Uncertainty

Frayn: COPENHAGEN (1998)

Is there such a thing as a reliable history of any event? This is one of the main questions brought up by Copenhagen and a reason for the play’s great appeal. As members of the audience we are the jury and can render a verdict on the characters at the play’s end. What the play makes clear is that history - even to the characters involved - is never clear. To paint an historic event as black and white would be to simplify it and to paint a false picture.
One of Copenhagen’s main questions - directly posed three times in the play itself, to Heisenberg himself - is, “Why did Heisenberg visit Bohr in Copenhagen?” Did he pass valuable information to Bohr, thus sabotaging the German war effort? Or vice-versa?

Even within the realm of “Simultaneity” where there is no passage of time, the three main characters cannot reach a consensus as to what actually happened all those years ago, in 1941. Just like humanity looks back on WWII ever since its end, Heisenberg, Bohr and his wife try to make some sense of that time although nothing they learn will make any difference. This indifference can be taken two ways and is true on two counts: 1) We cannot change the past, and 2) Humans will never learn from their mistakes; they are ruled by their aggression and have a long way to go before they can control it on a universal scale.

Characters in any play can be regarded as over- or underdetermined. Great playwrights create complex characters that bring audiences back for more. Hamlet is an ideal example of such a character. Depending on an actor’s delivery of Hamlet’s lines, his words can intimate different things. As an audience, we can never quite determine Hamlet’s motivations or figure out his ambiguities. The uncertainty principle in this play plays into the scientific and the everyday spheres. There is always uncertainty in understanding human conduct. From the outside perspective, we are all underdetermined. Often from within, people can view themselves this way too. Heisenberg, by the end of the play, can still not say why he went to Copenhagen; what he set out to accomplish by going there; who he wanted to serve by going there, as though here were being thrown about by some external force.
Heisenberg inhabits a nexus of sorts. He is pulled between the outcome of a world war, his friendship and respect for Bohr, German politics, and the worry of unleashing a powerful new weapon on mankind, none of which is a small burden to bear.

Classical physics has done humanity well until the twentieth century, giving us the ability to predict and understand the world with a presumption of certain physical conditions. The “Copenhagen Interpretation” is a truer model of both the actual physical world and of how one can understand human interactions. At the heart of many matters, nothing is certain. The difference between the two outlooks can be likened to groups of stars viewed from earth compared to the reality experienced by those stars: the stars as we seem them from earth appear to move apart in two-dimensional space, but they are really pulled apart in 3 dimensions with ever-changing magnitudes of the forces on them, colossal forces from within and from without.

In hindsight, whatever actually took place at this reunion in Copenhagen (just like the measurement of the position of an electron within an atom) is neither here nor there. Historically, it’s immaterial as nothing can be done to change it. What we can appreciate, though, is that history’s characters and their relationships with each other are more an intricate interlacing of fault lines than a clear and definitive one. Such is the nature of true fault lines, and yet most of us envision them as simple geological structures, for the sake of simplicity.

Science is a wonderful thing. It has enabled humanity to do things that we, as spectators and participants, marvel at. The last century (never mind the last quarter century) has witnessed an acceleration of scientific “progress” that would have stunned our ancestors. I’m sure many of them would think that we’d be better off without most of the knowledge we now possess.
In Copenhagen the late 1920s are portrayed as Bohr and Heisenberg’s scientific salad days when camaraderie, rivalry, brotherly love and respect all comingled at the cutting edge of science, without thought of any consequences. As seen throughout the play, though, it is all about perspective: Margrethe is resentful of the toll that Bohr’s research had on their family, and this comes out (p.57) when Bohr is unable to recall his son’s name.
From those beginnings sprung Heisenberg’s obsession, and eventual madness (p.50-52), with nuclear power as the script was flipped on him: (p.51) Bohr: “You were no longer running that programme, H. The programme was running you.”
Heisenberg: “Two more weeks, two more blocks of uranium and it would have been German physics that achieved the world’s first self-sustaining chain reaction.” Bohr, perhaps because he had no role in the race to build a bomb was and remains more rational than Heisenberg. During the war, Heisenberg, and Bohr to a lesser extent, couldn’t locate their own selves because of the speed at which the war and science were moving.

(p.29) Heisenberg: “Mathematics becomes very odd when you apply it to people. One plus one can add up to so many different sums…”
This quote sums up the complexity of all the characters in this play - and of all humanity. We are such multifaceted beings that we still cannot understand ourselves, what moves us, what drives us to do what we do.

p.69-70 H. “Exactly where you go as you ramble around is of course completely determined by your genes and various physical forces acting on you. But it’s also completely determined by your own entirely inscrutable whims from one moment to the next. So we can’t completely understand your behaviour without seeing it both ways at once, and that’s impossible. Which means that your extraordinary peregrinations are not fully objective aspects of the universe. They exist only partially, through the efforts of me or Margrethe, as our minds shift endlessly back and forth between the two approaches.”
Heisenberg sums up the difficulty of understanding anyone - their intentions, motivations and anything they might be thinking. This is subjective and depends on the person who is interpreting the other. It also poses questions regarding the fields of biography, autobiography as well as history).

Recollections are reorganized, consciously or unconsciously, as time goes by, to fit our changed perceptions of a situation, and no doubt Heisenberg did the same. (p. 118)

Uncertainty, at the end of the day, is what makes life interesting anyway. Interpreting the goings-on of our humanity is “tantalizingly difficult” and an inescapable dimension of life. Let’s hope this verity doesn’t hold back our self-understanding so long so as to let our common sense lose in its race with our scientific advancements.

Would Nietzsche have said that the world came to this heated stage as a result of the absence of the Dionysian in our modern lives?


The Stranger - Camus (1942).

Very candid, very frank with little tact. Autistic-like. Example, p.44, 52-53 - asks if he lovers Marie.
The descriptions, especially at first, are very unemotional and simple - just like his emotional development seems to be. His descriptions are two-dimensional, as though being pasted onto a canvas. Near the end, as he is awakened by the knowledge of his impending death, the language becomes more elaborate.

Meursault can appear cold and uncaring - but why do we view him this way? Not everyone has a deep and meaningful relationship with their mother. Moreover, one could say that he is more grounded than the average person because he remains aware that death is inevitable, inescapable. What is curious, though, is that he thinks of the tiny consequences of wasting time at work, perhaps because the consequences of doing so are immediate and avoidable. This is a sociopathic trait: the subject only thinks of immediate consequences for himself and does not think too far into the future… an argument could be made that Meursault has such leanings.

Meursault can be likened to Rousseau’s “natural man”. He does not “play the game” and is without social conditioning. His biggest crime is his lack of conformity and in not playing into society’s expectations. For this he is condemned. Camus might be saying that such a life is the essence of freedom, but that the surrounding life is absurd.

Reason vs Passion; Dualities in the story abound - but Meursault exists in a Central reality, living his own life.

Is the fact that the killed Arab, his sister and their family are never mentioned an indictment on European and colonialist attitudes? Similar to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (where Africans are portrayed as subhuman) there is a disconnect between the white and the non-white.