Abstract
How should we read Bohr? The answer to this question is by no means clear, not least because for a long period of time Bohr has not been read but rather mythologized, and his views “almost universally either overlooked or distorted beyond recognition” (Hooker 1972, 132). Even among his readers, though, there is a general feeling of uneasiness with respect to his use of words, and wide disagreement with respect to what he really meant to say. This seems to have always been the case, if we recall what Ehrenfest wrote to Bohr on July 17, 1921: “Now, dear Bohr, every person I know wails only over the fact that you write your things so briefly and compactly that one always has the greatest trouble fetching all of the ideas out of the fruit cake” (Works, 3, 623). Ehrenfest’s remark suggests that our predicament with Bohr’s thought originates in fact in his own style of writing; and accordingly, the many stories told in the doxography about Bohr’s mumbling unintelligible remarks or his endlessly rewriting each of his papers seem to point to some accidental and subjective characteristics of his: he had no deep professional knowledge of the language of philosophy, not enough time, or too much anxiety. But we could also look at Bohr’s struggle with language the other way around, in a very different way. Heisenberg, for instance, noted several times that Bohr was in the process of creating ‘a new language’.
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Notes
The current English translation of ‘anschaulich’ is ‘visualizable’, but except in quotations I shall use the word ‘intuitive’ in order to keep a more explicit reference to the Kantian tradition. From the point of view of that tradition, the word ‘intuitive’ makes sense in the context of all the original papers on quantum theory.
See e.g. APHK, 38, or the first section of Bohr (1939), which is one of Bohr’s most elaborate papers. On his use of the word ‘symbol’, see also Folse (1985), 246–9; Honner (1987), 153–160; and Chevalley (1991a), 559 sq.
See also ATDN, 12: “the symbolical garb of the methods in question closely corresponds to the fundamentally unvisualizable character of the problems concerned”.
Such importance was clearly assessed at the time; see e.g. Heisenberg’s 1929 statement that BKS “contributed more than any other paper from that period to the clarification of the situation in the quantum theory” (Works 5, ix). On the BKS theory, see Stolzenburg’s introduction to Works 5; for a connection with the concepts of Bild and Anschauung, see Chevalley (1991a), 458 sq.
Ever since 1913, Bohr had also been aware that in order to speak about the energy and momentum of light quanta, one had to use the concepts of frequency and wave length, as the very formula E = hv illustrated.
See Darrigol (1992) and Cassidy (1992). In the Drei-Männer-Arbeit, Heisenberg, Born and Jordan also talked of a “quantum symbolic geometry” in contrast to the “classical intuitive geometry” (Born, Heisenberg, and Jordan (1926)). On the Göttingen physicists and the rejection of spatio-temporal images, see Beller (1990).
I refer to the 1928 version published in Nature and Die Naturwissenschaften, which is different from the Como version, and also from the later one published in Danish, German, French and English resp. in 1929, 1931, 1932 and 1934.
It does not necessarily follow that the distinctions ‘Intuition-Symbol’ (or ‘Classical-Quantum mechanical’) and “Instrumert-Object” should be strictly identical. This is a controversial issue.
On Anschaulichkeit in the building of quantum theory, see Miller (1978) and Petruccioli (1988).
In this connection Bohr stresses the paramount importance of questions of terminology; for a commentary, see Scheibe (1973), Chap. 1.
Heisenberg also gave central importance to the ordinary language problem, in the way of Bohr.
I shall simply assume that a tradition is defined by a set of philosophical works in which some issues have a definite meaning during some time. It is often the case that traditions are closely linked with languages and with changes of languages (e.g. from Latin to French or Latin to German). Inasmuch as Kant was the first great philosophical writer in the German language, he contributed essentially to the creation of a tradition where words were sharply defined.
Bohr quotes Goethe many times — and so do Heisenberg, Pauli, Born or Schrödinger. We know that Bohr’s father gave special importance to Goethe’s writings.
I am much indebted here to Fink (1991). The Correspondence between Goethe and Schiller is also crucial to the understanding of their respective stands with respect to Kant’s third Critique.
There has been recently new assessments of the real import of the so-called Romantic tradition; see e.g. Cunningham and Jardine eds. (1990).
On Humboldt and the many striking similarities between his writings and Bohr’s, see Chevalley (1991a), 490–502.
We find here Kant’s symbolism as indirect presentation, but Humboldt dissociates symbolism in a restricted sense and analogy. His conception of concept-formation is very complex and can only be briefly sketched here.
Cassirer repeatedly made such acknowledgments, e.g. Cassirer (1910), (1923 — 25), and (1950).
For a more detailed analysis, see Chevalley (1991a), 422–442. Helmholtz’s papers on painting or on Goethe can be found in (1971).
On Hertz’s notion of eindeutig Symbol in connection with Bohr’s, see Chevalley (1991a), 554–566.
See also Weyl (1949) or (1953). On Weyl’s early discussions with Husserl about Anschauung and Symbol, see Tonietti (1988).
I have especially in mind the influence of Høffding, whose use of the ‘Analogy’ and ‘Symbol’ concepts was more explicitly tied up with the tradition I have just briefly explored. See Faye (1991).
Many other expressions of Bohr like ‘harmony’, ‘individuality-totality’, ‘principle of life’, and ‘principle of freedom’, are also expressions of Humboldt.
Obvious examples would be: 1) ‘assumption’ and ‘postulate’. Starting with the five assumptions of the 1913 papers, we find two postulates in the papers written in the period 1918–1926, and finally Bohr tells us in his 1928 paper on complementarity that the essence of quantum theory may be expressed in one postulate “which attributes to any atomic process an essential discontinuity or rather individuality, completely foreign to the classical theories and symbolized by Planck’s quantum of action”. The shift to only one postulate was clearly the consequence of Schrödinger’s 1926 discovery of the wave equation; see Works 6, 71 (Ms): “Quantum theory has entered in a new stage, in which the existence of stationary states does not appear as a separate postulate but where each such state appears as a possible proper vibration of the wave equation ...” And 2) the Correspondence principle. Despite its fundamental importance and significance for the building of quantum theory (or because of it), it is hardly possible to rely on only one definition of it. If its ‘first germ’ is to be found, as Bohr suggested, in a lecture of December 1913, its clarification was very progressive, going through the ‘analogy’ between classical electrodynamics and quantum theory of Bohr (1918–22) to the ‘general principle’ stated in 1920, then to the 1922 definition: “To each transition there corresponds a harmonic component of the mechanical motion” and finally to an ‘argument’ expressing “the endeavour of utilizing to the utmost extent the concepts of the classical theories of mechanics and electrodynamics, in spite of the contrast between these theories and the quantum of action” (APHK, 5).
Examples of expressions which require similar genealogical elucidation would be: ‘explanation’ and ‘description’ (Erklärung-Beschreibung), ‘formal analogy’ (formal Analogie), ‘univocity’ or ‘non-ambiguity’ and ‘equivocity’ or ‘ambiguity’ (Eindeutigkeit-Mehr/Zwei]deutigkeit), (spacetime) ‘coordination’ (Zuordnung), ‘analysis’ and ‘synthesis’, ‘presentation’ and ‘representation’ (Darstellung-Vorstellung), ‘phenomenon’ and ‘object’ (Phänomenon-Gegenstand), etc.
This use of the word ‘metaphysics’ already occurs in Descartes’ writings where it does not point to any naïve set of assertions about what the world really is.
The interpretation of the relationship which exists between the first Critique and Kant’s physics has been a crux of Kantian Studies, especially since the time of the Marburg School.
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Chevalley, C. (1994). Niels Bohr’s Words and the Atlantis of Kantianism. In: Faye, J., Folse, H.J. (eds) Niels Bohr and Contemporary Philosophy. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 153. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8106-6_2
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