Doesn’t the Denial of Motion Take All Joy and Verve out of Life?
I do feel this issue keenly. The kingfisher parable should make that clear. In principle, there is no reason why we should not attempt to put our very direct sense of change directly into the foundations of physics. There is a long tradition, going back at least to Hamilton, that seeks to make process the most basic thing in the world. Roughly, the idea is that physics should be built up using verbs, not nouns. In 1929 the English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead published an unreadable – in my experience – book called Process and Reality in which he advocated process. It all sounds very exciting, but I just do not think it can be done, despite a valiant attempt by Abner Shimony. Having translated seventy million words of Russian into English, I can say with some feeling that sentences do have a subject and generally an object. I could have written this book using the one verb ‘to be’, which hardly counts as a verb. For this reason it seldom appears in Russian; when it does, it is most often as a surrogate: ‘to appear’. But a book without nouns is nothing. Not even James Joyce could write it. For some reason, disembodied verbs exert a fascination not unlike the grin of the Cheshire cat. But when Owen Glendower claimed to be able to ‘call up spirits from the vasty deep’, Hotspur answered: ‘Aye, and so can I and any man, but will they come when you call them?’ I should like to see it done.
Less provocatively, I wonder if, at root, there is that much difference between the Heraclitan and Parmenidean schools, representing ‘verbs’ and ‘nouns’ respectively. If my definition of an instant of time is accepted, it becomes hard to say in what respect those two great Pre-Socratics might differ. The two best-known sayings attributed to Heraclitus are ‘Everything flows’ (Panta rei) and the very sentence which, entirely unconsciously, I used to clinch the argument that the cat Lucy who leapt to catch the swift was not the cat who landed with her prey: ‘One cannot step into the same river twice.’ There is always change from one instant to another – no two are alike. But that is just what I have tried to capture with the notion of Platonia as the collection of all distinct instants. Heraclitus argued that the appearance of permanence, of enduring substance, is an illusion created by the laws that govern change. Obviously, he and Parmenides could not be expected to have anticipated quantum mechanics, wave functions and the Wheeler-DeWitt equation, But I see Bell’s account of alpha-particle track formation as remarkable support for the Heraclitan standpoint that appearances are the outcome of the laws that bring them forth. Would it not be a wonderful reconciliation of opposites if the static wave function were to settle spontaneously on time capsules that are redolent of both flux (evidence of history) and stasis (evidence that things endured through it)?
But the loss of motion is still poignant, a premonition of mortality and a view of our life from outside it. There is a scene in George Eliot’s Middlemarch in which Ladislaw and a painter friend chance to see the heroine Dorothea in a particularly striking pose in Rome. The painter is keen to capture it on canvas, but Ladislaw taunts him:
Painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere coloured superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment.
Keats too, for all the beauty of his Grecian urn, addresses it with the words
Thou, silent form! Dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity. Cold Pastoral!
When Keats wrote these lines, he must have known that all too soon his home would be a grave. Is Platonia a graveyard? Of a kind it undoubtedly is, but it is a heavenly vault. For it is more like a miraculous store of paintings by artists representing the entire range of abilities. The best pictures are those that somehow reflect one another. These are the paintings we find there in profusion. There are very few of the mediocre, dull ones. Despite what Ladislaw says, the best paintings have a tremendous vibrancy. Turner does almost bind you to the mast of the Ariel. Indeed, Ladislaw’s own words immediately before the passage quoted above are: ‘After all, the true seeing is within.’ Frozen it may be, but Platonia is the demesne where ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ and the boughs cannot shed their leaves ‘nor ever bid the Spring adieu’. With that perfect ode, Keats did achieve the immortality for which he so desperately longed.
In a fine essay entitled ‘The timeless world of a play’, Tennessee Williams praises great sculpture because it
often follows the lines of the human body, yet the repose of great sculpture suddenly transmutes those human lines to something that has an absoluteness, a purity, a beauty, which would not be possible in a living mobile form.
He argues that a play can achieve the same effect, and so help us to escape the ravages of time. ‘Whether or not we admit it to ourselves, we are all haunted by a truly awful sense of impermanence.’ Again, this is very beautiful writing, but has Williams failed to see the truth all around us – the Platonic eternity we inhabit in each instant? Is it blindness that drives him to seek eternity? Some people can pass a cathedral without noticing it.
The desire for an afterlife is very understandable, but we may be looking for immortality in the wrong place. I mentioned Schrödinger’s curious failure to recognize in his own physics the philosophy of ancient India (especially the Upanishads) he so admired. There is a beautiful passage at the end of his epilogue to What is Life? that nevertheless strikes me as wishful thinking. He poses the question, ‘What is this “I”?’ Here is part of his answer:
If you analyse it closely you will, I think, find that it is just a little bit more than a collection of single data (experiences and memories), namely the canvas upon which they are collected. And you will, on close introspection, find that what you really mean by ‘I’ is that ground-stuff upon which they are collected. You may come to a distant country, lose sight of all your friends, may all but forget them; you acquire new friends, you share life with them as intensely as you ever did with your old ones … Yet there has been no intermediate break, no death.
Thus, he argues that our personal ‘ground-stuff is imperishable, holding us together through all the changes of life. He ends with this affirmation of faith: ‘In no case is there a loss of personal existence to deplore. Nor will there ever be.’ But earlier he had praised the great Upanishads for their recognition that ATHMAN = BRAHMAN (the personal self equals the omnipresent, all-comprehending eternal self). He seems to want to have his cake and eat it, to be dissolved in the all-comprehending eternal self yet still retain a personal identity. He is not finding a canvas, he is clutching for a straw.
Tennessee Williams faced up to things more squarely: ‘About their lives people ought to remember that when they are finished, everything in them will be contained in a marvelous state of repose which is the same as that which they unconsciously admired in drama.’ Exactly: this is the truth and beauty of Keat’s Grecian urn. Williams goes on: ‘Snatching the eternal out of the desperately fleeting is the great magic trick of human existence.’ Yes, though it’s not a magic trick but simply the opening of our eyes.
Some years ago, I heard Dame Janet Baker interviewed on radio. She was asked if she ever listened to her recordings and, if so, what were her favourites. She said she almost never listened to them. For her, every Now was so exciting and new, it was a great mistake to try to repeat one. In her singing she made no attempt at all to recreate earlier performances and do the high points the same way as the night before. Again and again she spoke with the deepest reverence of the Now and how it should be new and happen spontaneously. ‘The Now is what is real’, she said.