Principium Motus E-Book

Alfred Schmid

• Herausgeber: Graue Edition
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 180

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Eie Art Gegenentwurf zu den heute gängigen Auffassungen der Naturwissenschaft. "Felder" und "Kräfte", wie sie die Physik kennt, werden verworfen. Vielmehr beruht alles Geschehen in Natur und Kosmos allein auf der Fähigkeit, aus sich selbst wirken und von sich aus handeln zu können. Physik und Metaphysik bilden eine Einheit, Schöpfer und Schöpfung fallen zusammen. Das Buch erschien in deutscher Sprache 2007, die englische Übersetzung durch Michael Hauskeller soll den potenziellen Leserkreis erweitern. In The Marvel of Light - An Excursus (1957, engl.: East-West Publications 1984 / Graue Edition, ISBN 978-3-906336-94-7), Alfred Schmid (1899-1968) indicated that he was planning to write and publish a sequel, entitled Principium motus. Alfred Schmid worked on this sequel until his death, but did not quite manage to complete it. Based on the original handwritten manuscript, the existing chapters were first published in 2007 in order to make it easier for Schmid's work and ideas to be used to inform the contemporary discourse around matter and mind, physics and metaphysics, that takes place everywhere in the border regions of science, philosophy, and religion. To allow even wider access and to reach an international audience, this is now followed by the publication of the book's first English translation. The Principium motus provides an antidote to currently prevailing interpretations in the natural sciences. The "fields" and "forces" that physics still operates with are rejected, and everything that happens in nature and the cosmos is shown to rest solely on the ability of all things to act freely and of their own accord. This ability is the principium motus the book's title refers to: it revokes the separation between physics and metaphysics, and Creation and Creator become one. Alfred Schmid's "vision", speculative as it may be, is that of a scientist. In his younger years, he was a professor of physical chemistry at the University of Basel, as well as a successful inventor, before he addressed himself to more philosophical and religious questions. Professor Wolfram Schommers, who has provided the introduction and a postscript, is a theoretical physicist with posts held in Europe, China, and the United States. The translator, Michael Hauskeller, is a professor of philosophy at the University of Liverpool.

Leseprobe

DIE GRAUE EDITION

ALFRED SCHMID

PRINCIPIUM MOTUS: ON THE NATURE OF CREATION

A GNOSTIC VISION

PRINCIPIUM MOTUS

Cover page: Borris Goetz (1915 – 1998), „Satellit“ (1958)Copyright by Stadt Zell am Harmersbach, Germany

ALFRED SCHMID

PRINCIPIUM MOTUS

ON THE NATURE OF CREATION

A Gnostic Vision

Alfred Schmid (1899 – 1968)photograph taken in 1960Copyright by Estate of Dr. Dietmar Lauermann

DIE GRAUE REIHE 77

Schriften zur Neuorientierung in dieser Zeit Edited by Prof. Dr. Michael Hauskeller and Dr. Florian Lauermann in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Alfred Schmid-Stiftung, Zug/Switzerland

© 2019 Die Graue Edition

Prof. Dr. Alfred Schmid-Stiftung, Zug/Switzerland

ISBN 978-3-906336-82-4

All rights reserved. Printed in Germany

Ebook-Production and Distribution: Brockhaus Commission, Kornwestheim, www.brocom.de

TABLE OF CONTENTS

WOLFRAM SCHOMMERS

INTRODUCTION

PROLOGUE

I. MOSAIC

Instead of an Introduction

On Modes of Thought

Physics and Metaphysics

Thought and Idea

The Primordial Phenomenon

The Primordial Image

The Principium

Nature as a Continuous Act of Creation

Departure

Polarity as Essence of the World

Existence as Balance

Fiat et pereat

The Displacement of the Kant-Laplacean Worldview

II. MYTH

Universe and Cosmos

The Pre-Existence of Myth

The Field

Persistence

Gravity

Flotation

Electrogravitation

Electric Persistence

The Consumer

Causality and Freedom of Action

The Breakthrough

III. FORM

The Signpost

Striving as a Primordial Phenomenon

The Self-Directedness of Strivings in Cosmos and Nature

The Goal-Orientation of Self-Directed Strivings

All-Relatedness

Field Velocity and Light Ray

The Universe as a Holistic Inertial System

Causa Finalis or the Marvel of Autonomous Nature

The Synchronism Axiom

The Third Factor

IV. APPENDIX

Wolfram SchommersPostscript

INTRODUCTION

Matter and mind have always been discussed and investigated in many different facets, but at the end of the day a solution that satisfies everyone is yet to be found. There is, however, an urgent need to explore the issue because modern technologies will, already in the near future, allow us to operate on a level which in all likelihood forms the basis of mental and spiritual states. In order to assess what we are actually doing when we engage in such novel experimental activities, we need to know more about the mind ’s origin and significance and what its relation is to ordinary matter. With this monograph, Alfred Schmid presents a ground-breaking and exciting approach to solve the matter-mind problem.

It is well known that Descartes proposed we understand mind and matter as two connectionless elements, each part existing independently of one another. Yet this view raises serious problems and today has at best historical value. It is common to try and explain mental-spiritual states with the methods of modern theoretical physics by means of specific models. Mind is then based on the material level, and mental-spiritual states are merely secondary phenomena that are not really fundamental. Alfred Schmid rejects such attempted explanations and positively turns the matter upside down by suggesting exactly the opposite approach. According to him, the transcendental produces the material states. What can Alfred Schmid ’s wisdom give us? Not only can it strengthen the individual sense of self-worth, but it can also tie in with the possible potential of so-called nano-technology and give content and direction to all of this. Some brief remarks on this:

A few decades ago, the controlled manipulation of atoms was accomplished. This was the birth of nanotechnology, which currently runs all over the world through a highly accelerated development phase. This new technology is, so to speak, the very basis ofeverything that immediately affects man in the material domain. There is no level of development above that of nanotechnology. We are now capable of developing materials whose astounding properties can be defined absolutely: this is not only the strongest material that has ever been produced, but the strongest material that it is generally possible to produce. There is nothing above and beyond.

Yet nanotechnology also wants to affect brain functions on an atomic level, and it does so very decidedly and with the above-mentioned claim to absoluteness. “Computational neurogenetics ” is a new line of research that, within a nanotechnological framework, mathematically examines brain functions with the purpose of enabling us to demonstrate what needs to be done on an atomic level to remedy functional defects in the brain, which expressly includes the mental-spiritual domain. If there is to be a connection between mind and matter, then it surely manifests itself on this absolute, nanotechnological level. In this situation, we must give attention not only to the basis of matter, but we must also look into the origin of the mental-spiritual states and attempt to explain the connection that exists between mind and matter. Alfred Schmid’sapproach is unusual, but this also means that it is very different from the existing, less successful attempted solutions. It can provide orientation especially to those nanotechnological activities. In this respect, Schmid ’s world view is highly topical. Although Schmid does not commit to the customary standards of modern theoretical physics, he does not violate them either, which means, however, that some of the details he provides will prove to be in need of correction. In the form presented here, his remarks are kept general, as it was already his practice in his 1957 monograph The Marvel of Light. His worldview is comprehensive and largely eliminates the difficulties that arise in the context of standard physics. To make this easier to see, let us briefly consider the current situation in standard physics.

The problem of modern theoretical physics is that it claims to be able to describe the world in its entirety. The current state is alltoo clearly reflected when Steven Hawking, without provoking any meaningful objections from his colleagues, asserts that we will soon hold “God’s plan” in our hands. It also makes it obvious how inappropriate that claim is. And yet public opinion follows the same line, I suppose mainly because our technological achievements are indeed stupendous. That is convincing, so it seems to follow logically that we should be able to describe the world in its entirety. It is a fact that physics gives us the foundations for all technological developments, many of which are no doubt fantastic, breathtaking and also helpful. On the other hand, however, the more we advance in this process, the more lucre and the acquisition and exhibition of luxury are pushed to the fore. Those who are in possession of this wealth and luxury certainly don’t mind, and many who are not would not mind either. The trend is clear!

It is certainly true that modern theoretical physics, in all its forms of development, constitutes an outstanding intellectual system the likes of which has never existed before and that in the way it creates its standards closely follows experimental facts. Seen from this angle, the “physical method” is certainly irreplaceable. We must, however, judge as inappropriate its claim that it can understand everything in the world. The success of physics on the material level, which is evident particularly in the largely complete reproduction of experimental results, no doubt suggests that there is indeed nothing of substance besides the mathematically formulated laws of physics. Accordingly, it is precisely those elements that are believed to hold the world together at the core; here, metaphysical elements have no right to exist. That, however, is careless! In particular, it denies that modern physics is not free from transcendence or metaphysics either.

Theoretical physics is certainly free of mystical entities in whose real existence people in pre-scientific times still used to believe more or less firmly. In those days it was by no means absurd to be convinced that what was going on in field and forest was brought about by gods, demi-gods, capricious fairies, or other mystical“persons”. Of such mystic entities modern physics could, as I said, easily dispose. However, with its conceptualizations, it has by no means detached itself from transcendence and metaphysics. On the contrary, some basic elements and assertions can, as a matter of principle, not be measured. Take for instance the concept of the field. Modern physics expresses almost everything as a field property; the vacuum is positively stuffed with fields. With physical means of observation, however, we do not, due to the field’sinfinite value range, even get close to experiencing fields in their entirety, because once we have experimentally identified a particular set of values within an infinite range (and that is all we can do), there is still an infinite number of field elements left.

Alfred Schmid makes a fresh start. He does not graft physics onto metaphysics, but asserts that everything has its origin in the transcendental. For him, metaphysics is not an accessory and a leisure activity that has no place in our professional dealings with the world. Rather, Alfred Schmid puts the transcendental at the core of everything that happens in the cosmos, resulting also in the laws governing the material domain.

Alfred Schmid argues as follows: everything in the world, humans, animals, plants, minerals, and even elementary particles, do not act because they are causally conditioned to do so, but all those things act, as it were, of their own accord. Every part of Creation has the ability to act. Everything that exists is therefore elevated to the status of the “persona”, and there is no causally produced passive activity as the pull and push forces of Newtonian mechanics would suggest. According to Alfred Schmid, self-originated action is a primordial phenomenon, that is to say, the most fundamental thing in existence.

This means that every outside correlates with an immanent inside, the transcendental, which makes this outside possible in the first place, but which man can neither experience like a material object nor explain, even though we can notice, observe, and also influence its effects. This inside that is immanently at work ineverything that exists in the world Alfred Schmid calls principium motus; according to him this is ultimately what holds the world together at the core.

In Alfred Schmid ’s view this insight is generated by “gnostic thinking” and requires faith. This faith, however, is not simply a belief in something, but it is a knowing belief in something. Since what we are dealing with here are absolute, ultimate truths, it must be a faith with no conditions and one that is not supported by reason. Yet standard physics does not deduce its laws exclusively through logical thinking either. Rather, it always starts with a specific image that is posited and that results from a “higher insight”. Theoretical physics is here tangent to Schmid’s worldview. Schmid, however, has other and new areas of emphasis. Of this, the present seminal monograph is a convincing demonstration.

Karlsruhe, February 2007

Wolfram Schommers

PROLOGUE

This work expands upon my Marvel of Light1. Expanding upon something is different from continuing it. When you continue you can interrupt your train of thought more or less at random, whereas an expansion reflects incisions that attest to new breakthroughs in the author’s nature.

Such breakthroughs always occur in thrusts. This is why we also call them gnostic circles, because they resemble the circular ripples that a stone creates when thrown into the water.

Thus, it was neither by chance nor by intention that some questions in my Marvel of Light remained unanswered. Rather, the reason was that I had not reached the required level of knowledge. The time for answering them had not yet come in me, the required level of knowledge had not matured yet.

In some letters that I received at the time in regard to the Marvel of Light, I was repeatedly asked why I had not divided the work into a scientific and a philosophical part, since in its present form it was too philosophical for the scientist and too scientific for the philosopher. Such a division would have made it easier for the reader to find what is of interest to them. I can certainly understand why one would want this, but I have to say that in that case I would never have been able to write the book because scientific correctness and philosophical truths are different perspectives that should supplement each other, as I have tried to. However, genetic insight, as I understand it, is not merely a body of knowledge. It is not a specialized knowledge. Rather, it ultimately seeks to find the keys that unlock in their depth the preeminent spiritual and religious questions that concern us. What I have written about it, therefore, is not just a scientific communication, in that what had occurred previously had taken hold of not just the author’s thinking but rather beyond that also of his entire being, which is not much different from what happens when love takes hold of us.

*

Gnosis is the blossom of the tree of knowledge. Even though it bears fruit in its time, it is not an end in itself. It seems to be without purpose.

What is meant to delight us is not knowledge as such, understood as the result of an activity, but the very process of understanding. Which is always a gift!

Understanding is one of the great gifts of humankind. It is akin to love. What it makes us experience fills us with a primordial joy, which, just as the encounter with the angel, contains both delight and terror.

Primordial joy is not taken in through the senses, but through the soul. If such primordial joy did not exist, our humanity would merit neither gratitude nor praise, since one single grain of it is worth one hundred bushels of suffering.

Its only sources are understanding, love, and action rooted in virtue – logos, eros, and arête. Any other pleasure is just vain junk, the preferred attire of the dead-born. Without primordial joy there is only the endless repetition of our expulsion from the Garden of Delight, because all other pleasures do but deceive us and give us no true comfort. They are like the drops of jaded rain flowing into the sea of oblivion or the pool of regret. “Yet all (primordial) joy wants eternity, wants deep, wants deep eternity!”2 …

When the finger of God touched the extended hand of the first human, he was overcome by the rapture of that primordial joy, and he saw the Creation with God’s eyes, just as if he himself had been responsible for it. And we, too, experience in this – gnostic – understanding our secret part in the act of creation.

All hoarding of knowledge that relates only to reason and intellect merely opens in us the gate to the power of doubt, which always stands between man and nature. Ever since, man has understood that he has been stripped of his glory and forced to fight, by the sweat of his brow, to regain knowledge lost, as if he were arduously digging over the field with a spade, in search of treasure.

That is why all science grounded in a relationless intellect always remains synonymous with doubt, which constantly feels for the wounds that it has inflicted on nature. In contrast, gnostic knowledge serves no purpose. It is nature’s self-revelation in the spirit. For this reason I was deeply touched when back then Adolf Portmann3, the eminent biologist, recognized that the abundance of colours, patterns and shapes that nature lavishes did not serve the preservation of the self or the species, but was “far from the eye of a conspecific, sexual partner, or hereditary enemy” a “self-presentation, which we must call undirected". And he continues: “The actual phenomenon in its undirected being is inherently self-presentation. In extreme cases it is directed neither towards conspecifics nor towards enemies. It is purely appearance in the light-space.”

These are the key words of our turning times, just like the words with which he concludes his work: “Perhaps it has been noticed that humanity’s loneliest great creations are in a similar fashion purely phenomena in the light of the spirit as the countless exquisite forms of plants and animals are phenomena in the light.”

Thus, it is for the purpose of gnostic knowledge that every splendour of nature has been created “ad maiorem Dei gloriam”, and our reading in its wonders is both pledge and warranty of our immortality.

*

Even though we here represent the perspective of the gnosis, we do not deny that logic and science are without doubt necessary wherever they attempt to reconstruct and comprehend natural events through reason and intellect, often supported by results from higher mathematics (which I call “paramathematics”4). Every gnostic vision has its analogue in a perception by the eye, and every prehension of reason and intellect in the sense of touch.

A conversation or a lecture can convey knowledge. Yet beyond that, a conversation can also lead to a communion in the cognitive act, an event that oscillates between spirit and love. Plato’s theory of forms and the “Symposium” belong together. On its own, every part would remain without tone, like the strings of a violin without its body: Logos and Eros are siblings.

Gnosis is never simply “attainment”, and he who is seized by it is not a “creator” but a receiver, just as no one would think that the whispers of love of Mozart’s music are just an “attainment”. Every effort of the will, every active agency, positively prevents our surrender to gnostic vision and only leads to confusion and error.

Then again, gnosis is not “manna” falling from heaven, and I am far from claiming the infallibility of a vision if it misses its hour or bears witness merely to the cognizer. Also, that which is seen in the gnosis is initially rather veiled, or more precisely: it is something that only gradually unveils itself. Just as in a fog it is only bit by bit that we discern trees, houses and people, here too only outlines emerge initially, which only later reveal their complete shape.

That is why at the beginning no gnostic vision is free of turbidity, which later, following its own laws, begins to clear and settle, very much like cloudy water clears up on its own as soon as it is no longer disturbed. All this is achieved by time and that active non-action that we call “awaiting”.

Between the will-directed taking hold of nature by means of reason and intellect and its self-revelation in the gnostic vision, between the mindset of the logician and that of the gnostic, there is after all a deep difference in essence that today seems hardly bridgeable, but that will clear up on its own when the time has come …

*

Logic and gnosis become the more evident the more we understand how different the conditions are on which their works depend:

While the logician ’s work faces the danger of missing its goal,

for the gnostic it is conception that is at risk.

While the logician works as a restless seeker and tireless digger,

the gnostic works agitated and tensely waiting for “his hour”.

While the logician has doubts about his actions and thoughts,

the gnostic has doubts about his mission.

The last stretch of his intellectual path is full of impatience for the logician;

the period before “his hour” is torture for the gnostic.

The time of the logician is an “always”, and what he creates is the result of an arduous search and active agency; the “hour” of the gnostic resembles the weakness of a “letting-happen”.

The angel flies in the draught of expectation and stops to stay with those who have become masters in keeping still. But all encounters with the angel are a visitation and distress, primordial joy and terror. Rilke has seen this too in his later years, acknowledging in his first Duino Elegy:

“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic Orders? And even if one were to

Suddenly take me to his heart: I would perish through his Stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the onset of terror, which we can just about bear, and we admire it so because it calmly disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.”

*

Being dogmatic is, after all, of the essence of science: a fortification or stronghold that must defend itself against the flux that inheres in every inspiration. Yet since here there is no arbitrator, the Gnostic’s situation would be desperate if he did not invariably recover after many a detour his inner voice, which enables him to “know” what he believes, and to believe what he knows.

On that account I may be forgiven for putting such a strong emphasis on the Gnosis: it is simply a comforting soliloquy. Perhaps it may already be justified because of the advancement of knowledge I achieved in this Principium motus (which today must appear hardly believable), but certainly in view of the sand trickling away in the hourglass of my life …

I know, and do not kick against the pricks, that I will not live to see the time when my insights will have proved their worth. Burning in the flames or being forgotten in the catacombs of silence is, after all, an appropriate death for the gnostic heretic: it is his death!

And once again we find apposite words in Rilke, this time in his Book of Hours :

“OH LORD, give everyone his own death.

Dying, departing from the same life

That had love, meaning, and hardship.

FOR we are only the shell and the leaf.

The great death that everyone carries in himself,

That is the fruit around which everything revolves.”

The Principium motus is the last fruit that detaches itself from the tree of my life.

1 Alfred Schmid, The Marvel of Light. An Excursus, East-West Publications 1984.

2 Translator’s note: This quote is from the Second Dance Song in the third part of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

3 Adolf Portmann, "Unterwegs zu einem neuen Bild vom Organismus", in: Die Welt in neuer Sicht. Sechs Vorträge