What is ‘real’: A brief comparison

Steven French’s review of Bernard d’Espagnat’s 500-page tome On Physics and Philosophy (Physics Today, June 2007, page 66 ) got my attention, with its repeated discussion of something d’Espagnat calls “the Real.” I must confess I have not seen d’Espagnat’s book, but the more I read about this Real in French’s review, the more I thought I’d heard of it somewhere before. In the true scientific spirit of bringing to the attention of a researcher the results of prior research bearing on his work, I have interspersed citations from the Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas (1225–74) between passages from French’s review of d’Espagnat’s book.

French states that the Real “nevertheless exerts an influence on the phenomena.”

Aquinas wrote, “As there can be nothing which is not created by God, so there can be nothing which is not subject to His government” (part 1, question 103, article 5).

French writes, “The grand laws of physics are ‘highly distorted reflections … of the great structures of “the Real”’ (page 455)…. The Real, although impossible to conceive, is nonseparable; from it, both consciousness and empirical reality ‘co-emerge.’”

Aquinas wrote, “From the knowledge of sensible things the whole power of God cannot be known; nor therefore can His essence be seen. But because they are His effects and depend on their cause, we can be led from them so far as to know of God whether He exists, and to know of Him what must necessarily belong to Him, as the first cause of all things, exceeding all things caused by Him” (part 1, question 12, article 12).

Aquinas maintained that there cannot ultimately be any disagreement between faith and reason because both come from an infinitely faithful and infinitely reasonable God. It is amusing that an apparently secular philosopher such as d’Espagnat, writing for a modern audience of physicists and philosophers and basing his thought on the latest results of quantum mechanics, has nevertheless arrived at conclusions in harmony with the greatest philosopher of the Middle Ages.