QUANTUM METAPHYSICS - E-thesis

either religion or ethics. Also science, whose reliability Kant had relegated to dependence on the
human cognitive structure, lost its foundations in twentieth-century physics when the absolute
categories of Newton and Euclid, on which Kant based his a prioris such as time, space,
substance and causality, were no longer deemed to be necessary foundations for the scientific
approach. 333 On the other hand, two points made by Kant still stand. Firstly, that we need to have
some metaphysical framework: humans cannot obtain knowledge of nature’s universal laws by
simply waiting for the correct answers, they must present nature with questions which are based
on hypotheses. An approach to the world requires an a priori hypothesis in order for it to be
observable and testable. Secondly, that our sensations can only provide us with intelligible
experiences if they conform to our framework. Quantum mechanics bestows credibility on
Kant’s thesis that physics does not address nature as it actually is, only via our relationship to it –
nature as if presents itself to human questioning. 334
3.3.3. Romantic natural philosophy in Germany
Kant conceded that, in metaphysics, it is possible to think of things ”as such”, but left his
followers to answer the question of what to think about. In German philosophy, after Kant’s
demise, his Critical idealism quite rapidly became genuine Idealism with the elimination of the
”things as such”, with the consequence that no reality independent of the conceiving subject
remained. In his objective idealism, G.F.W. Hegel (1770-1831), Kant’s most important
successor, attempted to combine man and nature, mind and matter, as well as time and eternity
into an all-embracing multi-dimensional and developing dialectic process. Hegel viewed the
whole of world history as a process of development of an ”absolute spirit”. Investigation of the
laws of this “self-movement” he called a dialectic.
In his extreme Rationalism, which in experimental terms was difficult to distinguish from
Irrationalism, Hegel attempted to show that all the features of existence were necessary. He
considered philosophy to be ”an objective science of truth, a science of its necessity, of
conceptual knowing, it is no opining and no web spinning of opinions”. 335 Hegel abandoned the
333
Even though the general statement of causality is synthetic a priori, general and necessary, all the specific
causal laws are empirical. They are no more certain in Kant’s doctrine than they are in empiristic epistemology.
Aspelin 1995, 379.
334
Trusted 1991, 125, Tarnas 1991, 351, 358-359.
335
Hegel 1985, 17. In his Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel expressed an extended and trenchant critisism of
Newton. Burtt 1980, 35.
126