Planck, Kant and Schopenhauer on Mind

White Snakeroot

The issue Max Planck raised with his 1944 sentence - This mind is the matrix of all matter - remains somewhere in an answer to the question: what does Max mean by mind? It seems he gives this mind intelligence, sees in it a source of design, order and pattern. He claims this mind is a consciousness that was the reality from which all physical matter arose. And he argued that matter as we understand it is not a solid, rather it was a manifestation of Mind, Spirit, Will or Consciousness and continues to be so. If you think of our mind through Immanuel Kant's teetotaler eyes you'll find an understanding of a Mind, Spirit, Will or Consciousness that has structures which enable us to look around, feel stuff and otherwise enjoy perception. However our mind doesn't allow us to know reality, instead our mind allows us to transcend reality sufficient to make reality intelligible. The mind, Max chose to believe was behind the matrix of all matter, could touch those places Kant claimed our mind could only reach through transcendence or intelligent guesses. The mind behind the Matrix of Matter that Max talked about, knew reality, indeed it forged reality, it was part of reality. And to Max's own mind, whatever it was the Mind behind the Matrix thought it was doing, it wasn't Schopenhauer's blind irrational metaphysical Mind, Spirit, Will or Consciousness that thrived on endless suffering. Oh no! It was intelligent, it had a plan that was fair, balanced, reasonable and it was comforting so we could all relax and take less notice of Schopenhauer's suggestion that the best we could do was wave to each other while keeping a polite distance from each other. 

Idealism or Making Stuff Up

I wandered lonely as a cloud when all at once another host of Golden Wingstem

Cato the Elder, who was a Roman Senator and author of a book on Farming, disliked the Greeks. He thought them the equivalent of an ill-disciplined bunch of wishy-washy hippies. Cato the Younger, who was Cato the Elders great-grandson, another Roman  senator, following the defeat of Pompey the Great at the final battle of the Roman Civil War in 44 BC, the Battle of Pharsalia in Northern Greece, killed himself rather than submit to that tyrant and odious human being Julius Caesar. The Poet Lucan in his epic about the Battle of Pharsalia, gave us a line that has a sort of eternal relevance: "The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause was pleasing to Cato." As inevitably happens, even two thousand years later, the losers often look to Lucan's line for solace. Here in the USA the Confederate States, following the events at the Court House in Appomattox in 1865 used Lucan's line to reassure themselves that their defeat by the Union was a loss of liberty, certainly not a moral failing. In my view, and I am biased, the Confederate States, being a little desperate, were grasping, frightfully Anglo-Saxon, loose minded, were as bad as podcsters and bloggers in their quest to discover comfort in Lucan's sentence. So what does Max Planck mean when he claims: "There is no matter as such! All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter." In my view, assuming the force behind the existence of matter is a conscious and intelligent mind is an equally grasping assumption. But I at least can forgive Planck his idealism. He made this remark in Italy in 1944. The Italians had surrendered, the German army was holding on to the north of Italy and in the middle of it all Plank was attending a conference. Meanwhile Planck's home had been bombed, his son had been brutally killed for the role the boy had had in an assassination attempt on the Tyrant  Adolf Hitler, and Planck, who'd devoted his life to physics, was endeavoring to find relevance in a world that made less and less sense. Myself, I draw comfort from the misery of Arthur Schopenhauer, who died in 1860 and was much smitten by Buddhism. In Arthur's book The World of Will and Representation he explored the idea of a world driven by a Blind and Irrational Metaphysical Will that thrived on Endless Suffering. It's good stuff, the Ancient Greeks would have loved it