Niels Bohr's Philosophical Background

Question: Who cares what Niels Bohr’s philosophical background was?

Answer: The person asking himself — what in the world was Bohr thinking when he said “subject-object problem” or “unambiguous communication” and the like. (It won’t do to interpret Bohr’s words solely against the backdrop of recent analytic philosophy! For example, when Bohr talks about “subject and object”, he isn’t making this stuff up out of the blue. Rather, he is drawing on a tradition of use of those words among philosophers.)

There has already been some research on Niels Bohr’s philosophical background — although some of it is rather ill-informed about his peculiar, Scandinavian context. In the English-language literature, the biggest question seems to have been whether, or to what extent, Bohr was a Kantian — which would immediately condemn him in the eyes of some metaphysicians. But the focus on Kant is rather misguided, as quite a bit of philosophical water went under the bridge between Kant’s death (in 1804) and Bohr’s philosophical education. Indeed, Hegel had already eclipsed Kant on the continent (although there was a “back to Kant” movemenet), and Danish philosophers had been disillusioned with Hegel since the 1830s.

The literature by Danes has been, not surprisingly, more aware of Bohr’s peculiar context (see (Favrholdt 1992; Faye 2012)). Here the main point of debate has been the extent to which Bohr might have been influenced by the Danish philosopher Harald Høffding.¹ But for most of us, that question doesn’t mean much, because we don’t have any clue what Høffding’s philosophical views were.

An more esoteric and vexed question is whether Bohr might have been influenced by the philosophical views of Søren Kierkegaard. That idea may seem far-fetched from the point of view of the history of ideas — as Kierkegaard was focused on the God-human relationship, while Bohr was focused on the stability of atoms! But the idea starts to get some traction when one realizes that Kierkegaard died three decades before Bohr was born, and they even had common acquaintances!

The idea that Kierkegaard’s ideas had some influence on Bohr becomes even less far-fetched when one discovers the intermediary figure, Rasmus Nielsen, who transformed Kierkegaard’s epistemology into a philosophy of science that influenced an entire generation of Danish scientists and philosophers.

Bohr and Kant

I said above that it’s a bit short-sighted to ask if Bohr is a Kantian, or was influenced by Kant. But there is still something to be said for the fact that Kant exemplifies a certain philosophical mindset (critical philosophy), and inaugurated a certain tradition. It makes sense to ask whether, or to what extent, Bohr was of a similar mindset. (It’s also interesting to look at the triangle of Bohr, Kant, and Grete Hermann, or perhaps even the rectangle that includes Heisenberg.)

(Folse 1978; Kaiser 1992; Cuffaro 2010)