Schrödinger: ‘Metaphysics in general’

 Erwin Schrödinger said the physics of a book involves the consideration of thin sheets of wood pulp and black markings. If you want to get into the significance of those markings, you have to go beyond that. Physics is wood pulp and black markings. Metaphysics is everything else.

Leave it to a physicist, rather than a metaphysician, to get his finger on it.

Schrödinger says there are different ways of looking at metaphysics. It might be like scaffolding — it’s not the house, but the scaffolding that allows the carpenters to build the house. The scaffolding is then dismantled, but only those who are unfamiliar with the process would say it was unnecessary.

That’s one way to see it. But I like this:

 

Perhaps we may even be permitted to say: metaphysics turns into physics in the course of its development — but not of course in the sense in which it might have seemed to do so before Kant. Never, that is, by a gradual establishing of initially uncertain opinions, but always through a clarification of, and change in, the philosophical point of view.

 

I think the “hard problem of consciousness” is an example of what Schrödinger is talking about. The problem is not going to be solved with better physics and chemistry. It’s a philosophical problem. The confusion will dissipate when we clarify and change some concepts that are so basic to our thinking that we hardly notice them. 

• Source: Erwin Schrödinger, My View of the World, translated by Cecily Hastings; Cambridge at the University Press, 1964. The essays in My View of the World are short, usually two or three pages. “Metaphysics in General” is the starting point.