute certainties, but of a purely formal character. A coherent system of physics has been constructed to keep all relativity in check, to take every change and variation into account, with the greatest independence from points of reference and from everything bound to observations, to the evidence of direct experience, and to current perceptions of space, time, and speed. This system is “absolute” through the flexibility granted to it by its exclusively mathematical and algebraic nature. Thus once the “cosmic constant” is defined (according to the speed of light), the so-called transformation equations suffice to introduce a certain number of parameters into the formulae used to account for phenomena in order to get over a certain “relativity” and to avoid any possible disproof from the facts of experience.
A simpleminded example can make this state of affairs plain. Whether Earth moves around the Sun, or the Sun around Earth, from the point of view of Einstein’s “cosmic constant” is more or less the same. One is no more “true” than the other, except that the second alternative would involve the introduction of many more elements to the formulae, thus a greater complication and inconvenience in the calculations. For the person unconcerned with one system being more complicated and inconvenient than another, the choice remains free; this person could calculate the various phenomena starting either from the premise that Earth revolves around the Sun, or from the opposite premise.
This banal and elementary example clarifies the type of “certainty” and knowledge to which Einstein’s theory leads. In that regard, it is important to point out that there is nothing new here, that his theory represents only the latest and most accessible manifestation of the characteristic orientation of all modern science. This theory, though far from common or philosophical relativism, is willing to admit the most unlikely relativities, but arms itself against them, so to speak, from the start. It intends to supply certainties that either leave out or anticipate them, and thus from the formal point of view are almost absolute. And if reality should ever revolt against them, a suitable readjustment of dimensions will restore these certainties.
It would be good to look further into the kind and presuppositions of this “knowing.” The cosmic constant is a purely mathematical concept; in using it to speak of the speed of light, one no longer imagines speed, light, or propagation, one must only have in mind numbers and symbols. If someone were to ask those scientists what is light, without accepting an answer in mathematical symbols, they would look stupefied and not even understand the request. Everything that in recent physics proceeds from that stronghold participates rigorously in its nature: physics is completely algebraized. With the introduction of the concept of a “multidimensional continuum” even that final sensible intuitive basis that survived in yesterday’s physics in the pure, schematic, categories of geometrical space is reduced to mathematical formulae. Space and time here are one and the same; they form a “continuum,” itself expressed by algebraic functions. Together with the current, intuitive notion of space and time, that of force, energy, and movement also disappears. For example, in terms of Einstein’s physics the motion of a planet around the Sun only means that in the corresponding field of the space-time continuum there is a certain “curvature”—a term that, to be sure, cannot have made him imagine anything, dealing again with pure, algebraic values. The idea of a motion produced by a force is reduced to the bare bones of an abstract motion following the “shortest geodetic line,” which in our universe would approximate an ellipse. As in this algebraic scheme nothing remains of the concrete idea of force, even less so can there be room for cause. The “spiritualization” alleged by the popularizers of modern physics, due to the disappearance of the idea of matter and the reduction of the concept of mass to that of energy, is an absurdity, because mass and energy are made interchangeable values by an abstract formula. The only result of all this is a practical one: the application of the formula in order to control atomic forces. Apart from that, everything is consumed by the fire of algebraic abstraction associated with a radical experimentalism, that is, with a recording of simple phenomena.
With quantum theory one has the impression of entering into a cabalistic world (in the popular meaning of the term). The paradoxical results of the Michelson-Morley experiment provided the incentive for the formulation of Einstein’s theory. Another paradox is that of the discontinuity and improbability discovered by nuclear physics through the process of expressing atomic radiations in numerical quantities. (In simple terms: it deals with the evidence that these quantities do not make up a continuous series; it is as if in the series of numbers, three were not followed by four, five, etc., but skipped to a different number, without even obeying the law of probability.) This new paradox has led to a further algebraizing of the so-called mechanics of matrices, used to explain them away, beside a new and entirely abstract formulation of fundamental laws, like the energy constant, action and reaction, and so on. Here one has not only relinquished the law of causality, replacing it by statistical averages, because it seemed to have to do with pure chance: in addition, in the latest developments of this physics one sees the paradox of having to relinquish experimental proofs because their results were found to be variable. The very doing of an experiment allows that one may have one result now and another later, because the experiment itself influences the object; it alters it due to the interdependent values of “position” and “motion,” and to any description of the subatomic phenomena another, just as “true,” can be opposed. It is not the experiment, whose results through this method would remain inconclusive, but rather the pure, algebraic function, the so-called wave function, that serves to provide absolute values in this domain.
According to one most recent theory, which integrates Einstein’s relativity, purely mathematical entities that on the one hand magically spring forth in full irrationality, but on the other are ordered in a completely formal system of algebraic “production,” exhaustively account for everything that can be positively checked and formularized regarding the ultimate basis of sensible reality. This process was the intellectual background to the atomic era’s inauguration—parallel, therefore, to the definitive liquidation of all knowledge in the proper sense. One of the principal exponents of modern physics, Heisenberg, has explicitly admitted this in his book: it is about a formal knowledge enclosed in itself, extremely precise in its practical consequences, in which, however, one cannot speak of knowledge of the real. For modern science, he says, “the object of research is no longer the object in itself, but nature as a function of the problems that man sets himself”; the logical conclusion in such science being that “henceforth man only meets himself.”
There is an aspect in which this latest natural science represents a type of inversion or counterfeit of that concept of catharsis, or purification, that in the traditional world was extended from the moral and ritual field to the intellectual; it referred to an intellectual discipline that, through overcoming the perceptions furnished by the animal senses and more or less mixed with the reactions of the I, would lead to a higher knowledge, to true knowledge. In effect, we have something similar in modern algebraized physics. Not only has it gradually freed itself from any immediate data of sense experience and common sense, but even from all that which imagination could offer as support. The current concepts of space, time, motion, and causality fall one by one, so to speak. Everything that can be suggested by the direct and living relationship of the observer to the observed is made unreal, irrelevant, and negligible. It is then like a catharsis that consumes every residue of the sensory, not in order to lead to a higher world, the “intelligible world” or a “world of ideas,” as in the ancient schools of wisdom, but rather to the realm of pure mathematical thought, of number, of undifferentiated quantity, as opposed to the realm of quality, of meaningful forms and living forces: a spectral and cabalistic world, an extreme intensification of the abstract intellect, where it is no longer a matter of things or phenomena, but almost of their shadows reduced to their common denominator, gray and indistinguishable. One may well speak of a falsification of the elevation of the mind above human sense-experience, which in the traditional world had as its effect not the destruction of the evidences of that experience, but their integration: the potentizing of the ordinary, concrete perception of natural phenomena by also experiencing their symbolic and intelligible aspects.
From Ride the Tiger
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