Barad on the play Copenhagen: epistemological, ontological and ethical issues.
This week we are focusing on a quote from Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning- “Another crucial point that I have yet to discuss is the fact that Frayn continually confuses the epistemological and ontological issues-issues concerning the nature of knowledge and the nature of being”.
In this piece the author, Karen Barad, examines the play Copenhagen which was wrote by Michael Frayn. Copenhagen is a fictional play that is placed in Copenhagen and centers around Niels Bohr, Margrethe Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg after they have passed away. Niels Bohr is famously known for his work and contributions to the quantum theory and Werner Heisenberg is known for his uncertainty principles. Michael Frayn himself has a principle of uncertainty himself and I really liked how they state it in the piece “‘we can [in theory] never know everything about human thinking’” (Barad, 2006). Barad goes on to state that it was an invention that was based solely on the basis of analogy (Barad,2006). There are some ethical issues that are talked about within the play itself. The ones that stood out for me was when they were talking about if Bohr acted in ethical manner when creating a weapon of mass destruction such as the atom bomb. We don’t know EXACTLY what this person (Bohr) was thinking when he was doing this research and creating these items so we cannot say one way or another that he should be held accountable for what happened using the atom bomb. One more ethics issue that immediately jumped out at me was that Barad made sure to state that Heisenberg was NOT a Nazi or a Nazi sympathizer. I wasn’t too sure why this was necessary to include but I guess it’s good information to know.
Before going to much further into this assignment I needed to look up the definitions for epistemological and ontological:
Ontological- of or relating to ontology, the branch of metaphysics that studies the nature of existence or being as such; metaphysical
Epistemology-Plato’s epistemology was an attempt to understand what it was to know, and how knowledge (unlike mere true opinion) is good for the person who know the information/knowledge.
The problem that Barad has with Frayn’s play is that there seems to be no line between the major philosophies-ontology and epistemology. Frayn appears to know the two different philosophies but has an issue conveying what this in his play; Frayn frames Niels Bohr and Werner Hiesenburg as if they were meant to act according to the philosophies noted above but they just don’t exactly fit the bill. Barad states that Frayn is missing portions of Heisenberg’s principle to his own principle of uncertainty, “concerns the limits to our knowledge of the behavior of physical objects, like atoms or electrons-to the problem of what it is possible to know about human behavior; he is simply drawing a parallel.” (Barad, 2006).
References:
Barad, K. (2006).Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press.
