Re: multirealism, subjects, Bohr

From: Andy Blunden (a.blunden@pb.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Jun 18 2000 - 20:43:27 PDT


In response to Jay ...

I have used Einstein's Unified Theory as an example to explain the meaning
of Hegel's Absolute Idea (within the theoretical sphere), and was rather
touched when last week I read through "Einstein on Peace" and realised that
Einstein was as consistent in his advocacy of World Government as he was on
the ultimate necessity of a Unified Theory (though not determinism so far
as I know, he only criticises Bohr for supposing that the statistical
theory represented a "final result", in the same way that previous
generations had thought the classical system a "final result").

So, we have Hegel and Einstein promoting unitary rationality, but the
dominant bourgeois trend is fragmentation.

So, I am caused to reflect on how Marx dealt with this aspect of Hegel's
theory. So far as I know he was the first to criticise Hegel for supposing
that everything was "determinations of a single essence". (The positivists
of that time [1843] were still promoting "grand theories"). It is ironic,
because this is the criticism that it is fashionable even today to make of
Marx. But Marx was very much with Hegel against the atomised view of
society and theory, but he was not an advocate of "world government" or of
"unified theories".

Marx criticised Hegel's "society of mutual reconciliation" because the
contradiction between labour and capital was not resolvable. Likewise, I
think Einstein's laudable struggle to get the US and Soviet governments to
join a world government was idealistic.

I think Einstein was right, inasmuch as the Schrodinger quantum field
equation did not prove to be the "last word", but so far as I can
understand it, it is not any kind of field which is the most likely avenue
to overcome the incommensurablity of theories of macro/micro phenomena.

Hegel was right in saying that the bourgeois republic based on universal
suffrage could only lead to alienation of people from politics, but I don't
think it's any kind of state which is going to resolve this problem.
 
The point I'm trying to make is: people rightly object to
"multi-realities", because "multi-realities" can be a code-word for
individualist relativism (*one* particular, currently dominant reality),
but there *are* conflicting realities inasmuch as there is conflict in
society.

And BTW, substituting "history (has been)" for "logic (must be)" takes one
no further forward at all, and can constitute determinism of the highest
order.

Andy

At 13:52 16/06/2000 -0400, you wrote:
>A few short clarifications as I read responses to some of my recent postings:
>
>The notion of truth as MANY has nothing to do with consensus notions about
>truth. It is not a question of truth-for-one, or one-truth-for-all vs.
>truth-for-many. It is a question of one-truth-for-any vs.
>many-truths-for-any, where the many truths are all truths about, so far as
>it matters for one's current purposes, the same phenomena or issues or
>concerns. They are many different ways of seeing, talking about, making
>sense of whatever the subject or object of discourse may be (whether we
>imagine that subject to be wholly, partly, or not at all constituted by
>these discourses). Even if there is one ontological reality (an issue on
>which I am agnostic, I tend to think it a meaningless debate), it does not
>follow that truth is what is placed in one-to-one correspondence with it;
>rather there needs to be, it is better for our human survival and practical
>activity, if truths are what are in a many-to-one correspondence with it.
>To be dogmatic, there is no one truth about anything interesting.
>
>Asking what is the concrete historical subject for which some discourse has
>practical meaning, or which is itself the product of some state of affairs,
>is often a useful question, but it can be too narrow if it assume a totally
>anthropocentric view. It is not just individual human organisms which are
>'subjects' in this sense. The systems-that-know, the systems that do
>semiosis, include human organisms both in the category sense and in the
>part-whole sense. Human organisms are not subjects if they are taken in
>isolation from the larger systems of which we are a part; any labor-based
>theory of knowledge implies as much. The system in which knowing and
>meaning occur as processes is a system larger than the organism, and a
>system organized on and across many scales of organization. It is an
>impossible question in general, and usually a difficult one in any concrete
>case, to say which levels of organization, in what relationships to one
>another, are the subjects of history. From DNA and cells, to organisms and
>tools, to families, villages, social ecosystems, online communities and the
>technologies that enable them ... and for each of these, just as for the
>different Umwelts of different species, there are different truths.
>
>Bohr and Einstein warred, in a friendly way, over the interpretation of
>quantum theory for decades. By and large Einstein lost, and while the
>dominant view of succeeding generations of those who used their theories
>was not as strongly 'multi-realist' (i.e. many-to-one) as Bohr's, it was
>far closer to Bohr's than to Einstein's. Einstein greatly wished to
>preserve determinism; he loved the aesthetic, and as he saw it also the
>moral beauty, of knowing that the universe could only be as it is, that
>there was only one possible logically consistent system of principles, and
>that all in the universe was consistent with that one Unified Field Theory
>(today it's called the Theory of Everything). Bohr felt that human
>experience in general, and even our experience of physics and the cosmos,
>would always require more than one analysis, no one of which determined the
>possibilities of the universe (and as Heisenberg first showed, could not be
>applied simultaneously to create a complete and sufficient set of
>deterministic principles) ... and the later extensions of this viewpoint,
>from quantum indeterminacy to macroscopic chaotic indeterminacy have tended
>to suggest that it is not Logic, not what Must Be, but History, what Has
>Been, that determines what is and what can be now. All of which makes it
>much harder to say what could not be in some possible future.
>
>JAY.
>
>---------------------------
>JAY L. LEMKE
>PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION
>CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
>JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU
><http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/education/jlemke/index.htm>
>---------------------------
>
>
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