The Physical is a category we take for granted, but the question one might ask in the possible wake of Minerva’s owl is the question of what the “Physical” is. There is a continuity in the etymology, where “Physis”, meaning “nature”, is the object of this science. Thus, Aristotle’s Physics is a project continuous1 with Newton and Einstein (a triad that might need interrogation later). But with this continuity also comes serious discontinuities, insofar as the narratives and “worldview” of these three are very different, Aristotle being the strangest of the three.
Aristotle sought a system where his metaphysics could dictate physics in some way2, to at least tell us something of what is. It fails spectacularly3, but Aristotle still exerts a hold and he is still valuable to many today, even if just for his metaphysics. The slow unhinging of physics from theology is an achievement of so-called “modernity”. This separation is never complete though, insofar as the categories of monotheist thought haunt the very language of separation, which in its estrangement is put in often caricatured ways, ways that somehow invert into the fundamentalist reaction.
I
I would argue that the distinction of the modern category of “physical” is the explication of phenomena in the language of mathematics developed from early modernity till date. Calculus is especially important in this regard since it gave us ways to compute continuities using a virtual division of the continuum. The infinity in motion that Zeno recognizes4 is transformed into a computed cognitive motion to an unextended limit, which allows one to perform an infinite sum in finite time. One might say that calculus performs the motion using a sleight of hand. That is, at least, my take on what Calculus seems to do. Calculus, Matrixes, Set theory, “irrational” numbers, non-euclidean geometries; these are some of the advances that define modern physics. Modern mathematics and modern physics go hand in hand. Although it is not every mathematical field that has direct applications in physics (at least at first), the consistent usefulness of the former in the latter is significant. It represents a modern iteration of the transparency of (physical) being to (mathematical) intelligibility.
However, as any physicist will tell you, it is experimental results that dictate the more useful theories, not just mathematical cogency5. Different mathematical approaches can give the same result, and vice versa. There is a gap between mathematical integrity and physical existence, one that I don’t think physics or mathematics can explain, since such an explanation would be physical or mathematical, and thus would have to be mathematically explicated, presupposing the very thing we are trying to explain. There is an existentiality to physics that mathematics cannot explain.
This can be transposed into the question of the very existence of the universe, which is existentially unexplained by reductive theories. One can perhaps explain the substance of the universe, physical or otherwise. Maybe there was a Big Bang, Eternal Inflation, Conformal Cyclicicity, or whatever. All of these are live options for the physics of the universe’s “substance”, “what it was for such a being to be (to ti ēn einai)”6. However, the existence of the universe is not explainable with any of these methods. If the existence of a thing is the unity of that thing as Platonism argues, then that unity is prior to even the determination of “Being” or “Substance”. This is the puncture that deflates the idealist devaluation of Physics. Idealism, much like physicalism, deals in substances, providing reductionist explanations of things, only that the reduction is to the ideal and universal. There is nothing in the idealist explanation that gives us the individuation of things. They have to posit something material for that. This doesn’t mean idealism is false, only that like Physicalism, it is not enough. One cannot mathematically transition from the ideality of mathematics to the existence of the physical for precisely the same reason any idealism cannot unify the physical into existence. It can only provide the substance which is unified in the physical subject (in this case, the physical universe).
II
It stands to reason that the unity of the physical is unique, insofar as it is non-derivable. However, this argument also applies to the Ideal, and any category insofar as it posits existent things having something in common, or existent things at all in their uniqueness. In our case though, we want to see what this implies for the physical. Proclus says “All, therefore, that have ever touched upon theology, have called things first, according to nature, Gods; and have said that the theological science is conversant about these.”7 The first nature being unity, the Gods are unities. This unity, though, is the unity of all things through the lens of the physical. The physical, being today a category deserving of its own explication in contradistinction from the other categories of “natural” or “physical” that came before them, can then be said to possibly support a theology, if we can call it such a thing.
Theology is a revealed thing, for us explicable and explicated in endless story. Philosophy on the other hand is downstream from this, insofar as the story and experiences are analyzed to yield further insights8. That is, Philosophy and metaphysics are theophanic, downstream from the theology that is revealed in myth. Each of these is uniquely valuable, and should not be collapsed into each other. Physics, as practiced in its technicality, is thus structurally equivalent to philosophy and metaphysics; the narratives and Lebenswelt of the physics community (communities?) constitute its mythotopoi and is structurally equivalent to its theology; the universe itself, co-understood with — and encountered through — these two in its phenomenal appearance, is structurally equivalent to revelation. So what are the activities of these Gods, if they are ever discovered or — what amounts to the same thing — if they reveal themselves?
III
To justify my use of “Gods”, the unity of the physical universe is not just the unity of a substance, but the existentiation of a centreless spatiotemporal manifold. However, this “carelessness” is an absence of an exclusive physical centre. Instead, anywhere can and is a centre from which all things can and did begin. There is thus a multiplicity of centres, one that is not a set bracketed from the “outside” as it were, not even by other centres. It isn’t a normal collection of points in pre-existent space. Applying the existentiation idea from earlier, it is a set where each holds everything else together, a seemingly internally unified manifold, of a specific type; a type where they all “unify” — and thus “existentiate” — generally the same mathematically transparent “conditions”, “constants”, etc, and through this, the “mathematical story” that unfolds.
This “story” – as far as it appears to us anyway, since our material conditions affect how we experience the universe9 – has a specific character, or should I say a “unique” character, dancing through time, but also accomplished in space-time as the “block universe”. This “character”, this “trace of unity” expressed through commonality between unities unifying, is the “symbol” a God, a God who is “existentiates” it formally. It is the “Monad”, the monad of the Physical manifold. Each unity that shares this commonality is a God, but these Gods have “chosen” some God as the basis of their commonality, and this choice is expressed as the choice of this “trace” or “symbol” or “character” or “signature”. This is similar to how one might explain the “intelligible-intellective” in Proclus10, but I would say that describes a far more determined reflection of that process, something closer to Leibniz’s Monadology. The fact that the “totality is present in the henad as a continuum of powers, because the totality of henads is the potency of each”11 is expressed here in the monad/manifold relation, such that there is no “creation” of the universe from a totalizing object that would end up being quasi-physical. Instead, the unities/existences simply be the existence of the physical, but those characteristics of the physical are themselves existentiated by a God in common, “chosen” by the many Gods of the manifold insofar as they existentate the internally unified manifold; these Gods also in turn “chosen” by that God’s very “existentiation”.
These Gods do not “reveal” apart from physical nature itself or through those that explicate it. Physical nature is the revelation one seeks in experiments, and in the teasing out of mathematical and conceptual frameworks. The community formed is not of the same kinds as Athena would constitute. In an interesting twist, the Polis of an Athena, a Zeus, an Oduduwa or a Obatala is required for the communities of those devoted to the integrity of the physical universe to flourish. The value for this community is somewhat existential, insoafar as physicists do not necessarily need to do physics for any material benefit that might pertain to their discoveries or knowledge production. It is ideally knowledge of the physical universe for its sake. It’s a form of dissolution, an offering. These Gods might inspire a typical irreverence for any such practicalities, and inspire a “blindness” in its labrinths.
But that is enough speculation. What do you think? I personally do not know many Gods that fit this description; perhaps Hephaestus? Perhaps the nature of their activity might mean they do not want to be revealed beyond names and the “prophets” (read: scientists) that peer deep enough into their mazes. There is a lot more to say though, if that time comes.
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Rovelli, Carlo. ‘Aristotle’s Physics: A Physicist’s Look’. Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1, no. 1 (2015): 23–40. https://doi.org/10.1017/apa.2014.11.
“The explanatory ambition of Aristotle’s philosophy could, indeed, be a reason why its popularity had dropped off so sharply over time; it could not deliver on its promises. As a result, by Late Antiquity Aristotle’s work was taught on the introductory level at institutions where the ‘higher’ philosophy was that of Plato, rather than being taught at schools of a distinctly Aristotelian orientation. The other sciences, for which Aristotle had attempted to prescribe, did not feel the need for his guidance. To the degree that scientists of the Hellenistic and early Imperial era sought any particular philosophical orientation, the Stoics and Epicureans were more successful, their hypotheses bold enough and specific enough to be interesting, at least.” – Edward P. Butler, The Way of Being: Polytheism and the Western Knowledge System (Notion Press, 2023). Pg 176
“what Zeno’s paradoxes show is that there is infinite power in units as such. Every step toward the goal really progresses because it is a really existing unit which takes the step.” – Butler, The Way of Being. Pg 127
Einstein, Albert. ‘On the Method of Theoretical Physics’. Philosophy of Science 1, no. 2 (1934): 163–69. He says:
“Reason gives the structure to the system; the data of experience and their mutual relations are to correspond exactly to consequences in the theory. On the possibility alone of such a correspondence rests the value and the justification of the whole system, and especially of its fundamental concepts and basic laws. But for this, these latter would simply be free inventions of the human mind which admit of no a priori justification either through the nature of the human mind or in any other way at all.” (Pg 165).
Butler. Pg 282 Also note that “The sense of ‘was’ here is not temporal in that sense which would limit its application” (Pg 381)
Proclus, The Theology of Plato; Book I, Chapter III. (Prometheus Trust, 1995, Thomas Taylor Trans.)
Edward Butler, ‘The Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus’ (New School University, 2003), https://henadology.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/dissertation-revised-copy1.doc.
“Why can we “ignore space” to the point where we can just discuss things happening “wherever” at a sequence of moments in time? Basically it’s because the speed of light is large compared to human scales. In our everyday lives the important parts of our visual environment tend to be at most tens of meters away—so it takes light only tens of nanoseconds to reach us. Yet our brains process information on timescales measured in milliseconds. And this means that as far as our experience is concerned, we can just “combine together” things at different places in space, and consider a sequence of instantaneous states in time.
If we were the size of planets, though, this would no longer work. Because—assuming our brains still ran at the same speed—we’d inevitably end up with a fragmented visual experience, that we wouldn’t be able to think about as a single thread about which we can say “this happened, then that happened”.
Even at standard human scale, we’d have somewhat the same experience if we used for example smell as our source of information about the world (as, say, dogs to a large extent do). Because in effect the “speed of smell” is quite slow compared to brain processing. And this would make it much less useful to identify our usual notion of “space” as a coherent concept. So instead we might invent some “other physics”, perhaps labeling things in terms of the paths of air currents that deliver smells to us, then inventing some elaborate gauge-field-like construct to talk about the relations between different paths.
In thinking about our “place in the universe” there’s also another important effect: our brains are small and slow enough that they’re not limited by the speed of light, which is why it’s possible for them to “form coherent thoughts” in the first place. If our brains were the size of planets, it would necessarily take far longer than milliseconds to “come to equilibrium”, so if we insisted on operating on those timescales there’d be no way—at least “from the outside”—to ensure a consistent thread of experience.
From “inside”, though, a planet-size brain might simply assume that it has a consistent thread of experience. And in doing this it would in a sense try to force a different physics on the universe. Would it work? Based on what we currently know, not without at least significantly changing the notions of space and time that we use.” – Stephen Wolfram, ‘What Is Consciousness? Some New Perspectives from Our Physics Project—Stephen Wolfram Writings’, 22 March 2021, https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2021/03/what-is-consciousness-some-new-perspectives-from-our-physics-project/.
Butler, Edward. Essays on the Metaphysics of Polytheism in Proclus. lulu.com, 2014.