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Explaining the Universe with Physics from Conversations

The following is a transcript of a discussion held at the Thomas More Institute on November 9, 1970. Participants were Eric Voegelin, Erin O’Connor, Charlottee Tansey, and Cathleen Going.

 

charlotte tansey: You don’t think there are any new spatial experiences?

eric voegelin: You have the problem that if one tries to construct a “physical universe” out of the experience of physics, that doesn’t work. One cannot construct a physical universe. I’ve made a study of that problem in modern physics and I have shown, in the man­ner of the Kantian aporias, that any attempt to construct the uni­verse on the basis either of Newtonian or of Einsteinian concep­tions of time and space runs into logical aporias.

eric o’connor: Basically why?

voegelin: One would have to go through the whole system of the conception of, say, infinite space, infinite time, a ho­mogenous medium as in Newtonian physics. When you make assumptions with regard to infinite velocity of movement in that universe you must cover it somehow by a movement faster than light; you have to construct a model of how can it be experienced, and if it can be experienced by such a model, you get into the aporias. Of course, we don’t experience that, in fact. There can’t be any verified model of experience of the universe.

o’connor: You can certainly get a lot of theories. Those are the so-called verified models, but Charlotte is talking about new experiences–

tansey: –which might make a different pattern for symbols.

voegelin: What kind of experience would that be?

tansey: Going to the moon.

voegelin: No–we’ve always had the model of going to the moon. You don’t have to go there in fact.

tansey: I mean the experience of the human size being some­how dwarfed in a new way.

voegelin: Human size isn’t dwarfed in any significant way as compared with the cosmos conceptions of ancient civilization and of the Greeks. Since they had a fairly good idea how far away the sun is from the earth, they were as “dwarfed” as we are.

o’connor: I wonder if I have an example of a new experience. I was waiting for a bit of music on the radio to stop in order to be sure of something, and turn it off. Because I was waiting, I wasn’t relaxed in the time of the music, and I suddenly realized the strain of the waiting. This was a new experience of two times for me.

voegelin: But this is just a question of two orders of time.

o’connor: But still that may be the kind of thing–

There is No Infinite Universe

tansey: Yes. I meant, not the intellectual understanding, but the sheer feel of one’s shoulder in the presence of something that is in a different scale.

voegelin: But that hasn’t changed significantly in historical times. Perhaps you get a change when and if the indefinite expan­sion of space and time is hypostatized into a burden. But that is a mere question of hypostatizing it. It doesn’t make any difference–for a man–whether the universe is ten or ten million light years in dimension. The one is as infinite as the other.

o’connor: Or if it’s infinite or finite–

voegelin: –it doesn’t make any difference–

o’connor: –as far as the experience is concerned. It’s so mas­sive. But the infinite universe, in place of the universe bounded by the spheres, must have made a terrible shock.

voegelin: That would be between Copernicus and Galileo. That was perhaps a shock.

kathleen going: The only new experiences are differentiations of con­sciousness?

voegelin: Yes. All that is involved in the famous Copernican affair was already discovered by Aristotle; he knew it.

o’connor: As far as possibilities were concerned?

voegelin: He was clear that one can construct the universe geometrically–either by making the earth the center of the sun, or vice versa. If you make the earth the center it is on the basis of the empirical observations of his time, and for no other reason. A century later Aristarchus made the sun the center, again for empirical reasons.

If that didn’t become historically influential, it was due exclusively to Stoic resistance; there you get a reli­gious dogmatic opposition to making the sun the center because it would destroy the sacrality of the earth. The Stoics were the ob­stacle, not the Christians.

Aristotle formulated quite clearly what the problem is (as did Parmenides or Nicholas of Cusa): The center of the universe is where its dynamic organizing force sits. That, for Aristotle, is the periphery. His was a periphero-centric conception, not a geocentric or heliocentric one. And the periphery is far away; it’s not reachable.

o’connor: What you’re saying is there has been no basic change in symbols.

voegelin: No basic change, because experience is always the same: experience of participation in the cosmos.

tansey: Isn’t there any way out of that? Is experience always the same?

voegelin: That’s what we just talked about. When you start constructing a universe on the basis of physical observation you run into the aporias. Of course there is no infinite universe; the infinite is not the given. You don’t experience it; it is a definite construction. If you hypostatize that construction and make it a sort of nightmare, then you can have a nightmare experience. But if you don’t make it a nightmare, then it is no matter of interest how many billion light years there are.

tansey: Negatively, though, if you don’t look at the organic natural symbols (people know they can make water in the labora­tory; they don’t see water as something wonderful), wouldn’t that shift your imagination?

How Do You Explain a Rose?

voegelin: If you permit your imagination to shift, you can get into all sorts of nightmares and psychotic states.

tansey: Why wouldn’t it be a step to a new symbolization?

voegelin: It is, but to symbolizations of nightmare, or psy­chotic deformations.

o’connor: Why would you say the withdrawal of the natural symbols would be a nightmare?

voegelin: A plant is a plant. You see it. You don’t see its physical-chemical processes, and nothing about the plant changes if you know that physical-chemical processes are going on inside. How these processes will result in what you experience immedi­ately as a plant (a rose or an oak tree), you don’t know anyway.

So if you know these substructures in the lower levels of the ontic hierarchy (beyond the plant which is organism) and go into the physical, chemical, molecular, and atomic structures, ever further down, the greater becomes the miracle how all that thing is a plant. Nothing is explained. If you try to explain it in terms of some mechanism, you have committed the fallacy of reduction.

If you deform your experience by trying to explain what you experience by the things that you don’t experience but that you know only by science, you get a perverted imagination of reality–if you see a rose as a physical or atomic process.

tansey: But suppose in our experience we become anthropocentric, in which one’s center of consciousness has shifted and one doesn’t look at a rose.

voegelin: You get a perverted view of reality. You can always interpret going with a saw through wood as the inexplicable fact that sawing through a piece of wood you cut through atomic struc­tures, you cut the atom. Then that is the structure of reality.

tansey: But suppose I was sophisticated and saw proportion rather than–

o’connor: –saw proportion instead of seeing the concrete–

tansey: –saw relationship, saw everything relatively instead of head-on.

voegelin: I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean. As far as I can understand, it is the problem that Kant has treated. You can assume a theory of world evolution–that the species develop. You can make such an assumption. Then you can go on further and in the scale of evolution, down to the simple cells, try to explain the simple cells in terms of the molecular structure out of which life develops, and the molecular structure in terms of the atomic structures–and you only push back the question, What is the origin? What is the beginning?

tansey: I’m thinking simply on the level of description, not on the level of the explanation. Just what I react to as “the cosmos must be this way.”

voegelin: All the things that are described by a physicist are not experienced by anybody. Nobody has seen an atom.

tansey: But if the notion of the classical is somehow pattern, regularity, wouldn’t the randomness, the off-centeredness, be a shift in my assumptions (which are somehow my quick descrip­tions of how reality is)?

o’connor: If one sees reality as the summation, the realization of probabilities that were unknowable–

voegelin: –as in nuclear physics–

o’connor: Yes; you may in some sense cease to see a human being as a gestalt.

 

This excerpt is from The Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous Papers: 1939-1985 (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 33) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004)

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Eric Voegelin (1901-85) was a German-born American Political Philosopher. He was born in Cologne and educated in Political Science at the University of Vienna, at which he became Associate Professor of Political Science. In 1938 he and his wife fled from the Nazi forces which had entered Vienna and emigrated to the United States, where they became citizens in 1944. He spent most of his academic career at the University of Notre Dame, Louisiana State University, the University of Munich and the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. More information about him can be found under the Eric Voegelin tab on this website.

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