|
Raw-Feels Pain of a Wide World (Qualia Mundi)
The most remarkable feature of Einstein's relativity is that his theories give exceptional results - at macro level, one
should add - and explain so much that earlier appeared dim: they beautifully give a key to such big questions of the
world as time and space, motion, eternity, infinity, and limit, and in the end explain none of these things at all. In
the end they render all of them more doubtful, or as doubtful as they were. This, I assume, judging from statements that
he made, is what drove Einstein to a firm belief in God - although belief is clearly not the correct word: to the
conviction of a God or Higher Being (where there's conviction there is no room for belief and, logically, no more
religion: what we know we don't, in one clear sense, believe). I coincide with Einstein's notions on all points, except
I don't call my conviction, or its object, God (a Higher Being, and so on).
All is relative in physics, there's no good reason to doubt that. All motion is in fact a movement relative to
something. No single entity can move in isolation; there is no motion to pin down purely as such. (For the sake of mere
simplicity I disregard the problem of what entities or objects are.) For we're traditionally, intuitively used to think
that, throwing something, say an orange - or, more classically, a spear, in allusion to Epicurus' spear at the world's
end - throwing it and taking away all other objects from the world until there's nothing but that single orange left -
or, if you will, only the spear - it will go on moving ahead consistently with how we threw it; throwing it we somehow
conveyed motion to it: now it has, or it possesses a pure motion in itself. This, Einstein tells us, is mistaken. With
nothing there to move against an object obviously won't move. If it exists at all, alone, it must remain in the same
place, simply because there isn't any other place, or any reference of a place other than this.
And analogously with time: we tend to think of time in terms of time per se. But very clearly time is only an
abstraction that we base on how some objects move in relation to some others (or, more precisely, on how all objects
move in relation to all others). A certain amount of time has passed (we say, or think: one year) when object "earth"
has made one turn around another object "sun"; and while we measure time this way in terms of motion we believe that
what we measure is external to the measuring process - it's distinct from all the objects and their moves. Destroying
every object in the universe, we think (i.e. the universe itself, cf. below), time would tick on just as unfailingly as
before, only by now without a clearly defined measuring device. That's absurd. Just as an object couldn't move except in
relation to another, so time can't pass except in relation to some change. Time is that change. Time is the objects as
they're moving in relation to each other (or themselves - that again involves the problem of our concept of an object);
without the objects and their movements there's no time, and what we do measuring time is designating changed positions.
No year will pass unless the earth completes one turn around the sun, which now it can't because there is no earth or
sun (or anything that could be subject to a corresponding change) - and this explains why there's no time before the
world or after it. The world's eternal of necessity, in this one sense exactly: it's indivisible from time, time only is
where the world is and there is no before or after. And so the world has always been (been for all time), and never ends
(will go on being for all time).
The same is true regarding space: there is no space without the objects of the world which constitute it - space then is
infinite, like time, since it extends as far any objects go, but not beyond. Space is the objects, or the world, and
where it's not there can be nothing: no new world (or counter-world), no empty space. So there is only what there is,
and there's no border or a limit between one thing and some other - no place where one thing ends: the world, and
something else comes on: pure space. Space in this way reaches forever. And so pure space, pure time, pure motion are
inventions of the mind. They don't exist: there is no space, no time, no motion beyond the objects.
Which, in turn, is what Parmenides taught some thousand years ago, and Zeno proved so brilliantly in paradoxes - only
strengthened through the years by that vast string of flawed solutions.
None of the points alleged above holds true, of course: there is pure time, pure space, pure motion in the absolutest
sense, to the same exact extent as there is pain. As I have claimed, Einstein's theories account for nothing whatsoever.
It's like you'd tell the starving masses, people tortured, martyred ruthlessly before your very eyes, this instant
suffering excruciating pains that they'll die soon (eventually), so it won't matter that they suffer here and now.
Pain's only relative at best - you know, made up, you're telling them. Something imagined that subsists in function of
external facts, exclusively without extension of its own; eliminating all these other factors one by one pain isn't
real, it disappears devoid of time and space or a medium to develop. That's an offense; that's condescending to the ills
and sufferings of humankind. Once inflicted pain is there, relative only to itself, real if it occupies or doesn't
occupy space; it has extension in and develops over time, or is in motion, when we feel it, as a quale, independently
of any outer things, even our bodies - and note the scaring implications this suggests: there could be hell, a pain
beyond all space and time, without the body. Pain is reality, its highest and most sovereign expression, nobody
subjected to it will doubt the absoluteness of it.
To illustrate the point just made, let's take the case of Damiens, spectacularly reimplanted into general consciousness
by Foucault in "Surveiller et punir" from 1975. In 1757 Francois Damiens, by some considered a mere idiot, by others a
fanatic, half-heartedly made an attempt to murder Louis XV with a blunt knife. (Damiens himself asserted, probably with
truth, that his intention had been only to alarm the king - in any case the harm suffered by Louis XV was unimportant.)
Damiens made no attempt to escape capture, and he was sentenced for the deed to have the flesh torn from his breasts,
arms, thighs and calves with red-hot pincers; his right hand, holding the knife with which he'd committed the parricide,
was to be burnt away with sulfur; molten wax and lead and boiling oil were to be poured into the wounds, and after that
his battered body was to be quartered by four horses and his limbs and trunk consumed by fire. An eyewitness, Bouton, an
officer of the watch, left this account: "...the executioner, his sleeves rolled up, took the steel pincers, which had
been especially made for the occasion, and which were about a foot and a half long, and pulled first at the calf of the
right leg, then at the thigh, and from there at the two fleshy parts of the right arm; then at the breasts. Though a
strong, sturdy fellow, this executioner found it so difficult to tear away the pieces of flesh that he set about the
same spot two or three times, twisting the pincers as he did so, and what he took away formed at each part a wound about
the size of a six-pound crown piece. [...] [T]he same executioner dipped an iron spoon in the pot containing the boiling
potion, which he poured liberally over each wound" (Zevaes, A.L. (1937): Damiens le regicide, cited in Foucault, M.
(1979): Discipline and Punish: The birth of prison).
The horses were then harnessed to Damiens' arms and legs for his dismemberment - but the horses were ill-trained and
after hours of intense tugging his joints had still not broken apart. Finally the supervising members of the Parlament
of Paris were forced to order the executioner and his aids to simply cut them. Bouton describes: "...the executioner
Samson and he who had used the pincers each drew out a knife from his pocket and cut the body at the thighs instead of
severing the legs at the joints; the four horses gave a tug and carried off the two thighs after them, namely, that of
the right side first, the other following; then the same was done to the arms, the shoulders, the arm-pits and the four
limbs; the flesh had to be cut almost to the bone, the horses pulling hard carried off the right arm first and the other
afterwards" (ibid.).
Damiens' trunk, apparently still living - Bouton, for instance, affirms that Damiens' jaws were moving from side to side
as if he were talking - was then burnt at the stake, mark this detail, to the applause of the numerous crowd. During the
whole of the procedure a confession was taken from the offender.
Now, for the period of those hours, was time (space, motion...) real to Damiens (cf. the suffering masses, anybody
enduring pain), or was it relative? The thought of death could well have functioned as a faint semblance of hope, a
bleak and very distant prospect of relief in his position, but it in no way could have relativized his ordeal - as
little as death, when it occurred, could relativize it retrospectively. So Einstein's theories, though they're right,
tell us the wrong thing about time (space, motion... - or whatever forms the world); at deeper levels of reality they're
nothing but offensive.
No other theory that we know has failed so greatly at such heights, aside perhaps from Russell's theory of descriptions,
which so convincingly explained what there can be and cannot be, and exactly what we're able to express of it through
language, the great achievement without doubt of 20th century analytics, with the one drawback that it's altogether
wrong (Kripke convinces us of this with two or three strokes). But that's Philosophy, a field where one, somehow, at
length suspects that one will always be deceived - and not a scientific law of such immense exactitude, overwhelmingly
successful, an inexhaustible device producing hard, concrete results. Telling us nothing of why acts possess the power
to cause pain; why there is pain, and why there should be a capacity to suffer. Standing in contradiction to it. Going
despondently amiss depicting life's most basic fact, the ultimate truth of what determines our condition. Yielding a
power above nature, acting outside of its laws.
This forces Einstein to his knees, bowing his head in awe of God. Which, as I say, is where I no longer agree. I rise in
wrath against this lunacy, the terror and abuse which it sets free - this hateful source of agony, injustices, bloodshed
and cruelty, sadism that I refuse to denote God, that crushes me.
Arndt Britschgi was born and raised in Finland. He spent the best (if not the longest) part of his
life in Madrid, Spain, and recently took his
Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His writing has appeared in Literary Fragments,
Kulttuurivihkot (Finnish), Southern Cross Review, the EOTU Ezine, Word Riot, Slow Trains Literary Journal, Milk
Magazine, and The Modern Review.
Email: Arndt Britschgi
Return to Table of Contents
|