The estimable Laura Wood, an orthospherean shield mate of long standing in the culture wars, and an old friend, responded to my recent post on The New Castellation of the Eurosphere (which adduced the recent proliferation of bollards as its material) with an intelligent and forceful critique of my attribution of that castellation and all its dire cultural sequelae to the threat of Muslim terrorism. This post is a response to her comments.
Don’t Expose Yourself
I am reading, or rather re-reading, Dostoyevsky’s Demons, and so far enjoying it more than I remember enjoying it twenty years ago. Those of you who know the novel will recall that one of Dostoyevsky’s main themes is that the romantic liberals of the 1840s gave birth to the murderous nihilists and anarchists of the 1870s, the relation of these two generations being embodied in the characters of Stepan Trofimovich Verkovenski and his son. Continue reading
The New Castellation of the Eurosphere
It’s bollards.
All the big new buildings of Christendom have them. I was just down at the new – almost complete – Salesforce Tower in downtown San Francisco, and the bollards are everywhere. Ditto for the new immediately adjacent TransBay Terminal, still a year or two away from completion. They’ve got bollards by the thousand there – it’s a huge building – ready to be installed.
The newly ubiquitous bollards are the beginning of the closure of the formerly open West.
Seeds of Sedition
You have perhaps noticed that we are living in an age of Völkerwanderungen. The German word means wanderings or migrations of peoples. To some English speakers, the word “wander” connotes aimlessness and lack of direction, but the word in itself means only unfixedness and mobility. This is why the planets were anciently called “wandering stars.” Continue reading
Heisenberg on physics and philosophy
Physics and Philosophy
by Werner Heisenberg (1958)
Werner Heisenberg was one of the founders of quantum mechanics and an exponent of its Copenhagen interpretation. In this collection of essays, he tries to place the quantum revolution in a wider philosophical context. Mostly, it is a story of prior philosophies having been proven inadequate, although interestingly enough, Heisenberg explicitly connects aspects of quantum states to the Aristotelian concept of potency. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, to which Heisenberg subscribes in this book, has been subject to two well-known criticisms. First, we can only make sense of quantum mechanics as giving us probabilities for given observations by measuring devices assumed to be classical objects, and the existence of a non-quantum realm is an embarrassment if quantum theory is to be regarded as fundamental. Second, it can appear to eschew ontology altogether, to be not an interpretation of quantum mechanics but a positivistic reduction of it. To the first criticism, Heisenberg says that what distinguishes measuring devices is that they are not isolated, but interact with the outside world in countless messy ways, and these random environmental couplings somehow produce classical behavior. Physicists are still pursuing this idea; I suspect there’s something to it but am not yet sold on it.
More interesting is the quasi-Kantian framework in which Heisenberg places the Copenhagen interpretation. The math terminates on classical measuring devices primarily because classical physics describes core categories of the human mind that we need to make any sense of phenomena. Heisenberg is slightly more optimistic than Kant; we can get past the phenomena structured around our concepts to gain some knowledge of realms where deterministic causality, Euclidean geometry, etc break down, but this knowledge will always be mediated by the classical realm; the latter can never be entirely swept aside because of the kind of beings we are. We can learn that our classical ideas of space, time, matter, and causality break down–although a general lesson is that we can’t predict ahead of time where one of our concepts will break down–but we still need them. In the subatomic realm, we have the wave picture and the particle picture, each of which works in some regime and breaks down in others, but both of which are at least genuine ontologies. On the other hand, there is the full mathematical machinery of quantum mechanics, which never breaks down (so far as we know) but fails to provide an ontology.
This is something Heisenberg thinks we must learn to live with, but something which may actually be a blessing. As he understands it, the ultimate consequence of his great work has been to overthrow 19th century materialism. He sees alternate interpretations, such as that of Bohm, as desperate and mathematically unnatural attempts to rescue the old materialistic ontologies. No longer should we place blind trust in mathematically precise expressions of materialistic concepts. These have a range of validity, but it is limited and not to be categorically preferred to the natural intuitions of the human mind. As he writes
Furthermore, one of the most important features of the development and the analysis of modern physics is the experience that the concepts of natural language, vaguely defined as they are, seem to be more stable in the expansion of knowledge than the precise terms of scientific language, derived as an idealization from only limited groups of phenomena. This is in fact not surprising since the concepts of natural language are formed by the immediate connection with reality; they represent reality.
…
our attitude toward concepts like mind or the human soul or life or God will be different from that of the nineteenth century, because these concepts belong to the natural language and have therefore immediate connection with reality. It is true that we will also realize that these concepts are not well defined in the scientific sense and that their application may lead to various contradictions, for the time being we may have to take the concepts, unanalyzed as they are; but still we know that they touch reality. It may be useful in this connection to remember that even in the most precise part of science, in mathematics, we cannot avoid using concepts that involve contradictions.
…
The general trend of human thinking in the nineteenth century had been toward an increasing confidence in the scientific method and in precise rational terms, and had led to a general skepticism with regard to those concepts of natural language which do not fit into the closed frame of scientific thought–for instance, those of religion. Modern physics has in many ways increased this skepticism; but it has at the same time turned it against the overestimation of precise scientific concepts, against a too-optimistic view on progress in general, and finally against skepticism itself.
My copy has a fascinating afterward called “Science and Religion” in which Heisenberg reminisces on two conversations he had on religion with other physicists. It seems that Wolfgang Pauli and Niels Bohr also entertained hopes that the principle of complementarity would provide grounds for a rapprochement between religion and science, or at least an ease of tensions. Perhaps science does not provide a complete picture of reality because such a picture does not exist (at least for minds like ours), and perhaps religions speak in myths and parables not because they are false but because there are truths that can be expressed in no other way. Perhaps there are even resources here for wider rapprochements between rival religions and philosophies.
There is certainly some irony here. Heisenberg, a Lutheran Christian, thought he had dealt the death blow to 19th century materialism, just as Rene Descartes thought he had dealt the death blow to 17th century materialism. Needless to say, materialism is still going strong–stronger than ever–despite the brilliance of its opponents. In the case of Bohr and Heisenberg, even the memory that they ever saw their work in terms other than those of scientistic triumphalism has been largely forgotten.
The Interpenetration of Worlds is Born to Us: Hosanna in the Highest!
When we forget, and begin to think that this world is all that there is, it is easy to wax now and then discouraged – which is, to wane in spirit, in vim and vigor, and so to disappoint our mundane debts, that could have been satisfied by steadfast courageous virtue, of the worldly, merely manly sort, had we but kept our guts. Forgetting that there is more than the current petty defeats we all daily suffer at the hands of our deluded purblind incompetent adversaries, so numerous and so dull and so stupid to life as it plainly is and to things as they obviously are, it is all too easy to say, “forget it, never mind, sorry, going away now.”
And, “to Hell with you.” And, then … to go away. To leave the fight. To simply down arms and walk away.
Fortunately, thanks be to God, there is Christmas.
We are Now Nearest to the World’s Last Night
My last post may have seemed a bit of a downer. For younger readers, “downer” is old druggie slang for a barbiturate by which a drug taker was “slowed down” (and sometimes stopped dead), its antonym being “upper,” by which was meant an amphetamine, or “speed.” I don’t remember anyone referring to downers as “slow,” but the name would have suited a man on downers. The few I’ve know resembled a simpleton who hadn’t been getting enough sleep. Continue reading
A Christmas Greeting from an Orthospherean
Commenter Roger G sends along a greeting to the whole orthosphere:
Christmas almost being upon us, again I am reminded of a science fiction short story that I read long ago, and still find particularly moving. In a recent email exchange with Tom I sent him the summary below, and asked if he recalled the author and title. He did not, but maybe someone else out there will.
The protagonist is captain of an enormous alien ship. His race learned of their world’s coming destruction in time to build the vessel, and escaped to search the galaxy for a new home. Initially they had seen the journey as a great adventure, but having long failed to find a suitable planet for themselves, they have become despondent.
They discover what turns out to be Earth, and view it at first with great hope. The ship is placed in a geosynchronous parking orbit, and the captain leads a patrol down to conduct sustainability tests. To their despair, they determine conditions on Earth to be unsuitable.
They come upon a scene that turns out to be the Nativity. Mary, being who she is, knows who they are without requiring explanation, and comprehends their plight. She tells them that God has in fact sent them as a sign of man’s deliverance, and that just as He is giving humanity a Savior, so likewise will He provide for them.
As to the sign, their orbiting ship is the Star of Bethlehem.
Merry Christmas to you all!
Symposium II 2017 of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum
Our friends over at Sydney Trads have posted their latest Symposium, featuring long form essays from a number of traditionalist and reactionary writers. Among them are three Orthosphereans. Jim Kalb gives us Dissolving the Black Hole of Modernity; Tom Bertonneau asks, Is Practicality Practical?; and my own offering is Toward A New Aristocracy. Also present are Frank Salter, Mark Richardson, Barry Spurr, and Valdis Grinsteins.
The theme of this second Symposium of 2017: Reactionary Praxis: How to Turn Critique and Theory into Practical Use.
Many thanks to our colleagues at Sydney Trads, who have worked so hard to bring this project to fruition. Their introduction to the Symposium is a magisterial treatment of the reactionary’s predicament; highly recommended.
More on the priority of wholes
Kristor has published an important piece on the ontological priority of wholes to parts. I had been fumbling around with related ideas, but had not gotten nearly as far. I still haven’t in fact. Kristor seems to possess a sort of metaphysical vision that I lack. Or maybe he just doesn’t show us his work. Either way, it often takes me much laborious thinking to cross the distance of one of his “therefore”s. What follows will be longer and cover less ground than the above post, but perhaps it will help others like me whose minds need to move in small steps. There are some considerations that strongly favor the ontological priority of parts, what I shall be calling “atomism”, but I will argue that they leave some room for the reality and even priority of wholes.
