Between Science and Literature: AN INTRODUCTION TO AUTOPOETICS

20 Gravity Cannot Be Held Responsible?

20 Gravity Cannot Be Held Responsible? ฀ Albert Einstein may have said that “gravity cannot be held responsible for people falling in love.” Since I haven’t been able to find where he is supposed to have said it, I have to doubt the attribution, but since much of what’s significant about the statement resides in what makes it definitive for a popular icon of scientific genius, perhaps it even gains in resonance if attributed falsely to Einstein. It may be taken as a statement of humility (“I’m just a humble physicist; my jurisdiction does not extend to human affairs”), which in turn implies a kind of arrogance (“My theories are so powerful that people think I can explain everything, so I must demur”). Through the pun on falling, love seems to be described by a metaphor that refers to gravity, so the statement can be construed as the physicist disavowing responsibility for metaphor, which by definition involves a comparison between two fundamentally different realms. Gravity, here, is situated as the tenor or ground of the metaphor. However, when we recall that gravity was once synonymous with attraction, it seems that quite the reverse is the case: gravity may well have been first described by a metaphor that referred more primarily to love. Indeed, when Dante ended The฀Divine฀Comedy with a revelation of “the Love that moves the sun and the other stars,” he seems to have put Love—quite literally—in the role that we generally now ascribe to gravity. But since attraction derives from a Latin word meaning to฀pull, maybe we should say that at฀bottom we come not to things themselves but back around to our own interaction with them—pulling and pushing them and being pulled and pushed by them. Just to complicate things a bit more, the English word gravity, it turns out, “was first introduced in the figura16 -22.109-182_Livi.indd฀฀฀146 9/27/05฀฀฀3:29:11฀PM tive senses” of “solemnity” or “authority,” whereas (as the Oxford฀English฀ Dictionary puts it) “the primary physical sense of the Latin word came into English first in the 17th c.” If we set aside the question of whether the scientific concept of gravity has escaped the complex metaphorical orbit in which it began, the upshot of Einstein’s little joke is clear and, it would seem, uncontroversial enough: the laws of physics may be necessary but are not sufficient to account for social and biological phenomena; in other words, human biology and society cannot be reduced to or read฀off฀of physics. To put it another way, nobody could extrapolate from the laws of physics to predict the precise course of biological evolution on this planet, much less from there to deduce the plays of Shakespeare or the characters of Gilligan’s฀Island or the sequence of words in this sentence quagga quagga hovercraft. Implicit, here, is the familiar notion (and by the way, sorry for that little outburst in the previous sentence) that the universe may be divided into a series of levels: at the bottom is physics, followed by chemistry, then biology , then human society, and finally by culture (whatever that may be). The order seems to reflect the necessity of the lower levels to the higher: without the stuff and forces of physics, nothing else could exist, and so on up the sequence. On the other hand, the so-called higher levels do not seem necessary for the lower ones: wipe out cultures and consciousness and life would still exist, wipe out all life-forms and the earth would still exist, and so on. Likewise, the order of levels also seems to be a temporal order: physics alone is supposed to have ruled in the early universe of the big bang, chemistry arises only when atoms have formed and begin to combine,biology emerges only when life pulls itself together out of the chemical soup,and so on.Thus, each subsequent level is an emergent phenomenon that in some sense exceeds the previous level. The nature of this excess is debatable and may of course vary from level to level. It might be like the relation of necessity to freedom or the branching relation of one to many, as if, from a single set of physical laws, any number of biologies could develop,and from a single set of biological constraints any number of social organizations could develop, and from these...