Adopting a methodological approach grounded in hermeneutics, I draw directly from physicists’ writing to bring together the field of post-Kantian philosophical aesthetics and the post-quantum philosophy of science. Thus, physics can be located within the framework of the Kantian sublime. In occasioning imaginative representations that strive after something which lies beyond the bounds of experience, descriptions of the quantum realm in physicists’ writings disclose an aesthetic appraisal of the sublimity of nature that revives the Romanticist link between nature and aesthetics first established by Kant in the Critique of Judgement. Specifically, twentieth century physics embodies an implicit and unacknowledged aesthetic of the sublime within its discourse. This thesis argues that the representational problems encountered by physics can be more effectively mounted in aesthetic terms. Trading in issues of limits and limitlessness, unity and fragmentation and the tension between the whole and the parts that have historically preoccupied all philosophical enquiry, physics offers partial presentations of a totality which, as a totality, is unpresentable. At the end of the 20th century, having reached its empirical limits, physics presents us with the limits of our power to represent the world, effecting a convergence of contemporary thought in which the key themes are ‘indeterminacy’, ‘uncertainty’, and ‘unknowability.’ Dealing in entities and concepts that defy the imagination, the discourse of contemporary physics is characterised by a combination of science and metaphysics, of the rational and the mystical, and of explanation and speculation. Hence, physics enters the field opened up by the aesthetics of the sublime.ĪBSTRACT: Since its inception quantum physics has instituted an ongoing reappraisal of how we describe the Universe. In this paper I argue that the quantum field replaces the Romantic aesthetic of the infinite as a symbol of the mind’s relation to a transcendent order. These issues are particularly prominent in David Bohm’s description of the ‘holomovement’. Expressed in terms of a confrontation with a transcendental ‘other’, physicists’ encounter with the descriptive limits of reality entails a ‘presentation of the unpresentable’, effecting a shift to the poetic at the margins of its discourse that reflects the transition from representation to poiesis in Romantic aesthetics.
The realisation that the whole cannot be represented as a sum of its parts discloses an unexpected limit to scientific knowledge which sees ontological and metaphysical speculation interacting with other areas of thought in physicists’ writing. The discovery that the underlying structure of the universe is field-like rather than particle-like eludes traditional conceptions of representation. Abstract: A central tenet of quantum theory is the idea that the physical world is one interconnected, dynamic whole.
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