Nature and the Greeks

This is a book I have been meaning to read for a long time, like Physics and Philosophy by Sir James Jeans - especially having enjoyed Schrödinger's earlier essays on life, mind and matter. As one might expect, the first essay relates physics to its origins in Greek thought, with individual coverage of key thinkers such as Pythagoras, Parmenides, Xenophanes and Democritus as it traces the evolution of patterns of thought. In its broadest context, Schrödinger sees science as part of our quest to understand who we are, but he recognises the validity of different approaches reflected in the heart and pure reason. For him, religion rounds out one's worldview even if there is a danger of closure, but this is also present in science. He draws on Greek scholars such as Gomperz and Burnet, quoting the former as saying that a thorough knowledge of the origins of our entire intellectual education 'is the indispensable prerequisite for freeing ourselves from their overwhelming influence' (p. 19), noting that this includes our entire thinking, logical categories and linguistic patterns. Burnet makes the same point when he describes science as 'thinking about the world in the Greek way.'

There follows a chapter on the competition between reason and the senses as also reflected in the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. It was Pythagoras who defined things in terms of numbers, an approach also embodied in Galileo. There is an elegant description of how Pythagoras arrived at his theorem and how the Greeks deduced the circularity of the Earth, defined it as a planet, and, in 280 BC, Aristarchus established a heliocentric system overthrown 150 years later by the authority of Hipparchus in his capacity as 'President of the University of Alexandria'. The chapter on the Ionian Enlightenment identifies two key features that have come down from the Greeks to modern science: the assumption that the world can be understood, 'and the simplifying provisional device of excluding the person of the understander from the rational world picture that is to be constructed' (p. 54). Early attempts to understand the world did so in terms of various substances, although later in the book Schrödinger argues for the primacy of form over substance. Anaximenes is the first to recognise the processes of rarefaction and condensation, which Schrödinger sees as a stepping stone to atomism, itself an antecedent of quantum physics.

Moving onto the exclusion of the observer, Schrödinger points out that this helps simplify the scientist's problem of understanding nature 'by disregarding or cutting out of the picture to be constructed, himself, his own personality… the thinker steps back into the role of an external observer. Moreover, and this still applies, 'I am not aware of cutting out my mind when I construct the real world around me.' This necessarily results in an impoverished view of the world giving lots of factual information but being 'ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us…. it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity' (p. 95). We do not belong to this material world constructed by science, we are spectators even if our bodies do belong to it. Schrödinger then points out that 'in particular, and most importantly, this is the reason why the scientific worldview contains of itself no ethical values, no aesthetic values, not a word about our own ultimate scope or destination, and no God, if you please. Whence came I, whither go I? The world picture only contains primary qualities, not consciousness and sense.

Schrödinger returns to this theme towards the end of the second essay in a discussion of physical indeterminacy and free will, drawing on the thinking of Ernst Cassirer. Incidentally, the Templeton Foundation has just awarded a grant of more than $5 million to investigate the neuroscience of free will. For Schrödinger, this would be a category error since 'where is the room for the moral law if the natural law overpowers and entirely frustrates it? (p. 80) Free will is a higher order act that cannot be reduced to the mechanics or biochemistry of neural mechanisms. Cassirer maintains that free will includes as its most relevant part our ethical behaviour since our actions are determined by a variety of motives - physical randomness is simply not an adequate basis (see my review of Science and the Good in this issue). However, we can be tempted to explain things in terms of a backward-looking determinism after the event, as Bergson observes. This does not mean that they were determined a priori.

I would like to highlight one further point, passing over his fascinating discussion of the tension between the discrete and the continuous. After quoting some guidelines from a Commission for University Reform in Germany to the effect that each lecturer should be able to convey the limits of his subject matter, Schrödinger points out that even by the time he gave his second lecture nearly 70 years ago, our conceptions of matter had turned out to be much less materialistic than in the 19th century. He asks how we are to picture matter in our mind, commenting that matter is in fact an image in our mind and hence mind is prior to matter in terms of the general attitude we have to adopt in order to synthesise the findings of modern physics. However, we are still steeped in the kind of materialism that is based on these 19th century ideas. Schrödinger comments that it would take 50 years or so before the educated general public would have become aware of such a change, but it has still not really come about, not because of physics, but rather on account of the prevalence of mechanistic biology, notwithstanding the development of systems theory. He emphasises that the process of assimilation of new ideas is not automatic, 'we have to labour for it.' This is exactly what we are trying to do with the Galileo Commission Report in terms of a new science of consciousness. I am sure Schrödinger would have supported the initiative, and I recommend especially readers interested in the history of ideas to read this classic book.