Constituents of Matter / 4

4 SEARCHING FOR THE BEING OF THE CONSTITUENTS OF MATTER

We have ended the previous chapter determined to travel back to the time when science emerged from human experience in order to examine the origin of our ontological conceptions concerning atomic entities and to identify the role that, despite Einstein’s deep belief to the contrary, observation may have played in their formation. The journey we are going to undertake here is not so much a journey backwards in time, though some historical conversation will necessarily take place, as it is a journey inwards into the essence of man’s encounter with things. But, going back to the essential beginning requires that we know where that beginning was. Since we are talking about science here, we may be naturally inclined to consult writings on philosophy of science for an answer to that question. Such an attempt would however be unproductive because what goes for philosophy of science today is more about epistemology than about ontology; it is focused on how scientific knowledge concerning things is to be defined and gathered, not on what science takes those things to be. Martin Heidegger, on the other hand, was a philosopher obsessed with ontology. Consulting his writings on science might therefore prove productive for us who are likewise obsessed with ontology.

While most writers in the philosophy of science are concerned with how scientific knowledge differs from belief by being refutable, with how it differs from subjective description by being experimental, and with how it differs from anecdote by being quantitative, Martin Heidegger was instead concerned with the way science takes-up the things it studies. According to him, the basic act which accomplishes the conversion of pre-scientific to scientific comportment towards things is the objectification of things:

Objectification means turning something into an object. Beings becoming objects does not mean that through this objectification beings become beings for the first time. Rather, as the beings they already are, beings are to respond to the knowing which is making the inquiry. By responding to the question as to what, how, and whence beings are, they stand vis-a-vis the inquiry which reveals them. With objectification we face the task of demonstrating, i.e., determining, beings which encounter us from out of themselves, of their own accord as they stand over against us.

Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kant’s Critiques of Pure Reason

However, when we thus encounter a thing as an object, as something which has been ob-jaceo, that is, as something which literally has been thrown down at our feet, there is no way to avoid the conclusion that observing an atomic object will affect it. Indeed, since an atomic object must stand over against us of its own accord before any observation of it can occur, such an object will be disturbed by our approaching it with our observing apparatus and, since that apparatus is necessarily much larger that the object itself, the disturbance is likely to be large and uncontrollable. Consequently, scientific comportment comes already too late for us. If we are to comprehend the constituents of matter as the ontological unity of the observed and the act of observing it, we must stop viewing man’s knowing encounter with things as if it were a simple commerce which men of science are conducting with the objects given to them to study:

Perception is not to be interpreted as a procedure by which a subject provides itself with representations of something which remain stored up inside as having been thus appropriated, and with regard to which the question of how they agree with actuality can occasionally arise ... the perceiving of what is known is not a process of returning with one’s booty to the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it.

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (1927)

Rather, we must go deeper into the nature of that encounter and see if there might not be a more primordial level at which man and the things he encounters are given together, a level where things have not yet been fully cleaved-off from the inquiring mind which observes them. We must, in other words, go further back to a pre-scientific comportment.

Martin Heidegger traces pre-scientific comportment towards things back to our original encounter with them when they were taken as instruments rather than as mere objects. However, his analysis is deeply philosophical, and re-phrasing a philosopher’s statements is a notoriously dangerous game to play, even if one were the professional this author is not. Moreover, Heidegger’s views are scattered over his many works, each of which is focused on other issues. Consequently, we shall be well advised to gather together here the pertinent positions in Heidegger’s own words before attempting to trace the ontology of a quantum object.