The Ontological Dignity of Indeterminacy: Reimagining Nature and the Atom

What is it about?

Can we think nature without subject? Without any concept of itself, nature is just material externality. Without the intervention of determining, spirited beings, nature is ontologically indeterminate. But there is a dignity to this. In quantum physics, indeterminacy is given specific form in the electron cloud and the quantum wave. Reading Hegel and Bachelard, I argue that it is spirited beings that place nature, and in doing so, weave the void into an otherwise indeterminate nature. The atom, in a classical sense as the imagined unit of irreducibility, is a product of the imagination in its attempt to organize nature. It is the imposition of an absolute, a quilting point that anchors reasoned assessments of nature. Rather than a positive piece of materiality, the atom is a negation of nature’s own indeterminate negativity and is, thus, the negation of negation from which we can think nature.

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Photo by maks_d on Unsplash

Photo by maks_d on Unsplash