NOEMAYA

Dated November 3rd, 2013 

The world that we know is just a saying; it is pure hearsay. We know of it from the mouths of our so called world-professionals, from scientists, psychologists, cosmologists, philosophers and theologians, who have confused their inquiries about the world with the world itself; as if they cannot know the simplest fact, that inquiries about the world are really parts of the world, already embedded inside the very world they try to explain.

For any inquiry to initiate, the subject of inquiry must already be given, however vague and mysterious its manner of givenness. The subject of inquiry always precedes the inquiry itself. World, too, is always there beforehand we subject it to our methods of inquiry. The world is pregiven. The pregiven world is what I wished to see. No one put it better than Edmund Husserl when he wished to communicate to the philosophers how science has gone off course and missed its original goal of grounding the world: “Sciences meant to understand the world are themselves lost in the world.”

Besides the fact that the world is pregiven and must be present and presented precisely as world in the background of any inquiry, even the world that is known and explained within a particular mode of inquiry is always a function of the adopted methodology. All inquiries are erected upon and made possible by methodology. And methodology always determines what is given and what is not, and among what is given it determines what matters and what does not. So nature gives itself to us depending on the methods we choose to interrogate it. This is the most crucial point that the mass fails to grasp when they so enthusiastically take the scientific worldview as fact and put it as the ground of their existential and social self-perceptions, as if the universe of cosmologists existed apart from cosmologists themselves. It is a matter of logical distinction that what is seen, and known, depends on the instrument and the subject of inquiry. What we experience when we touch a breast is completely different from what we experience when we see it, smell it, taste it, etc; it is only later that the mind synthesizes these different perspectives to be of one and the same breast. Universe as we take it to exist is a pure mathematical construct consequent to Galilean mathematization of nature. Or to put it more precisely, nature as we know today is a product of the 17th century differential calculus created by Newton and Leibniz.

Nature is what we take it to be. I restate what I learned from quantum physics: To measure is to filter. Measurement is an instance of making something known, focusing on the object; this comes about at the cost of eliminating the rest, putting out of focus everything else. More precisely, to measure is to filter out all other alternatives until only one remains. But measurement, and all observations, do not just put out of focus; they have to destroy the alternatives in order to arrive at the intended object. This is because nature at its heart is a whole and not something essentially divided. To single something out one has to commit genocide against the rest. The energy that is released in splitting the nucleus of an atom is not the energy of the parts but the energy that keeps the whole together as a whole which is a million times greater than the sum total of all individual masses.

And it has happened to fall on our age that certain echoes of this saying called the world are stronger than others; they are shouted into our ears. Alas, we cannot hear it, for we are still busy with that breast.