The Nature of It All (Modernist Ontology)

Abstract

Modern science frames the project of modernity, through the Newtonian postulate of a universe governed by universal, objective laws; but thermodynamics, and the implication of a universe of declining energy, along with the anxieties resulting from Darwinian evolutionism, heralded the modernist scientific revolutions of Einstein and quantum theory. Modernist science is comfortable with the uncertainty principle, with the idea that no single language can necessarily guarantee an adequate account of the universe, and with the possibility that multiple universes may have to be postulated to account for contradictory bodies of data. Here we encounter the challenge of a universe that incorporates infinite acts of reflexive consciousness, revealed in language itself, the place where this tension is articulated, hence making any state of transcendence or ultimate cohesion unthinkable.