Often we have been told that the universe revealed to us by our eyes and ears, our taste and touch, gives a false presentation to the underlying reality: that, beneath the sensory lies a reality discerned through specialized instrumentation and intelligible only at the mathematical level. Sir Arthur Eddington quite famously proposed that there is the table we see and that we feel as solid—and the real table, made of particles so far apart that there is really more empty space than filled, and it is a wonder that its surface may support a meal. The “standard of truth” for Eddington and his followers consists not in what is revealed by sense, but what instruments may calculate.
In itself, this claim—to which there certainly is some truth—should cause neither doubt nor anger but rather, as Louis-Marie Régis writes, wonder. We confront, that is, two apparent universes: one revealed by the eyes, the other by instruments. How do we know which is true?
From Epistemology:
Despair is a paralyzing and passive suffering, and the suffering entailed by anger is blind and vengeful, but fear is filled with the hope of ridding itself of the evil causing it to suffer in order to replace it by the good of which this evil is the privation. Since wonder is fear and suffers through the presence of ignorance, it immediately begets an effort to put an end to this evil, therefore to dispel ignorance. This is what Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and others mean when they describe wonder as a source of inquiry or investigation and the most effective factor for progress. This inquiry normally starts with the cause of wonder, that is, with the wonderful or admirable, inasmuch as it is simultaneously made up of intelligibility and unintelligibility. What is the intellect’s attitude toward these two accounts?
…
Inquiry’s point of departure is wonder, that is, the coexistence in the soul of two universes known to be opposed to each other, both of which claim to refer to the same reality. How is this inquiry possible? There is only one way to solve the difficulty, and that is to inquire into the structure of the two universes as known and into that of the real universe, in order to discover whether the first two can be correlated. It will be objected that the real universe escapes experience and can only enter by means of knowledge into the parallel to be set up, and that this constitutes a sort of vicious circle! There certainly is a circle here, but that it is vicious is a statement standing in need of proof, for a circle is vicious only if results from an intellectual fraud, from a latent or overt sophism. Now, there is a world of difference between the universe as known and the real universe when known. In the first case the universe is considered with the characteristics it derives from the very fact that it exists in the soul, whereas in the second case the universe is considered with its own characteristics, which it possesses independently of knowledge, but which we became aware of in knowledge. Thus, a human being as known is universal; that is a characteristic acquired from the fact of his existence in the soul, whereas his existential characteristic is to be an individual. That I can perceive his individuality only in and by an act of knowledge is a truism known to all. What is not a truism, and what many thinkers do not see, is that the universe’s aspect as known and the characteristics belonging to this same universe as known in its real existence can be completely different.
Therefore, to resolve the wonderful, to discover the reason why the two universes as known are contradictory, we must examine the latter as such and compare them with the real universe of which they claim to be the exact reproduction. Now, if there are several ways of knowing, there may also be several universes as known; and if reality has several real aspects, it will be knowable in its very diversity and will justify the existence of a double synthesis in man. Thus, this justification will be possible precisely insofar as there is a plurality of cognitive means and a plurality of realities to be known. As long as this plurality has not been established, there is no possibility of agreement.
Régis 1958: Epistemology, 16-18.
Can we access the “real universe” to make such a comparison? Is it possible for us truly to touch and see and understand without the objects being reduced to our own frames of reference? On this question hinges the whole human experience. And that is worth contemplating!
(I do still reject the term “epistemology”, however.)
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