SOURCE: "Primitive, Newtonian, and Einsteinian Fantasies: Three Worldviews," in The Scope of the Fantastic-Theory, Technique, Major Authors, edited by Robert A. Collins and Howard D. Pearce, Greenwood Press, 1985, pp. 69-75.

[In the following essay, Ziegler argues that the Weltanschauung—or world-view—of any given time period necessarily places restraints on the creative imagination, but remains hopeful that the fantasy genre will benefit from the societal move from a Newtonian to an Einsteinian worldview.]

Fantasy, as a genre of the creative imagination, can be described as a chimerical or fantastic notion, where "fantastic" connotes unrestrained extravagance in the creations of the imaginative faculty. Despite this definition, fantasy, like all other human activities, cannot be wholly unrestrained. Restraints are placed on humans not only by their biological, psychological, and social natures but by the Weltanschauung of their times. Thus fantasy must be redefined as an extravagance in the creations of the imaginative faculty within the constraints of human nature and of worldviews. I will leave to biologists, social scientists, theologians, and philosophers the problem of human nature and address the problem of restraints imposed on the creative faculty by the worldview current at the time in which fantasists create their works.

The dominant worldview before the seventeenth century is often referred to as "pre-Newtonian," a term that may also apply to peoples who have not yet accepted the Newtonian system of thought. Since such peoples may otherwise represent different cultural levels, despite basic similarities in worldview, the term primitive is more convenient to describe the pre-Newtonian Weltanschauung.

Several aspects of such a worldview stand out. There is no clear division between the divine and the human or between living and inert matter. The characteristic division is between good and evil, which are almost Manichaean in their expression. Fantasy's role in the primitive mind is primarily moral. Myths, fairy tales, folk stories, and anecdotal material reflect this view of the universe as basically a moral system. Good and evil are absolute and objective. Both fantasy and nonfantasy are attempts to answer holistic questions such as "What is Truth?" "What is good and just?" "What is life?" Whether one reads Plato or Aristophanes, these questions are implicit. Plato's account of Atlantis and Aristophanes's description of Cloudcuckooland each reflect their common preoccupation with eternal verities. Also implicit in the two accounts is a moral comparison with the "real" world. The two men, however, must locate their mythical land either in the past (Atlantis) or in space (Cloudcuckooland). The descriptions must have points of similarity to the experience of humans living in the present on Earth, and these similarities must be sufficiently a part of the general worldview so that readers can comprehend and accept the moral message being conveyed. Primitive fantasy, as analyzed through the structuralist approach of Claude Levi-Strauss, displays a striking feature: the tales are always synchronous. Even tales laid in the past can be understood only in reference to the present. The primitive mind rejects the diachronous system.

The system of thought associated with the name of Sir Isaac Newton changed, and changes, people's worldview. No longer are they engaged in a holistic approach to the world. The type of questions they now ask are: "What happens when a rock falls from a height?" "How does the blood move through the body?" "How can I exploit a vein of silver ore without the miners drowning or suffocating?" When individuals like Galileo Galilei ask these questions, they are also rejecting the synchronous approach. They are examining discrete phenomena in an attempt to satisfy immediate objectives such as allaying curiosity, healing sickness, killing enemies efficiently, and amassing wealth. Although moral questions may emerge, the phenomena themselves are not moral. The examination of the phenomena can only occur serially, resulting in a diachronous activity. The seven decades separating Galileo's Starry Messenger from Newton's Principia Mathematica encompass the revolution.

Newton's great achievement was to point out that the examination of a small segment of the universe can produce a greater knowledge of the universe itself. This can be done because the universe is the same throughout. For the next two centuries explorations of nature and humans supported Newton's conclusion. The result was the development of a closed system operating by fixed rules that could be discovered by reason based on observation. Such discovery was made possible by the objectification and quantification of the observations. Observers approached a phenomenon as external to themselves with characteristics that could be described in numerical terms. Since relationships between numbers had been known since the time of Pythagoras, phenomena could now be quantified. Such phenomena would be value free in these terms, and reason could be applied to answer the nonholistic questions in the minds of the observers.

This methodology resulted in the triumph of science—not because science proved the truth of philosophical or theological systems, but because it solved the everyday problems facing humans. Although the seventeenth century witnessed modern scientific explorations in many fields, physics dominated. In succeeding years the methods of physics were applied to other areas of human knowledge. In the process human knowledge replicated physics, further legitimating science as the only valid worldview, one that was only limited by the people's use of their innate intelligence and the tools available at the time.

In nonscientific areas the Newtonian worldview also dominated. Art, music, and literature reflect this domination. The machine became the model. Individual works by artists, musicians, and writers had to be understood as machines that demonstrated at the same time their discrete individuality and their place in the universe. Fantasy shared in this. Charles Perrault took the primitive French folk stories and transformed them into Newtonian fairy tales. In Beauty and the Beast Beauty is the scientist, and the Beast is nature. Through understanding, fear and revulsion give way to love and partnership. The Fairy Godmother in Cinderella can be seen as the scientist delivering humankind into the Promised Land of a better life as personified by Prince Charming. The Wicked Stepmother represents ignorance and jealousy, which are overcome by the fitting of the glass slipper upon Cinderella's foot. The glass slipper can be understood as science, Cinderella's foot as humankind. When humans accept science, they are transformed, fear and jealousy are defeated, and they live happily ever after.

Fantasy's response to the changing Weltanschauung may also be seen in the comparison of Cyrano de Bergerac's account of a voyage to the moon with the story of the flight of Icarus. The myth of Icarus is explicitly a moral tale. In Cyrano's account, however, individuals leave Earth for another physical object in the universe. When they arrive, that object is identifiably similar to Earth and is inhabited by similar living creatures, with similar concerns. Icarus uses wings made of feathers held together by wax; Cyrano uses rockets and beef tallow. Icarus flies too close to the sun, the wax melts, and he falls to Earth. Cyrano returns to Earth by a demon taking him to hell, which requires a passage back to Earth. Cyrano solves the problem of his return by a method lifted from the primitive worldview.

From Cyrano de Bergerac to Jules Verne, fantasists have taken the latest discoveries of Newtonian science and put humans through fantastic adventures. In all cases, however, these adventures occur in the Newtonian universe. The picaresque stories of Gil Blas, the erotic fantasies of Casanova, the lies of Baron Munchausen, the tales about Till Eulenspiegel, Jonathan Swift's satire in the account of Gulliver's travels—all are Newtonian. Fantasists joined the other, less extravagant users of the imaginative faculty in turning away from the search for the good, the true, and the beautiful to portray the real, the material, within the continuum of time.

This might appear at first to be untrue. Although fantasists such as H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and Edward Bellamy reflect the Newtonian system, others like Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker appear to violate it. In their fantasies the premise seems to be one of deliberate flight from the Newtonian worldview. A closer reading, however, demonstrates that humans' attempt to violate the Newtonian system in these works regularly leads to disaster. Dr. Frankenstein creates a monster and is destroyed by it. Members of the Usher family attempt to survive without following the Newtonian principles and are killed off by the collapse of their house. Dracula would appear to be successful in transcending the Newtonian world; yet even he is destroyed by it in the end.

The fact that Dracula was written toward the end of the nineteenth century, and that it points to a non-Newtonian worldview, reflects what was happening in science. Scientists in the latter part of the nineteenth century were having increasing difficulties in reconciling their discoveries with Newtonian principles. Light, in particular, demonstrated properties of both matter and energy. The Newtonian system posited that matter and energy were discrete and different. The line between matter and energy became even more blurred with the work of Henri Bequerel and Wilhelm Roentgen, the discoverers of radio waves and X-rays. The development of quantum mechanics by Max Planck explained the phenomena but destroyed the barrier between matter and energy. By 1900 physicists were shifting from studying energy as an affective principle to a conception of energy as the basis of the universe.

The lack of adequate theoretical framework inhibited scientists in their attempts to explain phenomena such as radioactivity, electromagnetism, random particle activity, and osmosis. The laws of thermodynamics, which had enabled humankind to create the modern industrial society, were inadequate when applied to these phenomena. The foundations of the Newtonian system were developing cracks. The biggest crack was a growing realization that human understanding and control of nature required more than simply better observations and better tools. The seventeenth-century revolt against the then-prevailing assumption that events on Earth were punishments for sin, meliorated by God's grace, had led to the Newtonian system. It would appear that the next step would be a similar questioning of the Newtonian assumptions, with an almost infinite number of possible systems to replace the Newtonian system.

Perhaps this would have happened except for the publication of three papers by a Swiss patent office functionary in 1905-6. These papers, by Albert Einstein, although they did not have the breadth or simplicity of Newton's Principia Mathematica, did explain satisfactorily the discrepancies between scientific observations and the Newtonian system. In this way they are analogous to Galileo's Starry Messenger. Science, and humankind, then waited for the new Newton to synthesize all of the activities of scientists in the coming decades. Einstein, however, was to be the Newton of the new system, with the publication of The General Theory of Relativity in 1915. (The three earlier papers were published under the title Special Theory of Relativity.) Einstein was to spend the rest of his life in an attempt to achieve what the successors of Newton had done by developing a comprehensive system—in this case, the unified field theory. He failed, but the search is still going on, as indicated by the awarding of the Nobel Prize in physics for 1979 to men who have brought us closer to the formulation of the unified field theory. In the absence of the unified field theory Einstein's general theory of relativity expresses the contemporary worldview.

All of us are familiar with the word relativity. It has passed into discussions of, and inquiries into, all areas of human thought and endeavor. It has given rise to the "big-bang" theory of the universe, to situational ethics, to anarchy in the humanities. Unfortunately, most of those who use Einstein as the authority for their ideas have misused his theories. "Relativity," and its twin "uncertainty" (from Werner Heisenberg's principle), have been used to justify the rejection of absolutes, which in turn has led to the substitution of the subjective and ephemeral for the objective and eternal in nonscientific activity. Even in science the recent trend has been toward research in applied science rather than further exploration in Einsteinian problems. The present status of intellectual activity can best be summarized by statements such as this: "Since everything is relative and uncertain, whatever I express is as valid as anything else. The only criterion is the marketplace."

This approach might be acceptable if the marketplace were free. In ideas, as in goods, market research by pollsters has replaced the free exchange of intellectual endeavors. The statistician reigns supreme, and the result is presold formulas. These formulas dress up the Newtonian system in Einsteinian terminology. Whether it is Star Trek, Star Wars, or the latest horror flick, the Newtonian special effects demonstrate the only attempts at fantasy.

Apparently, we are aware that Einstein shattered the Newtonian worldview, but we are still unable to escape our bondage to Newton. We need some standard, and the statistician provides that standard. The computer has replaced the human brain in creating fantasy to such an extent that the brain is routinely referred to as a giant computer. But computers cannot escape the Newtonian universe, as HAL demonstrates in 2001: A Space Odyssey. What makes HAL different is the reinjection of a primitive worldview into the Newtonian universe. In fact, much of twentieth-century fantasy appears to be the survival of the primitive worldview in the Newtonian system. This is part of the twentieth-century attempt to deal with evil, because the realities of our time are more fantastic than most of our fantasies. None of the Newtonian fantasists could imagine horrors such as World War I, Stalinism, Nazism, World War II, Viet Nam, Kampuchea, concentration camps, Gulags, modern urban terrorism, or nuclear bombs.

Only the last horror owes anything to Einstein. The others result from following Newtonian principles. But all of the horrors of the twentieth century pose a significant problem for fantasists. They have three solutions. First, they can trivialize or make banal the reality around them. This is the solution of most contemporary fantasists. Second, they can escape from the horrors of the present by creating their own world. One direction is indicated by Tolkien, another by Norman Rockwell. Third, they can illuminate the present by exaggerating its flaws and absurdities. Works such as One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Yawning Heights, and Gravity's Rainbow illustrate this solution. This third solution also reflects the Einsteinian worldview.

To support my contention, remember that both the primitive and Newtonian systems were closed systems. Einstein created an open system. To Einstein and to modern science the universe is not closed. It appears closed to the observer, but that is relative to the observer. Move the observer, and the system changes. Because energy and not mass is the basis of the universe, motion is the norm. Both the observer and the object observed are moving. The perception of the observer is determined by the relative rates of velocity involved. Another observer moving at a different velocity than the first observer would perceive the object differently. When this premise is combined with the concept of an open system, the result is uncertainty. Newtonians focused their attention upon moving particles of matter. These particles did not change as their velocities changed, because Newtonians ignored the most crucial element involved—time.

To Newton time was a constant, to be measured in the same way that mass, density, and volume are measured. To Einstein time is relative in the same way that mass, density, and volume are relative. Since mass, density, and volume change as their velocities change, time also changes—hence the popular term fourth dimension.

It is this use of time that differentiates most clearly the Newtonian and Einsteinian worldviews. In terms of fantasy it means that time ceases to be diachronous. Time, however, does not become synchronous, as in the primitive worldview. Instead, it becomes something defined by the moving relationships of particles of matter. This means that time in the Einsteinian universe is achronous. Matter and time are determined by velocity, which in turn is the result of energy. Einsteinian fantasists will then concern themselves with energy and will subordinate matter and time to their proper, secondary roles.

Will fantasy reflect the Einsteinian worldview? I see some evidence that this is happening. Marcel Proust, in Remembrance of Things Past, illustrated this to some extent; here is a work in which movement from object to object replaces movement on the continuum through time—a movement that is without velocity and is certainly not Newtonian. The surrealists, also, represent a trend toward the Einsteinian system. Although they approach reality from the standpoint of the subconscious, their work illustrates the distortions that occur when the observer is placed on a different plane than that of the Newtonian system.

In conclusion, although there are some glimmerings of the Einsteinian world-view on the horizon, successful (in monetary terms) fantasy still hews to the Newtonian world-view. It is the juxtaposition of the Newtonian and primitive views that appears to be the major alternative to straight Newtonian fantasy. We are still in the same relationship to the Einsteinian worldview as the illiterate European peasants were to the early Newtonian worldview. Before the Brothers Grimm cleaned up the German folk tales and turned them into children's stories, the forest and its creatures, including humans, were dangerous and bloody. Now that Walt Disney has completely sanitized them, the stage is set for the next breakthrough. This will come with the emergence of someone like Aristophanes or Rabelais, who can then be followed by a bowdlerizing anthologist. At present, Luis Bunuel, J. L. Borges, Thomas Pynchon, and Grigori Zinoviev are pointing the way. To seize on the essence of Einsteinian fantasy, watch Un Chien Andalou, read The Yawning Heights, and then imagine a universe in which velocity is the determinant.