In Search of Schopenhauer's Cat: Arthur Schopenhauer's Quantum-Mystical Theory of Justice

6. Schopenhauer and Contemporary Scientific Theory

Chapter 6 Schopenhauer and Contemporary Scientific Theory The first decade of the twentieth century encased a strange, shadow time. We seem to have named and placed clear associations on the decades that followed, for example, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and so on, but not on that first decade. On the surface , perhaps, it seemed to be a generally quiescent time, but underneath , political and social energies and forces were seething and stewing, largely unnoticed, and were soon to erupt in the Great War. In at least one context, however, that first decade of the twentieth century was far from quiescent, and in that context a dynamism was emerging that would justify referring to the decade as an era of stunning creativity and achievement. Physicist Max Planck inaugurated the twentieth century by bringing forth the first crucial idea of what was eventually to become the theory of quantum mechanics:1 the notion that energy exists in 38 1. See Heinz R. Pagels, The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics As the Language of Nature (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 11 (hereinafter, Pagels). the form of discrete quantities and that the emission and absorption of energy occurs in packets, or bunches, or “quanta.” In 1905 Albert Einstein published three papers and wrote a fourth. His first paper proposed what is now recognized as the first convincing test for demonstrating the existence of atoms.2 The second posited that light—light had been thought of up to that time as wave rather than particle—as well as matter was “quantized,” that is, existed in the form of a rain of discrete particles which we now refer to as photons .3 The third introduced his special theory of relativity, which linked space and time as two aspects of one and the same phenomenon .4 Einstein’s fourth paper, written in 1905 and further developed in 1907, showed the equivalence of matter and energy in the now well known formula e = mc 2 .5 Planck’s modest beginnings in reinterpreting Newtonian mechanics and Einstein’s stunning insights were to alter forever not only the principles of physics as then understood and accepted, but (as we are now coming to realize) our basic understanding of reality itself. This modern Scientific Re-enlightenment finds its contemporary expression in two sets of theories: Einstein’s theories of relativity and the theories of quantum mechanics developed by Neils Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and others. Relativity theory speaks to understandings of reality at the macro level, if you will, the cosmic level of galactic space. Quantum theory, on the other hand, speaks to understandings of reality on the micro level, the level of subatomic events. It is in the implications of the theory of quantum mechanics that Schopenhauer ’s metaphysics find their closest analogue. Two seemingly different and opposed approaches within quantum mechanics have received considerable attention, Werner Heisenberg ’s uncertainty principle and Neils Bohr’s principle of complementarity . According to the uncertainty principle, it is impossible to Schopenhauer and Contemporary Scientific Theory 39 2. Pagels, 14. 3. Pagels, 15. 4. Pagels, 18. 5. Pagels, 21. measure the position and the momentum of a subatomic particle (such as an electron) at the same time. Granting “reality” to the one destroys it for the other. According to the principle of complementarity , “particle” and “wave” are concepts that exclude one another, and yet certain subatomic entities can be correctly represented as a particle and as a wave, although not at the same time. Bohr’s and Heisenberg’s principles, taken together, have come to be known as the “Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum mechanics and, taken together, they have an unsettling implication. Objectivity, in quantum theory, seems to be something that we, the “observers,” fix on reality, something that we grant to the world out there, at least to the world at the subatomic level. In the words of physicist Heinz Pagels, “The Copenhagen Interpretation of the new quantum theory ended the classical idea of objectivity—the idea that the world has a definite state of existence independent of our observing it.”6 One, of course, thinks immediately of Immanuel Kant’s tenet that the structure of the perceiving mind affects the perception of reality and of his cryptic formulation: “[I]t is clearly shown that if I remove the thinking subject the whole corporeal world must at once vanish .”7 It is not without significance that the...