Bringing the world back in: Revolutions and relations before and after the quantum event

Introduction

In 2013, I was invited to attend a symposium on quantum theory at the University of Sydney. The invitation was an accident of sorts. Someone else had to withdraw from the event, and a seat needed to be filled. I had never been to Australia, and James Der Derian was organizing the event. I was only a couple of years into my career, and travel and room and board were being covered. What could go wrong? I accepted immediately. Then the panic set in. Everything I knew about quantum theory came from Billy Bob Thornton’s courtroom monologue in the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There (Coen and Coen, 2001). I had been heavily invested in the ways in which complexity theory could be folded into the social sciences, but my understanding of physics began and ended with the term ‘Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle’. I had two months to read everything I could before walking into a room of experts, and this is what I did in the intervening weeks. I was relieved to find that nearly all of the major contributors to quantum physics had written collections of philosophical essays. This meant I would not have to learn new math – at least not yet. To my surprise, they were also interested in the same philosophers that had drawn me to complexity theory. They almost all shared a dissatisfaction with the Kantian schema of knowledge and its relationship to the world. What struck me most directly reading the essays and reflections of Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and, to a lesser extent, Albert Einstein was how speculative they were both in their pursuit of science and in what they thought their findings meant in an existential sense well beyond any technical application. The generation of physicists that started the quantum revolution saw philosophy as an invaluable part of their research and thinking.

After arriving in Sydney for the first Q event, I was profoundly struck by just how little of this cross-disciplinary curiosity and dialogue had survived the second half of the 20th century. In a room full of physicists, philosophers, and social scientists, all brought together to discuss quantum theory, we more closely resembled the tragedy of Babel than a community of scholars. We possessed no common language, no legible research questions in common, and few common texts or questions to return to. It felt like we were starting from scratch. A few years later, a lot of forward movement has happened. Yet we are nowhere near the mutual legibility necessary for something like the debate between Henri Bergson and Albert Einstein.

I am not interested in romanticizing the greatness of a truly liberal education, although I wish I had grown up with access to the classical training of the early 20th century. Instead, I want to return to the moment just before the quantum revolution to describe a kind of intellectual ethos that I think holds a great deal of value for contemporary research in the social sciences and international relations. The philosophers and physicists that take up the bulk of this article possessed a humility and spirit of adventure held in a tension that, I believe, made useful and provocative dialogue possible long after it had ceased being possible for every scholar to fully engage every other scholar’s research. Alfred North Whitehead was not capable of performing the double-slit experiment, but he could debate its significance with physicists. Likewise, Niels Bohr did not possess the depth of philosophical knowledge to be a philosopher, but he possessed sufficient interest and knowledge to engage and challenge contemporaries like Arthur Bentley and John Dewey in ways that pushed everyone involved beyond what their own experience could have produced.

I want to argue that this mutual vulnerability of reaching out beyond one’s own expertise while also bringing the virtue of that expertise to bear on shared questions offers promise for the interdisciplinary collaboration we need today. We face not just another quantum revolution but also challenges from artificial intelligence, climate change, nuclear weapons, global governance, and many other multi-sector complexities that demand of us expertise and dilettantism if we are to respond to these challenges in any meaningful way. The hesitancy to take up the ethos of intellectual adventure is regularly justified in the social sciences. We are often punished for experimenting with new ideas.

The article is inspired by four of the most recurrent criticisms I have heard over the past few years. The criticisms made most often against those wishing to engage quantum theory are: (1) the charge of science envy; (2) the related but distinct concern that bringing in quantum theory will allow the sciences to ‘colonize’ the social sciences; (3) the accusation that those who engage quantum physics are doing so only metaphorically; and (4) the claim that what can be gleaned from quantum physics has been rendered redundant by early insights from post-structuralism, critical realism, and complexity theory. Rather than refute each of these claims specifically, I adopt a more oblique strategy. I am going after what I think inspires these concerns. The wager is that an overly narrow view of what the quantum event was, along with a correspondingly narrow view of science, generates much of the anxiety over including physics in our social scientific conversations. ¹

The persistent and most pressing question for me is how to position quantum thinking among other kinds of and claims to knowledge. I want to see what happens when we place scientific and philosophical inquiry in dialogue, and what that conversation does to the authority and value of quantum thinking for the social sciences.

In the first section of the article, I sketch the major contributions of quantum physics and relational philosophy side by side in order to demonstrate overlapping concerns and also the independence of philosophy to pursue what to many in the sciences appear to be exclusively empirical questions to be answered by experiments. In the second section, as a kind of conclusion to the article, I will answer the question of whether international relations needs a quantum inspired ‘vitalist sociology’ and I will make a case for an ethos of adventurous humility that could be adopted for engaging quantum theory without either science envy or reactionary skepticism. Alongside this ethos, I want to sketch a non-progressivist view of what theory is for. What if the value of the social sciences is not progress at all? What if the value of the social sciences is to work out the philosophical tasks or problems raised by philosophy, physics, biology, politics, war – you name it – in each context, era, and point of inquiry?

An outline of the quantum event

What was the quantum event? Did it occur only within physics, or was it a more fundamental crisis in the nature of reality with which every discipline had to reckon? If it were the latter, then what role did philosophy play in giving the world its due in a complex and chancy cosmos? I understand the contribution of quantum physics along four lines of inquiry: discreteness, scale, space/time, and causality.

Discreteness is a key feature of a Newtonian or mechanical worldview. For things to be made of parts, and for those parts to enter into an efficient causal relationship, both things must be separate. Quantum experiments challenged many of the assumptions about the presumed boundaries between people and things. There are a few different examples of this in quantum theory: the observer problem; entanglement – that is, communication between particles despite spatial distance and no apparent relation; and non-locality – that is, electrons as probabilities rather than objects at particular coordinates. All of these examples complicate how we understand relationality and substance. In the words of an editorial from the New York Times in response to quantum theory, ‘Matter is a mere wraith’ (cited in Crease and Goldhaber, 2014: 45). According to Bohr, words like inside and outside are arbitrary after quantum insights. Speaking of the problem of the observer’s body in an experiment, he writes:

It was by no means necessary that this limit should coincide with the geometrical limits of the physical body of the individual who observes. We could quite well ‘contract’ the observer or ‘expand’ him: we could include all that passed within the eye of the observer in the ‘observed’ part of the system – which is described in a quantum manner. Then the ‘observer’ would begin behind the retina. Or we could include part of the apparatus which we used in the physical observation – a microscope for instance – in the ‘observer’ . . . There is thus no part of the system which is essentially the observer, but in order to formulate quantum theory, an observer must always be placed somewhere. (Bohr, 1998: 120)

Contrary to the common assumption that quantum effects ‘wash out’ in the macro world, scale was a frequent concern of early quantum theorists. In addition to the ways in which entanglement questioned our spatial understandings of distance and matter, we also have Heisenberg and Schrödinger’s work in biology as evidence that quantum phenomena had a longer reach into the micro- and macroscopic world. Heisenberg in particular was curious about the role of quantum phenomena in genetics. One of the examples he gives of how quantum phenomena cross scales is the way in which radiation causes changes to evolutionary history. When a particular gene gets knocked out sometimes, but not at other times, then what? The missing or altered gene changes the whole course not just of an individual animal but potentially of the entire species:

Genetic investigations into the frequency of mutations, for instance, seem to indicate that under certain conditions an event on an atomic level, such as the release of a single chemical link in a chromosome of a cell nucleus, can cause changes in the whole future development of an organism. In such cases the statistical laws of quantum theory assume a direct practical importance for the behavior of a living being. (Heisenberg, 1979: 91)

The taken-for-granted stability of discreteness and scale were unsettled by the popularization of Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity. Beyond the average person’s grasp of the theories, the point taken was that perceived reality did not conform with empirical testing. The idea, for instance, that gravity could change time or that speed and position altered the nature of space suggested that reality was in some very basic sense not intuitive. That we now had to speak of space/time and the fact that reality was ‘relativistic’ was a shock to political and social theories that rested on the providence and elegance of a clock-like universe.

Although less famous than Einstein’s theory of relativity, Bohr’s concept of complementarity was much more radical in that it challenged the very logic of causality. Complementarity questions whether reality is strictly contingent or whether novelty can emerge semi-autonomously from initial conditions. According to Prigogine and Stengers (1984: 226), Bohr’s insight into Plank’s constant is that the ‘wave collapse’ is only describable as an interaction between the measurement apparatus and the light being measured. The ‘value’ assigned is not assigned to the light packet but to the interaction – that is, the measurement itself. According to Bohr (1998: 141–142):

In physics, causal description, originally adapted to the problem of mechanics, rests on the assumption that the knowledge of the state of a material system at a given time permits the prediction of its state at any subsequent time . . . However, a wholly new situation in physical science was created through the discovery of the universal quantum of action, which revealed an elementary theory of ‘individuality’ of atomic process far beyond the old doctrine . . . This novel feature is not only entirely foreign to the classical theories of mechanics and electromagnetism, but is even irreconcilable with the very idea of causality.

One of the most basic characteristics of empiricism, the observation of cause and effect, is at some level, according to Bohr, an illusion.

Very much parallel to these scientific insights, but historically prior to the experiments of quantum physics, there are, broadly speaking, four corresponding clusters of contributions from relational philosophies: monism, the continuity of relations, panpsychism, and a shift to process over efficient causality. ²

Let us first consider monism, the theory that everything in the world is made of one substance rather than the dualism of mind and body or some other division. While going back to the very beginnings of ancient thought, monism made a distinct comeback at the end of the 19th century. Some of the most well-known thinkers of this position are William James, 20th-century cyberneticists like Norbert Wiener, and biologists like Henri Atlan, who is still working in the fields of artificial intelligence and biology.

Second, the idea that relations are continuous and indivisible is an extension of monism but one whose specificity runs in close proximity to the quantum problem of non-locality. In Matter and Memory, Henri Bergson (1988 [1896]) radicalizes Zeno’s paradox to argue that all things, including time, are continuous rather than mechanical and discrete – like Bohr’s electron, which only exists in movement. ³ Bergson also adds to the claim of continuity a number of things that are real but do not take up space. These are what Bergson calls intensive rather than extensive things. The category of intensive changes describes forces whose intensity makes a difference but cannot be measured in space or discrete units. For instance, we can consider the intensity of rage or sadness. This is important because it allows Bergson to consider forces like meaning or affect, which change systems even if they are not mechanically describable. To put it a bit differently, the category of intensive things means we are not stuck with the barren world of a narrowly interpreted physical causal closure. Yet we also do not have to invent a spiritual realm or second substance for those non-physical things that are real but only in their relations. Intensive differences are a kind of predecessor to what complexity theorists call emergent phenomena.

To avoid the problem of monism becoming a kind of reactionary determinism in which everything is just the result of matter senselessly interacting, we need French sociologist Gabriel Tarde’s ideas of a relationality and intention at the heart of all things. Tarde’s metaphysical arrangement is similar to the vitalist principle of élan vital put forward by Bergson but without the pesky parallelism. For Tarde, everything is a society from top to bottom, and humans in particular are an imitative and entangled species rather than individualistic and cut off from direct experience. However, for Tarde (2012), humans only have a capacity for consciousness and communicative sociality because all species, particles, and even stars are entangled – and transactional in imitative and innovative ways. All things, according to Tarde, are innovating and syncing swarms at multiple scales – from crowds, to nations, to planetary-scale assemblages. Tarde’s relational properties also extend from the macro to the quantum and back again. This allows Tarde to replace causality and structure with what he calls polygenesis, where one investigates how each thing or process is made rather than beginning from presumptions about structures or ideal types as explanatory tools (Tonkonoff, 2013).

Fourth, alongside complementarity, we have Alfred North Whitehead’s (1919) claim that we should abandon essence and identity in favor of process, relations, and rhythm. For Whitehead, the things of organizations are lured into an attraction with each other that becomes concrete rather than having a discernible cause in advance. Following this line of reasoning requires that the limits of logic be defined by the world rather than by humans. Whitehead argues that any rational explanation of the cosmos and the event of humans within it requires abandoning the principle of non-contradiction, much in the way that Bohr would articulate the abandoning of causality in his theory of complementarity. According to Whitehead (1985: 3), the terms coherent and logical need to be replaced by the terms applicable and adequate. In addition, for process to be adequately accounted for in empiricism, our explanations of the world need more than the naive realism of observation.

Empiricism required an experimental and speculative metaphysics as much as it needed science and observation. For Whitehead, neither observation nor rationalism was a sufficient condition of knowledge. Again, as with Bohr, knowledge included the observer and the observed in its production, and therefore the appearance of things was just that – an appearance – and often fell victim to what Whitehead (1997: 91) called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

From this perspective, where philosophy and physics are seen as in conversation rather than one being prior to the other, I hope it is becoming apparent that physics in no way has a monopoly over the seemingly key concepts of complementarity, entanglement, or even the wave particle duality. In fact, as I will continue to argue, quantum physics is only a sliver of the quantum crisis, which also included the fundamental rethinking of causality and relationality by philosophy and social theory in many cases a full generation before Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, and Heisenberg. Furthermore, relational theories make a significant contribution beyond their apparent similarities to physics, particularly in terms of what the questions of causality, locality, process, scale, and the epistemological status of laws and change in the universe mean for us as humans coping with those crises of causation and explanation.

As I will address in more detail in the subsequent sections of this article, relational theories also conceptualize questions about the relationship between epistemology and ontology that quantum theorists were often either hesitant to offer or simply did not ask in the first place. To demonstrate this point, I will draw attention to the explicit and implicit dialogue between philosophy and physics as it develops over the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.

Should we risk a vitalist sociology?

The world is weird, but is it so weird that we need a ‘vitalist sociology’ (Wendt, 2015)? Despite the seeming newness of the quantum question, many in international relations and political science took up the challenge of a monist and vitalist approach during the middle part of the 20th century. These were not minor figures in the field. Most notable was Karl Deutsch. In addition to engaging Planck, Heisenberg, and Bohr explicitly, as well as Wiener, Bergson, and Dewey, Deutsch’s (1963) Nerves of Government is by any measure a thoroughly monist account of a fully relational theory of political action and political change. Deutsch spoke of this work more in the framework of cybernetics than quantum politics. However, there is a strong claim to make that cybernetics was just the extension of the insights of quantum and transactional theory into other domains of inquiry. That said, we should engage Deutsch’s early work as it also exemplifies the kind of interdisciplinary approach to the sciences and philosophy that places them on equal footing.

There are a few other texts that operationalize relational thinking along the lines of Deutsch, with comparable levels of success, even if they, like Deutsch, have mostly been forgotten by the field. ⁸ Harold and Margret Sprout’s The Ecological Perspective on Human Affairs (2015 [1965]) and Towards a Politics of the Planet Earth (1971) attempt a monist and relational approach to global politics, albeit one more indebted to cybernetic or systems approaches to biology and ecology. In the same year that the Sprouts’ first book appeared, David Easton (1965) published A Systems Analysis of Political Life, which, like the Sprouts and Deutsch, offered a top-to-bottom relational theory for analyzing politics that directly references Bentley’s transactional approach. Harold Lasswell’s (1979) The Signature of Power: Buildings, Communications, and Policy tried to embed the problems of power and communication within the physical architectures that sustain them.

The fact that Deutsch and others were quantum before quantum was cool does not in any way detract from the significance of contemporary scholarship like that of Alexander Wendt (2015) and James Der Derian (2013). Der Derian is responding to a very real challenge posed by the application of quantum theory in the form of quantum computing. Wendt does vastly more than update the 1950s and 1960s interest in relationalism. He has attempted to fully reconstruct a positive social theory that reintegrates the agency – or, in his words, ‘will’ – of constructivism with the materiality that will and the rest of the world depend upon. Wendt’s position, like that of James, Peirce, Tarde, and Whitehead, and slightly departing from Bergson and other parallelists of the Spinozist variety, is thoroughly monist. It is an attempt to posit one substance – matter – without falling into a mechanistic and therefore deterministic worldview. ⁹

The attraction to this kind of flat ontology where everything has a point of view and is a point of view makes sense at a time when ecological crises are calling into question the providence of modernist thinking. Ignoring the world as a kind of dead matter subservient to conscious thought has not gone well – if we can agree that flourishing and survival are collective goods. However, beyond good timing and an ethical impulse to not destroy the world, the new monism and its relational cosmology also clear away a great deal of unnecessary mess that has stymied discussion over ideas and materiality.

Referring back to Bergson’s formulation in the preface to Time and Free Will that many of the problems of philosophy are the result of how we have stated the questions, it is equally possible that many of the ‘hard problems’ of the social sciences and international relations specifically are more indebted to first-principle errors – presuming two substances, smuggling in a two-world metaphysics, etc. – than they were to some actual real tension between ideational and material accounts of change. The permutation that the world is both ideas and materiality is unsatisfying precisely because from the monist perspective it settles a peace where there was no war in the first place. There is the world and the processes of different social relations (let us not forget that in Tarde’s monist sociology all relations are social, even those of stars and microbes), and the relational differences have different properties. Differences are not the result of substantive difference because there are no differences in substance.

For instance, the social relationships of diplomats differ in attribute, not substance, from those relationships that sustain nuclear chain reactions, no more or less than photosynthesis differs from animal respiration. For a species obsessed with its own ability to speak, language as a form of relationality will certainly play a significant part even in a monist ontology. However, the monist position, particularly as articulated by the most recent inheritors, challenges the provincialism of humans by drawing attention to the fact that our humanist obsession with language and consciousness has less to do with human exceptionalism and more to do with human narcissism. The fact that human language appears to be the easiest point of entry to the human species says nothing about the superiority of representational language in capturing the workings of the wider world (Connolly, 2017).

Once the world in total comes to define the limits and possibilities of relational differences, the contest between ideas and matter is no longer an abstract, theoretical question of substances. Every research question is a contextually and relationally dependent difference of degree when comparing the significance of variables, actors, value, material attributes, etc. What Whitehead calls a ‘way of life’ – each particular distribution and organization of different relations – makes the difference in formation, structure, and outcome. Therefore, the investigation of differences does not require privileging, for instance, meaning-making over, say, war-making. Instead, perspective and consciousness or world-making is baked into the formative material processes of mobilization, life and death, violence, negotiation, insecurity, demographics, nationalism, and thermodynamics.

In particular, Wendt’s attraction to such a monist worldview, then, is somewhat obvious. A monist flat ontology, with the weirdness of consciousness all the way up and down, squares the circle of will and materialism. Unfortunately, what it does not do is tell us how to proceed. To say that the entire world from speaking beings to neutrinos plays a part in the difference that precedes every change suggests that we all have to be physicists, biologists, sociologists, political scientists, astrobiologists, etc., all at the same time. ¹⁰ To put it another way, starting from the premise of one substance and a component of will distributed throughout the cosmos ends a number of theoretical debates but tells us nothing about where to start investigating new questions.

In an effort to address this problem, Tarde- and James-inspired sociologist Bruno Latour (2004) has suggested moving from matters of fact (the purview of positivists) to matters of concern to draw more attention to the arbitrary choice or cut one makes into the complexity of things when one begins an inquiry. As with Bohr and Heisenberg’s view of the apparatus of measurement in the experiment, the value of a monism in which one is always already in medias res is that it gives up on the impossible task of getting to the origin of something, or the even more impossible task of getting fully exterior to the observation, and simply makes peace with the mess we are in. We take responsibility for starting in the middle of things (Bousquet et al., 2020). Although not a philosophical or empirical argument against monism and panpsychism, the complaint that this position undermines objective, neutral, disinterested scholarship is well founded. The problem, though, is that reality – that is, the consciousness of experience – is not disinterested. It is invested and multi-perspectival in its nature, and therefore there is no way to do scholarship that is not a form of interested intervention. Even physicists intervene interpretatively according to Bohr and Heisenberg. There is no position outside of the physical and intellectual entanglement of the material world: ‘all levels reality implies an essential element of conceptualization’ (Prigogine and Stengers, 1984: 226). And, because we are human, those conceptualizations carry with them normative and political consequences that we bear responsibility for in the sense of causality. Whether we take responsibility for our conceptualization is an ethical question, but our will results in the conceptualizations that intervene in the world even if we refuse that responsibility.

This does not mean that one cannot design models that have predictive value. Instead, it means that when you develop a predictive model, say for the outcome of an election based on polling data, the previous polling and election outcomes used in the making of that model, the knowledge of that model as it circulates through the world, cannot exist without having an effect on the world that was modeled. Model-building is world-building. In Latour’s words, ‘positivism – in its natural or social form, in its reactionary or progressive form – is not wrong because it forgets “human consciousness” and decides to stick with “cold data”. It is wrong politically. It has reduced matters of concern into matters of fact too fast, without due process’ (Latour, 2007: 256, emphasis in original). The epistemological status of this accusation is interesting because it directly mirrors the weird state of affairs in a monist world. Simultaneously, the positivist position is politically and empirically dubious. The error is mistaking a particular matter of concern – say, human freedom – for a matter of fact in such a way that we think it is possible to solve problems with a practical re-sorting of the things of the world into the right groupings and that with everything in its right place we can resume the positivist enterprise. Nor is it the claim of either Latour or panpsychist monism that we cannot help but make matters of fact into matters of concern. Here the idea is that humans are somehow predisposed to smuggle in crypto-normative judgements when observing the world as a result of being beings of mind in a Kantian sense. Instead, when we put the world back together again, rather than divide it into ‘kinds’ (mind and matter), the world is empirically made up of matters of concern. That is, in a Jamesian sense, consciousness is not an exotic substance sitting apart from the world. It is instead the novel phenomena of relations that are experienced by one another (James, 2003: 13).

Therefore, it is precisely our involvement in things, our intervention, that makes us, those things, and the experience of that involvement – James’s stream of consciousness – that constitutes us. What we call data is not ‘out there’, and we are not ‘in here’. We are out there with it, because of it, and it because of us. In Wendt’s formulation of this problem of experience, which he formalizes as a hologram (the unified experience of the storm of relations and experiences), things only appear because they are observed. Yet they are real rather than mere appearances. Making reference to one of the most important phenomena studied in international relations, Wendt (2015: 273) says that ‘the state is like a rainbow – it only exists when someone is looking at it’. So, for Wendt, like Latour, the state is real but only because of the effects of studying, observing, and participating in the making of the state.

To paraphrase Latour, the problem of constructivism is not the insight that everything is constructed. That is indelibly true. The problem of constructivism is that is spends so little time considering from what constructed things are made and who and what can make them (Latour, 2004). For Latour, a bit more provocatively than Wendt, things, including the state and atom bombs and microbes, are made out of states of concern – just as states of concern are provoked by the dropping of the bomb or the unforeseeable future of the microbial event that will certainly define 2020 and beyond. That is, the things we think of as physical are made out of the experience of relations – both theirs and ours – as much as they are relations of energy or self-organizing nucleic acids. I am sure many will hate this position as it makes what we do as social scientists so much harder, particularly if the gold standard of the social sciences is measured by repeatable and testable theories. However, the position developed here is not strictly a ‘position’ in the argumentative sense or even the sense often meant by terms like critical in critical international relations.

My position is built on the insights of the relational revolutions in philosophy and the quantum revolutions in physics that are disruptive to Newtonian worldviews, but disruptive is not the same as critical in the normative or representational sense. I am making an argument about the possibility of empiricism in the world, not our world. Therefore, the opposition to this position cannot be the complaint that it is inconvenient or that one prefers the other world any more than one can complain about gravity when designing an airplane. Unlike post-structuralism or other hermeneutic approaches, this is not an argument for how to interpret the world. It is a claim about the world as such – that is, conditions of possibility for interpreting. As for how we should approach such a world, a world made out of matters of concern lends itself quite well to the idea that theory is a task rather than a riddle to be solved. In Latour’s (2007: 115) version of a methods book, he suggests that we ‘learn how to feed off uncertainties, instead of deciding in advance what the furniture of the world should look like’. This is easier said than done, but what else is there to do but to begin here where we are?

Bohr provides a good example of what such a research ethos could look like. As is evident from his extensive collections of talks and philosophical writings, Bohr was frequently asked to speak at gatherings of non-physicists. Whether speaking to biologists, humanists, or philosophers, Bohr began almost all of his talks with the words ‘It is only with great hesitation . . .’ (see, for example, Bohr, 2010: 23). The modesty of Bohr’s beginning was joined by the strength of his conviction that his quantum findings suggested the necessity to reconsider the common sense of everything, from biology to philosophy. That conviction was earned through experimental research, but it was first and foremost what Bergson called an intuition.

In fact, there is a certain kinship between Bohr’s style of philosophical writing and that of Wittgenstein. Like Bohr, Wittgenstein made a kind of break with an earlier view of rationalist philosophy that thought everything could be subsumed under logical principles. In writing about his later philosophy, Wittgenstein often distinguished between presentation and representation (darstellung and vorstellung) in the doing of philosophy (Cavell, 2013: 17). For Wittgenstein, the philosophy of representation tried to use proofs to make a philosophical problem disappear. On the other hand, Wittgenstein described his greatest book, Philosophical Investigations, as a kind of album, as a collection of philosophical remarks, a presentation (Wittgenstein, 2003: 17). He also said that to solve someone else’s philosophical problem was like trying to wear their hat for them.

This showing or presentation of philosophical problems rather than proofs of philosophical answers has, I think, an affinity with the style of Bohr’s philosophical writings and his speeches to non-physicists. In one such unscientific moment – I would say a vulnerable moment – Bohr celebrates how Einstein’s theory of relativity opened up thinking to consider the nature of reality in ways that were, in Bohr’s (2010: 18) words, ‘unprecedented’. However, Bohr goes on to warn against accepting Einstein’s confidence that we can distinguish easily between the observer and the observed, and warns further against trying to graft this confidence onto the biological and social world, as Einstein’s position rests on the assumption of the regularity of the behavior of the material world. Instead, Bohr suggests that the crises of physics provoked by quantum research are themselves parallel – not metaphorically analogous – to the philosophical or humanistic crises of other fields. He writes:

For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory regarding the limited applicability of such customary idealisations, we must in fact turn to quite other branches of science, such as psychology, or even to that kind of epistemological problems with which already thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tse have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence. Still, the recognition of an analogy in the purely logical character of the problems which present themselves in so widely separated fields of human interest does in no way imply acceptance in atomic physics of any mysticism foreign to the true spirit of science, but on the contrary it gives us an incitation to examine whether the straightforward solution of the unexpected paradoxes met with in the application of our simplest concepts to atomic phenomena might not help us to clarify conceptual difficulties in other domains of experience. (Bohr, 2010: 19–20)

Bohr is not using quantum theory here as a metaphor, nor is he trying to colonize the other fields with a kind of final scientific explanation. Instead, he is ‘horizontalizing’ the endeavors of philosophy, the social sciences, and even religion as pursuits of a more general set of problems that are similarly inspiring to physics and may benefit from the ways in which physicists came to deal conceptually with problems at odds with accepted logic. In this way, for Bohr, the value of his research for non-physicists was that it showed how quantum research questioned common-sense understandings of even the most basic assumptions of reality rather than being a case of physics providing a new foundation on which other modes of inquiry could stand. What Bohr is referring to as ‘incitation’ is in the same conceptual neighborhood as what Bergson (1912: 7) called intuition or an ‘intellectual sympathy by which one places oneself within an object in order to coincide with what is unique in it and consequently inexpressible’.

Bergson, Tarde, Peirce, and James, later joined by Dewey, Whitehead, and Bentley, all saw intuition as a vital philosophical tool, a kind of nose for sniffing out Latour’s ‘controversies’ or ‘matters of concern’. Intuition is always employed, whether we like it not. And yet intuition is often seen as a kind of methodological sin. We hide our intuitions rather than expose them to contestation and the pursuit of others. Rather than a quantum theory of international relations, what I think Bohr, Heisenberg, and the relational philosophers who preceded and then joined them have to offer is an inclination for speculative thinking inspired by the world rather than limited by a desire for how we wish the world worked. If this is what the ‘Q effect’ is on international relations, then the fears that the field will suffer from science envy and become susceptible to colonization by science seem as unfounded and unlikely as the danger of hurting physics through the metaphoric use of quantum concepts.

Almost 20 years ago, a number of critically inclined international relations theorists published an article entitled ‘God Gave Physics the Easy Questions’ (Bernstein et al., 2000). The article was intended to strike a blow against scientism by showing how distinct the social sciences are from the ‘hard’ sciences. In some sense, the authors hoped to widen the disciplinary gap between the social and natural worlds. However, the long dialogue from Bergson to Bell suggests there are no easy problems, and that the territorial dispute between humanistic theory and scientific inquiry is a recent and far from inevitable problem of contemporary scholarship. The world in which scholars like Bergson and Einstein debated is only a few generations removed and certainly not impossible to reclaim. The only requirement is that we all agree that it is the whole world and everything in it that is up for debate. James called this ‘radical empiricism’. The name matters less than the insight James made more than one hundred years ago:

It is difficult not to notice a curious unrest in the philosophical atmosphere of the time, a loosening of old landmarks, a softening of oppositions, a mutual borrowing from one another on the part of systems anciently closed, and an interest in new suggestions, however vague, as if the one thing sure were the inadequacy of the extant school-solutions. The dissatisfaction with these seems due for the most part to a feeling that they are too abstract and academic. Life is confused and superabundant, and what the younger generation appears to crave is more of the temperament of life in its philosophy, even though it were at some cost of logical rigor and of formal purity. (James, 2003: 39)