"Stupid people incomprehensible" - these words are found in Christian Morgenstern's "Galgenlieder", in which he describes the way in which "life's game" is played on the gallows hill in order to take revenge on "existence's deep seriousness". Seriousness and play - at first glance, they seem to be irreconcilably opposed to each other and unable to find common ground, but a second glance may reveal something else.
As a student, the great physicist Werner Heisenberg was annoyed when reading scholarly texts from ancient Greece that philosophers did not take the concept of the atom seriously and did not even play with it properly. For Heisenberg, "researching the laws of nature became an endlessly exciting game", because it was the only way he could understand them. And once he had succeeded in doing so, he was able to use his words to open up access to the world to people interested in the findings of science, which he had the privilege of having just found. For Heisenberg, there was an important task in this game, as he described it in five volumes of "Allgemeinverständliche Schriften".
This is why it always seems strange when people accuse the natural sciences of being too detached and then turn to philisophy. Yet the texts to be found here are largely incomprehensible, as can easily be demonstrated by the sentence with which the celebrated Hegel describes light: "As the abstract self of matter, light is the absolutely light, and as matter infinite, but as material identity inseparable and simple being outside itself". This is completely useless even for experts, and Hegel despised other people anyway: "Philosophy is by its very nature something esoteric, neither made for the rabble nor capable of being prepared for the rabble."
What particularly disturbs an author concerned with scientific education is that Hegel's admirers do not allow anything to shake their devoted attitude and celebrate his idea that only a speculative philosophy is a science.
The opposite is the case. Hegel did not take the empirical disciplines of natural science seriously, and so they had to take revenge on him and show with their game that they "know life better", as Morgenstern's view from the gallows mountain most understandably puts it.
THE AUTHOR
Ernst Peter Fischer
The graduate physicist, doctor of biology and habilitated historian of science is Professor of History of Science at the University of Heidelberg.
He is the author of several books and has received numerous awards.
