Clouseau

The difficulty is that 'egoism' is pejorative in its popular usage.

No Robots

Brunner recognizes the practical utility of egoism in its relativized state. He even says that it has its charms, as we see in the egoism of children. And he sees the spiritualized life as modified egoism. But his critique of common, unbridled egoism is unstinting.

Sven

Not only this - IIRC, Brunner also made some blunders concerning chemistry and quantum physics (no wonder since he wrote before the advent of the latter), which did (and does) not stop you to believe Brunner more than the last 100 years of science. That's what I meant as I said that you use his book as some sort of bible.

Scholars also have been reluctant to deal with Bozo the clown's take on Christianity. What exactly does this prove?

Again, IIRC, you had no problems with ignoring that modern science says that Brunner is bullocks.

No Robots

Brunner's doctrine of science was elaborated in his magnum opus, Die Lehre von den Geistigen und vom Volk. This 1000-page work has never been completely translated. Large extracts are available in the compilation Science, spirit, supersition. The following passage (p. 144) is particularly significant:

For us, who identify motion with matter and various material phenomena with variously rapid states of motion, the law of the conservation of energy, i.e. of the eternally constant total of all existing motion, is brought, precisely thereby, into yet closer and clearer coherence with the law of the conservation of matter. For us, fundamentally, the law of the conservation of energy or of the circulation of motion could be equivalent to the law of the conservation or of the circulation of matter.

An editorial footnote comments on the significance of this passage:

By identifying matter and energy with motion and by stating the equivalency of the two laws of conservation of matter and energy, Brunner here gives indirectly a good illustration of a philosophical Abstraction (law of thought) that was subsequently given scientific formulation by Einstein who—independently, to be sure—arrived at the now famous formula, E=mc2, which unifies both laws into the one law of the conservation of mass-energy.

As Hans Goetz (To live is to think : the thought of twentieth-century German philosopher Constantin Brunner, p. 29) points out, "Einstein put forward his theory of relativity in 1905. Brunner’s major philosophical work, Die Lehre von den Geistigen und vom Volk, was begun in 1895 and appeared in 1908." Heinz Stolte states:

His [Brunner’s] doctrine of the faculties provides a firm foundation for modern science, e.g., Brunner produced a philosophically-based “theory of relativity” which is confirmed mathematically by Einstein’s far more famous theory. The amazing thing is that the two men developed their ideas in complete independence from one another, yet at practically the same time. Einstein’s celebrated and oft-repeated formula, “mass equals energy,” is the fundamental idea of Brunner’s “doctrine of motion.” (Stolte, Vom Feuer der Wahrheit : der Philosoph Constantin Brunner, p. 21-22)

Connecting this to the physics of today, Goetz (p. 33-34) writes:

Science has reached the point where it describes the physical world as being ultimately a “superposition of waves” or as “wave packets.” Thus science has arrived at the stage where philosophy has always been: things are composed of their parts, right down to molecules; and since the latter are made up of their parts (“atoms”), and they in turn are made up of their smallest parts (electrons and other particles), it follows that a thing is the sum of its particles. However, these particles “are” superpositions of waves, that is, interferences; accordingly, the things thus composed are interferences of interferences. Things, finite, extended, discontinuous and qualitatively distinct, are therefore accumulations of wave packets, wave-interference-phenomena in a universe that is infinite, extended, continuous and qualitatively homogeneous (and thus lacking quality since it is “supra-qualitative”). This universe itself is nothing other than an interference-phenomenon, an ocean of waves consisting of “water” or “air” or “ether” or some other “prime matter”; the latter cannot be compared to concrete matter because it penetrates all materially diverse things, disregarding their boundaries and permeating all interstices. This “prime matter” forms the common basis of everything, whether compact or empty; it connects everything that is separate and obliterates all distinctions between the things thus connected. To that extent it can only be called apeiron, that is, we can only conceive it as indefinable and formless, we cannot feel it and (for that reason) we cannot imagine it. For that which is indefinable, existing without form, cannot be apprehended by any of our senses; and what is essentially inaccessible to our sense-perception cannot be perceived by the use of instruments and apparatuses either, since they only amplify our senses. If something is regarded as indefinable and formless, it must also be held to be unperceivable and unimaginable. Anaximander’s expression, the apeiron, is as clear and unequivocal today as it was 2,500 years ago. The ideas of the oldest philosophers and the discoveries of the most recent scientists testify to the same truth: they show that the world is immaterial. Apeiron and infinite divisibility mean this: the deeper we penetrate into matter, the more it escapes our hands and eyes. Electrons are reduced to purely mathematical, “abstract” waves: the more closely physicists inspect matter, the more it vanishes from their hands, their microscopes and micrometers, their measuring instruments and micro-cameras. In those regions there is nothing to be seen or measured, felt or weighed; all that we have, in all probability, are processes of motion below the level of Planck’s effective quantum and above the speed of light, and such processes of motion do not occur in the human, psycho-physical world. However, the question can be raised whether these processes take place only in and between the particles, or whether they apply to our lenses, measuring apparatuses and photographs too, and hence have an effect on our eyes and our brain and so forth. In other words, they nonetheless do cause physico- (and electro-) chemical changes in our world. Every part of our body is constantly undergoing processes of which we have not the faintest suspicion.

Among Brunner's followers there have been many biologists and physicians. Honored with the Annual Sarrazin Lecture of the Canadian Physiological Society in 1982, Dr. Aron Rappaport gives full credit to Brunner for his scientific insights. You can read the lecture in full here.

Sven

Thanks for quoting this beautiful example for what I meant. I rest my case.

Amedeo

I don't know Hans Goetz beyond your quotations; so, my comments about him are based on your quotations only:

Goetz is very confused about the nature and history of modern science, because

-- The famous equations which Einstein learned from DePretto but re-derived, I have read, in a more [mathematically] elegant fashion, IS NOT a Theory of Relativity -- either Einstein's Special or General Theory. (The mathematics Einstein used in the General Theory is based on the Absolute Differential Calculus which Einstein learned from its creator, Ricci-Curbastro, through a teacher by the name of Goodman. The mathematics in the Special Theory were the Lorentz Transformation. The point is that he simply did not originally develop anything mathematical.)

-- If Brunner equated matter and energy (meaning that we call matter is packets of energy, etc. etc.), this has to do with the constitution of what we call matter; it has nothing to do with the equation,
Kinetic Energy = mass times the square of the velocity of light.

This equation answers the questions: What is the amount of force exerted by a mass which radiates (rather than fall gravitationally)? The presumption that a mass can be reduced to radiating energy was inherent in the knowledge of radio-activity, atomic fission, and in Planck's quantum theory. Radiation is a spreading out at a constant velocity, whereas a gravitational fall is unilinear at an accelerated motion. (Einstein was never able to start developing the Unified Theory of Gravity and Electromagnetism, because apparently he never saw the mathematical equivalence or identity between unilinear accelerated motion and area-wise constant motion in a unit of time.)

-- The modern science Goetz is pointing to is what might be called "undulatory physics" in contradistinction to the 17th century "mechanical physics" to which acoustics and optics were peripheral, and to which electronics was added a centur later. (The electronic theory of atoms brought chemistry into physics, etc. etc.) Brunner did not provide a foundation for any science. It was the scientists before him that developed theory of non-mechanical energy. The idea of material objects being reduced to energy [heat and light], smoke and ashes, is as old as the experiences with fire. The new scientists have found smoke and ashes are in principle reducible to radiating energy, too.