Metaphysics And Science
Edwin Schrodinger

It is relatively easy to sweep away the whole of metaphysics, as Kant did. The slightest puff in its direction blows it away, and what was needed was not so much a powerful pair of lungs to provide the blast, as a powerful dose of courage to turn it against so timelessly venerable a house of cards.

But you must not think that what has then been achieved is the actual elimination of metaphysics from the empirical content of human knowledge. In fact, if we cut out all metaphysics it will be found to be vastly more difficult, indeed probably quite impossible, to give any intelligible account of even the most circumscribed area of specialisation within any specialised science you please. Metaphysics includes, amongst other things - to take just one quite crude example - the unquestioning acceptance of a more-than-physical - that is, transcendental - significance in a large number of thin sheets of wood-pulp covered with black marks such as are now before you.

Or, to take it at a deeper level: call to mind that sense of misgiving, that cold clutch of dreary emptiness which comes over everybody, I expect, when they first encounter the description given by Kirchhoff and Mach of the task of physics (or of science generally): 'a description of the facts, with the maximum of completeness and the maximum economy of thought'; a feeling of emptiness which one cannot master, despite the emphatic and even enthusiastic agreement with which one's theoretical reason can hardly fail to accept this prescription. In actual fact (let us examine ourselves honestly and faithfully), to have only this goal before one's eyes would not suffice to keep the work of research going forward in any field whatsoever. A real elimination of metaphysics means taking the soul out of both art and science, turning them into skeletons incapable of any further development.

But theoretical metaphysics has been eliminated. There is no appeal against Kant's sentence. Philosophy of the post-Kantian period - perhaps right down to our own day - has shown us the tormented writhings of the long-drawn-out death agony of metaphysics.

Speaking as a scientist, it seems to me that it is our uncommonly difficult task, as post-Kantians, on the one hand step by step to erect barriers which will restrain the influence of metaphysics on the presentation of facts seen as true within our individual fields - while on the other hand preserving it as the indispensable basis of our knowledge, both general and particular. It is the apparent contradiction in this which is our problem. We might say, to use an image, that as we go forward on the road of knowledge we have got to let ourselves be guided by the invisible hand of metaphysics reaching out to us from the mist, but that we must always be on our guard lest its soft seductive pull should draw us from the road into an abyss. Or, to look at it another way: among the advancing hosts of the forces of knowledge, metaphysics is the vanguard, establishing the forward outposts in an unknown hostile territory; we cannot do without such outposts, but we all know that they are exposed to the most extreme danger. Or again: metaphysics does not form part of the house of knowledge but is the scaffolding, without which further construction is impossible. Perhaps we may even be permitted to say: metaphysics turns into physics in the course of its development - but not of course in the sense in which it might have seemed to do so before Kant. Never, that is, by a gradual establishing of initially uncertain opinions, but always through a clarification of, and change in, the philosophical point of view.

How we are to come to terms with the announcement that metaphysics is defunct, confronts us as a still more serious and difficult question when we leave the sphere of pure knowledge and consider culture as a whole, including ethical problems. No one, of course, was more aware of this than Kant himself; hence his second critique of reason.

In the course of the last hundred years, the western world has achieved a quite enormous development in one particular direction: that is to say, a thorough knowledge of what underlies natural spatio-temporal events (physics and chemistry) and, based on this, a fantastic abundance of 'mechanisms', in the widest sense, have been constructed to extend the sphere of influence of the human will (technology). I feel impelled to state explicitly at this point that I am very far from holding that this (especially the second half of it, technology) is the most significant thing that has been happening in Europe during this period. I think it probable that this age, which delights in calling itself the age of technology, will in some later time be described, in terms of its brightest lights and deepest shadows, as the age of the evolutionary idea, and of the decay of the arts. But this is by the way; I am concerned now with what is the strongest force at work at this moment.

This partial 'elephantiasis' has meant that other lines of development in culture and knowledge, in the western mind or whatever we are to call it, have been neglected, and indeed allowed to decay to a greater degree than ever before. It almost seems as though the one mightily developing organ has exerted a directly damaging and crippling effect on the others. Rising to their feet after centuries of shameful servitude imposed by the Church, conscious of their sacred rights and their divine mission, the natural sciences turned against their ancient tormentress with blows of rage and hatred; heedless that, with all her inadequacies and derelictions of duty, she was still the one and only appointed guardian of our most sacred ancestral heritage. Slowly, almost unobserved, that spark of ancient Indian wisdom, which the marvellous Rabbi had kindled to new flame beside the Jordan, flickered out; the light faded from the re-born sun of Greece, whose rays had ripened the fruits we now enjoy. The people no longer know anything of these things. Most of them have nothing to hold on to and no one to follow. They believe neither in God nor gods; to them the Church is now only a political party, and morality nothing but a burdensome restriction which, without the support of those no longer credible bugbears on which it leant for so long, is now without any basis whatever. A sort of general atavism has set in; western man is in danger of relapsing to an earlier level of development which he has never properly over-come: crass, unfettered egoism is raising its grinning head, and its fist, drawing irresistible strength from primitive habits, is reaching for the abandoned helm of our ship.

End of Metaphysics And Science by Edwin Schrodinger