Heidegger's Philosophy of Science (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy)

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Heidegger's Philosophy of Science TRISH GLAZEBROOK

+,+ +'+ + §

Fordham University Press New York 2000

Copyright

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2000 by Fordham University Press

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Perspectives in Continental Philosophy No. 12 ISSN 1089-3938

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Glazebrook, Trish. Heidegger's philosophy of science I Trish Glazebrook.-1st ed. p. cm.-(Perspectives in continental philosophy; no. 12) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8232-2037-0 (hc)-ISBN 0-8232-2038-9 (pbk.) 1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976-{:ontributions in philosophy of science. 2. Science-Philosophy-History-20th century. l. Title. II. Series. B3279.H49 G57 193-Ilm:a. This is why Newton's laws of motion are entitled "Axiomata." His axioms are fundamental propositions that set things up in advance upon their foundation as things. The next three points follow from the fact that the essence of the mathe matical in modem science is axiomatic. First, insofar as modem science is axiomatic, the essence of things is anticipated and their structure and relation to other things are sketched in advance in the mathematical project. Second, the axiomatic project recons trues nature as "the realm of the uniform space-time context of motion" (MSMM 268/FD 71). Third, such an axiomatically

METAPHYSICS, MATHEMATICS, AND SCIENCE

59

determined realm of nature requires an appropriate mode of ac cess for the things within it. Heidegger argues that because modem science is mathemati cal in this sense of axiomatic, things are now no more than what they are prefigured to show themselves as within the realm of nature. They show themselves "only in the relations of places and time points and in the measures of mass and working forces" (MSMM 268/FD 72). Accordingly, the project deter mines the experience of things by establishing the conditions under which nature can provide answers to questions. Rather than looking to ordinary experience for such answers, the mod em scientist therefore looks to the experiment. The sixth and final point summarizing the essence of the mathematical is that numerical measurement becomes possible and in fact requisite in the mathematical projection of nature. Modem science is necessarily mathematical in the ordinary, nar row sense of calculative and numerical because it is mathemati cal in Heidegger's broader sense. Because the project entails a uniformity among bodies, in which all alike are governed by relations of space, time, and motion, "a universal uniform mea sure [is required] as an essential determinant of things" (MSMM 269/ FD 72). Only on the basis of the mathematical projection of nature, suggests Heidegger, does Descartes develop analytical geometry, Newton, infinitesimal calculus, and Leibniz, simulta neously, differential calculus. The narrow sense of the mathematical, and even much of modem mathematics, is derivative for Heidegger from his broader sense of 1:(1 l-luST)l-lm:u. Modem science is mathemati cal-that is, calculative--in a way it never could have been for Aristotle, because the essence of modem science is the mathe matical projection of nature. Accordingly, Heidegger argues in 1938 in "The Age of the World Picture"; "If we come across three apples on the table, we recognize that there are three of them. But the number three, threeness, we already know. This means that number is something mathematical. Only because numbers represent, as it were, the most striking of always-al ready-knowns, and thus offer the most familiar instance of the mathematical, is 'mathematical' promptly reserved as a name for the numerical" (AWP 118-19/H 78). The mathematical is

60

' HEIDEGGER S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

wh at is al ready known beforeh and in any understanding. Therefore it is a commitment to wh at counts as knowledge. On th e basis of h is account of th e math ematical, Heidegger reads th e directive over th e door of Plato's Academy: "aYEUl!LE 'tQT]'t oC; !LT]bEi.C; ELaL'tUl!" This is not th e order th at only th ose wh o know geometry in the sense of knowing certain rel ations be tween lines and figures can enter th e Academy. Rath er, Heideg ger reads it as the cl aim th at only th ose wh o know th e math ematical in its originary sense may enter. Only th ose wh o h ave grasped " th e fundamental condition for th e proper possi bil ity of knowing" (MSMM 254/ FD 58) have a pl ace in the Acad emy. This condition for th e possibility of knowing is " th e knowledge o f th e fundamental presuppositions o f all knowl edge and th e position we take based on such knowl edge" (MSMM 254/ FD 58). P ut more simpl y, knowledge is conditional upon its explicit foundation and awareness of its limits. In th is sense, th e h istory of metaph ysics bel ongs to th e math emati cal .

METAPHYSICS AND THE MATHEMATICAL

In Die Frage nach dem Ding, th e h istory of modem metaph ysics is so tied up with ph ysics forHeidegger th at h e l ooks to th e h istory of science precisely with th e intention of understandin g modem metaph ysics. It is wh en he wants to understand " th e possibility and necessity of such a th ing as Kant's Critique of Pure Reason"· (FD 50) th at he turns to G al ileo and N ewton. He explores mod em metaph ysics by tryin g to bring to l igh t the essential feature of modem knowledge as it is evident in ph ysics. Indeed, th e cl aims Heidegger makes in Being and Time about th e sh ift from concemful dealings to th e th eoretical attitude of ph ysics can be understood as exactly an anal ysis of th e h istorical devel opment of modem physics. Heidegger describes the transition from concem ful dealin gs to th e th eoretical attitude as a sh ift in wh ich th e understanding of bein g ch anges over at §69(b) . At §16 he discusses how th e • "die Moglichkeit und Notwendigkeit von so etwas wie Kants reinen Vermmft«" (FD 50).

»Kritik

der


61

worldly character of the environment announces itself by way of conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy, the modes of concern in which what is ready-to-hand is brought to the fore as present-at-hand, in which utility becomes thinghood. It seems in both these places that the changeover from concemful deal ings to the theoretical attitude belongs to individual Dasein. Yet at §69(b), this move is not characterized as a transition in the attitude of individual Dasein so much as a moment in the history of science. Heidegger explores the theoretical attitude as "the rise of mathematical physics" (BT 413/52 362). This ambi guity, whether the move to the theoretical attitude is to be un derstood as made by an individual or as a moment in the history of science, can be resolved by simply answering that it is both. The definitive moments of the history of science take place in the thinking of individual scientists. Given Heidegger's treatment of Galileo as definitively characteristic of modem science in the texts from 1916 and 1935, Galileo is for Heidegger, although con spicuously absent from §69(b) of Being and Time, precisely the individual scientist in whose thinking mathematical physics first arose. Accordingly, the historical rise of modem physics is for Heidegger not just a moment in the history of physics, but also a moment in the history of metaphysics. In Die Frage nach dem Ding he develops this insight into the relation between physics and metaphysics by pinpointing the mathematical. Heidegger argues that "modem natural science, modem mathematics, and modem metaphysics sprang from the same root of the mathematical in the broader sense" (MSMM 272-73/ FD 75). Because metaphysics reaches the farthest, to beings as a whole, and the deepest into the being of beings as such, it is metaphysics that must inquire into its mathematical basis. The locus Heidegger chooses for this inquiry is the beginning of modem philosophy in Descartes. Heidegger tells a story about Descartes that he calls "at best . . . only a bad novel" (MSMM 274/FD 77). In this account, Des cartes liberated philosophy from the disgraceful petrification of academic knowledge which failed to concern human being or illuminate reality. Through a process of doubt, Descartes even tually came to the indubitable foundation of the ego cogito, for doubting has the doubter as its condition. This is the insight that


62

a theory of the world must follow upon a theory of knowledge: that philosophy begins with reflection upon knowledge and its possibility. Accordingly, epistemology became through Des cartes the foundation of philosophy. Heidegger has a different story to tell. He argues that Des cartes's central work is

prima philosophia

is the

Meditationes de prima philosophia and that :rtQUrtl] tpLAoootpla of Aristotle. Such first

philosophy says nothing about a theory of knowledge but con cerns rather the being of beings. As he argued that Kant was a metaphysician and not an epistemologist, so Heidegger argues in

1935 that Descartes's inquiry is metaphysical rather than epis

temological. For what Descartes doubts, he suggests, is precisely the being of beings. Descartes's work came about in a time when "mathematics had already been emerging more and more as the foundation of thought and was pressing toward clarity" (MSMM

275/FD 77). Knowledge has in Descartes's day, Heideg

ger holds, a sure foundation in mathematics, and it is rather being that is in doubt. Heidegger therefore reads Descartes's method of doubting as not in the least bit skeptical. Rather, it comes about in a time of passion to clarify and show the fundaments of knowledge. Heidegger interprets this passion as the will of the mathematical "to explicate itself as the standard of all thought and to establish the rules which thereby arise" (MSMM 275/FD 78). Descartes's Meditations are a "reflection upon the fundamental meaning of the mathematical" (MSMM

275/FD 78) that concern the totality

of beings and knowledge thereof. Hence they are necessarily a reflection upon metaphysics in Heidegger's sense of the mathe matical. They are an argument to ground the being of beings in certainty. Heidegger looks for further evidence of his reading of Des cartes in an unfinished, early work published posthumously, Re

gulae ad directionem ingenii. In

this work, mathematics submits

itself to its own essence in order to become "the measure of the enquiring mind" (MSMM 276/FD 78). The essence of the mathe matical is the fundamental presupposition of knowledge, and in this text Descartes enunciates the rules of thinking. This is the sense in which, for Heidegger, Descartes submits the mathemat ical to its own essence. It is here, Heidegger argues, that Des-


63

cartes coins the modem concept of science, for he "grasps the idea of a scientia universalis, to which everything must be di rected and ordered as the one authoritative science" (MSMM 276/FD 78). This is the mathematical in the sense of mathesis

universalis. If the mathematical in this sense is to ground knowledge, it requires the formulation of special axioms that must be abso lutely certain and that must determine in advance the thingness of things. Descartes is thus in search of "the very first and high est basic principle for the Being of beings in general" (MSMM 278/FD 80). As a truly mathematical principle, it must require no further ground, that is, it must be self-grounding. Descartes's cogito ergo sum is precisely this principle. Accordingly, the foundation of modem science is the subjec tivity of the subject. Heidegger makes the connection between modem science and metaphysics on the basis of the mathemati cal. For in his view, the "question about the thing is now an chored in pure reason, i.e., in the mathematical unfolding of its principles" (MSMM 282/FD 83). The mathematical provides a bridge by means of which metaphysical assumptions find their expression in science. Assumptions about the object of science are not separated from the question of the possibility of knowl edge in the modem epoch. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is there fore the necessary formulation of the question of the thing in that epoch.

CONCLUSION In his early writings, prior to "The Age of the World Picture," Heidegger consistently maintains that the essence of science is the mathematical projection of nature. This point is entangled, however, in his further argument that philosophy is itself a sci ence. He first takes metaphysics as science to ground the positive sciences, since it is the task of metaphysics to show how a re gional ontology is possible. By 1929 he holds that the task of metaphysics is not the grounding of science in regional ontology, but rather the establishing of goals for the sciences to give them a meaningful unity. In 1935 the question of regional ontology

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and of meaningfulness come together in Heidegger's insight that the meaningfulness of physics lies precisely in its projection of the being of beings, in its mathematical projection of nature. Rather than suggesting that metaphysics has a critical task to perform in scrutinizing science, he argues that modem science is in its mathematical essence precisely metaphysical. Metaphysics is no longer a science for Heidegger so much as a determining aspect of modem physics. Heidegger disentangles the claim that philosophy is a science from the claim that science is the mathe matical projection of nature such that he rethinks the relations among metaphysics, physics, and mathematics in a way that will prove crucial to his later account of technology. Only under standing his early view of physics so developed makes it possible to understand his later view of both phYSics and technology. Accordingly, Heidegger's early account of physics as science is a view that develops over a twenty-year period. It begins in 1916 when he notes that Galileo projects space and time as uniform and homogeneous and determines the lawfulness of motion on that basis. It develops in Being and Time when he rec ognizes that this projection is a metaphysical determination of beings, a projection of the being of the beings under inquiry. And it culminates in Die Frage nach dem Ding when he argues that modem science is metaphysical insofar as its determination of its object brings with it a mathematical grounding of knowl edge. Heidegger's later account of technology, that it is not just a collection of equipment but rather a truth, a way of revealing, would not be possible without the development of his account of science in these early years, for it is in these years that Heideg ger sees that the mathematical projection of nature at work in physics is not just a methodology but a metaphysics. In Heidegger's later view, philosophy's task is to think being, which it cannot do scientifically; and the essence of science lies in the essence of technology. The mathematical projection of na ture remains in this later account of science, but the question of the essence of science is reformulated. The ground upon which this reformulation becomes necessary is Heidegger's tum from the question of philosophy as science to the sciences themselves. That turning point has been laid out as an inquiry into Galileo and Newton. Heidegger develops it further by looking to the scientific method: experimentation.

2 Experiment and Representation is c onc ern ed in l arge part with the logic and epistemol ogy of sc ientific theory and prac tic e. Heideg ger is c ertainl y a philosopher of sc ienc e in this sense, for his analysis of the experimental method is an ongoi ng c onsideration of the epistemologic al assumptions underl yi ng sc ientific ratio nal ity, as wel l as a historic al acc ount of the prac tic e of sc ienc e by Gal ileo and N ewton in c ontrast to A ristotle. In the 1930s, Heidegger' s anal ysis of the experimental method is the begin ni ng of his c ritique of representational thinkin g, for the c ul mi nating question he poses is that of the role of mathematic al representation in sc ienc e. He unc overs a metaphysic s of subjec tivity in whic h the c ertainty of the experimental method is founded upon the self- assertion of the thinkin g subjec t. Experi mentati on is therefore underwritten in Heidegger's acc ount by an epistemology seeking the c larity a nd disti nc tness of subjec tive representations, a C artesian l ogic that sec ures in suc h repre sentations truths from whic h other truths can foll ow. S ir Karl Popper (1959) argues that the logic of sc ientific devel opment is not one of verific ation, not one of establ ishin g c ert ain ties and sec uring truths, but of the falsific ati on of hypotheses. Kuhn (1970) mai ntains that the history of sc ienc e c onsists in shi fts between inc ommensurabl e paradigms, from, for example, P tolemy'S geoc entric universe to C opernican hel ioc entrism. T he history of sc ienc e ca nnot be c onsidered c umul ative under Kuhn's acc oun t, sinc e there is no l ogic al c onti nuity throughout suc h a shift. L akatos (1970) defends the notion of progress against the K uhnian view by arguing that rational rec onstruc tion of paradigm shifts is possibl e. F eyerabend (1975) c laims that " anythin g goes, " that is, sc ientific progress best takes pl ac e when c onfl ic ting or i nc ommensurabl e paradigms c oexist in theTHE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE


66

oretical anarchism.

In fact, he suggests, the history of science is

filled with idiosyncratic and irrational moments, such that the logic and rationality held essential to science are more myth than truth. Heidegger, unlike these analytics, is not strictly interested in the history of science. Rather, his concern is with the history of being, and with human being as the location of such a history. He

thinks that history as a sequence of three epochs: the ancient,

the medieval, and the modem. The latter is determined by sci ence, as the Greeks were by philosophy and the medievals by religion. Heidegger's work in the 1930s on the experimental method will move him toward this conclusion. Hence his contri bution to the history and philosophy of science is not an analysis of the epochal history of science, but rather of the epochs of being. His analysis of experimentation shows that representa tional thinking, definitive of modernity, is first and foremost found in scientific method. For this reason, Heidegger is inter ested in the differences between ancient and modem science; that is, he treats the history of science in order to think the place of science in modernity and not as a historian of science. Unlike the analytics, whose aim is an analysis of science itself, Heideg ger seeks to understand science toward a further end. He lays bare the role of science in determining modernity in the West. Heidegger's conception of the logic and epistemology of sci entific theory and practice is not easily positioned in relation to the analytic tradition. Whereas the analytics uncover a logic within the history and practice of science, for Heidegger science is part of a larger logic. The logic by which he reads the history of science is ultimately a historical dialectic, despite his explicit repudiation of dialectic in, for example, his

The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics.

1928

lecture course,

There he argues that

"all dialectic in philosophy is only the expression of an embar rassment"

(FCM 187/GM 276),

but in 1940 he will argue that

Aristotle is decisive for what emerges in modem metaphysics as the collapse of science and technology. I will lay out Heidegger's reading of Aristotle in the penultimate chapter of this book, and

I will argue in the final chapter that for Heidegger, the history of the West is the history of the collapse of what were for Aris totle clearly demarcated branches of knowledge. Theoretical and

EXPERIMENT AND REPRESENTATION

67

productive knowledge merge in the common essence of modem science and technology. This is a picture in which the history of the West is reduced to a reconciliation within knowledge, a reconciliation for which negative dialectic is now called, if other possibilities for human knowledge are to be opened. There are also for Heidegger smaller moments of dialectic in the history of the West. I will examine these moments more closely in a chapter on ancient science, for the accounts Heideg ger gives of Plato and Aristotle are the clearest examples of a logic of dialectic at work in the history of human knowledge of nature. Heidegger argues in Introduction

to Metaphysics that Plato

is a pivotal figure, both preserving and irretrievably changing pre-Socratic insight into being. When Plato interprets being as

'L&Ea (IM 180ff./ EM 137f£.), he preserves the pre-Socratic notion of being as presence, but abolishes being as (jllJ OL�, such that the stability of the l:&Ea over and against the transience of (jruau; con tains the origin of the medieval distinction between existentia and essentia (1M 181/EM 138). Plato reconciles being with idea in essence, a synthesis out of which existence emerges as antithesis. Heidegger argues in 1940 that Aristotle's

Physics is a similarly

destructive and preservative moment in the history of the West, preserving an echo of the pre-Socratic experience of being, while planting the seed that will flower as the distinction between na ture and spirit (BCP 224/W 243). Aristotle is the site of the origi nal reconciliation of nature and production that determines a common essence for science and technology in modernity. Hence it is not clear whether Plato or Aristotle is to be read as the crucial figure in the transformation of the ancient into the medieval epoch. For indeed, an account of the relation between Plato's and Aristotle's thinking is sorely lacking in Heidegger's work. In the 1930s Heidegger seems to have been looking for an account of that transformation. He attempted to find it in Plato in "Plato's Doctrine of Truth" and

Introduction to Metaphysics,

but he subsequently located the end of ancient metaphysics in Aristotle. Heidegger reads the history of being as a sequence of epochs-the ancient, the medieval, and the modem-which are radically distinct, yet bound inextricably to prior epochs by a logic of intellectual history. Science, as part of that history, falls into the same tripartite

68


epochal division, yet it also plays a special role only beginning to be visible to Heidegger in the 1930s. In this decade, he ac knowledge the significance of physics in ancient thought. He argues in 1935, in

Introduction to Metaphysics,

that CPU<JL�, nature,

the object of physics, is the original determination of being for the pre-Socratics. Physics is not just a discipline within a taxon omy of knowledge, but informative of the pre-Socratic experi ence of being. Furthermore, it is in 1938, in "The Age of the World Picture," that Heidegger first sees that science is decisive for the modem epoch insofar as representational thinking in forms modernity. The experiment is the 1:6lto� wherein Heideg ger develops the latter thesis.

On the one hand, then, Heidegger can be aligned with Kuhn: there are epochs in the history of science which are radically distinct. On the other hand, Heidegger's continual retrieval of Greek concepts as a strategy for understanding the modem demonstrates his Lakatosian commitment to the intelligibility and rationality of shifts between epochs. Accordingly, Heideg ger could not be aligned with Feyerabend, despite their shared nostalgia for the Greeks. Feyerabend argues that science is not as rational as has been supposed, whereas Heidegger's intent with respect to science is to investigate it as the yardstick of ra tionality in modernity, that is, as the paradigm of representa tional thinking. Unlike the analytics, Heidegger is not concerned with whether or not science is rational, for he holds that science is the determination of rationality for the modems. In analytic terms, then, he is an anti-realist.

In 1938 Heidegger argues that the modem epoch is the age of the world as picture, that is, that representational thinking is the hallmark of modernity. Furthermore, he argues in the

Beitrnge

that representational thinking is a condition for the possibility of the experimental method. I will expose those theses within these and other of his writings, but also support the stronger interpretation of Heidegger's position: modem science is not just symptomatic of, but rather essential to and informative of, the modem epoch. Indeed, Heidegger's account of representation in experimentation points to Descartes as the origin of the meta physics of modem subjectivity, and hence of representation. Descartes's method in philosophy, as he himself points out in


69

the preface to his Meditations on First Philosophy, is borrowed from the sciences, where it has been for him successful (Des cartes 1986:4). The sciences set the standard for truth and knowl edge in modernity. Heidegger is, then, preoccupied with the sciences not in order to understand better their logic and devel opment, but in order better to understand the rationality of the modem epoch. Hence it can be argued, with Father Richardson (1968:511), that Heidegger is not a philosopher of science, since his interest in science is on the way to analysis of the history of being. Yet it can also be argued, with Karlfried Griinder, that issues of sci ence pervade Heidegger's writings (1963:18). Heidegger is in tensely preoccupied with questions of scientific practice and theory, with its logic and epistemological assumptions and con sequences, for he reads science as the determining ground of the metaphysical epoch of nihilism. This argument will come to fruition in the Nietzsche volumes. In the 1930s, on the way to that argument, Heidegger continues to develop his earlier concep tion of modem science by looking to the experimental method. Heidegger's conception of science is traceable back to his earli est work, that is, to his clear if superficial commitment to scien tific realism explicit in 1912 in his discussion of the problem of realism in modem philosophy, and to his interest in 1916 in con trasting Aristotle's scientific methodology with Galileo's. In the earlier text, Heidegger argues that philosophy must be able to answer the question of realism, since the sciences are so success ful. His assumption is that the success of the sciences depends upon the truthfulness of their account of physical reality. In 1916, however, he argues that modem science is projective. This thesis is typical of anti-realism. Is Heidegger, then, a realist or an anti-realist? I argue that he does not reduce to the either/ or of realism and anti-realism, for he holds that the experiment is projective in its understanding, yet that it gets at truths about physical reality. Heidegger's view that the essence of science lies in the mathe matical projection of nature was first evident in 1916 in "Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft." Here he considers the projection of the concept of time in the physics of Aristotle and Galileo in contrast to time in the historical sciences. Using


70

Galileo's law of free-fall acceleration, he characterizes modem science as the a priori formulation of hypotheses which are then tested in experimentation. TIUs account is based on the popular view of the scientific method. It is naively misconceived in that Newton describes himself as working in the reverse order: he experimented in order to uncover phenomena which he general ized by induction into universal law. Yet it is some twenty years

Principia on method (MSMM 259/FD 63). In Being and Time the account is more sophisticated than it was

until Heidegger will cite Newton's

in 1916. Heidegger argues in §69 that more than the time concept is projected onto nature in the theoretical attitude: the projection of the being of beings gives the theoretical attitude its stance. Anticipating the analytic debate about the theory-loadedness of observation, Heidegger suggests in §69(b) of

Being and Time that

only in the light of such a projection of the being of beings can a fact be found and set up for an experiment. There are no bare facts without a prior ontological commitment. Heidegger's ac count has developed since 1916, but he holds fast to the question of the role of the mathematical projection of nature in the sci ences.

In fact, it is in the decade

following

Being and Time that he

first develops this question. Heidegger develops the question by contextualizing it in a dis

Die Frage nach dem Ding, the Beitriige, and "The Age of the World Picture." cussion of the experimental method. The focal texts are

Three particular issues, all of which revolve around the question of the projective nature of the scientific method, can be traced throughout these texts. First, how is nature projected in the sci entific method such that certainty can come from a single experi mental result? That a single result can be decisive is a point made in the

Beitriige.'

Analytic philosophy of science has raised

the same issue as the question of the crucial experiment. I use the Michelson-Morley experiment, which disproves the aether hypothesis, by way of a case study, to see whether Heidegger's claim that a condition for the possibility of the modem experi ment is the decisiveness of a single result is justified. ' All translations from this text are my own, with the generous guidance, assistance, and advice of Will McNeill. The original will be given in footnotes.


71

Second, the Beitriige raises the question of the experiment by drawing a distinction between empirical evidence and ordinary experience. nus is not a new issue to Heidegger. He first sepa rates the empirical evidence of the experiment from experience in Die Frage nach dem Ding, where he suggests that Galileo and Newton argue against the evidence of experience (MSMM 265-66/FD 69) . In the Beitriige he asks whether observation in experiment creates or observes the phenomena at issue. In "The Age of the World Picture" he argues that research in physics stipulates in advance "that which must henceforth . . . be nature" (AWP 1 1 9 /H 78). Is nature thus investigated discovered or cre ated as an object of knowledge? For analytic philosophers of science, this problem takes the form of the worry that the theory-loadedness of observation brings a threat of vicious circularity: the theory may determine what counts as the facts, which in tum support the theory. Hei degger's answer in "The Age of the World Picture" is that sci ence does not necessarily create phantasms in its account of nature. But, Heidegger argues (and still maintains in 1954 in "Science and Reflection"), in establishing its sphere of objects, science determines the real within reductive limitations. Hence Heidegger treads a middle ground within the realist/ anti-realist debate in which theoretical entities are to be taken either literally or as fictional. He holds that science does not make up but rather sets up its object. TIUrd, I address the question of representation in science inso far as that representation is mathematical. In the Beitriige, the question of calculation is brought into Heidegger's account of the mathematical nature of modem science. Whereas pre viously, in Die Frage nach dem Ding, Heidegger redefined the mathematical to mean the a priori (MSMM 251-53/FD 56-58), in the Beitriige he asks about the numerical aspect of science. The calculative representation of nature is also an issue in "The Age of the World Picture," where Heidegger rethinks the mathemati cal projection of nature by arguing that the rigor of mathemati cal, physical science is exactitude. It is on the basis of the conclusions about representation drawn in this text that he will later argue that the essence of science is to be found in the es sence of technology. Accordingly, the work Heidegger does on

72

' HEIDEGGER S PIDLOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

representation and the scientific method in the 1930s is founda tional to his later critique of technology. These issues demonstrate three things. First, that Heidegger's analysis of the experiment is a study of the logic and epistemol ogy of science in the traditional sense of philosophy of science. Second, that his account of science can be put into dialogue with the analytic tradition of the philosophy of science. And third, that the experiment is the bridge by means of which Heidegger moves from his early analysis of the essence of science as the mathematical projection of nature to his later analysis of the es sence of science as the essence of technology. Accordingly, the experiment plays a more significant role in Heidegger's analysis of modem science than may be readily ap parent. He claims, after all, in 1935 that the fact that modem science is experimental is inadequate to distinguish it from an cient and medieval science (MSMM 248/FD 51-52), and that to call modem science experimental is to miss its fundamental fea ture (MSMM 249/FD 52). He goes on to identify the fundamen tal feature of modem science as the mathematical. It is only through Heidegger's analysis of the mathematical, at work in his ongoing conception of science as the mathematical projection of nature, that his account of the role of the experiment in modem science can be grasped. For the experiment, it seems, is an ap peal to the facts. It ensures in experience, as Kant's first Critique demanded, what reason adduces. Heidegger argues, however, that the experimental method is a projection of a priori concep tions onto nature, rather than observation and experience. This is Heidegger's insight into the scientific method in the 1930s: experimentation is a methodological idealism. It begins with an idea to which nature is then confined. Hence the experi ment is mathematical in the strong sense Heidegger develops in Die Frage nach dem Ding. When he says in those lectures that the experiment is not a fundamental feature of modem science, he is denying that experimentation establishes modem science as the science of facts in contrast to medieval superstition. He will go on to argue that the fundamental feature of modem science is the mathematical, which means that it is projective (MSMM 251-53/FD 56-57). When this text is read in conjunction with those written three years later, the Beitriige and "The Age of the


73

World Picture," it is clear that the projective essence of modem science lies in its experimental method. Nature is conceived and represented in the experiment.

CRUCIAL EXPERIMENTS Some twelve years after Galileo's death, and sixty years after the event supposedly took place, Viviani recorded that Galileo climbed the tower of Pisa and let fall two objects. This moment began modem science, it is commonly believed, by establishing the revolutionary experimental method. It is odd that such a groundbreaking event took so long to be mentioned in print; so odd, in fact, that Favaro, chief editor of the National Edition of Galileo's works, suggests that it must be true, despite the lack of remark in the literature of the time, because Viviani must have heard it from Galileo himself. Lane Cooper suggests rather that the story is a myth (1935:13ff.). Ernest Moody argues further that even if the event did take place, "we may be assured on the incontestable authority of Galileo himself that its physical mean ing was totally different from that which is ascribed to it by the tradition of our physics books" (1951:163). Galileo does refer twice in De Motu, written while he was at Pisa between 1589 and 1592 but unpublished until the late eigh teenth century, to experiments involving throwing spheres from towers (1960:31, n. 12; 107). Both references are strange in that Galileo describes how, when two weights are thrown simultane ously from a height, the lighter initially descends ahead of the heavier, which then catches up and passes the lighter. His expla nation is that the heavier must overcome more inertia to begin its descent. That the heavier should initially descend more slowly is so unexpected a claim that presumably its source must be observation. Yet this evidence that Galileo performed the experi ment is not conclusive. At this point in De Motu, Galileo inserts a marginal note: "Borrius, part 3. ch. 12" (1960:106, n. 2). Borri taught at Pisa while Galileo was a student there, and in his De Motu Gravium et Levium he describes throwing weights from his window with the result that the lighter descended more quickly. He explains this observation along the lines of Galileo's later

74


reasoning. It could very well be that rather than performing the experiment himself, Galileo borrowed the account from Borri. Whether or not Galileo actually performed the experiment seems, however, irrelevant. Borri did similar experiments, and Simon Stevin of Bruges claims in 1605 that he and John Grotius had long before performed experiments involving dropping weights thirty feet (Cooper 1935:14). Renieri actually dropped weights from the tower of Pisa in 1641, which he reported to Galileo as part of an exchange of correspondence that makes no mention of Galileo's performing similar experiments (Cooper 1935:30). Such experiments clearly took place in Galileo's day. That Galileo has been recorded as the daring groundbreaker perhaps says more about Galileo's personality and reputation than it does about the history of science. For, if the story is a myth, then it is a founding myth, and Galileo is its hero. He founds modern science by the radical introduction of a novel method. The hallmark of modern science is precisely that method: ex perimentation. Experimentation is a break with the medieval, scholastic tradition. It is a turn toward nature to uncover truths that can be used toward practical ends. In 1620 in the Great In stauration, the introduction to his Novum Organum, Francis Bacon called for science to "conquer [vincitur] nature in action" (1980:21). For him, that conquest was the noblest work of natural philosophy, over and against the merely speculative science of the ancients. He seeks "the true ends of knowledge," which are "the benefit and use of life" (1980:16). In the Novum Organum he classified the many different kinds of experiments that set the active scientist apart from the contemplative spectator. The suc cess Bacon anticipated for the experimental method is evidently reached in technological achievements that have only in recent years succumbed to criticism-environmental, social, and other wise. Later in the seventeenth century, in his Principia, Newton pre sented his theory of gravity as established by the scientific method. He writes to Oldenburg that his theory was evinced to him "not by deducing it only from a confusion of contrary suppositions, but by deriving it from experiments concluding positively and directly" (Thayer 1953:7). He deduces proposi-


75

tions from phenomena uncovered in experimentation, and then makes them general by induction. This method seems sound, for it is arguable that there has never been a more successful theory than Newton's theory of gravity. Indeed, the scientific method, however several its formulations, has again and again proven itself successful in the human understanding and con quest of nature. Accordingly, it is not surprising that when Heidegger turns in the 1930s from the question of philosophy as science to the sci ences themselves, experimentation is the pivotal issue. The Gali lean founding myth of modem science shows not so much that bodies of different weight fall at the same rate as that the experi ment is methodologically decisive for modem science. Not only is experimentation definitively modem, but the story of Galileo and the tower indicates that a single experimental result can be adequate to establish or overturn a hypothesis. In Galileo's case, the toss from the tower overturns a belief apparently held by Aristotle. Scholars of the sixteenth century took Aristotle to hold that rate of free-fall is proportional to weight, and Galileo's he roic audacity is his refusal to accept this traditional view of his superiors in favor of the evidence of his eyes. One only has to see once that a ten-pound weight does not fall the same distance as a one-pound weight falls in one-tenth the time. What is sig nificantly new with Galileo is not so much a belief as it is a method. Although Heidegger was in 1916 ignorant of Newton's account of method, for there is a step of generalization to hy pothesis from several observed instances, his reading of Galileo is filtered by the common conception of that method. In 1935 Heidegger reads Newton on method in Die Frage nach dmz Ding, and his concerns about the experiment lie elsewhere. He is inter ested in the conditions for the possibility of the experiment in modem science. In the Beitriige, Heidegger cites "the conditions for the possi bility of the modem experiment": "1. the mathematical projec tion of nature, objectivity, representedness; 2. the transformation of the essence of reality from essentiality to individuality. Only under this prerequisite can an individual result claim strength of

76


ground and proof of validity.'" The first condition is the claim that experimentation is not possible until nature has already been projected as representable numerically. The second is the claim that whereas ancient methodology involved generalizing about essences on the basis of experience and thus could not proceed with but a single instance, modern science establishes its evidence on the basis of an individual experimental result. I will return to the first condition below. Here I wish to under stand and evaluate the second condition for the possibility of the modern experiment. Is Heidegger's claim that experiments are not repeated? Or that repeatability validates the already successful result? Can a single experimental result carry the weight Hei degger attributes to it? For indeed, repeatability is a criterion of success in experimentation. Heidegger's analysis appears wrongheaded from the start, since repeatability and the validity of a single result are not consistent demands to make upon the experiment. I show that in fact repeatability and decisiveness for a single result are only superficially inconsistent, and really two sides of the same coin: realism. Repeatability as such a criterion has been a focal issue in the analytic tradition of the philosophy of science. Analytic philoso phers of science question repeatability in a different context than that in which Heidegger makes his claim for the decisiveness of a single result. Ian Hacking, for example, is interested in the logic of scientific practice, while Heidegger is thinking through in a much more abstract way the logic of scientific ideology. Now it is certainly the case that the analytic focus on the practice of science has brought more insight into the genesis, develop ment, and logic of the sciences than abstract considerations of ideology. Indeed, Paul Feyerabend has shown that the gap be tween ideology and practice in the sciences is large, and perni cious (1975:295-309). Yet it cannot be denied that the impact of the sciences on their larger social context is as much a result of 2 "Grundbedingungen der Moglichkeit des neuzeitlichen Experimentes: l . der mathematische Entwurf der Natur, Gegenstandlichkeit, Vor-gestelltheit; 2. die Umwancllung des Wesen der Wirklichkeit von der Wesenheit zur Einzeln heit. Nur unter dieser Voraussetzung kann ein Einze/ergebnis Begriindungsk raft und Bewahrung beanspruchen" (Beitrage 164).


77

beliefs about science as of its actual practice. By putting Heideg ger's analysis of the ideology of modem science against Hack ing's practically based account of repeatability, and against Duhem's and Lakatos's denial that there are single decisive ex periments in the history of science, I use Heidegger's account to resolve an apparent discrepancy in the analytic tradition of philosophy of science. That discrepancy lies in the fact that what are called crucial experiments are not necessarily accepted by the scientific community before many repetitions. To begin, then, does the criterion of repeatability for successful experi ments undermine Heidegger's claim that a single experimental result can be decisive? Ian Hacking suggests that talk of repeatability is misleading, since much repetition happens by way of improving experi ments. Relying on the "paradoxical generalization . . . that most experiments don't work most of the time"

(1983:230), he sug

gests that repetition is a way of learning when experiments are working, or, more importantly, an attempt "to produce a more stable, less noisy version of the phenomenon" (1983:231). Exper imental science is difficult, argues Hacking, because the phe nomena are difficult to produce as stable. Repetition can be a case of advancing technically beyond earlier versions of the ex periment, as repetition of the experiment to test the Bell inequal ity in quantum physics has been. This experiment involves separating particles that have interacted, the further apart the better, and then measuring their spin. Repetition has produced technically superior versions of what was originally a thought experiment. One recent version, performed by Dr. Nicolas Gisin at the University of Geneva in July

1997, is noteworthy in that

the photons were measured ten kilometers apart, whereas previ ous versions covered distances of one hundred meters or less. The original reason the Royal Society demanded repeatability was to conduce honesty and discourage the fudging of results. Once this concern is satisfied, however, repeatability does seem a strange criterion of success for an experiment. Is it a more than trivial demand scientifically? Newton made it a rule of reason ing that his experimental results could be generalized univer sally (Thayer 1953:3); having established experimental evidence of his hypotheses, he brought that knowledge a priori to further

78

' HEIDEGGER S PlflLOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

objects without needing experimental evidence to understand them. Indeed, he claims explicitly that he requires "the proof of but one experiment" (Thayer 1953:4) in order to conclude that bodies are infinitely divisible. Given that an experiment estab lishes controlled conditions within which results can be pre dicted, it seems, to borrow a metaphor, that repeatability as a criterion of success is much like buying several copies of a news paper in order to see if the first one is true. Yet the historical fact is that significant experiments regularly get done officially more than once. The experiment described above, for example, which pits quantum physics against local realism by means of the Bell inequality, was performed at least seven times between 1972 and 1976 alone. Not all those repeti tions are cases of different scientists wishing to see for them selves. John Clauser at the University of California at Berkeley did it officially twice (d'Espagnat 1979:166). Against Heidegger's claim that an individual result can claim validity, and Newton's claim that the proof of but one experiment is adequate to sup port a universal hypothesis, the question must be asked: Why have the results of Significant experiments in the history of sci ence failed to get accepted without multiple repetition? This question has been taken up in philosophy of science as the debate concerning "crucial experiments." Such experiments produce the Single experimental result that Heidegger argues has the strength of proof in modem science. The term comes from Francis Bacon, who included in his taxonomy of experi mentation in the Novum Organum what he called Instantiae crucis. This expression means literally "instances of crossroads" and describes experiments that are crucial in the sense that they are decisive in choosing between competing theories. Whether or not there are such experiments is a matter of debate, however. Heidegger argues in the Beitriige not only the weaker claim that such experiments exist, but also the stronger claim that their possibility in principle is a condition for the modem scientific method. Pierre Duhem denies that there are crucial experiments in physics. He argues that the scientist tests not an isolated hypoth esis but groups of hypotheses. In response to a result that was not predicted, the scientist must revise, replace, or abandon at


79

least one of those hypotheses, but "the experiment does not des ignate which one should be changed"

(1954:187). Likewise, Irnre

Lakatos rejects crucial experiments because there is no "instant rationality"

Within a scientific research program, ex

(1970:154).

periments that decide between similar versions of a theory are common. But a research program is defeated only "with long hindsight"

(1970:173). Science advances by means of painstaking

and thorough labor, not sudden, theory-shattering experimental results. Science is simply not that transparent to scientists, ar gues Lakatos. Only long after the fact is it possible to see what was significant, what pedestrian, in the progress of knowledge. Hacking argues against Lakatos's view, suggesting that in a crucial experiment one

can

see at the time that one is at a cross

roads. "Crucial experiment" is perhaps too strong a term, he qualifies, but nonetheless, some kinds of experimental result "serve as benchmarks, permanent facts about phenomena which any future theory must accommodate, and which, in conjunction with compatible theoretical benchmarks, pretty permanently force us in one direction"

(1983:254).

The Michelson-Morley ex

periment produced just such a result, and is in fact the standard case study of a crucial experiment in the debate among analytic philosophers of science. It is an experiment designed to test the hypothesis that a subluminiferous aether permeates all space. The truth of the matter is that the Michelson-Morley experi ment was not a onetime affair. It was first performed in The most famous version was in ment five times, the last in

1925,

1881. 1887. Michelson did the experi and it has been done officially

many times since. Do the many instances of this experiment, decisive for subsequent science, count as evidence against the crucial experiment, and thus also threaten Heidegger's claim that the individual result can "claim strength of ground and proof of validity"? The idea of an all-pervading aether was long-standing and embedded in several other theories. Thomas Young's wave the ory of light and

G. G.

Stokes's account of astronomical aberra

tion, for example, depended upon it. Further corroboration seemed evident in Maxwell's combining of electromagnetism with the theory of light, and in Hertz's work on radio waves. Lakatos describes a logic of discovery in which a scientific re-


80

search program consists of a "hard core" surrounded by a pro tective belt of auxiliary hypotheses

(1970:133). The latter bear

the brunt of adjustment when evidence contrary to the theory becomes apparent. The aether hypothesis was truly hard core.

In the late nineteenth century, Albert Michelson devised

an ex

periment to test it. The experiment can be outlined quite briefly.3 Michelson split a beam of light using a half-silvered mirror such that half the rays were sent in the direction of the earth's motion, half at right angles to it. What he wanted to do was measure the motion of the earth relative to the aether on the basis of the interference effect of the reunited rays. The aether should have a drag effect on one beam of light, and the resulting velocities once recombined would produce a phase change evi dent in an interference effect. The experiment produced a negative result: there was no in terference. Hence, concluded Michelson, there is no stationary subluminiferous aether. He did not think that his experiment failed because it gave a negative result. Rather, in publishing his results, he expressed no doubt that the experiment was entirely successful. He concluded strongly: "The interpretation of these results is that there is no displacement of the interference bands. The result of the hypothesis of a stationary ether is thus shown to be incorrect, and the necessary conclusion follows that the hypothesis is erroneous"

(1881:128). He further takes his results

as contradictory to Stokes's explanation of astronomical aberra tion, and thus allows his experiment to topple two, albeit inter related, theories. Why, then, was the experiment performed repeatedly by Michelson, both with and without Morley, and by others? One reason was suggested by Hacking: to improve the experi ment technically. It was a difficult experiment to perform.

In the

original experiment, Michelson had to leave the city and float his equipment in vats of mercury to escape interfering vibra tions. Horses passing the building were enough to disturb the experiment. Repetition can be, as Hacking points out, a way of 3 Cf. Hacking 1983:254-61; see also Michelson 1881 and Resnik 1968:chapter 1 .5-7 for an account of the experiment and attempts to preserve aether through adding additional hypotheses.

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improving the experiment, yet that is not the case here. Michel son had what he considered an adequate and satisfactory ar rangement of the apparatus before he published his results. And despite the availability of the technology to improve experimen tal conditions beyond any question, the experiment continued to be repeated well into this century. Repeating experiments may be about producing more stable, less noisy phenomena, or it may be an indication that equipment is the first thing at which to point the finger when awkward results are produced. Awkward results like the negative result of Michelson-Morley threaten hypotheses that have a history of success in a research program and that rightly should not be thrown over too quickly. To aban don a core hypothesis is to open a hole at the center of a group of theories that may fall down without its support. Indeed, one reason the experiment was so often repeated was a reluctance on the part of the scientific community to relinquish the aether theory, which had done quite well as a theory for so long and figured prominently in other theories. Scientists resist giving up such hard-core hypotheses because to do so threatens other elements in a coherence of theory. This means, however, that it was not the case that the experiment was repeated be cause it was not yet clear that it was decisive. It did not become decisive through repetition. Rather, the experiment was redone

precisely because its decisive nature was already recognized and

re

sisted.

Kuhn argues likewise that crucial experiments are recognized for their decisiveness, but he suggests that they do not in fact illuminate scientists' decision-making processes, except as a ve hicle for illustrating criteria of choice. "By the time they were performed," he argues, meaning Foucault's pendulum, Caven dish's demonstration of gravitational attraction, and Fizeau's measurement of the relative speed of sound in air and water, "no scientist still needed to be convinced of the validity of the theory their outcome is now used to demonstrate"

(1977:327).

Crucial experiments are, he suggests, pedagogical tools that demonstrate criteria of choice long after the choices have been made. They would only be relevant to theory choice if they pro duced an unexpected result. It is certainly the case, however, that the Michelson-Morley experiment produced such an unex-

82


pected result. As a crucial experiment, it does precisely what Kuhn denies crucial experiments do: it provides a decisive, if unexpected, result. Heidegger's claim that an individual result is decisive is con sistent with the ongoing repetition of the Michelson-Morley ex periment. Its individual result has the strength of proof. That a phase change should be detectable is the principle on which the experiment succeeds, even if that success is a negative result. Michelson-Morley was a starting point for Einstein's special rel ativity long before people stopped repeating the experiment. Michelson's result only became accepted when there were other means available-for example, relativity theory-to explain things for which the aether hypothesis had previously ac counted. Refusal to accept Michelson's results in 1881 without resistance is more a reflection of human nature than it is of ad herence to the criterion of repeatability for experiments. Per fectly good explanations are simply difficult to give up when they lose their perfection, until better explanations come along. Heidegger can accordingly be used to reconcile the fact that experiments are intended to have decisive results with the fact that their decisiveness does not prevent their repetition from being more than triviaL If Michelson-Morley is a crucial experi ment, it is not because it decides between competing theories. One could say that there are two theories: one, that there is a stationary subluminiferous aether permeating all space; the other, that there is not. But this analysis is at best ad hoc and at worst triviaL Rather, there is a single fact at stake at a crossroads where one way holds to that fact and the other way does not. The fact of a luminiferous aether topples in the single experiment of 1881. It simply takes several decades before the scientific com munity will relinquish such a powerful explanatory tooL If cru cial experiments are "instances of crossroads," then Michelson Morley shows that they are decisive in pointing out which ways are blind alleys. Michelson-Morley falsifies the hypothesis of subluminiferous aether decisively; it proves no positive thesis. Is it the case, however, that crucial experiments can have a positive function-that is, are there experiments that do not just topple a theory, but that decisively establish a competing theory? Modem science has as its founding myth Galileo's free-fall ex-


83

periment, which is considered decisive between the Aristotelian and modem worldviews. It would seem that if there ever were a crucial experiment, Galileo's free-fall experiment would be it. Yet it seems unlikely that it was ever performed. As a founding myth, however, it is completely consistent with the scientific strategy of taking truth from a single result rather than from generalization over multiple instances. The myth founds a meth odology in which a single production of an observed result can topple a theory. Heidegger claims in the Beitriige that a condition for the possi bility of the modem experiment is a transition of the essence of reality from essentiality to individuality. In Being and Time he claims that in the theoretical attitude, the "understanding of Being . . . has changed over" (BT 412/52 361). This claim can easily be understood as referring to the gestalt switch on the part of the individual scientist. Or the claim can be read historically by means of the Beitriige, which I have situated in the context of the analytic debate about crucial experiments. To take Heidegger to be saying that modem science is committed ideologically to the crucial experiment (i.e., to the effectiveness in principle of a single result) is to use analytic philosophy of science to read the transition described in §69 of Being and Time as historicaL There Heidegger claims to have left hanging the "question of the gene sis of theoretical behavior" (BT 412/52 360). If this point is taken on the basis of the Beitriige as historical rather than existential (i.e., as concerning the history of science and not the conscious ness of the scientist), then the question of the genesis of theoreti cal behavior can be answered: a condition for the possibility of the experimental method is precisely the transformation of the experience of reality from essentiality to individuality. Reality is no longer experienced as essences, knowledge of which requires several instances; rather, it can be experienced decisively in a single experimental result on the basis of a priori formulation of hypotheses. Michelson-Morley is a crucial experi ment exemplifying precisely the decisiveness of a single result. Indeed, more than a theory is thrown over by the toss from the tower. A cosmology falls. And, more significantly, a new way of doing science supplants previous methodologies. Galileo's free fall experiment is methodologically crucial. It rejects the specula-

84


tive metaphysics of medieval science in favor of the empirical evidence of experience. Or does it? Heidegger argues that the experiment does not in fact rely on the evidence of experience. The contrast between Aristotle's method and the modem experi ment is central to the distinction Heidegger draws between ordi nary experience and the empirical evidence of experimentation. Experience is simply not the same thing for Aristotle and for the experimental physicist.

EXPERIMENT AND EXPERIENCE

Heidegger argues in §78 of the Beitriige that the experiment does not take its validity and force of proof from ordinary, everyday experience. Rather, it constructs empirical findings outside the realm of such experience. Indeed, were the quotidian an ade quate forum for scientific proof, one would not need a laboratory in which to experiment. In Die Frage nach dem Ding, Heidegger argues the stronger thesis that the experiment argues against ex perience (MSMM 265-66/FD 69). He comes to these claims through a long-standing inquiry into the differences between Aristotle's physics and Galleo's. The focal contrast he uncovers is that Aristotle's physics takes its evidence from experience, Galileo's from the empirical. The distinction between experience and the empirical is a Heideggerian innovation that warrants careful attention. It flies in the face of a scientific ideology that collapses the two in the experiment by taking the empirical re sults of experimentation to be precisely proof in experience. Aristotle is renowned as a realist, and Heidegger himself ar gues as early as 1916 that Aristotle's method is to generalize on the basis of experience (ZG 419). Yet Aristotle did not experi ment. Why not? Because he lacked the right technology? He could surely have come up with two weights and a height from which to throw them. The modem experiment is different from any test Aristotle may have performed in that his explanations in terms of essences, generalized over many instances, are re placed by the observation of single instances that can support or undermine a hypothesis which is held by the scientist in ad-


85

vance. Experimentation is not central to Aristotle's method be cause he does not proceed on the basis of such hypotheses. The experimental method is peculiarly modem. As such, it establishes a novel experience of nature for the scientist. Moody speculates that "the most decisive factor in Galileo's achieve ments in physics" (1951:414) may have been the "ideal of axio matic formulation of a physical theory, in which the physical postulates involved in the theory are made fully explicit, and their consequences derived by rigorous mathematical deduc tion" (1951:413). What's new with Galileo's science is the scien tific method, not insofar as it is experimental, but in that it entails the formulation of a priori hypotheses whose conse quences can be mathematically derived. Moody argues that Gal ileo took the ideal of a mathematically demonstrated dynamics from Archimedes (1951:413). His method has its roots not in Ar istotle's realism, but in mathematical idealism. For the modem scientist, reality no longer consists of essences whose nature can be generalized over several experiences, but rather in entities that can be thoroughly described mathematically. Indeed, in modem science the ideal world of mathematics overlays physi cal reality unproblematically, until quantum theorists raise the question of physical interpretation of their mathematical for malism. Heidegger argues in the Beitrage that the experiment is an ar gumentum ex re that develops against the argumentum ex verbo of the Middle Ages. In the same year, in "The Age of the World Picture," he claims that when Bacon demands the experiment, he wants "the argumentum ex re instead of the argumentum ex verbo" (AWP 122/H 82). For the latter the ground of certainty is divine revelation, the question is one of interpretation of author ity, and the cardinal rule is that against contradiction (Beitrage 162-63). The medieval preoccupation with textual interpretation is replaced in modem science by a concern for the phenomena. One can easily construe this shift as a move toward realism, a tum from word to world, as indeed the shift from Aristotle's Ef1:7tELQla to medieval doctrina was the reverse move, from world to word. Indeed, Moody argues that one must "concede a healthy measure of Platonist and Alexandrian character to the western medieval tradition" (1951:389). That is, medieval science


86

is determined by the abstract and generalized terms in which a problem is formulated, rather than by the commonsense empiri cism of Aristotle. But, Heidegger argues, the transition from medieval

doctrina to modem

science, though a move away from

the word, is not a return to the world of experience. The question of the relation and difference between ancient

Beitriige. He 1916 in "Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichts wissenschaft," and returned to it twenty years later in Die Frage nach dem Ding. He observed in 1916 that the modem scientific and modem science is not new to Heidegger in the raised it originally in

method of testing an a priori and universal law stands in opposi tion to Aristotle's method of generalization on the basis of expe rience. But, whereas Heidegger read the difference between Galileo and Aristotle as methodological in

1916,

twenty year

later he does not locate the difference between Newton and Aris totle in methodology.

In 1935 Heidegger argues that for both Newton and Aristotle, the process of knowledge comes to a halt in the phenomenon experienced, in the thing known. He lifts this methodological principle out of Newton's Principia, Book ill, and he cites Regulae

IV: "In experimental philosophy we are to look upon proposi tions inferred by general induction from phenomena as accurate or very nearly true, notwithstanding contrary hypotheses that may be imagined, till such times as other phenomena occur, by which they may either be made more accurate, or liable to excep tions"

(MSMM 259/ FD 63). Newton's method is an appeal to the

phenomenon that holds a proposition to be true until contrary evidence is uncovered. Hence it is compatible with Aristotle's method in that both look to the phenomenon as the final arbiter of scientific knowledge. The difference between Heidegger's views in

1916 and in 1935

does not arise, however, because he views Galileo and Newton as methodologically distinct. Rather, it is his own thinking that

1935 that both Newton and against the evidence of ordinary experience. When

has changed. Heidegger notes in Galileo argue

dropped from the tower of Pisa, a lead weight does in fact fall faster than a feather. Galileo's task is precisely to account for that difference such that his law of uniform acceleration can be held valid. He achieves this end by appealing to something that


87

is not itself visible: the air's resistance (MSMM 266/FD 69). Like wise, Newton's law of inertia applies to something that does not exist: a body not impressed by any external force. There is no such body (MSMM 265/FD 69). Although modem science ap peals to the empirical in the experiment, it does not in fact ap peal to ordinary experience. Rather, it appeals to an isolated, controllable empirical situation. Modem science returns to the empirical only insofar as it separates the empirical from ordi nary experience. Heidegger's claim that the empirical is distinct from ordinary experience is in accord with Bacon's proposal of the experimen tal method. Bacon based his method precisely on this difference, arguing that "sense fails in two ways" (1980:24): by rendering either no information or false information. The purpose of ex periment was precisely to rectify the senses. Rather than use the senses to judge nature, he suggested that "the office of the sense shall be only to judge of the experiment, and that the experiment itself shall judge of the thing" (1980:24). The empirical data pro duced in an experiment are different-better, in fact-than ordi nary experience. The argument that the experiment is a separation of the em pirical from ordinary experience can be found in the analytic tradition of philosophy of science some fifty years after Heideg ger first made it in Die Frage nach dem Ding. Ian Hacking argues that experiments do not observe so much as they "create, pro duce, refine and stabilize phenomena" (1983:230)-phenomena that are not plentifully available in nature. He is not suggesting that experiments create phenomena that exist nowhere else, but rather that they produce phenomena that are easier to work with than their counterparts in nature. At least that seems to be the claim. But his analysis, despite its regular focus on examples from quantum physics, overlooks the fact that many experi ments produce phenomena not found in experience outside the laboratory. In what sense does an experimental scientist produce what she or he examines? Thomas Kuhn argues in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that science works on the basis of paradigms. The latter are much like what Heidegger called ''basic concepts" (BT 29/ SZ 9): the structures that demarcate and fix the area of subject matter

88


of a science. Heidegger claims that the real movement of the sciences takes place when these basic concepts undergo radical revision; Kuhn calls such radical revision "scientific revolution." Kuhn argues that paradigms do not create data so much as they determine what gets picked out as the data and how it is orga nized. We may wish to say that "after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world" (Kuhn 1970:1 1 1). But, using Dalton as an example, Kuhn argues that really a new paradigm is "an index to a quite different aspect of nature's regularity" (Kuhn 1970:130). A revolution in science is a gestalt switch, after which different features of reality appear for the scientist as the observable data. Hence different paradigms are incommensura ble. They have different data, rather than common data upon which they disagree. Accordingly, whereas Hacking holds that experiments repro duce phenomena, Kuhn argues that paradigms determine selec tion of what count as phenomena. Hacking is a realist in Representing and Intervening: he holds that experiments produce as more stable phenomena what could otherwise be found in nature. Experiments in particle physics do not fit this account quite so neatly. Not only has realism been further undermined in quantum theory by the Bell inequality, but even the most committed quantum realist surely would not suggest that one could meet quantum particles in ordinary experience. Kuhn's position is more subtle: scientists looking at the same world through different paradigms simply don't see the same data. What about Heidegger? Does his claim in Die Frage nach dern Ding that experimentation is a separation of the empirical from ordinary experience commit him to holding that the experiment creates reality? The earliest piece in Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe is called "Das Realitatsproblem in der modemen Philosophie." In this 1912 text, Heidegger's inclination is readily toward realism. He rejects a Husserlian philosophy of immanent consciousness and phe nomenalism on the grounds that a rejection of both these posi tions makes the establishing and determination of realism possible.' Heidegger is committed to realism at this early point • "Mit der Zuriickweisung des Konscientialismus und Phiinomenalismus sind Setzung und Bestimmung von Realitaten als moglich dargetan" ("Realitat sproblem" 11).


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in his life for two reasons. First, because the "healthy realism" of empirical, natural science has produced such "dazzling re sults" that science stands as an "irrefutable, epoch-making fact."s Second, he believes that the "establishing of a conscious ness-transcendent reality is above all demanded through the fact that one and the same object is directly communicable to differ ent individuals."· The success of the sciences and the intersub jective availability of objects lead Heidegger to want to ground the validity of scientific realism philosophically. Accordingly, he asks whether first an establishing (Setzung), and second a determination (Bestimmung), of the real are possi ble. He answers that an establishing of the real is possible only on the basis of both thinking and sensation. Neither alone can suffice to establish the existence of an outer world (der Auflen welt) ("Realitatsproblem" 13). And he further suggests that the determination of the real-that is, the determination of the na ture of the outer world above and beyond the establishing of its' existence-is in fact the goal of the sciences themselves.' He suggests that the history of science shows movement toward this goal unambiguously.s Hence Heidegger holds as early as 1912 that the relation between philosophy and the sciences is such that the assumption of realism by the latter can be validated by the former. But Heidegger's early realism is a naive realism. His interest in and concern with the sciences is an unreflective commitment to their success, of which he will only later begin to be critical. Finding evidence of consciousness-transcendent objects on the basis of their intersubjective availability, and in large part through an account of nerves and physiology, is a position only possible on the basis of realist assumptions. It is Heidegger's 5 "gesunden Realismus . . . glanzenden Erfolge . . . unabweisbare, epochema chende Tatbestand" ("Realitatsproblem" 3-4). ' ''Die Setzung von bewuiltseinstranszendenten Realitaten wird vor allem durch die Tatsache gefordert, daB ein und dasselbe Objekt verschiedenen In dividuen urunittelbar kommuikabel ist" ("Realitatsproblem" 12). 7 "Eine vollgiiltige, adequate Bestimmung der gesetzten Realitaten wird fur die Realwissenschaften ein ideales Ziel bleiben" (Realitatsproblem" 14). 8 "Neben dem materialen Fortschritt weist die Geschichte der Wissenschaf ten unzweideutig ein Vorwartsdrangen in der normalen Bestimmung der Ob jekte auf" ("Realitatsproblem" 14).

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faith in science that leads him to reject Kant's attempt to ground physics in phenomenalism as inadequate. The struggle to secure the sciences on the foundation of meta physics remains the cornerstone of Heidegger's philosophical inquiry until Being and Time. Heidegger begins with a commit ment to realism because of the success of the sciences, and hence he can give realism immanent critique. Yet he also begins very much under the influence of transcendental idealism, which he also thinks critically from within. This is the background out of which his analysis of experimentation emerges. His critique of the experiment is not that it creates its objects ex nihilo. Nor is he any longer a naive realist, however. He has come to a position that can no longer be characterized in term of realism and ideal ism. The complexity and subtlety of his position consists in his insight that the experiment is a separation of the empirical from experience. In the Beitriige, Heidegger comes back to the question of the separation of experience and the empirical in the experiment. He notes that experimentation is a return in some sense to Aris totle's Ef.ll'tELQla. If the origin of modernity is to be traced back to the Middle Ages, it must be further traced back to Aristotle's interest in the empiricaL On this basis he criticizes Walther Ger lach's argument-albeit cryptically, in "Theorie und Experiment in der exacten W issenschaft"-that modem science had already begun already in the Middle Ages: "If already [begun], then back to the origin of this medieval 'modernity': Aristotle's Ef.ll'tELQla."9 I interpret him to mean that modem science has more in common with Aristotle than with medieval doctrina. Heidegger's view, like that of Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is that the history of science moves forward with radical breaks. Yet, like Lakatos, Heidegger believes that a thoughtful analysis can make rational sense of such radical breaks. Indeed, for Heidegger the logic at work in the progress of science is dialectical more than anything else. Epochal trans formations are Aujhebungen, in which something is cast off and something maintained, something abolished and something 9 "Wenn schon, dann zurtick auf die QueUe dieser mitteialterlichen »Mod emitiit«: Aristoteies, EJmEt.Qla" (Beitritge 164).


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raised up. Therefore no epoch is for Heidegger free of its history. Something of Aristotle's E!lJtELQla remains in modernity in the experiment. Medieval doctrina is radically different from both ancient science and modem science. A trace of Aristotle's EI!1tELQla remains in what distinguishes modem science radi cally from medieval doctrina: the experimental method. In Heidegger's view, the experiment belongs in modem sci ence because the latter can only establish its certainty through experience. He argues that "in order that the concept of scientific experiment in the sense of the modem science of today can be provided with adequate certainty, it needs a view through the steps and ways of experience, in which context belongs the ex periment."l0 The experiment brings the assurance of experience to results. Yet one should be wary of finding experience in the experiment, even etymologically. The etymological connection does not guarantee that the earlier words contain anything like the modem experiment: "The long history of the word (and that is at the same time of the thing), that sounds with the name 'experiment: should not encourage that in addition there, where experimentum and experiri and experientia are found, now also already knowledge of the 'experiment' of today [is found), or even just the immediately prior preliminary stages."" There is something essentially different to be found in the modem exper iment: the intent to order by means of a lawlike hypothesis. In §77 of the Beitriige, Heidegger raises the question of the ex periment as a method of gathering knowledge. He argues that there are two possibilities for the collection of information on the basis of the preconception at work in experimentation. One is "an indiscriminate collection of observations merely on the basis of their interminable diversity and conspicuousness."12 \0 "Urn dem Begriff des wissenschaftlichen Experimentes im 5inne der heuti gen, neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft die hinreichende Bestimmtheit verschaffen zu konnen, bedarf es eines Durchblicks durch die 5tufen und Weisen des »Erfah rens«, in deren Zusammenhang das » Experiment« gehort" (Beitriige 159). 11 "Die lange Geschichte des Wortes (und d. h. zugleich der Sache) das mit dem Namen »experiment« anklingt, dad nicht dazu verleiten, dort, wo experi mentum und experiri und experientia vorkommen, nun auch schon die Kennt nis des heutigen » Experimentes« oder auch nur die unmittelbaren Vorstufen dazu finden zu wollen" (Beitriige 159). " "eine wahllose Ansammlung von Beobachtungen lediglich auf Grund ihrer unabsehbaren Mannigfaltigkeit und Auffalligkeit" (Beitriige 161).

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The second is "a collection with the intention of an order in which [the) principle is still not at all taken from the observed objects."'3 The latter emphasizes regularity and is an anticipa tion of the imposition of a rule, that is, of a constant recurrence in the same conditions. What the understanding brings to things and therefore finds there, Heidegger called in 1935 "the mathematical." The mathe matical is for him not simply the numerical. Rather, it is under stood in contrast to the empirical insofar as the mathematical has its source in the thinker rather than experience. The number 3, for example, is found in things only because it is first brought to things by the understanding (MSMM 252-63/FD 57-58). Ac cordingly, the claim that the ordering principle is "not at all taken from the observed objects" is the claim that the ordering principle is placed there by the scientist. The intent upon a rule is what, according to Heidegger, deter mines objectivity beforehand in a given area of science." The experiment is in fact only possible where an area of objectivity is determined that sticks to rules, that is, which exhibits measur able regularities. This is the sense in which the experiment is mathematical for Heidegger: a hypothesis is formulated before hand of the regularities nature will exhibit under experimenta tion. Only because it is mathematical in this broader sense does modem science have what Heidegger calls, in "The Age of the World Picture," the rigor of exactitude. He suggests there that mathematical research into nature is not exact because it calcu lates with precision; rather, "it must calculate in this way be cause its adherence to its object-sphere has the character of exactitude" (AWP 120/H 79). Its prior projection of its object as reckonable gives sense to the rigor of precision. In the Beitriige, Heidegger argues that the experiment is neces sary to modem science precisely because physics "is mathemati cal (not empirical), therefore is it necessarily experimental in the sense of the measuring experiment."1S The mathematical projec13 "eine Sammlung in der Absicht auf eine Ordnung, deren »Prinzip« noch gar rticht aus den beobachteten Gegenstanden entnommen ist" (Beitrage 161) . .. "dall iiberhaupt das Regelhafte und nur dieses das Gegenstandliche in seinem Bereich im voraus bestimmt" (Beitrage 162). 15 "Wei! die neuzeitliche »Wissenschaft« (Physik) mathematisch (rticht em-


93

tion of nature is, he claims, "precisely the prerequisite for the necessity and possibility of the 'experiment' as measuring."!6 Later he argues that because modem science is exact, therefore the experiment (Beitriige 166). The experimental method is cru cial to modem science, Heidegger is arguing, because modem science demands precision. It is mathematical in the narrow sense of using measurement and calculation because it projects nature as reckonable. Nature is projected as something that will demonstrate regularities, regularities that can be predicted pre cisely and measured. Across several texts from the second half of the decade follow ing Being and Time, then, Heidegger holds that measurement in experimental methodology is definitive of modem science. Yet he acknowledges as early as 1916, in "Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft" (418, n. 1), that experimentation as a methodology was known before the modem epoch. In 1935, in Die Frage nach dem Ding, he is prepared to distinguish the mod em experiment from older versions. In making the distinction, "what matters is not the experiment as such in the wide sense of testing through observation but the manner of setting up the test and the intent with which it is undertaken and in which it is grounded" (MSMM 248/FD 52). What is this difference in the manner of setting up the test and its intent? Heidegger noted in 1916 that a difference between ancient nat ural philosophy and modem natural science is that the former "searched for the metaphysical essence and hidden causes aris ing in immediate actuality."17 This is the sense in which Aristotle is an empiricist. He generalizes on the basis of observations, and therefore his account of natural phenomena begins with experi ence. But he does not begin with the experiment, which sets up the test in a different way and with a different intent than the pirisch) ist, deshalb ist sie notwendig experimentell im Sinne des

perimentes" (Beitrage 163). 16

messenden Ex

"Gerade der Entwurf der Natur im mathematischen Sinne ist die Vorausset zung fur die Notwendigkeit und Moglichkeit des »Experimentes« als des mes senden" (Beitrage 163). 11 " suchte das metaphysische Wesen der in der unmittelbaren Wirklichkeit sich aufdrangenden Erscheinungen und deren verborgene Ursache zu erfor schen" (ZG 418-19).

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ancient reliance on experience: the modem intent is to appeal to the empirical under controlled conditions. By the 1930s Heidegger has thought explicitly the difference between experience and experiment. In Die Frage nach dem Ding he laid the difference out as a contrast between Aristotle on the one hand and Galileo and Newton on the other. In the Beitriige he argues that it is "without the pursuit of the history of the word, that the issue concerning a development of experience and of the empirical is sketched toward a preparation of a de limiting of the essence of the experiment."'· The essence of the experiment is to be found in the relation between experience and the empirical, not in etymology. Etymology points to continuit ies, and Heidegger wants to point to discontinuities. What, then, are those discontinuities? In "The Age of the World Picture," originally read as a lecture in 1938, Heidegger describes Aristotle as the first empirical sci entist: "To be sure, it was Aristotle who first understood what Ef.LltELQla (experientia) means: the observation of things them selves, their qualities and modifications under changing condi tions, and consequently the knowledge of the way in which things as a rule behave" (AWP 121/H 80-81). Experience is that which happens to one without one's doing, argues Heidegger. Aristotle understood this. Observation in his sense is different from what it is in the research experiment, and would be even if Aristotle's observations had worked with numbers, measure ments, apparatus, and equipment. For what is essential to the research experiment is missing in Aristotle's method: "Experiment begins with the laying down of a law as a basis" (AWP 121/H 81). As Heidegger already knew in 1916, Aristotle generalizes the fact from observation. But mod em science comes to experience after the fact, as it were, since its fore-structure entails a universal law which the scientist then investigates in the ongoing activity of research. This ongoing research is what Kuhn called "normal science," in opposition to revolutionary science, in which a paradigm is overthrown in 18 "Es sei hier, ohne historischen Verfolg der Wortgeschichte, der Sache nach eine Stufenfolge des » Erfahrens« und des »Empirischen« aufgezeichnet zur Vorbereitung einer Wesensumgrenzung des »Experimentes«" (Beitriige 159-

60).


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favor of a new one. The modem experimental method entails observation, but observation follows behind and is determined by theory. This arrangement precludes the possibility of inter pretation according to the Aristotelian model Heidegger charac terizes, in which the phenomena themselves are the basis for generalization. Likewise in the Beitriige, Heidegger argues that the modem scientific experiment is more than the "looking around" of Aris totle's style of observation. As a going toward something (Zu gehen auf etwas) and a testing (Erprabung), the experience gained through experiment is already what he calls a seeking (Ges uchtes). Experience has in this account a kind of "letting be" reminiscent of the maxim of phenomenology Heidegger proclaimed in §7 of Being and Time that an active seeking does not, since it risks overdetermination. The modem scientist pur sues (verfalgt) the encounter with the thing. Scientific observa tion is not simply an inspection but a determination of the conditions under which a thing is encountered precisely through interventions (Eingriffe). In the experiment, "we provide ourselves with definite experiences through definite interven tions and under application of definite conditions of a more pre cise seeing and determination."'· The word used here, Eingriff shares its root with the German Begriff meaning "concept." Both German words are derived from greifen, which means to grasp or lay hold of. The experiment is an active laying hold of its object through intervention rather than a passive, in the sense of non-interventionist, observing of how things behave when left to themselves. The magnifying glass and the microscope are exam ples Heidegger gives of such adaptation of the conditions of ob servation. But the decisive factor in the modem experiment is not the apparatus as such. It is the placing of the question, that is, the concept of nature (Beitriige 166). It is the way nature is projected such that it makes sense to adapt the conditions of observation through intervention. Indeed, that experiments in tervene is a central thesis in Hacking's book, Representing and -

Intervening. 19 "verschaffen wir uns bestinunte Erfahrungen durch bestinunte Eingriffe und unter Anwendung bestinunter Bedingungen des genaueren Sehens und Bestinunens" (Beitrage 160).


96

Accordingly, the modem experiment stands not only in oppo sition to the (medieval) argumentum

ex verbo and (ancient) specu

lative thinking, but in opposition to simple experience itself.20 The distinction between modem science and medieval

doctrina

is not therefore a contrast of observation and experiment against words, opinions, and authorities, but rather of projection and intervention against description, grasping, and discovery with out a predetermining concept.21 Likewise, the contrast between ancient and modem science is between experience as observa tion and the empirical as determined by the intervening of experimentation.

In

both cases, the contrast is between herme

neutic openness and a determining preconception.

VIOLENCE This distinction is not as simple as it sounds, however. It has never been made clear in Heidegger's work what it would mean for an act of interpretation to be "open." The argument of "On the Essence of Truth" hinges on a discussion of freedom in which the latter is "letting beings be," "das Seinlassen von Seiendem"

(BW 127/W 188).

The account is of truth as uncon

cealment, for which Heidegger uses the Greek term

a"T)eELU,

such that the interpretation of beings that is ontic truth is deriva tive from their originary unconcealment. The point is to ac knowledge beings in that unconcealment as what makes the truth of correspondence possible. Likewise, in §7(c) of

Being and Time

the reader is presented

with the slogan "To the things themselves!" as the maxim of phenomenology which is explained as the call "to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself "

(BT 58/5Z 34).

It is not entirely clear what

20 "Jetzt das Experiment nicht mehr nur gegen bioSes argumentum ex verba und gegen »5pekulation«, sondem gegen alles bloSe experiri" (Beitrage 163). Cf. "Jetzt das Experiment gegen das experiri" (Beitrage 164). 21 "Jetzt der Unterschied nicht mehr gegen blojJes Reden und Zusammensetzen von Meinungen, »Autoritaten« tiber einen 5achverhalt, sondeTn gegen nur Besch reiben und Aufnehmen und Feststellen, was sich bietet, ohne den bestimmten, das Vorgehen vorzeichnenden Vorgriff" (Beitrage 166).


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this means, but evidently natural science is the home of such a phenomenology. For it is when Heidegger comes to his discus sion of natural science in §69(b) of Being and Time that he says his preliminary conception of phenomenology "will be devel oped for the first time" (BT 408/52 357). Despite the fact that phenomenology is for Heidegger explicitly a method for philos ophy, for an existential analytic of Dasein, nonetheless it is in his discussion of the theoretical attitude that he himself sees his conception of phenomenology being developed. This indicates a naivete about science in Being and Time. Heidegger holds in 1927 that the sciences treat their object, beings, while letting those beings be. I have shown that by 1938 he holds no such view: experimentation does not let beings be at all. Yet that Heidegger in 1927 understands his account of science to be the place where his conception of phenomenology will be developed for the first time is a clear indication that the question of science is central rather than peripheral to his thinking. Of course he takes phenomenology to be scientific philosophy dur ing these early years, so it could be the case that he here connects phenomenology to science on that basis rather than taking "sci ence" to mean natural science. Yet his subsequent discussion at §69(b) is explicitly of the mathematical projection of nature in natural science. Phenomenology is to be developed in the con text of natural science, not in the context of philosophy as a sci ence. Heidegger is doing ontology in Being and Time according to his conception of the phenomenological method. But his dis cussion turns to natural science in §69 because he holds that the sciences are phenomenological: he sees the theoretical attitude as a disinterested interruption of concemful dealings. He will later find himself wrong on this point, both through the Nazi appropriation of scientific knowledge and through its appropri ation toward human ends in technology. Indeed, Heidegger chooses natural science as the place to de velop a phenomenology of "letting beings be" because he con strues scientific research as a modification of everyday circumspective concern. In everyday circumspective concern, things appear in the context of equipmentality as ready-to-hand. In the theoretical attitude, however, entities are stripped of that readiness-to-hand and appear instead as present-at-hand: they


98

are discovered " 'merely' by looking at them"

(BT 402/52 351).

The theoretical attitude is free of the interpretive fore-structure essential to everyday understanding, which is characterized by

(BT 191/52 150). Being and Time seems to hold that natural science

fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception Heidegger in

is phenomenological in the sense that it can be hermeneutically open: it engages in non-interventionist observation, rather than setting up its object on the basis of a prior determination. The description in the

Beitriige of Aristotle's method of pursuing sci

ence is of just such a "looking around." Yet in

Being and Time,

Heidegger was already aware of the

hermeneutic nature of experimentation. The evidence appealed to in support of a theory through experimentation ("the facts") is hermeneutically determined: "Only 'in the light' of a Nature which has been projected in this fashion can anything like a 'fact' be found and set up for an experiment regulated and de limited in terms of this projection. The 'grounding' of 'factual science' was possible only because the researchers understood that in principle there are no 'bare facts' "

(BT 414/52 362). John

Caputo argues that this insight "is one of the most significant points of contact between Heidegger and the recent rereading of the history and philosophy of science. There are no facts except within the pre-given horizon which enables them to appear in the first place"

(1986:52).

Indeed, both Heidegger and more re

cent philosophers of science have had to come to terms with the fact that the price paid for the self-grounding of the sciences is a hermeneutic circularity. Yet this circularity is not necessarily vicious in the sense that the things uncovered in experimentation need be phantasms, al though fictitious entities can readily be found in the history of science. Caloric and phlogiston are the most popularly cited ex amples. Nor does this circularity entail necessarily that false hypotheses can be contrived to be true, although the first place the scientist looks to place the blame in a failed experiment is often the laboratory equipment rather than the inadequacy or falsity of the theory. Rather, hermeneutic circularity is a limita tion on understanding, for in the closure of the hermeneutic cir cle of objectivity it may well seem that beings are in fact nothing more than objects, that nature is nothing more than a coherence


99

of forces that can be reckoned, calculated, and arranged to be have in a predictable manner. Accordingly, while it may be the case for Heidegger that Aris totle's inquiry into nature was phenomenological in the sense that it did not impose a fore-conception onto the things it inves tigated, but drew rather its conception from them, Heidegger cannot continue to maintain the thesis that modem science is phenomenological, that it lets beings be rather than determining them by prior conception. His subsequent work on the experi mental method develops what appears as a tension in Being and Time: on the one hand, Heidegger claims that the theoretical atti tude is the place to develop phenomenology; on the other hand, the theoretical attitude simply shifts circumspective concern to the mathematical projection of nature. Heidegger fails to see in Being and Time that the shift to the theoretical attitude is not itself interest-free, that theory is not value-neutral. It is, however, in Being and Time that Heidegger argues that no understanding is possible without some kind of fore-structure. Nature is accessible to the modem scientist only as mathemati cally projected in objectivity. In §80 of the Beitrage, Heidegger develops that thesis to argue further that there is not even de scription without interpretation, since something is interpreted as color, or as sound, or as large, for example, in description. Yet this circularity is the hermeneutic nature of any understanding. It is not necessarily hermeneutic violence which would preclude that the thing known play a role in that knowledge by overdeter mining the thing in an a priori conception. The necessary fore structure of any understanding is not the hermeneutic violence at work in experimentation in Heidegger's account. Another sense of violence is to be found in What Is Metaphys ics? and Introduction to Metaphysics, both texts that are subse quent to Being and Time. In the former, Heidegger considers human being's pursuit of science: "In this 'pursuit' nothing less transpires than the irruption by one being called 'man' into the whole of beings, indeed in such a way that in and through this irruption beings break open and show what they are and how they are" (WM 97/ W 105). Here interpretive violence is the vio lent bursting of human being into the whole of beings, the very condition for understanding beings. Science is a rupture for Hei-


100

degger in which beings are exposed as what and how they are. Hermeneutic violence and phenomenology are reconciled in that Heidegger holds that an act of conceptual rupture is needed to make scientific investigation possible. Likewise, Heidegger's account of 1tOAElwc:; in Introduction to Metaphysics is of such a rupture that opens up a world. He con siders Heraclitus's Fragment 53, in which Heraclitus says that 1tOAEf-WC:; is the father and king of all. Heidegger translates the fragment from Greek as "Auseinandersetzung ist allem (Anwes enden) zwar Erzeuger (der aufgehen laBt), allem aber (auch) waltender Bewahrer. Sie laBt namlich die einen als Gotter er scheinen, die anderen als Menschen, die einen stellt sich her (aus) als Knechte, die anderen aber als Freie"

(EM 47).

Manheim

translates Heidegger's translation into English as "Conflict is for all (that is present) the creator that causes to emerge, but (also) for all the dominant preseIVer. For it makes some to appear as gods, others as men; it creates (shows) some as slaves, others as freemen"

(1M 61-62). Robinson renders the fragment in a more

standard translation as "War is father of all, and king of all. He renders some gods, others men; he makes some slaves, others free"

(1987:37).

Heidegger has in his translation a very specific

purpose. He reads Heraclitus not as commenting on war in the ordinary sense, but as suggesting that the struggle that opens a world for human understanding determines both human being and the beings that appear in that world. Heidegger argues that in this fragment 1tOAEIWC:; "is not a mere assault on something already there"; rather, it "constitutes unity, it is a binding-together"

(1M 62/EM 47). IIoAEfwc:;

is not a

forcing apart so much as it is a collecting together of the being into its unity in being. The struggle that opens a world makes visible beings in their being, for beings are only encountered in Heidegger's account within a world. Here too a kind of violence is the condition for understanding, but it is not a violent assault on beings so much as it is the ground of their possibility for that understanding. The struggle to open a world is not an assault, but in the case of scientific understanding it is preparatory to an assault. For the question of the violence of scientific understand ing is not exhausted by this account of 1tOAEfWC:;. A third sense of violence can be found in

Die Frage nach dem


101

Ding. Here Heidegger argues that there was for Aristotle a dis tinction between what is "natural and [what is] against nature, i.e. violent" (MSMM 264/FD 68). This difference has disap peared in Newton's doctrine of motion. Heidegger argues that for Aristotle, violence (�la) consists in making something do what goes against its nature, that is, what it would not do ac cording to its own nature. It is, for example, in the nature of rocks to move toward the center of the earth. To throw a rock upward is violent in this sense. Indeed, Aristotle distinguishes at Physics 5.6.230a32 what happens as a result of natural neces sity from what happens violently. Heidegger's claim is that since for Newton "force [is] only a measure of the change of motion and is no longer special in kind" (MSMM 264/FD 68), the Greek distinction between natu ral and violent motion can no longer be drawn in Newton's physics. The implication of this argument is that there is an in herent tendency to violence in modern science which itself re mains concealed. The separation Heidegger draws in the Beitriige between ordinary experience and the empirical nature of the modern experiment also implies that the experiment is violent in the sense of �la. The experiment seeks its object by constrain ing it to behave in ways it in fact would not when left to itself. Indeed, an experiment is performed in a laboratory precisely because one attempts to establish the conditions under which a thing will behave in a certain way, a way in which it would not behave outside those determined conditions. The problem of falling bodies, for example, is central to mod ern physics. But, as Lane Cooper points out, "Aristotle in his writings on physics never once used the word 'fall' in relation to speed" (1935:14). It does not occur at all in De Cae/a, and appears in the Physics as an example of the term "automatic" (197b3032). IIi.:rtTELv, to fall, and its nominal form, JtT&OL�, are terms Ar istotle uses in grammar, logic, and mathematics. Applying Heidegger's insights to the question of why this is the case, Aris totle's lack of interest in the physics of falling bodies is due to the fact that bodies simply do not fall regularly enough to make free-fall an issue. Aristotle is more interested in how they do regularly behave-for example, growth. Experience does not present him with the problem of free-fall. That free-fall is a cen-

102

' HEIDEGGER S PillLOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

tral issue in modem physics is evidence for Heidegger's claim that its concepts are formulated a priori rather than generalized from experience. The scientific method, based on the principles and qualities of bodies formulated a priori-that is, prior to the empirical evidence of experiment-is an establishing a priori of what questions it makes sense to ask. Aristotle's questions re spond to experience. Galileo's are formulated prior to experi ence and then established by demonstration. Galileo's science is accordingly not phenomenologicaL It does not let beings be, but manipulates them, not just in answering its questions, but in asking them. There are, then, three senses of violence to be found in Hei degger's account of science. The first is hermeneutic violence, in which any understanding must impose structures upon the ob ject it seeks to understand. Modem science is violent in this sense, not just because it imposes an interpretive structure nec essary even for description, but because it imposes on nature an objectivity that determines it as obeying laws formulated a pri ori. Second, science is a violent rupture into the whole of beings that makes beings available for human inquiry. In this sense sci ence is definitive for modernity as the way the modem world is first and foremost opened up. Third, modem science is violent in the sense of �la. It forces nature to behave in ways it would not when left to itself. Indeed, Bacon himself tells us in his Great Instauration, in which he propounds his experimental method, that he intends that method as "a history not only of nature free and at large . . . but much more of nature under constraint and vexed; that is to say, when by art and the hand of man she is forced out of her natural state, and squeezed and moulded" (1980:27). Modem science is violent in all three senses in Heideg ger's account. In a lecture read to a small group in 1954, "Science and Re flection," Heidegger argues that there is a possibility for science other than violence. He traces the word "theory" to the Greek eEWQELV. 0EWQELV can thus be understood as "to look attentively on the outward appearance wherein what presences becomes visible and, through such sight-seeing-to linger with it" (SR 163/VA 48), or, alternately, as "the beholding that watches over truth" (SR 165/VA 49). Modem truth has its roots in a respectful

103


viewing, Heidegger argues, and there is a shadow of the earlier meaning of

8EWgELV in the modem "theory." What this alterna In the

tive means for modem science is less than clear, however.

Rektoratsrede, and again in 1937 in "Die Bedrohung der Wissen schaft," Heidegger spoke of breaking down departmental barri ers and bringing to the sciences a meaningful unity.

In 1955,

in

"Science and Reflection," he does not make this idea more con crete. Yet it seems that the alternative to modem scientific the ory-that is, reflection-must entail the unity of knowledge over and against its fragmentation, since his tracing of the history of "theory" points explicitly to the dividing of knowledge into specialized disciplines. Heidegger argues that the modem term has been handed

conternplari. The core of this word, templurn, comes from the Greek "tEf.tVELV, which means to cut or divide: "In 8Ewg[a transformed into conternplatio there comes to down through the Roman

the fore the impulse, already prepared in Greek thinking, of a

1661VA 50-51). Theory entails an aggressive division of beings into spe looking-at that sunders and compartmentalizes" (SR

cialized objects. Specialization brings together the various senses of violence at work in Heidegger's account of science. The prior determination of its object, which sets apart a specialized sci ence, establishes the hermeneutic circle within which that sci ence proceeds. Specialization is a rupture that opens a world in which beings are visible in their being. And, furthermore, spe cialization determines the object of a science that can then be interrogated under controlled conditions. Heidegger uses

Betrachtung to translate the Latin conternplatio,

and Lovitt uses "observation" to translate Betrachtung. Heideg ger asks what this observation is. Trachten is from the Latin tract

are,

which can be translated into English as "to deal with, to

treat," or "to consider, discuss," but can also mean "to maul." Heidegger translates tractare with bearbeiten: "to manipulate, to work over or refine" (SR

167 I VA 51).

Thus Heidegger under

stands observation as "an entrapping and securing refining of the real" (SR

167 IVA 51-52). As Edward Ballard puts it, Heideg

ger "interprets his definition [of science] to mean that a science of facts acquires its object by 'working it over' until it can be viewed as present and 'real' ''

(1971:42).

Heidegger holds that

104


scientific observation sets upon its object when it sets it apart in specialized, experimental science. Samuel Weber rightly points to the discussion of technology in "The Question Concerning Technology" to show, on the basis of Heidegger's use of "nachstellen," that Heidegger character izes the human relation to nature as one of pursuit and hunting down (1989:981). The technology essay was published in the same year the lecture "Science and Reflection" was given, and it is my contention that Heidegger's account of technology arises from his thinking about science. For

I have shown that his ac

count of science as a setting up and entrapment of nature is evi dent in his thinking in the 1930s, some twenty years prior to the critique of technology, in the discussion of �la in Die Frage nach

dem Ding and in his critique of the

experiment in the

Beitriige. In

Heidegger's view, the experiment is a setup. It is violent in that it sets beings up to behave in ways they would not when left to themselves.

SETIING Up THE REAL: EXACT SCIENCE Philosophers of science in the analytic tradition have shared Hei degger's concern that science is a setup. Here the debate takes the form of the worry that observation is theory-loaded. The term "theory-loaded" was coined by N. R. Hanson in his Pat

terns of Discovery

in 1958. He intended to establish a historicist

approach to science, and his point was more about language usage than about the ensuing problem of realism. Nonetheless, philosophers of science recognized the implications of his argu ment: that there is no such thing as observation free of theoreti cal import. This is a problem for the realist in that, if the scientist does not encounter an object uncontaminated by the projection of theory, then the entities that figure in the theory may not be real at all but merely theoretical constructs. Accordingly, such theories may not be true in the sense of accurately describing physical reality. Joseph Kockelmans offers a Heideggerian solution to the problem of truth in the sciences. He argues that "one can say legitimately that scientific claims made on the basis of univer-


105

sally accepted theories and adequatel y supported by the rele vant scientific empirical evidence are indeed true" (1986:22). His poin t is that, viewed from the perspective of the scientific con ceptual framework, the state of affairs is how it is claimed to be in the theory, reg ardless of how theory- laden the empirical evidence is. His account shows how cl osely Heidegg er's account of truth compares with what Hil ary P utnam wil l later call, in Representing and Reality, internal real ism: within a conceptual scheme, the entities tha t figure in that scheme are real . B ut that, of course, is precisel y the probl em: scientific theories are sup posed to describe reg ularities in nature, not g round consistent fantasies. T he concern about observation is that even observation statements may be hermeneuticall y suspect, much as Heidegg er pointed out about description in §80 of the Beitriige. Ian Hacking's response to th is concern in Representing and In tervening is worth sing ling out because the position he advances is similar to Heidegger's anal ysis. B oth rej ect the view that ob servation is disin terested, and both focus their critique of science on representation. Hacking arg ues that observation can not be theory- loaded in a way that compromises all observation, be cause " [ there] have been important observations in the history of science, wh ich have in cluded no theoretical assumptions at all" (1983:176), such as Herschel's discovery of radiant heat. S im ilarl y, Heidegger arg ues in the Beitriige that a naive description is more certain than an ex act ex periment because a description requires l ess theory (Beitriige 166). Furthermore, arg ues Hacking, it may be the case that technicians, who neither know nor under stand the theory, are better at reading resul ts than scientists (1983:179). B eing g ood at observing is being g ood at noticing th ings, not being adept at the theoretical manipul ation of dubi ous data. In response to the question of the origin of two ideas, real ity and representation, Hacking arg ues, "T here may be more truth in the averag e a priori fantasy about the human min d than in the supposedly disinterested observations and mathematical model building of cognitive science" (1983:131), in an astute collapse of cognitive psycholog y with the problem that theories may just be g ood stories, that is, fictions told with an ulterior motive. C ogni tive psycholog y may be just such a story. Hacking takes reality

106


to be "just a byproduct of an anthropological fact," where "anthro pology" means "the bogus nineteenth-century science of 'Man' " (1983:131). Advancing a theory not of Homo faber, but of Homo depictor, Hacking argues that people make representations and that theories are representations. It is only when theories begin to compete that worries about what is real come into play (1983:139). Reality is therefore for Hacking an idea that comes about in a particular tradition of thought, but nonetheless a good idea for a place to do experiments, and "our notions of reality are formed from our ability to change the world" (1983:146). Philos ophy can "catch up to three centuries of our own past" when it recognizes that reality as representation and reality as interven tion mesh together in modem science, which is "the adventure of the interlocking of representing and intervening" (1983:146). For Hacking, things are not necessarily real because they figure in experiments as theoretical entities. But, when things can be used to achieve some other end, then they are reaL For example, electrons are not necessarily real when predic tions about them turn out right, because of the underdetermina tion of theory by evidence. Results can show that a certain explanation containing some entity is wrong; but when results support an account, there could still be some other account, the true one, in which the theoretical entity does not figure at all. But if the scientist can use some entity to do something, this control speaks to the reality of the entity. With electrons, for example, "if you can spray them, then they are real" (Hacking 1983:22-23); that is, in an experiment on quarks, if electrons can be sprayed to affect the charge of a large drop of niobium, then electrons, but not necessarily quarks, have a secure status as reaL They have been set up. Heidegger's realism is evident in what "Science and Reflec tion" adds to the thinking on experimentation in the Beitrage. He too takes exception to the modem idea that science is disinter ested, that "it does not encroach upon the real in order to change it" (SR 167 IVA 52). But what for Hacking is simply a good basis for being a realist contains for Heidegger a further worry. Exper imentation-"intervention," as Hacking calls it-is in Heideg ger's view an encroachment. Science encroaches upon the real,


107

not by making it up, but by setting it up. Heidegger's worry, like Hacking's, is not that experiments simply construct reality ex nihilo such that theories are merely stories about fictitious enti ties. The experiment has access to the real, but science sets up the real to show itself in a certain and limited way: objectively. As object, the real appears and is represented by the scientist as a coherence of forces to be reckoned in advance. The real is constrained in modem science to "exhibit itself as an interacting network, i.e., in surveyable series of related causes" (SR 168/ VA 52). The real is the object that can be reckoned and secured, precisely in the way Hacking describes the securing of the elec tron as real in the experiment on quarks. Hacking's analysis is consistent with Heidegger's. In modem science, the real is put at the disposal of human being. But Hei degger's point is criticaL The fact that modem science puts na ture at the disposal of human being does not mean for Heidegger that herein we have a ground on which to claim suc cess in our scientific results, that science actually does describe nature accurately. For Heidegger, physics is an encroachment in that "nature has in advance to set itself in place for the entrapp ing securing that science, as theory, accomplishes" (SR 172-73/ VA 57). The picture painted in science is reductive and never complete. Scientific representation "is never able to encompass the coming to presence of nature; for the objectness of nature is, antecedently, only one way in which nature exhibits itself" (SR 174/VA 58). Science as research is the forcible confinement of beings in objecthood. Heidegger's argument in Die Frage nach dem Ding, the Beitriige, "The Age of the World Picture," and "Science and Reflection" is that the experiment forces beings to behave in a way they would not when left to themselves: as objects. In this sense, it is violent. The "new assault upon reality" (MSMM 275/FD 77) which Hei degger attributes to Descartes's age in Die Frage nach dem Ding goes beyond the rupture described in What Is Metaphysics? and Introduction to Metaphysics. The scientific reduction of things to objects opens a world, as Heidegger argues in the latter two texts. Here "world" should be taken in the second sense laid out in Being and Time: in the sense that there is, for example, a "world of a mathematician" (BT93/SZ 64-65). A realm of possi-

108


ble objects is defined in a regional ontology. But further, in Hei degger's view, this opening of a world in modem science is an assault upon reality that confines beings reductively to such a world. This assault is the reduction of nature to calculability. In 1943 Heidegger added a postscript to What Is Metaphysics? He argued here that calculation is the culprit in the modem as sault upon reality: "Calculation uses everything that 'is' as units of computation, in advance, and, in the computation, uses up its stock of units . . . it is of the prime essence of calculation, and not merely in its results, to assert what-is only in the form of something that can be arranged and used up. Calculative thought places itself under compulsion to master everything in the logical terms of its procedure" (WMp 357/W 309). The es sence of calculation is, for Heidegger, anticipating his later cri tique of technology, the will to master everything as something that can be calculated. In Heidegger's analysis, modem science is violent in its demand that all beings can be accounted for in exactitude. Harold Alderman argues in "Heidegger's Critique of Science and Technology" that technology and science are possible in a way that does not simply assault nature aggressively. He sug gests that the problem is not that they are calculative but rather "their insistent and aggressive spirit" (1978:50). For Heidegger, however, this aggressive spirit is not incidental to calculation but at its essence. The problem of a benign alternative is hinted at throughout his discussion of phenomenology in Being and Time, in the enigmatic "saving-power" that remains so opaque in "The Question Concerning Technology," and in the equally un fleshed-out notion of Besinnung in "Science and Reflection." Hei degger's call for thinking gives that thinking a scanty account. Indeed, his readers are only now beginning to think through the possibilities, witnessed by the 1997 volume of Heidegger Studies entitled The Critical Threshold for Thinking at the End of Philosophy. An alternative would entail a clear understanding of how scien tific theory and practice are violent. I have laid out already three senses in which experimental science is violent. Mathematical, calculative science is violent in all three ways. It imposes struc tures on beings in order to understand them. This impOSition of structure is a rupture, an opening up of a world as a basis for


109

understanding. It reckons on the basis of experiments that track the behavior of beings in artificial situations. Calculation is fur ther violent in a fourth way in Heidegger's account. He argues in "The Age of the World Picture" that calculation represents beings reductively as objects. Heidegger begins his account of science in "The Age of the World Picture" as he has often done: with a contrast between ancient and modem natural science. Specifically, he suggests that we cannot construe Aristotle's doctrine that light bodies strive upward as false in the light of Galileo's doctrine of falling bodies. The latter is not true in some sense in which the former would be false. Each is an interpretation that rests on a different interpretation of beings, and thus a different approach to the questioning of natural events. Nor can we speak of Galileo's sci ence as an advance any more than we would consider Shake speare's poetry more advanced than that of Aeschylus (AWP

117/H 77).

Likewise, one of the more controversial points im

plied by Kuhn's

Structure of Scientific Revolutions is that progress

in science is a meaningless notion. A new paradigm is not a revision or improvement of existing theory but is rather incom mensurable with the old paradigm. Given the radicalness of a shift, science cannot be construed as cumulative, and therefore talk of progress loses its meaning. Heidegger questions the no tion of progress in science in order to say that it is "impossible to say that the modem understanding of whatever is, is more correct than that of the Greeks" (AWP

117/ H 77).

Other philosophers of science are horrified by the loss of the notion of progress in the history of science. Lakatos, for example, takes it as his task to oppose the notion of paradigm shift, prefer ring instead "rational reconstructions"

(1970:177-80).

If para

digms are ways in which reality is mapped, then Lakatos's rational reconstructions map the route from the old map to the new one. The necessity for rational reconstruction arises because Lakatos does not want to concede that the history of science is itself irrational. Heidegger agrees with Kuhn that the notion of progress is useless for comparative evaluation of the correctness of hypotheses across epochs. Yet he need not hold that Kuhn's view precludes the rationality of science; rather, it implies that

110


the very meaning of "rationality" can undergo epochal transfor mation. Accordingly, Heidegger asks what, if not this notion of prog ress, distinguishes modern science from ancient. The former is exact, whereas ancient E1tLO't�ftT] was not. But, argues Heidegger, "Greek science was never exact, precisely because, in keeping with its essence, it could not be exact and did not need to be exact. Hence it makes no sense whatever to suppose that modern science is more exact than that of antiquity" (AWP 117/H 77). The essence of Greek science is not herein further elucidated, but Heidegger's point remains clear: exactitude is unique to modern science and thus serves as no measuring rod for comparison with ancient science. This idea is not new to Heidegger. He argued in 1929 in What Is Metaphysics? that science is no more rigorous than history, even though its rigor has the character of exactness (WM 96/ W 104). He there understood the scientist as researcher. In 1938 he formulates this idea more strongly by arguing that what distin guishes modern science is that "the essence of what we today call science is research" (AWP 118/H 77). He argues that the essence of research consists in "the fact that knowing establishes itself as a procedure within some realm of what is, in nature or in history" (AWP 118/H 77). The fundamental event in research is the opening up of an object-sphere by means of projection. A research area is defined-that is, both opened up and de limited-by such projection of the "what" of an area of study. For example, "the corporeality of bodies, the vegetable character of plants, the animality of animals, the humanness of man" (AWP 118/ H 78) are projections that determine the objects stud ied in physics, botany, zoology, and anthropology, respectively. Accordingly, in modern physics a ground plan of nature is projected: nature is "the self-contained system of motion of units of mass related spatiotemporally" (AWP 119/ H 78). Such a pro jection determines in advance the way in which knowledge re lates itself to its objects. This relation which binds knowing to known, Heidegger calls "rigor" (AWP 118/H 79). The rigor of scientific research is exactitude. On the basis of its rigor, science can be contrasted with historiography. The latter projects a ground plan of history in such a way that it binds itself to its


111

objects through source criticism. History gets at its objects through its sources: "Because historiography as research proj ects and objectifies the past in the sense of an explicable and surveyable nexus of actions and consequences, it requires source criticism as its instrument of objectification" (AWP 123/H 83). Correspondingly, physics proceeds by means of the experiment. It objectifies bodies in their corporeality, and thus it binds itself to its objects with the rigor of exactitude. Because physics has as its object spatiotemporally extended bodies, it concerns itself with extension, with the quantifiable properties of those bodies. Accordingly, Heidegger argues that scientific research into na ture is not exact because it calculates with precision; rather, it must calculate with precision because its rigorous demand as research is for exactitude (AWP 119-20/H 79). Calculation is accordingly a necessary part of the projection of nature in mathematical physics. Heidegger's insight is to point out the relation between the two senses in which science is math ematical, an insight he previously laid out in Die Frage nach dem Ding. The broader sense is that science is projective; the nar rower sense is that it relies upon mathematics. In Heidegger's account, science is quantitative-that is, experiments measure and scientists calculate-because science is mathematical in the broader sense, rather than it being the case that science is mathe matical in the sense of projective because it measures. Science does not project because it measures; rather, it measures because it projects nature as quantifiable. Likewise, science is not essen tially research because it performs experiments; rather, the con verse is true: "experiment first becomes possible where and only where the knowledge of nature has been transformed into re search" (AWP 121/H 80). The medieval scholar is replaced by the research scientist in the modem epoch because knowledge has been transformed into research (AWP 125/H 85). Research in science is the investigation into the quantifiable properties of bodies. In research, then, in Heidegger's view, there is a prior deter mination of what counts as an object for a particular science. For example, in the case of physics the scientific method has a prior ity over nature, for physics as a specialized science entails the determination in advance of what nature is. Nature is repre-

112

' HEIDEGGER S PffiLOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

sented beforehand and, "being calculated in advance, . . . [is] 'set in place' " (AWP 127/ H 87). It is, as Heidegger puts it in "The Question Concerning Technology," represented before research begins as "a coherence of forces calculable in advance" (QCT 21 / VA 25). According to Heidegger, this conception of nature underwrites modem physics. Such representation was thought in Basic Problems of Phenome nology as the genesis of a science through the establishing of a regional ontology. Subsequent analysis has taken that line of thinking further to explore how nature is represented in modem physics. The representation that grounds modem science is ob jectification, and for Heidegger objectification changes the very nature of representation itself.

REPRESENTATION Heidegger gives an extensive definition of representation in an appendix to "The Age of the World Picture": To represent means here: of oneself to set something before one self and to make secure what has been set in place, as something set in place. This making secure must be a calculating, for calcula bility alone guarantees being certain in advance, and firmly and constantly, of that which is to be represented. Representing is no longer the apprehending of that which presences, within whose unconcealrnent apprehending itself belongs, belongs indeed as a unique kind of presencing toward that which presences that is unconcealed. Representing is no longer a self-unconcealing for, . . . but is a laying hold and grasping of. . . . What presences does not hold sway, but rather assault rules . . . . Representing is making-stand-over-against, an objectifying that goes forward and masters. (AWP Appendix 9, 149-S0/H 108)

Modem science is not phenomenological: it does not let beings be and allow them to reveal themselves as they are. Rather, the experiment sets upon, lays hold of, controls, and masters nature. Hence Heidegger argues that the "fundamental event of the modem age is the conquest of the world as picture" (AWP 134/ H 94). Modem representing is in this sense different from Greek ap-


113

prehending. The Greek thinker apprehends what is, but for the modem researcher, "to represent [vor-stellen] means to bring what is present at hand [das Vor-handene] before oneself as some thing standing over against, to relate it to oneself, to the one representing it, and to force it back into this relationship to one self as the normative realm" (AWP 131/H 91). Beings as objects must conform to the requirements of the modem researching mind. Likewise, Heidegger argued earlier in "On the Essence of Truth" that propositional truth is possible only on the basis of the adequacy of the thing to the intellect (adaequatio rei ad intel lecturn) rather than the adequacy of the intellect to its object (ad aequatio intellectus ad rem) (BW 120/W 181). In this sense, human being places itself in the scientific, experimental picture in prece dence over whatever is. The transcendental tum is the threat of representational thinking to nature. For this "setting before" is an objectification in representation that secures for the researcher a certainty with respect to the objects so represented. Representation is complicit in science as research, for the representation of nature as a calculable coher ence of forces determines the rigor of science as exactitude. The representation of the objects of science determines the object sphere of each specialized science and the certainty with which those objects are known. Heidegger argues that science becomes research "when and only when truth has been transformed into the certainty of representation" (AWP 127/H 87). This certainty of representation is secured, Heidegger argues, and subsequently demanded by Cartesian metaphysics, in which that which is, is defined as the objectness of representing (AWP 127/H 87). There is no truth for Descartes about the exter nal world-that is, the world of nature which includes even the bodily subject-until the subject has first secured itself in the cogito. In such an account, truth lies in the certainty of the sub ject's representation of its object. That is to say, truth is taken to be the correspondence of subject and object in representation. Representational certainty in modem science is attained in the experiment, for experimentation is precisely the method by which science represents: "To set up an experiment means to represent or conceive [vorstellen] the conditions under which a specific series of motions can be made susceptible of being fol-

114


lowed in its necessary progression, i. e. , of being controlled in ad vance by calculation" ( AWP 121/ H 81). T he experiment repre sents by establishing a measurable picture of the movements of a thing, geometrically, as in G alileo's Two New Sciences, or statis tically, as in quantum theory. In §80 of the Beitriige Heid egger ask s whether the experiment d etermines a thing as a such and such, or whether it d etermines a relation, specifically a cause- effect relation. He ask s further whether this cause- effect relation alread y d etermines quantita tively, as an " if so much- then so much (wenn so viel---dann so vie/)" (Beitriige 165) relation. U nd er the account offered in "The A ge of the World P icture," the answer is that the experiment d oes d etermine a quantitative causal relation. To k now remains to k now the cause, as it was for A ristotle, but " cause" is con strued here, as is motion, much more narrowly than in A ristot le's account. T he cause is efficient, and the motion is a change of place in N ewtonian mechanics. To be able to pred ict measurable results successfully is to und erstand and control causes. Heid egger has alread y argued in Die Frage nach dern Ding that all d eterminations of bod ies in mod ern science have one basic blueprint, accord ing to which the natural process is nothing but the d etermination in space and tim e of the motion of points of mass ( MSMM 267/FD 71). In Introduction to Metaphysics he ar gued that " appearance in the large sense of the epipha ny of a world , is now the d emonstrable visibility of things present at hand " (1M 63).22 These two claims come together in "T he A ge of the World P icture" in Heid egger's argument that the mod ern world is opened on the basis of the scientific d etermination of things as quantifiable objects, that is, bod ies in motion. In Hei d egger's analysis, the scientific representation of beings is the key to the mod ern world as picture. Heid egger cannot accept the id ea that a med ieval world pic ture changed into a mod ern one. Nor could the world be as pic ture for the G reeks. He claims that " the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what d istinguishes the essence of the 22 I have used my own translation here, since Manheim's terminology is not clear out of context. The German reads: "Erscheinen im grossen 5inne der Epiphanie einer Welt, wird jetzt zur herzeigbaren 5ichtbarkeit vorhandener Dinge" (EM 48).


115

modem age [der Neuzeit]" (AWP 130/H 90). But, argues Heideg ger, the world as picture has its origin in Plato's dlioUOL£ is to be wondered about, contemplated in j3lo£ 8EWQT]"tLXO£, because, to use Heideg ger's formulation of the question of metaphysics at the closing of What Is Metaphysics? and the opening of Introduction to Meta physics, (jlUOL£ is the source of the beings in the question, "Why are there beings at all, and not rather nothing?" For it is from (jlUOL£ that beings, including that being for whom its being is an issue, first and foremost come into being. In Heidegger's account of the Greeks, (jlUOL£ is not simply "na ture" but rather the power by which things come into being and remain in unconcealment to be encountered by human beings. In 1935 Heidegger defines it as "the emerging and arising, the spontaneous unfolding that lingers" (1M 61/EM 47). This read ing of (jlUOL£ stays with Heidegger such that twenty years later,

ANCIENT SCIENCE

187

physics as knowledge at all (Cornford 1941:236), since knowl edge is of the eternal and not of transient TU eooQLa has as its end the thing known. It is knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and seeks only to become one with its object. I1QU1;L£ is practical knowledge, consisting in ethics and politics, and has its end in action. TEXVT] is productive knowledge under which fall, for example, the knowledge of the craftsperson and the art of the doctor. TEXVT] has its end in the thing produced: the work. A carpenter produces a house, a doctor, health. Aris totle makes a further threefold division within 8eooQLu. Since the end of all 8eooQLu is the thing, the end serves to distinguish its three branches on the basis of a further distinction between kinds of things that are known. This strategy of separating knowledge on the basis of its end also appears in De Anima, where Aristotle distinguishes intellection from perception on the basis of the difference between intelligible and sensible ob jects, and the five senses on the basis of their different objects. The object of hearing is sound, of sight is color, and so forth. In the case of the three branches of 8eooQLu, the objects of the branches differ according to their motion. But motion does not mean simply change of place for Aristotle. Rather, it means change in general, including change of place but also growth, decrease, and qualitative difference, and the special case of gen eration and destruction. Aristotle explains at Physics 198a29-31 that "there are three branches of study, one of things which are incapable of motion, the second of things in motion, but indestructible, the third of destructible things." The first branch is metaphysics, and its ob ject is that which does not move, separate substance. The second is mathematics, including astronomy, and its objects move, but not in the sense of generation and destruction. The final branch of 8eooQLu is the study of nature (UOL�

of "work" for Heidegger. The possibility of this meaning of

is the primary sense

EVEQYELa,

the real as the

work, has been suppressed in favor of the Romanized usage. Heidegger's claim that the Romanization of

ciens

ahla into causa effi

is a narrowing of the rich Greek understanding of causa

tion has already been pointed out. "Science and Reflection" adds little insight into the Romanization of thinking, since Hei

(aQXT] ahla) belongs in the Greek experience. Ground and cause, principium and causa, are the ways in which these notions have degger puts off the question of how the notion of cause

and

come down to us. W B. Macomber comments on the translation of Greek into Latin that the "loss of its linguistic roots is the fate of the Western tradition"

(1967:154).

Heidegger argues in "The

Origin of the Work of Art" that "this translation of Greek names into Latin is in no way the innocent process it is considered to this day. Beneath the seemingly literal and thus faithful transla tion there is concealed, rather, a translation of Greek experience

Roman thought takes over the Greek words without a corresponding, equally authentic experience of what they say, without the Greek word. The rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation" (23/H 8). Concealed in the German wirken is the Romanization of the real into Wirklichkeit. into a different way of thinking.

The real "is now that which has followed as consequence" (SR

161/ VA 46). In

Heidegger's account, the real in

this sense of

causes and effects that follow after one another comes to the

236


foreground in the history of Western thought. What follows after a determinate and determinable cause in this sense is factual: "now the real presents itself in the taking place of consequences. The consequence demonstrates that that which presences has, through it, come to a secured stand, and that it encounters as such a stand [Stand]. The real now shows itself as object, that which stands over against [Gegen-stand]" (SR 162/VA 47). In modern science, the real is what has been secured as object. The second etymological account of the relation between the ory and the real is to show how objectivity is a representing. Heidegger traces "theory" to the Greek eewQElv and gives two accounts of this word. First he examines the word as built from eta and oQuw. The latter means to look at something attentively, to view it closely. The former is the outward appearance in which something shows itself, which Plato names eIbo�. 0ewQelv can thus be understood as "to look attentively on the outward appearance wherein what presences becomes visible and, through such sight-seeing-to linger with it" (SR 163/VA 48). To theorize in this sense is to remain with something by looking at it. This is for the Greeks a way of life-that is, �lo� eewQTrnx6�-that is the highest doing of which human being is capable. The second account of eewQElv is given in terms that share etymological roots with the first: eeu and wQa. The former is a goddess whose name is found in &":rjeeLa. Heidegger has argued since Being and Time, most notably in "On the Essence of Truth," that &A.�eeLa is a more originary notion of truth than correspon dence theories. It is unconcealment, which is the very thing that makes correspondence possible. In "Science and Reflection" he suggests that it is as the goddess 'AA.�eELa that unconcealment that is, truth-appears to Parmenides. At what in the Greek ex perience of truth is Heidegger trying to get in tracing the modern word "theory" back to the goddess 'AA.�eeLa? Heidegger spoke of the goddess 'AA.�eeLa in "Moira (Parmen ides VIII, 34-41)." He argued there that what is given to "the thinker to think remains at the same time veiled with respect to its essential origins" (EGT 94/VA 240). Those origins are being in Heidegger's account. The goddess should not therefore be un derstood as the abstract personification of a concept, he sug-

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

237

gests, but as the disclosure of the duality of being and beings, that is, of the ontological difference, in which thinking is a rela tion not just to beings but to being. If this account is brought to bear on "Science and Reflection," then Heidegger's reference there to eECt and 'AA�6ELa can be read against the claim that truth has a veiled origin: being. Heidegger is suggesting, then, that theory takes its truth from an obscure source, a source that remains veiled to science. That source is being. Heidegger explains wQa in terms of respect, honor, and es teem. Thus he defines 6EWQElv as "the beholding that watches over truth" (SR 165/VA 49), and he connects the German Wahrheit with both wQa and oQCtw. Modem truth has its roots in a respect ful viewing, but its rootlessness consists precisely in the fact that science left those roots behind when the real became established as object in the age of representational thinking. eEWQElv is not representational thinking; it is not speculation about that which stands over and against the subject as object. Rather, eEWQElv belonged to the Greeks in their �lo£ 6EWQTj1:LXO£, not to modem human being's way of approaching its object in representational thinking. Under both etymologies, 6EWQElv is not simply a with drawal from activity into speculation. It is in fact precisely an activity, but of a very particular kind. It is the activity of standing in the truth, of holding back action to allow what is revealed to show itself. It is a relation to being that does not simply grasp beings by way of a concept. Heidegger attempts to retrieve ancient 6EWQElV with the mod em word "reflection" (Besinnung). His claim is that reflection is in a sense useless, that is, it does not endow one with the power to act as do the sciences, which produce knowledge that can then be applied. But the very uselessness of reflection is a prom ise of further wealth (SR 181 / VA 66) in that reflection promises something that can never be encompassed in scientific reckon ing. Reflection approaches that which is worthy of question (SR 182/VA 66). In opposition to the sciences, it can hold out in the questionable. This is precisely the task that was elucidated for thinking in 1951-52 and remains at the end of philosophy in the account from 1966: "the surrender of previous thinking to the determination of the matter for thinking" (BW 392/ Zur Sache des Denkens 80). The task is not to remain complacent in the face of

238


what has been thought, but to surrender it, to give it up to fur ther reflection. Such reflection determines that the matter for thinking-that is, what calls for thinking-is being. "Reflection" in "Science and Reflection" gets at the same thing as "thinking" in What Is Called Thinking? Both turn toward a matter that is constricted, confined, and closed off in the modem epoch: being. Likewise, theory is a stunted development of something that was much richer in the thinking of the Greeks. There is, Heidegger claims, nonetheless a shadow of the ear lier meaning of 8EWQELV in the modem "theory." The modem term has come to us, however, through the Roman contemplari. The core of this word, templum, comes from the Greek 'tEftVELV, which means to cut or divide: "In 8EWQLU transformed into contemplatio there comes to the fore the impulse, already pre pared in Greek thinking, of a looking-at that sunders and com partmentalizes. A type of encroaching advance by successive interrelated steps toward that which is to be grasped by the eye makes itself normative in knowing" (SR 166/VA 51). This im pulse to division is prepared for in Aristotle's division of knowl edge and in his account of the many ways for a thing to be, of which !pUOL£ is only one, in Heidegger's view. The specialization of the sciences is already prepared for in Greek thinking. The tendency toward division in Romanized contemplation is an assault upon its object, a manipulation that determines that object by confining it in a particular realm of beings determined as the object-area of a specialized science. Such a limited view of nature is, however, necessary insofar as a science such as phys ics, for example, requires a determined realm of objects in order to then proceed with investigation of that realm. It investigates through observation. Hence Heidegger understands observation as "an entrapping and securing refining of the real" (SR 167/VA 51-52). It orders nature in such a way that "at any given time the real will exhibit itself as an interacting network, i.e., in sur veyable series of related causes" (SR 168/VA 52). This is the a priori determination of nature by modem science. Nature is accordingly for physics "das Unumgiingliche": "that which cannot be gotten around" (SR 174; d. 177/VA 59/ VA 61). Physics takes nature as its object, and it remains directed at that object and cannot pass it by. Furthermore, "objectness as such

239


prevents the representing and securing that correspond to it from ever being able to encompass the essential fullness of na

ture" (SR 174/VA 58). Physics cannot even ask if nature is with

drawing rather than appearing in scientific representation, for physics has already undertaken its task with respect to an area determined by objectness to the preclusion of such a question. Likewise, all sciences are directed at that which they cannot get around and which they cannot encompass, for in each case a science cannot determine what it is directed at in any fullness beyond objectivity. Were it the case that the sciences could find within themselves what is not to be gotten around, then "they would have before all else to be in a position to conceive and represent their own essence" (SR 176/VA 61). They can-in fact,

must-represent their object in order to be able to proceed, but as Heidegger has argued in What Is Called Thinking?, where he called it one-sidedness, the sciences are never in a position to represent their own essence: "Physics as physics can make no assertions about physics. All the assertions of physics speak after the manner of physics. Physics itself is not a possible object of a

physical experiment" (SR l76/VA 61). Physics can proceed with the investigation of its object, but to

think

critically about the

object of physics, one must first step outside physics. The inaccessibility of what cannot be got around in a science is itself constantly passed over, for the sciences proceed in the modem epoch more securely than ever. The inaccessibility of what they cannot get around remains inconspicuous. The sci ences lie in such inconspicuousness, Heidegger argues, "as a river lies in its source" (SR l79/VA 63). This source is that which is worthy of question in reflection. Reflection

(Besinnung)

is

"calm, self-possessed surrender to that which is worthy of ques

tioning" (SR l80/VA 64). It is different from the knowing of the sciences. Heidegger's argument is that the poverty of the use lessness of reflection on what cannot be got around can become a rich treasure when that which is worthy of question is taken up. Heidegger suggests that even though reflection on any par ticular science is impossible from within that science, still "every researcher and teacher of the sciences, every man pursuing a way through a science, can move, as a thinking being, on various levels of reflection" (SR l8l-82/VA 66). The task of thinking

240


herein set for both philosophers and scientists is reflection upon the sciences. "Science and Reflection" is therefore a development beyond

What Is Called Thinking? In the latter text, Heidegger claimed that science does not think In "Science and Reflection" he suggests that practitioners of science can and presumably should think .

,

that is, reflect on their science. This means not simply evaluating the science in terms of results and usefulness in practical appli cation, but reflecting on how the science determines its object. The task for the scientist is to pause from science and raise the question of its origin and essence: the a priori determination of its object. Heidegger had held explicitly since Basic Problems of Phenome

nology that

sciences proceed through a regional ontology-that is, a science investigates an object that has been determined be

forehand. In this prior determination of its object, a science has its source and its essence. On this basis, Heidegger's claim in

What Is Called Thinking? that the "sciences belong in the realm of the essence of technology" (WCT 14/WHD 50) can be interpre ted. The essence of technology is Ge-stell. Science too has its Ge explicating this claim, I show how it is only on the basis

stell. In

of the scientific object that modem technology is possible for Heidegger. That is, the essence of technology arises from the

Ge

stell of science. GE-STELL Much work has been done on Heidegger's critique of technol ogy, but the question of the relation between science and tech nology in his thinking has been neglected. This question seemed to have been answered by Heidegger in What Is Called Thinking?, where he argues that "science is grounded in the nature of tech

nology" (WCT 135/WHD 155). Yet he also argues that technol ogy is only possible because of science (WCT 234/WHD 142).

Furthermore, in reportedly the last text Heidegger wrote, read at the tenth annual Heidegger Conference at DePaul University only two weeks before his death, he raised precisely the question of the relation between science and technology: "Is modem nat-


241

ural science the foundation (Grundlage) of modern technol ogy-as is supposed-or is it, for its part, already the basic form of technological thinking, the determining fore-conception and incessant incursion of technological representation into the real ized and organized machinations of modern technology?" (MNST 3). "Foundation" (Grundlage) means literally "ground laying." Heidegger is asking whether modem science lays the ground for technology, or whether science is already essentially technology. I will show that Heidegger holds the latter thesis: the essence of science is the essence of technology. I will thus argue that Ge-stell is not just the essence of technology for Hei degger, but also the essence of science. Further, that Heidegger holds that technology is only possible because beings are first set up as objects in the epoch of science. And lastly, that science is made possible by the trace of ancient TEXVT] that remains in representational thinking. Hence the relation between science and technology sounds muddled: science is grounded in technology, yet science makes technology possible. Yet it is a simple historical relation: modem technology is possible because its essence is already to be found in science. That is, a trace of ancient TEXVI1 remains in modem science, and that trace makes technology possible. That trace is projection. As ancient TEXVI1 began with the idea in the mind of the artist prior to production, so modem science and technology both have their a priori projection of being. That projection Hei degger names Ge-stell. The Ge-stell of technology is standing-re serve---beings appear as resource. The Ge-stell of science is objectivity-beings appear as object. I will support this interpre tation by reading "The Question Concerning Technology." In this text, read in 1955 in Munich as part of a series called "The Arts in the Technological Age," Heidegger insists that the claims that "Technology is a means to an end" and that "Tech nology is a human activity" belong together as the instrumental, anthropological definition of technology. He argues against this view, suggesting that it is not wrong, but rather inadequate. He claims instead that technology is "a way of revealing" (QCT 12/ VA 16). This claim is best read against "On the Essence of Truth" from 1930. In that essay, Heidegger retrieves the Greek word for truth, aA.�eELa. He translates aA.�eELa as Unverborgenheit, uncon-

242


cealment, and argues that truth is a question of essence in the difficult claim that "the essence of truth is the truth of essence" (BW 140/WW 201). What he means is that what truth is, is a question of historical epoch. He undermines the notion of a uni versal, transhistorical truth and gives instead an account in which truth is a stance human being takes toward being, an at tunement that informs an epoch and evolves over time, an open ing of an understanding in which being is concealed as human being loses itself among beings. Heidegger's claim in 1954 about technology, that it is a way of revealing, is hence the claim that technology is a truth. That is, it is a human stance toward being by means of which beings are revealed. But beings are not revealed in just any way. Rather, technology is a "challenging [Herausfordern]" (QCT 14/VA 18). It "sets upon [steIlen] nature" (QCT IS/VA 18) to unlock and ex pose its energy for stockpiling. Technology sets up beings as standing-reserve. The inadequacy of the instrumental and an thropological definition of technology is its failure to acknowl edge how human being is implicated in technology as the one who sets up the reaL Human being determines how a thing can reveal itself. Technology is a way of allowing things to appear, or making them appear. This is not to say, however, that human being creates all that is. Heidegger distinguishes technology from creation: "the re vealing that holds sway throughout modem technology does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of JWLT]OLUOL

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