A World History of Knowledge (II)

Shuja Ul Haq*

Beware of the periphery, for it there that the ambush lies.

The Third Perspective and Relativity of the Past

In our attempt to construct the primary structure of world history of knowledge we have proposed two major hypotheses. First, that a unified picture of world history is possible if we approach it from a new, or what we can call the third perspective arising from a critique of the two reigning historical perspectives, modern or scientific on the one hand and traditional or religious on the other. Second, the present and past are interconnected in the sense that our present is determined by the way we see or understand our past. This means that, firstly, the present social order is the direct outcome of the way past is seen by the two reigning historical approaches and, secondly, if we can demonstrate another view of the past, a different social order from the present one will follow.
Furthermore, we noted that what is common to both the existing historical perspectives is their belief that the past is fixed and absolute, the chief aim of each being the recovery of the ‘true’ ‘real’ or ‘objective’ past by removing the dust assembled over it by various human factors. However, we argued that a fixed and immutable past, whatever our attempts to reveal its true face, is still an old past and therefore any attempt to construct a new future on its basis will inevitably end up in repeating the past. It resolves the age old question: Does history repeat itself? The answer is, yes it does, if we see the past as absolute, and that is what we are witnessing around. In short, once we realize that the belief in an objectively existing, absolute past is an illusion, the whole edifice of the present (or of the presently existing social order) founded on this belief loses its legitimacy.
The remarkable implications that follow from this hypothesis can hardly be underestimated. In the first place, what makes a perspective past-oriented, or backward looking is its belief in the absolute, fixed past and therefore, contrary to the prevailing view, modern perspective is no more open ended or future oriented than the traditional, religious one. Secondly, historical determinism is inherent in the absolutist view of the past, rendering the very notion of human freedom meaningless. If our present and future is pre-ordained by the past historical process, whether shaped by divine decree or material human factors, as the given perspectives claim, then we are merely playing the script which has already been written by the divine or human hands in the bygone ages.
Finally, it has special implications for us, the peoples of the non-Western world, in our struggle to overthrow Western domination towards a just and humane social order. The given social order, with capital and state as its central institutions, is believed to be the natural outcome, almost bound in a cause and effect relationship with the historical conditions prevailing in Europe for over two millennia. Two important conclusions are drawn from this premise. First, the past that created the present order is objective, absolute, existing independently of human beings. Second, since this past or the historical conditions leading to present order appeared in Europe alone, and not any where else in the world, the extra-European world must renounce their own pasts and assume European past as their own to reach to the present system. This is how we will catch up with the West.
The first problem with this thesis, that pushes us to tread on a pre-determined path, is that it leaves us in a hopeless situation of eternal subordination to the West, for, like Zeno’s Achilles, we will never be able to catch up with the West. Moreover, it involves some fundamental questions relating to human freedom and human nature. For the present order is not only thought to be inevitable, but also according to human nature. What we have to demonstrate is that both of these beliefs stem from the view of the past that the European thinkers constructed in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries as a rationale for the emerging order. Therefore if we can construct a new past, with the far wider and richer data available now than at the hands of the European architects, we can show that this system is neither inevitable nor according to human nature.
In short, if the human is free to shape his own destiny, then it must mean that in order to project a new future, or bring about social change in a new direction, a new past inevitably needs be constructed. The word remaking or reconstruction is often used for this process, but only metaphorically, for it is believed that actually there is a true, objectively existing past which is being revealed. The truth is that reconstruction of the past is carried out literally and not metaphorically, for there is no such thing as past which can be seen through our senses. What we have is a picture of it that we make in our present on the basis of our understanding or interpretation of historical records, and even a cursory look at the historical records proves the point. Take the case of the religious books of the 2KR each of which projects a vision of the past to sustain the vision of the future which contains its core message, including the moral and social order to be followed by its adherents. And if there is a marked contrast between the different accounts, they at the same time vary from the accounts of the past of the age of the 1KR and which in their turn vary from the prehistorical narratives which have survived in the present day primitive societies.
An illuminating instance is gained from the Abrahamic or the so-called western religious tradition comprising Judaism, Christianity and Islam. All three largely support the same narrative of the past, beginning with the accounts of creation and immediately following history, but the core difference between them arises from the place of Jesus in the tradition. For one he was a heretic, for the second son of God and for the third a prophet. Now which one accords with the ‘real’ past? When we end up in accepting all three accounts as true, we cannot escape the conclusion that the past is relative and the belief in absolute, ‘real’ past a chimera.
Interestingly the most powerful and vivid example for the relativity of the past is found in modern times, chiefly provided by Marxism. Its materialist vision of history, with its five historical stages from early to advanced communism, captivated humanity for nearly a century, determining the whole landscape of our planet for as long, and is still adhered to by many faithful. Since class conflict played the central role in his vision of the future, Marx proclaimed all history as the history of class struggle. Lest it be thought that the demise of his system refutes our point, we will see that in fact Marxist reconstruction was rooted in the grand modern reconstruction of the past which began earnestly with the European Enlightenment in the later half of the eighteenth century and to which we will now turn our attention.
By the eighteenth century the world was ruled by one grand vision of the past, based on the religious perspective that underlay the whole social structure of the pre-modern world. But it should be quickly added that within this perspective there were many sub-perspectives, of which five dominated the larger part of the globe. These were defined by Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Taoism-Confucianism shaping the minds of their adherents in their respective areas. As noted, they differed in their details, sometimes radically, as exemplified in the variance between western and eastern traditions, but the core running through them was their common epistemology which defined their conception of reality, it being the unity of the two opposite realms of existence, material and non-material, or physical and spiritual. This core was going to be the target of the massive assault by the emerging modernist perspective in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries Europe and which would be the basis of the project of colossal reconstruction of the past to be undertaken by the leaders of the Enlightenment and their heirs.
Now the difference between the reconstruction of the past from the third perspective and that by the first and second is already apparent on the key issue about the underlying epistemology of pre-modern thought. For if from our perspective it is characterized by a unity of opposites, of the physical and non-physical worlds, for both the first and second perspectives the non-physical world alone is real for the pre-modern man. We will argue that the Great Pyramid, the St. Peter’s and the Taj Mahal are among the chief evidences of pre-modern human’s vision of reality, that unifies the temporal and the eternal which appear to the modern and contemporary religious mind as contradictory and irreconcilable. For it is naïve to think these enduring, aesthetic structures could have been built by those who did not believe in the reality of the physical world.
The modern perspective insists that the non-physical world is illusory and the past must be seen as made up of purely material factors. Thus debunking the religious epistemology, the core of the modern perspective is defined by its equation of the real with the physical and the material. Since the whole of the religious past was enmeshed and littered with the illusory phenomena, it must be thrown in the dustbin of history. The reconstruction of the past that began on the basis of new epistemology traced its origins in the scientific revolution of the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries (SRSSC), which, as seen from the third perspective, marked the beginning of the Third Knowledge Revolution (3KR). Interestingly, the fresh reconstruction of the past followed naturally in the heels of the reconstruction of the physical world in which Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton had played the central role.
This means that what we are arguing is thatthere is no objectively existing physical world any more than there is objectively existing history or historical world. Being the two sides of the same coin, both are human constructions based on the old and new data gained from the physical and social worlds. We will see that this realization came with the scientific revolution of the early twentieth century (SRETC), which ushered the Fourth Knowledge Revolution (4KR). To put it in a word, if the modern reconstruction of the past derived from the physical reconstruction of the STSSC, we are engaged in the reconstruction of the past following the new physical world constructed by the SRETC.
Now the collapse of the Christian oriented religious perspective in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries Europe was not an isolated event. It also marked the demise of the social order raised on it. The nature and direction of the new social order that was taking its place, however, was envisaged differently by the Marxists and the liberals, the two heirs of the Enlightenment. But in their epistemology or philosophical orientation they did not differ, for rejecting the religious conception of reality, they believed in the reality of the physical sphere alone, regarding the non-physical world an illusion. This vision of reality was at the heart of the new scientific world outlook. What this implied was that in so far as the premodern human lived in an illusory world and an illusory past, his social order was merely a reflection of it. A new social order was therefore to be raised on the true, scientific nature of reality based on, or as a continuation of the real past where material causes alone determined events in human world just as they did in natural world.
The constructions of a new social order and of a new past were therefore the two intertwined aspects of the same project. When we say that the human is a historical being, what it means among other things is that the human seeks the justification of his behaviour and institutions in the past. Thus both liberal and Marxist faces of modernity sought legitimacy of their new social projects in the pasts that they constructed for themselves. Capitalism as the highest stage of civilization was seen as inevitably following the past driven by material forces. The Marxists, who believed capitalism was to be superceded by communism, derived the justification of the latter in the kind of their past that they constructed taking historical determinism to morbid lengths. 
So with the collapse of communism not only a social structure died, but also a past died with it too, now considered no less illusory than the religious past which it was trying to replace. And let us also remember that Marxist vision of history claimed to be more scientific than its adversary. Therefore if just two decades ago it was considered by half the world as based on real past, more real than the now surviving past of the modern world, it is hardly justifiable to hold that the surviving one is real, objectively existing past. However, with the disappearance of an alternative scientific view of the past it was thought that the last challenge to the existing scientific view of the past had been overcome. But this was only for a while.
For just over a decade later, the religious view of the past, as part of the view of a different social order, resurfaced in the non-Western world and once again the legitimacy of the modern view of the past was questioned. Indeed, we see that in our part of the world the religious view of the past, far from giving ground to the modern view, is becoming even more entrenched. The increasing force of the religious challenge, coupled with the rise of relativism and widespread challenge to the reigning empiricist epistemology in the last century, has led many a scholar to think that both scientific and religious conceptions of reality might well be seen at par. If that be the case, there might be no objectively existing, real past.
It is interesting that if the modernists consider religion chiefly responsible for obscuring the true face of the past, the religious intelligentsia level the same charge against the modernist forces, that is, of attempting to destroy the real past by way of an atheistic, materialist ideology. Consequently, for each the other’s past is illusory. We know our religious intelligentsia’s obsession with the real past, and it is for this obsession that they are called fundamentalists. Indeed all reform movements since Ibn Taimiya in the fourteenth century were directed chiefly at purifying the past from the extraneous influences, or the bid’a (innovations) introduced by human mischievousness. On the other hand, if we pick up any book from a zealous modern historian, we would find repeated, sometimes even tedious, going to extra length assertions claiming that modern history has finally discovered the past ‘as it was,’ freeing it from the myths and legends engendered by religion.

History as a Show of ‘How it Really Was?’

J.H. Plumb, for long a history don in Cambridge, for instance, opens his The Death of the Past with the observation that in his book he had ‘tried to draw a sharp distinction between the past and history.’ By past, in simple words, he means the past as it was imagined by premodern historians and by history he means the past understood ‘in its own terms’ or as it ‘actually happened,’ supposedly discovered through the toil of modern historians. Thanks to this great feat, we are informed, ‘Professional history of the twentieth century is as remote from the history produced by our ancestors as modern physics is from Archimedes.’
Obviously the phrase ‘what actually happened’ is derived from the great progenitor of modern historians, Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), ‘the representative of the age which instituted the modern study of history.’   He defined the historian’s task as to demonstrate how it really was or ‘to show what actually happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen).’ Plumb repeats this mantra many times over in his book. See for instance the following passages, the story supposedly beginning with the Renaissance:
But from the Renaissance onwards there has been a growing determination for historians to try and understand what happened; purely in its own terms and not in the service of religion, or national destiny, or sanctity of institutions….The historian’s growing purpose has been to see things as they really were… But that as it may, their (Chinese historians’) development never broke the final barriers that lead to true history – the attempt to see things as they were… They never attempted, let alone succeeded, in treating history as objective understanding. … The past used to dictate what a man should do or believe; this history cannot do, but at least the historian can describe what has happened and what, therefore, it may be imprudent to do….

This was all from his Introduction. Now begins the first chapter:
For as long as we can discern, the past has loomed ominously about the lives of men, threatening, demanding and hinting at cataclysm….But until very recent times there was no history as we know it; little intention in all those who dealt with the past of searching for what actually happened…. [Among the Greco-Roman historians] Thucydides grasped the nature of the problem - the need to construct the past as it happened - and decided that the solution, in any large sense, was impossible, and so he devoted himself to contemporary events which he could explore through his own senses before Time had eroded or destroyed the evidence.….

Plumb is clear as to where history as a science of discovering what actually happened, the real human past, began. It was indeed in Europe. But he is unable to make up his mind as to when it started. Whereas earlier we were told that the struggle to construct the past as it happened began with the Renaissance, later we are informed of Guicciardini and Machiavelli that ‘They too did not wish to understand the past in its own terms.’ Further on we read that ‘It is not only necessary to discover, as accurately as the most sophisticated use of evidence will allow, things as they actually were, but also why they were so…’ and in late eighteenth century ‘history was struggling not only towards accuracy, but to analysis, to the description of growth and, in elementary sense, to the reconstruction of past societies in their own terms.’ For ‘in their own terms,’ we may read ‘our own terms’, that is, ‘in material terms,’ because these terms were foreign to the past societies. And finally, as to the origins of modern history, to our surprise, we read that 
The attempt to discover or verify universal truths, through historical knowledge, was almost as old as man, but the development of historical criticism – to see things as they were in their own times – we owe to the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Being committed to the dogma of modern history that it is free from the interests of the social order in and for which it is being written, he is scathing of the historians of the past societies for writing history in the service of their present, of their political regimes, their statesmen, or for ‘moralists as a guide to conduct.’ But at the same time the truth that history would be meaningless without such concerns does slip through his pen occasionally, as when he writes:
The historian’s purpose, therefore, is to deepen understanding about men and society, not merely for its own sake, but in the hope that a profounder knowledge, a profounder awareness will help to mould human attitudes and human actions. Knowledge and understanding should not end in negation, but in action.
This view of history, which is essentially that of the greatest historian of modern times – Marc Bloch – would, I think, command a considerable measure of assent from working historians.

In the wake Edward Said’s Orientalism, and a host of studies in postcolonialism in the last few decades, I do not think modern history’s deep alignment with the social order in which it was created can be contested anymore. But what we are chiefly concerned with presently is the other side of it, that is, the literal reconstruction of the past in the service of the present as suggested in the celebrated remark by B. Croce that all history is ‘contemporary history.’
Plumb’s is indeed an illuminating book in more than one ways, not least for its contradictions. On the one hand is his certitude, as a member of the new historical community, of having found a true indubitable measure to ‘construct the past as it happened,’ of having got the license for the ‘reconstruction of past societies,’ mingled with a sentiment that echoes the self-righteousness of the early Church fathers who thought they had found the truth to disperse the darkness of Greco-Roman paganism and ‘reconstruct the past societies.’ But on the other hand all this flies in the face of the intended purport of the book and which is that in the destructive side of its mission Europe might have destroyed the past, in its constructive aspect it might not have been successful in replacing it with history. In the words of Niall Ferguson,
The real importance of The Death of the Past lies not in Plumb’s quite conventional liberal claims for the redemptive power of ‘scientific’ history, but in his thinly concealed anxieties that such history may be an inadequate substitute for the past. ‘The old past is dying,’ he proclaims, adding: ‘May history step into its shoes….’ But can it? Did it?

Feeling this anxiety pervading all through the book one detects the suspicion hovering somewhere in the unconscious realms of his mind that history might be another construction of modern man like the past of his ancestors that he was finding hard to destroy. A history based on the contempt for ancestors is a contradiction in itself. And in so far as the human is above all a historical being, his being defined by the legacy of his past, any attempt to deny that legacy is bound to fail no matter undertaken in the interests of religion or science. In the closing paragraph Plumb tries to reassure himself, and of course his readers, though once again pouring hateful scorn on those who went before, ending with a prayer, addressed not to the gods of the past of course but to history, not wondering for once that may be gods or God were only the names given by his ancestors to the same force that he is calling history, beseeching for redemption.
Introducing the book thirty four years after its publication and three years after its author’s death, Ferguson believes that his mentor’s limping optimism might have run its course. There were indubitable signs, at the first decade of the new century, he contends, that history was sinking along with the past that it claimed to replace. For ‘If Plumb continued to hope that the past could be remade by the historians, he felt a sneaking suspicion that they might botch the job. A generation later, his nightmare of a society which has lost both its past and its history seems far from fanciful.’
Modern reconstruction of the past began in Europe when its religious past lay in ruins. But if what took its place is showing the same spectacle, it is time to construct a new past, not in our own terms but in the terms in which the past societies saw themselves, without any illusion though that it is the real past pushing us to a new future. We are free to choose, to abide by the course that has brought us to the turn where the ‘nightmare of a society which has lost both its past and its history seems far from fanciful,’ or make another past which is more inspiring, rationally, and, aesthetically. The first thing that we notice on this way is that the determinist notion of history that binds us with a supposedly objective, absolute past has not gone unchallenged. But before we turn our attention to it we must have a look at the relation between the new science of history and its model, the science of physics.
 
The Science of Physics and Science of History

It may well be remembered that the endeavour to construct objective history, to see things as they were, was modeled on the new physics’ attempt to discover the objective world, the world as it is, that is, free from religious or any other human preconceptions. Employing the fond jargon of modern historians, Plumb asserts that ‘History, like science, is an intellectual process. Like science, too, it requires imagination, creativity and empathy as well as observation as accurate as scholar can make it.’ Therefore, ‘The practicing historian is like the practicing scientist.’ So just as a scientist aims to discover the world as it is and as it was, the historian seeks to discover the past, as it is and as it was. The truth of the first premise, so it seemed to the nineteenth century historians from Marx to Ranke, led logically to the truth of the second.
Objectively existing physical world and objectively existing history, each based on objective facts, were thus believed to be the two sides of the same coin. What physics was doing in the natural sciences, history was doing in the human sciences; one giving the real, true picture of the physical world, the other of the real, true picture of the past. Now we must ask what is the principle or method on the basis of which the discovery of the objective physical world and objective history is made possible. This is known as the separation between the subject and the object, that is, the investigator and the phenomena investigated. This is what is at the heart of the scientific method that both scientist and historian follow or practice.
To put it in other words, while looking at the phenomena under examination, the examiner must free himself from all preconceptions. At the beginning it implied mainly freedom from religious beliefs and presuppositions. For it was believed that the premodern human, in his treatment of both the physical world and past had mixed up his own being with what he was studying. When studying the past, he was subject to the authority of holy books as well as of the political and religious regime he happened to be serving or belonging to. Similarly, when investigating the natural world, he looked at it in his own image, as a living entity, due to which he saw it as a working of gods and spiritual beings. In both cases, his studies were fundamentally flawed because they were not based on objectively existing facts but his own personal experiences and religious premonitions.
However, more specifically, the scientific method meant adhering to new, materialist epistemology which denied reality to the non-physical world. From this perspective the world was seen as lifeless phenomena, like a machine and at the same time observer behaving like a machine too, devoid of all human emotions and feelings. In similar vein, the historian was to observe his data from the past in purely material terms, as a play of material forces, ignoring the spiritual forces that the premodern man considered central in his world. Needless to say, he was expected, ideally speaking, to be an atheist.
In the beginning doubts were raised if social and human sciences, such as sociology and history, could really be called sciences. This was mainly because it was thought highly unlikely that a historian, for instance, studying the history of his own nation or civilization could be as detached from his subject as a natural scientist would from his subject. But it is apparent that the truth of the principle of subject object separation ultimately rests on its application in the natural sciences. If it is the right method in the study of natural phenomena, it must be right for the study of social phenomena however short of the ideal it be. What follows is that if the social scientists fail to fully practice the method, the problem is not with the method but with the social scientists.
This defines the problem at our hands. It is that if we have to question the notion of objective history, based on the separation of the subject and object, existing independently of our present concerns, we must have to question the notion of objective world existing independently of human beings. But if the first idea has been hotly contested, as we will see presently, the latter one seems to be so self-evident, according so well with the common sense that suggesting the contrary seems hardly worth listening to. For it is considered as the foundation of modern science and its questioning simply amounts to reverting to the premodern, religious world view. We will see that those who have questioned the validity of subject object separation in the study of the past or of the physical world have been dubbed as relativists who are equating the religious and scientific perspectives and pulling the dividing line between them down. 
It should be apparent, then, that the fate of the question of the relativity of past under discussion ultimately rests on the question whether in our study of the physical world subject object separation can be maintained. We have already proposed that in the light of the theory of relativity, and we must add, of quantum theory, subject object separation and with it the belief in the absolute, objectively existing physical world or history cannot be sustained, for what are considered as objective facts bear in their very structure ‘the indelible stamps of human origin,’ to rephrase a famous saying of Darwin. Therefore if this belief cannot be sustained, then it must be treated as a dogma, that is, a belief which has lost its justification in the light of the new developments in science. And further, if it is no more a scientific belief, then a tectonic, paradigmatic shift has taken place in the history of science transforming the very basic conception or image of science with which we have been hitherto possessed.
This, in brief, is what we are proposing. Hitherto it was believed that if there are many religions, there is one science. Not anymore, though, for we will be arguing that the scientific revolution of the early twentieth century has given birth to a new image of science based on the picture of the physical world which is perhaps more radically different from the picture created by the scientific revolution of the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries than the latter was from the world picture of premodern age. With this development there is not one scientific world, or one scientific perspective, but two and the difference between them can be compared to two different religions and, also, shifting from one scientific perspective to other might be termed as conversion.
This hypothesis is one of the major planks of the third perspective underlying our construction of world history of knowledge, and it will take our lengthy attention at the later stages. For the moment suffice to mention that the belief in the existence of independently existing, objective physical world and with it of objective history was founded chiefly on Newton’s idea of absolute space and absolute time. What it implied in concrete terms was an absolute perspective, or absolute standard of reference from where a scientist or historian could see the events of the world or of the past. It was thus assumed that looking from this hypothetical, or better to say, celestial point, for old ideas often filter through in a new dress, and Newton was a staunch believer anyway, the facts of the natural and social world could be seen as they actually were.
In other words, looking from the absolute frame of reference one could see the whole course of natural events from the past to endless future. If the present position and velocity of all the particles in the world could be known, so it was claimed, the past and future of the world system could be known to ultimate precision, like the motion of planets. The same determinism was shifted to history, of which Marx’s theory of history was the supreme expression. Western domination of the world was also seen as determined by the natural course of history. Both beliefs, of the absolute frame of reference, and determined course of natural events, were undermined by the relativity quantum theories.
Let us try to illustrate the point by analogy of a running train, or, better, a horse driven carriage. The simple fact of a running carriage can be described from two frames of reference, from that of the person sitting inside the carriage and from the one standing outside watching the carriage passing by. Modern man believed that his ancestor could never bring himself out of the carriage in describing the fact of running carriage. So he, equipped with scientific method, that is, separation of subject and object, observer and observed, situated himself outside the train and believed that his was the objective observation of the fact of the moving carriage.
Now one may ask why the traditional man didn’t bring himself out of the carriage to describe his observation of the moving carriage. It seems quite stupid on his part not to have come up with such a simple idea. However, it can be explained, by the fact that he never had experienced mechanical motion, for, as his experience told him, there was always some living force which moved things. Therefore, since the carriage could not move by itself, the only perspective available was of the one sitting inside the carriage, for obviously it did not make sense to describe a carriage moving by itself. 
Now let us substitute the carriage with the earth. The traditional man was again accused that, being unable to detach himself from the earth, he endowed the earth and by implication all the celestial bodies with his own qualities of life, feelings emotions and so forth. Modern man, on the other hand, from his fixed frame of reference, could see the earth as it were, lifeless, moving in mechanical motion from beginning to end.
In the later half of the nineteenth century the concept of absolute space and time was already denounced as ‘metaphysical’ by the physicist Ernst Mach, of whom we will know more later, on the grounds that it had no sensory experience behind it. But it was Einstein who finally put it to rest by his celebrated theory of relativity. Things only exist in relation to each other, relativity showed, and therefore the fact of a moving carriage cannot be isolated from the observer who is observing it. As H.W. Carr put it:
The essence of it [relativity] is to introduce the bane of the physicists, subjectivism, into the arcana of physical science. It shows that it is impossible to abstract from the mind of the observer and treat his observations as themselves absolute and independent in their objectivity. It requires us to give up the assumption of an absolute standard of reference for the measurement of the velocity of a system.

No wonder,
The introduction into pure mathematics or into pure physics of a subjective element seems not only a sacrilege but a downright betrayal of the very principle on which science is based. It has been supposed that in its purely objective basis lies the strength of physical science and that to this objective basis is due the steady and rapid and continuous progress which is often vaunted as presenting a favourable contrast to speculative philosophy.
 
In the light of relativity theory, then, we can see that the traditional man was not completely off the mark in thinking that the carriage or the earth could not be absolutely separated from the one who was observing it.
The belief in the objectively existing world, based on the strict segregation of the perception of the world from the one who was perceiving it, was struck even harder by the quantum theory. More importantly, the concomitant cherished scientific belief in the fixed, determined course of nature which allowed the scientists to boast that predicting the whole train of future events was theoretically possible was undermined by Heisenberg’s indeterminacy or uncertainty principle which rejected the possibility of observing the behaviour of any particle with any certainty. Quantum theory, as Paul Davis puts it, ‘rejects the objective reality of the quantum microworld. It denies that, say, an electron has a well-defined position and a well-defined momentum in the absence of an actual observation of either its position or its momentum (and both cannot yield sharp values simultaneously).’ We can only make statements about a mass of particles, and that also only statistically. Thus certainty was replaced by probability. Unpredictability in the subatomic world, it was emphasized, was not due to limitations of human tools of observation, but inherent in nature.
The discovery of quantum theory, as we know, that preceded, rather paved the way for relativity, began with Max Planck’s quantum hypothesis, proposed in 1900, that changed not only the way the physical world had been seen hitherto, but also the way we think. By proposing that light could behave as both particle and wave it challenged logic, that tells us that a thing cannot be both A and B if they happen to be opposites. By the time in 1924 Louis de Broglie had the ‘vision’ that even a particle could have both corpuscular and undulatory properties, the scientific world, and I mean the world itself, had changed beyond recognition. As Polkinghorne put it:
The discovery of modern quantum theory in the mid-1920s brought about the greatest revision in our thinking about the nature of the physical world since the days of Isaac Newton. What had been considered to be the arena of clear and determinate process was found to be, at its subatomic roots, cloudy and fitful in its behaviour. Compared with this revolutionary change, the greatest discoveries of special and general relativity seem not much more than interesting variations on classical themes.

As I have suggested, what marked the turning point is that quantum revolution did not merely revise ‘our thinking about the nature of the physical world’ but transformed our way of thinking itself.
It being evident that the enormity of the subject needs a reconstruction of history of science, for the moment what needs to be underlined is that while relativity and quantum theories have been hitherto seen as falling within the scientific parameters of the world constructed by the SRSSC, we have suggested that they open up a new world and a new scientific perspective which allows us to call the revolution that they unleashed as the second scientific revolution (2SR), superceding the first scientific revolution (1SR) of the sixteenth seventeenth centuries. The realities that the two perspectives speak of, or attempt to picture, can by no means be understood in the same terms, nor the thought processes involved in the one can be reduced to the other.
Even if the terms be same, they stand for different realities. Atom, for instance, is a billiard ball in one, ‘a system of superimposed waves’ in the other. Reality and imagination lost their boundary walls the day field was discovered and finally mass and energy were known as essentially one. Just as ancient sources, from the Upanishads to the Quran, insisted that whatever perceptual image that we employ for ultimate reality represents it only approximately, for reality, as the Quran puts it is unlike everything that comes into our sensory experience or is described in everyday language, so atoms, electrons, protons and so forth, are merely representations of a reality that is beyond perception. The leaders of the quantum revolution, Bohr and Heisenberg especially, took pains to emphasize the limitations of the language of everyday experience when it comes to the description of what is beyond everyday experience. Therefore, both the new theories, we will argue, force us to re-examine the whole legacy of premodern knowledge because many of the insights therein resurface in the understanding of the world unveiled by the 2SR. The most important outcome of this re-examination, needless to say, would be the coming down of the Berlin Wall that modern science raised between science and religion. And with it, of course, the Berlin Wall that modern history erected between the past and history, and between the past and the present.
However, if I am asked what marks the watershed that brings the radical break between the first and the second scientific revolution, it is that the second renounces the epistemology of the first which equated reality with the material and the perceptible alone. The epistemology of new science is closer to that of the premodern world view in that it finds it impossible to explain the world in purely material terms. The Evolution of Physics, a little known book that Einstein wrote in collaboration with Infeld, provides us with many insights in this regard. There he regards Michael Faraday’s discovery of the field in the nineteenth century as ‘the most important invention since Newton’s time,’ which heralded the end of what he calls mechanical world view for which matter and forces were the only reality. It shifted the focal point of scientific perception from the material bodies to what lay between them, the imperceptible field. He writes further:
The old mechanical view attempted to reduce all events in nature to forces between material particles…The field did not exist for the physicist of the early years for the nineteenth century. For him only substance and its changes were real. He tried to describe the action of two electric charges only by concepts referring directly to the two charges…. In the new field language it is the description of the field between the two charges, and not the charges themselves, which is essential for an understanding of their action….It was realized that something of great importance had happened in physics. A new reality was created, a new concept for which there was no place in the mechanical description. Slowly and by a struggle the field concept established for itself a leading place in physics and has remained one of the basic physical concepts. The electromagnetic field is, for the modern physics, as real as the chair on which he sits.

Subsequently he reiterates the point more forcefully in these words:
It needed great scientific imagination to realize that it is not the charges nor the particles but the field in the space between the charges and the particles which is essential for the description of physical phenomena.

Though he concluded his book succinctly with the observation that ‘The reality created by modern physics is, indeed, far removed from the reality of early days,’ he remained reluctant to take the new developments to their logical conclusion that would have cut their umbilical chord from the mother revolution. This is quite common a phenomenon in history. Copernicus proposed a radical shift in the world system but could not break from the circular motion of the spheres considered sacred from ancient times. It was only when Kepler thought of elliptical motions for the planets that the concept of heliocentric system set out to transform the whole of the celestial landscape. Of the three founding figures of the 2SR, namely, Planck, Einstein and Bohr, perhaps it was the latter alone who came to the realization that the world of new science could not be made sense of with the categories of established science.
Einstein’s predicament is the predicament of all those in the West who imbibed the scientific thinking engendered by the first scientific revolution, so to speak, with their mother’s milk. But we, in the non-Western world, and this is another important hypothesis underlying our construction of the world history of knowledge, are not inhibited by such constraint. We can see the radical difference between the two scientific perspectives or between the realities they try to picture or construct more readily, perhaps for the ironic reason that we have not yet caught up with the Western world and therefore our minds are not conditioned and encumbered by the traditional scientific thinking of the last three centuries.
I know that the hypothesis that historically non-Western mind can understand the real import of the 2SR better than the Western mind would be taken as most bizarre of the hypotheses that I have so far proposed. But it is no more bizarre than the discovery that subatomic phenomena reacts to human observation. If we were to translate this phenomenon in the language of the pre-modern mind, it simply means that nature is alive, a belief which was universal to all premodern thought, including the Greek and Roman. And in so far as we are still alive to ancient thought, the Western mind having forsaken it as it embarked on the path of science, we know the real import of the destruction of the Berlin Wall between the subject and the object, and which is the disappearance of the dividing line between life and non-life, live and dead. Its beginnings were marked the day Michael Faraday discovered the field, which made the boundary walls of material object, within which the foundation of physics had been laid, evaporate into thin air. From there, the essential unity of mass and energy, to which Einstein arrived, represented through the celebrated E=mc2 equation, was only a logical step forward. In short, beware of the periphery, as they say, for it is there that the ambush lies.
The new developments in physics had their impact on social sciences and it was not long that the belief in objective history and with it in objectively existing facts was challenged in history. Interestingly, E. H. Carr, the man who led the attack, was not trained as a historian and never held a chair in history at any university. It recalls Einstein’s remark about Faraday, who was largely a self-educated man, that had he received ‘a regular college education,’ he would probably had never come to the idea of the field as a reality existing independent of matter. It is also amusing to note that when Einstein himself wrote his famous papers in 1905, on relativity being one of them, he was working at Swiss Patent Office, still looking for a job in a university that would take another four years. Beware of the periphery!

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