Max Knoll: Transformations of Science in Our Age
When we compare the present state of science with that of a few decades ago, we gain the impression that it has grown in something more than scope:
the very structure has changed. Most of the significant work done in recent years has not been in the main disciplines, but in their borderline fields.
Disciplines which used to be strictly separate or even opposed, as, for example, medicine and psychology, have so knit together at their borders that they can no longer be sharply distinguished from one another.Ia In general, a new perspective on the relationship between the various disciplines seems to be opening.
An outward sign of this new co-ordination is the fact that all over the world, not only in Ascona at the Eranos meetings but also in other places, scholars in such diverse fields as theology and biology or psychology and physics are coming together and are beginning once again to unite their special disciplines into a universilas, into a new whole.
On the inward plane, there must lie back of this phenomenon a new awareness; that is to say, within the individual branches of learning a process of becoming aware of forgotten psychological contents must be taking place, and it is this process and its manifestation with particular respect to the concept of time which we shall here attempt to describe.
It is clear that contemporary natural science itself arose from a great process of becoming conscious—from the nineteenth-century striving for ever more exact and “impersonal” cognition of the surrounding world with the development of the ratio2 as the dominant (psychological) function.
This process naturally entailed a limitation of the human cognitive faculties to what can be “objectively” or causally apprehended and predicted in a system of physical space and time, and even now this trend does not seem to have reached its extreme.
True, the logical and causal linking of phenomena that could be measured or counted made possible an apparent consistency in the scientific conception of the world. But by the beginning of the twentieth century it was already obvious that this picture of the world must be one-sided. For example, it provided means for describing living processes, including psychological ones, in such a space-time (“dimensional”) system, but not for describing them according to their dynamic content.
Moreover, the very trend toward increasing objectivization made considerable breaches in the coherence of such a rationalistic3 world view; logicians found gaps in
the rational cognitive faculty,4 and physicists found relations between conjugate energy and position values of elementary particles which intrinsically exclude an accurate determination of both at the same time.
Nonetheless there are positivists who still believe that in the not too distant future an extension of the classical physical picture of the world will enable us to describe and predict accurately all the phenomena around us, including living processes, in the dimensional and quantitative form. There
is, however, sufficient reason to doubt this—not only because for a long time science has made no discernible progress in this direction, but also because the findings of quantum physics and the psychology of the unconscious make a complete, homogeneous description of the world in terms of exactly predictable causes and effects appear inherently unattainable.
As Bohr has shown,6 quantum physics necessarily contains “fragments of aspects6 and causal chains that can no longer be fitted together to create a model of a nature that exists independently of the observer.” 7 Only now, after the recognition of these “irrational” connections between complementary theories (“aspects”) and complementary determinants of elementary particles has taken place, may we speak of a new unification of physical theories. It seems paradoxical that the abandonment of an accurate determination of certain atomic properties should have appreciably increased the scientific value of the exact discipline of microphysics.
At first this state of affairs, which one might be less surprised to find in psychology, seems very strange in a field dealing with mechanical systems. It appears at
present, however, that departure from a logically (or causally) consistent system in favor of a “pair of aspects” system, though frequently thought to be inconsistent, not only did not interfere with the scientific description of matter as a “whole,” but was even necessary for a general “unified theory.”
A considerable literature has already come into existence concerning this structural change in physics and its philosophical consequences.8 An attempt will be made below to show that a similar structural change (the formation of “pairs of aspects”) is taking place in other sciences, especially in psychology.9 We will start, however, with modern physics, because its precisely formulated and tested findings10 reflect most clearly the nature of the new structure as it appears in the description of matter.
Then, later, in line with the principal subject of this volume, we shall demonstrate in particular how our scientific concept of time is also subject to this structural change. Using examples of effects of the solar cycle on man, we shall show that “biological time” and “psychological time,” familiar to us from psychology and mythology, can form a complement to physical time and that together they make up a pair of aspects in the scientific sense.
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