The Decline of Metaphysics
The course of modern philosophy unfolded under the impact of Kant’s epochal distinctions. At first, Kant’s successors in Germany pursued his thinking in an unexpectedly idealist direction. In the Romantic climate of European culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel suggested that the cognitive categories of the human mind were in some sense the ontological categories of the universe—i.e., that human knowledge did not point to a divine reality but was itself that reality—and on that basis constructed a metaphysical system with a universal Mind revealing itself through man. For these idealists, the “transcendental ego” (Kant’s notion of the human self that imposed categories and heuristic unifying principles on experience to render knowledge) could be radically extended and recognized as an aspect of an absolute Spirit constituting all reality. Kant had held that mind supplied the form taken by experience, but that the content of experience is given empirically by an external world. For his idealist successors, however, it seemed more philosophically plausible that both content and form were determined by the all-encompassing Mind, so that nature was in some sense more an image or symbol of the self than an altogether independent existent.
But among most scientifically inclined modern thinkers, the speculations of idealist metaphysics could not command widespread philosophical acceptance, especially after the nineteenth century, for they were not empirically testable, nor for many did they appear to represent adequately the tenor of scientific knowledge or the modern experience of an objective and ontologically distinct material universe. Materialism, the opposite metaphysical option from idealism, seemed to better reflect the quality of contemporary scientific evidence. Yet it too assumed an ultimate untestable substance—matter, rather than spirit—and seemingly failed to account for the subjective phenomenology of human consciousness and man’s sense of being a personal volitional entity different in character from the unconscious impersonal external world. But because materialism, or at least naturalism—the position holding that all phenomena could ultimately be explained by natural causes—appeared most congruent with the scientific account of the world, it constituted a more compelling conceptual framework than did idealism. Still, there was much in such a conception that was not entirely acceptable to the modern sensibility, whether because of doubts concerning the completeness and certainty of scientific knowledge, because of ambiguities within the scientific evidence itself, or because of various conflicting religious or psychological factors.
The other available metaphysical option was therefore some form of dualism reflecting the Cartesian and Kantian positions, one that more adequately represented the common modern experience of disjunction between the objective physical universe and subjective human awareness. But with the increasing reluctance of the modern mind to postulate any transcendent dimension, the nature of the Cartesian-Kantian position was such as to prevent, or at best make highly problematic, any coherent metaphysical conception. Given both the discontinuity of the modern experience (the dualism between man and world, mind and matter), and the epistemological quandary entailed by that discontinuity (how can man presume to know that which is fundamentally separate and different from his own awareness?), metaphysics necessarily lost its traditional preeminence in the philosophical enterprise. One could investigate the world as a scientist, or human experience as an introspective analyst; or one could avoid the dichotomy by admitting the human world’s irresolvable ambiguity and contingency, arguing instead for its existential or pragmatic transformation through an act of will. But a universal order rationally intelligible to the contemplative observer was now generally precluded.
Thus modern philosophy, progressing according to principles established with Descartes and Locke, eventually undercut its own traditional raison d’être. While from one perspective the problematic entity for the modern human being was the external physical world in its dehumanized objectification, from another perspective the human mind itself and its inscrutable cognitive mechanisms had become that which could not command full trust and endorsement. For man could no longer assume his mind’s interpretation of the world to be a mirrorlike reflection of things as they actually were. The mind itself might be the alienating principle. Moreover, the insights of Freud and the depth psychologists radically increased the sense that man’s thinking about the world was governed by nonrational factors that he could neither control nor be fully conscious of. From Hume and Kant through Darwin, Marx, Freud and beyond, an unsettling conclusion was becoming inescapable: Human thought was determined, structured, and very probably distorted by a multitude of overlapping factors—innate but nonabsolute mental categories, habit, history, culture, social class, biology, language, imagination, emotion, the personal unconscious, the collective unconscious. In the end, the human mind could not be relied upon as an accurate judge of reality. The original Cartesian certainty, that which served as foundation for the modern confidence in human reason, was no longer defensible.
Henceforth, philosophy concerned itself largely with the clarification of epistemological problems, with the analysis of language, with the philosophy of science, or with phenomenological and existentialist analyses of human experience. Despite the incongruence of aims and predispositions among the various schools of twentieth-century philosophy, there was general agreement on one crucial point: the impossibility of apprehending an objective cosmic order with the human intelligence. That point of agreement was approached from the various positions as developed by philosophers as diverse as Bertrand Russell, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein: Because empirical science alone could render verifiable, or at least provisionally corroborated, knowledge, and such knowledge concerned the contingent natural world of sense experience only, unverifiable and untestable metaphysical propositions concerning the world as a whole were without genuine meaning (logical positivism). Because human experience—finite, conditioned, problematic, individual—was all man could know, human subjectivity and the very nature of human being necessarily permeated, negated, or made inauthentic any attempts at an impartially objective world conception (existentialism and phenomenology). Because the meaning of any term could be found only in its specific use and context, and because human experience was fundamentally structured by language, and yet no direct relation between language and an independent deeper structure in the world could be presumed, philosophy should concern itself only with a therapeutic clarification of language in its many concrete uses without any commitment to a particular abstract conception of reality (linguistic analysis).
On the basis of these several converging insights, the belief that the human mind could attain or should attempt an objective metaphysical overview as traditionally understood was virtually relinquished. With few exceptions, the philosophical enterprise was redirected into the analysis of linguistic problems, scientific and logical propositions, or the raw data of human experience, all without metaphysical entailments in the classical sense. If “metaphysics” still had any viable function, aside from being a handmaid to scientific cosmology, it could only involve the analysis of those various factors that structured human cognition—i.e., to continue Kant’s work with an approach at once more relativistic and more sensitive to the multiplicity of factors that can influence and permeate human experience: historical, social, cultural, linguistic, existential, psychological. But cosmic syntheses could no longer be taken seriously.
As philosophy became more technical, more concerned with methodology, and more academic, and as philosophers increasingly wrote not for the public but for each other, the discipline of philosophy lost much of its former relevance and importance for the intelligent layperson, and thus much of its former cultural power. Semantics was now more germane to philosophical clarity than were universal speculations, but for most nonprofessionals, semantics held limited interest. In any case, philosophy’s traditional mandate and status had been obviated by its own development: There was no al
l-encompassing or transcendent or intrinsic “deeper” order in the universe to which the human mind could legitimately lay claim.
The Crisis of Modern Science
With both philosophy and religion in such problematic condition, it was science alone that seemed to rescue the modern mind from pervasive uncertainty. Science achieved a golden age in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with extraordinary advances in all its major branches, with widespread institutional and academic organization of research, and with practical applications rapidly proliferating on the basis of a systematic linkage of science with technology. The optimism of the age was directly tied to confidence in science and in its powers to improve indefinitely the state of human knowledge, health, and general welfare.
Religion and metaphysics continued their long, slow decline, but science’s ongoing—indeed, accelerating—progress could not be doubted. Its claims to valid knowledge of the world, even subject to the critique of post-Kantian philosophy, continued to seem not only plausible but scarcely questionable. In the face of science’s supreme cognitive effectiveness and the rigorously impersonal precision of its explanatory structures, religion and philosophy were compelled to define their positions in relation to science, just as, in the medieval era, science and philosophy were compelled to do so in relation to the culturally more powerful conceptions of religion. For the modern mind, it was science that presented the most realistic and reliable world picture—even if that picture was limited to “technical” knowledge of natural phenomena, and despite its existentially disjunctive implications. But two developments in the course of the twentieth century radically changed science’s cognitive and cultural status, one theoretical and internal to science, the other pragmatic and external.
In the first instance, the classical Cartesian-Newtonian cosmology gradually and then dramatically broke down under the cumulative impact of several astonishing developments in physics. Beginning in the later nineteenth century with Maxwell’s work with electromagnetic fields, the Michelson-Morley experiment, and Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity, then in the early twentieth century with Planck’s isolation of quantum phenomena and Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity, and culminating in the 1920s with the formulation of quantum mechanics by Bohr, Heisenberg, and their colleagues, the long-established certainties of classical modern science were radically undermined. By the end of the third decade of the twentieth century, virtually every major postulate of the earlier scientific conception had been controverted: the atoms as solid, indestructible, and separate building blocks of nature, space and time as independent absolutes, the strict mechanistic causality of all phenomena, the possibility of objective observation of nature. Such a fundamental transformation in the scientific world picture was staggering, and for no one was this more true than the physicists themselves. Confronted with the contradictions observed in subatomic phenomena, Einstein wrote: “All my attempts to adapt the theoretical foundation of physics to this knowledge failed completely. It was as if the ground had been pulled out from under one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere upon which one could have built.” Heisenberg similarly realized that “the foundations of physics have started moving …[and] this motion has caused the feeling that the ground would be cut from science.”
The challenge to previous scientific assumptions was deep and multiple: The solid Newtonian atoms were now discovered to be largely empty. Hard matter no longer constituted the fundamental substance of nature. Matter and energy were interchangeable. Three-dimensional space and unidimensional time had become relative aspects of a four-dimensional space-time continuum. Time flowed at different rates for observers moving at different speeds. Time slowed down near heavy objects, and under certain circumstances could stop altogether. The laws of Euclidean geometry no longer provided the universally necessary structure of nature. The planets moved in their orbits not because they were pulled toward the Sun by an attractive force acting at a distance, but because the very space in which they moved was curved. Subatomic phenomena displayed a fundamentally ambiguous nature, observable both as particles and as waves. The position and momentum of a particle could not be precisely measured simultaneously. The uncertainty principle radically undermined and replaced strict Newtonian determinism. Scientific observation and explanation could not proceed without affecting the nature of the object observed. The notion of substance dissolved into probabilities and “tendencies to exist.” Nonlocal connections between particles contradicted mechanistic causality. Formal relations and dynamic processes replaced hard discrete objects. The physical world of twentieth-century physics resembled, in Sir James Jeans’s words, not so much a great machine as a great thought.
The consequences of this extraordinary revolution were again ambiguous. The continuing modern sense of intellectual progress, leaving behind the ignorance and misconceptions of past eras while reaping the fruits of new concrete technological results, was again bolstered. Even Newton had been corrected and improved upon by the ever-evolving, increasingly sophisticated modern mind. Moreover, to the many who had regarded the scientific universe of mechanistic and materialistic determinism as antithetical to human values, the quantum-relativistic revolution represented an unexpected and welcome broaching of new intellectual possibilities. Matter’s former hard substantiality had given way to a reality perhaps more conducive to a spiritual interpretation. Freedom of the human will seemed to be given a new foothold if subatomic particles were indeterminate. The principle of complementarity governing waves and particles suggested its broader application in a complementarity between mutually exclusive ways of knowledge, like religion and science. Human consciousness, or at least human observation and interpretation, seemed to be given a more central role in the larger scheme of things with the new understanding of the subject’s influence on the observed object. The deep interconnectedness of phenomena encouraged a new holistic thinking about the world, with many social, moral, and religious implications. Increasing numbers of scientists began to question modern science’s pervasive, if often unconscious, assumption that the intellectual effort to reduce all reality to the smallest measurable components of the physical world would eventually reveal that which was most fundamental in the universe. The reductionist program, dominant since Descartes, now appeared to many to be myopically selective, and likely to miss that which was most significant in the nature of things.
Yet such inferences were neither universal nor even widespread among practicing physicists. Modern physics was perhaps open to a spiritual interpretation, but did not necessarily compel it. Nor was the larger population intimately conversant with the arcane conceptual changes wrought by the new physics. Moreover, for several decades the revolution in physics did not result in comparable theoretical transformations in the other natural and social sciences, although their theoretical programs had been based largely on the mechanistic principles of classical physics. Nevertheless, many felt that the old materialistic world view had been irrevocably challenged, and that the new scientific models of reality offered possible opportunities for a fundamental rapprochement with man’s humanistic aspirations.
Yet these ambiguous possibilities were countered by other, more disturbing factors. To begin with, there was now no coherent conception of the world, comparable to Newton’s Principia, that could theoretically integrate the complex variety of new data. Physicists failed to come to any consensus as to how the existing evidence should be interpreted with respect to defining the ultimate nature of reality. Conceptual contradictions, disjunctions, and paradoxes were ubiquitous, and stubbornly evaded resolution.2 A certain irreducible irrationality, already recognized in the human psyche, now emerged in the structure of the physical world itself. To incoherence was added unintelligibility, for the conceptions derived from the new physics not only were difficult for the layperson to comprehend, they presented seemingly insuperable obstacles to the human intuition generally: a curved space, finite yet unbounded; a four-di
mensional space-time continuum; mutually exclusive properties possessed by the same subatomic entity; objects that were not really things at all but processes or patterns of relationship; phenomena that took no decisive shape until observed; particles that seemed to affect each other at a distance with no known causal link; the existence of fundamental fluctuations of energy in a total vacuum.
Moreover, for all the apparent opening of the scientific understanding to a less materialistic and less mechanistic conception, there was no real change in the essential modern dilemma: The universe was still an impersonal vastness in which man with his peculiar capacity for consciousness was still an ephemeral, inexplicable, randomly produced minutia. Nor was there any compelling answer to the looming question as to what ontological context preceded or underlay the “big-bang” birth of the universe. Nor did leading physicists believe that the equations of quantum theory described the actual world. Scientific knowledge was confined to abstractions, mathematical symbols, “shadows.” Such knowledge was not of the world itself, which now more than ever seemed beyond the compass of human cognition.
Thus in certain respects the intellectual contradictions and obscurities of the new physics only heightened the sense of human relativity and alienation growing since the Copernican revolution. Modern man was being forced to question his inherited classical Greek faith that the world was ordered in a manner clearly accessible to the human intelligence. In the physicist P. W. Bridgman’s words, “the structure of nature may eventually be such that our processes of thought do not correspond to it sufficiently to permit us to think about it at all.… The world fades out and eludes us.… We are confronted with something truly ineffable. We have reached the limit of the vision of the great pioneers of science, the vision, namely, that we live in a sympathetic world in that it is comprehensible by our minds.”3 Philosophy’s conclusion was becoming science’s as well: Reality may not be structured in any way the human mind can objectively discern. Thus incoherence, unintelligibility, and an insecure relativism compounded the earlier modern predicament of human alienation in an impersonal cosmos.
Passion of the Western Mind Page 46