My parents did not give me the best genes but they happened to be well fitted for nurture. I survived despite being this sickly child. Every day was a day worried but also a day won. It was with wonder I was raised. A mother’s wonder at eczematous skin so raw around a kid so gentle. My father’s wonder at the asthmatic shortness of breath of his son otherwise so long-winded. Two sister’s wonder at the intensity of a brother who couldn’t deal with reality. Two brother’s wonder at the straight lines thought by somebody with a back so crooked. It might seem that I am making myself to be the center of the universe, but the fact is I was a spoiled brat if ever there was. I looked back in their wonder filled eyes and couldn't but think that I was a miracle. “I’m a miracle!”, it was not so much a thought as a way of being.
This may be the reason why I cannot separate happiness from worrying, why I can’t simply be (as my psychiatrist once ordered). So I wondered whence came this human desire for a clear separation of concepts. It so seemed - I thought, maybe soaking in the bathtub - that being happy required not worrying and worrying implied not being happy. The word “not” is taken to cut as sharp as Ockham’s razor. If one isn’t not bald, one surely is bald. Except if you are like me: neither fish nor fowl. Then again the razor is not meant to shave my hair, it is meant to shave away superfluous words. And whether that is chasing wild geese, or it is chasing a cancer out of our natural language, in modern times it has become a scientific witch hunt (which is a fact not even postmodernists would deny1). Excluding the middle, so was my foresight, is excluding anybody unruly like me.
What we moderns want is to chase the unclarity out of our everyday language so it neatly cuts at nature’s joints. Like a butcher our scientific superego wants to dissect nature. This makes me (and others in the ghetto of philosophy) think: is there any life left after that? Is it not vitality itself we have cut before we ever can arrive at those precious joints? Aristotle, it seems to me, wouldn’t have dreamed about keeping everything but two things constant - let alone if the dependent variable was a human being like himself. That surely would have been cutting too close to home; too close for ethical comfort. Then again comfort is one of the words we moderns feel needs chasing since competition should ultimately get all of us out of that zone. We have science to tell us the truth so we don’t have to take it, or indeed anything else, on anyone’s word anymore. Trust, it seems, left us with God’s dying gasp.
So, what’s the fuss with all this fuzzy philosophy? Why can’t my mathematical mind shake off this funny feeling that all cannot be said and done? Science - or so we’re told, because whatever else it does, science makes for damned good stories - has the story on this too. It is conveniently located at the very base of its pyramid, in quantum mechanics. Truth is in the eye of the beholder after all and the truth is that our eyes are flawed. However far we’ll technologically improve our eyesight, our measurements are fraught with uncertainty. That means certainty is a kind of thing we just happen not to be made of. Physics says that we can have our determinism and eat it too. Well, some physicists say that and it is a hell of a story but one physicist puts it differently. Bohr says indeterminacy is basic - we had better trust our eyes as they are all we have to appreciate the phenomena that make our world.
Bohr brings me right back to my bathtub and an Eureka! feeling I once felt in it. “Not” is not everything it is made out to be. Some things are false but nothing is true2. Forgive me my innocence because the ‘me’ in the bathtub was just a wee lil’ boy without friends, without a specialized education and way too much time on his hands. But, as it turns out, Bohr really thought along complementary lines. I am not saying this just because it is a compliment to that lonely young me soaking in a bathtub. I say this since Bohr showed something similar: any theory in physics must use notions like position (a particle being in a particular place) and momentum (its rotation literally making waves). These notions are ‘mutually exclusive’ in that they cannot be measured at the same time (here Einstein started to grumble). They are also ‘jointly sufficient’ in that together they are the basis for predicting empirical results in physics. The problem is not with our eyes (regardless of the experimental extensions we give them). The problem is with our prejudice of determinism (and the related prejudice of clarity). We cannot say exhaustively what will happen (what is the truth) given we have to use these complementary notions, but we can definitely rule out some things of happening (apples floating above trees are, like determinism, impossible). Indeterminacy is a physical fact (of life). Not even elementary particles can be cut around man-made joints! Many still continue Einsteins’ grumbling, but nobody (in their right physicist’s mind) would still assert our universe consists of small, disconnected, clearly delineated, bouncy Newtonian balls.
Probably at this point you feel like going to soak in your bathtub (something which I would take as a compliment by the way!), but bear with me. What just happened isn’t mysterious. As Gödel also saw, it boils down to a very simple observation. If you dissect a living animal to examine how it is precisely built it is by definition dead. But if you keep it alive then it will be impossible to see how, precisely, it builds its self. Complementarity rather than clarity, is what our world is made of. Science, then, is not about how things are independent of how we perceive them. It is about us, collectively, trying to point out falsities in scientific stories used to contend we have to just accept “the way things are”. Science is activism, resisting the idea that we have to accept some ultimate wisdom of the past. It is a matter of trying to critically point out what’s wrong with theories without ever individually getting to (pro)claim you are definitely right. “Sapere Aude!”, Kant would have said; the pursuit of knowledge is risking to break the status quo of present injustice in search of finding future fairness.
Fortunately, this is just a complex preface for a book that’s hopefully as easy to understand for the charitable layperson as outside the grasp of those who will forcefully demand clear, decisive knockdown arguments3. A book collecting dichotomies in order to vividly illustrate they are complementary pairs trying to grasp what always escapes as difference. Fractals of dualities allowing to create trust across differences instead of predicating (in)convenient truths invariably winding up by separating people. A pro-trust book for our post-truth era.
Derrida says that there is always a bit of meaning escaping the conscious intention of writing. It mostly surfaces in footnotes and prefaces, which is why it is best to say here science in its origins (pace Evelyn Fox-Keller) was complicit in hunting witches. Sorcery and science, then, are complementarily complicit.
When I once put this on an internet message board, I got laughed at and ridiculed by what I thought to be professional philosophers so I thought my proposition had to be absurd. To this day however I believe it is, for lack of a better word, true. As close as I can get to making sense at least. I say this respectfully as a meanwhile summa cum laude graduated professional philosopher ;-).
Taking you back a moment to footnote 1, it is not at all by chance that the image of scientists ‘forcefully demanding’ ‘knockdown’ arguments sounds very scientific. What escapes from Western science are the fumes of belligerent metaphors and extreme emotions about having to be unemotional.
PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it is the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).