This is a book about two of my intellectual heroes: Donna Haraway and Niels Bohr. It is also a book about Western and indigenous philosophy. And a book about quantum physics and what it is to be an individual. These three sentences should suffice as a preface if not for the insufficiency of the idea of sufficient reason. It is rather like the law of the excluded middle which, by excluding the middle, highlights it as what really is in need of inclusion. In stating this I do not want to speak in riddles. Rather, I want to point to the fact that a riddle is, necessarily, the form in which we speak1.
Let me explain: whenever you think ‘enough is said’, more needs to be said, because the one thing one cannot do is to remain silent if one must speak out against injustice. This go around may not be merry but there is no going around the fact that we go around. At every occasion we think we got it solved, we find ourselves again in a situation of having to solve something else. I think Nietzsche’s fascination with eternal recurrence is just this: to know that we eternally come face to face again with our hubris of thinking we solved it once and for all the last time. Better to be gay about it and really try to scientifically solve this so we’ll find something really different to solve the next time we go around. Alas, the problem with science is that it has become serious in trying to find the solution. As it seems tantalizingly close, we believe we just need to push through, solving more puzzles so everything finally fits. And round we go like the bee hitting the window in a slightly different place after having recoiled from its previous failed attempt at taking the shortest path to the light. Maybe you will first find this depressing but this book will show it is truly exhilarating: let’s just find us a different window to bounce off of before we get in a fit realizing nothing finally fits.
I now ignore those ignoring footnotes and merrily proceed with incommensurability of Western and indigenous world views as was footnoted2. One footnote further you might question whether incommensurability really hits the brief given the playful gaiety common to all cultures. And the only thing wrong with your question would be the word really (which is an obnoxious word if ever there was, it sucks the play right out of anything, really). Let us stay with this question. How can two world views be incompatible and simultaneously have something - necessarily playful - in common? Cordova is right of course. Western thought is about isolating things and laying them out in front of us - so we can take some distance allowing ourselves a detached dia-logos about them. This singular focus on the purification of abstract concepts in pursuit of singling out an individual cannot be farther removed from feeling related in the concrete process of, say, having a sit-down listening to the stories of one’s elders about wolves or what have you (the Western ear in hearing this sentence automatically re-splits it in the binary opposites of rationality and spirituality respectively).
Now one can definitely say Westerners are wont to speak, like snakes, with split tongues, but our hearing is growing, through our long tradition of purification, pitch perfect. There is, as Cordova (thanks to her bilingual fluency) can point out, an incommensurability between the rational and the spiritual3. The one, when driven to its current extremes, leads to a split tongue. The other, when driven to its ancient extremes, leads to everybody being joined at their hips. Both, however, are unreal; mere mathematical idealizations, limit cases, of what the world would be like if it, counterfactually, were one-sided, unequivocally determined as either a matter of rabbits or a procession of ducks. The proof of this is that the current and the ancient are continuously fused whether by Cordova splitting in the way of the West the indigenous and the rest, or by extreme right snakes appealing to the ‘spirit of individualism’ to move ‘as one’ against ‘the other’. Fission and fusion, fusion and fission, both a matter of bombs and the process of life. The choice is ours as the outcome is undetermined and, as for me (but it is not just up to me), I c h o o s e life (which my autocorrect correctly wanted to correct to love4).
Incommensurability, then, is not a mere historical fact, as Kuhn wanted to have it. It is the way things are at any moment in time and for any slice of space. Whatever we look at can be seen as either purely duck or rabbit, either purely particle or wave, either individually or relationally, but it can never be exhausted or reduced to the one or the other as, to know it, we need to remain seeing it as a combination of both. This is what Bohr hinted at with his idea of complementarity (and why Feyerabend insisted on the continuous omnipresence of incommensurability): the cosmos is political5. It constantly presents us with choice. That is just the way it is: not turtles but choice all the way down. Or, equivalently, it is feeling all the way up, as Whitehead had it.
And even here, between Whitehead and Bohr we find incommensurability because whilst feeling is what (literally) joins us, it takes separate individuals to feel at all (as we all know by trying, and rarely succeeding, in figuring out what the other really feels, or even trying to figure out what we as individuals feel ourselves). But, whether we start from what joins us, or from the atom-like nature of our nature, they agree on the basic fact the cosmos leaves the future (partially) undetermined - and our choice consequently meaningful. It is Haraway who realized that we better stay with this trouble: that reality is a Cyborg, part mechanistic determination and part creative vitalism. It is our choice to develop - in choosing - the best possible feeling for leaving as many futures open, avoiding fascist futures closing most avenues of existence just because they appear different.
This will not be an easy book bringing together the politics of Haraway and Bohr’s physics. It will be a worthwhile book if it succeeds in showing life is both trust ànd trouble, culture is tradition ànd transgression; an entanglement of collective history ànd individual innovation.
PS: This is a series of prefaces of books that I will not write. If Derrida is right then it are the prefaces and footnotes that are truly telling, so why bother to try tell the truth? There will be 26 of them in all - and if you are good readers I might even tell you why (good readers, by the way, are readers that make comments or vote in the polls).
The Western philosopher Wittgenstein said so and V.F. Cordova indigenously referred to him, speaking of the incommensurability of indigenous and Western worldviews thereby showing their complementarity in articulating that there is no conceptual scheme that can lock out (human) beings from making creative sense out of each other. Maybe we never fully understand each other but we all at least understand that.
This footnote is just for us to continue to play the game of hide and seek a truth not so much passively concealed - as Heidegger had it - but that loves to actively conceal itself over and over again, a little like a playful parent playing peek-a-boo with their infant. The universal truth in that game, a truth at odds with simplistic views of incommensurability, is that play is the only thing unifying all culture, and indeed all life
As there is between cognition and emotion, between the abstract and the concrete, between subjective and objective. Every process of abstraction (because it is process, as you will learn in this book) leaves us with the ambivalence of either seeing ducks or rabbits. Now, whether it is quacking or clucking we are tuned to, we always stay with the trouble that we could, contrariwise, have tuned to clucking or quacking instead. To delve into the political depth of these rabbits and ducks I turn you back to the preface.
Because, indeed, choosing life does not mean choosing one’s own life but to choose love, i.e. to allow creation of new life by making space for others. To be worthy of trust is to allow others their play.
I will give you the solution to this implicit reference: it is Isabelle Stengers’ notion of the cosmopolitical - even if my argument leading to it is not hers but mine. Whoever finds the other 3 implicit references here in this preface wins a preface tailored to their own subject (one has to take one’s play seriously).
Credits image: Lip Kee.