From Modernity to Cosmodernity

Science, Culture, and Spirituality

Basarab Nicolescu

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781438449647, 9781438449630
• eBook ISBN: 9781438449654
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The quantum, biological, and information revolutions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries should have thoroughly changed our view of reality, yet the old viewpoint based on classical science remains dominant, reinforcing a notion of a rational, mechanistic world that allows for endless progress. In practice, this view has promoted much violence among humans. Basarab Nicolescu heralds a new era, cosmodernity, founded on a contemporary vision of the interaction between science, culture, spirituality, religion, and society. Here, reality is plastic and its people are active participants in the cosmos, and the world is simultaneously knowable and unknowable. Ultimately, every human recognizes his or her face in the face of every other human being, independent of his or her particular religious or philosophical beliefs. Nicolescu notes a new spirituality free of dogmas and looks at quantum physics, literature, theater, and art to reveal the emergence of a newer, cosmodern consciousness.

CHAPTER ONE

FROM SHATTERED CULTURE TOWARD TRANSCULTURE

THE CHRISTIAN ORIGIN OF MODERN SCIENCE

Modern science, and even modernity itself, began in Europe in 1632, with the publication of Galileo’s book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.¹

The identity of modern science is, of course, crucial for Europe. Its past identity has many embodiments: the Greek, Roman, and Christian legacies; the Reformation; the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment; the modern messianisms (communism and nazism); and psychoanalysis. This contradictory relationship between the unity and diversity of its identity is both an asset and a challenge.

There is one often-neglected aspect that nevertheless seems important when trying to decipher the future identity of Europe: the birth of modern science there, in Europe, at the time of its great founders—Galileo, Newton, and Kepler. Of course, other civilizations—Greek, Egyptian, Sumerian, Mayan, Arabian, and Chinese—made crucial contributions to science in its general meaning. For example, the Chinese civilization had everything necessary to give birth to modern science—theoretical thinking and technology—but the historical fact is that it did not do so. The point is that the Chinese vision of the cosmos forbade them to accept fragmentation and separation.

Joseph Needham asked in his famous book Chinese Science and the Occident: “why is modern science, as a mathematization of the hypotheses regarding nature, with all its implications in the field of advanced technology, only rapidly increasing in the West, in the era of Galileo?”²

The search for the most intimate resorts, of the thinking style and of the imaginary that leads to a certain worldview typical of a certain era, is indispensable for a rigorous approach to Joseph Needham’s question. Europe’s cultural and spiritual environment contained the germ of modern science. This is the premise that led me in 1988 to formulate the hypothesis of the Christian origin of modern science in my book Science, Meaning, & Evolution: The Cosmology of Jacob Boehme.³

According to my analysis, the dogmas of the Christian Trinity and the Incarnation, which permeated the cultural and spiritual environment of Galileo’s time, accompanied by an important technological development, enabled the formulation of the methodology of modern science. The fact that Christianity was the dominating religion in Europe was also an important historical aspect.

After the publication of my book, I discovered a short study by Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) entitled “L’origine chrétienne de la science moderne.”⁴ Kojève, a known neo-Marxist French philosopher of Russian origin, cannot be remotely suspected of sympathy toward Christianity. The main argument of his study, which was published in 1964, is based uniquely on the dogma of the Incarnation.

Kojève starts by acknowledging the birth of mathematical physics in Western Europe in the sixteenth century. For Kojève, pagan theology represents the theory of the double transcendence of God: “The Theos of ‘classic’ paganism … is not only beyond the world where the pagan lives. This Theos is irremediably beyond the Beyond that the pagan may, at some point, access after his death.”⁵ Double transcendence is the conception of an unsurpassable wall that does not allow us to conceive perfection in our world, perfection that is, nevertheless, assumed by the laws of physics. According to Kojève, this perfection is ensured by mathematical physics, “Therefore, for pagans like Plato and Aristotle, as for all civilized Greeks who are therefore likely to pursue the sciences, looking for a science like modern mathematical physics would be not only madness, but a huge scandal—as, indeed, for the Jewish people.”⁶ As for the obvious reproach regarding the conflict between the founders of modern science and the Catholic Church, Kojève responded with justification: “What these scientists are fighting against is scholasticism in its most advanced stage; that is, the Aristotelianism portrayed in its pagan authenticity, whose incompatibility with Christian theology had been clearly observed and indicated by the first precursors of the philosophy of modern times.”⁷ Furthermore, Kojève reviewed the Christian dogmas of God’s uniqueness, of ex nihilo creation, of the Trinity and the Incarnation, in order to conclude for the preeminence of the latter dogma, that of the Incarnation, in the birth of modern science. He eliminated the first two dogmas simply because they were also found elsewhere, namely in Judaism and Islamism. He also removed the dogma of the Trinity because, wrote Kojève, “it rather incites ‘mystical’ introspection or metaphysical speculations than a careful observation of a body of phenomena and of their experimental manipulations.”⁸ What remained was the dogma of the Incarnation, about which Kojève wrote: “Indeed, what is the Incarnation, if not the opportunity for God to be effectively present in the temporal world, in which we live ourselves, yet without decaying from his absolute perfection?”⁹ For Kojève, Copernicus “lifted to Heaven the body of Christ, revived by the entire terrestrial world where Jesus died, after having been born here. But whatever this heaven might have been for the faithful Christians, it was but a ‘mathematical’ or a mathematizable sky for all the savants of the era.”¹⁰

Kojève’s theses could seduce an important medieval literature specialist such as Alexandre Leupin. In his book Fiction et Incarnation,¹¹ published in 1993, Leupin showed that the pagan-Christian epistemological rupture introduced a new conception about language and a new regime of truth and fiction. Christian epistemology requires a realism of language and concepts. Language structure is not caught in an infinite loop, closed on itself. It opens toward reality, toward meaning. It refers to an event of reality. Leupin operates seductive conjunctions: concept/divine truth, experience/life of Christ, event/writing. The contradictory pair God-out-of-the-world/God-from-this-world is foundational for modern science, which is characterized by another contradictory pair: mathematics/scientific experiment. Leupin says: “Biblical writing is co-substantially the story of the thing (res gestae) and the thing itself, the unthinkable identity, which places the entire medieval writing, whatever its nature, under the absolute sign of the impossible. At the same time holding the experience and being the experience itself, the truth and the representation of the truth, the testamentary ‘anti-writing’ promotes writing to a dignity that is unrelated to the values that had been attributed to it by pagan antiquity.”¹²

Of course, Kojève’s theses were violently criticized by the American philosopher Steven Louis Goldman,¹³ who accused him of having assigned the paternity for the mathematical physics to Christianity.

Kojève is, in fact, right and wrong at the same time.

He was certainly right when he stressed the importance of the dogma of the Incarnation for the birth of modern science.

But he was wrong in first reducing modern science to mathematical physics.

Modern science is defined by its methodology, which was formulated by Galileo in the form of three postulates that are still valid today (see chapter 3):

1. The existence of universal laws of mathematical nature.

2. The discovery of these laws through scientific experimentation.

3. The perfect reproducibility of experimental results.

A careful examination of these postulates shows that mathematics certainly plays an important role, although not an exclusive one. Mathematics is at the same time an artificial language, different from familiar language, but also, according to Galileo, expressed by Salvicio, a common language between God and humans.¹⁴ If the first postulate and, perhaps, the third have some relation with the dogma of the Incarnation, this is not obvious for the second postulate, which introduces a third term in the human being–God relationship: nature.

Kojève was also wrong in having neglected the role of the dogma of the Trinity in the birth of modern science. It is certainly wrong to reduce this dogma to an “incitement towards mystical introspection” and to “metaphysical speculations.” As shown in a study conducted in collaboration with Catholic priest Thierry Magnin, philosopher and poet Michel Camus, and historian of religion Karen-Claire Voss,¹⁵ the dogma of the Trinity operates with a different logic from that of classical logic—the logic of the included middle, studied by Stéphane Lupasco (1900–1988).¹⁶ This logic is an extraordinary tool for analysis and inference and is necessary for pondering the harmonious coexistence of the opposites. It is not accidental that the logic of the included middle is the one that solves all the paradoxes of quantum mechanics and quantum physics as well as the one that can give a rational explanation of Christian texts.¹⁷

In this context, the example of Jacob Boehme (1575–1624), whom Hegel called “the first German philosopher” and whose work has exerted an undeniable influence on Newton, Novalis, Schlegel, Goethe, Fichte, Schelling, and Karl Marx, is very significant.

In order to explain the world, Boehme invented a septenary typology inspired directly by the dogmas of the Incarnation and the Trinity. The dogma of the Trinity consists of three terms that in turn have a ternary structure. Thus, Boehme obtains a structure with nine elements, two of which are discontinuities (Fiat, in Bohme’s language). If the ternary (associated with the dogma of the Trinity) concerns the inner dynamics of each system, the septenary (associated with the dogma of the Incarnation) is the foundation of the manifestation of all processes.¹⁸

The hypothesis of the Christian origin of modern science opens an interesting path to a new vision of what the roots and the future of Europe are. If Christianity is really the origin of modern science, it is very hard to believe that science has nothing in common with culture and spirituality. It is like saying that a baby has nothing in common with his or her mother. The fact that many scientists are atheist or agnostic is irrelevant in this context. Science itself is one thing; scientists are another thing. A given scientist is the conscious side of science and the historical movement and evolution of science are its subconscious part, like two sides of the same coin.

DO SCIENCE AND CULTURE HAVE SOMETHING IN COMMON?

At the beginning of human history, science and culture were inseparable. They were animated by the same questions, those about the meaning of the universe and the meaning of life.

In the Renaissance, those ties were not yet broken. As its name indicates, the first university was dedicated to studying the universal. The universal was embodied in those who would make their stamp on the history of knowledge. Gerolamo Cardano (1501–1576), the inventor of imaginary numbers and of the suspension system that bears his name, was a mathematician, a doctor, and an astrologer: the same person who established the horoscope of Christ was the author of the first systematic exposition of the calculus of probabilities.¹⁹ Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) was both an astronomer and an astrologer.²⁰ Isaac Newton (1643–1727) was simultaneously a physicist, a theologian, and an alchemist. He was as captivated by the Trinity as by geometry, and he spent more time in his alchemical laboratory than in the elaboration of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica.²¹ The founders of modern science had nothing in common with the stereotypical image of a scientist. Paradoxically, the scientist is forced, in spite of himself, to become a high priest of truth, an embodiment of rigor and objectivity. The complexity of the birth of modern science and of modernity itself helps us to understand the subsequent complexity of our own time.

The germ of the split between science and meaning, between subject and object, was certainly present in the seventeenth century, when the methodology of modern science was formulated, but it did not become fullblown until the nineteenth century, when the disciplinary big bang took flight.

In our time, the split was consummated. Science and culture have nothing more in common. This is why one speaks of science and culture. Every self-respecting government has a minister of culture and a minister of science. Every self-respecting international higher educational institution has a Department of Culture and a Department of Sciences. Those who try to cross the frontiers discover the risks of such an adventure. Science does not have access to the nobility of culture, and culture does not have access to the prestige of science.

In Europe, within science, one distinguishes the exact sciences from the human sciences, as if the exact sciences were inhuman (or subhuman) and the human sciences inexact (or non-exact). Anglo-Saxon terminology is still worse: one speaks of hard sciences and soft sciences. We will pass over the sexual connotation of these terms in order to explore their meaning. What are at stake are the ideas of definition, rigor, and objectivity, which convey the sense of exactitude (or of “hardness”). According to classical thought, the only exact definition is a mathematical definition, the only rigor worthy of its name is mathematical rigor, and the only objectivity is that corresponding to a rigorous mathematical formalism. The “softness” of the human sciences attests to their lack of respect for these three key ideas, which formed a paradigm of simplicity over the course of several centuries. What could be softer, more complex, than a human subject? The exclusion of the subject is therefore a logical consequence. “The death of the human being” coincides with the complete separation of science and culture.

One understands the indignant cries unleashed by the concept of two cultures—scientific and humanist culture—introduced some decades ago by C. P. Snow, a novelist and a scientist.²² The emperor wore no clothes. The comfort of the owners of the spheres of knowledge was threatened and their conscience was put to the test. Conforming to Snow, science is certainly part of culture, but this scientific culture is completely separated from humanist culture. For him, the two cultures are perceived as antagonists. The split between the two cultures is first of all a split between values. The values of scientists are not the same as the values of humanists. Each world—the scientific world and the humanist world—is hermetically shut on itself.

Of course, the analysis made by Snow was oversimplif...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• Chapter One: From Shattered Culture Toward Transculture
• Chapter Two: Contemporary Physics and the Western Tradition
• Chapter Three: The Grandeur and Decadence of Scientism
• Chapter Four: The Valley of Astonishment: The Quantum World
• Chapter Five: The Endless Route of the Unification of the World
• Chapter Six: The Strange Fourth Dimension
• Chapter Seven: The Bootstrap Principle and the Uniqueness of our World
• Chapter Eight: Complexity and Reality
• Chapter Nine: The Human Being: The Most Perfect of All Signs
• Chapter Ten: Beyond Dualism
• Chapter Eleven: The Psychophysical Problem
• Chapter Twelve: From the Quantum World to Ionesco’s Antitheater and Quantum Aesthetics
• Chapter Thirteen: The Theater of Peter Brook as a Field of Study of Energy, Movement, and Interrelations
• Chapter Fourteen: From Contemporary Science to the World of Art
• Chapter Fifteen: Vision of Reality and Reality of Vision
• Chapter Sixteen: Can Science Be a Religion?
• Chapter Seventeen: The Hidden Third and the Multiple Splendor of Being
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover