Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

an undertaking is equivalent to holding a boulder at rest upon a
steep hill:
The situation would be unnatural now, because the
boulder's tendency would be otherwise. You can hold
it only by opposing its natural tendency. This would
not be a self-sustaining situation. There would be a
certain order to it, and you might count yourself
pleased with it. But it is your order. You created
it; you are responsible for it. If you decide you
don’t want to maintain your order, it unravels the
instant you give it up. (26)
But Western science and medicine, as well as much of the greater
Western world, has indeed chosen to hold back that very same
boulder: the boulder of chaos, of disorder, of Uncertainty.
And that germ of very natural, universal Uncertainty –
unignorable, inevitably, in spite of the widespread influence of
Christianity, Western science and medicine, and Western
imperialism – would seem to have been the herald of the Post-
Modern Age. Of this, Richard Tarnas explains:
By the end of the third decade of the twentieth
century, virtually every major postulate of the
earlier scientific conception had been controverted
[…]. […] Confronted with the contradictions
observed in subatomic phenomena, Einstein wrote:
“All my attempts to adapt the theoretical foundation
of physics to this knowledge failed completely. It
was as if the ground had been pulled out from under
one, with no firm foundation to be seen anywhere upon
which one could have been built.” (356)
Upon this, Tarnas continues:
Physicists failed to come to any consensus as to how
the existing evidence should be interpreted with
respect to defining the ultimate nature of reality.
Conceptual contradictions, disjunctions, and
paradoxes were ubiquitous, and stubbornly evaded
resolution. A certain irreducible irrationality,
already recognized in the human psyche, now emerged
in the structure of the physical world itself. (358)
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