Naphta Criticizes Science (MM34) (2024) Картина - Noël Van Hoof

Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain – Part 34

It was a faith like any other, only worse and more obtuse than all the rest; and the word “science” itself was the expression of the most stupid sort of realism, which did not blush at taking at face value the dubious reflections that objects left on the human mind and seeing them as the basis for the most dismal and vapid dogma anyone ever foisted on humanity. Was not the very idea of a world of senses that existed in and of itself the most ridiculous of all possible self-contradictions? But as a dogma, modern natural science lived exclusively and solely from the metaphysical assumption that the forms by which we recognize and organize reality – space, time, causality – reflect a real state of affairs existing independent of our knowledge. That monistic claim was the most naked piece of effrontery the Spirit had ever had to endure. Space, time, and causality – in monistic terms that meant evolution. And there you had the central dogma of atheistic freethinkers and their pseudo-religion, which presumed to abolish the Book of Genesis and replace it with a stultifying fable of enlightened knowledge, as if Haeckel had been present at the creation of the earth. Empiricism? The ether of space – that was exact, was it? That atom, that nice little mathematical joke, “the smallest, indivisible particle” – proved, was it? The theory of infinite space and time – that was definitely based on experience, was it? Indeed, with just a modicum of logic, one could achieve very amusing results from the dogma of infinite space and time – to wit: nothing. To wit, the insight that realism was true nihilism. And why? For the simple reason that in relation to infinity any given unit of mass approached zero. There was no size in infinity, and no duration or change in eternity, either. In infinite space, given that every distance is the mathematical equivalent of zero, there could be no two adjacent points, let alone a body, let alone movement.

(English translation by John E. Woods)

Связанные темы

Thomas MannThe Magic MountainDer ZauberbergAlbert EinsteinErnst Haeckel