Philosophy, Quantum Science... and Psychoanalysis
Towards the First Cause of Subjectivity and a Higher Order Temporality
This week at The Portal we welcome Dr. Ruth E. Kastner to present and discuss “Science and Spirit”. Dr. Kastner is the author of Adventures in Quantumland: Exploring Our Unseen Reality, a book which offers a fully relativistic interpretation of quantum mechanics that allows for both free will and reconciliation between science and spirit. To find out more, or to join us, see: The Portal.
The history of philosophy in the European tradition is, as suggested by Alfred North Whitehead, “a series of footnotes to Plato”.1 What Whitehead meant by this is that philosophy in the European tradition has been indebted to the wealth of general ideas that one can find in Plato’s foundational writings, i.e. a type of “inexhaustible mine of suggestion”.2
The idea of “The Idea” is perhaps the most foundational and inexhaustible mine.3 As is commonly expressed and known, and as we all learn in introductory philosophy class, Plato’s idea of “The Idea” is something like a division between sensible reality and suprasensible reality. This division is usually expressed with the Cave Allegory, where we find prisoners chained to the walls of a cave, looking at (sensing) the shadows on the cave wall. In the allegory, one the prisoners breaks free, turns around and makes his way out of the cave, and towards the source of the light that casts the shadow on the cave walls.4 There he finds the truth of the sense appearances in the suprasensible “sun” of “The Idea”, the “Perfect Forms”, the “most beautiful”, and so forth.
This allegory is meant to express our relationship to the everyday world that we can see with our senses (sight, smell, touch, taste, hear), and the unobservable or unseen world, which is the “true source” of this world as suprasensation.
While one might think this ancient distinction has no practical relevance today outside of classical philosophy, you would be wrong. Whitehead’s suggestion that the European tradition of philosophy is but “a series of footnotes to Plato” may be actually too limiting, it seems like even science (which of course emerges out of Western philosophy) is also but a footnote to Plato. Dr. Ruth E. Kastner suggests as much in her book Adventures in Quantumland: Exploring Our Unseen Reality5 when she suggests that the quantum mechanical paradigm essentially brings us to a distinction that looks a lot like the one we read in Plato’s Cave Allegory. For Kastner, this distinction between the sensible world of appearances and the suprasensible world of forms, is one that may help us to think through one of the most basic ideas in quantum physics, that of complementarity or wave-particle duality.
To state it simply, complementarity was a principle introduced by the quantum physicist Niels Bohr to imply that phenomena at the atomic and subatomic scales are not like large-scale phenomena. While large-scale (visible, observable) phenomena exhibit behaviour that we can classify as either particle or wave, quantum phenomena exhibit both behaviours at the same time. In other words, complementarity suggests that the contradiction of existing in a state as both particle and wave is reconciled at the quantum level; whereas for our basic sense perception of everyday reality, we never encounter such a reality, we only ever see phenomena as either particle or wave.
There is fundamentally a different logic at work to think in quantum terms.
If this seems irrelevant, it actually shatters our classical understanding of science, because it forces us to confront our own involvement in the world of things. For example, when Galileo observed moons orbiting Jupiter (as opposed to the Earth), he and his contemporaries did not believe that the moons orbiting Jupiter depended on the machinic context of his observations of them. The debate and the tension was classical: either the moons orbited Jupiter or they orbited Earth, independent of our machinic context and observations. What was at stake was our classical centrality with respect to cosmic movement.
While all modern subjects have not only come to accept that the moons of Jupiter orbit Jupiter and not Earth, but also that movement in the cosmos is far more de-centered from our particular locality than traditional cosmologies would have suggested; we have yet to reconcile ourselves with the complementarity that seems to be at the ground of reality beyond our capacity for direct sense. That is, when we include the machinic context of observation and testing of subatomic reality, the very context of our intervention changes the behaviour of what is being observed and tested. What is crucial here is the total context that changes the behaviour, i.e. the intervention of our machine apparatus and the process of testing particle-wave behaviour. Unlike the aforementioned situation with Galileo, our intervention does change behaviour.
To imagine how strange this is: think about the solar system existing in a superposition of states when we are not looking at it, and then existing in a clear and deterministic orbital pattern when we are looking at it. Einstein framed his disbelief about the ontological conclusions of certain interpretations of quantum mechanics in the following way:
“Do you really believe the moon is not there when you are not looking at it?”
Since the advent of the quantum mechanical paradigm, philosophical debates have raged about how to interpret the strange behaviour of quantum mechanical reality. Is there really more to the world than what we see?6 Is there an other world, a quantum world, that behaves fundamentally differently from the world that we know and love/hate? Is the division we find in quantum mechanics representing the equivalent of the Allegory of the Cave: the result of a few prisoners qua scientists unshackling themselves from the sense appearances of the world, and discovering the deeper (quantum) reality that is the true source of this world?
Dr. Kastner does not try to answer this question absolutely. She rather decides to use this distinction to create a limit condition for what science can and cannot know, perhaps similar to Kant’s transcendental distinction between phenomena and noumena. The phenomena represent the world of sense-perception, what science can know and investigate through observation and testing; and the noumena represent the quantum world beyond sense-perception, thus what science cannot know via empirical judgement.
Funny enough, we might consider bringing in a strange third friend to this party at the intersection of philosophy and quantum science: psychoanalysis.7
Can we extend Whitehead’s claims even further and suggest that all of philosophy, science and psychoanalysis is but “a series of footnotes to Plato?”
This idea may hold if we consider that, in psychoanalysis, we reach a distinction between the world of sense-perception and its limit in an other side when we consider that psychoanalysis is about the analysis of dreams. What is interesting is that, for Freud, we can also apply Bohr’s logic of complementarity when we think about the distinction between the world of sense perception and the “suprasensible” world of dreams, which seems to embody a different logic.
In order to understand this, we must first note that Freud is famous for making the distinction in dream work between manifest and latent content, that is between observable and hidden content.8 The whole point of dream analysis in psychoanalysis was to bring to analysis what was manifest in the dream (e.g. falling, being eaten, running in the same spot, meeting an old acquaintance, etc.), and to discover its latent or hidden meaning, which in Freudian schools, was as a rule traceable back to childhood memories and sexual energy representing unfulfilled wishes or desires. For Freud, children’s dreams represented direct expressions of unfulfilled wishes from the previous day:9
“The common element in all these children’s dreams is obvious. All of them fulfilled wishes which were active during the day but had remained unfulfilled. The dreams were simple and undistinguished wish-fulfillments.”
Whereas adult’s dreams represented indirect and complex expressions of unfulfilled wishes, due to the historical pressures characteristic of adult life on the pleasure principle from the reality principle (as the limit of pleasure).
Adults dreams are far more complex expressions of unfulfilled wishes of the previous day, week, month, year, lifetime… because they are not only deeply repressed, basically, but also necessarily so due to the structure of historicity itself.
However, what is most interesting for our purposes here is to note that dream thoughts possess a character that our normal waking day thoughts do not possess:10
“Ideas which are contraries are by preference expressed in dreams by one and the same element.”
In other words, Freud is suggesting that dream thoughts express contradiction without recognising it as contradiction, but simply positivising it. Another quote:11
“Each train of thought is almost invariably accompanied by its contradictory counterpart.”
Freud notes, from an interesting historical and anthropological angle, that:12
“most ancient human languages tended in general to express contradictory opposites by the same word. (E.g. ‘strong-weak’, ‘inside-outside’. This has been described as the antithetical meaning of primal words’.).”
If we were looking for a connection in psychoanalysis to Bohr’s complementarity — that reality at the quantum level behaves differently than the reality we observe through sense-perception — we would be hard pressed to find a better example of the distinction created at the ground of analysis, that is the distinction between our waking thoughts and our dream thoughts.
Moreover, Freud notes the strange affect that accompanies us in dreams when we try to make sense of the strange reality of dream thoughts as embodying contradiction: absurdity at the way the dream disregards classical logic:13
“Absurdity in a dream signifies the presence in the dream-thoughts of contradiction”
In other words, if classical logic was based on identity, that logic no longer applies when we take into consideration:
the outside of Plato’s Cave,
the outside of classical reality, and
the outside of our waking life.
To say it positively: classical logic no longer applies when take into consideration:
the suprasensible,
the quantum reality, and
our dream reality
Here we can sharpen these three distinctions, in trying to bring philosophy, quantum science, and psychoanalysis into the same room:
Plato’s Cave vs. Suprasensible Reality
Classical Reality vs. Quantum Reality
Waking Life vs. Dreaming Life
What are we to make of these distinctions? Was Plato from the very beginning recognising this basic split between our waking and our dreaming reality? Is quantum science bringing us to the edge of classical reality where it is nothing but an indeterminate superposition of potentialities/possibilities qua dreams? Is psychoanalysis bringing us to reconcile with the desire/dream-ground as the origin of our thinking and language?
Dr. Kastner seems to suggest that the key word to think here is possibility or potential. In classical empirical science we tend to become tethered to (what we think is) the actual and foreclose (to use the psychoanalytic jargon, precisely)14 the reality of the possible or potential. In other words, when science gets caught up in empiricism, it represents the world as “things” and “facts” but does not think about the way those “things” or “facts” either came to be observable things, or came to be relevant facts.
In order to understand how things came to be observable things, or to understand how facts came to be relevant facts, we might have to think with a different logic, that is, the logic of contradiction.
Considering that adults are very repressed, it is hard for them to accept and work with the logic of contradiction without going psychotic, that is, it is hard for adults to accept and work with the logic of contradiction without positivising delusion and foreclosing the negativity that is implied in working with contradiction. At the same time, this seems to be the precondition for the drive.
This problem is expressed well by Dr. Kastner in one of her recreations of a Platonic dialogue around the issue of whether or not there is a “real reality” behind the cave shadows, and whether or not this “real reality” is the “truth of the quantum world”. In an article titled “A Troublemaker in the Cave”,15 Dr. Kastner articulates a situation where one man, Bohrus, creates a mathematical theory of the movement of the cave shadows. While a few of his friends are impressed with the capacities of prediction that are opened up by this new theory, another friend, Socrates, suggests that his mathematical theory presupposes more dimensions than we observe on the surface of the cave walls in order to make these predictions.
Later in Kastner’s story, Socrates re-visits his friends, and tells them that he has found the extra-dimensional entities, but they are not observable on the surface of the cave walls, they can only be observed outside of the cave:
“You know that theory you just came up with? Well I just saw the entities it’s describing! To see them, you have to go outside the Cave! There this bright light, I think it’s what the Mystics refer to as “Consciousness”– and all these huge, multidimensional objects that we can’t see in here. When the light shines on them, we see their shadows, but only one side at a time! That’s why you’re getting this ‘Complementarity’ thing!”
Kastner goes on to remind us that the moral of this story is not to reify the mystical other side, but rather to set proper limits to empirical science:
“Now, of course, Socrates might be wrong. He might be deluded. He may simply have drunk one too many Cave-Cocktails. But the point is that his scientific colleagues cannot use empirical science to make that judgment, one way or the other. And when they try to do that, they misuse their scientific authority by extending it beyond its legitimate purview.”
While Kastner’s point about limiting the judgement of empirical science is an important one, how are we to deal with the problem of delusion that she (correctly, in my opinion), brings to our attention?
The problem of delusion when we step out of the bounds and limitations of empirical science are a big issue. We see all sorts of weird mystical identifications today, not only from New Age spiritual obscurantists, but also emerging precisely from the same minds that may have for a long mediation, been well trained within the structural limits of empirical science. Let us again revisit the distinctions from philosophy, quantum science, and psychoanalysis, to see if we can get to the bottom of it:
Plato’s Cave vs. Suprasensible Reality
Classical Reality vs. Quantum Reality
Waking Life vs. Dreaming Life
When we make the journey out of Plato’s Cave for the suprasensible reality (as marked by the historicity of philosophy), or when we make the journey out of classic reality and into quantum reality (as marked by the historicity of science), or when we make the journey out of waking life into dreaming life (as marked by the historicity of psychoanalysis), we are making a journey from what we might call “rationality without truth” towards the “madness of truth”. However, and crucially, the true task is not making this journey and remaining in the “madness of truth”. Paradoxically, this movement becomes untruth.
Why?
The truth is that the madness of truth is always-already outside of itself. That is, in the same way that we perceive that we are outside the truth; for the truth, it is outside of us. Thus, while we have had to make a journey to truth irrespective of the domain of inquiry (suprasensible philosophy, quantum science, dream analysis), we also need to bring truth back (to the cave, classical reality, and waking life).
This is the real arduous journey.
While many philosophers and quantum scientists have not made this journey, it seems that Freud knew it early on in his journey with psychoanalysis. What is remarkable about specifically Freudian psychoanalysis, is that he founded the discipline in the recognition that the hysterical hypnotic state in-and-for-itself was a truth that required speech, that is it required to be expressed in the cave of classical reality and waking life. The secret of psychoanalysis is not finding out the latent hidden meaning in the dream world, the secret of psychoanalysis is expressing the latent hidden meaning in the dream world in a speech act vis-a-vis an other (human being).
We find out the truth of the madness of truth in rational historical relation to the other.
We can frame this problem in terms of both philosophy and quantum science: what is most difficult in both philosophy and quantum science is not recognising that there is a truth outside of the cave (philosophy) or that there is a quantum reality which is underlying classical reality (quantum science), but rather talking about it between philosophers and scientists. Discourse between philosophers and discourse between scientists, that is the difficult thing. This is where reason and truth collide.
Perhaps that is why, Hegel — and following Hegel — Žižek, try to sublate Plato by recognising that “Plato’s deep insight” is that:16
“Ideas are not the hidden reality beneath appearances (Plato was well aware that this hidden reality is that of ever-changing corrupting and corrupted matter); Ideas are nothing but the very form of appearance, this form as such.”
If we recall Socrates delusion in Kastner’s story:
“You know that theory you just came up with? Well I just saw the entities it’s describing! To see them, you have to go outside the Cave! There this bright light, I think it’s what the Mystics refer to as “Consciousness”– and all these huge, multidimensional objects that we can’t see in here.”
We only need to transpose this delusion back into the structural nature of appearance qua appearance. In other words, we need to collapse the distinction between appearances and the truth beyond/behind them, back into appearances themselves. To quote Žižek:17
“The conclusion Plato avoids is implied in his own line of thought: the suprasensible Idea does not dwell beyond appearances, in a separate ontological sphere of fully constituted Being; it is appearance as appearance.”
What is interesting about psychoanalysis, and why it makes for such an interesting partner in the dance between philosophy and quantum science, is that it focuses on the speech that is produced at the very division itself between the cave and its outside, classical reality and its outside. Psychoanalysis forces us to recognise that not only does the cave/classical reality have an outside, but this outside is only an outside for-us: in-itself we are its outside.
We are dealing here with the structure of an unorientable surface, a möbius loop.
That is why, Lacan, following Freud, suggests that, in the end, it is not so much about setting up a clinic to cure us of our past traumas, but rather about setting up a space where this gap may speak:18
“My seminar […] brought forth the place from which it could speak, opening more than one ear to hear things that would have passed over indifferently since they would not have been recognised.”
He goes on to connect this to Plato’s Cave Allegory:19
“The place in question is the entrance to the cave, towards the exit of which Plato guides us, while one imagines seeing the psychoanalyst entering there.”
In this way, Lacan is in a sense suggesting that, while all of philosophy may be a footnote to Plato, perhaps psychoanalysis inverts this entire path. Philosophy mediates our journey from the rational enclosure of the cave to the suprasensible truth beyond appearances (“towards the exit”), whereas psychoanalysis invites us to return and speak about it (“the psychoanalyst enters there”).
However, Lacan warns us that this location, the entrance of Plato’s Cave (not its exit), will not be “popular with tourists”.20 Moreover, it requires an extremely contradictory stance: that of an individual whose inside is what we consider outside, and thus, for an individual whose outside is what we consider inside.
Lacan suggests that this is a true position of a psychoanalyst.
However, this contradictory position is not one that Lacan describes in a classical way, between temporality (of the cave/classical world/waking life) and eternity (of the suprasensible/quantum world/dream life), but rather as the difference between two types of temporality, what he calls a “temporal structure of a higher order”.21
It is this move which guarantees us two things: we are no longer in a pre-modern world, set between a distinction of temporality and eternity (behind/beyond the appearances of the world), but we are also no longer in a post-modern world, which removes eternity and replaces it with nothing. We are instead dealing with temporality and a temporal structure of a higher order. We might call this the reality of the becoming of the subject.22 The becoming of the subject represents a temporal structure of a higher order because it requires the subject to sublate both reason and truth, both being and nothing (life and death), and face the excess of its own process of self-mediation.23
This is why Lacan’s Écrits sets itself up as a form of knowledge which is concerned, not with the cave walls nor its outside, but about the inversion of the two, which opens the conditions of possibility for the first cause of the subject.
In philosophical terms, the first cause of the subject is the subject which leaves the cave for the suprasensible and returns to the cave with the suprasensible.
In quantum scientific terms, the first cause of the subject is the subject which leaves classical empirical reality for the quantum reality of possibilities and returns to the classical empirical reality with the quantum reality of possibilities.
In psychoanalytic terms, the first cause of the subject is the subject which leaves the waking world reality for the dream world reality and returns to the waking world reality with the dream world reality.
This movement is logically speaking the negation of the negation. The movement negates the cave/classical/waking reality, only to negate this negation and return with suprasensible vision, possibilities as potentialities, and dream-desires that might as well be from an Other world.
The key is realising that this distinction between our world and an other world itself collapses into one process of becoming. This is why Dr. Ruth E. Kastner’s version of quantum mechanics is a “fully relativistic interpretation”, meaning that she totally decouples quantum mechanics from a “delusional” absolute background.24 In the search for a theory of quantum gravity this is referred to as “background independence”.25
However, and at the same time, without recognising this complex and counter-intuitive journey, we can easily lose the critical details required to navigate this abyssal condition (background independence) in a hyper-temporality (not an eternity) without performative contradiction. Or better: if we keep in mind these critical details, we are able to navigate it by working contradiction as the thing-in-itself.26 What follows is not a movement from actuality to potentiality, but rather its opposite, the process that involves the transformation of potentiality into a new actuality.27
This week at The Portal we welcome Dr. Ruth E. Kastner to present and discuss “Science and Spirit”. Dr. Kastner is the author of Adventures in Quantumland: Exploring Our Unseen Reality, a book which offers a fully relativistic interpretation of quantum mechanics that allows for both free will and reconciliation between science and spirit. To find out more, or to join us, see: The Portal.
Whitehead, A.N. 1979. Process and Reality. Free Press. p. 39.
Ibid.
Let us not forget that Hegel’s whole logic revolves around this Idea.
The question of how does anyone break free from Plato’s Cave has been a source of deep inquiry in Daniel L. Garner’s work for
, see: “How Does Anyone Leave Plato’s Cave?”Kastner, R. 2019. Adventures in Quantumland: Exploring Our Unseen Reality. World Scientific Europe.
Quantum physicists, like Carlo Rovelli, seems to center this as the fundamental question, to reference the title of his book: Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity (2016), Riverhead Books.
Oh no, not psychoanalysis!
Freud, S. 1901. On Dreams. In: Freud — Complete Works. p. 1060.
Ibid. p. 1062.
Ibid. p. 1076.
Ibid. p. 1075.
Ibid. p. 1076.
Ibid.
Lacan suggested that science was psychotic, in the sense that it forecloses the Name-of-the-Father, that is, it forecloses the mechanism by which the possible becomes actual. In this way, for Lacan, science “sutures (closes) the subject it implies.”, see: Lacan, J. 2005. Science and Truth. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 744.
Kastner, R. 2016. Science and Spirit: Troublemaker in the Cave (Part 2). Transactional Interpretation. https://transactionalinterpretation.org/2016/09/17/science-and-spirit-part-2/
Žižek, S. 2011. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 31.
Ibid. p. 37.
Lacan, J. 2005. Position of the Unconscious. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 710-11.
Ibid. p. 711.
Ibid.
Ibid.
In teaching Thus Spoke Zarathustra I suggest it is the difference between a Heraclitean becoming, which can be explained with reference to a river (you cannot step into the same river twice, etc.) and a Hegelian becoming, which cannot be explained with reference to a river, but rather with a strange entity (subjectivity) that can sublate being-nothing. I furthermore suggest that such an entity is described by Nietzsche through the vehicle of Zarathustra, see: Spirit’s Logic: Zarathustra as the Becoming of Being-Nothing. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra (2023). p. 19-48.
This may be useful for thinking
’s notion of Hyperhumanism, see: Smith, C. 2023. Overbecoming: Hyperhumanism as a Bridge Towards Interbeing. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 547-574.Kastner, R. 2019. Adventures in Quantumland: Exploring Our Unseen Reality. World Scientific Europe.
See: Smolin, L. 2008. Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. Hachette.
This is the key move from Plato to Hegel.
Presumably these are the stakes of moving from quantum physics (as opening the truth of potential), to quantum gravity (as opening the truth of processes of actualisation).