Relativism-Relativity Relativism-Relativity: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on a Modern Concept By Maria-Ana Tupan and Marin Cilea Relativism-Relativity: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on a Modern Concept, by Maria-Ana Tupan and Marin Cilea This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Maria-Ana Tupan and Marin Cilea All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4744-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4744-5 CONTENTS List of Figures............................................................................................ vii Author’s Argument ...................................................................................... 1 Chapter I ...................................................................................................... 7 The Time and Space of Modernity I.1. Newton and absolute time and space ............................................... 7 I.2: Leibniz and relative time and space ................................................. 9 I.3. Relativity in the twentieth century ................................................. 12 Chapter II ................................................................................................... 15 Identity between Essentialism and Constructivism II.1. Physics and identity ...................................................................... 15 II.2. Relative identity ........................................................................... 20 II.3. Suspended identity: the self multiplied as me-copies across the multiverse ...................................................................... 21 II.4. Identity/ Alterity ........................................................................... 25 Chapter III ................................................................................................. 33 Relativism: The Origins of a State of Mind III.1. Essayistic argumentation: the generic frame of modern intellectual pluralism ...................................................................... 33 III.2. Renaissance esotericism .............................................................. 39 III.3. Kepler between nothing and everything: "On the Six-Cornered Snowflake,” or auguries of fractal geometry .................................. 46 III.4. Mapping chaos: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Laurence Sterne and differential calculus ................................................................. 48 III.5. From en cyclos initiation to encyclopaedic knowledge in the public sphere of discourse: Jean le Rond d’Alembert .......... 54 Chapter IV ................................................................................................. 61 The Embassy of Modernity: Moldavian Prince Dimitrie Cantemir between Eastern and Western Sites of Relativism vi Contents Chapter V .................................................................................................. 73 Relativism and Its Moralised Landscapes V.1. Suspended moral judgement on the line of the universe: Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman ........................................... 73 V.2. A Satyricon in the key of quantum superposition: The Return of the Prodigal Father by D. R. Popescu .................... 85 Chapter VI ................................................................................................. 89 Relationism: An Alternative to Relativism? VI.1. Looking backwards ..................................................................... 90 VI.2. Enabling relativism ..................................................................... 90 VI.3. Lapserian relativism .................................................................... 91 VI.4. The birth of the semiotic consciousness ..................................... 93 VI.5. Relationism from Leibniz to Quantum Darwinism ................... 100 Conclusions ........................................................................................ 106 Index ........................................................................................................ 111 LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 1. Douglas Burnham: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Indiscernibility test for a definition of space. The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy http://www.iep.utm.edu/leib-met/ Fig. 2. Steven French: Identity and Individuality: Particle Distribution. plato.stanford.edu/entries/qt-idind/ Fig. 3. William Blake: The Ancient of Days Measuring Time, 1794 -etching/ watercolour (British Museum). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_of_Days Fig. 4. God as Architect of the World. Bible Moralisée, Codex Vindobonensis 2554 (cca 1250) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:13th-century_painters_- _Bible_moralis%C3%A9e_-_WGA15847.jpg Fig. 5. Sacred Geometry: Flower of Life www.world-mysteries.com/sar_sage1.htm. Liber Floridus 1120 Fig. 6: Leonardo da Vinci: Versions of The Flower of Life and Vitruvian Man. http://www.esoteric-school.org/esoteric-encyclopedia/14-sacred-geometry.html http://www.crystalinks.com/davinci.html Fig. 7. The tilling of regular polygons http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Tessellation.html Fig. 8. Generation of Fractals: The Koch Flake. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KochFlake.svg Fig. 9. The Divine Pymander of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/pym/ Fig. 10. The Worldline: hyperspace of the present at the intersection of the past and future cones. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_line Fig. 11.a: 1. A cycloid generated by a circle of radius r = 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycloid 2. Inflation as an explanation for expansion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space 3. Oscillating Model with Entropy Increase. http://www.reasonablefaith.org/the-ultimate-question-of-origins-god-and-the- beginning-of-the-universe Fig. 11.b: 1. Big Crunch http://friendofreason.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/omega-pointless-theory/ 2. Big Bang http://www.reasonablefaith.org/the-ultimate-question-of-origins-god-and-the- beginning-of-the-universe Fig. 12. Schrödinger’s cat. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schrödinger's_cat viii List of Figures Fig. 13. Geometrical representation of the infinite: line bent into a circle. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003491609001936 Fig. 14. The Riemann Sphere. http://m.friendfeed-media.com/9f13c7b42c059ecc66c4b22d363f4d9c6ab61de5 AUTHOR’S ARGUMENT Setting out to write on “the many faces of relativism,” Maria Baghramian admits that the subject can be carved up in different ways, its ascription depending “on a great variety of doctrines and positions” (Baghramian: 1), several of which have already entered into the history of ideas. At the same time, writers on the topic are reproached for a lack of consistency concerning their criteria for the classification of the objects and domains of relativism. It is doubtful whether consensus about classificatory definitions will ever be reached, even when less slippery notions than “relativism” are being debated. Maybe a common divisor or an algorithm for the definition of the concept in its intensional meaning should take priority over its extension, as the list of “objects” and “contexts” will always be an open set. In Baghramian’s classification below (Baghramian: 6) for instance, we could add religious relativism to the cognitive/ moral/ aesthetic taxonomy (δ is actually doubling up α) of objects of relativism, considering that even Saint Paul approved of the altar whose inscription read “To an unknown god” (Acts 17:23), which may be paraphrased as “To God Whoever He may be”…. α cognitive norms: truth, rationality, logic, epistemic standards (cognitive relativism, epistemic relativism) β moral values (moral relativism) γ aesthetic values (aesthetic relativism) δ knowledge claims, worldviews, ontologies, systems of belief (cognitive, conceptual, and epistemic relativism) We have opted, therefore, for an “essay,” i.e. an informal approach, which traces the birth and modulations of a defining concept in the passage from medieval to modern history. Since the sixteenth century it has meant different things to different thinkers, its symptoms being complaints including cognitive uncertainty (Michel de Montaigne), epistemological fallibility (William Whewell), and ungrounded morality (Friedrich Nietzsche), amongst others. This, however, has been only one side of the coin, the other showing pluralism as the liberating premise for the mind’s supervening to genuine knowledge, epistemic structures, and ethical attitudes. It is especially through relationism, Karl Mannheim’s 2 Author’s Argument word for a special case in the declension of relativism, that modern epistemology has turned up more fruitful results in its search for representational regimes of being and meaning. The concept of relativity is today automatically associated with Einstein’s physics, but is born of the confrontation between Cartesians and Helmontians on the early modern battlefield of the philosophy of science. It was one of the favourite issues of essayistic speculation in the later nineteenth century when it came to be perceived as a more appropriate epistemic position than Kantian transcendentalism in a post-Nietzschean world, which had experienced