Tag Archives: Metaphysics

The Heroic and the Religious

History, at least since we left the caves, has largely moved within two opposing paradigms: the heroic and the religious. In the West, both have long operated within the horizon of the law of noncontradiction, certainly since Aristotle. The heroic elevates the individual above the fray of ordinary existence. The religious elevates the collective through piety above that same fray. Each becomes a privileged site through which meaning is organized and transmitted as history. In the United States, we can still glimpse these tendencies in the broad, admittedly imperfect, categories of Republican and Democrat. Republicans, as currently exemplified by Trump, tend to glorify the heroic: the supposedly self-mastered, self-enriched hero of capitalism. Autocracy is the political glorification of the individual. Democrats, by contrast, tend to orient themselves around the collective good. What matters here is not the adequacy of those categories, but the recurring tension between the individual hero and the collective ideal. As early as 375 BC, Plato’s The Republic diagnosed a problem in Athenian democracy that still echoes today in the United States: democracy can privilege rhetoric and persuasion over knowledge and truth. Plato observed that politicians often win power by pandering to the public’s short-term desires rather than enacting wise, long-term policy.

Plato did not regard democracy as an ideal system, but as a deeply unstable prelude to tyranny. He illustrated this through the Ship of State allegory: just as a ship should be steered by a trained navigator rather than by a popular but unskilled crew member, a state should be guided by those trained in governance rather than by the untrained many. In democracy, freedom can degenerate into license, and license into disorder. Citizens lose respect for authority, tradition, and law, creating a political environment driven more by appetite and emotion than by reason. Out of that instability, Plato believed, the public eventually seeks a strongman who promises protection. That populist figure then seizes power and converts democracy into tyranny. Plato’s suspicion of democracy was also personal. A democratic Athenian court condemned his mentor, Socrates, to death, convincing Plato that majorities could be manipulated into grave injustice. For Plato, the only escape from such decay was the union of political power and philosophical wisdom. Philosophers, in his view, were not merely intelligent; they had devoted themselves to metaphysics and to the apprehension of the Forms. They therefore understood Justice, Goodness, and Moderation more fully than those driven by opinion or appetite. Because they pursued truth rather than wealth or fame, Plato believed they were less susceptible to the greed and ambition that corrupt states. The Philosopher King thus represents reason ruling the state, just as reason ought to rule the soul.

Had Plato known social media and the highly refined science of marketing, he might have concluded that we had become especially vulnerable to tyranny. We are living in an age in which it is easier than ever to see, in real time, how a figure like Hitler could arise. Marx analyzed the ways capitalism produces artificial forms of value, and that critique remains relevant. Having traveled widely, I have come to think that many of us in the United States take for granted what we have inherited. We often do not recognize how fragile democratic life can be until its forms begin to erode. What we are now witnessing, in part, is the weakening of democracy and collectivity under renewed elite control—the old conviction that the powerful know better than the masses what must be done. Still, I do not write without hope. Hope, however, requires vigilance. We should keep our eyes open to the operations of “Big Brother.” When autocracy is generated by the magnate—the individual hero celebrated as the successful businessman—it begins to pull the strings of its subjects like puppets. That, to me, is one of democracy’s recurring failures. The question, then, is what Marx might still tell us about communism and collectivity.

In Marxist theory, the transition from bourgeois society to communism requires the abolition of private property and class structure, typically through proletarian revolution. Ownership of the means of production—factories, land, and capital—is expropriated in order to create a classless society in which no class lives from the labor of another. In that sense, communism can be understood as the glorified politics of collectivity without the reference to God or gods. Yet China also shows how far historical communism can depart from Marx’s ideal. Despite the officially atheistic posture of the Chinese state, religious life has by no means disappeared. More importantly, Chinese communism has never realized the collective ownership Marx envisioned, and I would argue that it never can. Just as heroic individualism collapses into autocracy, so too does collectivity when it is organized through autocratic power.

Historically, Chinese communism has decisively oriented itself toward autocracy and state ownership (party-state capitalism) rather than the direct, democratic collective ownership by the proletariat envisioned in orthodox Marxist theory. Under Mao Zedong, the state expropriated the bourgeoisie. However, ownership did not pass to the collective workers. Instead, it passed to a centralized state bureaucracy. The state acted as a singular, ultimate capitalist entity—a structure known as state capitalism. In a genuinely Marxist collectivity, workers would directly control production and share in the surplus. Historically and currently in China, citizens do not hold individual stakes or receive dividends from State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs). Profits are retained by the enterprises and directed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to fulfill its political and macroeconomic goals. Following the chaotic personalistic rule of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping attempted to implement a system of collective leadership within the party elite to prevent a return to autocracy. This was not a public democracy, but an internal oligarchy ruled by consensus among top cadres. Under Xi Jinping, this internal elite consensus has been dismantled. Power has been heavily consolidated into a single executive figure, effectively shifting the political apparatus from an oligarchic party-state to a personalized autocracy. China’s modern economy is a Socialist market economy that allows private enterprise and billionaires, but it functions as party-state capitalism. Private entrepreneurs are allowed to generate wealth, but they must operate entirely under the oversight and strategic imperatives of the CCP. The state retains a monopoly on all land and controls the financial system. True economic and political ownership remains concentrated at the apex of the party structure, rather than being decentralized or handed down to the populace. In summary, history demonstrates that the Chinese model bypassed the phase of universal common ownership, relying instead on an authoritarian hierarchy where the party-state dictates the economy, ultimately culminating in the highly centralized autocracy seen today. As opposing poles, both individualism and collectivity now fail to meet the demands of human survival.

In the present and near future, global catastrophes only await the final catastrophe of our tired classicism. A science confined to classical physics remains indebted to the same suppressed metaphysical histories. We really need to understand our metaphysical tropisms (inclusive of logic) which have become a stumbling block for us in the light of quantum physics. At the very least, any purely positivistic quantum physicist must acknowledge the problematic dilemma that quantum physics poses to the classical law of noncontradiction. If the law of noncontradiction is taken to mean ‘Contradictory propositions cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time’ a certain context, alien to classical logic, needs to be specified. Both relativity and quantum mechanics systematically dismantled these axioms, forcing a radical relativization of how we apply logic to reality.

Einstein’s account of time introduces a difficulty that classical physics did not adequately anticipate. In relativity, time is not an absolute constant but a variable dependent on the observer’s frame of reference. Under classical assumptions, time functions as a fixed and universal backdrop. Einstein showed that this apparent constancy is really contextual: at everyday speeds, time appears stable, but as motion approaches the speed of light, time dilates. The point here is not simply physical but logical. Once “at the same time” can no longer be treated as universally fixed, the classical formulation of noncontradiction requires qualification. What had once seemed an absolute logical backdrop must now be indexed to context. This marks a major shift from classical logic through relativity and, more radically still, into quantum physics. Classical absolute time assumes that simultaneity is observer-independent. Classical spectator realism assumes that observation is passive and detached, merely registering a reality already there. Modern physics unsettles both assumptions. Simply put:

In classical Aristotelian logic, the logic of noncontradiction demands that a proposition and its exact negation cannot both be true simultaneously. Time is an absolute backdrop. “Now” is the same everywhere in the universe.

The Relativistic Correction: Einstein proved that simultaneity is relative. Two cosmic events can happen simultaneously for you, but sequentially for someone else.

The Logical Impact: Because “at the same time” has no universal meaning, truth values must be relativized to a specific reference frame. A statement about an event is only logically coherent if it includes the observer’s relative motion.

Quantum mechanics introduces a further complication: the observer. What appears in quantum physics cannot be fully specified apart from the act of observation. Classical physics treated both time and observation as effectively independent variables. It also assumed that the limits of measurement were primarily technical—that greater precision would simply yield more accurate access to an already determinate reality. What I am trying to map here is the way paradigm shifts in science have quietly altered the terrain of our common assumptions about reality. In quantum mechanics, observation is no longer merely a passive report on what is already there; it becomes part of the conditions under which what appears can be described at all. Simply put:

From the classical view: The observer is a detached “spectator”. Measuring a system reveals properties that the system already possessed in secret.

The Quantum Reality: The observer is a dynamic “participator”. Through the Observer Effect, the physical act of measurement forces a wave function to collapse into a specific, localized reality.

The Logical Impact: A quantum system in superposition does not possess definitive classical properties (like a precise position and a precise momentum) prior to measurement. The property itself is dependent on the experimental apparatus chosen by the observer. Let’s look at a few examples of this:

In the famous thought experiment of Schrödinger’s cat, a cat is locked in a box with a radioactive atom, a radiation detector, and a vial of poison. If the atom decays, the poison is released and the cat dies. Under the older classical view, the cat inside the closed box is either fully alive or fully dead; our ignorance is merely human ignorance. When we open the box, we simply discover what was already the case. Under the quantum view, however, before the box is opened the cat is in a superposition—a state of combined probabilities. To the observer outside the box, the cat exists as a wave of probability: neither definitively alive nor definitively dead. The moment an observer opens the box, that observer becomes part of the system, and the wave of probability collapses into one concrete outcome: a living cat or a dead cat. The cat is never alive and dead to the same observer in the same setup. To the outside observer with the box closed, it is a probability wave. To the observer who opens the box, it is a definite state.

This paradigm shift upends classical objectivism—the idea that the universe is made up of hard, fixed objects existing independently of us. Instead, physics points toward a reality defined by relations and contexts. Reality becomes relational rather than absolute. In classical physics, properties such as speed, position, and existence belonged entirely to the object. In quantum physics, a property is not simply something an object has; it is something that occurs in interaction with a measuring apparatus. A particle, for example, does not possess a precise location in the classical sense until it is measured. In that sense, reality is disclosed in interaction. This is the end of the passive observer. We do not look at the universe without affecting it; every measurement is an intervention. Humanity is not standing outside nature looking through a glass window, but is woven into the physical systems it studies. The ontological shift is from things to possibilities. At its deepest level, the universe is not made of tiny billiard-ball particles, but of fields of potential and mathematical probability. Matter behaves like solid, deterministic substance only at the macroscopic scale. What, then, does this do to classical logic and noncontradiction? Schrödinger’s cat offers a useful test case.

In classical logic the cat is either alive or dead. The cat must be either definitively alive or definitively dead inside the closed box. If quantum mechanics claims the cat is both alive and dead simultaneously, it violates classical logic.

Under this revised logical framework, before we open the box the cat is in a unified superposition. After we open the box, the cat is in a single, collapsed classical state (alive or dead). Therefore, truth values are indexed to the experimental boundary. However, there is a resolution of these radically different assumptions. The cat is never alive and dead within the same setup. To the closed box setup, it is a single probability wave. To the open box setup, it is a classical certainty. No contradiction exists for the open box. But this comes at the cost of abandoning classical certainty. Just for kicks let’s take this further into just a few contemporary interpretations.

In the Copenhagen Interpretation a quantum system does not possess physical properties until it is measured. The superposition wave function is merely a mathematical tool to calculate probabilities. So noncontradiction can be preserved strictly through operationalism. It is logically meaningless to speak of the cat’s state prior to measurement. Contradiction is avoided because the law is only applied to actual measurements, never to unobserved possibilities. A definitive measurement always yields a single, non-contradictory result.

In the Many-Worlds Interpretation the wave function never collapses. Instead, the act of measurement causes the universe to branch. In this way noncontradiction is strictly preserved through physical indexing. The contradiction is resolved by separating the states into different physical realities. The cat is alive in Universe A and dead in Universe B. Because the two states do not coexist in the same universe, the law of noncontradiction remains perfectly intact within each independent branch.

In Einstein’s view called objective realism the universe possesses definite, observer-independent properties. Quantum mechanics is simply incomplete and fails to show the “hidden variables” determining the outcome. Noncontradiction is strictly preserved through classical absolutism. This view rejects the notion that the cat is ever in a literal, physical state of superposition. The cat is always 100% alive or 100% dead inside the box, exactly as classical logic demands. The probability wave is merely a reflection of human ignorance, not a reflection of fundamental reality. There are many more interpretations that I go through in my book. This dogged determinism to preserve classical logic and go to great lengths to do so in contemporary philosophy is called positivism.

Long before the positivism movement had a name, its foundations were laid by British empiricists, 17th to 18th century, like David Hume, who argued that all factual knowledge must come from sensory experience. During the French Enlightenment, the term “positivism” was initially used by French social theorist Henri de Saint-Simon, who acted as Comte’s early mentor.

Classical positivism ranges from the 1820s to the 1880s. In 1822, Comte published Plan of the Scientific Operations Necessary for Reorganizing Society, helping launch the movement. In 1842, he released his monumental multi-volume work, Course of Positive Philosophy. Comte argued that human history progresses through three distinct stages:

  1. Theological: Explaining the world through gods and magic.
  • Metaphysical: Explaining the world through abstract philosophical ideas.
  • Positive: Abandoning speculation to focus strictly on observable, scientific facts.

Logical Positivism ranges from the 1920s to the 1930s. This is the specific wave that directly intersected with the birth of quantum mechanics. In 1924, a group of physicists, mathematicians, and philosophers formed the Vienna Circle, led by Moritz Schlick. They updated Comte’s ideas by introducing formal mathematical logic. They declared that any statement that cannot be verified by sensory observation or mathematical definition is completely meaningless. This directly inspired Werner Heisenberg to reject unobservable electron orbits and construct his quantum formulas purely out of measurable data.

Positivism is a philosophical system stating that authentic knowledge can only be derived from sensory experience, empirical observation, and logical or mathematical treatment of such data. It absolutely rejects metaphysics. It completely rejects assertions about reality that cannot be directly verified through experiment, dismissing them as meaningless or “unscientific.”Scientific theories are not seen as descriptions of “objective reality behind the scenes,” but rather as useful mathematical tools (instruments) to predict observable data. The development of quantum mechanics was deeply influenced by logical positivism, specifically through the rejection of classical concepts that could not be directly measured. In 1925, Heisenberg formulated matrix mechanics by discarding all classical notions of unobservable particle trajectories or internal electron orbits. He argued that because we cannot observe an electron between its energy states, science should strictly restrict its math to measurable quantities, such as the frequencies and intensities of light emitted by atoms. As the leader of the Copenhagen school, Bohr insisted that science does not describe nature “as it is,” but rather what we can say about nature based on our experiments. He maintained that asking what a photon is doing before it hits a detector is a logically meaningless question, as there is no empirical verification possible outside of a specific experimental setup. Wolfgang Pauli famously used positivist criteria to dismiss unprovable theories, famously coining the phrase “not even wrong” for hypotheses that could not be tested.He fiercely defended the view that physical reality cannot be detached from the specific observer and measurement apparatus, mocking Einstein’s quest for an independent, hidden reality.John von Neumann and Paul Dirac stripped quantum mechanics of visual or physical analogies, reducing it to a pure axiomatic mathematical framework.In this view, the wave function is not a physical “thing” rippling through real space; it is simply an abstract tool used to calculate the precise probabilities of macroscopic laboratory measurements.

Albert Einstein’s relationship with positivism was complex: he used positivist methods to invent the Theory of Relativity, but strongly rejected positivism later in life, calling it an “untenable” philosophy. When the developers of quantum mechanics used positivism to justify their new theories, Einstein fought back. His disagreements focused on several key principles:

  1. Rejection of “Esse Est Percipi” (To Be is to be Perceived)

The Positivist View: If a property cannot be measured, it does not exist. The state of a particle before observation is a meaningless question.

Einstein’s Counter-Argument: Einstein dismissed this as a revival of George Berkeley’s old idealistic philosophy. He famously mocked the idea by asking colleagues if they genuinely believed the moon was not there when nobody was looking at it.

His Position: Reality exists objectively, completely independent of human awareness or laboratory equipment.

  • The Purpose of Physics: Prediction vs. Comprehension

The Positivist View: The goal of science is not to describe “ultimate reality,” but to build mathematical formulas that correctly predict the outcomes of laboratory experiments.

Einstein’s Counter-Argument: He argued that this reduced physics to a mere utility tool.

His Position: The true goal of science is to understand how the physical world operates when we are not looking. He stated that predicting pointer readings on laboratory meters without a real narrative explaining the underlying physical mechanisms was intellectually empty.

  • The Rejection of “Unobservable Entities”

The Positivist View: Early positivists, like Ernst Mach, went so far as to reject the existence of atoms because no one could see them directly.

Einstein’s Counter-Argument: In 1905, Einstein mathematically proved the existence of atoms using Brownian motion. He noted that positivism wrongly condemned theoretical thinking precisely at the moments where creative speculation was necessary to uncover hidden structures.

His Position: Concepts cannot be derived purely from sensory data. Human beings must use their imagination to invent abstract mathematical concepts (like curved spacetime) to explain the hidden clockwork of nature.

  • Determinism and Strict Causality

The Positivist View: Because quantum mechanics can only predict the probabilities of where a particle will land, the universe is fundamentally random. Causality is an unobservable, outdated metaphysics concept.

Einstein’s Counter-Argument: This prompted his legendary declaration that “God does not play dice with the universe.”

His Position: Just because our current theories are limited to statistics does not mean nature itself is random. He believed that the statistical nature of quantum physics proved it was simply an incomplete theory, hiding a deeper, fully deterministic reality underneath.

Estimates are that 35% to 42% of physicists are strict positivists and favor the Copenhagen Interpretation. They believe that physicists should only describe what can be measured. Pragmatic positivists make up 30% to 40% of quantum physicists. While not identifying as philosophers, they follow a fundamentally positivist culture nicknamed “Shut up and calculate.” They believe that if the mathematical formulas yield highly accurate predictions for smartphones, lasers, and quantum computers, then arguing about “what is actually happening inside the box” is a waste of time. Anti-positivists make up 25% to 35% of physicists. They completely reject positivism and side with Einstein’s view that physics must describe an objective, observer-independent reality. However, they are deeply fractured into opposing theories:

1. Many-Worlds Realists (~15% – 18%): They believe the wave function is a literal, physically real object that never collapses. They avoid the observer paradox by calculating that the universe physically splits into parallel realities during every interaction.

2. Pilot-Wave / Bohmian Realists (~7%): They believe particles are real and have exact, definitive tracks at all times (just as Einstein wanted), guided by a hidden, non-local quantum wave.

While 20th-century philosophy largely moved beyond logical positivism, quantum mechanics has arguably kept it alive in practice. If one combines explicit defenders of the Copenhagen interpretation with the pragmatic “shut up and calculate” culture, a large portion of modern quantum physics remains operationally positivist. What matters here is not merely that logic has been preserved, but that it has been repeatedly reformulated in order to preserve noncontradiction across changing scientific paradigms.

It seems to me that common sense rests on two closely linked assumptions. First, we place deep trust in perception, especially sensory perception—the conviction that seeing is believing. Second, logic depends heavily on that trust. To doubt the senses, then, is also to unsettle logic and its foundational commitment to noncontradiction. Yet the history of thought suggests that logic itself has shifted through major paradigm changes, and many of those shifts appear motivated by the effort to preserve noncontradiction under new conditions. Once perception is understood as mediated by context—and once context is understood as dependent on the observer—the classical notion of shared sensory certainty begins to weaken. One observer may register results that differ from another’s, even in tightly controlled experiments structured by probability. If so, what classical science meant by “context” may no longer be adequate. The question, then, is how this transformation bears on our understanding of logic itself.

Once the law of noncontradiction shifts from meaning that contradictory propositions cannot both be true “in the same sense and at the same time” to meaning that different observational results may both count as true within different observational contexts, the notion of identity itself becomes more difficult to secure. By identity, I mean the problem of what still counts as the same when results vary with the conditions of observation. Sameness can no longer simply mean the same observed result. At best, under highly controlled repetition, we can identify a structured range of possible outcomes. I am not claiming that classical observation or noncontradiction is therefore false. My point is narrower: once we move between these very different contexts, it becomes strained to speak of sameness in the old sensory and logical sense. And if positivists resist any appeal to a reality “behind” sensory experience, empirical observation, and formal treatment of data, then one must ask whether a concealed metaphysical commitment is already at work in the effort to hold classical and quantum observation together under one continuous notion of noncontradiction. Are we, in effect, bending history to fit a positivist dogma? Is there a hidden metaphysics within the very appeal to sensory experience, empirical observation, and formal reasoning that continues to sustain noncontradiction?

These historical efforts to preserve a coherent sense of noncontradiction may themselves reveal a metaphysical inheritance that positivism officially denies. A positivist would resist that description, of course. Yet what if logic itself—the supposed bedrock of truth—has been stretched through an ongoing series of conditionals and contextual revisions, all while still being presented as the same noncontradiction? At that point, one may reasonably ask whether positivism rests on its own act of faith: a faith in perception and in the continuity of logic across ever-changing contexts. If these repeated adjustments continue to function like metaphysical commitments, then perhaps they are metaphysical commitments, whether acknowledged as such or not.

Some still hold, almost religiously, to the hope that a future discovery will restore classical noncontradiction in the ordinary common-sense form of “what you see is what you get.” Yet if quantum observation has taught us anything, it is that such a restoration would require considerable conceptual gymnastics. Our language and intellectual history have certainly preserved a provisional sense of truth as noncontradiction, but that preservation has not been simple or cost-free. Scientists themselves have often remained deeply ambivalent about metaphysics. One need only recall Isaac Newton’s simultaneous involvement in physics, biblical literalism, and alchemy. However committed positivists may be to purging metaphysics, the ideal of absolute truth remains difficult to exorcize.

What we need to move beyond, then, are both the exhausted pretensions of inherited metaphysics and the opposing fantasy of scientific purity. On one side stands a rationalist totalism expressed as cumulative, progressive, and collective truth; on the other, the irrationalism of the isolated tragic hero. Both now appear inadequate. The conceptual habits inherited from classicism, along with the provisional structures built to preserve them, have become obstacles rather than aids to survival. Even classical science contains both heroic and collective elements: the figure of the individual genius, such as Einstein, and the accumulation of shared knowledge through paradigm shifts. But that inheritance now produces desperation in both its defenders and its opponents, especially where quantum theory is forced back into categories it increasingly resists. This tension is one of the reasons that led me to write Quanta, Alterity, and Love.

This returns us to the point from which the essay began. The struggle over logic, observation, and metaphysics is not an abstract dispute detached from history; it is bound up with the older human tendency to organize meaning around two exhausted poles: the heroic individual and the sacred or collective whole. What appears in modern politics as the glorification of the strongman or the idealization of collectivity has its analogue in our intellectual life as well. In both cases, thought seeks stability in a form of mastery—either through the self-enclosed power of the individual or through the redeeming authority of the whole. My claim is that both inherit the same classical desire for grounded certainty, and both now show signs of exhaustion. If quantum theory exposes the limits of that inheritance at the level of logic and ontology, then the larger question is what kind of human orientation remains once those inherited forms no longer suffice.

Both the heroic and the collective have carried human survival to this point, yet both now threaten it. Quantum physics, in my view, is one sign that something fundamental has gone wrong in the conceptual structures we inherited. The anxiety some physicists display when confronted with the inadequacy of classicism suggests how deeply those structures still govern our imagination. Their efforts to preserve classical metaphysics and classical logic at all costs can resemble a kind of intellectual reassembly: an attempt to stitch together a failing world-picture from incompatible parts. Beneath both individualism and collectivism there remains the same rudimentary metaphysics of the thing—an entity assumed to be reducible to place, time, or deterministic law. In that framework, the self appears as a discrete object, however socially embedded, and this produces a deep alienation at the level of ontology. What our exhaustion calls for, then, is not simply reversal or reform, but a movement beyond these inherited forms.

This beyond neither affirms nor simply negates individualism or collectivity; it treats both as historically exhausted possibilities. The exhaustion lies in the repetition of a “me” whose horizon is still self-preservation, self-expansion, or self-justification at the expense of the other. In that sense, the human drama begins to resemble Sisyphus: the endless return of the same effort, the same burden, the same failure. Nietzsche can recast that burden heroically; modern culture can aestheticize it, even make companions of horror. But none of that escapes the underlying exhaustion. What is required is growth beyond our inherited evolutionary and metaphysical paradigms. Here the other is no longer understood as another version of myself, nor as something to be absorbed into the collective. In Levinasian terms, the other appears as radically other, irreducible to my categories, resistant to every attempt at homogenization. To encounter the other in this way is to enter an asymmetric relation that unsettles the old opposition between individual and collective and opens another path altogether.

The other cannot be assimilated either to the isolated individual or to the collective whole. To recognize the other is to confront the limits of the self and of every “we” built in its image. Levinas names the background of this confrontation the “there is,” the incessant murmur of existence itself, the fray from which the ego, along with its concepts and identities, tries to withdraw. What remains after the exhaustion of our present metaphysics is not a triumphant new system, but an ethical demand. The future, if there is one, depends on the self’s capacity to face the other without reducing that other to sameness, utility, or inclusion within a totalizing order. The asymmetry of the other places me under obligation before I can master it conceptually. For Levinas, this ethical claim is not secondary to metaphysics; it emerges precisely where metaphysics fails. That is why responsibility, rather than heroic self-assertion or collective absorption, becomes the only adequate response to radical alterity. This conviction animates my own work and shapes what I have tried to think through in Quanta, Alterity, and Love. Levinas is most powerful not when turned into another metaphysical position, but when read as the interruption of every such position that would reduce the other to thought, presence, or possession. What remains is not a new system to inherit, but an irreducible responsibility: before truth, before ontology, before every order I would build to secure myself, I am already answerable to the other even before I can name myself as “me.”

What is Reality?

I have had several conversations recently which I think bring up this interesting question. My background in a lifetime of interest in philosophy and physics has sometimes caused me to over-assume that others are aware to some degree of how 19th century metaphysics of mechanics is still very dominate in most folks thinking. The metaphysics of mechanics assume an absolute time and space dominated by Cartesian metaphysics in which Renes’ Descartes writing in the 17th century declares, “I think, therefore I am”. At the very beginning of the Scientific Revolution, time and space was thought through the metaphor of a machine. This was no ‘spooky action at a distance’ but with Newton there soon would be ‘action at a distance’ with gravity and later with electromagnetism. The notion of aether had been around for a very long time before Newton but Newton would attribute gravity to a Christian God. Therefore, it was reasonable that shortly before the birth of Newton, Descartes in keeping with Latin Christianity would think of reality as subject and object. The subject was the domain of aether, God, mind, spirit, etc. and the object was matter, substance, body, just dead stuff. This metaphysic of absolute dualism would make the Mechanical Revolution of the 18th and 19th century possible. I use metaphysic from the Latin as the Christianized transformation from Aristotle’s works on ‘first philosophy’ or being as such. This metaphysic became ‘reality’. It became a largely unquestioned assumption which underscores more the impact and vast significance of history as human than any such thing as the ‘real’.

In the 19th century Hegel’s dialectic shattered with great genius and logic this dominate metaphysic. His impact was so devastating that reactions to Hegel spun off Karl Marx and communism (long before the Russian Revolution). Marx vigorously opposed the bourgeois Hegel in favor of material dialecticism. Hegel also spun off the British Empiricists and Adam Smith which became the foundation of capitalism. What was so devastating about Hegel’s observations? Hegel pointed out clearly that the dominate metaphysic of his day was an abstraction. It was not a matter denying the ‘reality’ of Cartesian dualism but of showing how it was an abstraction. Kant tells us,

For human reason, impelled by its own need rather than moved by the mere vanity of gaining a lot of knowledge, proceeds irresistibly to such questions as cannot be answered by any experiential use of reason and any principles taken from such use. And thus all human beings, once their reason has expanded to [the point where it can] speculate, actually have always had in them, and always will have in them, some metaphysics.

—Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

Isaac Topete writes,

Kant posits a two-fold constitution of knowledge by the two faculties of understanding and sensibility, and thereby, rejects the hypothesis of an intuitive understanding. With these two stances in mind, Hegel—within the Science of Logic—is critical of Kant insofar as he sees these above positions by Kant as detrimental to the project of idealism. Detrimental in the sense that Hegel thinks that Kant’s position is self-contradictory to the extent that concepts exist only in relation to appearance (i.e. illusory being) and, hence, concepts do not have any actual ‘truth’ to them insofar as they only apply haphazardly. So, from the perspective of Hegel, for Kant, concepts are derivative and hold no actual traction beyond that which appears. This, therefore, leads to Hegel’s attempt to critique and overcome these Kantian assumptions within the Science of Logic. (Topete)

Kant distinguished concepts from the ‘thing in itself’ or noumenon as opposed to phenomenon or manifestations – concepts. So, Kant was still to some extent working from Cartesian metaphysics. However, even Kant was already thinking clearly about the absolute abstractions of concepts and their inability to sustain any such thing as ‘reality’ without essentially being a metaphysic. Hegel shows through rigorous and extensive writings that Kant’s dualism resulting in the ‘thing in itself’ could not stand as Kant intended but even Kant’s unstated dualism was itself merely Concept. Hegel thinks Kant is still a victim of abstraction in that he could not break with some notion of reality which maintained the opposition of noumenon and phenomenon. This was the beginning of the end for Cartesian dualism over one hundred and fifty years ago.

Philosophy after Hegel broke into two main divisions: Continental and Analytic Philosophy. Continental meaning mainland Europe and Analytic meaning chiefly United States. However Analytic Philosophy grew out of the British Empiricist’s reaction to Hegel and the German Idealists. Both strains of philosophy have also traversed to widely varying degrees away from the mechanics of Cartesian reality.

Continental philosophy eloquently shows the break from the classical world to the modern world beginning with Existentialism and into phenomenology. Existentialism was focused on the matter of existing in a daily world and how to live without the metaphysics which made the classical world possible. Phenomenology was contemporaneous in the early 20th century with Einstein and Relativity. While not directly affecting each other they had some interesting parallels. Phenomenology started in earnest when Edmund Husserl began by focusing not on abstractions of metaphysics but how phenomenon shows itself from intentionality. As human we always encounter the world with intention which is not passive but active in determining what shows itself. His student Martin Heidegger also working from Husserl discusses two examples of how this works. Heidegger asks how do we experience spatiality? Do we encounter it as linear extension, as feet or inches from objects?

Actually, linear extension is an abstraction. It is a grid we impose on the world. Even Einstein tells us space is not linear but relative to time and frames of perspective. ‘Long’ and ‘short’ change relative to the speed of light. For Heidegger, we have lived-space. We bring close and distance ourselves from regions of contoured spatiality. While the glasses on our face may be much closer to us in linear extension our lived space is what our intentions are occupying in interests beyond and through our glasses. When we are in a class room there is a space between the teacher and the students which we experience as different regions where possibilities are delineated in advance. Lived space is not devoid of everything except dead extension. It is alive and has various qualities which inform us about ourselves, others and the world and how we act in various regionalities. Additionally, lived-time is not linear now moments. Lived time has a stretch of duration from a past through a present to a future. When we are happy ‘time flies’ and when we are bored or depressed time slows to a halt. Lived-time is a stretch of qualities and not just dead time. In terms of Einstein, time is relative to us, our frame of reference. Continental philosophy goes on to show how time and space are concretized by qualities of our experience of them.

Continental philosophy moved on in the mid to latter 20th century to structuralism and poststructuralism, modernism and post-modernism. These movement encompassed vast areas beyond philosophy including architecture, art, feminism, etc. These movements laid a foundation for a critique of abstractions from the classical and modern world and showed how their influences became occasions for violence and domination both to ourselves and our environment. Derrida showed through deconstruction how dominate, historic narratives must necessarily include their own antithesis and undoing. Fanaticism and terrorism result from their inevitable collapse. Furthermore, any form of structuralism is doomed to carry the seeds of its own demise. Derrida even goes so far as to say that “deconstruction deconstructs itself”. A case and point here is the interesting turns we find in Analytic Philosophy.

Analytic philosophy got its impetus from getting back to the senses in British Empiricism and not German Idealism. However, it quickly became entangled in linguistics, semantic and syntax. Once it emerged from the logic of language it took on the philosophy of language in a much more evasive role.

Those who use the term “philosophy of language” typically use it to refer to work within the field of Anglo-American analytical philosophy and its roots in German and Austrian philosophy of the early twentieth century. Many philosophers outside this tradition have views on the nature and use of language, and the border between “analytical” and “continental” philosophy is becoming more porous with time, but most who speak of this field are appealing to a specific set of traditions, canonical authors and methods. (PhiIn)

I am not as familiar with the Analytic tradition but I understand that sense perception has become inseparable from language games, context, intentions, intersubjectivity and histories. Rudolf Carnap even went so far as to substitute intention for sense. Contextuality is not something added on to reality but constituent of reality. The ‘Pittsburg Hegelians’ have even taken Analytic Philosophy back to Hegel in some important respects. Writing of Wilfred Sellars (an important advocate of the Pittsburg Hegelians) Willem A. deVries writes,

For both Hegel and Sellars, the sociality of thought entails also its historicity. We always operate with a less than ultimately satisfactory conceptual framework that is fated to be replaced by something more satisfactory, whether on the basis of conceptual or empirical considerations… Sellars denies both that there are ‘atoms’ of knowledge or meaning independent of their relation to other ‘pieces’ of knowledge or meaning, and that they are structured in a neat hierarchy rather than an interlocking (social) network. The determinate content of a thought or utterance is fixed by its position in the space of implications and employments available to the community in its language or conceptual framework. This kind of holism is congenial to Hegelian modes of thinking… Hegel is an epistemological realist: he rejects the idea that we do not (or are not even able to) know things as they are in themselves. Yet neither Hegel nor Sellars wants to reject altogether the distinction between phenomenal reality and things as they are in themselves. Sellars calls the distinction between the phenomenal and the real the distinction between the manifest and the scientific images of man in the world.

Hegel provides for numerous phenomenal realities related in ways that require a phenomenology to understand. It is not the distinction between phenomenon and reality itself that Hegel and Sellars attack, but the notion that it is absolute, establishing an unbridgeable divide.

McDowell, however, is concerned to defend our ‘openness to the layout of reality’ and seems not to take seriously the idea that we might have systematically false beliefs about the nature of things… The strategy, boiled down, is this: Kant’s critical philosophy is formulated in terms of basic dualisms, apriori/aposteriori, analytic/synthetic, receptivity/spontaneity, even empirical science/philosophy. Hegel insists that trapped in these dualisms Kant cannot satisfactorily explain human cognition or action. The gaps imposed by the assumed dualisms never get properly bridged. (deVries)

DeVries goes on to state that Sellars rejects the standard static interpretation given by Hegel in Hegel’s absolutisms. The important point here is that even the arch-typical school of sense empiricism has re-discovered, perhaps in some novel ways, the radical and complete loss of metaphysical ground which dominated the West from the Roman Empire to the 19th century.

Physics tells us of the absolute (if you will) relativity of ‘objects’ in which size and even temporal existence is contingent. In quantum mechanics it appears that even the notion of a particle is simply relative concentrations of energetic field densities more like micro and macro waves and currents in the ocean. Subatomic ‘particles’ with no mass (infinitesimal forces popping in and out of existence) energize these densities to create mass, gravity and their relative temporalities. This tells us that a ‘particle’ as a solid piece of matter is an abstraction which we have told ourselves through history based more on a quasi-scientific/theological notion of Newton’s absolute time and space. Newton told us gravity as action at a distance was God.

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle even tells us that there are aspects of phenomena which are impossible to reconcile (position and momentum of the wave-particle). This hits at the very heart of logic as built upon the principle of non-contradiction.

Schrödinger’s cat in the box thought experiment tells us the cat in the box can both be alive and dead at the same time. This is really an observation about the mathematics of superposition which is the basis of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics tells us about infinite possibilities which are actualized, made real, by observation. The immediate reaction of many including myself years ago was, ‘Are we saying that everything is subjective?’ This jump to subjectivity was the only possibility given to us by our metaphysics when confronted with this observation.

Einstein referred to entanglement as ‘spooky action at a distance’. Most quantum fields have a property called spin. These fields become constituents of many particles such as an electron. One characteristic of spin is called up and down. This is really how a magnetic field effects the orientation of the field. When particles such as an electron become entangled with each other they form a pair that can be separated by billions of light years and a magnetic field on one electron will instantly change the orientation of the other electron no matter what the distance between the two electrons. This seems to violate Einstein’s basic postulate which tells us nothing in the universe can move faster than the speed of light. This appears to violate a fundamental law of physics concerning locality. Einstein thought perhaps there were hidden variables which could explain this problem. One possibility could be that the universe is composed of more dimensions than four, three dimensions of space and one of time. Locality is intuitively thought as the ‘me’, the ‘I’ of ‘I think, therefore I am’. History has taught us that we are all absolute individuals. We have a certain sacred and protected domain which endows us with sacred, unalienable and unquestionable ‘rights’. We typically downplay the absolute of individuality with the equal and opposite other half of rights which is responsibility.

The notion of a multi-dimensional universe has contributed to many-worlds theory (which goes all the way back to the Greeks). String theory and parallel universes coupled with Schrödinger’s observation tell us that possibilities may be more than reality fictions but fundamentally comprise the ‘stuff’ of reality. What we thought as dead stuff, substance, may have much more to it that could make the boundaries of what is thought as living and dead a more complex problem.

Dark energy is thought to comprise 73% of all mass and energy in the universe. Additionally, dark matter is thought to comprise another 23% of the universe. The leaves 4% to comprise everything we see such as planets, stars and people. And, we really have no clue what it is. We know it must exist because we see its effects like wind in the trees. Dark matter and dark energy may solve a problem which resulted in perhaps Einstein’s greatest blunder, the cosmological constant. In short, Einstein inserted this ‘x’ factor into his equations to make relativity of time and space work with gravity. This made the universe static and kept the universe from flying apart. However, many subsequent discoveries have leads us to the dark halls of dark energy and matter as the reason why the universe does not fly apart. Without the gravitational effects of dark matter and energy we would have to accept the almost theological explanation of Einstein’s ‘x’ factor. The mystery of what dark matter and energy tell us is to buckle up, we really know very little about reality.

What is the real? It is neither subjective nor objective but those tired old metaphysics should tell us more about who we are that what reality is. We have inherited ‘filters’ which help us make sense of the world in language and history. Language and history are as much a part of our anatomy as our heart is. The ‘real’ is not some absolute, everlasting reality apart from us to which we are enslaved but essential to us in an ‘essentially’ indeterminate way. Philosophy and physics have come together to show us that our ability to abstract not only is the ‘real’ but somehow indeterminately determinate of what gets taken up as ‘real’.

To speak of the ‘real’ in this way is not to deny the ‘real’ but to put the ‘real’ in a more nuanced and less abstract way than historic embodiments which grossly oversimplify and distort ‘isness’. These distortions lead to the worst of human behavior as they champion the heroic ‘defender of the faith’ at any horrific cost. The threats to reality are manufactured inherent in ‘reality’ not imputed from the unrepentant. We do not really know to what extent our forceful expectations of ‘reality’ force the reality we ultimately find. It may be that the worlds we create become our tomb and not the occasion for an ‘other’, infinitely removed from our metaphysical prisons.

Creation did not happen from our reality but from a reality we never knew. Language was not our invention after birth but in some indeterminate and historic fashion constitutes who we are, what ‘reality’ is or isn’t. It constitutes a past that never was our personal past but somehow participates intimately in our moments and after-moments of creation, of birth. To think of ourselves as an absolute individual is perhaps the momentous sin of ‘reality’ which ignores the grace which makes us possible. We owe a debt to creation, the moment of birth, that gives gifts and makes possible language and meaning. It is up to us as to how we embody these gifts with wistful arrogance or humble gratitude. The other, the he or the she, is not diminished or captured by our petty judgements of them. They are as much the miracle of who we are as language, as ‘reality, as the indeterminate infinity which we choose together and apart. The possibility of ethics is a choice, perhaps the only choice we can make. Over one hundred and fifty years we have traversed from ‘I think, therefore I am’ to ‘We think, therefore we are’. We can welcome this transformation or die fighting it but who is to say if we meet our apocryphal demise, another unaccounted, unrecognized moment of creation will not create infinites of ‘realities’ which once again ask for gratitude, grace and ethical desire for what we know not.

Works Cited

(n.d.). Philosophy of Language. Retrieved from https://iep.utm.edu/lang-phi/

deVries, W. A. (n.d.). Hegel’s Revival in Analytic Philosophy. Retrieved from https://mypages.unh.edu/sites/default/files/wad/files/devries_hegels_revival_in_analytic_philosophy.pdf

Topete, I. (n.d.). Idealism from Kant to Hegel. Retrieved from https://www.csustan.edu/sites/default/files/groups/University%20Honors%20Program/Journals/isaac_topete.pdf

Postscript from “A thought experiment…”

While I am not a Christian, I find ages of accumulated wisdom in many religious traditions which must be wrested out from the noise which history has encased within these traditions. While I certainly do not ascribe to the effectively cliche metaphysical positions which have dominated these traditions, I do find the historic play of metaphysics can embody allegorical dramas which has the possibility to bring a kind of clarity from the dust bins of dystopic ages past.

One of the more interesting and intentionally playful metaphysical musing was given to us by Friedrich Nietzsche most notably in his work, “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”. Within the backdrop of classic, Newtonian physics, Nietzsche reasons that since space and mater is limited and time is eternal all combinations of matter will eventually be repeated exactly as it was before. Effectively, this means every human life will always come again only to repeat itself in the exact same way for an infinite amount of time. Zarathustra called this the ‘Great Nausea”. By this he meant that it sickened human spirit to think such a metaphysical thought. However, Zarathustra’s insight was that this nausea held the possibility for affirming life as the ‘eternal recurrence of the same’. He thought this was the sign of an ascendant life as opposed to the decadent, sickened life of despair and the utter pitifulness of those who are forever condemned to take their extreme vengeance on life. In the case of Zarathustra, we can clearly see a kind of allegorical play with Metaphysics which can illustrate the philosophical underpinnings of Nietzsche’s thought. In this way, I would propose another metaphysics in a contrary direction as Nietzsche’s concern which has a more updated take on physics.

With the advent of relativity and quantum mechanics absolute time and space are no more. While physicists hate singularities and infinities, they are compelled at the current time to labor under these mathematical obscurities. Certainly, calculus is the mathematics of infinities and the peculiar formalities in which physics currently shows its dilemma (e.g., as converging and diverging infinite series, peculiarities of zero, etc.). What is more, physics has discovered that most of the universe is pervaded by an absolute mystery called dark matter and dark energy. We find that the fundamental building blocks of all mater is held together by quarks which pop in and out of existence, more like flavors of reality than reality itself. We are told that nothing can be smaller than a Planck size or the distance light travels in a perfect vacuum. A Planck is the absolute smallest possible unit of measurement which can have meaning (approximately 1.6 X 10 -35 m). And yet we are told that black holes can reduce the mass of a sun, billions of times larger than our sun, down to a singularity. What is more, we also have the peculiar dilemma which has yet to be disproven that intrigues many physicists that black holes may really be the other side of a ‘big bang’. So, even though we know meaning can only be thought in terms of Planck size we effectively are saying that universes can be created from what we think is a finite amount of matter in a huge sun. Universes have much more matter than one huge black hole. Our universe has many supermassive and known ultra-massive black holes in addition to all the other mass in our universe. So, if a black hole can create a universe with extreme orders of magnitudes more mass than the mass of its collapsed star – even more so, according to Einstein’s physics, the infinite mass of a singularity, we have a huge amount of mass in the new universe which can have no meaning according to the notion of a Planck size. What shows itself here is that our idea of meaning is more convention than ‘meaning’. Furthermore, to suggest as some physicists do that there may be infinite universes, makes Nietzsche’s metaphysics outdated and a bit moldy. That is why I would like to propose a counter metaphysics which has more affinity with the present.

Instead of a finite amount of matter given over to the infinite amount of time producing eternal recurrence of the same. Perhaps the singularity of Heraclitus’ river which can never be stepped in twice is more apropos. Nothing is ever repeated in exactly the same way. There can by rhymes but not repetitions. If the metaphysical notion of the soul has a rhyme, may it be in the notion of a one without another which nevertheless cannot remain in absolute obscurity but must affirm an Other, the other. A singularity cannot remain shrouded in absolute meaninglessness but must rise again to affirm the other, not the same which is fundamentally meaningless. Instead of the assertion of power and might, of absolute Spirit, perhaps the weakest confounds the strongest. The weakest not condemned to utter despair and vengeance but opened upon the possibility of others. The decision that spirit cannot remain in absolute certitude of itself but must Decide that others, that other, is built into the cry of despair and emptiness. Instead of perpetual and eternal vengeance we have the ‘meek inheriting the earth’. Why? Because they cannot stand in the allusion of grandeur, of mastery and self-subsistence, ‘self-substance’ which makes no sense. The other is not the multiplication of the same, it is the opening onto the ‘tree of life’, that which makes possible any such erroneous notion as the same. Meaning as convention fails to be what it aspires to, what it asserts itself as. Only in the Decision of choice, Ethics, can obscurity rouse itself from its eternal slumbers in welcoming the Other, the stranger, the he and the she.

Whimsically, can I also suggest that in order to rise from the dead as the God, mythically spoken of in the last post (“A thought experiment…”), could it be that every obscure singularity must through many universes and worlds ultimately become a ‘Jesus’ and die for the world, the Other, eternal Agape?

All life and death and elsewise must forever be in its singularity, its moment which can never be altered. Even more I, as a rhyme of singularity, must ultimately take upon myself the sins of the world, missing the mark, such that I become sin meaning that I am Responsible and held to account for the suffering of the Other…just saying…