Die philosophische Bedeutung der Idee der Komplementarität

Summary

The situation called “complementarity” byN. Bohr is explained with the aid of the example furnished by the spheres of application of the contrasting concepts of “wave” and “particle” in modern atomic physics. It consists in the fact that the experimental arrangements to which the one or the other of these intuitive pictures is applied necessarily are mutually exclusive as a consequence of the fundamentally never completely determinable interaction between instruments of observation and observed system. The analogy is pointed out between this complementary situation and the paradoxes in the relation “subject—object” in general, as well as the pair of opposites employed in more recent psychology, “conscious—unconscious”, in particular.