Feynman's 'nobody understands' taken seriously

00:24:52 — Feynman’s ’nobody understands’ taken seriously

Žižek reads Feynman’s quip literally rather than as modest self-deprecation. To ‘understand’ in the strong sense means to translate a phenomenon into the grammar of our existing world-picture. Quantum mechanics, on his view, reveals a stratum whose very structure is incompatible with that grammar — which is why no such translation succeeds. The idealist mistake is not taking this seriously enough and concluding that observers therefore constitute reality; the materialist reading is that reality contains a level our reality cannot consistently accommodate.