The Crisis in Physics by Christopher Caudwell

Author:Christopher Caudwell
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Verso Books

5. THE MOVEMENT OF LOGIC

Kant’s critical idealism in fact cleared the ground for such a development. With Kant there is the flow of phenomena but they flow in a framework of determinism: this however is an imposed framework. However the very fact that phenomena are susceptible of such a framework makes them lawful; and the fact that the mind must impose this framework is yet another law of reality. Hence necessity is still grounded on ‘faith’ in the existence of physical laws, and this faith is reflected in the queer appendage which exists the other side of the screen—matter ‘on trust,’ or the unknowable thing in itself. This thing-in-itself is a kind of pledge for the honesty of the law of determinism. It is a reflection of the mind the other side of the screen—the two necessities supplement each other.

It remained for Hegel to point out the non-existence of the unknowable and delete the thing in itself. This did not however lead to positivism, for he substituted for the necessity of objective reality or mechanism the necessity of subjective reality, or logic. Phenomena unfolded themselves with the determinism of logic. But in doing so, the mind dissolved into Ideas which began to lead an existence independent of the subject. They were absolute Ideas and unfolded themselves according to their own necessity. They had therefore become objective reality, and Logic had become equivalent to the God of Malebranche, the substance of Spinoza, the spirit of Newton and the matter of Diderot. There were two important differences. These Ideas, just because they had sprung from the loins of the human subject, changed—they unfolded themselves. Cartesian and Newtonian objective reality, being grounded on God, had always been eternal and changeless. Thus objectivity for the first time had been given the quality of self-evolution and change, because of its former history attached to the subject. It had become dialectic—or, as Malebranche would put it—pagan. It had returned to the live matter of Epicurus, but containing within itself all the subjective complexity developed in the interim. Object is the only form in which the bourgeois can know it: that of mechanism. The object can only blossom into consciousness of society again in the form in which the proletariat can know it, as the Nature upon which Man is active in the concrete relation of society. But during its development in the human head, it had torn itself away from any outside reality on which to ‘practice.’ Thus it lacked the very means of self-discovery and self-development which is afforded by practice on objective reality. The Hegelian Universe could only unfold with beautiful accuracy what was already in it and then stop—with Hegel. It could not drag into itself any fresh knowledge from outside (as man does by practice on objects) because there was no ‘outside.’ Hence Hegelianism could not be a physicist’s creed, for it denied the need for physics. It could only be a speculator’s creed.

Yet its criticism of the Kantian thing-in-itself was bound to leave its mark on physics.

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