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Oppenheimer or the Inevitability of Doom
“It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful; they are found because it was possible to find them.”
J. Robert Oppenheimer
In Hindu cosmology, the world cycles between birth, life, and destruction. At the ending stage of a cycle of the universe, Shiva, manifest as Nataraj, the god of dance, performs the dance of destruction, Tandava. After the Tandava, the universe is dissolved, only to be reborn again, signifying the endless cycle of life and death in the cosmos.
In the Hindu vision of the world, there is no progress. The world is endlessly cycling between its birth and its death. Hence the ultimate goal of Hinduism (and many variants of Buddhism) is the escape of rebirth: Nirvana is the state that transcends the wheel of Dharma.
The Christian notion of the world is a different one. There is a light at the end of the tunnel: there is the second coming of Christ, the object at the end of time, and there is paradise to be reached. But (wo)man was expelled from paradise for the sin of thought, for the sin of eating from the apple of self-awareness. And so (wo)man has to strive towards realizing this notion of paradise in the world.
And even while Christianity has been on the decline in the West for centuries, following the reformation, Copernicus, Newton, the French Enlightenment, and culminating in the “Death of God”, proclaimed by Nietzsche at the end of the 19th century, the defining characteristics of Western thought remain influenced in important ways by Christianities eschatological (the notion the end of the world) outlook on history.
Hegel, one of Europe’s most influential philosophers of the 19th century, thought of history as directed towards the telos (goal) of the self-realization of the world spirit, and of history as a process progressing towards a goal. His idea inherited much from the Christian notion of paradise and of the world spirit progressing towards higher stages of itself. The neo-Hegelian philosophers, the most important one among them probably Karl Marx, were in turn heavily influenced by Hegel’s ideas…
