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As has been shown clearly (cf. e.g. Jammer 1974; Honner 1987; Murdoch 1987; Folse 1985; 1989; and in this volume), the "complementarity interpretation" or the "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum-mechanics is not a single, clear-cut, unambigously defined set of ideas, but rather a common denominator for a variety of related viewpoints. Within the particular realm of quantum physics issues on the above interpretation has become unusually famous by the unabating Bohr-Einstein debate, probably forerunned by the Leibniß-Newton debate. Out of this scientific environment David Bohm's own theory has emerged. He belongs to those who were and still are wavering between the two positions, or trying to reconcile the incommensurability inherent in the above debate. Like "complementarity" was for Bohr, or 'synchronicity" for Pauli (cf. Peat 1987; Laurikainen 1988), the tacit principle guiding Bohm's scientific research might be termed as the principle of metaphoricity. Roughly defined this principle refers to a kind of insight that the creative synthesis might lurk in the interstices between the two opposites; it is made up by the juxtaposition of two irreconciliable ideas; it defies our categorical imperative that something be either this or that, but not both. But this is only one of its many meanings summarized in sec. 1 and as might appear throughout the present article. My discussion of this principle will regard not so much the technical exegesis of his theory; instead it is only a provisional attempt to non-technically, i.e. humanistically, reconstruct it and, where necessary, to disclose its presuppositions.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-011-2779-0_19

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