The "Critique of Practical Reason" by the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant from 1788 contains a famous confession by the philosopher. It reads: "Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and more persistently reflection is occupied with them: the starry sky above me and the moral law within me."
Those who use this quote usually break it off here, and the question remains open as to what Kant had on his mind and wanted to say to people. By reading on, they can find out and learn to marvel. Kant writes: "The first sight of an innumerable multitude of worlds destroys, as it were, my importance as an animal creature that must return the matter from which it was made to the planet (a mere point in space) after it has been endowed with vitality for a short time (one does not know how). The second, on the other hand, raises my value, as an intelligence, infinitely, through my personality, in which the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and even of the whole world of the senses."
"The starry sky and the moral law"
Kant's point of view is appealing due to the tense contrast between (geometric) point without extension and (cosmic) infinity without limit. The mystery of reality is thus an interplay between punctual nothingness and infinite space, which runs towards a center and meets man there.
When (narrow) physics began to expand into a philosophy in the 20th century, it succeeded in taking this difficult step by dividing both light and matter into closed points (particles) and endless openness (waves). Perhaps biology should try to do the same and endeavor to grasp the secret of the life force mentioned by Kant with the idea of the complementarity of point and world that he liked. Life can spring from a tender point (Goethe's Faust), but it can also reach out infinitely in order to participate with its richness in "the whole sensory world" (Kant). The world is full of contradictory possibilities. Science has known this since it found the tiny point from which the energy wells up with which the whole world can become and the universe can form. This is the quantum of effect. It is almost nothing and yet makes everything possible. A point that has been given to people and fills their minds and the world - in and above their heads.
