This is where Stephen Hawking goes wrong when, at the very beginning of his bestseller The Grand Design, he triumphantly proclaims that "philosophy is dead:"* With the latest advances in quantum physics and cosmology (M -theory), he claims, so-called experimental metaphysics has reached its apogee. Upon a closer look, of course, we soon discover that we are not quite there yetalmost, but not quite. Furthermore, it would be easy to reject this claim by demonstrating the continuing pertinence of philosophy for Hawking himself (not to mention the tact that his own book is definitely not science, but a very problematic popular generalization): Hawking relies on a series of methodological and ontological presuppositions which he takes for granted. Only two pages after making the claim that philosophy is dead, he describes his own approach as "model-dependent realism;' based on "the idea that our brains interpret the input from our sensory organs by making a model of the world. When such a model is successful at explaining events, we tend to attribute to it . . . the quality of reality"; however, "if two models (or theories) accurately predict the same events, one cannot be said to be more real than the other; rather, we are free to use whichever model is most convenient."** If ever there was a philosophical (epistemological) position, this is one (and a rather vulgar one at that). Not to mention the further fact that this "model-dependent realism" is simply too weak to do the job assigned to it by Hawking, that of providing the epistemological frame for interpreting the well-known paradoxes of quantum physics, their incompatibility with common-sense ontology. However, in spite of all these problematic features, we should admit that quantum physics and cosmology do have philosophical implications, and that they do confront philosophy with a challenge.***
*Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design, New York Bantam 2010, p. 5.
**Ibid., p. 7.
***Furthermore, one cannot help noticing that. as to the positive content of Hawking's Theory of Everything, it bears an unmistakable resemblance to dialectical materialism. or is at least fully compatible with a reasonable version of dialectical materialism.
From Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing, Verso: London, New York, 2012. pp. 910-11.
-- Edited by Nomen est omen on Wednesday 26th of March 2014 05:20:10 PM
Finally, there is the Stephen Hawking hypothesis of "irrational time" (in the sense of irrational numbers), which dispenses with the very notion of the Big Bang: the curvature of time means that, like space, time has no limit, although it is finite (curved into itself). The idea of the Big Bang results from applying to the universe the logic of a single linear time and thus extrapolating to a zero-point, where in truth there is lnerely an endless circular movement.
Do not these five versions form a complete series of possible variations? Are we not dealing here with a systematic series of hypotheses like the set of the relations between the One and the Being deployed and analyzed by Plato in the second part of his Parmenides? Perhaps contemporary cosmology needs such a "Hegelian" conceptual systematization of the underlying matrix that generates the multitude of actually existing theories. Does this take us back to the ancient Oriental wisdom according to which all things are just ephemeral hagments which emerge out of the primordial Void and will inevitably return back to it? Not at all: the key difference is that, in the case of Oriental wisdom, the primordial Void stands for eternal peace, which serves as the neutral abyss or ground of the struggle between the opposite poles, while hom the Hegelian standpoint, the Void names the extreme tension, antagonism, or impossibility which generates the multiplicity of determinate entities. There is multiplicity because the One is in itself barred, out-of-joint with regard to itself: This brings us on to another consequence of this weird ontology of the thwarted (or barred) One: the two aspects of a parallax gap (wave and particle, say) are never symmetrical, for the primordial gap is between (curtailed) something and nothing, and the complementarity between the two aspects of the gap function so that we have first the gap between nothing (void) and something, and only then, in a (logically) second time, a second "something" that fills in the Void, so that we get a parallax gap between two somethings. For example, in Lacan's formulae of sexuatioll, the feminine formulae (or mathematical antinomies) have a (logical) priority; it is only in the second moment that the dynaJnic antinomies enter as attempts to resolve the deadlock of the mathematical antinomies.
From Slavoj Zizek, Less Than Nothing, Verso: London, New York, 2012. pp. 927-28.
