Someone sold a set of lectures by physicist Max Born to Strand Bookstore in New York City. Physics and Politics is a thin volume bound in hardcover cloth with the jacket missing; not considered rare or anything like that. I found it on one of the sidewalk carts and bought it for two dollars.

Some of what Born had to say seems to still bear relevance today. In one lecture he identified a fundamental change undergone in the very meaning of the concept ‘knowledge’: “the gigantic increase of knowledge of the human race as a whole may mean that individuals become more stupid and superficial” (1962, 5).

It might be added that often these individuals are those in possession of the resources of knowledge. It might even be considered whether these are the self-same individuals with ‘forces of nature’ such as ‘momentum’ on their side that work to confirm and validate while elsewhere leaving inequities in their wake.

This fundamental change – due to a continually increasing, unbounded amount of published research that defies individual integration, the acquisition of instruments whose size and price were previously unheard of, and everywhere organizational shifts into teams of researchers – what this meant for Born is a concept of ‘knowledge’ itself that no longer refers to a single person but to “the community of all men” (5).

It seems an important point to flag – the scaling up of knowledge acquisition in these ways producing a disproportion between micro- and macro-scales and perhaps even a break with previous assumptions of reciprocity – such that, even with respect to individuals or, for that matter, teams of individuals in possession of the resources of knowledge, there isn’t thereby and automatically a ‘conferral’ of said knowledge itself, for the reasons Born identified. For him, this constituted one of the great social problems of our time for which no solution had yet been found. A runaway advance of organizational knowledge aligned with state interests that outpaces the ability to consider its philosophical implications is problematic since, “true and deep knowledge depends, by its very nature, on the single enquiring mind” (6).

Physics and Politics presaged some of the psychological spillover of that culture to its impact today in terms of social behavior – the unwarranted assumptions of familiarity that follow from practices seeking to secure unbounded knowledge, the search for relations that would allow me to exert my ‘subjective condition of sensibility’ in a bid for an outsized influence that lays ownership claims on the future. In fact, the set of problems identified above with respect to scientifically advanced nations might be better recognized today in terms of their cultural fallout.

For instance, there is the popular phrase ‘Putting money in your karma bank.’ An annoying thing to say (although it is instructive), the phrase bears a notion of a unity being advanced that can’t really be guaranteed in the sense of a measuring out of return in proportion to your own sacrifice, yet it persists in the popular imagination, belonging more to astrology than astronomy, to sexuality in the Lacanian sense. What seems implied is a me-centered conceptualization of outcomes in which of central relevance is my personal welfare as determined in advance with respect to me. Which is fine, really, except that the rationale also appears to be couched in an incorrect usage of the test of coherence (Russell) to arrive (again) at truth in a regressive movement; as well, the law of identity in which you ‘solve for x’ is made to function in this capacity, all of which does restrict movement and with it the flow of general ideas. Unless by ‘bank’ what’s meant is something like an embankment. But what is actually said is to ‘Put a deposit in your karma bank,’ clearly referencing a unity of context that will prove to be unity of relevancy according to a theory of relevancy.

Similarly distracting is when people say ‘You create your own reality.’ Even where this is related with the best of intentions, it seems to go against a key observation Kant made in his Critique of Judgement: “We cannot make the special conditions of sensibility into conditions of the possibility of things, but only of the possibility of their existence as far as they are phenomena” (26). This suggests that sayings such as ‘You create your own reality’ or ‘Reality is a social construct’ is applicable not to really existing things but to their phenomenal appearance. We may shape our sensibility to perceive in such a way, to guide interpretation, to form conclusions. But none of this guarantees the existence of the object other than its appearance as phenomenon. This should hold as well for self-fulfilling prophecies.

Along these lines is the remark, ‘This ain’t my first rodeo.’ To those people I would ask what you’re still doing here. In terms of style, in terms of how in the sense that Gertrude Stein spoke of style, how is this claim on authority any different from a cynical exploitation of thirst in the desert, a refusal to relinquish materiality of that which is past, indicating an infirmity, fault, shortcoming; indicating a susceptibility of mind on your part to be effected by the object, to come to know on the basis of the object, of the side it shows to you, this side keeping you from functioning in an otherwise indeterminate way (that you are free to do otherwise) were you to keep to the object as phenomenon rather than restrict it to “the condition of the possibility of things.”

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