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Journal of Chinese Philosophy

COMPLEMENTARITY AS A MODEL FOR EAST-WEST INTEGRATIVE PHILOSOPHY

Robert Elliott Allinson

Published Feb 10, 1998• 13 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Recently it has been discovered that Niels Bohr, the father of quantum physics, was acquainted, at a young age, with the ancient Chinese philosophy of Lao-Tzu.New evidence has come to light from a letter written by Bohr himself, discovered in 1998, which is a reply to a letter of inquiry from a Svend Hugo Jiirgensen, a teacher from the Danish town of Aalborg.The teacher had sent Bohr a manuscript entitled 'Tuo Te Ching and the Idea of Complementarity'.Bohr's reply, dated 26 March 1958 begins, "I thank you for your letter and the enclosed little note about Tuo Te Ching, which I have read with great interest.I believe what you say about the old Chinese philosophy is in many ways quite to the point.In my youth I received a beautiful impression of it through Ernst Merller's book 'Oldmester', and at a visit to China twenty years ago I learned how highly the memory of Lao-Tzu is still valued."Since Merller's book was first published in 1909 (the year Bohr turned 24) and Bohr by his own account was in his youth, it is clear that his knowledge of Chinese philosophy preceded his discovery of the complementarity principle in physics ( 1927).While this does not conclusively prove that he learned his idea of complementarity from Chinese philosophy, it is nonetheless a document of great interest.In any event, it is clear that Bohr valued highly ancient Chinese philosophy.It was either instrumental or decisive for his complementarity principle in physics, which has proved invaluable as an explanatory principle for Western physics.What better proof is needed to illustrate that the "Chinese mind" is not "of a different order of humanity" than its accessibility through the medium of Danish language to a Western physicist?That the same Western physicist could then apply the idea of complementarity to understand the workings of the universe common to both Western and Chinese minds is a further demonstration that the Chinese mind is as universal in its application to reality as its Western counterpart.And what better evidence can be cited to show that the

DOI
10.1111/j.1540-6253.1998.tb00527.x

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Recently it has been discovered that Niels Bohr, the father of quantum physics, was acquainted, at a young age, with the ancient Chinese philosophy of Lao-Tzu.New evidence has come to light from a letter written by Bohr himself, discovered in 1998, which is a reply to a letter of inquiry from a Svend Hugo Jiirgensen, a teacher from the Danish town of Aalborg.The teacher had sent Bohr a manuscript entitled 'Tuo Te Ching and the Idea of Complementarity'.Bohr's reply, dated 26 March 1958 begins, "I thank you for your letter and the enclosed little note about Tuo Te Ching, which I have read with great interest.I believe what you say about the old Chinese philosophy is in many ways quite to the point.In my youth I received a beautiful impression of it through Ernst Merller's book 'Oldmester', and at a visit to China twenty years ago I learned how highly the memory of Lao-Tzu is still valued."Since Merller's book was first published in 1909 (the year Bohr turned 24) and Bohr by his own account was in his youth, it is clear that his knowledge of Chinese philosophy preceded his discovery of the complementarity principle in physics ( 1927).While this does not conclusively prove that he learned his idea of complementarity from Chinese philosophy, it is nonetheless a document of great interest.In any event, it is clear that Bohr valued highly ancient Chinese philosophy.It was either instrumental or decisive for his complementarity principle in physics, which has proved invaluable as an explanatory principle for Western physics.What better proof is needed to illustrate that the "Chinese mind" is not "of a different order of humanity" than its accessibility through the medium of Danish language to a Western physicist?That the same Western physicist could then apply the idea of complementarity to understand the workings of the universe common to both Western and Chinese minds is a further demonstration that the Chinese mind is as universal in its application to reality as its Western counterpart.And what better evidence can be cited to show that the
When I was staying at Yukawa's Institute in Kyoto two years ago, I had occasion to discuss Bohr's ideas with the great Japanese physicist, whose conception of the meson with its complementary aspects of elementary particle and field of nuclear force is one of the most striking illustrations of the fruitfulness of the new way of looking at things that we owe to Niels Bohr. I asked Yukawa whether the Japanese physicists had experienced the same difficulty as their Western colleagues in assimilating the idea of complementarity and in adapting themselves to it. He answered, “No, Bohr's argumentation has always appeared quite evident to us;” and, as I expressed surprise, he added, with his aristocratic smile, “You see, we in Japan have not been corrupted by Aristotle.”
The theory of complementarity became prominent during the last century (primarily as a result of the ideas of Niels Bohr and quantum physics). It gradually developed into a dominant paradigm un-derlying research into the nature of existence. Bohr’s exposition of the principle also emphasized its epistemological value for providing more accurate information regarding what seem to be paradoxical aspects of reality. The principle of complementarity has proven to have far reaching philosophical im-plications concerning such basic notions as subject and object, space-time and causality, chance and necessity, and more. However, scholars also acknowledge that it contributes to resolving the problem of the discontinuity between underlying reality and the human ability to conceptualize the ontological nature of existence. It has grown in popularity because it seems to off er a means of addressing dichoto-mies in other sciences and in philosophy.When analysts scrutinize the factors that infl uenced Bohr’s understanding of the principle of comple-mentarity they fi nd that one source clearly stems from the infl uence of American Pragmatism. Although the Pragmatist infl uence is traced primarily to William James there is at the roots of the philosophy of Pragmatism reference made to concepts that refl ect the principle of complementarity explicating how to gain reliable knowledge concerning the nature of existence. From the very inception of American Prag-matism there was the recognition that Western philosophy faced a problem connected with
This article explores the physicist Niels Bohr’s cosmopolitan vision through the lens of his foundational complementarity principle. Bohr’s coat of arms—combining a Latin motto with the yin-yang symbol—stands as a visual manifesto of his lifelong quest to reconcile opposites. Archival research and textual analysis illuminate how Bohr transformed Chinese classics into epistemological allegories, reviving ancient ideas to bridge science and humanities. Tracing a thread from Bohr’s retelling of a Song‑dynasty tale to illustrate quantum mechanics, through his fusion of Schiller’s Confucius poems with Kierkegaard’s philosophy, to his 1937 dialogue in China on Zhuangzi’s “Joy of the Fish” and Princeton’s “identical twins” parables, this article weaves cross‑cultural encounters into constellations of complementarity. At the heart of these constellations lies my most surprising discovery: Bohr’s spectator‑actor analogy which he attributed to Laozi—sprang from the Danish recreation of the Daodejing, not the Chinese original. Unfolding this discovery maps out a multilayered migration of ideas through a practice I term “transreading.” In an era of disciplinary fragmentation, this article reveals an intellectual history in which science and humanities co‑create meaning. Bohr’s vision affirms a timely truth: the future of knowledge depends on the courage and imagination to transread across cultures and worlds.
This book gives a clear and comprehensive exposition of Niels Bohr's philosophy of physics. Bohr's ideas are of major importance, for they are the source of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics; yet they are obscure, and call for the sort of close analysis that this book provides. The book describes the historical background of the physics from which Bohr's ideas grew. The core of the book is a detailed analysis of Bohr's arguments for complementarity and of the interpretation which he put upon it. Special emphasis is placed throughout on the contrasting views of Einstein, and the great debate between Bohr and Einstein is thoroughly examined. The book traces the philosophical influences on Bohr, and unravels the realist and anti-realist strands in his thinking. Bohr's philosophy is critically assessed in the light of recent developments in the foundations of quantum physics (the work of Bell and others) and in philosophy (the realism-anti-realism debate) and it is revealed as being much more subtle and sophisticated than it is generally taken to be. While the book will be of interest to specialists, it is written in a style that will make it accessible to those who have no specialist knowledge of the relevant physics and philosophy.
Ninety years ago in 1927, at an international congress in Como, Italy, Niels Bohr gave an address which is recognized as the first instance in which the term "complementarity", as a physical concept, was spoken publicly [1], revealing Bohr's own thinking about Louis de Broglie's "duality". Bohr had very slowly accepted duality as a principle of physics: close observation of any quantum object will reveal either wave-like or particle-like behavior, one or the other of two fundamental and complementary features. Little disagreement exists today about complementarity's importance and broad applicability in quantum science. Book-length scholarly examinations even provide speculations about the relevance of complementarity in fields as different from physics as biology, psychology and social anthropology, connections which were apparently of interest to Bohr himself (see Jammer [2], Murdoch [3] and Whitaker [4]). Confusion evident in Como following his talk was not eliminated by Bohr's article [1], and complementarity has been subjected to nine decades of repeated examination ever since with no agreed resolution. Semi-popular treatments [5] as well as expert examinations [6-9] show that the topic cannot be avoided, and complementarity retains its central place in the interpretation of quantum mechanics. However, recent approaches by our group [10-13] and others [14-20] to the underlying notion of coherence now allow us to present a universal formulation of complementarity that may signal the end to the confusion. We demonstrate a new relationship that constrains the behavior of an electromagnetic field (quantum or classical) in the fundamental context of two-slit experiments. We show that entanglement is the ingredient needed to complete Bohr's formulation of complementarity, debated for decades because of its incompleteness.