Nigel Tubbs
University of Winchester
Studies in Philosophy and Education, v.30 no. 1 pp. 53-66 Jan 2011
Know Thyself: macrocosm and microcosm
‘we are a way for the cosmos to know itself’ – Carl Sagan
Introduction
As my reviewers pointed out this is by any standards an ambitious paper.1 It stands or
falls on the basis of three claims: that the idea of ‘education in Hegel’ (Tubbs, 2008) is a
conceptual schema of the modern metaphysical relation between experience and learning;
that it can offer a re-thinking of the relation between macrocosm and microcosm in a
philosophy of nature; and that therefore one can have an educational theory of the
universe. One reviewer commented here that ‘there is no educational theory of the
universe in any intellectually sober version of it’. Perhaps so. But I want to explore
whether an educational theory of the universe is possible in something like ‘the
Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk’ (Hegel, 1977, 27).
At the outset let me say something about the concrete circumstances, themselves
educationally significant, in which this article arises. At the University of Winchester
(UK) in 2010 we began teaching an undergraduate degree programme in Modern Liberal
Arts. The programme holds that the three areas which have defined liberal arts education
for more than two thousand years are nature, politics and truth. Broadly speaking, in
liberal arts education the quadrivium searches for laws of nature in the universe, the
trivium for the good in human life, and philosophy and theology (around logic and
1
In the first few pages of this article and then at times beyond that, I am employing the unusual strategy of
responding to some of my anonymous reviewers’ comments. I want to acknowledge the high quality of
their responses, and to thank them very much for the ways in which they engaged with this speculative
piece and responded to its spirit of enquiry as well as its inherent weaknesses. I thank, too, Gert Biesta, for
his support and trust.
1
dialectic) continue their struggle for sovereignty in this search for truth. But uniting these
three concerns in liberal arts education has been the search for first principles. A
programme calling itself Modern Liberal Arts can reasonably be expected to have a
modern take on this search for first principles. In the current academic climate one might
expect the Programme to hold that the search for first principles is anachronistic in a
pluralist and post-foundational age. However, this is not our view.2 Instead, the
philosophy of education that underpins the degree and this article is this: the search for
first principles currently falls within a Kantian and Hegelian structure of modern
metaphysics, a structure whose educational substance inheres in relations of revel and
repose between opposites. The natural universe and the political universe express these
relations, and it is the job of modern metaphysics and of modern liberal arts education to
re-interpret the notion of first principles in this philosophically dynamic modern context.
The following article attempts part of this re-interpretation by investigating the make up
of and the relation between the macrocosm and the microcosm of the natural universe. No
doubt, for some readers this content, dealing with among other things Heisenberg’s
notion of quantum mechanics, falls outside any appropriate definition of the relation
between philosophy and education. But this is to overlook that one of the ways in which
education and philosophy were conjoined in liberal arts education was precisely through
the struggle for self-discovery in the relation between macrocosm and microcosm, or
between the heavenly spheres and its elementary particles. It is to this tradition of ‘know
thyself’ that our new degree programme aligns itself, in particular around the educative
significance of the groundlessness and uncertainty of modern metaphysics. I will expand
on this point in a moment. The struggle in liberal arts education to know thyself has
always taken place in the relations between macrocosm and microcosm, or between the
universal, the theory of everything, and the particular, the theory of one thing. One
reviewer warned here that traducing concepts in nature into philosophical concepts is a
categorical error. My reply is that it is not the categories of universal and particular or
macrocosm and microcosm that I am comparing. Rather it is the notion of the experience
of relation, both within each pairing and between the different pairings, that is under
2
I will return to this issue below in relation to Zizek’s notion of absolute particularity.
2
investigation.3 By ‘relation’ here I refer to the concept of ‘education in Hegel’ as that
which comprehends the philosophical significance of the experience of relation as
education. As such, ‘education in Hegel’ expresses this relation between opposites as
both a philosophical experience with educational import and an educational experience
with philosophical import.
I am responding to all three reviewers when I say that, from experience, I know that
‘education in Hegel’ greatly irritates some people.4 It is deemed too post-foundational to
satisfy a right-Hegelian reading of the Absolute, and not open or groundless enough to
please post-foundational theorists. One reviewer noted that ‘Educational theories built on
post-structuralism very often have similar perspectives’ to those found in my article. My
work has at times been received in this way because of its emphasis on uncertainty and
groundlessness. It is (obviously) less well received here when I retrieve metaphysics and
a notion of truth to accompany this openness.
It is this openness to truth as education that I am employing below in formulating an
educational philosophy of nature for modern liberal arts. I do so mindful of four things:
Alan Sokal’s (1996) spoof article on gibberish in cultural theories of modern physics;
Stephen Hawking’s (2005) lament that philosophy has long since withdrawn from any
joint venture with science into the educational mysteries of the universe; the need in a
Modern Liberal Arts degree to retrieve and perhaps reform a philosophy of nature; and
finally, the unavoidably over-ambitious nature of this project to conceive an educational
theory of the universe.
3
Clearly this analysis of relation cannot be carried out without definitions of the content of the pairs of
categories, but within the argument I am about to present all content is in any case always actual, which
means that all definitions are always already mediated in and through social and political experience. If
anything the reverse is the case to that noted by my reviewer, that is, it is most often actual definitions that
are traduced into merely abstract content.
4
Not, however, Ross Abbinnett (2010) who reviewed Education in Hegel in this Journal.
3
The article begins by describing very briefly the modern metaphysics of Kant and Hegel 5
and then by reading the science of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein on the macrocosm
as a version of this modern metaphysics. I emphasise in doing so that I am not comparing
the views of Newton and Einstein with those of Kant and Hegel on time and space.
Instead I am exploring the experience of the relation between their ideas as having
metaphysical and educative import. The second part of the paper looks at the science of
the microcosm in the work of Werner Heisenberg and Slavoj Zizek on quantum
mechanics, and in particular at the metaphysical implications of presuppositions made by
them. As if this were not ambitious enough, in conclusion the paper combines the
metaphysics of macrocosm and microcosm into an educational theory of the universe
around the vocation to know thyself.
Modern Kant/Hegel metaphysics
Modern metaphysics as we employ it in the new Modern Liberal Arts Programme has its
most profound expression in the two great philosophical minds that continue to dominate
European philosophy. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1968) [1781 and 1787] and
Hegel’s Science of Logic (1969) [1812-16] together offer a template for a modern
understanding of the great divide in metaphysics between the in-itself and for-itself. I
hold that these two terms remain essential in understanding the metaphysical character of
modern uncertainty. Kant’s first Critique shows how the object has its truth in-itself
compromised by being unavoidably an object for thought. He sees this unavoidable
mediation as heralding a Copernican revolution in metaphysics because he says it is as
revolutionary to say that objects must conform to thought as it is to say that the earth
orbits the sun and not the other way round. From the point of view of the Aristotelian
identity of truth as in-itself,6 the implication of Kant’s first Critique is that Kant becomes
the great destroyer of the objective truth of reality. Everything known, because it is
known in and through thought, is now known not as in-itself but only as it exists for
I have added this short section to go some way to meeting the reviewers’ requests for more on the idea of
‘education in Hegel’. A fuller account of this idea of modern metaphysics can be found in Tubbs (2009)
chapter 6.
6
I mean here the idea in the Posterior Analytics that what an object is ‘is its explanation, and that it is not
possible for it to be otherwise’ (I.2.71b,11; Aristotle, 1984, 115).
5
4
subjective thought. This instability of a subjective a priori is expressed by Kant in and as
the synthetic a priori judgement. Here the a priori conditions for any knowledge at all
require subjective mediation. Famously this synthetic a priori judgement is described by
Kant as where ‘the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are likewise
conditions for the possibility of the objects of experience’ (Kant, 1968, A158/B197
emphasis removed). The danger with this formulation is that the necessity of subjectivity
for the a priori creates the spectre of an infinite regression, an infinite relativity of truth.
Kant sought to avoid such dialectical regression not by turning to the contingency of the a
priori but by affirming its transcendental status above and beyond experience such that
the pure in-itself is ineffable.
However, this unknowability is protected from contingency by Kant through
presuppositions that become the target of Hegel’s critique of Kant. In the Phenomenology
of Spirit Hegel offers a very simple rejoinder here. Implicit in Kant is the presupposition
that the thought of pure reason is the error of mediation, compared to pure reason without
mediation. For Kant, thought compromises pure reason at the same time as revealing it.
Hegel’s essential modernity lies in his comprehending that this judgement is based on a
pivotal presupposition, namely that truth and thought are irretrievably opposed to each
other. Hegel’s question to Kant is this: in the search to comprehend truth, how is it that
before we find it we yet know enough about truth to know that ‘it’ is unknowable in
thought? Hegel asks Kant if it is this fear of mediation as error that is really the error.
Perhaps, instead, Kant should yield to the truth of the universality of mediation and
change his pre-conceptions of truth accordingly? But Hegel goes further than this by
demonstrating that reason does not just mediate the knowledge of all objects, it also
mediates the knowledge that reason has of itself. As such, it is precisely in the infinite
regression that is produced by reason mediating itself that reason here practises on itself
the mediation that it preaches for everything else. For Hegel this integrity is a new
understanding of rational truth. It is a logic – the logic of a culture of rational self-critique
– where the in-itself is true to itself when it is also for-itself, and where the for-itself or
mediation is seen to be its own truth in-itself. The truth of this new logic and metaphysics
of mediation he called the Notion (Begriff). One reviewer asked if, with this double
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negation, we ‘end up… with certainty after all?’ The answer is No. In the concept of
‘education in Hegel’ the absolute is a culture of certainty and uncertainty, where neither
can survive the other. The formative ambiguity of this philosophical education has
learning as its truth in-and-for-itself: to learn is to gain and at the same time to lose what
is known, including what is known about knowing. The caricatures of the Hegelian
absolute as only truth in-itself or as certainty do not take account of how the Notion
expresses (in Adorno’s phrase) ‘the totality that is false’ (Adorno, 1991, 28).
If Hegel is arguing that the Kantian relativizing of the a priori is universal and
unavoidable, then we can now say that together the metaphysics of Kant and Hegel
expresses the modern shape of the in-itself and the for-itself as the truth of reason in its
own uncertainty. This is the form and content of modern doubt, a doubt that is aporetic,
offering no way or path beyond itself. In Kant we find the in-itself that is for-itself
expressed in the instability of the synthetic a priori. But where Kant ultimately protects
the a priori against the instability of synthesis, Hegel finds logic – an educational logic –
in this instability, expressed as the Notion. As such, Hegel’s Notion is the truth in-andfor-itself of Kant’s relativistic concept of synthesis. It is a principle of uncertainty
because the Notion does not protect the relative a priori from its own instability. Where
Kant protects it from the paradox of infinite relativity, Hegel finds a culture or an
education within the experience which teaches repeatedly that in infinite regress the
certainty and uncertainty of reason always appear together. Where Kant avoids infinite
relativity, Hegel’s principle of uncertainty refuses such avoidance, preferring the view
that it is in our learning, in the culture of certainty and uncertainty, that the truth of their
struggle with each other is constituted.
Newton and Einstein
There is a well rehearsed version of the story of cosmological natural philosophy in the
West. I summarise very briefly now Hawking’s (2005) version of this story up to Einstein
and relativity.
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In the Ptolemaic universe the earth is at the centre of eight spheres which carry the Moon,
Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, with the fixed stars at the outer edge.
This geocentric cosmology is overturned by the Copernican heliocentric model.7 But
even here there is still a centre of the universe, and the rotations of the planets (despite
some irregularities) seem to fit with observations about the relationship between the
centre and its satellites. In 1609 when Galileo, using a telescope, discovers moons
orbiting Jupiter, this is at least as dramatic a discovery as Copernicus’s heliocentric
model because it does away with the idea of the sun or the earth as the centre of
everything. But now an old question arises with new force – what keeps the bodies in
orbit?
Newton’s Principia (1687) theorises gravity and its relation to mass. Every body attracts
every other body by gravity, and the strength of gravity is proportional to the mass of the
two bodies and the distance between them. Despite the obviousness with which an apple
falls to the ground, Newton’s theory brings with it unprecedented uncertainty. Since
Newton believes that the laws of science or motion apply to all freely moving observers,
these laws of motion cannot be used to determine where someone is. The laws of motion
cannot be used to distinguish rest from movement since the laws of motion apply equally
to both. There is, therefore, no ground or position or standpoint that is not ungrounded
and relativized by its relation to other bodies, which are also equally relative to other
bodies … and so on. The ground on which we stand is ungrounded by Newton.
If Newton relativizes space and position then Einstein relativizes time. Newton believed
that position could not affect time and that time would be the same wherever the recorder
was. But Maxwell’s work on field theory in 1865 had suggested that light waves travelled
at a fixed speed. The relativity of position meant that no such fixed speed could exist. An
attempt was made to avoid this contradiction between space and time by retrieving the
notion of the ether. Here relative position no longer undermined speed because speed
could be relative to distance but fixed relative to a stable ether – where ether was seen to
be the medium through which light waves travelled.
7
Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310-250 B.C.) had also argued for such a heliocentric theory.
7
The genius of Einstein in 1905 is in pointing out that the contradiction between relative
position and the fixed speed of light has its condition of possibility in the presupposition
that time is absolute. Taking his cue from Newton that the laws of motion are the same
for all freely moving observers, Einstein argues that the speed of light is also the same for
all such freely moving observers. But, post-Newton, if distance is also relative, what is
the speed of light fixed in relation to? The nature of this whole problem is changed if time
is seen to be relative, for then the speed of light could be fixed, with observers
disagreeing on the time it took. The logic is this: if time is absolute then relative position
and fixed speed contradict one another. But if time is relative, then the contradiction
between relative position and fixed speed is resolved. The speed of light can be finite and
fixed provided it is freed from its bondage to absolute time. This is the Special Theory of
Relativity.
There is something very Hegelian about Einstein’s reasoning here. As we saw above,
Hegel points out in the Phenomenology that the relativistic implications of mediation are
only deemed to be error if one presupposes beforehand the nature of the absolute that it
contradicts. Similarly Einstein points out that the fixed speed of light must be in error
only if one presupposes beforehand the nature of absolute time that it contradicts. For
Hegel, what is contradictory can in fact become true if mediation is not posited as error.
For Einstein what is impossible – the fixed speed of light – can become true if relative
time is not posited as error. The genius of Hegel and Einstein lies in their seeing that, if
the universality of mediation and relativity cannot change, then it is how we understand
truth and the nature of the universe respectively that has to change. Both thinkers accept
the error as true and change their understanding of truth accordingly.
As Hawking points out, Einstein’s finding truth in relativity contains ‘some remarkable
and often counter-intuitive consequences’ (2005, 32), not least the idea of space-time as
the fourth dimension in which space and time are relative to each other. What concerns
Einstein here is how to reconcile Newtonian gravity with Special Relativity. The problem
is how to reconcile an instantaneous force of gravity with the relativity of time and space.
8
His solution is to accept the truth of their opposition and to change once again his
understanding of the nature of the universe. In his General Theory of Relativity (1915)
Einstein accepts that gravitational force relativizes space-time (by bending light) and that
gravity itself is relativized by being contingent upon the relative position of bodies in
space-time. Using the principle of equivalence between (relative) motion and (relative)
rest Einstein shows here how gravity and time produce between them a relativity of the
structure and nature of the universe itself.
Hawking says of this that Einstein achieves ‘a restless march of logical reasoning
unmatched in the history of human thought’ (2005, 46). However, I believe that the logic
that Hawking refers to here, in the case of the relation between Newton and Einstein, can
be viewed in terms of the modern metaphysics of Kant and Hegel.
The experience of the relation between Newton’s laws of motion and fixed space
produces an aporia of logical reasoning. This mirrors the loss of objectivity in Kant’s
Copernican revolution. Space in Newton and objects in Kant become relative to the laws
of motion and laws of a priori thought respectively. The logical error that results is that in
both cases the absolute does not survive its mediation. Equally, the loss of absolute time
in Einstein mirrors the loss of absolute reflective self-consciousness in Hegel. Time in
Einstein and reflective self-consciousness in Hegel are both relative to the observer and
the thinker respectively. But these relations of relativity are also themselves experienced
– and here metaphysics does the work – as related to each other. In the Kant/Hegel logic
of modern metaphysics the relative object of experience (Kant) becomes the relative
experience of itself as an object (Hegel). This relativity of relativity is expressed by the
concept ‘education in Hegel’ or by the structure of modern metaphysics. Similarly, I
believe we can say that in this modern metaphysics relative space in absolute time
(Newton) is itself experienced relatively as space-time (Einstein). This, too, is the
relativity of relativity. The metaphysics of both relations – Kant/Hegel and
Newton/Einstein – is the educational experience for us not just of uncertainty but also of
the uncertainty of uncertainty.
9
However, if this metaphysics of the relativity of relativity is to be an educational theory
of the universe – and one working with the commendation to ‘know thyself – then it
requires that the experience of relativity in-itself is also experienced as relativity foritself. Thus far, relativity has appeared only as a metaphysics of its abstract universality.
But modern metaphysics can express this relation of relativity to itself where the
macrocosm relativizes itself in relation to the microcosm. This we will now explore
through Heisenberg’s approach to quantum physics and through Zizek’s interpretation of
modern quantum reality. I repeat the point made above that I do not believe it is a
category error to equate macrocosm and microcosm with universal (the universe) and
particular (the particle). I am not comparing them as content. I am comparing the way
their relation to their opposites is expressed as modern metaphysical experience. The
equivalence is not in the content but in the experience of the content.
Heisenberg and Zizek on quantum reality
Any concept such as ‘education in Hegel’ or modern metaphysics which takes
uncertainty seriously as a principle – and especially as a principle of philosophical
education – does well to take note of what Heisenberg tries to do with his ‘uncertainty
principle’ derived within quantum physics. For our purposes, and following Richard
Feynman, quantum mechanics arises from the famous double slit experiment where an
unobserved single photon is fired at two slits and, because it produces an interference
pattern, is deemed to have passed through both slits at the same time.
Heisenberg says that ‘the epistemological analysis of quantum theory … contains many
features reminiscent of the methods of Hegelian enquiry’ (Heisenberg, 1974, 18).
However, Heisenberg is much clearer about his support for Plato than for Hegel. Against
Democritus Heisenberg sees the Platonic solids as compatible in particular ways with
modern atomic theory, not least because for Plato atoms are not solids as such, but
composed of triangles. This ‘mathematical form’ (Heisenberg, in Wilbur, 2001, 49) is
more fundamental even than matter and it is mathematics and not atoms themselves that
can provide ‘a clear cut account of what is going on’ (Heisenberg, in Wilbur, 2001, 52) at
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the quantum level. This raises the question as to whether something grounded in
mathematical probability can also be understood existentially.8 Heisenberg sees that this
sets up a tension between transcendental forms and the world of empirical and observable
objects, but argues that it is within this tension that decisive scientific advances are made.
I note three distinctly educative interpretations in Heisenberg of the relation between
quantum form and existential content. First, he retrieves the concept of recollection to
explain how harmony in nature is recognised in and by the soul that carries it.9 Second, in
Heisenberg’s notion of a ‘closed theory’ when the latter’s axioms are contradicted by real
experience a new set of axioms is being announced. In line with the structure of Hegelian
Aufhebung the closed theory that is being replaced nevertheless remains ‘an integrating
constituent of our current understanding of the world’ (Heisenberg, 1974, 45) and
remains too, ‘an indispensable part of the language’ (Heisenberg, 1974, 44). Uncertainty
here negates and preserves. Third, like Hegel, Heisenberg sees truth expressed in the
tension that connects the parts to the whole. These tensions often define periods of
intense uncertainty that precede new scientific breakthroughs. Heisenberg suggests that
the uncertainties of relativity and atomic theory may be just such creative periods.
However, at crucial points in his thinking Heisenberg also protects the transcendental
from any transformative relation to experience. I select two important examples here.
First, he argues that any conceptual framework must be free of contradictions so that
experience can be represented by consistent mathematical equations (see Heisenberg,
1974, 43 & 75). In addition, Heisenberg claims that one should ‘make no a priori
assumptions about the meaning of the word “understand”’ (Heisenberg, in Wilbur, 2001,
73). Yet to make ‘understanding’ conform to mathematical principles and to do so by
resolving contradictions in fact contradicts the stricture that understanding should not be
presupposed. It is not modern Kant/Hegel metaphysics that Heisenberg employs here.
8
A reviewer noted that philosophers who draw philosophical conclusions from quantum theory often act as
if they understand it when professional physicists themselves understand the maths but are not at all clear
that quantum theory can be understood on an existential basis. I don’t think this is the case for Heisenberg.
Moreover, this should not discourage philosophers from exploring and struggling with the existential
meaning of quantum theory.
9
My own thoughts on recollection in Hegel can be found in Tubbs (2008) and on recollection in the history
of Western philosophy in general in Tubbs (2009).
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Second, this gives rise to something very un-Hegelian yet also very influential in his
thinking. He noted in 1962 that ‘the seemingly contradictory pictures yielded in the
interpretations of experiments in atomic physics initially had the effect of placing the
concept of “possibility,” of merely “potential reality,” at the heart of the theoretical
interpretation’ (1974, 83). This meant that contradictions between, for example, the
material particles of Newtonian physics and the force fields of Maxwell were resolved,
for ‘both are possible manifestations of the same physical reality’ (1974, 83). Thus, in the
mathematical formulas of quantum theory what is displayed is no longer an objective
state of affairs, but only a principle of uncertainty. Heisenberg states here that ‘it is no
longer the actual happening itself but rather the possibility of its happening – the potentia,
to employ a concept from Aristotle’s philosophy – that is subject to strict natural laws’
(1974, 16). Here contradictions are resolved in the turn from actuality to potentiality and
in expressing the experience of quantum effects as quantum possibilities. This is not, I
think, the same logic of Einstein so lauded by Heisenberg, where Einstein found actual
truth, and not potential truth, in the contradiction of fixed speed and relative position.
When Einstein famously said that ‘God does not play dice’ it is in effect a critique of the
concept of potential in quantum theory – which Einstein never accepted.
As Heisenberg theorises the relation between microcosm and experience through
Aristotelian potentia so Zizek theorises the relation between object and subject by means
of the concept of potentia found in quantum theory. For example, in Part III of The
Indivisible Remainder Zizek confronts quantum physics with the Hegelian dialectic, and
finds a wild state of untamed and uncivilized potential beneath and underlying the
external reality of the symbolic order. He reasons here that the real world is sustained by
symbolic fictions, and therein comes to be seen as unreal. In this realization, or in the
process in which the taken-for-granted becomes ‘for itself,’ the unacknowledged is
acknowledged, and reality as such is undermined.
What concerns Zizek is the relation that is left between subject and object when the
symbolic fictions are exposed. One answer is found in the dialectic of the cynic and the
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ironist. For the cynic, ideology can reveal itself but continue unaffected even by the
exposure of its workings. Here knowledge does not affect its object – contra the belief of
reflective modernism and psychoanalysis – and leads to a seemingly impossible critique
of total ideology. This resonates with Adorno’s enunciation of the totality that is false.
So, Zizek frames his question like this: is there any kind of knowledge left – the kind of
knowledge which in Hegel sees the in-itself become for-itself – ‘which can no longer be
co-opted by cynical distance?’ (1996, 203). Or, again, in Hegel’s sense but using
Derrida’s term, is any kind of freedom available that is not autoimmune? The ironist
understands this dependence on the order of symbolic fiction and knows too that its
exposure does not mean that it can be avoided or overcome. Where cynicism believes
reality to be oppressive, irony knows that the oppression is textual and unavoidable.
Zizek concludes, ‘each of the two attitudes involves its own trap: the cynic’s, a naïve
belief in ultimate reality outside of the web of symbolic fictions; the ironist’s, the
opposite: the reduction of reality itself to a fiction’ (1996, 208). How, then, to break ‘this
vicious cycle’ (1996, 208) – which is the same as to ask, is there a response, and
especially an educational response, to the totality of ideology that does not entrap us in
this dialectic of enlightenment wherein ideology is already total and totality returns to
ideology?
It is here that Zizek turns to quantum physics for a different way of understanding this
relation between object and subject, that is, for a way of finding the truth of the collapse
of the object in the observation of this collapse. He notes that in Heisenberg’s uncertainty
principle the ontology of the particle defies the symbolic order of its representations, and
it is this that seems to be ‘the ultimate proof of its validity’ (1996, 208). Indeed, the
moment we take a term in quantum physics too literally, ‘we are led astray’ (1996, 210).
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that the position and velocity of the atom at a
given time cannot be uniquely connected by a law with its position and velocity at a later
time. Zizek, noting in a similar way that the reality of a particle cannot have a fully
specified mass and momentum, but only one or the other, says that this principle is
profoundly Hegelian. He explains this by arguing that Hegelian actuality is the negation
of all potential bar one; the one that is. The value of this way of thinking, for Zizek, is
13
that it undermines the incorrect idea that the reason we cannot understand a particle fully
is merely due to the inadequacy of our measuring instruments. This resonates against
Kant’s presupposition that experience is not adequate to the task of knowing the thing initself. Hegel’s advance on Kant, Einstein’s advance on classical theory, and quantum
physics’ advance on classical physics, is to see that ‘what first appeared to be an
epistemological obstacle turns out to be a property of the thing itself’ (1996, 211). I will
argue below that Zizek does not carry this insight far enough.
In formulating this argument Zizek makes clear his impatience with certain forms of poststructuralism. Complementarity, he says, is often interpreted as the pluralism of
narratives implicit in the ‘now-fashionable’ (1996, 214) idea of ‘the impossibility of the
complete description of a particular phenomenon’ (1996, 214).10 This pluralism, he
believes, is guilty of its own universalism, that is, that it can speak of complete
contextualisation only because it posits for itself ‘a neutral-universal place of pure metalanguage exempt from any specific context’ (1996, 214) and a ‘neutral-universal notion
of “culture”’ (1996, 216) that enables one to ‘play the game called multiculturalism’
(1996, 216).
Zizek notes two effects of this. First, a culture becomes a kind of irreducible particularity,
indeed, an ‘absolute particularity’ (1996, 217) to which universals must match up. This,
says Zizek, inverts the traditional relationship of universal and particular. Second,
Hegelianism seeks to understand the historical conditions under which such an inversion
takes place, for, in this instance, the neutral-universal notion of culture is itself ‘the very
place of the inscription of universality into the Particular’ (1996, 214, italics removed).
Complementarity here refers to the unavoidable relation between universality and
historicism. It is the politics of the standpoint of the modern particular and it is the
critique of that standpoint by itself. What this gives rise to, says Zizek, is the experience
of the lack of universality, or the for-itself. That cultures are different is, he says, a
Heisenberg explains that the term ‘complementarity’ comes from Niels Bohr. It describes how two
pictures of the world, for example, those of waves and particles, can be mutually exclusive yet complement
each other. Heisenberg says here, ‘By playing with both pictures, by going from the one picture to the
other, and back again, we finally get the right impression of the strange kind of reality behind our atomic
experiments’ (Heisenberg, 2000, 18).
10
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banality. What is more significant is the way cultures share this antinomy or discontinuity
of universal and particular.
From this arises Zizek’s own uncertainty principle: namely, that real political experience
is when the in-itself of our lives in the symbolic order of reality collapses into the foritself. This is universally potential across cultures, but actually (and particularly) different
in each. The collapse of universalities is not resolvable in some transcendent universality.
It remains incomplete because, for Zizek, the in-itself and the for-itself are mutually
exclusive; both can exist, but not at the same time as each other. This is his version of an
Hegelian uncertainty principle.
Finally, Zizek turns to the double slit experiment to try to show how this Hegelian
uncertainty principle repeats the central mystery of the quantum world. The particle, as
particular, follows all possible paths within the wave function when unobserved,
including passing through two slits at the same time. When observed, however, it acts as
a single particle. As in the symbolic order, so now in the quantum world of the particle,
actuality – understood as mediation by thought or observation – traumatizes potentiality.
For Zizek this is not an epistemological shortcoming on our part. It is the ontological
truth of potentiality. The simultaneity of knowing and doing, be it political reality or the
particle, collapses into a principle of ontological uncertainty. Zizek says here that ‘this
inversion of an epistemological obstacle into an ontological “impediment” which
prevents the object from actualizing the totality of its potential qualities (mass and
momentum) is “Hegelian”’ (1996, 211). This is because the ‘Yes’ of Hegelian actuality,
says Zizek, is not a “Yes” to synthesis or totality, but ‘a “Yes” to complementarity: a
“Yes” of fully accepting that one cannot simultaneously “know it” and “do it”’ (1996,
213). This fact bids farewell to the ‘Enlightenment illusion of self-transparent activity, an
activity wholly aware of its implications’ (1996, 213). As such, there will always be guilt
that I could have acted differently. If one invokes Schelling’s Ent-Scheidung here as a
movement of pre-ontological decision, one can speak of a universe of undetermined
15
potentiality which collapses into a real object. In potential, qualities are held together in
ways which become impossible in actuality.11
For Zizek,
The conclusion imposed by quantum physics, therefore, is the following: what
we experience as the ‘hard reality’ of objects in time and space is not the
‘ultimate reality’; ‘beneath’ it there is another universe in which something
can emerge out of nothing, and so on. In short, the quantum universe displays
in a ‘wild’ state, at a more ‘primitive’ level, a series of features which,
according to our philosophical tradition, constitute the differentia specifica of
the human universe of language – as if the old Schelling was right, as if in
human freedom and language something that already underlies ‘external
reality’ itself is raised to a higher power (1996, 229).
What is interesting here is the way in which Zizek tries to ally an open and unteleological
Hegel with the uncertainty and incompletion expressed in quantum complementarity,
and, in turn, to argue that this expresses the relationship between quantum probability and
existential reality. However, I do not think this is the way to understand Hegel with
regard to such openness.
Potential is actual
For Heisenberg and Zizek, then, albeit in different ways, potentia expresses the
mathematical and existential truth of quantum probability. For Zizek in particular,
potentia collapses under the observation of the observer, and actuality is deemed to be a
wrenching of determination out of the indeterminate. The observer forces completion
upon what is by nature incomplete. Yet Zizek knows too, that the observer cannot posit
for herself a neutral-universal identity. The notion of the observer is just another
11
Even more intriguing, in the idea of vacuum fluctuation particles pop into being and then annihilate
themselves before reaching full actuality. Somehow, in the gap between event and inscription, the particle
chooses which law to obey. Perhaps our universe is the same, and will choose to annihilate itself. Perhaps,
says Zizek, the universe in its entirety ‘does not exist [and] is a mere quantum fluctuation without any
external boundary that would enable us to conceive of it as “actual”’ (1996, 228).
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symbolic fiction whose identity collapses when it becomes ‘for-itself.’ But I think Zizek
does not carry the logic of this collapse far enough. We saw above how he employs the
Hegelian dialectic to show that the contradiction of quantum reality is how the particle is,
and that this is not a fault with the thought that thinks it, i.e. its measuring instrument. So
far so good. But when the observer, or Zizek, makes judgements about potentia as a
movement of pre-ontological decision, and of a universe of undetermined potential prior
to its collapse into determinate actuality, this is precisely to posit the observer as a
neutral-universal identity. It is as much a collapse into actuality for the observer to know
the collapse of potential as it is to know the potential for collapse. Potentia is only
another symbolic fiction, this time the fiction that it is prior to being a symbolic fiction.
In truth, and unavoidably, potentia is actual.
I imagine that one response to this would be to say that this is exactly what marks out the
(im)possibility of quantum reality – that it cannot be known completely. Yet education in
Hegel and modern metaphysics makes entirely the opposite point, namely, that this is
how quantum (im)possibility is known. This is how it is. Actuality is potential’s only
possibility, unless we make the NeoPlatonic assumption that the inadequacy is, once
again, to be found in thought as the measuring instrument.12 When Zizek says of
Hegelian philosophy that ‘what first appeared to be an epistemological obstacle turns out
to be a property of the thing itself’ (1996: 211) the property in question is its actuality.
But Zizek avoids this conclusion by positing potential as the logic of the error of
actuality. The point is that without actuality there is no potential. The actual is the
condition of the possibility of potential, not the other way round. In the modern
metaphysics of Kant and Hegel actuality expresses this unavoidable totality of mediation.
Here actuality carries both contingency in subjectivity (Kant) and the contingency of the
contingency (Hegel) – or what Hegel calls subjective substance. Using Kant’s aporetic
formula of the observer of the synthetic a priori one might say that actual thought without
the quanta of potential is empty while quanta without observation is blind.13 But Hegel
applies this contingency to itself and says that this Kantian observer of the relationship of
12
I deal at length with the nature of such NeoPlatonic presuppositions in Tubbs (2009).
Kant says ‘thoughts without content are empty [and] intuitions without concepts are blind’ (1968,
A51/B75).
13
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synthesis is already actual, and that therefore the formula is already relative to the actual.
As we noted above, the universality – the truth – of this logic of actuality is only deemed
not true if one first presupposes mediation as error.
The relationship between the microcosm of quantum physics and political and existential
reality comes into sharp relief around this notion of potentia. One understands what is at
stake here for Zizek politically, for potentia stands guard against political dogmas that
hold themselves immune from the contingency of the for-itself. In his sights, as we saw
above, is the way in which universals now serve absolute particularities, that is, where
universals conform to (the hidden universality of) illusions of incompleteness. Claimed as
openness, in fact these absolute particularities exempt themselves from their own social
and political actuality. It is not enough to know the falsity of all totalities, one needs also
to understand how this view is itself part of the totality that is false.
Yet even though Zizek believes that complementarity expresses this ambiguity and
heralds the openness of the Hegelian dialectic, I think Zizek nevertheless absolves this
view from the totality which is false. In particular, I wonder if he in fact comes close to
repeating an absolute particularity in his notion of potentia as a pre-ontological decision,
a universe prior to external reality. I can see how such a wild and primitive universe
could be envisioned as harbouring a form of communality that speaks between and across
cultures of their discontinuities in ways that do not merely repeat these actual cultural and
political differences. But, if potential is always actual, then there is no actual justification
for positing a separate realm of potential reality. Indeed, to do so is precisely to fall foul
of what Zizek described above as positing ‘a neutral-universal place of pure metalanguage exempt from any [actual] context’ (1996, 214). Potentia and absolute
particularity share the illusion of being conditions of possibility whereas in fact they are
conditioned as possibility by actuality. This illusion is always politically significant but
can become especially so when it exempts itself from the social and political conditions
that determine its own possibility, for what remains is a notion of openness immune from
being actually open. One reviewer raised the question here of Zizek’s essay ‘The
Hegelian Ticklish Subject’ (Zizek, 1999). It is true that in this essay Zizek’s treatment of
18
Kant’s relationship to Hegel is very similar to the one I have presented above. But where
Zizek finds the Hegelian ‘Yes’ of complementarity to be a revenge of substance against
subjectivity’s positing of its own teleology, I think this revenge in Zizek still sees the
pathology of reality as error and not, in his own words, as ‘a property of the thing itself’
(1996, 211). This is not to say, however, that one does not continually agonize over the
contestation between subject and substance.
An educational theory of the universe
I push the over-ambition of the article even further now, in asking how can the
macrocosm and microcosm be brought together as an educational theory of the universe?
The logic of my argument thus far suggests that this is learned in the structure of the
modern metaphysics of Kant and Hegel, reading the universe as the universal, the particle
as the particular, and the observer as the court of modern reason where the latter is the
accuser, the accused, and the judge, all participating in the culture of the revel and repose
of total mediation. The in-itself of the universe, or the macrocosm as time and space,
collapses in the experience of self-contradiction in the laws of motion and its relativistic
implications. Similarly, the in-itself of the microcosm, or the particle as mass and
acceleration, collapses in the experience of self-contradiction in the quantum laws of
physics. The macrocosm and microcosm do not seem to share the same laws of physics
and the search to unite gravity and quantum mechanics becomes the holy grail of
twentieth and twenty-first century science. But they do share the culture of revel and
repose that occurs in their mediation by the observer. They share the modern
metaphysical experience with all its educational significance.
I mean here that the nature of the universe finds its truth expressed in and as the
philosophical experience of its observer. In Newton and Einstein the universe expresses
itself as being relative to itself. In quantum physics this experience of relativity is
expressed as the uncertainty of each elementary particle of the universe. But the two
relativities have a third educational significance.14 The actuality of general relativity and
14
On the caution of employing the term ‘third’ here see below.
19
of quantum physics is in the philosophical experience in which this actuality is learned as
learning. They are actually relative in the philosophical experience of the observer
wherein univers(e)al and partic(le)ular are both subject and substance. This ‘third’ is a
well-rehearsed variety of Hegelian speculative philosophy. My own contribution here is
to suggest that this modern metaphysics is essentially educational in its nature and that
substance and subject are the education. As such, this education carries the actuality of
the universe and the actuality of the particle in and as the actuality – the relative
education, or revel and repose – of its mediation by us. In the sense that this is the
actuality of how life per se is known to itself, this is a theory of life having its truth in the
relative education in which it is known.
A reader who is on guard against geocentric dogma may ask at this point, is this actuality
the only possible (sic) actuality or experience of the universe, either on Earth or
elsewhere? The answer is not as simple as saying that it would be imperialism on a
cosmological scale if one were to say Yes. The question is already within the educational
structure of the modern metaphysics of the falsity of totality and the totality that is false.
The question ‘are we alone in the universe?’ does not so much anticipate mediation by an
‘other’ as bear witness to our own otherness to the same universe that we question. The
question of life elsewhere is already part of the answer, for it displays the formation – one
might say misrecognition here – of the ‘we’ within the culture of ‘our’ cosmological
enquiries. It is as this culture that we are already open to the actuality of asking the
question at all. This is very different merely from abstractly musing on the possibility of
‘life’ elsewhere.15
Caution is needed in referring above to the idea of modern metaphysical education as a
‘third’ in relation to the opposition of universal and particular. It gives the impression of
being somehow free-floating or of effecting reconciliation. This is not what is meant by
‘third’ here. Rather, I mean by it the notion of Aufhebung in which the third is the
learning of the aporetic relation of opposites without overcoming them. The third
I have put forward a similar theory of self and otherness grounded in the concept of ‘education in Hegel’
in Tubbs (2008) Chapter 1 and Tubbs (2009) Chapter 7.
15
20
expresses their relation as learning, but remains dependent upon their being related. The
existential substance one lives with here is the totality that is false, something that can
speak its truth precisely because it is not overcome. Of course, this raises questions in our
mind about the significance of this third, for it seems to leave everything as it was. But
this is only the case for those who might desire a totality other (sic) than that of the
culture of learning, perhaps a New Jerusalem where oppositions are resolved or where
new ethical relations can avoid revel and repose altogether.
Final thought
A universe that has a way of revealing its nature to itself through its parts is a universe
that has its nature as education and, indeed, in the vocation to ‘know thyself.’ In our
Modern Liberal Arts Programme, in our approach to nature (as to freedom and truth) we
will try to illustrate this nature of a universe – a nature expressed as ‘know thyself’ –
through its relation to modern metaphysics. As such, we will challenge our students with
these questions: Why shouldn’t the meaning of life, the meaning of the universe, be
education as an end in-itself? Why shouldn’t creation in fact be actual as learning? What
better way to relate to others, from this earth or beyond, than through the openness of a
life lived in the truth of a universe that is experienced, and is real, as learning?
References
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Kant, I. (1968) Critique of Pure Reason, London: Macmillan.
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Tubbs, N. (2008) Education in Hegel, London: Continuum.
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Wilbur, K. (2001) Quantum Questions, Boston: Shambhala.
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Zizek, S. (1996) The Indivisible Remainder, London: Verso.
Zizek, S. (1999) The Ticklish Subject, London: Verso.
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