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

7. Ontological “Oneness”

Chapter 7 Ontological “Oneness” In 1975, theoretical physicist Fritjof Capra published a popularization of quantum theory under the title The Tao of Physics. The book also carried a subtitle: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism. Capra’s book became a best seller, went into second and third editions, and has had a profound effect—it has opened to the general public the quandary we have been discussing, the fact that contemporary quantum theory has radically altered our Western scientific understandings of space, time, matter, causality, and objectivity. In Capra’s words, [a]t the subatomic level, matter does not exist with certainty at definite places, but rather shows “tendencies to exist,” and atomic events do not occur with certainty at definite times and in definite ways, but rather show “tendencies to occur.” .l.l. At the subatomic level, the solid material objects of classical physics dissolve into wavelike patterns of probabilities, and these patterns, ultimately, do not represent probabilities of things, but 44 rather probabilities of interconnections.l.l.l. Quantum theory thus reveals the basic oneness of the universe.1 Schopenhauer had no less difficulty than Capra in articulating the point: There yet remains something on which no explanation can venture , but which it presupposes, namely the forces of nature, the definite mode of operation of things, the quality, the character of every phenomenon, the groundless, that which depends not on the form of the phenomenon, not on the principle of sufficient reason, that to which this form in itself is foreign, yet which has entered this form, and now appears according to its law. This law, however, determines only the appearing, not that which appears , only the how, not the what of the phenomenon, only its form, not its content. .l.l. [I]n everything in nature there is something to which no ground can ever be assigned, for which no explanation is possible, and no further cause is to be sought.l.l.l. [T]his, I say, is to the mote what man’s will is to man; and, like the human will, it is in its inner nature not subject to explanation.2 Tendencies to exist .l.l. tendencies to occur .l.l. patterns .l.l. probabilities of interconnections. Reaching for a word that is not quite there. Schopenhauer chose the word “will.” Schopenhauer’s dual world is a strange one indeed—every bit as strange as the dual world of the quantum theorists. At the ordinary level—the phenomenal level, that is, the level at which we normally perceive things—we experience things and events as discrete and Ontological “Oneness” 45 1. Capra, 68. 2. WWR-1, 121, 122, 124. concrete “realities.” But at that other level, the level of true reality, the level of thing-in-itself—the noumenal level—it is quite a different situation. At that deep level, which we can experience only dimly and inferentially, all is “will,” a chaos of tendency—a tendency to exist , to live, and to survive. What we have learned in recent years, with the now well-accepted principles that flow from the special and general theories of relativity and the theory of quantum physics, is that we do indeed live in a dual world: the world of ordinary perception in which we experience things and events as discrete and concrete “realities,” and another world, a world in which time and space are one, in which the concept of causality is jettisoned along with the concept of simultaneity , and in which the “building blocks” of matter are nothing but tendencies and potentialities. Physicist Nick Herbert has summarized the situation: According to Heisenberg [wrote Herbert], there is no deep reality—nothing down there that’s real in the same sense as the phenomenal facts are real.l.l.l. [T]he atoms and the elementary particles .l.l. form a world of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things or facets.l.l.l. The probability wave .l.l. means a tendency for something.l.l.l. It introduces something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality. .l.l. The quantum world .l.l. is not a world of actual events like our own but a world full of numerous...