To the Editors:
At the risk of creating too many wheels within wheels, I feel it necessary to respond to the letter from Ignazio Gätz (Cross Currents, Summer 1997). I share his enthusiasm for Toolan's article but believe he has misinterpreted it, taking it in directions it was not intended to go. He thereby makes what I consider an improper use of physics based on an equally serious misunderstanding of Einstein.
Toolan can take care of himself without my defense but the issue is serious. He has eloquently laid out how physics -- and in particular, cosmology -- can determine the forms and rhythms of our thinking about our place in the world, our attitude toward the natural order. It is one of the most useful articles I have read in some time. He makes no reference to ethics. Nor should he; there is no way to get from physics to ethics; the attempt can be made only by strained analogy. (I am told that Heisenberg, reasonably enough, was irritated by the use made of his Uncertainty Principle. His principle dealt with sub-atomic particles, not people.) Usually those making the attempt start with an assumed principle -- in this example, relativism -- and attempt to validate it by some fortuitous resemblance to the terminology of a scientific discipline.
Unfortunately, in this case as in so many, the scientific principle is misunderstood. One of the sad things about the work of the modern mind is that Einstein's fundamental term should so closely resemble a term that is quite different -- relativism. Ortega corrected this error (vainly) in 1922:
The most absurd misinterpretation which can be applied to the new mechanics is to interpret it as one more offspring of the old philosophic relativism, of which it is in fact the executioner. In the old relativism our knowledge is relative because what we aspire to know, viz., space-time reality, is absolute and we cannot attain to it. In the physics of Einstein our knowledge is absolute; it is reality that is relative. (I quoted a fuller version of this passage and explored the issue further in "Ortega and the Rebirth of Metaphysics," Cross Currents, Fall 1979.)
Nothing in Einstein justifies saying, ". . . . reality as it appears to us." Relativity has to do not with relativism but with relation. His own illustration is for laymen: the speed of a train is one thing to an observer on the platform, another to the driver of an automobile on the highway, still another to an observer on a train going in the opposite direction. In each case the speed is "real," not a product of anybody's subjectivity. The reality is in the relation, thus making observers an integral part of reality, as Toolan eloquently describes in other contexts. The ethical analogy is much surer but in considering the ethics of relation we would do better to trust Ortega and Bakhtin -- and the New Testament.
Einstein's own political and social activities demonstrate that he held principles he believed to be true, not the product of anybody's subjectivity. If we allowed ourselves to be trapped in the airless prison of solipsistic relativism, we would find that many of those disparate voices are not singing ". . . . a glorious hymn of recognition and of the love of God" but something far less attractive. Should we forget the hymns sung by Nazis and the Klan and the Tutsis and the Serbians? Relativism provides no protection against their subjective commitments.
JOHN W. DIXON, JR.
Professor of Religion and Art, Emeritus
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
To the Editors:
I've just caught up with Dennis O'Brien's article on the papacy (Fall 1996) in which he suggests that dialogue about the place of the pope should center on his place as Patriarch of a Spiritual Family rather than on "authoritative teacher" (p. 387).
It seems to me that this has already taken place in the minds of most Catholics, who revere the pope and go out by the hundreds of thousands to greet him, and yet disagree with some of his dogmatic statements. They listen to his teaching with reverence, as they would to a grandfather who holds a family together, and they recognize that role as being much more important than any particular pronouncement.
It appears that the "sensus fidelium" is ahead of the theologians -- as it always is, since the theologians try to explain the faith of the people. I wonder if O'Brien realized that he got his insight from the practice of the people.
RAY TETRAULT
Providence, R.I.