Physics
58th installment to my philosophical system.
Long live physics! Of all the subjects belonging to science presently, few command such respect as physics. This cannot be helped, I suppose, for just like in real life where old things are praised on account of their antiquity, physics has been studied for as long as man could write.
One sees the hierarchical (aristocratic) nature within academic disciplines no clearer than in physics: look at how all knowledgeable heads bow to it in reverence, perhaps even out of servility or habit; one cannot even hear its name without some trepidation and heart palpitations. What is it about physics, though, that has made everybody today nod to it out of respect? What power does it sway over us, over even the ignorant—even fools know better than to speak ill of it? What is this Mephistophelian thing? Treated as if it were a monster from out of the Cthulhu Mythos. Before we touch on this, however, we ought to go over its history at least.
Physics is, in sum, a branch of science that studies the natural world, usually through mathematical applications, and this is by design—for the physics we’re introduced to in high school is nothing more than an overview of all the great discoveries made about the natural world following Galileo, usually ending with Maxwell. To go a bit further on this point, the one quote which seemingly all physicists have memorized is the one by Galileo, from his 1623 work Il Saggiatore (The Assayer), which goes:
Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed. It is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one wanders about in a dark labyrinth.
And I find this dark labyrinth a rather intriguing thing to ponder—psychologically anyway—for who would ever bother concerning themselves with the stars when there’s a whole universe inside them just waiting to be released? What kind of mind does one need to have so as to find something like the moon, or the precession of Mercury’s orbit around the sun, as something worth considering? A mind which, like Thales, finds more glory in what lies above it than what lies presently beneath it—and so, also like Thales, this mind is bound to fall into a pit should it stare for too long at the heavens. I suppose we cannot be too harsh on Galileo for seeing mathematics as the only language by which to speak of the world, for, after all, he was after answers, and not pretty descriptions about what might be. Such is the divide—I think it a false dichotomy—which separates the poet from the scientist: one is concerned with understanding the causes from the given effects, while the other wishes to beautify the effects by speaking of them poetically, justified by the mysteriousness of the causes.
Aristotle most definitely spoke of the natural world in his Physics in a very poetical way. That work was the first true attempt to systematize all that had been considered to be the case regarding the natural. In it we see the world approached from first principles—physical laws (as they’re called today) deduced from reason rather than experiment; the Ancient Greeks had no need for experiment, for they were all implicit rationalists: the gods were considered the cause of all things by the vulgar, and the philosophers argued either on behalf of the gods, or tried to explain all things logically and naturalistically—speaking of essences, eternities, innate properties, atoms, voids, sympathies, and hylomorphic principles. Before the language of the universe was mathematics, it was poetry; it was the age of the gods, the age of Homer and Hesiod, an age where the stars, seas, memories, passions, and even fate itself, were all controlled by forces that rest outside of man. There were, however, a few noble souls who decided against the God hypothesis and tried to explain the world in terms of its arché (ἀρχή), its first principles—the first of which was already mentioned, Thales: he posited water as the beginning, and after him came a deluge of hypotheses all claiming to be the true arché, but that of course never came, for every arché posited could easily be refuted by another—and so, there were no methods yet devised to systematically and unequivocally eliminate one assumed arché over any other.
And so physics remained for nearly a millennium, in a state of constant confusion and disagreement over what principles should and shouldn’t be assumed—over what arché best described reality. It took the development of science by the Muslims to finally give us a criterion, a method—the scientific method!—by which principles could be established through experimentation and empirical analysis, rather than relying on the vague and unjustifiable assertions, all of which were determined from the start on the basis of whatever the philosopher thought was the most reasonable type of arché. And so, with the poets dead, the gods laid aside, and the first principles being brought into question, a new alternative had to be found, and it was found fairly quickly, actually: mathematics. The world had now officially moved from speculations on the qualities of the universe to weighing and measuring the actual quantities of it. This thorough approach was taken into all areas with great efficacy, and as a result, greater progress was made in a shorter amount of time. Thus began the triumph of numbers and figures over poems and recitations, and so thorough was the overthrow of philosophical speculation for science that philosophy can no longer be mentioned alongside science today without mockery and scorn—or at least not without serious condescension.
The Muslims did that. They were not only extremely well-versed in theology and Greek philosophy, but were tremendous scientists, physicians, and mathematicians: one need only look at the creation of algebra, the breakthroughs made in geometry, trigonometry, astronomy, optics, etc., and the countless medical advances that were made by men like Avicenna to see how much they accomplished. It’s astounding, too, when you remember that just a few centuries before the Islamic Golden Age, men would speak of the world in terms of a priori principles and describe it using analogies, speaking sensu allegorico (in an allegorical sense)—as if that really explained anything, no different from the people today who fill the gaps of science with God. Granted, historically speaking anyway, physics went under a different title—natural philosophy—and so, God wasn’t technically a foreign notion to it as a subject in its inception, but, as already discussed, God was made obsolete—for, conceptually, it was no different from an assumed first principle that never gave insight into the cause from all the effects—and so was rightfully put to rest after it died.
Over many centuries—with the foundation for physics now plucked from the clouds of heaven (philosophical speculation) and made to roam the tangible Earth—along with much effort and systematization (discoveries being standardized, that is), men during the Enlightenment milked the natural world for all it was worth, making advances in virtually every area of science, in fact, not just physics; the advances made in physics, however, were tremendous.
To study physics today, as I mentioned at the start, is really to take a journey through a vast intellectual orchard, containing all the apples which landed on various people’s heads throughout the centuries. If Galileo is considered the father of modern physics, then Newton was the more successful son. There are really two types of physics: physics before Newton and physics after Newton. The mathematical method, as it came to be developed in Europe by men like Alberti, Da Vinci, Copernicus, Tartaglia, Cardano, Kepler, and Descartes, was brought to its zenith by Newton—who had mastered not only all of classical and modern mathematical subjects up to his own time but went on to develop his own theories, which went on to become entire independent fields of study within mathematics and physics alike. Newton was perhaps the greatest mind in history.
Being one of the last Renaissance men—in an age where that kind of thing was becoming impossible, due to all the intellectual fields that were blossoming into their own and becoming independent branches of knowledge—and in complete command of mathematics as a subject in all its levels of difficulty, it was perhaps only natural for him to develop all the mathematical demonstrations in the manner he did, clearly taking most from Euclid. Newton’s mind was seemingly geared towards the mathematical, the deductive, the logical: with this singular pursuit for truth carried out in such a geometrical manner, it’s no wonder he uncovered so much about nature and left behind many useful tools for future generations to improve upon; it was for this reason that Voltaire, overhearing some learned men discussing the question of who was the greatest man, affirmed Newton with complete confidence, reasoning: “It is to him who masters our minds by the force of truth, and not those who enslave them by violence, that we owe our reverence.” Often does history praise most those intellectuals who uncover truth, rather than those who organize and compile it; and more often than not, these truths are mathematical or scientific rather than artistic or literary.
It was Newton who transformed history’s intellectual consciousness. Prior to him, philosophy (particularly metaphysics), along with theology, were still seen as the highest branches of knowledge a mind could climb to and study. Newton showed—unfortunately for philosophy and theology—quite simply that his method gave better results, uncovered more recondite “truths,” and provided the world real answers rather than unsatisfactory arguments from questionable first principles. It should also be remembered that during the Enlightenment, the intellectual atmosphere was more open, more liberating, more likely to go against the grain—men questioned religion, traditional morality, the foundations of individual identity, the rights of women, the state, the king, Epicurean atomism, and even God’s very existence; everything was up for grabs, and anything that was not subject to reason was blasted to smithereens. It’s this kind of thinking, in fact—this implicitly rational approach to all cognition, upheld by a quasi-theological affirmation in the truth (a faith claim, effectively, that says truth is divine and to be grounded in its own validity)—that has made science, and specifically physics, what it is today, and has also made philosophy what it is today: a total shell of its former self.
It is this that has destroyed all philosophical speculation. This love of truth, so long as it be discovered scientifically or demonstrated mathematically, has led to the three-century-long philosophical hibernation we’ve been in since the Enlightenment: this vexing malaise in which a man’s thoughts cannot be his own unless he restricts and modifies them; unless he makes them scientifically accurate; unless he makes them evidential; unless he takes the spontaneity out of them and subjects them to a rigorous analysis in the same manner a forensic accountant overlooks the books of some company—in short, unless a man completely rewires his brain to stop thinking as it naturally does and rather subjects all his observations to a critical examination of each particular sensation, in hopes of discovering some pattern hidden within them from which he can produce a few lemmas that lead to his indubitable conclusion. You see how stultifying, boring, lifeless, and soulless this approach to thinking is; and yet, the current zeitgeist forces everyone to think in this very restrictive, rational, practical, economical way—taking the humanity out of everything totally and rendering all of us emotionless automata, automata programmed only to follow specialized biological imperatives. Well, I’m sorry, but I don’t view reason or rationality as an either/or thing, in which I can only ever be either rational or irrational; to do this is to saw off an entire aspect of humanity, an aspect that we cannot live without. This kind of thinking was rightly criticized and, I dare say, totally dismantled by Schopenhauer in the Preface to the Second Edition of his On the Will in Nature when he said:
But, even in a general sense, it may be looked upon as a good sign, that a new edition of the present treatise should have been found necessary; since it shows that there is an interest in serious philosophy and confirms the fact that the necessity for real progress in this direction is now more strongly felt than ever. This is based upon two circumstances. The first is the unparalleled zeal and activity displayed in every branch of Natural Science which, as this pursuit is mostly in the hands of people who have learned nothing else, threatens to lead to a gross, stupid Materialism, the more immediately offensive side of which is less the moral bestiality of its ultimate results, than the incredible absurdity of its first principles; for by it even vital force is denied, and organic Nature is degraded to a mere chance play of chemical forces. And this infatuation has reached such a point, that people seriously imagine themselves to have found the key to the mystery of the essence and existence of this wonderful and mysterious world in wretched chemical affinities! Compared with this illusion of our physiological chemists, that of the alchemists who sought after the philosopher’s stone, and only hoped to find out the secret of making gold, was indeed a mere trifle. These knights of the crucible and retort should be made to understand, that the mere study of Chemistry qualifies a man to become an apothecary, but not a philosopher. Certain other like-minded investigators of Nature, too, must be taught, that a man may be an accomplished zoologist and have the sixty species of monkeys at his fingers’ ends, yet on the whole be an ignoramus to be classed with the vulgar, if he has learnt nothing else, save perhaps his school-catechism. But in our time this frequently happens. Men set them selves up for enlighteners of mankind, who have studied Chemistry, or Physics, or Mineralogy and nothing else under the sun; to this they add their only knowledge of any other kind, that is to say, the little they may remember of the doctrines of the school-catechism, and when they find that these two elements will not harmonize, they straightway turn scoffers at religion and soon become shallow and absurd materialists. They may perhaps have heard at college of the existence of a Plato and an Aristotle, of a Locke, and especially of a Kant; but as these folk never handled crucibles and retorts or even stuffed a monkey, they do not esteem them worthy of further acquaintance. They prefer calmly to toss out of the window the intellectual labor of two thousand years and treat the public to a philosophy concocted out of their own rich mental resources, on the basis of the catechism on the one hand, and on that of crucibles and retorts or the catalogue of monkeys on the other. They ought to be told in plain language that they are ignoramuses, who have much to learn before they can be allowed to have any voice in the matter. Everyone, in fact, who dogmatizes at random, with the naïve realism of a child on such arguments as God, the soul, the world’s origin, atoms, &c. &c. &c., as if the Critique of Pure Reason had been written on the moon and no copy had found its way to our planet—is simply one of the vulgar. Send him into the servants’ hall, where his wisdom will best find a market. There too he will meet with people who fling about words of foreign origin, which they have caught up without understanding them, just as readily as he does himself, when he talks about “Idealism” without knowing what it means, mostly therefore using the word instead of Spiritualism (which being Realism, is the opposite to Idealism). Hundreds of examples of this kind besides other quid pro quos are to be found in books and critical periodicals.
And there we have it. Leave it to Schopenhauer (in my mind the last truly universal genius of mankind, for after Goethe there was no other except him) to write a single paragraph which annihilates every conceit and reveals every philosophical stupidity committed by all those so-called scientists and “rational” conscientious objectors, fighting a battle they’ve never had a ground to stand on in the first place—always bold, always brash, always pompous, always puffing out their chests, reveling in scientific discoveries not their own, and using that great discovery as justification to subject all kinds of thinking to that exact mode of analysis: it’s utterly bizarre how narrow-minded these monkeys are; I honestly can’t fathom it—the arrogance, to be so sure in your method’s validity across every area of thinking, and then they presume it to be objective on top of everything.
This is why I’m over it when it comes to hearing the “objectively” good benefits science has given us—again, as if that was all the justification one would need to employ that same kind of reasoning across all of life. They’re thinking about things scientifically, not philosophically. That’s what the real issue is. They’re not interested in the validity or grounds behind their methods—they’re strict pragmatists; so long as it gives them results they can falsify, they’re happy with it. As a method of uncovering “truth,” fine, have it as you like it; but when it comes to the philosophical aspect—the existential—this is where we must all stand firm and assert, “No! No! No more!” We cannot apply one kind of reasoning or thinking across all areas of life merely because it has proven useful in a specific case. Life is too multifaceted to be reduced. Reductionism needs to die—and scientism along with it.
We’ve been shackled to these quasi-theological dogmas for centuries, all upheld on the collective affirmation by us that truth is a good in and of itself (not unlike how we all collectively—in America at least—uphold capitalism on the basis of its liberalism, all the while it’s the most illiberal system of economics ever devised by man): but I dare ask, “Good for whom? To whom do we act so servilely, and for what end? Truth as an end in itself? I say the most wretched slavery imaginable.” What is needed today is an existential physics—a psychological framework for comprehending and effectively dealing with issues which no science will ever be able to answer. That is my primary value—and that is what I hope my system provides: a new type of thinking, a new way of evaluating—of reevaluating what is bad in the old and affirming what is good in the old, in order that the new may truly be representative of the times, and, perhaps, be made eternally true, dialectically at least, from the fact of its own honest circularity.
With all this said, you may now ask, “Whence comes this deep respect for physics (or science in general)?” I think the answer is fairly intuitive given the history: physics is a pragmatic-realist framework made for objectifying the world and satisfying the rational man’s eternal desire for finality and closure with respect to everything he contemplates. If this itch is not scratched, man will either turn towards theology or philosophy, and with theology always inclining towards the dogmatic if left unchecked—that is, if left in a woeful state philosophically—it is my opinion that one should become a master of philosophy if he cannot choose all three: science (the objective), theology (the subjective), and philosophy (both objective and subjective). It also helps that physics is primarily mathematical, and with most people being total ignoramuses when it comes to math, that strengthens in their eyes the prestige of it as a subject. A man will always praise what he cannot understand if it is praised by the public at large.
And so, with everything so far said, I say again (though slightly altered): long live this new physics—existential physics! Physics made philosophical again.