The Principle by Jérôme Ferrari
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Refuge of Mathematical Forms

This is the way to write intellectual biography - from the inside, living in the mind of the subject, in fact being the subject, or, as close as possible to that, sharing the subject’s obsessions, fears, stupidities, and disappointments as well as his talents. As with all biography, this involves imagination, but imagination of a particular kind, an imagination of the gospels not the rapportage of a newspaper or even of an ‘official’ life history.

Such a biographical story doesn’t move from past to present, it moves from incipient purpose to increasing articulation of that purpose. It is teleological in other words, documenting not historical causes but prospective attractions, not origins but fate as this emerges from experience. From the beginning it maintains an awareness of the driving force which the subject cannot resist because he is that force.

This sort of biography is, of course, poetic. It points not to facts but to amorphous and vaguely defined experiences which are outside the realm of language entirely. It is an interpretation that demands further interpretation. What it says is intended to be said in different ways as readers sense it pointing at their own inarticulate experiences.

But such poetry is not fiction. Imagination is constrained not by plot or character or consistency of development but rather by a life which has been known by others. These others are components of the poetry not as independent actors but as part of the consolidated mind which is the subject himself. Their poetry has been absorbed by him to help articulate his own omega point.

The technique of poetic, teleological biography is fascinating. The prose is all second person address: ‘you did this,’ ‘you thought that,’ ‘you had a decisive effect on me.’ The narrator is, in an important sense, the realised product of the subject. Just as the subject has purposely absorbed his contemporaries, so the narrator has absorbed the subject. Often he is indistinguishable from the subject. He is the subject’s purpose realised.

And how appropriate is all this for understanding a life of the mind and how mind is invisibly passed along, especially the mind of a genius like Heisenberg for whom the immateriality of mathematics was the most concrete substance in the universe. For him, there was no need to observe and measure and experiment, only to think. Mathematics was the real world, the already realised eschaton - in short, Heaven on Earth.

Regarding all else - relationships, politics, the practical consequences of knowledge - Heisenberg was functionally autistic. Divinity not humanity ruled: mathematics (and its practical equivalent: music) showed him reality “...by revealing that the world wasn’t just the chaos it seemed to be, that great broken body, with its pointless deaths, its lost souls, its vain hopes, its ruins, its indistinguishable resentment and anger, the humiliation of its diktats, and that it was still possible to have faith in what you didn’t call God but a central order, within which everything had its place.”

But living in and promoting this perfect world of mathematics has what economists call ‘externalities.’ Potentially someone like Heisenberg creates vastly more broken bodies, pointless deaths and lost souls in the world outside mathematics. Faith, any faith, that “mystical intransigence of passion” tends to do just this, even if it is only faith in a central order. There is a price to passionate belief in such order. Most often it is not a price paid by the believer but by those upon whom belief is imposed.

So thus the great Principle emerges from Heisenberg s mind : “... what the language of men expresses so clumsily can be grasped all at once in an equation of such concision and simplicity as to conceal its poisonous nature.” The message of this equation is radical, and not just scientifically: “things have no core.” The only thing there is the language used to express it. Horrifying when this sinks in. Language is all we have. The order is there and there alone.

This is indeed “sitting on God’s shoulder.” It is the report of a mystic who has returned from the sacred mountain: ‘there is nothing there but what we say about it.’ This is idolatry. Idolatry exists when only words matter, when language, even mathematical language, is confused with reality. Reality is permanently beyond language. It is nevertheless real. But language can mask reality; it can deform our senses so we don’t believe them. Things like fascism, and brutality, and war are normalised through language. The disastrous reality of their consequences are hidden, never talked about. Language saves. Language also betrays as Heisenberg and is colleagues discover when they are ‘hacked’ by their captors after the war.

But there are cracks in language, and therefore in the world language forms. The cracks don’t reveal much but just enough to suggest the masks of idolatry. Listening to oneself being listened to is therapeutic in revealing where the cracks are. The existence of “reality can’t be entirely abolished, even by decree, any more than can the distinction between lies and truth, which is still preserved somewhere, out of the reach of men.” Out of reach does not imply irrelevance or uselessness but the essential need for hope. Only hope can overcome the idolatry of faith - in religion, in ideology, in science, in beauty, in oneself or ones compatriots.

Poetic biography about purpose has, I think, a unique kind of meaning. Neither our own experience nor the expression of that experience is sufficient to prevent the fantasies of spiritual, intellectual, or aesthetical idolatry on their own. Although language is produced through experience, experience is warped by language. Hope is the only bridge to the world of non-language which we call truth, or reality, or perhaps even God. But hope, unlike faith, is never certain, never convinced. Hope is fragile, tentative, unstable; it has no content or substance. Hope has no refuge in which to rest, not even in mathematics, which is itself a product of hope. This is the meaning of Heisenberg’s mind for me.

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