Approaching Modesty and Mystery in Kabbalah, Philosophy and Science

The Immeasurable: The Dynamics of Concealment

—In front of the mirror, Sarah looks at her naked body. If she takes her time to examine it closely, it is because she knows it escapes her.

Edmond Jabès (23)

—Your body is the trace of your body

Octavio Paz (24)

—The exile of the body in outward history has its parallel in the exile of the soul in its migrations from embodiment to embodiment.

Gershom Scholem (25)

Carving out the problem of the body in a somewhat different manner, we can call to mind the observations of bodies—the most elementary bodies—performed in modern science. Fine detail in the micro world of subatomic particles may seem like an unusual choice to depict the strange phenomena of modesty, but the experiments show that nature plays into the logic of concealment and unknowability. Given that our prior staging of the concept of modesty in the theater of the Hebraic Biblical cannon yielded the conditions of walking (i.e. dynamic motion or the transition from place to place, from activity to activity in a modest/concealed manner) and the wisdom of the wise (to see the sudden appearances of that which is being born in virtue of modesty), we can uncover an appropriate parallel in the following example from sub-atomic physics. The thinking of unknowable and undetectable movements directly relates to the famed ‘watched kettles’ as Paul Davies describes:

When an atom is excited, an atomic electron jumps to a higher energy level. It remains there for a certain duration before dropping back down to its ground state—a process known as ‘decay.’ The excess energy from the decay process is divested, usually in the form of a proton, which flies away. By detecting and measuring the energy of the photon, we can figure out the difference in energy of the atom’s levels.

How long the electron spends in an excited state varies from case to case, but a definite prediction can be computed using quantum mechanics. However, an essential feature of quantum physics is its indeterminacy: the behavior of individual systems cannot be predicted. The theory can yield the average lifetime of the excited state, but it cannot tell you in a particular case precisely when that specific atom is going to decay. The inherent fuzziness prevents us from giving a meaningful answer to the apparently straightforward question: how long does the electron take to jump from one level to another? Try as you may, you will never spot the electron in the act of jumping, or hovering halfway between levels. There is a certain well-defined probability that, after a certain time the electron will be back in its ground state, having decayed at some unspecific time beforehand….You can never detect the atom in the process of decay. What actually happens, if you look at the atom closely and continuously, is that the very act of observation itself interferes with the decay processes, and effectively freezes the atom in its tracks (i.e., in the excited state). This phenomenon has been dubbed ‘the watched-kettle effect,’ because it is reminiscent of the proverb that a watched kettle never boils. (26)

Hence, we have a ‘physical’ phenomenon wherein our objects are packets or clouds of energy that jump from one level to another. This quantum leap may be likend to an interruption in the steady and individually particular states of an object resulting in the discontinuity of appearances. Appropriating this model as a metaphor in the intersubjective world of social observation, we employ the leveling effect of the law of averages with great frequency to counter the unsettling surprise of the individual encounter. The jagged edges and ‘inherent fuzziness’ of our pre-photoshopped snapshots of life and people reveal an unavoidable indeterminacy. Moreover, immodesty, be it on the part of the observer or the observed would seem to qualify as Davies phrases it as an interference that stems from “the very act of observation.” Of paramount importance, however, is the sketch of undetectable transition, humility as quantum decay.

We might inquire as to the effect in science that denies dynamic motion. Photo opportunities try to catch the subject in a compromising pose. The snap and flash of it all suggest an experience of immediacy crafting a timeless moment. Perhaps therein lays the violence. Life becomes sliced and spliced as discreet frozen frames (even if we know nothing of the transition between frames).  The subject of the portrait is dispossessed of the right to temporality—to be a temporal being. The de-temporalization of the subject within the mimetic act drains the lifetime out of that subject turning his or her inside out. A timeless body is spread out and open on an autopsy table.

Even before the overexposure of representation, light itself approximates timelessness. As the hallmark of the Einsteinian revolution, light not only seals the envelope of time by marking the convergence of ultimate limits in the physical universe—the maximum speed being the speed of light coupled with the notion that infinities of energy and mass are reached at this speed—are sown together in one of the most uncanny predictions of relativity: that light waves do not experience change in time. True instantaneousness or timelessness (although the two may in fact be quite different) grant light immunity from everyday temporality. Keeping up with it proves impossible.

On a more mystical note, we shouldn’t be at all surprised that light figures as the metaphor par excellence in Jewish mysticism and beyond. Aside from the qualities of light in general, the self-serving application of light when employed to detect objects fosters claims to the totality of those objects caught within the perceptual framework. Thus, moving from ‘hard’ science to social science, David Michael Levine recasts these questions in terms of what he calls the “need for perceptual closure”:

What the Frankfurt School of research found was that people whose personality makes them strongly disposed to authoritarian behavior and strongly supportive of authoritarian institutions correspondingly display perceptual habits that are distinctly authoritarian and totalitarian. They need perceptual closure (closed wholes, or totalities), insist on clarity and distinctness at all costs, and cannot tolerate ambiguities, uncertainties, complexities, and intricacy. Their perceptual forms tend, therefore, to be obsessively static and rigid, and they tend to see individuals not as individually, but through the stereotypes of their prejudices. Their vision is accordingly disengaged from open interactions with others—not disengaged, however, as Descartes would have it, for the sake of judgment of Reason, but disengaged, rather, so as not to disturb the fixed, automatic application of the stereotype. (27)

Physical problems have a way of mirroring philosophic problems. From the traditional focus on what is lost in translation or transition, we have succumbed to a novel variation: we have lost the translation/transition itself. We operate as though it isn’t there precisely because of the (near) impossibility of observing it. Consequently, our immodesty concerns the circumstances that generate our opinions and perceptions of nearly everything when those “habits” affect the “prejudices” and “stereotypes” that are unacknowledged projects of processes that move from premise to conclusion without a trace. Clarity is often purchased at the expense of fluidity. Consequently, denial of the flux of things subtly suggests that nothing moves me.

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