মহাবিশ্ব, পদার্থবিদ্যা ও ঈশ্বর

সৃষ্টিকর্তার অস্তিত্ব বা অনাস্তিত্ব পদার্থবিদ্যার বিষয় নয় । বিষয়টি দর্শনশাস্ত্রের

অভিজিৎ এর ভাল প্রত্যুত্তর দিয়েছে, হকিং কে উদ্ধৃতি দিয়ে। দর্শনের এই অবলুপ্তীকরণ খুব নতুন কিছু নয়, এটা বস্তুত কয়েক দশক ধরেই চলছে। আমি ঠিক এই বিষয়ের উপর ১৯৮৬ সালে লেখা Harry Redner এর “The Ends Of Philosophy” বই থেকে উদ্ধৃতি দিচ্ছি। সময় ও কলেবর বিবেচনায় অনুবাদ করলাম না। উল্লেখ্য যে রেডনার বিজ্ঞানী নন। তিনি কলা বিভাগের অধ্যাপক । কাজেই পক্ষপাতদুষ্ট বলে নাকচ করে দেয়া যাবে না।

From Inside Jacket:
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“Philosophy today finds itself in a desperate predicament. Deprived by the sciences of
the capacity to deal with issues of substantive knowledge, fragmented and divided against
itself – philosophy might not continue much longer as anything other than an academic
discipline.

The Ends of Philosophy traces the ways in which this situation has arisen, going back to
the initial secession of science from philosophy at the start of the Scientific
Revolution. As a result of this continuing process of secession, metaphysics is now at an
end and philosophy itself is threatened with extinction.

The ending of metaphysics was accomplished within philosophy itself largely be the
critiques of the “great destroyers”: Marx, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Heidegger. The
book concentrates particularly on Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and seeks to turn their
destructive arguments against them so as to destroy their ways of philosophising.
However, the book does not rest on this negative conclusion, but proceeds to open up new
ways of philosophising; for example, it seeks a model for language-analysis in psyche-
analysis. No one with a concern for philosophy will want to ignore this often
provocative, wide ranging and penetrating discussion of the End(s) of Philosophy.”

Page 20:
———-

“However, there is this difference between the philosopher as specialized expert and
every other expert: the philosopher has no specific object or field that is peculiarly
his own. He is the expert on nothing — and everything. Every specialty that philosophy
has sought to preserve for itself has been taken over by the sciences and expropriated
from philosophy. Over the last two centuries philosophy has been gradually displaced from
one field to another as it has tried to escape the relentless pursuit of the sciences.
After metaphysics had to abandon the claim to the whole of Being, philosophy sought refuge
in epistemology and the mind, but that had to be given up to psychology and the scientific
methodologies. Philosophy tried to retreat into concepts and ideas, only to have to
abandon these to the new cultural sciences. The escape into consciousness was blocked by
psychoanalysis, which revealed the secondary nature of the conscious Ego as compared with
the unconscious systems that subtend it. For analogous reasons History had to be given
up to the sociologists and world-historians, Life to the biologists and cyberneticists
and Thought to the logicians and methodologists. Language had seemed a last refuge for
philosophers but philology, linguistics and semiology are now making it insecure, and,
before long, it, too, may have to be given up. A history of wrecks of modern schools of
philosophy since Kant is like a swathe of ruins beaten by the flight of philosophy from
the world, crushed under the relentless pursuit of ever newer sciences and humanities.”

Page 21-22:
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“Sociologically considered, the retreat of philosophy from the scientific world and its
withdrawal into its own purified spheres must be seen as a way of preserving itself from
having to face the scientific challenge. In their own departmental fastnesses
philosophers could busy themselves with matters in which by stipulation no scientist had
any competence and for which no philosopher need know any science or have any other
specialized knowledge. Indifference to outside knowledge began to typify the professional
philosopher. Secure from serious outside challenge, such philosophy has ipso facto
rendered itself obsolete. The problems and solutions of school philosophy are usually of
no. concern to anybody else. No scientist, historian or critic waits on the deliverances
of philosophy to resolve any one of his difficulties, for that which the philosophers say
is likely to be irrelevant to him.”

P-23:
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“But who is the philosopher now? It is anybody, no matter from what profession, who
carries out knowingly or unknowingly the functions of philosophy; often it is a scientist
or scholar totally divorced from official philosophy.”

Pages 83-84:
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“Within the university rationalisation produced departmental separations as the universe
of knowledge was parcelled out through a division of labour between the sciences.
Philosophy was pushed into a specialised department of its own and gradually displaced
from any substantive area of knowledge. It could only find room for itself in the
temporarily unoccupied gaps between the sciences. This process had already begun much
earlier during the second secession. As metaphysics was driven out from all natural and
cultural reality by the new sciences, so simultaneously was room opened up between the
sciences for new modern non-metaphysical philosophies to fill. But then these
philosophies too were continually expelled by the formation of yet other sciences filling
the gaps between the older ones. Still more specialised philosophies were devised to
escape the newer sciences, and these, too, were then threatened by still further
scientific developments. The structure of this total economy of knowledge following on
the second secession does explain the bewildering proliferation of usually short-lived
schools of philosophy whose ruins litter the historical landscape of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Inmost cases, each of these schools resulted from a specific
configuration of sciences between whose interstices it was designed to fit. The total
field of philosophy thus became fragmented and scattered as each philosophy could only be
partial, and none could any longer hope for a general system to cover everything.

The process of fragmentation and displacement of philosophy begun earlier seems about
to complete itself in this era of the third and perhaps final secession of science. There
seems no place for Philosophy at all among the technosciences in the technocratic
‘multiversity’, the current successor of the old university. It is temporarily tolerated as
an antiquarian fossil only when it keeps to its own department. Outside it has no
relevance. The sciences hem it in from all sides and remove the ground from any aspect of
reality it might wish to occupy. The natural sciences deprive it of any say on the old
philosophical issues, such as matter, space, time, the nature of life, or of the universe.
The social sciences reject all its assump- tions about history, language or knowledge. On
behalf of a new discipline, the science of science, which is to take over from the
philosophy of science, Elias pronounces the concluding expulsion of philosophy from
science:

Transcendental philosophers often claim that they can prescribe
for sciences generally. Their claim ought to be firmly rejected.
Theirs is an esoteric enterprise of no relevance to the work of
social scientists, and probably not to that of natural scientists
either.

Bereft of all relevance to knowledge, philosophy seems about to come to an end. This final
outcome is not, however, fore-ordained, nor is it completely necessitated by present
intellectual conditions. It is true that the history of metaphysics is now a closed book.
It holds for us no unrealised possibilities or undiscovered truths. For us the question
‘what is metaphysics’ can only be answered in the past tense: metaphysics is what it was.
But this harsh verdict is not completely applicable to philosophy itself.”

P-96:
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“Modern science and philosophy had one by one critically to weaken and destroy almost
every element of method and principle in Aristotelian science before it could take its place. It
could not have succeeded in this without the support of a philosophy of reduction, though
this was at first limited.

This was where the work of the new epistemological philosophers was auxiliary to that
of the physicists. Philosophy assumed the role of what Locke called ‘the under-labourer in
clearing the ground, and removing some of the rubbish that lies in the way of knowledge’,
in the way, that is, of ‘master builders’ like the ‘incomparable Mr.Newton with some others
of that strain. Philosophy, no longer the queen of the sciences, was henceforth reduced
to being their handmaiden; it was restricted to studying the formation of ideas,
restricted, that is, to the basis of knowledge — knowledge itself became the preserve of
science.”

Pages 286-287:
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“Others, however, have already resigned themselves to the demise of philosophy and turned
away from it to the history of science or the science of history, or alternatively to the
art of criticism or the criticism of art.
In an article on Nietzsche, de Man puts it quite explicitly ‘philosophy turns out to be
an endless reflection on its own destruction at the hands of literature’ . The reflection
is endless because the destruction is ‘a rhetorical mode … unable ever to escape from
the rhetorical deceit it denounces. Philosophy, on this account, is trapped in figures
of speech. Philosophy cannot get beyond or behind language, seen as figural and
rhetorical, to some external realm of reference, to Truth, Being, or even Society; it is
inextricably caught in language, that is, in the art and artifice of words. Hence, it is
consigned to literature, the primary mode of the figural disposition of words. Like
Polonius we ask: ‘what is the matter?’ in the book of philosophy, only to be told that it
is ‘words, words, words’. If it is nothing but words, ‘this is the same as saying that it is
structured as rhetoric. And since, if one wants to conserve the term “literature”, one
should not hesitate to assimilate it to rhetoric, then it follows that the deconstruction
of metaphysics, or “philosophy”, is an impossibility to the precise extent that it is
“literary”. So philosophy lives on because it is literature; it cannot be finally
destroyed because the destructive attempt is itself a literary trope doomed to continuous
self-repetition. But once one is aware of the internal irony of this literary game, why
one should keep on playing it out is not explained.”

এছাড়া ডকিন্স এর ১৯৯৬ সালের নভেম্বরে বিবিসি তে দেয়া বক্তৃতাও উদ্ধৃতি করার লোভ সামলাতে পারলাম না।

“You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being. Aristotle was an encyclopedic polymath, an all time intellect. Yet not only can you know more than him about the world. You also can have a deeper understanding of how everything works. Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues.”