Physicist Richard Feynman writes:

Everything is made of atoms...everything that animals do, atoms do. In other words, there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics

Certainly no subject or field is making more progress on so many fronts at the present moment, than biology, and if we were to name the most powerful assumption of all, which leads one on and on in an attempt to understand life, it is that all things are made of atoms, and that everything that living things do can be understood in terms of the jigglings and wigglings of atoms.

The notion that all is reducible to atoms and receives ultimate explanation in the behavior of those atoms is about as correct as the idea that the novel is reducible ultimately to its letters.

Each letter of the alphabet has its properties. It is written a certain way, it can be capitalized or in lower case, has a definite phonetic, which can change in a particular but larger context ('h' is silent, 'k' is silent, 'k' is hard, etc.). As a child we are taught the properties of the letters as a prelude to reading. Some of these letters have accents, etc. Some letters are italicized, underlined, made bold, placed next to quotation marks, etc. These letters await further determination, that is, a context in which to be. It is that context that determines them further, that is, determines their meaning. That context is the word. Now, the letters determine the word in a way, but the word determines the letters in a much more profound way, as I will try to explain. The word can be isolated, but as such it lacks the deeper meaning of which it is capable (potential). It too receives formal determination within a higher context, namely the sentence. It is the idea to be expressed that determines the sentence, which determines the words and their tenses, capitalization, accents, etc. And the words, as was said, determine the letters.

But often an idea is just too complex to express in one sentence - impossible to express in a letter, such as the letter 'm'. So, instead of just one sentence, we need a paragraph. It is the entire paragraph that shapes and molds the sentences, which shape the words, which determine the letters. Knowing the alphabet tells me nothing about the ideas expressed in the paragraph above. The paragraph is greater than the letters and not the mere sum of the letters, nor is it reducible to the letters. The letters in a very limited sense determine the paragraph to be a paragraph in so far as there is no paragraph without the letters. But they don't determine the meaning of the paragraph. The letters are more of a "material" cause of the paragraph, and not a "formal" cause.

The meaning of the word is not contained in the letter, nor is the meaning contained in the sum of the letters. The sentence is a series of words, but not a mere series. The meaning of the sentence is not in the words but in their order or arrangement, and their arrangement is outside the very meaning of the words themselves.

The meaning determines their arrangement. And so it is the sentence that determines the meaning of the word, not vice versa. We all know what it means to take words out of context. When we do take something out of context, we distort its original meaning. For example, "gray". In one context, "gray" refers to a color, as in "The sky is gray today." But in another context, the word has an entirely different meaning, a more subtle meaning: "This issue takes us into a gray area". The meaning of the whole idea determines the meaning of the word; for the meaning of the whole determines the arrangement of the words.

But even the sentence finds its meaning within the higher context of the paragraph. The paragraph arranges and orders sentences (We often rearranged sentences a number of times before we submit the final draft). It is not enough to have the sentence. The meaning and order of the sentences is determined by the entire paragraph, or the idea that the entire paragraph is ordered to communicate. And the paragraph is situated in the context of the chapter. The chapter in turn is situated within the context of "Part One", and "Part One" is situated in the context of the entire novel.

One cannot write a novel word by word, or even chapter by chapter. A good quality novel knows where it is going before it even begins. So the process begins from the top (idea) down (letters). We begin writing the novel letter by letter, but the letters do not determine the novel. They determine the novel in a very limited sense - they are the material cause of the novel, so to speak. You can't have a novel without letters. But the idea is prior to the "matter" (letters) not merely in the order of time (although this is debatable), but primarily according to the order of perfection and completeness. The idea is in the mind of the author, and it is this idea that is the ultimate determinant of the whole novel, that is, every part of it.

Now the idea of the novel, the experience that the author wishes to communicate to his readers, is far too complex to be captured in "Part One", not to mention the chapter, the paragraph, the sentence, and the word.

A good novelist brings out the beauty of the language and reveals the power of the word. There is more power in the words I am using than I am capable to bringing out, but the novelist who has an eye not simply for truth, but for beauty, can bring out that power in the words. The words, nonetheless, receive their power from the context. It is the context that determines or empowers the words. The words are not actually powerful, but potentially powerful. They receive their actuality from the harmonious arrangement of the words within the larger context of the author's vision. The idea, the familiarity of the author with the language, his sense of beauty, his insight into the human condition, etc., all work to invest his words with power. On their own the words could not hope to acquire such status. They are what they are by virtue of something outside of themselves.

And so the novel is far richer in property than the letter "m" or "p" or "q" etc. The novel's form does not come from the letters, or the words, or the sentences. These latter, what they are, come from the form which exists in the mind of the novelist, and it is this form that seeks to communicate itself, and so it seeks to incarnate itself in the material causality of language.

If all he had were sentences, he could not write a novel. The sentences need a qualitative context much higher than themselves, not to mention mere phonetics. To write a novel, it is not enough to know the alphabet, nor is it enough to just know words, nor is it enough to know how to write a sentence. And it is not enough to be able to write a chapter or an essay. The author has a complex, rich, and beautiful experience he is trying to communicate to others, in the hopes of drawing them into that experience.

Similarly, the rich heterogeneous and polymorphic character of the world we live in can hardly be explained by atoms, any more than a novel is explained by words. Just as the author needs his matter (words, sentences, etc.), so too do the "ideas" of things need properly disposed matter (baryons, mesons, leptons, electrons, protons, neutrons, positrons, atoms, molecules, amino acids, proteins, etc.,) if these ideas are to be spread out materially. This matter does not determine the meanings of things, their natures or essences, much less their existence. They are disposed in a general way; they are orientated potentially towards an idea. And these "matters" do not determine their relationship to one another any more than the words of a novel determine their own relationship to one another. The final cause is determined not by matter, but by form.

But a typical reductionist like Richard Feynman works from the bottom up, that is, from the accents, to letters, to words, to sentences, to paragraphs, etc. When everything is broken down into its fundamental constituents, the reductionist believes he's moved one step closer to explaining everything. In light of the above, though, he has not moved closer at all but away from a genuine explanation of things. To explain the novel, you have to read it first. A novel is understood from a bird's eye view. It is really only understood at the end, for it is at the end of the novel that we get the original idea and can glance back at the whole movement from the beginning to the end. Knowing the alphabet was a means, but by no means a sufficient means to coming to understand the entire novel. Without a good memory, we could not gaze back at the whole experience and look at all the parts in the light of the whole, and most importantly, without a rich life experience we couldn't begin to appreciate a good novel. Moreover, a good novel is one that, among other things, keeps us thinking long after we have finished reading it (the idea within it is complex and profound).

Now the empiriological method has no choice but to work from the bottom up. For the scientific method is ordered primarily toward production. The principal goal of empiriological physics is to manipulate matter and predict. It must understand proximate causes, and there is no other way to do that than through an empiriological method. But a proximate cause is not an ultimate cause any more than the letters are the ultimate cause of the word in which they find themselves. But Feynman believes he is explaining the whole by understanding the material constituents. But this does not explain the whole any more than knowing the constituents of words enables you to explain A Tale of Two Cities or The Brothers Karamazov. Constituent parts are subservient. They serve the whole; they do not determine the whole. They have, nonetheless, a determining role, a causal role; for you can't determine the word without letters, and you can't determine a sentence without words, but the meaning of the word or sentence is not determined by the letter or word. Again, note the two-fold meaning of "determination". The former refers to material determination, the other to formal determination. The meaning (sens) is the direction, and the essence of a thing is known by its direction or tendencies, that is, its activities, and not its parts.

And so Physics is not the queen of the sciences, as Feynman so readily believes. Rather, it is the most subservient of them all. It does not "judge" other sciences in a higher light, rather it serves other sciences, just as the science of letters which we learn in grade 1 or 2 serves higher things, such as literature, but does not judge literature. Physics is far from being an all-inclusive science. It is because Feynman confuses proximate causes with ultimate causes, material causality with formal causality, that he sees physics as all-inclusive. The most all-inclusive science will be that whose object is all-inclusive, and the most all-inclusive object of knowing is nothing other than being. And so it isn't Physics that is the queen of the natural sciences, but metaphysics or the philosophy of being. And of course the highest science will not be the science that enables us to know the properties of letters, but rather that which enables us to understand the ultimate causes of those letters, the ultimate reason for their existence and their final cause, that is, the science that enables us to know the rich experiences of the author and his ideas that are too complex to be expressed in a word or sentence. Such a science is metaphysics and sacred theology.  No doubt Feynman would likely deny that these are sciences (for not even mathematics and psychology are sciences according to Feynman); for according to him, the test and validating criterion of all knowledge is experiment. The problem with this principle, though, is that it cannot be validated through experiment.  In the end, he denies his own principle in the very act of putting it forth.

Moreover, just as a novel does not contain within itself the explanation for its own existence, so too the natures of things do not contain within themselves the explanation for their own existence. Physics is impotent in the face of this question, namely the existential cause of ordinary things. Not only is the existential meaning of things outside of things themselves, but the essential meaning of all things seem to have their meaning outside of them, that is, in their final causes. For the meaning of the letter is in the word, and the meaning of the word in the sentence, and the sentence in the paragraph, and the paragraph in the chapter, and the chapter in the context of the entire novel. In the same way the meaning of the atom is in the molecule, whose meaning is found in a larger whole, such as amino acids, whose meaning is to be found in a still larger whole, such as proteins, whose meaning is to be found in a still larger whole, such as the organ of the eye, etc. The ultimate meaning of things will not be found on the subatomic level, but at the complete opposite end of the extreme. It will be found in the ultimate final cause of all things. And since science cannot measure final causality, the ultimate meaning of things is not something that empiriological science will ever discover. Metaphysics, and in particular sacred theology, can discern the ultimate meaning of matter.

Copyright © 2003 by Douglas P. McManaman
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