The twentieth‐century European philosophy called existentialism is a direct descendant from Kierkegaard. It has inherited most of his ideas about the position of the individual and his duty to define his relation to the world and God. Whatever the outcome of this personal choice is, the attitude is religious even when it proclaims atheism. It is well documented that the roots of existentialism grew in the soil prepared by Kierkegaard.

  Existentialism tends to take a stand against rationalism. This makes it difficult to pinpoint its exact meaning. This, however, is in the spirit of Kierkegaard's work. Ironically enough, his influence has branched over into fields totally outside his sphere of concern. The cultural atmosphere in fin‐de‐siècle Vienna was imbued with existentialist ideas. The impetus to Wittgenstein's Tractatus is to be found in this atmosphere, so even if this has been a central text for the development of twentieth‐century logistics, it carries with it a part which is pure existentialist discourse. In the later Wittgenstein, this trend becomes a leading one.

  Another unexpected influence of Kierkegaard's Danish legacy is the impact on modern physics. In spite of its rationality, this no longer accords with a fully systematic formulation but offers a fractured and hazy world description. Niels Bohr in Copenhagen had grown up in an atmosphere where Kierkegaard's spirit was ever present. It may thus not be an accident that he defined the esoteric framework for the emerging quantum theory of reality. Instead of the isolated individual forming an existential view of his position, modern physics pictures the generic experimentalist as captured in his subjective role of observer, but with a freedom to carry out the next operation at his will. There seems to be little anxiety attached to this position, but the essential amount of uncertainty and limitation corresponds strongly to that expressed by existentialism.

  Whether this relation between modern physics and existentialism is necessary or accidental is hard to decide. It may mirror a characteristic of reality or of our mind's way of treating experience, but most likely it suggests a universality in how mind perceives its surroundings. In this case it contains some profound truth about reality and our place in it. Today, however, we lack sufficient insight to formulate this truth. If Kierkegaard was right, it lies in the nature of this truth that we can never know it.

  (p.44) Kierkegaard in modern thinking

  The defining feature of Kierkegaard's approach to life is the central role laid by the individual (den enskilde). He strongly experienced the plight and duty of the individual person, who is thrown into the midst of his existence and has to find his own way and modes of being and acting. The strong moral core of his thinking is founded on and developed within a frame of Christianity. All aspects of life and motivations for actions (or avoidance thereof) are formulated in the language of religion. At a time when psychology was only an emerging dawn at the horizon, such a framework may have been both natural and efficient. Many aspects of religious discourse have undoubtedly been developed as rules for moral behavior. In fact, lacking direct access to the subconscious machinery of information processing, we may well be able to progress in understanding human mentality using any sufficiently developed area of social intercourse. Freud, on his side, managed to initiate modern psychology by mapping all behavioral patterns on sexual relationships underlying the social structures of society. This view is, from today's perspective, grossly oversimplified and, perhaps, tied to the local environment where it was developed. But, as a method of analysis, Freud's approach has formed a precedent for much later work. We may thus see Kierkegaard's effort as an early attempt to organize the world view of the individual in a situation when religion had come to lack the absolute conviction of earlier times, but still provided a theoretical framework for governing the experiences of living one's own life.

  It has been claimed that Kierkegaard's approach is centered entirely on his own personal experience. He understood his subjective concepts as universally applicable, his motivations and choices as characteristic of the human situation. Later existentialist thinkers have started from the same human isolation in a universe lacking certainties and guidelines. However, they have, even in this situation, striven to gain a systematic framework or at least a method to analyze the ever‐streaming sensations experienced by the individual. Kierkegaard would have disapproved of any such attempt; he could not approve of propagation of essential personal convictions by rational methods. After the individual has accepted a stand by a leap of “faith”, he must live in this conviction to the extent that he is willing to die for it. No rational argument can convey such an absolute certainty. All rational thinkers, philosophers or theologians, err when they provide a formal frame of concepts instead of the absolute convictions implied by the individual's sincerity (innerligheten). But Kierkegaard does not claim to be a philosopher, he tends to despise all such academic categories. Yet, looking at the future developments of existentialism, one may wonder if he was not correct; the attempts to form a firm basis for discourse based on the cognitive experience of the individual have not led to any convincing result. Existentialists have not been able to find any Cartesian rock for theory building, based solely on the experience of the individual human stream of consciousness. This is the dilemma motivating Husserl's lifelong struggle with objectivity. Later (p.45) existentialists seem to have totally abandoned any attempt to understand reality. They have concentrated on the subjective experience and its manifestation in textual material. Relations to scientifically analyzable facts seem to play no role.

  In considering Kierkegaard's version of existentialism, I find that his language foreshadows both the linguistic scepticism of Wittgenstein and the observational uncertainty of Bohr. This is best seen in one of Kierkegaard's late works which is presented in some detail below.

  The Kierkegaard text most clearly heralding the modern views is the work [28] Unscientific Postscript published in 1846. Characteristically, this work purports to have been written by a Johannes Climacus, and Kierkegaard only appears as the publisher of the text. The figure Climacus is based on a real person, a Greek monk living in the Sinai monastery during the sixth century. He wrote a text based on the ladder of James in Genesis. The book, Scala Paradisi displays thirty steps to the perfect rest in God. Kierkegaard, no doubt, saw his “stages on life's way” as a latter‐day analogy to the method of the original Climacus. He, however, deviated from his master Hegel in abandoning all systematic ways of progress. The step from one rung of the ladder to the next had to be made through a personal commitment, the leap of faith advocated by Kierkegaard.

  In Unscientific Postscript Kierkegaard explicitly starts from the condition of existence. Basing himself on Lessing, he states that the road to religious conviction emerges from the individual person not from any closed system. No formal structure can encompass the totality of reality. Stating clearly what is posited and assumed, a philosopher may construct a system of thought. No such system may, however, capture the genuine being, which is always open and under eternal development. The reason, according to Kierkegaard, is that the thinker cannot extricate himself from the process of evolution, he may not form a closed objective view from the outside where he cannot go. The objective philosophy cannot reach the inner person who strives to understand the evolution of his cognition. Here Kierkegaard clearly anticipates later developments both in psychology, existentialism, and quantum physics.

  In this philosophically oriented text, Kierkegaard states that the goal for the individual is to become subjective. To be objective may be sound within science, but it offers only a cul‐de‐sac for the understanding of one's personal place in life. He goes as far as to state that only the personal can be true. Only what we know can be designated as known. This use of the term “true” differs, of course, greatly from its use in modern logical parlance. Set in a religious frame, it seems to base its validity only on revealed truth, but in an interesting manner it foreshadows the concept of pragmatic “truth” advocated by William James not too much later.

  Kierkegaard clearly contrasts the objective thinking from the subjective [28]:

  The objective thinking does not busy itself with the thinking individual and his existence. The subjectively thinking person, on the other hand, is engaged as a human being existing in his own thinking. This implies a special kind of reflection: the sincerity, the reflection of (p.46) inner possession, whereby the thought belongs solely to the thinking person and to nobody else. The objective thinking states all in finished results and lures the whole humanity to take a free ride by offering phrases of answers and conclusions: The subjective thinker rests on being and eliminates the conclusions, partly because he has already accepted this by finding the way and partly because human existence is eternally evolving.

  The world view acquired by the subjective is complete and personal. He realizes the impossibility of a common view of total being. He has seen through the web offered by objectivity and even everyday language:

  One states something, and the other believes he agrees quite according to the wording. They think they are in agreement and that they understand each other. In case the speaker is unaware of the duality of thoughts, he is also not conscious of the dual meaning of the statement. He cannot imagine that this agreement can be the most profound misunderstanding.

  The objective thinking is the method of science, but its relation to the inner person is lacking:

  The objective way leads to abstract thinking, to mathematics and historical knowledge of various kinds. It leads ever away from the person whose being or nonbeing becomes something totally irrelevant, which objectively speaking is fully in order.

  But also: “The individual, as existing, is unable to follow both ways simultaneously.” Kierkegaard here announces a kind of complementarity in psychology. He is, however, well familiar with the objective claim for truth, but he prefers to pursue his own version as truth being based on the subjectively collective experience of the individual:

  Empirically ie according to experience, one determines the truth as agreement with reality. Already thereby, truth becomes something eternally becoming, something one desires and aims at, because the goal of one's experience is never finished, and because the existing having the experience is himself eternally becoming. Thus truth consists of an endless approaching and correcting, whose beginning cannot be established because there cannot be any established end. Its beginning cannot be a hypothesis either, because a hypothesis always implicates that a conclusive decision is conceivable.

  Heuristically approached, this may well be taken to describe the continuous process of extracting knowledge about empirical reality including the procedures of quantum physics. Kierkegaard assigns truth only to the subjective conviction achieved by faith:

  Objectivity holds only the fixation of thought, subjectively the inner significance, the sincerity. In its most intense form, this how is the manifestation of devotion, which emerges in a perspective sub specie aeternitatis, which is the truth. But this devotion is just the subjectivity. Thus subjectivity is the truth….

  In a mathematical expression, on the other hand, objectivity is given, but then its truth is only an uninteresting truth.

  (p.47) Does this foreshadow Wittgenstein's view that mathematical validity is only inconsequential tautology? Individuality, on the other hand, is not easily discerned in a fellow communicator:

  When a thought acquires its proper verbal expression, which occurs through immediate reflection, there appears promptly a second reflection: how is this statement related to the existing human person who utters it, and how does it mirror his own relation to the thought itself?

  When applied to one's own utterances and the corresponding thought, this attitude reflects the enigma encountered by Møller's Danish student.

  Notes:

  (1) An exception is the Master Thesis by Karri Sunnarborg entitled Late‐Wittgensteinian features in the philosophy of physics by Niels Bohr. This interesting work submitted to the University of Helsinki in 1996 is unfortunately available only in Finnish.

  3 The view from Copenhagen

  3.1. Bohr the master

  3.1.1. Life and position

  There is no doubt, that Niels Bohr was the central figure forging the world view of the emerging quantum description of empirical reality. Not only did he initiate the revolution in atomic physics, but he also formed the center around which the tribe of younger physicists gathered in brainstorming sessions whose ideas were subsequently worked out separately or in groups. All this was orchestrated by Bohr, who also acted as a godfather and sounding board for the actual hard task to produce the technical details. His sphere of influence has been referred to by the fuzzy epithet “Copenhagen interpretation”. I will later go into some details of this school of physics, but first we need to establish the family and culture which made Niels Bohr the singular individual he was.

  In 1881 Christian Bohr married Ellen Adler. Christian descended from a German family that had moved to Denmark. The family had a tradition of learning and teaching, which was manifest by the life of Christian. He studied medicine, did research on the physics of gases, and developed a theory for respiration and oxygen utilization. Ellen descended from a family of Jewish origin which had pursued business in Hamburg and London. Her parents moved to Copenhagen in 1850, and the father eventually developed into one of the wealthiest men in Denmark. The Jewish origins remained a decisive influence on the life of the family. Ellen had three brothers and two sisters.

  Niels Bohr was born on October 7, 1885 as the middle child in the family. The elder sister Jenny was born in 1883 and the younger brother Harald in 1887. He was to become a successful mathematician and an international level football player.

  In 1890 Christian Bohr was promoted to the status of full professor in physiology at the University of Copenhagen.

  All three Bohr children were babtized into the Protestant faith.

  In 1903 Niels entered the University of Copenhagen. Christian Bohr was Rector 1905–6 at the university.

  In 1909 Niels met Margarethe Nørlund, his wife‐to‐be. Margarethe was the daughter of a pharmacist from Slagelse, and the couple met because her two brothers were friends of Niels Bohr's.

  Niels suffered the loss of his father who died at the young age of 56 in 1911. Niels also acquired his Ph.D. in this year. He left Denmark to work with (p.49) J. J. Thomson in Cambridge, England. The collaboration did not work out, and Rutherford arranged to have Bohr transferred to Manchester.

  In 1912 Niels Bohr worked in Manchester, left the Lutheran Church, and returned to Denmark, where he married Margarethe.

  He published his theory of the hydrogen atom and gave lectures on this theory in 1913. He also showed that β‐ decay is a nuclear process.

  In 1914 he returned to Manchester as lecturer but received a professorship in Copenhagen and returned to Denmark.

  The periodic system was explained by Bohr in 1920–2.

  The theoretical physics institute in Copenhagen was opened in 1921. This was to become the famous Niels Bohr Institute.

  In 1922 Bohr lectured in Göttingen at what has been called the “Bohr Festspiele”. Here he met Pauli and Heisenberg. Bohr received the Nobel Prize for “Investigations of the structure of atoms and the emission of radiation emanating from them”.

  First papers on quantum physics by Heisenberg and Bohr appeared in 1925, and the theory was developed by Heisenberg and Jordan. Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit introduced the electron spin as a fundamental entity.

  In 1926 Schrödinger published his first paper on wave mechanics. Bohr introduced the idea that quantum mechanics predicts probabilities. Bohr dis‐ cusseed the foundations of quantum theory with Heisenberg and Schrödinger in Copenhagen. This was the famous occasion when the strain and intensity of the arguments forced Schrödinger to bed from exhaustion. Also many of the other key figures of quantum physics, for example Kramers (the Netherlands), Klein (Sweden), and Dirac (England), visited Bohr that year.

  In 1927 Heisenberg published his paper on the uncertainty principle associated with his name. This was written in Copenhagen. Bohr presented the concept of complementarity at the Volta meeting in Como. In Brussels the Fifth Solvay conference took place. Here the famous series Bohr‐Einstein debates started.

  In the year 1930 physicists met at the Sixth Solvey conference and continued the Bohr–Einstein dialog. On this occasion the gravitational effects of the clock‐ in‐the‐box were considered. In 1934, Bohr visited the Soviet Union for the first time. He lectured in Moscow, Leningrad, and Charkov.

  Bohr's eldest son Christian drowned in 1934. The Bohrs had six sons, of which Aage born in 1922 became a successful physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize.

  The publication of the Einstein‐Podolsky‐Rosen paper (=EPR) and Bohr's rebuttal took place in 1935. In 1938 Bohr defined his concept of a “phenomenon” and related complementarity to human culture.

  After the German occupation of Denmark, April 9, 1940, Bohr's situation was precarious. This was the year of the controversial visit of Heisenberg to Bohr's institute. The actual discussions and their motivations have been debated endlessly even up to the scenes of theaters.

  (p.50) In 1943 Bohr and his wife fled Denmark to arrive in the US via Stockholm and London. He was only to return when Denmark was liberated.

  1962: Niels Bohr died of heart failure on November 18.

  These dates indicate the central milestone's in Bohr's life and the physics events where his influence was most decisive. In addition to these instances, he contributed greatly as an administrator and supporter of experimental physics. He also became an influential spokesman for peace and international harmony. These activities are left out above because they have less bearing on the arguments pursued here. For further details references should be consulted.

 

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