[b]Werner Heisenberg
Revere those things beyond science which really matter and about which it is so difficult to speak.[/b]
Revere is hardly the right word though, is it?
If we wanted to construct a basic philosophical attitude from these scientific utterances of Pauli’s, at first we would be inclined to infer from them an extreme rationalism and a fundamentally skeptical point of view. In reality however, behind this outward display of criticism and skepticism lay concealed a deep philosophical interest even in those dark areas of reality of the human mind which elude the grasp of reason. And while the power of fascination emanating from Pauli’s analyses of physical problems was admittedly due in some measure to the detailed and penetrating clarity of his formulations, the rest was derived from a constant contact with the field of creative processes, for which no rational formulation as yet exists.
And that’s before we get to the world of is/ought.
The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can anyone conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear, we would probably be left completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies.
This may well be the mother of all ironies. Or at the very least the first cousin.
The existing scientific concepts cover always only a very limited part of reality,
and the other part that has not yet been understood is infinite. Whenever we
proceed from the known into the unknown we may hope to understand, but we
may have to learn at the same time a new meaning of the word ‘understanding’.
Not even counting those [here for example] who are hell bent on actually defining it.
In classical physics, science started from the belief – or should one say, from the illusion? – that we could describe the world, or least parts of the world, without any reference to ourselves.
Or, for some, only in reference to ourselves.
The probability wave meant a tendency for something. It was a quantitative version of the old concept of “potentia” in Aristotelian philosophy. It introduced something standing in the middle between the idea of an event and the actual event, a strange kind of physical reality just in the middle between possibility and reality.
And not just sub-atomically. Whatever that means.