Preface
Imre Lakatos’s philosophy of science is rooted in a number of different
fields, and not all of them are purely scientific. During his years of
education, he was influenced by mathematics and natural sciences as well
as by philosophy, but the role of political ideologies cannot be denied.
His basic philosophical ideas – such as the rationality of science, the
continual growth of knowledge, the social determinism of scientific activities,
and the indispensable role of historical attitude in the philosophy of
science – are definitely in accordance with his early devotion to Marxism
(and Lukacs’s philosophy) both in theory and in practice.
One can easily find clear evidences that Lakatos saw basic connections
between the theoretical sciences he studied and the practical principles
he followed in politics. This is clearly demonstrated by the early papers
he published in different journals, and it must have played an important
role in the doctoral dissertation he wrote in 1947. Unfortunately, no copy
of this dissertation can be found now. There are several assumptions as
to when and why the paper disappeared, but most probably Lakatos himself
might have “stolen” it some time before leaving Hungary in 1956. Later
he hinted several times that he was rather unsatisfied with it, regarded
it as “immature”, and he also said that he would not have minded if nobody
had ever seen it. After some failures to find it, we have good reasons
to believe that the dissertation is lost for ever.
Fortunately, we are not left without traces of the contents of this work, because it seems that important parts of it were published while it was being written. Sándor Karácsony, one of the most influential of Lakatos’s teachers in the university, the opponent of the dissertation, evaluated it in July 8, 1947 with the following words:
“I got interested in the foregoing scientific activities of this
young man, and not least because I read most of them at the moment they
were published. Now I see all of Imre Lakatos’s work in unity, and I deem
that it comes up to the standard. His dissertation is not a sudden idea,
it was matured by two previous publications, both in very serious journals.
The first was published in Athenaeum under the title A fizikai
idealizmus bírálatai, and the second came
out in a thick volume written to teachers: Továbbképzés
és demokráciaii, entitled Modern
fizika, modern társadalomiii.”
Here we can skip a list of Lakatos’s early publications cited by
Karácsony in the evaluation. We continue the quotation, however,
with mentioning another important paper, since its topic – education –
was extremely important for Lakatos at this time, and formed the subject
of a lot of his investigations. Karácsony writes:
“The journal Embernevelésiv also published
a paper by Lakatos, which had the title: Demokratikus nevelés
és természettudományos világnézetv.
Its most essential statement is: democratic education teaches humbleness
towards the facts, it teaches the desire to face reality instead of mere
views. The original democracy of natural sciences is to be emphasised:
their facts and theories can be controlled by anyone, and this control
drives them forward.
The foregoing scientific works of Imre Lakatos are based on dialectic
Marxism, but in its modern and not orthodox form. And it is only a base,
since he himself has original and particular things to say, and more now
than earlier. His originality is increasing. The philosophy behind all
of his opinions is consistent and systematic.”
Now, if we compare the two papers mentioned by Sándor Karácsony
as the preliminaries of the dissertation, we come to see that the essential
body of the earlier one (The Criticism of the Physical Idealism)
is almost literally identical to a great part of the longer paper (Modern
Physics, Modern Society). The small differences are either stylistic
or explanatory, since the journal Further Education and Democracy,
an ideological collection of writings for supporting teachers (published
by the Ministry of Religion and Education), served more popular purposes
than the rather scientific Athenaeum, the journal of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences and the Hungarian Philosophical Society. Naturally,
it is very likely that this text contains most of young Lakatos’s essential
thoughts and ideas concerning the position, the development and the function
of science, and it is reasonable to suppose that it formed an important
part of the lost dissertation entitled A természettudományos
fogalomalkotás szociológiájárólvi.
The Criticism of the Physical Idealism is a critical essay
discussing Susan Stebbing’s book Philosophy and the Physicists
(London, Pelican, 1943). Lakatos, however, criticises not only Stebbing’s
analyses of Eddington’s and Jeans’ idealism, but he also adds his own criticism
of the two scientists’ world views that he considers as typical examples
of the “bourgeois” science. Instead of focusing on the immanent development
of science, he decides to look for explanations outside of science. He
emphasises the indispensable role of sociological and economic influences
on scientific concept building, and he concludes that the world view of
a given scientific age or community is nothing more than a historical category.
The whole argumentation appears again in Modern Physics, Modern Society,
supplemented by some further ideas and more loose associations: the context
becomes broader and the investigations more fundamental. Here we are given
a deeper (Marxist and Lukacsian contra Hegelian) analysis of the “dialectical
structure” of the modern scientific view determined by social relations
and motions. And if we imagine that we go further in this direction, then
we must be very close to the text of the lost dissertation.
*
The whole translation of the paper Moder Physics, Modern Society
is given here. Notes marked with numerals are those of the author, comments
and specifications of the translator are put in square brackets. Further
references not given by Lakatos are specified in endnotes marked with asterisks.
We also indicate the beginning and the end of the part of text that the
two papers mentioned above have in common.
Gábor Kutrovátz
Notes to Preface
i “The Criticism of the Physical Idealism” (1946)
ii “Further Education and Democracy”
iii “Modern Physics, Modern Society” (1947)
iv “Human Education”
v “Democratic Education and the Scientific World View”
vi “On the Sociology of Concept building in the Natural Sciences”
Modern Physics, Modern Society
When examining the significance of modern physics in the history of
sciences and of humankind in general, we have to emphasise three aspects
in the first place:
- the exploration of nuclear energy as a productive force;
- the considerable development of newer physical terminology in terms of epistemology and logic;
- the preparation and the establishment of large scale working-forms of natural sciences, and of their planned co-operation.
Let us examine these issues in more detail.
1. If heat and electric energy multiplied man’s power over nature, created
an artificial environment on the ever smaller surface of Earth, and tore
out a sizeable piece of free time from the time needed for the constant
direct war against nature, then, with proper technical utilisation, these
results can be increased incredibly by the deliverance of nuclear energy:
It disconnects the remaining “natural” elements from the picture of the
Earth’s surface (hence it finally removes the dependence of industrial
plants on coal source areas, waterfalls, etc.), it makes our planet a narrow
homeland (leaving the Earth becomes possible for us), and it soon eliminates
almost entirely the direct war against nature (the required labour time
dropping to few minutes a day).
But “by thus acting on the external world and changing it, he [man]
at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers
and compels them to act in obedience to his sway.”[1] Hence
human nature is changed primarily not by “spiritual renewals”, nor
by “re-education”, but by transformation of the mode of production. Therefore
there is no doubt that the whole habit of human personality will be changed
in the nuclear era.
Heat and electric energy played an indispensable role in the shaping
of human personality’s present historical phase. This gave the immense
strength to capitalism to destroy once and for all the feudal constraints
on individuals, the dependence on other persons; this unfolded in man an
incredibly rich and varied mass of abilities inconceivable before; partly
by reducing the labour time, partly by - with
the help of instruments using heat an electric energy in transportation,
telecommunication and lighting industry (that brought close village to
town, continent to continent, and lengthened the day) -
widening the borders of free time so much that more and more populous parts
of humankind can be reached by the collection of the cultural treasures
of previous centuries.
When, however, capitalism started this splendid progress on the basis
of heat and electric energy, when, through the extension of human labour,
it extended men himself who is formed by labour, it then, at the same time,
initiated another progress as well which turned this process of labour
upside down, deformed it, and transformed it from the extensor of man into
the spoiler, and then the remover of him. Because the product taken away
from man’s hands - dead labour -
becomes alive in the commodity production, it gains a form of independent
existence not ruled by but ruling over man, determining him, either when
- like capital -
it throws itself as an evil vampire onto the living labour in order to
suck overlabour with insatiable appetite, or when -
like the simple product realising its value only on the market (or not
realising it at all) - depriving average men
from the result of their labour, or when forcing them into crises and wars
not impressionable by human will. And not only the product of labour is
separated from the worker, opposing him as an enemy power in this enchanted
world, but the instruments of labour that once was his personal property
and the elongation of his hands does become alien to him, even an enemy,
something to be destroyed. If the guildsman’s tool is the elongation of
his fingers, then the modern worker at the production line is the mere
elongation of his tool. The process of labour is understood only by the
engineer who works in his laboratory outside the factory. Physical labour
and mental labour are differentiated, they begin to fight, and in the meanwhile
men sink to be partial workers: these are the characteristics of this strange
distorted motion. Man disappears, and there remain turners and engineers,
Germans and Frenchmen, townsmen and villagers, capitalists and workers.
Labour is not forming but deforming man. Men can only be men outside labour
hours: what a contradiction! Heat and electric energy have brought people
close to one another, but at the same time -
under the supervision of capital - it squeezed
them into blind character masks. Bringing them together was still a historical
achievement, and it was achieved by the bourgeoisie through the vast extension
of the productive forces.
But what can the bourgeoisie do with nuclear energy? A society where
production is not regulated by the law of value, where man is the master
of the objectual aspects of his labour, could definitely use it: with it
the differences between physical labour and mental labour, village and
town, nation and nation could be abolished, and a new historical form of
labour could be shaped: of which the Entfremdung would no more be a structive
characteristic, as Hegel believed it - always
postulating the passing category of civil labour in the “sich entfremdete
Geist”- ; which will no more be measurable in
hours; and of which the “tasteless story” of Menenius Agrippa will no more
be true, for hands and brain will not be projected into different persons.
Division of labour, quantitatively measurable labour, the irrationality
of the motion of product of labour: these can be left behind.
If, however, the productive forces that emerge in classical capitalism
launched a contradictory evolution, then the declining capitalism
with its last great productive force, the nuclear energy, is able to nothing
but destroy. The brilliant source of humankind’s future wealth has
been distorted into a terrible weapon of the world bourgeoisie. The remarkable
difference between the introduction of electric and nuclear energies is
not a mere accident.
And the physicist? The physicist doesn’t want to destroy. But the atomic
bomb, the product of his labour, withdrawn from his hands, becomes his
master in the same way as the shoe becomes the master of the worker when
it is taken from his hands. The physicist created the conditions of
one of the most important leaps in humankind’s development, the conditions
of a society without classes; and the product of his labour has become
a weapon in the war against the classless society, a weapon in the pompous
fortress of capitalism.
2. It cannot be surprising that such a discovery with its unmatched
significance in the history of humankind causes crucial changes in human
thinking as well. As a result of the exploration of the atomic structure,
the alliance of metaphysical materialism and formal logic collapsed, though
it had been ruling over natural sciences for hundreds of years, and it
had connected the very concept of matter to the notion of material structure
of the 18th and 19th centuries: the notion of rushing
billiard balls in empty space with only measurable properties. As Du Bois
Reymond (since then classically) put it (1872): “Cognition of nature -
that is, acquiring scientific knowledge of the world of bodies with the
help of and in the terms of theoretical natural sciences -
lies in reducing changes in the world of bodies to motions of atoms, motions
caused by time-independent central forces. Hence cognition of nature
is the dissolving of natural processes in the mechanics of atoms.” Since
then it has turned out that this picture is an approximation valid only
in earthly dimensions, and it is as useless in the million light year regions
of the universe as in the tiny cosmos of the atomic nucleus. The rapid,
eruptive development of science has made deeper and deeper demands on human
thinking that was used to intermediate dimensions when building scientific
concepts: the exploding qualitative transformation of live and inanimate
nature - the unfolding of matter’s history full
of revolutions - on the one hand, the constant
changing of the picture we conceive of nature on the other, have proved
clearly that science is a reflection of an ever changing material world
on an ever changing human mind, where the coincidence of image and object
will never follow. The structure of matter is constantly changing -
we can observe on the small scale how the cosmic radiation, the mere oscillation
of the electromagnetic field, transforms into masses bearing negative and
positive charges [2] - and we
are beginning to realise a vast tide (a tide in which the subsequent states
are connected not only by the thin chain of causation but by relations
much broader, much more complicated, more alive) of which our earthly world
is only a provincial corner in space and time with its generally peacefully
balanced atomic configurations [3], and with its slow particles
with relatively constant masses [4]. In this idyll, however,
everything is a mere historical category, even the carbon atom which, with
its peculiar character, has launched this wonderful and maybe momentary
awakening of matter to self consciousness. In the immense density chaos
of distant stars [5] we would look in vain for this strange
symbiosis of six neutrons and six protons [6], not to mention
the shell of six electrons which, with its fellows, is able to join in
to the magnificent round dance, the base of the organic world [7],
but we would probably search in vain for the dialectics of protons and
neutrons: matter is a dense ancestral mass of neutrons [8],
which hardly knows anything about the tension of electric charges dissolved
in the dynamic balance of the atom, nor about the electric charge itself;
here the opposites of matter are yet in a sleep of germs, ripening the
emergence of diverse forms of their motion. Chemical laws are not valid
yet, since there are no atoms that could fuse as molecules and then part
again; and what meaning could Coulomb’s Law get when electron and proton
haven’t parted yet, when positrons and electrons in a beam of gamma light
are waiting for the proper historical moment [9] to show
their corpuscular aspects? And if we go further, peeping into dim shapes
with groping imagination, towards the final, undifferentiated unity of
mass and energy, of mass and space, where, perhaps, existence is boiling
without quantitative law, then it is not difficult to convince ourselves
that the present state cannot be the final one (which is implied gloomily
by the red shift in the spectra of stars, not known whether it suggests
the explosion of our universe). Therefore, as the only thesis of materialism,
there remains an infinitely broad Leninian axiom postulating an existence
independent of our mind, of which our mind reflects constantly more
and more, without ever exhausting it.
This picture differs qualitatively from the world view of classical
physics which described a seemingly ever moving universe -
for example, it revealed the firm iron bars of bridges to be busy swarms
of molecules which can, with certain probability, disperse at any moment
- but this motion was governed by eternal laws.
Even Hegel himself, who recognised the revolutionary dialectics of the
history of society, thought of nature as the limit of his method. In his
opinion, historical change, as opposed to nature where change is only circular,
that is, the repetition of the same, takes place not just on the surface
but in the notion. The notion itself - the law
- is what changes.
The great achievement of modern physics is planting historism into
natural science (of course not in the narrow idiographic, Rickertian
sense!), thus eliminating all types of nomothetic-idiographic dualism [10].
And here we can think not only of the results of astrophysics which deprive
the earthly forms of matter from their absolute and exclusive character,
because we can think of those contradictory structures so frequent in modern
physics: the opposites of mass and energy, of light and particle, of particle
and wave, contrasts that exclude each other conceptually but are still
inseparable, transforming into each other. (According to the classical
scientific ideal which could deal with problems only in which the identity
or opposition of only two things could be examined at once, a scientific
result which postulates the identity and the opposition of two poles at
once is viewed as false: contradiction, therefore not true. The Hegelian
dialectics for the case of the spirit, and its firm version, the Marxist
economy for the case of the society, show that such contradictions do not
point to the incorrectness of our opinions but they belong to the self-development
of the spirit, to the essence of the motions of society. Modern physics
has resolved the temporary splitting of natural and social realities that
came this way.)
These dialectic structures are naturally not yet processed by logic
at all today; but it is certain that the mere conceptual list of dialectical
structures is absolutely unimportant and épatez le bourgeois-like
as far as they are emphasised only as exotic (the more they upset our present
intuition, the more effective they are); but they immediately become precious
heuristic principles when we start looking for the historical dialectics
lying behind the contingent, formal elements of conceptual dialectics.
The opposition of the exchange-value and the use-value within commodity
was already recognised by Ricardo. Marx’s revolutionary deed was to show
that the commodity, as a unity of these opposites, is a historical category,
the antithetic phase in the dialectic line of product-commodity-product
[11]. The problem is not simple. Since, after all, the Marxist
dialectics literally - conceptually as much
as historically - is properly supported by examples
only in The Capital [12], it is difficult to cope simply
with analogies. One thing is for certain: conceptual dialectics is useful
only in the case when it is backed by historical dialectics. The appearance
of conceptual dialectics in modern physics means the necessity of the historical
method.
We can see now that the world of eternal, universal ideas borrowed from
mathematical conceptualisation failed not only in the field of the history
of ideas but in natural sciences as well. But if the old ideal in the mathematical
science held that the cognitive subject must withdraw totally from the
result of cognition (so that the image can really be objective) and that
knowledge becomes truly scientific when all the subjective characteristics
of the cognitive subject have vanished from it (“Subjekt überhaupt”)
then historism - the ideological intensification
of class antagonisms following the wavering of the ideological supremacy
of the bourgeoisie - denies even the possibility
of such a cognition, but naturally only in the field of social existence.
But the legacy of the resulting dualism has met serious doubts owing to
the Heisenberg uncertainty relation, which determines the smallest change
one can cause in nature when touching it with the finest “finger”,
a photon or an electron. (Note that with humankind the biological evolution
has virtually come to an end; humans evolve in their instruments of labour
as if in elongated organs.) Of course it is conceivable that the Heisenberg
relation is just a temporary, approximate result of science. One can assume
that this minimal uncertainty can decrease or transform structurally. But
it will have no influence on the fact that, while as a condition of scientific
cognition it has been held until now that the observer must not disturb
the observed object, today this disturbance is acknowledged as a condition
of scientific cognition without which no effect would get to us at all.
(The sociological condition of the emergence, and then the disintegration,
of a world view from the primitive man’s demonic view of nature, a world
view in which nature is independent of man and is ruled by strict superhuman
laws, to which it is possible to reflect as an outer passive “observer”,
this condition can easily be explained by the theory of commodity fetishism
[13].)
Atomic physics therefore has a huge importance concerning the general
world view and human thinking. The rigidly separated -
in subject as well as in method - disciplines
of metaphysical materialism and historism are taken over by the uniform
cosmos of historical materialism.
*
But the bourgeoisie is as incapable of exploiting the results of
modern physics in philosophy as in production. And like the atomic bomb,
the practical result of the atomic physicist’s work, having left the laboratory
becomes independent of his will, and then turns against him, so becomes
the theoretical result of his labour, independent of or against his will,
a servant of the demands of the bourgeois class ideology, the authentiser
of all kinds of fideist-idealist chaos in the ideological front of the
struggle against socialism. This is how the questions of free will and
of moral responsibility, the problems of materiality of existence, of God
and the world, could get into the centre of the philosophical arguments
concerning modern physics: such complexes whose examinations did not help
at all in the specific developments of natural and human sciences. This
is obviously necessary in the case of ideologists belonging to a class
whose existential uncertainty leads to the obsessed search for the elixir
of life in every field, and which thus looses all objective connections
to reality.
Two prototypes of these ideologists are Jeans and Eddington.
In Jeans’ case the main question is the material versus spiritual character
of existence. Susan Stebbing in her book [14] on the modern
physical idealism shows how Jeans# makes the picture of the
universe subjective when he steals “senseless” distances and “lonely” stars
into it in order to get to a hostile, cold cosmos where we live our momentary
lives as miserable nothings, where our lives are not purposeful and essential
at all. This picture does not require any specific element from modern
physics; Kant could have associated the same to the vast distances of the
sky, instead of the experience of the moral world order. (Poetry of course
reflects society quicker and more sensitively than physical or philosophical
world views: 50 years before Kant, Pope writes: “A mighty maze, but not
without a plan”, while 50 years before Jeans, Matthew Arnold says: And
we are here as on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle
and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night” [15].)
Out of this hopelessness leads then the Jeansian metaphysics: the cosmos
is only a thought in God’s mind. For if there is no “matter”, there are
no “real” physical relations, then the insignificance of man and the terrible
emptiness of the world are ceased.
Hence it is not surprising that Jeans’ philosophy stands on such a subjective,
we could say, emotional base, and that his epistemological concepts are
incredibly confused and contradictory. It is true though that exact, distinct
thinking, and the existential “anxiety” [16] which makes
all objective relations to the outer world impossible, are incompatible
notions as well. Therefore it is no wonder that Jeans, who thinks of nature
as a subjective category, holds that Heisenberg showed: “nature has more
horrors of exactness and distinctness than of anything else”.
Jeans’ nature actually is a social category: in it the capitalist society
is extended to be a cosmic vision. In capitalist society the position of
individuals is characterised - as an upside-down
appearance of a social constraint stronger than in any previous social
form - by the loneliness in a hostile, alien
world depicted by Jeans; where existence is
senseless, where man is nothing, where the mood of death depresses the
souls. (The realistically disadvantageous cosmic perspectives do
not seem to have a special impression on men: they did not take notice
at all of the heat death of the universe made plausible by the entropy
theorem!) But all these are not eternal, unchangeable natural laws but
a human net of relations that can pretend to be a natural law only in the
extreme phase of the reification of society.
From Jeans’ conception there follows unavoidably what Stebbing calls
“the escape of Jeans”: the fideist construction mentioned above by which
he becomes a trivial apologist for the anti-human capitalism;
the hopeless and senseless world is a mere illusion: drive matter out and
the nightmare disappears. If “the world is purely thought” then the spirit
is not any more an “accidental trespasser in the realm of matter” but something
“creative and controlling”. With this mental construction, however, Jeans
could not put an end to the painful reality of capitalism reflected by
his cosmos so faithfully; this -
somewhat indirect - ideology can ease only those
for whom the dehumanising effect of capitalist production is only momentary
discomfort, “Unbehagen” [17].
The fact that in Jeans’ last book [18] published in 1942
we can find, instead of his well-known brave and certain style, only careful
ideas that mention his old theories only as possibilities, is in close
connection with the wavering of the feeling of security of the English
bourgeoisie to an extent that cannot be recovered by such an ideological
weaponry.
The base of Eddington’s philosophy is the three-fold structure
of reality: there is a “familiar” world, the world of colours, sounds,
fragrances, there is a “physical” world, the world of oscillations, potentials,
Heisenberg-matrices, and there is an unknowable, “real” world, of which
the physical world is only an empty shadow or frame. This “real” world
used to be the realm of theologians but now the roles have changed: if
physicists used to refer to theologians as to the possessors of “higher”
knowledge, then today theologians refer to idealist physicists: “science
itself tells us so”. Modern physics, of course, does not postulate such
an unknowable world any more than classical physics did. The Eddingtonian
three-fold splitting of the world is still not Eddington’s arbitrary mental
construction but the historical result of an ideological process necessary
in its main lines. In what follows we attempt to outline this process.
This was not the first example of such an attack against “the physical
world” in history. Think of Goethe. But Goethe started his attack
from the “familiar” world, and not from an unknowable world like Eddington.
“Goethe’s theory of colours must be viewed as an attempt which is meant
to save the reality of sense impressions from the attack of science” -
writes Helmholtz* . Indeed, Goethe claims not to “seek
for something behind the phenomena”** , he voices “the superiority
of ordinary human reason” over “the chamber of torture of the concepts”***
.
But how did concepts become chambers of torture? How did this mental
(yet two-fold) splitting of uniform reality happen, characterised by Heisenberg
as “Newton’s and Goethe’s theories of colour deal with two different layers
of reality”? [19] According to Whitehead [20]
- who illustrates the same process in the case
of Wordsworth and Shelley - this originates
from the discordance of man’s aesthetic intuition and the mechanism of
science. This discordance, however, is not an eternal category at all.
The same quantitative and mechanistic structures that Wordsworth felt too
narrow and that are “chambers of torture” for Goethe, had mediated the
harmony of spheres for Kepler.
The explanation for the phenomenon is yet simple on the whole. When
products became commodities (things deprived from every perceptible feature
except for exchange-value), when the concrete, directly human form of production
was transformed into a rationalised mechanism torn to partial processes
measurable with a watch, then the whole field of human knowledge, from
geometry through physics and biology to ethics, was flooded by a new set
of abstraction (the notion of the quantitative in the first place). This
new group of concepts, despite its being objective, discovering the
essence of nature, therefore independent of its manifestation in the
motion of commodities, has unrecognisably fused with the spiritless number-world
of the motion of commodities, with the mechanical nature prevailing over
man in the capitalist production. Therefore in a society where class rule
appears as a “feature” of machines to rule over men, where social and natural
relations - as a result of social relations
becoming natural ones - seem to transform into
one another, there a realistic illusion is born by necessity that quantitative
concept-building, and hence the concept of “physical world”, is “responsible”
for the dehumanisation of capitalism. This dehumanisation, however, does
not unfold itself in the era lasting for centuries when the capitalist
production is yet an island in the feudal social order: in this time the
capitalist is the citizen, the representative of humanity, the hopeful
deposit of its infinite extension, just like quantitative concept-building
seems to open up infinite perspectives for science -
and for the social success of science. But the bourgeois reality soon changes
these perspectives into illusions.
In the “physical world” natural things become mere coat-racks for numbers
- that reflect their objective essence! -
; but at the same time they, as reificated forms
of human relations, obtain quantitative features: the land will be characterised,
for example besides its potassium content, by its allowance, or gold will
be described not only by its density and atomic mass but also by its interest.
And when we have characterised the Sun by giving the numerical value of
its energy then the energy of man appears in joules as well.
But while the characteristic mathematical data of the “physical world”
supersede neither the beauty of the Earth nor the brilliance of gold, the
quantities of reificated nature turn grey both man and nature in an imperialist
way, and deprive them from all other features.
In reality, therefore, we are indeed faced with a double world: the
unity of the non-excluding opposites of the physical world and the familiar
world which reflects the natural existence of things and, as an
opposition to it, the fetish world reflecting the social existence
of things. But the coincidence that the dialectical structure of the motion
of commodities and of factory production turned out to be isomorphic with
the structure of the essence of nature, and the fact that man was led by
the economic unfolding of his own historical movement to, so to say, resound
with this isomorphism, strengthen to a vast extent the objectual skin of
social relations that was necessarily deposited in commodity production,
and the objective splitting is forced to appear in the seemingly rigid
opposite of familiar and physical worlds; the
physical world (actually, by developing the productive forces, the extensor
of humanity!) will seem to drown humanity, and the familiar world will
seem the only object of direct human relations to the world. In
reality, the natural nature is obviously restricted to the familiar world
only in the eyes of the men of feudalism. Wordsworth and Goethe stay imprisoned
in this restricted narrow perspective when they start their magnificent
attacks against the dehumanised nature.
But if this is the war of humanism against capitalism (admittedly, in
restricted perspective), the situation is absolutely different in the case
of the present criticism of science in the name of humanism today. The
problem is new even in its form: up to now we have observed the splitting
of our picture of nature into two, but we can speak about a three-fold
splitting in the new world view.
The question arises why the criticism of the physical world cannot appear
from the side of the familiar world in the age of imperialism as well.
This is so because even the memory and the possibility of all realistic
forms of non-reificated man-nature relation have vanished from the intuition
fascinated by the fetishes of the capitalist production. But does this
mean that, with the vanishing of our critical standpoint, the physical
world as the new relation of man and nature can be established without
contradictions? No; the criticism remains there,
even as a formless Unbehagen for a moment, in order to proceed soon from
a new direction: from the direction of the unknowable world.
In Goethe’s criticism of Newton the fact played a crucial role that
in Goethe’s time the physical world had not penetrated yet into technology
enough, it had not measured itself in the vast practical field that it
created later in the 19th century. The Goetheian standpoint,
according to which man’s power is greater in the familiar world, can arise
only in a society where the productive forces have not yet been transformed
and suddenly increased by physics. Goethe is answered from capitalism by
Heisenberg; that for our scientific world
view - which creates our domination over nature
- “we had to pay a great prize”, we had to give
up our direct relation to nature [21]. Thus the capitalist
development splits progressive humanism into the Heisenbergian “progression”
neglecting humanity and the Goetheian “reactionary” humanism. But now we
want to emphasise that the vanishing of the familiar world as a possible
relation between man and nature, and the further evolution of reification,
are made possible, even necessary, by the progression, by the (specifically
capitalist) development of the productive forces.
The argumentation of Heisenberg, however, does not prove adequate at
all when examined in more detail. In the age of world-wars the development
of physics does not increase man’s domination over nature any more, and
thus the physical world seemingly becomes a bloodless, abstracted (from
reality) empty frame in its negative sense, for which it is not worth making
any Heisenbergian “sacrifice” at all.
This is the way in which all concrete forms of relation to nature become
senseless for man. Thus the desire is increased to get to real nature
in another way which is different from all previous ways, may be it the
Bergsonian “épouser l’essence des choses”, or any other form of
direct cognition without concepts. What is blind for the progressive citizens,
like Anschauung ohne Begriff, becomes the only source of light for the
declining bourgeoisie! And so - in the hopeless
deadlock of these experiments - the unknowable
nature is born. Nevertheless, the unknowable world signifies the failure
of bourgeois rationality [22]. As Goethe could not separate
the physical world from the reificated world, so confuses modern physical
idealism the failure of the bourgeois reason towards nature with the failure
of reason itself towards nature. Bergson and Eddington are the victims
of the same ideological shift, both of their theories show the bourgeois
ideology becoming illusion, its purposes becoming unavailable, its rationality
turning to irrationality.
How incapable the bourgeois ideologists are of evaluating objectively
the important logical results of modern physics, is especially shown by
the example of the principle of causality. Modern physics has undoubtedly
modified our notion of causality. It showed that the universe is a machine
which is not perfectly fixed, it has a certain allowed “play” determined
by the Planck constant. Only the minuteness of the Planck constant compared
to the quantities of our world makes it possible that the statistical laws
of microphysics can take the form of causal laws that are valid in the
macro-world by strong necessity.
But this is not the first time for physics to modify the principle of
causality. Causality - as the general but concrete
law of the objective relations of the material world -
will undoubtedly appear as a historical category, and its mental reflection
has already proved to be a historical category. We must not forget that
one of the most basic laws of the macro-world, the Newtonian law of motion,
finds a cause for the change in velocity, but not for the change in location.
(This was not understood by Kepler, and this is why he could not interpret
his kinematic laws in terms of dynamic ones. Since he -
standing on the ground of a blind notion of causality -
was looking for the cause of change in location in forces effective
along the tangent of the orbits, which forces were naturally not
found.) In this sense we can say that as, according to modern physics,
the familiar principle of causality is made possible by the minuteness
of the Planck constant, so holds classical physics that this principle
is based on the smallness of n in the law
dnx
m ------ = K
dtn
m ------ = K
dtn
(n is not greater than 2); were it
not valid, motions would have a much greater -
in a sense different from the one used in quantum mechanics -
“acausal” play.
It is now obvious that the mental reflection of the objective respect
of causality, the law of causality, has reached a higher degree in its
development. The only remaining problem can be the one whether this development
has any influence on the question of free will. The answer is: no, because
the brain processes initiating human actions are macroscopic, and the present
phase of the theory of causation offers yet no guideline to deal with the
problem of free will.
But such an objective evaluation of scientific problems is not possible
in a society which, from physics, “expects guiding too, a world view that
guarantees the utmost earthly good, the inner peace of the soul” [23],
but without the criticism of the capitalist relations of production.
And so it happened that the newer development of causality divided physicists
into two opposing groups: the “jubilants” and the “mourners”[24].
Capitalist society in its imperialist era puts more and more shackles
on the individual, surrounding him with its drowning, seemingly objectual
net in which he cannot make a movement. Limit and freedom, of course, are
generally not mutually excluding terms but presuppose one another. In the
capitalist society these split into - realistically
- rigid opposites. I cannot go now into the
details of this process exceedingly peculiar to the capitalist order. I
can only hint that while Goethe, for instance, could still say that “In
der Beschrä nkung zeigt sich erst
der Meister, und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben”, this conception
is totally alien to the art of modern civil society: epigonal classicism
on the one hand and the anarchy of -isms on the other have taken over the
place of the great realism. Only two standpoints are possible within the
capitalist society: the acceptance of limits, “trust in and total devotion
to the higher power ruling our whole lives” [25], or the
absolute rejection of limits in the action gratuite [26].
The dissolution of the unity of limit and freedom is therefore not only
a subjective appearance, not only an “error” in the ideology of bourgeois
thinkers, but a very real appearance, the real reflection of a real historical
process. The only way towards the tertium datur is socialism, which absolutely
transcends the capitalist society.
Our two poles are clearly demonstrated in the ideological movements
swarming around physics: the action gratuite, this miserable and
distorted copy of freedom, is recognised and seen verified by the “jubilants”
in the unpredictable, playful electron of quantum mechanics. But the “mourners”
turn against this groundless anti-capitalist rebellion distorted to be
reactionary in its result, and they, starting from the incompatibility
of action gratuite and human dignity, from this seemingly right
argument which in essence idealises the capitalist reality (for where in
capitalist society is any human dignity?), reach the conclusion that the
domination of causality must be restored in quantum mechanics, and that
only causality (in its old form!) as an eternal category makes scientific
thinking possible## . Hence the bourgeois ideology today leaves
only two ways open: the ways of irrationalism and of the restriction of
rational theory.
We can therefore see how the declining capitalism turns back all the
proceedings of humankind; how the most
brilliant, most revolutionary era of natural sciences is reflected in the
appearance of the seemingly insoluble crisis by the scientific public opinion
fascinated by the view of the capitalist crisis. Naturally it is not a
pure coincidence that, while the productive kinds of energy of capitalism
brought an atheist and rational atmosphere, the mass murderer atomic energy
hypocritically arises religious and irrational ideologies everywhere. This
is how an idealist monism can be built from the blocks of a uniform materialist
world view.
*
3. As capitalism has come from the individual producer through the concentration
of the instruments of production to the institutionally organised production
which is hence systematic in its cells but chaotic in the whole range,
so has it come in science from the isolated scientist through the growing
concentration of scientific apparatus to the institutionally organised
scientific work which is hence systematic in its cells but chaotic in the
whole range. Moreover, in the crisis of the bourgeois world power which
by today has become permanent, when a scientific equipment worth millions
is concentrated in one laboratory that works strictly according to a systematic
plan, then not only it is impossible to speak about planned scientific
work in a world-wide range but the internationality of scientific research
also vanishes, it falls into hermetically isolated Anglo-Saxon, French,
Russian sciences. As the exchange of the products of industrial production,
the world trade, has ceased, the exchange of scientific results, the international
science, has ceased in the same way.
And, as in the capitalist development of production, a parallel process
has started, of which the essence is to deprive and to alienate workers
from their instruments of production, so the development of science has
led, through the abolition of private libraries and of private laboratories,
to scientific factories owned by the bourgeois state or a certain tycoon.
*
The purpose of this brief discourse was to show how close natural sciences
are tied to society, how strongly determined their development is by the
economic foundation. We saw that, as in the capitalist society the development
of the productive forces involves the seeds of their limitation, the general
theoretical proceeding launched by the natural sciences is distorted into
the narrow canon of class ideology, and the scientific organisation cannot
exceed the state of development of the organising forms of production.
But does the dialectics of conceptual development not remain (delayed or
accelerated, perhaps changed in its motives by the speed of the progress
of society) untouched? Will hence physics not be an always more and more
exact reflection of nature? In this way, in the development of conceptual
reflection, we can discover the pure, immanent sphere of science, and only
its radiation, the material limits of its motion, can be touched by the
distortion of a society struggling with controversies!
But what should we mean by “more and more” exact reflection? Conceptual
development is not quantitative development that renders the ever larger
concentric circles of exactness. Nor it is “logical”, for conceptual development
changes logic as well. So what guarantees the “more and more” exact system
of concepts?
Does the sociological sphere not penetrate into scientific concept-building
itself?
Dealing with this question on this occasion falls outside the limits
of this paper. But it is at any rate certain that the examination of the
subjective, sociologically determined aspects of scientific concept-building
can only support us in the belief that the objective aspects play an ever
larger role in the development of science; the
nature independent of human mind is reflected more and more completely,
in an ever larger domain of human practice, in our “physical world”.
Notes and References
(Given in footnotes in the original paper. For explanation see end
of Preface.)
1. Marx: Das Kapital. [The Capital, Vol. I, Part III, Ch.
5, Sect. 1 (The Labour Process), second paragraph]
2. Materialisation of gamma rays.
3. Protons, neutrons and electrons, the stable forms of
this dynamic balance, are rather rare phenomena in the universe (the word
“generally” refers to unstable systems, the radioactive elements).
4. According to the theory of relativity, the mass of a
particle travelling at a considerable velocity compared to the speed of
light is increased compared to its rest mass.
5. The latest results of astrophysics tell us that in some
stars the matter is condensed at extremely high density.
6. The carbon nucleus consists of six protons and six neutrons,
surrounded by an electron cloud of six electrons.
7. We think of the benzene ring here.
8. See Landau’s paper in Nature, 1938, p. 333 (“neutronic
state of matter”).
9. It must be near a heavy nucleus, in order for the impulse
law to be satisfied.
10. In Rickert’s opinion, reality becomes nature if we look at
it with regards to the universal, and becomes history if we look at it
with regards to the particular and the individual. Having this in mind,
Rickert - following Windelband - opposes the universalising, nomothetic
procedure of natural sciences to the individualising, idiographic procedure
of historical sciences.
11. Molnár, Erik: Dialektika, p. 116
12. On the logic of The Capital see: Molnár: Dialektika,
pp. 88-117, and Fogarasi, Béla, Marxizmus és logika. [Marxism
and Logic]
13. Lukács, G.: Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein. [History
and Class Consciousness] Berlin, 1923, p. 109.
14. Stebbing: Philosophy and the Physicists, Penguin edition,
1937.
# Beginning of the part which is greatly identical
to the body of the paper The Criticism of Physical Idealism.
15. Whitehead: Science and the Modern World, pp. 99-101.
[Lakatos quoted the original English text in the footnote. The cited poems
are: Alexander Pope: Essay on Man, and: Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach]
16. Its philosophical representation is the Heideggerian Angst.
17. Freud: Das Unbehagen in der Kultur.
18. Jeans: Physics and Philosophy, 1942. Published in Hungary
in 1945: Új fizikai világkép
* In: The Scientific Researches of Goethe, p.
359. A lecture from 1859 Jan. The same lecture was given by Helmholtz in
1892, at the meeting of the Weimar Goethe Society.
** In: Goethe: Scientific Studies, Suhrkamp Edition, Vol.
12, p. 307.
*** Loc. cit.
19. Heisenberg’s talk in Budapest on Goethe’s theory of colours.
In: Matematikai és Fizikai Lapok, 1943 (Translated by Faragó
Péter.)
20. Whitehead: Science and Modern World, 1926. [See chapter: The
Romantic reaction]
21. Heisenberg: Wandlungen in den Grundlagen der Naturwissenschaft,
Leipzig, 1935 [in Hungarian: Változások a természettudomány
alapjaiban, Egyetemi nyomda, 1946]
22. This cannot be applied mechanically to the Kantian epistemology
because that is based on the Wolffian dogmatism and is therefore directed
mainly against feudal ideology.
23. Planck: Sinn und Grenzen der exakten Naturwissenschaften.
24. Eddington’s terminology.
25. “Free action” that falls outside every causal chain.
26. Planck, loc. sit. p. 131.
## End of common part.
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