How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

Wolfson takes up the question of Einsteinian space-time in order to answer a most obvious and common criticism of his work: that there is something anachronistic or inappropriate about employing twentieth-century Continental philosophy to medieval kabbalistic literature. Put simply, you cannot use present categories of thought to interpret the meanings of the past. Not if space-time is curved, not if the future can reach back to the past to change or reveal its potential meanings: Without delving into the thicket of theoretic grappling that this subject demands, I pose the rhetorical question: What would be the consequences if a historian were to take seriously the conclusion reached on the basis of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity that spacetime—the “mathematical structure” that “serves as a unifying causal background for phenomena”—is to be regarded as a curve? Does this not at least entail the possibility that the past is as much determined by the present as the present by the past?61 This, of course, was Ioan Couliano’s question (and deeply resonant with Nietzsche’s answer about the circularity of time and our potential superhuman powers over it).