I'll add a second in the form of a question. Our noetic ability to acknowledge disparate relations as being simultaneous--can that faculty be mistaken as the principle of complementariness? I think an answer to that is important, especially when we have had Logos to be a running candidate.
It seems we need to drill down to what the complementarity principle actually states. I think of it as a kind of rebuke to Aristotle’s third law — the law of the excluded middle, as defended most cogently by Einstein, in a rebuke or refutation of his friend Bohr, who first dreamed up complementarity in the first place.
Einstein said,
…if two descriptions of a phenomenon are mutually exclusive, then at least one of them must be wrong. His friend Niels Bohr — the “father” of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics (which Einstein never would accept) — saw things differently. Bohr said you need both of these seemingly mutually exclusive entities in order to make a complete description of the system to which both refer, each in its way, but each only partially.In short, the law of the excluded middle produces a kind of digital, or “either-or” style of thinking that ill comports with the way human beings actually live their lives. It lives in an artificial world of "true-false," “yes-no,” “black-white,” “0-1.” Though this “style of thinking” works perfectly well for computers, human experience actually demands that we acknowledge that life cannot be sorted into such clean, distinct categories, with the understanding that “at least one of the terms must be wrong”; that both terms are valid in some way, and both necessary to give us the “complete” picture of man’s relations to himself, to the world, and to other men.
I don’t see the complementarity principle as necessarily related to “compatibility.” Indeed, the point seems to be that what the principle states is seemingly “incompatible” things find resolution at a higher state of reality, according to (forgive me) a Logos, or ultimate standard of logic and reason, that pervades our universe, from its beginning, and which ever points to a “beyond” of material existence.
To give an example of what I mean:
Let’s say I’m at the Met listening to a performance of the aria “Un bel Di” from Puccini’s magnificent Madama Butterfly —which I experience as a sound waveform and (more subtly) as a pressure wave that affects my visceral body. An analog recording could be made of the aria, and later digitized (i.e., “quantized”) so it can be played on state-of-the-art audio equipment.
But which of these is most authoritative, most “real”: the performance of the soprano and orchestra directed to and actually experienced by me and the other members of the audience? Or the analog recording, or the digital recording?
It seems according to modern-day science, the analogue and digital descriptions are perfectly respectable, and even superior to the actual event that led rise to them (because they are allegedly more “universal” in terms of descriptive power.) In short, some modern scientists seem to want to “reduce” the world to its description. But what they seem to forget is the description is not, nor cannot be, the same exact thing as what it describes. It is a "reduction" of the actual situation that provoked the making of a description in the first place.
But to the extent that people forget this distinction, we get the sad example of a John Derbyshire. To see the world through the filter of the scientific description exclusively — as John Derbyshire seemingly has sunk to on another thread running here (“God and Me”) — is to miss the point of life altogether. (And I so admire Derbyshire; been reading him for years in National Review; would hope for a better take on life by and for him than he produces in the “God and Me” essay. Poor man!)
It seems to me that what science intends to do is to “take man out of the picture” altogether. Which is a ridiculous expectation! Jeepers, Bohr had it exactly right when he said [paraphrasing here] that science is not the natural world itself. Science is a description of man’s relations to that world, which is entirely dependent on man. So how can man ever become irrelevant???
What has “killed” Derbyshire is his willingness to accept a reduced (I would even say a defaced) description of the world, and then to go “live there.” This is the very description of a “second reality.” No man prospers by living in a second reality. No wonder Derbyshire seems so grim, so sad, despite his manifest talent and genius.
Oh, I have so much more on this difficult subject. But this will have to do for now. Thank you ever so much for writing, cornelis!
Thank you ever so much for including me in this discussion.
p.s.: Hayek seems to me to have exactly the right take on our problems....
Your talk about the problem with Aristotle's excluded middle reminds me of another literary term popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: paradox. I wrote my undergraduate honors dissertation on paradox in the poetry of John Donne, and my tutor put me onto Chesterton's "Orthodoxy" in connection with the project.
I still recall Chesterton's image of orthodoxy not as something staid and stable, but as a chariot wildly reeling its way down through history, spilling heretics out left and right, while the truth managed to stay on board.
Thus, for instance (to suggest a few examples on my own in Chesterton's spirit, since I don't have the book by me), Jesus is not either God or Man, but both. Innumerable heresies tried to make Him one or the other, and failed. Human beings are not just bodies or souls, but both. We are neither "the soul in the machine" nor are we compounded only of matter. Hegel was a wild man, but he was on to something with his pattern of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.
Why was paradox so popular among the religious poets? Perhaps because it can shadow forth what a literal statement finds it difficult or impossible to say.
But as for Bohr and Einstein, didn't Einstein (I forget his exact words) say that he didn't think God approved of quantum mechanics?
Great job, as usual. Thanks.
Of course, it all depends upon the subject at hand. Sometimes two cases are the only two possibilities, and they are mutually exclusive. It either is or it isn't. Sometimes, however, the two mutually exclusive possibilities mark two extreme ends of a continuum; reality can be found somewhere along the line between the two poles; as you point out, this is mostly where we live our lives. Principles and ideal states are often clear cut, but when those principles and ideal states are translated into the physical world, into flesh and bone, into human history, principles and ideal states and even the mutually exclusive get expressed in interesting amalgams. Sometimes it takes good eyes to see the ideal and the principle being worked out.
Since I have already pushed this little line of thought this far, I'll go just a little farther.
Life is full of contradictions, between the mutually exclusive, between what is and what ought, there is damage caused by destructive agents, and these contradictions have to be bridged by people, by human hearts and human lives. In the story the little Dutch Boy shoves his finger in the dike to hold back disaster, but in every day terms, human lives are shoved into the breach. When there is a "tear" in the time-space continuum, people bridge it with their lives, sometimes resolving the contradictions, sometimes just providing a living patch, sometimes absorbing them like a shock absorber, and sometimes taking them to the grave.
Pardon the non sequitor. I don't know what came over me.
That is a problem when the either-or analysis is misapplied. True, it works great for computers. It also holds for certain levels of human thought. We could say that the antinomies you call complimentary are compatible with other relations that inhere.
Reductionist views prefer one of the antinomies (or aspect) at the exclusion of the others. But a resolution is something else entirely. You want to call it an ultimate standard of logic or reason, but warrants this move? I know of a patristic author who said the world is full of these antinomies simply to keep mankind from raising any aspect of creation to be divine. But calling it Logos, reason, or divine and you've already got yourself a nontraditional trinity. I'm following Freedom Protector's notice here, I think: "Your essay could be compared to to a movie, where there is a surprise twist...reading along I was expecting a Kierkagaard like statement of existence of truth of higher order which results in the resolution of a paradox, but went down the path of refuting reductionism."
But the coin thingy is misleading. The reductionist doesn't recognize the other side. The resolution is not a side.