I decided to take a somewhat different approach to the précis, in light of the fact that others have already posted very good overviews of the text. I decided that I would make my précis the “departure point” and bring up what I think are some glaring problems of the text. I picked my 5 least favorite uses of quotes and also the attack on science as a whole through the attack on physics in specific.
Early on Arendt establishes a dichotomy. There are scientists and there are the laymen. The laymen she associates with humanism and the scientists with, not a misanthropy, but definitely a lack of caring for humanity. But, there is an issue with who Arendt is calling “scientist.” Originally she uses the word physicist, but quickly supplants physicist with scientist. In this way she equates science and physics. She argues against all of science, particularly the questions science seeks to answer, but her criticisms are specific to physics and to quantum mechanics and atomic physics. Her criticisms are based upon the words of the physicists in those fields – very prominent physicists (Schrödinger, Einstein, Heisenberg, etc.). However, she often takes their words out of context, or applies meaning to their quotes that they don’t necessarily imply. A few of those quotes are as follows:
1. “The data with which modern physical research is concerned turn up like “mysterious messenger[s] from the real world.”[3] They are not phenomena, appearances, strictly speaking, for we meet them nowhere, neither in our everyday world nor in the laboratory; we know of their presence only because they affect our measuring instruments in certain ways.”
This implication that the data is possibly not confirmable is an attack on the world that corresponds to this data, a world she views as different from the world we obtain through our senses.
However, what Arendt doesn’t seem to understand is that the processes by which these “machines” detect are based on the same processes that our senses work with. Although this quote is a reference to observing things beyond the scope of our senses, or indirect observations (observing a change by an effect it has elsewhere) the results are still obtained by the same process by which our senses are confirmed, namely waves, but in a scale that gives more information about the world. To attack the scientific world in this way is very much to attack one’s own senses and does not offer any reason as to why one of these worlds ought to be preferable to the other.
2. “Max Planck was right, and the miracle of modern science is indeed that this science could be purged “of all anthropomorphic elements” because the purging was done by men. Man has left behind his humanity.”
I contrast this to the idea of the unexamined life. When a life is examined must it not also be devoid of assumptions, and multi-perspective? Can anything be examined only from a single perspective? Is science being criticized for its alternative perspective? And humanism being argued for based on its uniperspective? Not too sure if she answers this.
3. “In the words of Erwin Schrödinger, the new universe that we try to “conquer” is not only “practically inaccessible, but not even thinkable,” for “however we think it, it is wrong; not perhaps quite as meaningless as a ‘triangular circle,’ but much more so than a ‘winged lion.’”
The “universe” Schodinger is likely referring to is the “universe” of quantum mechanics. Not the universe in the ultimate sense, but in the sense of encompassing a field of study. These are not claims about the universe we live in, nor a rejection of what we observe in our life, the connection between the quantum universe and our own are only now being discovered. Though Arendt argues that these claims effect our life even when they aren’t understood, the only real example that she produces is that of the atomic bomb. She does not show how quantum mechanics, the field she is referencing here, has effected our lives. Quantum mechanics is still too far removed from our world to be practical yet, and it describes the world at a level that it recognizes is not relevant to the “universe” that we live in. Quantization is easily simplified into continuity and described classically at our level. The level at which quantization is important is smaller than we are in relation to the entirety of the universe and as such we are unable to comprehend the scale. However, she also uses this claim as well as the next claim to discuss how science is self-defeating.
4. “the most significant indication that it might be self-defeating consists in Heisenberg’s discovery of the uncertainty principle. Heisenberg showed conclusively that there is a definite and final limit to the accuracy of all measurements obtainable by man-devised instruments for those “mysterious messengers from the real world.” The uncertainty principle “asserts that there are certain pairs of quantities, like the position and velocity of a particle, that are related in such a way that determining one of them with increased precision necessarily entails determining the other one with reduced precision.”[23] Heisenberg concludes from this fact that “we decide, by our selection of the type of observation employed, which aspects of nature are to be determined and which are to be blurred.”
Arendt completely misunderstands this concept, and because she does her conclusion is unfounded. Uncertainty is not a phenomenon related only to measurement, and by that a limitation of what we are capable of knowing about nature; it is a description of how much nature can know about its self. It is in fact a discovery that doesn’t show how man can never reach the limit of science (and space) but that space and nature have their own limits. Uncertainty is why the atom does not collapse on itself, it is why life is capable of existing. The very fact that an electron does not simply fly towards the proton (as we all know unlike charges attract one another), and reduce all matter to a neutron soup, is necessary for matter to exist in various forms. How uncertainty governs this phenomenon is that if an electron constrained its position to an exact spot its momentum (and consequently, energy) becomes too great. This is why there is no zero energy ground state, why absolute zero cannot be reached, and ultimately why the electron is not able to attach to the proton even though they are electrically attracted. The claim that this simply shows that science is doomed to be limited is boldly wrong. It is proof that science reaches the natural boundaries.
I know that Arendt's argument is not wholly linked to the usage of these quotes, but these quotes illustrate that Arendt doesn't know what she is talking about when it comes to the science she is criticizing. Rather than argue that science ought to end, why not argue that everyone should become fluent in the language it uses? Or that everyone empower themselves (if scientists have so much power) and bridge the gap to science themselves.
5. objectivity of the natural world, so that man in his hunt for “objective reality” suddenly discovered that he always “confronts himself alone.”
Again, another quotation used without any context. Can we possibly see who this quote could be viewed differently than Arendt views it? What if it is a description about how man confronts his own mental limitations, not his self. He is not injecting his self into the results, thought that is a possibility, but he is trying to overcome himself. These scientists wrote extensively about how quantum mechanics is completely non-intuitive, and when one studies this field ones insistence on intuition regularly gets on one’s way. To read this as an insistence that man injects his self into his science is, I think, Arendt’s misunderstanding of the field itself.
Poor stoopid Arendt.
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