Heidegger’s philosophy of science 9780823220380, 9780823220373

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Acknowledgments (page ix)
Abbreviations (page xi)
1. Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Science (page 14)
2. Experiment and Representation (page 65)
3. Science in the Institution (page 119)
4. Ancient Science (page 163)
5. Science and Technology (page 207)
Bibliography (page 255)
Index (page 267)
Index of Greek Expressions (page 277)

Citation preview

Heidegger's Philosophy of Science

PERSPECTIVES IN CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY

John D. Caputo, series editor 1. John D. Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. 2. Michael Strawser, Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard—From Irony to Edification.

3. Michael Barber, Ethical Hermeneutics: Rationality in Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation.

4. James H. Olthuis, ed., Knowing Other-wise: Philosophy at the Threshold of Spirituality. 5. James Swindal, Reflection Revisited: fiirgen Habermas’s Discursive Theory of Truth. 6. Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern and Postmodern.

Second edition. 7. Thomas W. Busch, Circulating Being: From Embodiment to Incorporation—Essays on Late Existentialism.

8. Edith Wyschogrod, Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics. Second edition. 9. Francis J. Ambrosio, ed., The Question of Christian Philosophy Today.

10. Jeffrey Bloechl, ed., The Face of the Other and the Trace of God: Essays on the Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas.

11. Ilse N. Bulhof and Laurens ten Kate, eds., Flight of the Gods: Philosophical Perspectives on Negative Theology.

Heidegger’s Philosophy of Science TRISH GLAZEBROOK

Fordham University Press New York 2000

Copyright © 2000 by Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Perspectives in Continental Philosophy No. 12 ISSN 1089-3938

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Glazebrook, Trish. Heidegger’s philosophy of science / Trish Glazebrook.—Ist 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—Contributions in philosophy of science. 2. Science—Philosophy—History—20th century. I. Title. II. Series. B3279.H49 G57 2000

193—dc21 00-025802

Printed in the United States of America

00 01 02 03 04 $543 2 1 First Edition

For Geoffrey and Norma

BLANK PAGE

Acknowledgments ix

Abbreviations Xi Introduction 1 1. Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Science 14 Husserl: Philosophy As Rigorous Science 20 Kant and Metaphysics: Grounding Science 25 Synthetic A Priori Judgments 36 The Thing and Copernican Revolution 41

The A Priori 47 Mathematical Projection: Galileo and Newton 51 Metaphysics and the Mathematical 60

Conclusion 63

2. Experiment and Representation 65 Crucial Experiments 73 Experiment and Experience 84 Violence 96 Setting Up the Real: Exact Science 104

Representation 112 Conclusion 117

3. Science in the Institution 119 The Nothing 124 Destiny as Nihilism 131 Self-Assertion: Knowing versus Amassing

Information 139 The Threat of Science 148 Valuative Thinking and Disillusionment 156

Conclusion 159

Vill CONTENTS

4. Ancient Science 163 ®votis As Truth 165 Aristotle’s Analogy of Being 179 Theoretical versus Productive Knowledge 184 Avvauet ov 191 @Mvoic and teyvyn 199

Conclusion 205

5. Science and Technology 207 Epoch and Essence 209 “Science Does Not Think’ 214 Thinking As Thanking: Being and Being

Represented 224 The Theory of the Real 232 Ge-stell 240 Quantum Theory 247 Conclusion 251

Index 267 Bibliography , 255

Index of Greek Expressions 277

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS There are many people to thank for their support and assistance during the time I have been working on this book. Research was funded by the University of Toronto, the government of Ontario, and the German government, and further supported by the Department of Philosophy at Auckland University. I could not have done without the productive commentary, advice, and discussion on the entire manuscript that I got from Graeme Nicholson, Rebecca Comay, Will McNeill, and Dan Dahlstrom. Their close readings and prompt responses were indispensable to the development of this book. I am further indebted to Will McNeill for

his enthusiastic and precise suggestions on translation. I am grateful to Father Joseph Owens for teaching me to love Aristotle. Jim Brown’s support at the University of Toronto was su-

pererogatory, and I owe Ian Hacking a great deal for his contribution to my understanding of the philosophy of science, despite his dislike of both Heidegger and this project. Jim Wetzel and Marilyn Thie read and commented helpfully on individual chapters. I wish I knew the names of those who asked questions on the chapter on experimentation at the Ontario Philosophical Association meeting at Waterloo University in 1993. Their comments were useful. Likewise my critique of Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle was all the better for rigorous scrutiny at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in New Orleans in 1993 (on dvoic and téyvn) and Georgetown in 1996 (on Aris-

totle’s analogy of being). The chapter on Heidegger and the institution benefited from exposure to the Department of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago and at the annual con-

ference of The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in Seattle in 1991. The original idea for the book was conceived in conversation with David Wood, and first tried out

in the philosophy department at the University of Guelph in

x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1991. In particular, I wish to thank Jack Caputo, whose ongoing support of this work has been crucial to its completion. On a more personal note, thanks to Brian Hackeson for keep-

ing my computer running, to George Hendry for all those lunches, to Louise Signal for spunk and chocolate biscuits, to Ann Saddlemeyer and the residents of Massey College, to Jacques Bismuth for backgammon, and to Rachel Boyington, who kept things in perspective by sharing the first weeks of her life with me as I completed the original draft. My deepest debts of love and life are to Geoff and Norma Rotenberg, and it is to their memory that I dedicate this book.

ABBREVIATIONS AM Aristoteles, Metaphysik [X.1-3 An Post Posterior Analytics

AWP “The Age of the World Picture,” in QCT

BC Basic Concepts (G) BCP “On the Being and Conception of muotc in Aristotle’s Physics B.1”’

BdW “Die Bedrohung der Wissenschaft” BPP Basic Problems of Phenomenology (GP)

BT Being and Time (SZ) BW Basic Writings CPR Critique of Pure Reason

EGT Early Greek Thinking | EM Einfiihrung in die Metaphysik (IM)

EN Nicomachean Ethics ET ““On the Essence of Truth,” in BW FCM The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (GM)

FD Die Frage nach dem Ding FT “The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts,” with SA

G Grundbegriffe (BC) GM Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (FCM) GP Die Grundprobleme der Phinomenologie (BPP)

H Holzwege

HCT History of the Concept of Time (PGZ)

IM Introduction to Metaphysics (EM)

K “Die Kehre”™

KM Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (KPM) KPM Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (KM) MAL Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Logik (MFL)

Met Metaphysics MFL The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (MAL)

MNST “Modern Natural Science and Technology”

xil ABBREVIATIONS MSMM “Modern Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics,” in BW/FD

N Nietzsche

NI Nietzsche I

NII Nietzsche II

PA De Partibus Animalium

PGZ Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (HCT)

Phys Physics

PRS “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” (Husserl) OCT The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays

SA “The Self-Assertion of the German University” SR “Science and Reflection,”” in QCT SU “Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universitat; Das Rektorat 1933/34: Tatsachen und Gedanken”’

SZ Sein und Zeit (BT)

W Wegmarken VA Vortriige und Aufsitze

WCT What Is Called Thinking? (WHD) WHD Was heisst Denken? (WCT)

WM What Is Metaphysics? WMp Postscript to What Is Metaphysics? WW ““Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,” in W

ZG “Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft”

Heidegger's Philosophy of Science

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INTRODUCTION “ON THE LONGEST DAY he ever lived,’”’ said Father Richardson,

“Heidegger could never be called a philosopher of science” (1968:511). What exactly does it mean, to be a philosopher of science? The label received widespread adoption only in the late 1950s, and one of the few things philosophers of science agree

upon is that the discipline is not clearly demarcated. The breadth and diversity of philosophy of science is due in large part to the fact that the term “science” itself covers a wide range of practices and modes of thought. Social science, for example, may be no more scientific than the sociology of science is philosophical, or just as scientific as the latter is philosophical. One thing is clear: the task of the philosopher of science is, at least in part, to ask what constitutes science. Heidegger is certainly a philosopher of science in this respect. Over several decades he explores the thesis that science is the mathematical projection of nature. From its incipience in “Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft,” to its full formulation in Being and Time, to the analysis of representation in “The Age of the World Picture,” to the entanglement with technology in What Is Called Thinking?, to the setting up of the real in “’Science and Reflection,’”” the idea that science is the mathematical

projection of nature runs throughout Heidegger’s work as a background against which his critique of modernity unfolds. This conception of science binds together his thinking of the question of science over sixty years.

The several analyses of science that Heidegger undertakes during his life have been remarked on and described, but never interpreted as a coherent movement throughout his thought. John Caputo has argued that there are two essences of science in Heidegger’s work: a hermeneutic one and a deconstructive one. The former he uncovers in Being and Time and suggests is an “existential genealogy”’ (1986:44), inseparably bound to an alleg-

2 INTRODUCTION edly pure logic of science, that explores the genesis of science in the historical life of the scientist. This essence is subsequently

suppressed in Heidegger’s thought, Caputo argues, by the deconstructive sense, ‘which signifies an entire understanding of man and world, of being and truth” (1986:44). Caputo intends to correct a misunderstanding in which Heidegger is taken as hostile to science by showing instead that Heidegger sought to critique and delimit science in its deconstructive sense. My reading of Heidegger’s philosophy of science is sympathetic to Caputo’s account. Heidegger was not well versed in science, as Patrick Heelan has underscored (1995:579). Yet I resist

apologism. Heidegger’s continual rethinking of the question of Science is not a naive non-scientist’s condemnation, for which ereater technical expertise would be necessary to achieve validity. Rather, his contribution to philosophy of science is his insight into the extent to which science underwrites modernity. By laying out a sustained analysis of Heidegger’s philosophy of science, I extend Caputo’s reading even further. I expose the hermeneutic and deconstructive essences of science in Heidegger’s early and late work, respectively, and furthermore suggest a transitional period in Heidegger’s thinking in order to trace how it develops from the former to the latter. Theodore Kisiel has also uncovered several—three, in fact— essences of science in Heidegger’s work. The earliest he calls a logical conception, and I find it in a 1916 text, ““Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft.” He describes two further essences of science from Being and Time: an existential one, which is much like Caputo’s hermeneutic; and a metaphysical or epochal conception, which he locates in the unpublished Part Two of the book and claims is later elaborated under the rubric “overcoming metaphysics” (Kisiel 1977:163). Heidegger’s later analysis of modern science is a critique of the nihilistic metaphysics of subjectivity that he holds is essential to modern science. He holds that science informs modernity, and hence his critique is ultimately, as Kisiel suggests, an attempt to expose, and therefore to overcome, the metaphysics of the modern epoch. These different but not discordant accounts of the various essences of science in Heidegger’s work uncover the complexity of his thinking on the question of science. His thesis that the es-

INTRODUCTION 3 sence of science is the mathematical projection of nature does not fail so much as it calls for reformulation when he realizes that the relation between thinking and science is not what he had previously taken it to be. That relation was expressed by the thesis that philosophy is itself a science. This claim is not as simple as it may seem. Naturwissenschaft is natural or physical science, for which physics is paradigmatic. But Wissenschaft also sounds of Geistes-

wissenschaft, the arts or humanities. For the early Heidegger, struggling against the yoke of transcendental idealism, these two conceptions are entangled in his attempt to ground the sciences in metaphysics and his thesis that philosophy is itself a science. When the attempt fails, Heidegger leaves behind that thesis. What remains is a specific, if not always precise and never

entirely static, topic: the question of the nature of science. At issue here is Naturwissenschaft—specifically, the mathematical physics of modernity that begins with Galileo, flourishes under

Newton, and has its quintessential expression in quantum theory.

Yet philosophy of science is more than a battle to draw the borders of science. It is also an inquiry into several sets of questions: the logic of discovery, proof, and method; the metaphysical and epistemological suppositions of scientific knowledge; the historical genesis and development of the experiment; the political consequences of institutionalized science; and the nature and limits of theory. Not only can each of these constellations of inquiry be traced throughout Heidegger’s work, but also that work can be bridged to the analytic tradition of philosophy of science. How are Kuhn’s “paradigms” different from Heidegger’s “basic concepts,” and from Ge-stell? What conclusions does

Heidegger take from his insight, shared with Hacking, that experiments both represent and intervene? Where does Heidegger stand in the realist debate? on the existence of crucial experiments? on the role of mathematics in modern physical science? These are questions that can be answered out of Heidegger’s philosophy of science. It would be ludicrous and tedious, however, to suggest that Heidegger has a view on every issue taken up by the analytics. He says almost nothing explicitly, for example, about the prob-

4 INTRODUCTION lem of induction, the relation between the philosophy and the history of science, the nature of probability, the logical foundations of statistical inference, and the function of explanation. Yet

neither does, nor even could, each analytic philosopher of science treat every issue that falls under the rubric of philosophy of science. Certainly Heidegger has enough to say on a broad range of topics pertaining to science that I can defend the claim that he has a philosophy of science on the superficial basis of the number and variety of way he addresses the issue. I will, however, argue more deeply for Heidegger’s philosophy of science by mapping its content, and by locating his thinking in the analytic discourse. Accordingly, I share none of Father Richardson’s reluctance to call Heidegger a philosopher of science. The infamous distinction Father Richardson drew between Heidegger I and Heidegger II was a useful and insightful tool for seeing changes and transitions, breaks, and abandonments in Heidegger’s ongoing work. Yet now, some twenty-odd years after Heidegger’s death, when Father Richardson himself (1997:18) has grown uncomfortable with the division, I emphasize rather the continuity in Heidegger’s work: the question of natural science is a constant and continuous support against which Heidegger’s thinking develops and grows. Certainly, as Karlfried Grtinder has claimed, the “problem of the essence, possibility, and limitations of science pervades all his writings published to date’ (1963:18). The earliest entry in the Gesamtausgabe uses the “dazzling results [glanzenden Erfolgen|” (“Realitaétsproblem” 3) of scientific practice to press the problem of realism. In reportedly the last thing Heidegger wrote before his death, he questioned the relation between science and technology (MNST 1-2). In the sixty-four years between these two texts, natural science is ubiquitously peripheral and regularly central to his thought. Yet an analysis of the significance of the question of natural science to Heidegger’s thought, though overdue, has not been worked out. Indeed, whereas treatments of Heidegger’s critique of technology abound, his lifelong entanglement with issues concerning the natural sciences has remained largely neglected. There is a growing body of papers on the topic, but a systematic,

INTRODUCTION 5 sustained account of the development of Heidegger’s treatment of science is missing. This book is aimed precisely at addressing that gap by demonstrating both the significance of science to Heidegger’s thought and the contribution of that thought to philosophy of science. I show not only that Heidegger works extensively and systematically on questions concerning science, but also that his ongoing consideration of science guides and informs his work on other issues, especially his critique of technology. Further, I show that issues crucial to Heidegger’s analysis are central in the analytic tradition of philosophy of science, and I bring his contribution to bear on that tradition. In a word, then, I intend to interpret Heidegger in a radically novel way: according to his philosophy of science. The years in which Heidegger wrote can be divided into three distinct phases as philosophy of science: the early view, extend-

ing into the 1930s, in which he held that philosophy is itself scientific; a transitional phase, in which he turns to questions of scientific practice and away from problems of philosophy, that

is, from metaphysics to physics; and a later phase, from the 1950s onward, in which he locates the essence of science in the _ . essence of technology. What binds these three periods together, such that they are one path of thinking rather than simply three different inquiries, is the notion that science is projective. In the early years, Heidegger understands such projection as the establishing of regional ontologies by means of basic concepts. During the transitional phase, he struggles to work out the projective nature of science by looking to the writings of Galileo and Newton. He talks not of basic concepts, but of the mathematical, which has been compared to the Kantian a priori (Kisiel 1973), but which Heidegger reformulates away from Kant’s idealism. In the later years, Heidegger names what is projective in technology “’Ge-stell,’” and argues that the essence of science is to be found in this essence of technology. Hence the three stages of Heidegger’s critical inquiry into science have a unity insofar as each is a different formulation of its projective nature. Heidegger’s early inquiries into the projection at work in science are made against a Husserlian background. Philosophy is rigorous science for Heidegger, as it was for Husserl, rather than Weltanschauung philosophy. By using phenomenology as a sci-

6 INTRODUCTION entific method for doing ontology, however, Heidegger rejects the bracketing of metaphysical issues for which Husserl’s phenomenology called. He accepts Husserl’s conception of regional ontology, in which the sciences define some realm of beings as their object by projecting a basic concept. But Heidegger further argues that metaphysics, in contrast to the sciences, takes being as its object. At the root of regional ontologies lies, then, fundamental ontology. Hence Heidegger calls scientific philosophy a pleonasm: ontology, as the exploration of the ground of the sciences, is already inherently scientific. Yet this relation of grounding proves problematic to Heidegger as he attempts to understand it more deeply. The ground of science may be the projection of a realm of being, but Heidegger resists that the final word on science is idealism. The projective nature of modern science lies in the fact that the scientist proceeds on the basis of an idea, a hypothesis, rather than with the object. That is to say, a science that begins with a regional ontology is idealistic in that it is founded on an a priori conception of its object rather than on experience. Yet Heidegger no longer holds that such an a priori conception is necessary to all and every science. Rather, it is characteristic for him of modern science. He looks to uncover other possibilities for the essence of science: to answer how the essence of science can be projective without simply collapsing into idealism. In the 1930s, Heidegger describes the essence of science as research. He argues that the transition from the ancient experience of nature to that.of Galileo and Newton is the move from a realism in which qvouc, nature, is a priori—that is, prior to thought—to an idealism in which the a priori formulation of a hypothesis precedes the investigation of nature. His particular interest is the Cartesian establishing of certainty on the cogito

that is paradigmatic of representational thinking, such that knowledge in modernity has its foundation in the thinking subject rather than in the thing known. This thesis is particularly significant as a critique of modern science, since the claim to certainty on the part of scientists such as Newton and Bacon takes much of its force from the empirical nature of experimental science. The analysis of the essence of science as research leads Heidegger to argue that the experimental method is a set-

INTRODUCTION 7 ting up of nature on the basis of an a priori conception from which the appeal to the empirical is derivative. During this transitional phase, his developing insight into the essence of science as projective is that the projection at work in science sets up not only the realm of beings to be investigated, but also the epistemic criteria that determine what counts as knowledge in science. In his later writings, Heidegger argues that the essence of sci-

ence lies in the essence of technology. In a nutshell, he holds that the tripartite division of the history of Western thought so pervasive in his work—that is, the division into ancient, medieval, and modern epochs—culminates in modernity as the epoch of science and technology. He argues that technology is essentially a reformulation of the essence of science. Since Being and Time, Heidegger has argued that modern science projects an understanding onto nature. In that understanding, nature consists in spatiotemporally extended bodies subject to efficient causes. In 1940 he teaches that Aristotle held rather that nature is teleological. Final, much more so than efficient, causes are crucial to understanding nature in Aristotle’s Physics. Only once nature has been rendered devoid of final causes—that is, devoid of end and purpose—by the modern scientific confinement to efficient causes, is nature available ideologically for appropriation to human ends and purposes in technology. Accordingly, the revealing of nature as a standing-reserve at the disposal of human being that is the essence of technology, is made possible by modern science. Heidegger’s ongoing critique of science is accordingly an ac-

count of the resolution of modernity into technology. It is a novel expression of what it might mean to be postmodern which goes beyond a metaphysics of subjectivity to other possibilities for thinking and being. Heidegger recognizes that modern science is the historical, Western expression of the human desire to

know. But he escapes the problem of cultural relativism that haunts post-Kuhnian philosophy of science by thinking it more deeply than the notion of worldview permits. He holds that modern science is a destiny; that is, it is definitive of a historical

epoch in which being and human being unfold together in a metaphysics of subjectivity. There are other possibilities for knowledge in Heidegger’s view. For example, the ancient inter-

8 INTRODUCTION pretation of being as @uvotcs reveals new beginnings latent in the epoch of science and technology, since that epoch can trace its origin to the ancient Greek world. Beyond representation lie thinking (Denken) and reflection (Besinnung). By dividing Heidegger’s analysis of the essence of science into

an early, a transitional, and a late period, I will show not that there are several—and especially not two—Heideggers, but rather precisely that his work is an ongoing development. For indeed, these three periods in his thinking are bound together as an analysis of modern science and an uncovering of other possibilities for understanding nature. The role of representation in modern science—that is, the question of how scientific projection determines its object—is the decisive factor that underlies each account. I will trace the development of his thinking about science in five chapters. The remainder of this introduc-

tion first outlines the movement that binds these five chapters together and then summarizes the internal logic of each chapter. In the first chapter, I explore the relation between metaphysics, mathematics, and science. I show how Heidegger rejects Kant’s idealism as the basis on which to understand science. The next chapter lays out his argument that modern science is bound by the experimental method to a subjective metaphysics of representation. The third chapter explores his disillusionment with the university as the housing of the sciences and his questioning of the value of knowledge. The fourth chapter reads Heidegger on ancient science. I argue that the loss Heidegger sees in Plato

and Aristotle of a pre-Socratic insight into muotc, nature, provides him with a place for rethinking the essence of science in terms of possibilities that lie outside modern science. The final chapter analyzes Heidegger’s account of the relation between science and technology in order to interpret his claim that the essence of science lies in the essence of technology. I conclude with a brief comment on quantum theory in which I make sense of Heidegger’s denial that quantum physics is essentially different from Newtonian physics. The first of the following chapters is an explication of Heidegger’s early analysis of modern science, by which I mean his thinking in the years from 1916 to the mid-1930s. During these years Heidegger maintains, on the one hand (e.g., in Being and

INTRODUCTION 9 Time), that the essence of science is the mathematical projection of nature, and on the other hand (e.g., in Basic Problems of Phenomenology), that metaphysics is the science of being. The latter

thesis becomes for Heidegger problematic as he attempts to ground the sciences in metaphysics in Kantian style. His account

of metaphysics is very much tied up in his reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Having looked at this text several times already, he asks in 1935 in Die Frage nach dem Ding why it was both possible and necessary for Kant to write such a critique. At

precisely the point in the course where he raises this question explicitly, he turns from Kant to Galileo and Newton. Kant’s text is directed exactly at securing the certainty of Newton’s physics through the synthetic a priori nature of Euclidean geometry. Yet Heidegger’s analysis of the mathematical in modern science cuts more deeply than the claim that Newton’s physics is mathemati-

cal insofar as it uses Euclidean geometry to describe nature. Rather, Heidegger finds in the mathematical the a priori projection of certainty. He concludes that science entails a binding together of a metaphysics and an epistemology; that is, he shows that modern science entails an a priori stance toward what can be known. He explores this stance by looking to the scientific method itself. Hence he turns from a consideration of metaphysics as a science to the sciences themselves. The pivot by means of which Heidegger makes this turn is the experiment. Accordingly, the next chapter looks to the logic of

scientific development and methodology. I read Heidegger as arguing that the empirical is not the experiential as eusteroia was for Aristotle, and that the experimental method is a mathematical idealism. I raise three specific issues surrounding the experi-

ment and locate Heidegger’s treatment of these issues in the analytic debate. First, crucial experiments: is a single experimen-

tal result enough to prove or overturn a theory? Heidegger answers that it is. Second, the theory-loadedness of observation: does the informing of fact by theory preclude realism? Heidegger holds that it does not, but he displaces the debate. And third, representation in modern science: how does science represent its objects? Heidegger argues that it does so mathematically, but he radically revises that term. These issues lay a basis for Heidegger’s later critique of technology in their treatment of represen-

10 INTRODUCTION tation. Furthermore, they serve to explicate his claim that the essence of science is research, and to show that his central concerns are thematic in contemporary analytic philosophy of science.

The chapter on science in the institution investigates the Betriebscharakter of science. It is an account of Heidegger’s view of the role of the sciences in the university, and of his analysis of the university as the housing of the sciences. His vision is that the German university, grounded in the essence of science, can serve to guide the historical destiny of human being. Since Heidegger holds that human being is definitively constituted as inquirer, and he takes modern human being to inquire first and foremost as scientist, he envisions the university as the institution in which human being realizes itself in the modern epoch. His disillusionment with that vision comes with the realization that, whereas he calls for a renewal of science for the sake of the sciences themselves in their service of human being and the history of being, the Nazi call for a renewal of the sciences is toward their own political ends in shaping the destiny of the German people. What little I have to say about Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism is found in this chapter. The next chapter treats Heidegger’s view of ancient science. I focus first on Heidegger’s uncovering of being as @votc, nature, for the pre-Socratics, and then on the impact of Aristotle’s analogy of being on this earlier experience of nature. In Heidegger’s account, Aristotle narrowed the ancient conception of nature by maintaining that @uotc is one way of being among others. Nonetheless, he sees in Aristotle a glimmer of the pre-Socratic insight. This is Aristotle’s distinction between vous and téyvn, between nature and artifact, that has subsequently been lost in an understanding of nature by analogy to artifact. The emergence of modern science is therefore for Heidegger the culmination of a narrowing conception of nature that began with Aristotle. He reads Aristotle’s analogy of being by way of actuality and potentiality, well beyond Brentano’s analysis by way of the categories. His novel reading of the analogy thinks the difference between nature and artifact in Aristotle. The latter holds that things in nature move—that is, realize their end—of their own accord. An acorn, for example, moves toward its fulfillment as an oak tree

INTRODUCTION 11 on the basis of an internal drive. An artifact, however, requires something outside itself to bring it to fulfillment: an artist. This distinction echoes, Heidegger argues, the pre-Socratic understanding of being as @uotc, since it is as nature that being first and foremost comes to presence. Aristotle’s understanding of nature as form and matter, however, despite the priority he assigns to form, opens up the possibility of understanding nature by analogy to artifact. As the human artisan imposes form onto matter in the creative act, so nature can be understood as having a creator. Things in nature can be experienced as artifacts of divine origin. This possibility of understanding nature is for Heidegger decisive to the subsequent history of the West. He reads Aristotle’s Physics to rethink nature as more than an analogue of the artifact. In the final chapter I turn to the question of the relation between modern science and technology and substantiate my argument that the ancient distinction between qvotc and téxvn is not sustained in the modern epoch. In 1966, in a letter to Professor Schrynemakers, Heidegger suggests three sets of questions to the participants of a symposium on the influence of his thinking. The first is the question posed in Being and Time of the mean-

ing of being, whether that question has been taken up, if it is possible to do so, and how it characterizes his relation to the Western tradition of thinking. The second is the question of the limits of Being and Time, what an account of the epochs of being accomplishes as an interpretation of the age of technology. The third raises the issue of the relation of being to modern science.

Heidegger hopes the symposium will work out one of these questions. I suggest that these three questions are different formulations of the same issue that cannot be worked out separately. Being, science, and technology are bound together in a critique of modernity. Ten years later, in 1976, Heidegger formulates the question of science and technology as one question: “Is modern natural

science the foundation of modern technology—as is supposed—or is it, for its part, already the basic form of technologi-

cal thinking, the determining fore-conception and incessant incursion of technological representation into the realized and organized machinations of modern technology?” (MNST 3). In

12 INTRODUCTION Heidegger’s analysis, modern science is not simply the foundation of technology, but rather the basic form of technological thinking. His insight is that what was originally for the Greeks a difference so radical as to preclude identity through analogy is in modernity an unsustainable distinction. Hence Heidegger’s claim that the essence of science lies in the essence of technology. I trace his account of the relation between the two and show how he understands the essence of technology to have arisen out of the essence of modern science. For modern science moves much like ancient téyvn: the scientist begins with an idea which is then imposed onto nature. I close with a short comment on Heidegger’s view of quantum theory in which I argue that he recognizes no significant distinction between Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics. Al-

though Heidegger understands the difference between the mathematics of each, he holds that definitive of Newtonian physics is its projection of nature as a coherence of forces calculable in advance. Quantum physics shares this projection in Heidegger’s account. I use Bell’s inequalities to assess Heidegger’s

analysis of quantum physics in order to ask whether his view holds beyond the science of his day into more recent developments in quantum theory. It is impossible to pursue Heidegger’s philosophy of science without encountering the questions of metaphysics, technology, and representational thinking. This is not because Heidegger’s account of science is derivative upon these other issues, but rather because his developing views on science underlie these issues that are so significant to his thought. Although a substantial body of literature has developed in recent years on the question of Heidegger’s analysis of science, no text to date has systematically explored its place in his thinking. Grtinder’s claim that the problem of science pervades Heidegger’s writings continues to hold true beyond 1956 when Griinder made it. I show that the question of science is foundationally informative of Heidegger’s work and is basic to a novel and coherent, systematic account of his thinking, as well as a contribution to philosophy of science. This reading of Heidegger is radical. It cuts to the root of his thinking, for I argue that what are taken to be Heidegger’s many

INTRODUCTION 13 and significant contributions to philosophy—that is, his overcoming of metaphysics, his rereading of the ancients, his critique of technology and representational thinking, his vision and revi-

sion of language, truth and thinking—have at their core an inquiry into science that drove his thinking for sixty years. I am not arguing for a new reading of a few texts, or for adjustments and refinements of existing readings of Heidegger. Rather, I am bringing to light a new basis on which to interpret his work as a whole. I am not suggesting that there do not exist already insightful and important interpretations of his work. Heidegger may be right that “Every thinker thinks one only thought” (WCT

50/WHD 58), but the richness of the history of philosophy speaks to the multiple possibilities for envisioning such a thought. I read Heidegger’s thought as a philosophy of science.

1

Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Science HEIDEGGER’S ACCOUNT Of science can be concisely expressed by

the thesis that modern natural science consists in the mathematical projection of nature. This view is evident as early as 1916 in “Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft,’”” where he distinguishes history from natural science on the basis of the projection of the time concept in each. It is explicit in §69 of Being and

Time, where his analysis of the theoretical attitude echoes the account he gives of Galileo in 1916 and takes up again in 1935. The end of Heidegger’s early view of science is evident in that 1935 text, Die Frage nach dem Ding, as well as in Introduction to Metaphysics. In Die Frage nach dem Ding, Heidegger does not re-

linquish the idea that science is the mathematical projection of nature, but he has untangled that thesis from a second thesis central to his early view: that metaphysics is itself a science. Heidegger’s philosophy of science from 1916 to the mid-1930s cannot be understood apart from his account of metaphysics as science. Explication of this early view entails laying out his account of the relation between metaphysics and natural science. Heidegger begins by taking metaphysics to ground the sciences. He does not remain satisfied with this view, but rather eventually determines the relation between metaphysics and science as the mathematical. For Heidegger, the mathematical is that which is known beforehand and brought to experience by the understanding. In Being and Time and in Basic Problems of Phenomenol-

ogy, he begins his inquiry into the question of being with the ontic fact that any understanding of beings entails a prior projection of being. In Basic Problems of Phenomenology, the object of

fundamental ontology as Heidegger envisions it is being, and the task is the investigation of being in order to secure the sciences in their regional ontology.

METAPHYSICS, MATHEMATICS, AND SCIENCE 15

Regional ontology is the condition for the possibility of any science. Heidegger argues in Basic Problems of Phenomenology that

all non-philosophical sciences, that is, the positive sciences, “have as their theme some being or beings, and indeed in such a way that they are in every case antecedently given as beings to those sciences. They are posited by them in advance” (BPP 13/

GP 17). Sciences are positive in the sense that they posit their realm of objects in a regional ontology. Regional ontology is the determination of the subject area of a science by projection of what Heidegger calls, in Being and Time, ‘basic concepts” (BT 29/SZ 9). By projecting a basic concept, the scientist establishes a realm of possible objects of inquiry, a “world” in Heidegger’s second of the four senses of that term in Being and Time (BT 93/

SZ 64-65). Heidegger suggests that the movement of the sciences happens when their basic concepts ““undergo more or less radical revision” (BT 29/SZ 9), much as Thomas Kuhn argues that sciences move through paradigm shifts during crises. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics in 1929-30, Heidegger describes such a situation with respect to the life sciences. Biology,

he argues, confronts the task of developing ‘‘an entirely new projection of the objects of its enquiry” (FCM 188/GM 278). In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that the basic concepts of

a science are transparent to it, as Kuhn holds in his historical analysis that paradigms shifts come from within the sciences themselves. In the 1929-30 lectures, however, the situation is not quite so simple. Heidegger describes a circular interrelatedness

between metaphysics and science. The proposition that expresses the presupposition essential to, in Heidegger’s example, zoology, does not come from zoology, yet it cannot be “‘elucidated independently of zoology either” (FCM 187/GM 276). What is this interrelatedness? Heidegger argues that ordinary understanding finds such circularity objectionable, and he insists that the movement is not dialectic. Later, throughout several texts but especially in ‘Science and Reflection,” Heidegger will argue that no science has access to its own essence; he calls a science’s basic concept “das Unumgiingliche” (SR 177/VA 60), that which cannot be gotten around. No science can raise the question of the projection of the being of its objects that makes it possible. Yet the move to this blindness on the part of the sci-

16 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE ences—called ‘‘one-sidedness” in What Is Called Thinking?—and

hence to the problem of whence comes critical thinking of science is a development in Heidegger’s thinking. In Being and Time and Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger holds that phenomenology is the method of scientific philosophy that can raise precisely the question of the grounding of the sciences in their a priori projection of being.

In Being and Time, Heidegger uses phenomenology as the method for raising the question of being. Both this text and Basic Problems of Phenomenology explore temporality as fundamental to the constitution of Dasein, and both texts are aborted projects. In §69 of Being and Time, Heidegger analyzes the shift in under-

standing from everyday, concernful dealings to the theoretical attitude. He is interested in the change in understanding being that the theoretical attitude involves. As in Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger holds in Being and Time that an under-

standing of being underwrites the sciences, and his interest is in laying this understanding bare. Hence the theses that philosophy is a science and that science is the mathematical projection of nature are entwined in Heidegger’s phenomenology: scientific philosophy raises the question of the projection of being at work in the sciences. That is to say, philosophy is a science for Heidegger insofar as it is metaphysics, and metaphysics unfolds in 1927 in two tasks: first, Being and Time is an attempt at an analytic of Dasein; and second, Basic Problems of Phenomenology

is an attempt at grounding the sciences. In 1928, these two tasks coincide in the self-undermining of metaphysics. Heidegger argues in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic that the concept of metaphysics consists in fundamental ontology and metontology (MFL 158/MAL 202). He introduces metontology to characterize the recoil (Umschlag) at the heart of fundamental ontology in which ontology turns back on itself by placing into question the very notion of questioning. In William McNeill’s reading of this obscure moment of recoil, Dasein as questioner is unsettled. McNeill argues (1992:76) that the shift (Umschlag) Heidegger describes in §69 of Being and Time, which he attempts to analyze again in Basic Problems of Phenomenology,

is this very turning into metontology in which ontology recoils upon itself, and that this moment of recoil is found again in the

METAPHYSICS, MATHEMATICS, AND SCIENCE 17

interpretation of Antigone in Introduction to Metaphysics. In the former two texts, argues McNeill, the withdrawal of the meaning of being is so radical that the possibility of thematizing the projection of beings as a whole is “far from assured” (1992:77). In Introduction to Metaphysics, the question of being is displaced by

the withdrawal of being which prevails as being’s appearance in beings: “because such withdrawal prevails precisely as the appearing of being in beings, being can no longer be thought of as the ‘earlier,’ the apriori ground of beings” (McNeill 1992:78). The year 1935 is therefore a crucial one in Heidegger’s thinking.

The thesis that has driven his inquiry into being through Being and Time and Basic Problems of Phenomenology, that being is an a

priori project, stands in conflict with the regional ontologies of the sciences. For the apophantic moment in which beings are uncovered is the withdrawal of being, not its presencing for thinking. McNeill’s reading of metontology can be applied to the tension at the heart of the entanglement of scientific philosophy with the sciences understood as the mathematical projection of nature. When the a priori projection of being becomes problematic because it is a withdrawal and not a presence, the projection of being at work in the regional ontology of science becomes likewise awkward. If phenomenological inquiry with being as its object is no longer possible, since the a priori nature of such an understanding of being has been undermined, then the question of what metaphysical assumptions underwrite science be-

comes not only sensible but also demanded: if being’s withdrawal precludes its aprioricity, then on what basis can the sciences be taken to have a metaphysical grounding? It is precisely this question that Heidegger asks in Die Frage nach dem Ding, and which he answers with the notion of the mathematical.

Accordingly, the two theses that Heidegger holds until the 1930s with respect to science—that philosophy is itself scientific

and that science is the mathematical projection of nature—are entangled insofar as he takes the task of scientific philosophy to be the investigation of being as a means for establishing the regional ontologies of the sciences on sure ground. The possibility of such an investigation is undermined by the realization that

18 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

the projection of the being of beings is simultaneously a withdrawal of being. Hence Heidegger is drawn to the question of the metaphysical ground of the sciences, an investigation he undertakes in Die Frage nach dem Ding by uncovering the metaphys-

ics of modern science at work in Galileo and Newton and quintessentially formulated in Descartes’s foundation of the sciences upon the self-certainty of the knowing subject. Heidegger’s move from philosophy as science to the question

of the sciences themselves can be thought through by tracing the separation of the two theses that characterize his early view. Heidegger gives up the thesis that philosophy is scientific, and subsequently goes on to rethink the thesis that science is the mathematical projection of nature. He does not simply turn from metaphysics and thereby come to science. Rather, his thinking is driven by the question of being, and I argue that the failure of his attempt to give the sciences a metaphysical grounding is at the heart of his turn away from metaphysics. To examine Heidegger’s thesis that philosophy is itself a science, one must read that thesis against the background of Husserl’s conception of rigorously scientific philosophy: phenomenology. Joseph Kockelmans (1985) has given an extensive treatment of the Hegelian and Husserlian background against which Heidegger’s thinking of science comes about. Rather than repeat that work, I will point only to the question of philosophy as rigorous science. Heidegger repudiates Husserl’s epoché and prefers to make ontology central rather than bracket it. For Heidegger argues that whereas ontic sciences proceed on the basis of a regional ontology, taking as object some realm of being, scientific philosophy (i.e., ontology) takes as its object being itself. His break with Husserl, despite the apparent ambivalence he shows toward Husserl in 1925 in History of the Concept of Time,

is his insistence that ontology is precisely the issue at stake if philosophy is to be properly scientific. It is the history of ontology that Heidegger wishes to destructure in Being and Time, and it is ontology that he names as scientific philosophy in Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Yet these texts lead Heidegger to the question, what is metaphysics? Hei-

degger’s reading of Husserl leads him to Kant and away from the claim that ontology is the science that has being as its object,

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to the claim that being is not an object at all. In his entanglement

with Kant, Heidegger fails to distinguish the pure from the a priori in the first Critique. Hence when Heidegger appeals to the

notion of certainty in modern science, he calls that certainty mathematical rather than a priori. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, situated between the inquiries into ontology and the 1929 address on metaphysics, is the text wherein Heidegger makes the shift from ontology to metaphysics. Heidegger holds, under the influence of Husserl, that philosophy is a science; and against Husserl, that scientific philosophy is ontology. The latter claim pushes Heidegger back to Kant, wherein he confronts metaphysics. It is Heidegger’s overcoming of Kant that constitutes as a single move his abandonment of the claim that philosophy is itself a science and his abandonment of metaphysics. That move is the insight in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics that philosophy cannot provide a ground for the sciences. Philosophy as science had always been intended by Heidegger to do exactly that, and hence in discarding that task he discards the thesis that philosophy is a science. Having worked through the history of philosophy as science, Heidegger is drawn to the sciences. In 1929, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, he thematizes the life sciences, specifically biology and zoology; and in 1935, in Die Frage nach dem Ding, he treats explicitly the physics of Galileo and Newton. In the claim that science consists in the mathematical projection of nature, Heidegger considers science in the narrow sense of natural science. He examines Galileo’s free-fall experiment and Newton’s first law of motion as a rethinking of the mathematical. On the basis of a radical interpretation, Heidegger proposes that the mathematical is the metaphysical moment of modern science. My strategy is therefore straightforward. I look at how philosophy as rigorous science is different in Heidegger’s account from Husserl’s, and then assess Heidegger’s reading of Kant on metaphysics and the a priori. This will bring me directly to the notion of the mathematical in Heidegger, and I will examine the thesis that physics consists in the mathematical projection of nature in Heidegger’s analyses of Galileo and Newton. A concluding section on metaphysics and the mathematical will lay the groundwork for Heidegger’s subsequent philosophy of sci-

20 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

ence. Hence this chapter shows how Heidegger moves from philosophy as science to philosophy of science. HUSSERL: PHILOSOPHY AS RIGOROUS SCIENCE

In 1925, Heidegger argues that it was Husserl who founded scientific philosophy as phenomenology in his Logical Investigations (HCT 24/PGZ 30). In Being and Time, Heidegger acknowledges several debts to Husserl. He dedicates the book to him and appropriates his maxim of phenomenology, ““Io the things them-

selves’ (BT 58/SZ 34). In a footnote, he says that Husserl “enabled us to understand once more the meaning of any genuine philosophical empiricism” (BT 490, n. x/SZ 50, Anm. x). In another note, he attributes to Husserl the temporal interpretation of metaphysics as presence that he himself intends to investigate as an exploration of the ecstatical unity of Dasein (BT 498, n. xxiii/SZ 363, Anm. xxiii), but which remained unpublished. He further claims that Husserl’s Logical Investigations prepared the ground for Being and Time, since it was therein that phenomenology first emerged (BT 62/SZ 38). Yet Heidegger rejects Husserl’s phenomenology by arguing that what is essential in phenomenology is not its actuality as a philosophical movement. ‘Higher than actuality stands possibility’’ (BT 63/SZ 38), and it is the possibility of phenomenology that Heidegger wishes to seize upon. When he distinguishes his project from anthropology, he cites Husserl’s ““Philosophy as Rigorous Science” for the recognition that a person is not a thing (BT 73, n. v/SZ 47-48), that is, Dasein is not simply present-athand. Yet when he argues that the limitation of the anthropological inquiry is that “the cogitationes are either left ontologically undetermined, or get tacitly assumed as something ‘self-evidently’ ‘given’ whose ‘Being’ is not to be questioned” (BT 75/ SZ 49), he must be referring to Husserl. In Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger locates this criticism of Husserl—that he fails to question being—in the epoché. Heidegger did not allow the text of his 1927 lecture course on phenomenology to be published until 1975, when it appeared as Volume 24 of the Gesamtausgabe. The explicit acknowledgment

METAPHYSICS, MATHEMATICS, AND SCIENCE 21

of Husserlian phenomenology found in Being and Time is not evident in Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Yet the introduction

appears to have been cribbed from Husserl’s contribution to the first volume of Logos in 1911, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.” Here Husserl distinguishes phenomenology as scientific philosophy from Weltanschauung philosophy, precisely the distinction at work in Heidegger’s introduction to Basic Problems of Phenomenology.

Husserl argues in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” for a philosophy that is scientific, rather than either naturalism or Weltan-

schauung philosophy. Naturalism in his account naturalizes consciousness and ideas on the basis of empirical science. The naturalist, Husserl claims, seeks to lay out the natural laws of thinking and “‘believes that through natural science and through a philosophy based on the same science the goal has for the most part been attained” (PRS 169). Like contemporary cognitive sci-

ence, naturalism looks for laws of nature to describe thought. But, criticizes Husserl, this position is self-refuting since it begins with a theoretical absurdity. Since it binds itself to empirical science, which deals only in bodies, and consciousness is not a

body, Husserl sees implicit in naturalism the preclusion of the very thing it seeks to investigate. Insofar as contemporary cognitive science looks to the brain to explain the mind, it is susceptible to the same criticism. Husserl suggests ‘‘a phenomenology of consciousness as opposed to a natural science about consciousness” (PRS 173).

This phenomenology investigates the intentional correlates of consciousness and hence clarifies all fundamental kinds of objectivities. It pursues the relation between consciousness and being

not as the relation between mind and bodies but rather as the relation between subjective consciousness and intentional objects within consciousness. Hence it is related to psychology, but whereas psychology concerns itself with empirical conscious-

ness, phenomenology in Husserl’s sense deals with pure consciousness, that is, essences and essential relations. It ““makes no use of the existential positing of nature’’ (PRS 183) but seeks to investigate what the psychic is. Psychology, on the other hand, begins with a supposition of the psychic, and hence Husserl calls absurd its hope to “give scientific value to the designation of the

22 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

psychical” (PRS 184). Hence Husserl’s philosophy as rigorous science can be neither naturalism nor psychology. Furthermore, Husserl is not arguing for Weltanschauung philosophy. The latter seeks the wisdom of the age, he claims, that “according to the situation of the time, harmoniously satisfies both intellect and feeling’ (PRS 194). Scientific philosophy, on the other hand, is impersonal and requires not wisdom but theoretical talent by means of which it “increases a treasure of eternal validities’”’ (PRS 195). It bears the stamp of eternity, and hence it “‘alone is capable of providing a foundation for a philosophy of spirit’ (PRS 189). Indeed, this is what scientific philosophy is about in Husserl’s view: it is radical and foundational, a science of true beginnings, of origins, and it “must not rest until it has attained its own absolutely clear beginnings” (PRS 196). Husserl envisions this philosophy as a scientific critique of reason that has a rigorous method of proceeding and which provides a sure foundation both for itself and for cultural practices like the sciences. Likewise, Heidegger rejects worldview philosophy as inadequately radical in Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Like Husserl,

he finds that worldview philosophy is limited by its belonging to “the particular contemporary Dasein at any given time’”’ (BPP 6/GP 7). It arises for a particular factical Dasein. Although Heidegger is interested precisely in the scientific construction of a worldview, his philosophy “must define what in general constitutes the structure of a worldview” (BPP 10/GP 13). Hence that philosophy is not directed at the formation of a particular worldview, but nonetheless remains at the foundation of worldview formation. Accordingly, Heidegger’s phenomenology is, like Husserl’s, an alternative to Weltanschauung philosophy. But Heidegger’s conception of phenomenology is fundamentally at odds with Husserl’s. For both Heidegger and Husserl, phenomenology is a method, and for each it begins with a reduction. Yet their reductions move in opposite directions. Husserl turns away from the question of being. He is prepared, at §148 to §150 of Ideas, for example, to take up the questions of formal and regional ontology. But he disregards the question of being by suggesting that for his inquiry, fantasies such as “‘winged horses, white ravens,

METAPHYSICS, MATHEMATICS, AND SCIENCE 23

golden mountains, and the like” (Husserl 1983:356/Ideen 310) serve just as well as examples of physical objects as things in actual experience. Husserl is interested in physical objects as intentional correlates of consciousness and not as bodies constituted outside of consciousness. Subsequently, he claims at §59 of Cartesian Meditations that the task of an ontology of the real world is, though necessary, not philosophical, and at §60 of the same text that the results of his inquiry are metaphysical only as “anything but metaphysics in the customary sense” (1960:139; 1950:166). Husserl’s concern is meaning, not being. And indeed, Heidegger repudiates Husserl in 1929 precisely for his idealistic epistemology, for failing to “ask the question about the being constituted as consciousness” (MFL 133/MAL 167). Whereas Husserl’s epoché is the bracketing of ontology, for Heidegger “phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being... to the understanding of the being of this being” (BPP 21/GP 29). Heidegger’s reduction is precisely to the question of being. It is first a negative move away from the particular being, and second a positive construction of being that brings it into view “in a free projection” (BPP 22/GP 29). This projection is free in that it does not reduce being by making it accessible as a being. These two basic components of Heidegger’s method, combined with the destruction of traditional use of concepts as the third, are ““philosophy as science, . . . the concept of phenomenological investigation” (BPP 23/GP 31). Phenomenology is for Heidegger the scientific method of ontology, and he therefore rejects Husserl’s phenomenology, which begins by precluding the question of being. Heidegger’s criticism of Husserl here leads him directly to Kant, and indeed Heidegger’s focal criticism of Husserl is that he is neo-Kantian. He charges Husserl with following Kant in taking existence to mean extantness (BPP 28/GP 36), and later with using Descartes’s distinction between res cogitans and res extensa in order to characterize subjectivity (BPP 124-25/GP 175-76). Hence Husserl’s separation of beings into subjectivity and objectivity presses the question of the unity of being. Yet, as Hofstadter notes in the introduction to his translation, Heidegger chooses Kant, not Husserl, “as the most suitable rep-

24 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

resentative of the problem” (BPP xvi). Heidegger has already argued in 1925, in History of the Concept of Time, that the Marburg

school misinterprets Kant by appropriating him to psychology, that is, by reading him as “working out the constitutive moments of knowledge in the form of a science of consciousness” (HCT 16/PGZ 18). For Heidegger, reading Kant is an opportunity to think his work as metaphysics rather than epistemology, and to retrieve a “philosophy of science’”” (HCT 16/PGZ 18), as he called it in 1925, that is obscured by Husserlian psychologistic subjectivism. In his investigation into the thesis of logic, the “is” of the cop-

ula, Heidegger commends Husserl for bringing logic to light. But he “did not succeed in conceiving logic philosophically”’ (BPP 178/GP 253), rather tending to develop it as a separate science in the conceptual schemata of neo-Kantianism. Heidegger takes such preoccupation with propositional logic in ques-

tioning truth and being to be a “principal criterion of neoKantianism”’ (BPP 201/GP 286) and argues that it was Husserl who first drew the distinction between making a judgment and its factual content that makes such an approach possible. Husserl is accordingly not only neo-Kantian for Heidegger, but further, a basis for neo-Kantianism. Hence Heidegger’s treatment of Husserl in Basic Problems of Phenomenology brings him face-to-

face with Kant.

Indeed, in his rejection of worldview philosophy, Heidegger pinpoints the entry of the word “Weltanschauung”’ into philosophy in Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Here it means “’a beholding of the world as simple apprehension of nature in the broadest sense” (BPP 4/GP 6). He says that this usage dies out, but he attempts to retrieve something of it by appealing to Kant’s distinction between the academic and cosmic concepts of philosophy. The latter investigates the end of human reason, that for the sake of which reason is what it is, while the former is “the whole of all the formal and material fundamental concepts and principles of rational knowledge” (BPP 8/GP 10). This gets at the distinction Heidegger wants to draw between scientific and worldview philosophy, since in making his distinction Kant brings the question of the end of human reason to the center of the question of philosophy. But it is an inadequate distinction

METAPHYSICS, MATHEMATICS, AND SCIENCE 25

for Heidegger, since philosophy in the cosmic sense does not have as its task the question of the development of a worldview, and Heidegger’s inquiry, though not directed at the formation of a particular worldview, is aimed at the foundation of worldview formation. Accordingly, Heidegger does not set his task in the early years differently from Husserl’s vision of his task. Both seek to investi-

gate what is foundational and hence prior to a worldview, and both resist naturalism, psychology, and the entrenchment of philosophy in a worldview. Yet the two are in fundamental disagreement about what the scientific philosophy is that pursues their chosen task. Each calls his method phenomenology, but whereas for Husserl that means the radical investigation of consciousness and not being, for Heidegger it means precisely the question of being. So formulated, Heidegger’s phenomenology leads him from Husserl back to Kant. KANT AND METAPHYSICS: GROUNDING SCIENCE

Heidegger’s early view of the sciences is colored by his commit-

ment to metaphysics, which is for him philosophy proper because he holds that metaphysics is itself a science: the science of being. Basic Problems of Phenomenology operates within a tension

in which metaphysics understood as ontology is a science, yet thoroughly distinct in Heidegger’s view from the sciences. He separates them on the basis that the sciences are positive, that is, they work with some realm of beings whose being is posited. Metaphysics, however, has as its object being rather than a particular realm of beings. Whereas sciences proceed on the basis of regional ontology, scientific philosophy is fundamental ontology. In 1929, two years after Being and Time, Kant and the Problem of

Metaphysics was published. This text begins the separation of philosophy and the sciences that will serve as the basis for Heidegger’s critique of representational thinking. His abandonment of metaphysics as the science of being and his later critique of the sciences both arise from a tension in his reading of Kant: on the one hand, ontology is the science of being; on the other hand,

26 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

it is not a positive science. This astoeta dissolves in the claim that

being is not an object of cognition. But therefore philosophical thinking cannot be for Heidegger a positive science. His interpretation of Kant plays a key role in his thinking on the relation between and subsequent separation of metaphysics and science. In Being and Time, Heidegger distinguishes everyday understanding from the theoretical attitude. Basic Problems of Phenome-

nology aligns ontology with the theoretical attitude since Heidegger argues that philosophy is itself a science, “the science of being” (BPP 11ff./GP 15). Ontology is so scientific that ‘the expression ‘scientific philosophy’ contains a pleonasm” (BPP 4/ GP 4). Heidegger’s concern in Basic Problems of Phenomenology is

to show that scientific philosophy is ontology, and thereby to retrieve the question of being from its history. Yet ontology occu-

pies the ambiguous position here that, though a science, it is distinguished from the positive sciences. The difference between the positive sciences and ontology is that whereas positive sci-

ences “deal with that which is, with beings . . . with specific domains, for instance, nature’ (BPP 13/GP 17), philosophy has being as its object. The positive sciences are grounded in regional ontology and are only possible on the basis of that prior understanding of being. The task of ontology is precisely the inquiry into that prior understanding. Heidegger rejects ontotheology in his ubiquitous claim that being is not itself a being. In both Basic Problems of Phenomenology

and Being and Time, he attributes to Kant the thesis that “being is not a real predicate” (BPP 27ff./GP 35; BT 127/SZ 94). In the latter text, he explains that this claim means exactly that being is not accessible as an entity (BT 127/SZ 94; cf. BT 23/SZ 4). In the former, he explains further that the claim that being is not a real predicate means “that something like existence does not belong to the determinateness of a concept at all” (BPP 32/GP 42). The distinction at work here between existence and reality is one he draws from Kant. Heidegger argues that reality for Kant is synonymous with > Leibniz’s term possibilitas. Realities are ‘‘the what-contents of possible things in general without regard to whether or not they are actual” (BPP 34/GP 45). Reality belongs to the category of quality, whereas existence belongs to the category of modality.

METAPHYSICS, MATHEMATICS, AND SCIENCE 2/

Heidegger gives Kant’s example at B627 of the first Critique of one hundred possible thalers, which contain no less coin than one hundred actual thalers (BPP 38/GP 50-51). The what-content of each—that is, the predicates attributable to each—is the same. Kant uses this point to show the impossibility of an ontological proof for the existence of God and claims that “we can no more extend our stock of [theoretical] insight by mere ideas, than a merchant can better his position by adding a few noughts to his cash account” (A602/B630). Reality consists of such whatcontents and has nothing to do with existence. Existence goes beyond real predicates in Kant’s account, and is a uniting of the concept with the actual thing. This relation is “added to my concept synthetically” (A599/B627). It goes outside the concept of the thing (CPR A6-7, B10-—11; BPP 41). Exis-

tence exceeds reality to the absolute position of the thing, to its positedness as a being. What is posited when one posits existence is a relation between an object and a knowing subject: existence “expresses a relationship of the object to the cognitive faculty” (BPP 45/GP 61). Being is position. The entity corresponding to the concept is positioned in relation to the concept when it is thought as existent. This sense of positioning a being in being in relation to a thinker is the sense in which the sciences are for Heidegger positive. That being is not a real predicate and

that being is position are therefore read by Heidegger as the same claim. Heidegger is, however, in spite of the fact that Kant’s distinc-

tion between existence and reality is useful for his strategy of distinguishing ontology as science from the positive sciences, critical of Kant’s metaphysics. He reaches his interpretation by asking how Kant defines the meaning of existence positively (BPP 43/GP 58). His answer is perception (BPP 46/GP 62), for it is in perception that an object is positioned in space and time in relation to a knowing subject. In Being and Time, Heidegger accuses Kant of simply repeating Descartes’s principle of equating existents with res extensa in a renunciation of “the possibility of a pure problematic of Being” (BT 127/SZ 94). Likewise, here in Basic Problems of Phenomenology, he argues that Kant’s commit-

ment to existence as extantness forecloses prematurely on the question of being by interpreting being as position.

28 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

For, argues Heidegger, extantness belongs to an existent thing whether it is perceived or not, since it is only on the basis of a prior extantness that a thing can be perceived (BPP 49, 70ff./GP 66, 98-99). Extantness is a sufficient but not necessary condition for being perceived. Accordingly, Heidegger objects that ““posi-

tion in the sense of positedness is not the being of beings .. . rather, it is at most the how of being apprehended of something posited” (BPP 49 /GP 49). Kant’s account of being falls short. Although in 1925, in History of the Concept of Time, Heidegger saw the possibility of a retrieval of Kant away from epistemology and toward metaphysics, and the promise in Kant of a treatment of the question of being, in 1927 he finds the latter hope disappointed. Yet Kant’s metaphysics is the location Heidegger chooses to begin his laying bare of the basic problems of phenomenology. For Kant’s claim that existence is added synthetically to the concept is food for thought about being. In fact, Kant’s synthetic a

priori cannot but be intriguing to the thinker who argues in Being and Time that the understanding which discloses entities in their possibility has a projective fore-structure that understands

being (BT 192-93/SZ 151). Heidegger asks whether simply to say that this “fore” is “a priori’ is to conceive adequately of its character. And he finds that it is not, for the a priori project is of meaning, which characterizes Dasein, and he instead wishes “’to make the scientific theme secure by working out these forestructures in terms of the things themselves” (BT 195/SZ 153). In other words, the inquiry of Being and Time is scientific insofar as it investigates not transcendental subjectivity, but rather the question of being. Hence the eventual abandonment of the project of Being and Time. As long as Heidegger undertakes his journey around the hermeneutic circle as an analytic of Dasein, he will remain in an idealist metaphysics. But he is not yet ready to give up the attempt to retrieve philosophy from that history of metaphysics as idealism. Instead, he goes at the problem differently in Basic Problems of Phenomenology. He seeks still a scientific philosophy for which the basic issue is the question of being, but in this text he explores the relation between ontology and the sciences. The

positive sciences provide Heidegger with a different access to

METAPHYSICS, MATHEMATICS, AND SCIENCE 29

the question of the projection of being, since each positive science is grounded in a regional ontology, precisely such a projection. Hence the grounding of the positive sciences is a perfect location for scrutinizing the a priori nature of understanding in which being is that a priori. Early in Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger raises the

question of being as a problem of the a priori (BPP 20/GP 27). Being is always prior to beings in understanding. It is not prior in the sense of clock time, but in the sense that “it is implicit in the basic constitution of the Dasein itself that, in existing, the Dasein also already understands the mode of being of the extant” (BPP 71 /GP 100). Likewise, in Being and Time, Heidegger notes the a priori nature of being in a world for Dasein (BT 144/ SZ 110; cf. BT 249/SZ 206). Furthermore, in Basic Problems of Phenomenology, he comes back to the question of the a priori in his closing statement. Plato is “the discoverer of the a priori” (BPP 326 /GP 463-64) who expresses that discovery in his doctrine that “learning itself is nothing but recollection” (BPP 326/ GP 464-65). Demythologizing this claim, Heidegger interprets it to mean that “being has the character of the prius which the human being, who is familiar first and foremost with beings, has forgotten” (BPP 326 /GP 465). Liberation from Plato’s cave is precisely the retrieval of the a priori (i.e., being) from this oblivion in forgottenness. What is at stake in Basic Problems of Phenom-

enology is how being stands as an a priori in the ontological difference.

On this basis, Heidegger argues that there is a twofold possibility of objectivity and therefore two possible types of science: “objectification of beings as positive science; objectification of being as Temporal or transcendental science” (BPP 327/GP 466). That is, there are positive sciences whose grounds are laid in regional ontologies, the objectification of beings, and there is in Heidegger’s account a further science that objectifies being yet is not grounded in a regional ontology. This is the science of

being, and it is not positive for Heidegger. It does not posit being, but rather seeks to explain ‘‘why the ontological determinations of being have the character of apriority” (BPP 325/GP 462) by means of an inquiry into the temporality of the understanding of being.

30 HEIDEGGER S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Hence under Heidegger’s reading, Kant, rather than denying the possibility of metaphysics, “is in search precisely of a scientific metaphysics, a scientific ontology’”’ (BPP 30/GP 39). Yet in that reading, Kant’s search fails. Kant speaks of the concept of being, but in Der einzig mégliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes (S.78) he declares it an unanalyzable concept. The suggestion “that the concept of “Being’ is indefinable”’

(BT 23/SZ 4) is one of the three presuppositions against which Heidegger argues for the necessity of raising the question of ~ being in the opening pages of Being and Time. The meaning of being is not eliminated as a question by the indefinability of the concept. The latter shows, rather, that this question must be faced. Kant never faces it, argues Heidegger in Basic Problems of Phe-

nomenology, since he does not go beyond understanding being as position to the analysis called for by the indefinability of the concept. Likewise, Heidegger argues in Being and Time that Kant failed to achieve insight into the problem of temporality because “he altogether neglected the problem of Being .. . [and] failed to provide an ontology with Dasein as its theme” (BT 45/SZ 24).

Heidegger does recognize that the problems of a theory of knowledge and of the question of being are related. He argues that attempts to solve the problem of reality “in ways which are just ‘epistemological’ ” (BT 252/SZ 208) show that the problem, as ontological, must be taken back to an existential analytic of Dasein. But Heidegger’s call to an analytic of Dasein toward a renewed metaphysics is a question of emphasis and a shift away from neo-Kantian interpretations. That is, it is an attempt to do ontology by means of an inquiry into human understanding that does not reduce the issue to idealism. Heidegger sees himself in Being and Time and Basic Problems of

Phenomenology as a revisionist. He is undertaking the Kantian task of grounding knowledge, but revising that task to achieve it successfully through an analysis of temporality. Kant’s Copernican revolution can be truly revolutionary—in fact, scientific— for Heidegger only as an analytic of Dasein that does not lose sight of the question of being. Basic Problems of Phenomenology is then for Heidegger, as was Being and Time, an attempt to retrieve

the question of ontology from its collapse into epistemology

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through an analytic of Dasein. He reads Kant as undertaking also precisely that task, but failing in that he does not see beyond being as position. Heidegger of course fails also insofar as both

these texts remain incomplete. He undertakes the task again in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Once again he locates his inquiry in the relation between philosophy and the sciences, specifically, metaphysics and physics. The development of Heideg-

ger’s thinking from the earlier two attempts is that now he denies that relation is one of ground, and on this basis he argues

that his inquiry is into being, not knowledge. | Heidegger argues in 1929 in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics

that there is a specific sense in which Kant’s first Critique is not about knowledge. That is to say, “ontology in no way refers pri-

marily to the laying of the ground for the positive sciences” (KPM 8/KM 12), but rather serves a “higher interest” of reason. This claim is a shift in Heidegger’s thinking. It is a rejection of the Husserlian thesis that philosophy is a rigorous science in the sense that its primary task is a securing of the epistemological foundation of the sciences. Heidegger argues in 1929, as he has consistently argued before, that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is to be read as a ground-laying of the problem of metaphysics, not as a question of epistemology. He again takes exception to neoKantian readings of the Critique as a theory of knowledge. But for the first time he voices his discomfort with the neo-Kantians as the suggestion that the relation between metaphysics and the sciences is not one of ground. The question of being is for Kant,

he argues, rather a transcendental inquiry. It is formulated on the assumption that objects must conform to our knowledge (KPM 8/KM 12-13). The issue is not What must things be like such that we can know them?, but What are the structures of

knowledge to which objects must conform in order to be known? This is taken as Kant’s Copernican revolution precisely in that it rewrites the question of knowledge as the question of the constitution of the transcendental subject rather than as the question of the constitution of things. But, Heidegger argues, Kant’s inquiry does not shake the tra-

ditional account of truth as correspondence. Rather, foreshadowing ‘On the Essence of Truth,” Heidegger argues that Kant’s inquiry “actually presupposes it, indeed even grounds it for the

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first time’ (KPM 8/KM 13), by showing that ontic truth can only achieve such correspondence if the being as a being is already

apparent in its being, that is, on the basis of ontological truth. Kant’s thinking is not revolutionary for Heidegger because it shifts the focus of the question of truth to the subject. Yet Heidegger sees in Kant’s Copernican revolution the forcing of the question of ontology. He says the year before that reading an epistemological intent in Kant as a Copernican revolution is a misunderstanding (MFL 142/MAL 179). For Heidegger reads Kant as turning back the question of knowledge to its ground in the pre-understanding of being that makes any knowledge of particular beings possible (KPM 11/KM 17). Accordingly, the knowledge of beings that is the sciences, for

which an object is given in its being beforehand in a regional ontology, is exactly what Heidegger does not wish to pursue and does not see pursued in Kant’s first Critique. Heidegger’s claim that the purpose of the Critique is not primarily to ground the positive sciences is in essence the argument that ontology is not simply propaedeutic to the positive sciences. In 1929 Heideg-

ger is concerned to distinguish ontology from the positive sciences, that is, metaphysics from physics, as he was in Basic Problems of Phenomenology. In 1929 metaphysics is taken as ground-laying for the sciences, but ground-laying is now understood as “elucidation of the essence of comporting toward be-

ings in which this essence shows itself in itself so that all assertions about it become provable on the basis of it” (KPM 7/ KM 10). Metaphysics establishes a comportment toward beings on the basis of which hypotheses can be proven. This change in view came about the year before. In fact, in 1928 Heidegger argued, contrary to his earlier view, that ontology is not a science. In 1928 Heidegger gave the lecture course that is published under the title The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Here he thought through the conjunction of the idea of being with the idea of ground. He argues that the problem of ground is also the central problem of logic (MFL 117/MAL 144-45). But for

Heidegger, “logic is nothing other than the metaphysics of truth” (MFL 213/MAL 275). Truth is already thought in this text

as the presence of being that makes possible the assertion and its correspondence. Ground is thus understood by Heidegger in

METAPHYSICS, MATHEMATICS, AND SCIENCE 33

terms of Dasein’s transcendence. Because Dasein transcends, it is free to think toward ends and reasons, hence to ask, why? Heidegger formulates ground as “essence, cause, truth or argument, intention” (MFL 115/MAL 143). In taking beings as their object, the positive sciences obviously then inquire into grounds. But what of their ground? Heidegger argues that ontology— that is, the question of beings as a whole—is not “a summary ontic in the sense of a general science that empirically assembles the results of the individual sciences” (MFL 157/MAL 199-200). One cannot simply combine the regional ontologies of the sciences to get at ontology. Accordingly, Heidegger argues for the first time, in what for him is a radical change from his earlier view, that “nonsensical at bottom is the expression ‘scientific philosophy,’ because philosophy is prior to all science, and can be so only because it is already, in an eminent sense, what ‘science’ can be only in a derived sense’”’ (MFL 180/MAL 199-231). In his supplement, Heidegger again explicitly rejects the thesis that philosophy is a science. His claim is that in order to ground the sciences, philosophy must be something quite different from them. The thesis that philosophy is a science is given up precisely in order to argue that the task of philosophy, albeit not its only or primary task, is the grounding of the sciences. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, when Heidegger again takes up the question of the metaphysical grounding of the sciences, he argues that metaphysics lays the ground for the sci-

ences by establishing a comportment toward beings that is secure in its own truth. The possibility of such comporting lies in the method of the natural sciences, upon which, according to Kant, “a light broke. . . . They realized that reason has insight only into what it produces itself according to its own design’”’ (CPR Bxiii; KPM 7/KM 10). Heidegger interprets this observation as the recognition of a preliminary understanding of being at work in the sciences, and he focuses on the fact that it is being

that is understood rather than on the a priori nature of such understanding. Since what makes the sciences possible is their preliminary understanding of being, ontology stands in relation to the sciences. Regional ontologies, not fundamental ontology, eround the sciences. Fundamental ontology is an inquiry into

34 HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE Dasein, as, for example, in Being and Time. A regional ontology, and not metaphysics, grounds physics in Heidegger’s account.

For, he argues, the relation between the two is such that one only comes to metaphysics through physics. Heidegger quotes Heinze on metaphysics: “It is a science that is, so to speak, outside of the field of physics, which lies on the other side of it” (KPM 4/KM 7). Metaphysics is meta precisely in that it is beyond

physics, not prior to it. One does not, as the history of science shows, have first to do ontology to make scientific investigation possible. In Being and Time Heidegger argued that the sciences cannot and should not wait for philosophy to do its ontological work before they proceed (BT 76/SZ 51). He argued there that the task of philosophy is not one of grounding, but of recapitulating ontic discovery in greater ontological transparency. The in-

sight that reason can be certain only of what it itself projects is an indication of a ““fundamental conditional connection between ontic experience and ontological knowledge” (KPM 7/KM 12). One comes to the problem of fundamental ontology only when the sciences have done their work such that a preliminary understanding of being is evident. Metaphysics understood as funda-

| mental ontology cannot ground the sciences because it necessarily follows upon them. Yet neither is metaphysics grounded in physics in Heidegger’s account. Mathematical natural science is exhausted at the point

at which a preliminary understanding of being is uncovered. The connection between ontic experience and ontological knowledge does not solve the problem of the preliminary understanding of being, but rather only points to it (KPM 7/KM 12). To proceed with the task of laying a ground for metaphysics, the inner possibility of ontology must be shown. This could hardly be construed as the task of the positive sciences. In Heidegger’s account, then, in 1925, the sciences do not ground metaphysics any more than metaphysics grounds them. Hence Heidegger explicitly separates scientific philosophy from the positive sciences radically in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.

This is the sense for Heidegger in which Kant’s first Critique is

not about knowledge (KPM 11/KM 17). It is rather a groundlaying for metaphysics. Heidegger understands peta Ta Pvoind as “‘the title of a fundamental philosophical difficulty” (KPM 4/

METAPHYSICS, MATHEMATICS, AND SCIENCE 35

KM 7). Under Aristotle’s much earlier analysis, Heidegger suggests, a doubling is uncovered in metaphysics. On the one hand,

it is knowledge of beings as beings; on the other hand, it is knowledge about the region of beings from which being as a whole determines itself. This doubling is reflected in a division of metaphysics into metaphysica generalis, which is knowledge of beings in general, and metaphysica specialis, knowledge of the principal divisions of the former, that is, God, nature, and humankind. An inquiry into metaphysica specialis is brought to the question of what makes possible such ontic knowledge, that is, knowl-

edge about particular beings, whether supreme, natural, or human. The fundamental philosophical difficulty that is metaphysics consists in the fact that a being is always encountered with a previous understanding of its being. This preliminary understanding of being, questioned in metaphysica generalis, makes metaphysica specialis possible. The inquiry into metaphysica spe-

cialis is thus led back to metaphysica generalis, which is in the broadest sense the problem of ontological knowledge. On this basis, Heidegger argues that “transcendental knowledge does not investigate the being itself, but rather the possibility of the preliminary understanding of Being” (KPM 10/KM 16). In Heidegger’s account, Kant’s inquiry in the first Critique is not simply a theory of experience or a theory of knowledge, but rather a laying of the groundwork for the problem of metaphysics that is ontology. Kant’s text “signifies . .. the working out of a complete determination of the ‘whole contour’ and the ‘whole internal, articular structure’ of ontology” (KPM 11/KM 16). What is at stake under Heidegger’s reading of the Critique of Pure Reason is the inner possibility of ontology. The task Heidegger envisions for Kant’s text is to secure the

possibility of questioning being, the a priori in knowledge. ‘How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” is the question Heidegger acknowledges explicitly as that for the whole sake of which the Critique is undertaken (KPM 10/KM 15). But Heidegger has dislocated Kant’s question ‘‘How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” from transcendental subjectivity, that is, from neo-Kantian accounts, and relocated it in ontology. What,

36 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

then, of that question? How are synthetic a priori judgments possible in Heidegger’s account? SYNTHETIC A PRIORI JUDGMENTS

In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger finds many senses of “synthetic’”’ at work in the first Critique. Initially, he

defines the synthetic nature of judgments in a twofold sense: “first, as judgments in general [which synthesize—i.e., connect—subject and predicate]; and second, insofar as the legitimacy of the ‘connection’ (synthesis) of the representation is ‘brought forth’ (synthesis) from the being itself with which the judgment is concerned” (KPM 10/KM 15). These are the senses

in which synthetic a posteriori judgments are synthetic. There is, however, a further sense of “synthetic” at work in synthetic a priori judgments. Because it is a priori, a synthetic a priori judgment “should bring forth something about the being which was not derived experientially from it’’ (KPM 10/KM 15). These three senses of “synthesis’’ are complicated by a further distinction of synthesis into three kinds: veritative, predicative, and apophantic (KPM 19/KM 29). Veritative synthesis is a mediation between thinking and its object by intuition which makes

judgments true or evident and is recognizable as the second of the syntheses defined earlier. In veritative synthesis lies also the predicative synthesis: the unification of various representations into a single concept. Predicative synthesis did not appear in the earlier account. Although the name suggests it is the synthesis of predicate and subject, it is defined here differently, and here Heidegger calls that synthesis of subject and predicate apophantic. In yet a further synthesis (one could call it a meta-synthesis), predicative and apophantic synthesis are “joined together into a structural unity of syntheses” (KPM 19/KM 29). Furthermore, the thrust of Heidegger’s reading of Kant is that Kant’s insight in the first Critique is that sensibility and understanding are synthesized by imagination, which is not simply another faculty among the three but rather the basis for their structural unity. Now Heidegger’s reading becomes interesting, rather than simply an explosion of “synthesis’”” into more senses than one

METAPHYSICS, MATHEMATICS, AND SCIENCE 37

can keep clear. Heidegger explicates in Section 31 the difference between the A and B editions of the first Critique. He argues that

in the former Kant makes his insight into imagination as the synthesis of intuition and understanding, an insight that shows how understanding is inherently finite through its inseparability from possible experience, its bond to intuition. But, argues Heidegger, in the B edition Kant shrank back from that insight and

instead gave priority to the understanding. As “pure reason as reason drew him increasingly under its spell’ (KPM 115/KM 168), Kant shrank back from the idea that sensibility constituted the essence of reason insofar as the synthesis of imagination renders a structural unity of sensibility and understanding. Heidegger accuses Kant of being unable to stomach his own insight into

the finitude of human understanding and therefore of giving logic primacy in his B edition. Heidegger rejects the “already long-established” (KPM 116/KM 170) reading of the two editions as a move from a psychological interpretation to a logical one by suggesting that the more exclusive orientation to pure reason of the B edition is, in fact, more psychological than the earlier account.

Heidegger argues that Kant fell back from his insight into imagination as the unity of a pure, sensible reason because his inquiry into the subjectivity of the subject led into “darkness... the abyss of metaphysics” (KPM 146/KM 214-15). In this inquiry, ‘the manner of questioning regarding human beings becomes questionable’ (KPM 146/KM 214). The manner of questioning leads into anthropology. The question, What is being?, asked by means of the subjectivity of the subject, unveils the more original question: ‘What does Being mean, which is already understood in advance in every question?”’ (KPM 152/KM 223). The latter question is anthropological because it poses the question of being via the nature of human being as questioner. What the anthropological question asks about is the possibility of comprehending what is always already understood. The Critique undermines itself by uncovering the finitude of Dasein, for the A edition, under Heidegger’s reading, uncovers as necessary

for understanding what it seeks to show is possible. This is the sense of synthesis that is crucial to Heidegger’s inquiry: ontological synthesis, the synthesis of being and the object of thought in

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the prior understanding of being that is present in all human understanding. Kant’s turn from anthropology to logic in the move from the A to the B edition is, in Heidegger’s view, an attempt to remedy this collapse of the question of being into the finitude of human understanding. But the second edition, as a preference for the synthetic power of understanding over imagination, is a move in the wrong direction. This is to say that Heidegger is dissatisfied with Kant’s Copernican revolution. Kant was unable to sustain the analytic of Dasein requisite for the grounding of metaphysics. And Heidegger himself attempts to retrieve the ground-laying of metaphysics in such an inquiry. He does this by retrieving the insight that the question of being is the finitude of human understanding. He rethinks the Critique into the terminology of Being and Time and concludes that ‘in the ground of its essence Dasein holds itself into the Nothing” (KPM 162/KM 238). This is Dasein’s anxiety, the basic disposition that places the thinker before the nothing, and presumably this anxiety is expressed by Kant precisely in his falling back from the question of human finitude and appealing to the understanding over intuition. In the same year he published Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger gave the lecture What Is Metaphysics? In this lecture the question of the nothing and a shrinking back before that question in anxiety are explored, albeit not as an inquiry into Kant. Here Heidegger is drawn back to the question of the relation between metaphysics and the sciences, but unlike in his earlier texts, Heidegger no longer argues that metaphysics is propaedeutic to the sciences. Rather, he suggests that its function with respect to the sciences is unification and guidance. In the technical organization of the universities, he argues, “‘the practical establishment of goals by each discipline provides the only meaningful source of unity’”’ (WM 96/W 104). But, he adds, the root of the sciences has therein atrophied. The sciences want to know nothing of the nothing in spite of the fact that “scientific existence is possible only if in advance it holds itself out into the nothing” (WM 111/W 121). Rather, the sciences lose themselves in beings, a move Heidegger will later call, in ‘““On the Essence of Truth,” errancy, the insistent holding fast to beings and the inessential. Hence “man goes wrong as regards the essential

METAPHYSICS, MATHEMATICS, AND SCIENCE 39

genuineness of his standards” (ET 135/W 195-96). Likewise, in What Is Metaphysics? Heidegger suggests that the question of metaphysics is, ““Why are there beings at all, and not rather nothing?” (WM 112/W 122). Since metaphysics asks about the nothing, into which the sciences hold themselves out, “Only if science exists on the base of metaphysics can it advance further in its essential task, which is not to amass and classify bits of knowledge but to disclose in ever-renewed fashion the entire region of truth in nature and history’’ (WM 111/W 121). The relation between the sciences and metaphysics goes deeper than it did for Heidegger in his earlier accounts. Metaphysics is not simply a ground for the sciences, but, as the inquiry into their root, has a guiding function to perform. If science determines the existence of modern Dasein, then its guidance from the mere amassing of information to knowledge is a crucial function that the sciences cannot perform themselves. For the sciences are a shrinking back in anxiety from the very thing Kant shrank before: the nothing. Heidegger, however, in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, holds fast in the face of such anxiety and pursues the question of the finitude of human understanding. He finds there the ““what always already was” (KPM 164/KM 240), evident in the history of metaphysics as early as the ancients in their metaphysics of presence. Being has always had an alreadiness, its a priori, and for Heidegger this is the synthesis at stake in the ground-laying of metaphysics. It is what he calls ontological synthesis, the prior understanding of being that makes all questioning and understanding possible. But the “earlier” at work here has nothing to do with time if time is taken in the common sense of sequential moments measured by clocks. Rather, time is to be understood in a more fundamental sense, as the horizon of understanding constitutive of Dasein. That is to say, the retrieval of Kant’s insight in the A edition of the Critique is exactly the task Heidegger understands himself

to have undertaken in Being and Time. But having done the groundwork necessary to the question of being, both in Being and Time and now again in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics,

neither text then undertakes the question. The former was never completed, and the latter simply ends with a citation from Aristotle’s Metaphysics 7.1, the question of what being is. Heidegger

40 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

has argued that the ground for this question (i.e., metaphysics) is precisely Kant’s question, ‘““How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?’’—and read that question as, ““How is being always understood a priori?” But no answer is forthcoming. Heidegger takes up Kant’s account of synthetic a priori judgments again in the lecture course from 1935-36 published as Die Frage nach dem Ding. Heidegger explains here the background against which Kant makes the claim that there are synthetic a priori judgments (FD 129-31). In the tradition, analytic judgments were always taken to be a priori, whereas synthetic judg-

ments were a posteriori. Kant’s account of the difference between synthetic and analytic judgments is consistent with this history, for Kant argues that while analytic judgments fail to go

beyond the concept in question, synthetic judgments are synthetic precisely in that they add something beyond what is contained in the concept. This is a straightforward reading of the first Critique (A6—7/B10-11). Synthetic judgments are what Kant

calls ““ampliative’”’ in that they bring to a concept something extra.

The “something extra” of synthetic judgments was accordingly taken to entail that such judgments are a posteriori, for if the source of this “something extra” is not the concept, then it must be the thing encountered in experience. Only analytic judgments could be a priori, since they do not exceed the concept, and synthetic judgments were taken to be a posteriori, since they add to the concept what is not already there and hence require experience for their verification. Kant’s task is to break that correlation in order to show that synthetic a priori judgments are possible. Heidegger argues that the “something extra’ of synthetic judgments is the object (Gegenstand) (FD 142). As he argued in Basic Problems of Phenomenology that, for Kant, being is position

as a relation between an object and thought, so he argues again here that synthesis is the relation between an object and a concept that is an “alongsideness” (Beistellen) (FD 142). He asks not simply, ““How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?”’, but, “How are they necessary?” He answers that they are necessary for the possibility of human knowledge as experience (FD 132). If knowledge had no “something extra,” it would be knowledge

METAPHYSICS, MATHEMATICS, AND SCIENCE 41

only of reason itself and not of what is other to reason, the object

which the thinker understands as alongside but precisely other to the thinker. He takes this point to be precisely the thrust of Kant’s highest principle of synthetic knowledge: that the conditions for the possibility of experience are at the same time the conditions for the possibility of the objects of experience (FD 143).

Heidegger argues that to understand this highest principle of synthetic judgments is not just to understand Kant’s text as a book, but is to master the starting point of historical Dasein which cannot be avoided, skipped, or in any other way denied (FD 143). But, he claims, this principle must be brought to an appropriate transformation for delivery into the future. This

appropriate transformation is recognition of the between (Zwischen). Die Frage nach dem Ding concludes with the claim that

the highest principle of synthetic judgments—that the conditions for the possibility of experience are at the same time the conditions for the possibility of the objectivity of the objects of experience—points to what moves between human being and thing. Kant’s question concerning the thing is tied up with the question of human being, since knowledge takes place precisely between the two.

THE THING AND COPERNICAN REVOLUTION

Die Frage nach dem Ding is then precisely the kind of retrieval Heidegger called for earlier, that of a grounding of metaphysics in the finitude of human understanding. But Heidegger reads Kant here with an openness not earlier evident. Rather than attempt to adapt the Critique into the project and terminology of Being and Time, this text seeks to explore what Kant’s thought makes possible in the history of metaphysics. Kant opens up a dimension between thinker and thing in which to raise the question of being. Metaphysics need neither confine itself to a naive inquiry into the nature of things nor collapse into idealism in an entanglement with subjectivity. Heidegger concludes in Introduction to Metaphysics that the a

priori was originally for the Greeks being as qvotc, nature.

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@voic is not experienced free of empirical admixture, but is pre-

cisely what is experienced as empirical content. Accordingly, Heidegger could not have raised the question of being without a long struggle with Kant. That struggle began as an analytic of Dasein and hence as a transcendental inquiry in the Kantian sense: an inquiry into the structures of understanding. Yet Heidegger’s reading of Kant is complicated and tedious, as much because Heidegger must dig deeply into the assumptions that inform his thinking in order to retrieve the question of being

| from its forgottenness in idealism, as because in his reading of Kant, it has been a struggle to confine Kant to metaphysics rather than epistemology. Heidegger’s reading of Kant contains an ongoing tension. On the one hand, Heidegger rejects neo-Kantian accounts, especially the Marburg school, and his aim is to retrieve Kant from their reading. On the other hand, Kant is not to be retrieved as misread. He is simply too committed to psychologistic subjectivism and idealism by the transition in his thinking from the A to the B edition of the first Critique. Heidegger wants to make both claims: Kant has been misread, and his project fails. For Heidegger, the Critique of Pure Reason is an exercise in metaphysics, but one that fails to avoid the trap of idealism. Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein is an attempt to achieve the aim of the first

Critique. Being and Time grounds and limits the sciences by showing that the theoretical attitude is a modification of everyday understanding, and it shows how synthetic a priori judgments are possible by investigating the structure of understanding. Heidegger’s attempt to undertake Kant’s project more successfully is in a sense an attempt at the Kantian Copernican —

revolution without entrapment in idealism. | In 1938, however, Marjorie Grene argued that Heidegger’s thinking is no Copernican revolution. She argues that there is simply nothing revolutionary in it (Grene 1976:39), and agrees

with Carnap’s analysis (1931) of What Is Metaphysics?—that Hei-

degger’s arguments “depend to a large extent on syntactical misconstructions” (Grene 1976:45). Expressions such as “‘world worlds” or “nothing nothings,” she argues, are meaningless. For her, Heidegger fails in his attempt to write the Kantian Copernican revolution more successfully.

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In 1967, Charles Sherover described Kant’s Copernican revolution as the insight “that all knowledge of the particular things in our field of cognitive vision, is dependent on the prerequisite for something to be, to be knowable, for us” (1967:561), precisely the formulation of Kant’s Copernican revolution that Heidegger

rejects. Sherover described Heidegger’s work as a move from Kant’s philosophy to ontology, whereas the move to ontology is what Heidegger attributes to Kant. Sherover read Heidegger not as a return to Aristotle’s thinking but as a continuation of Kant’s thinking. While Heidegger has remained faithful to the Kantian problematic of transcendental subjectivity, his ““aim has been the

unification of [human being] with the world as it appears to [one], the unification of [human being’s] structure in order to account for the coherence of human experience” (1967:572). In Sherover’s account, Heidegger’s thinking is implicitly a Copernican revolution in exactly the sense in which Heidegger sees such a thing in Kant. Unlike Grene, Sherover takes Heidegger to be successfully revisionist of Kant. In 1971, George Vick argued that Heidegger’s philosophy is a

new Copernican revolution that stands “to overturn the commonsense and linguistic structures on which depend alike the earlier Kantian ‘revolution’ and most philosophy since” (1971:630). Kant made the subject the measure of truth, whereas Heidegger seeks to make apprehension constitutive of human being. Vick takes Heidegger as not simply revisionist but as a radical revolutionary, novel in his account of knowledge. Whereas Grene saw such expressions as “world worlds” or “nothing nothings” as meaningless, Vick viewed the parallel construction of his own coinage, “manifestation manifests,” as a call for a new syntax to express the radical meaning contained therein. While Grene attacked Heidegger as an arrogant poseur, Sherover supported Heidegger’s response to the Kantian prob-

lematic, and Vick lauded the “radically different syntax’’ (1971:630) implied by Heidegger’s work. Grene wrote on the basis of Being and Time and lectures given in 1931 and 1932. Sher-

over’s preoccupation was almost exclusively with Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Vick focused on Introduction to Metaphys-

ics. Heidegger is or is not a revolutionary or non-sensical thinker

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depending upon which texts one chooses as focus and how one chooses to read them. Certainly, taking the later of these texts as a culmination of Heidegger’s view on the question of transcendental subjectivity, it is clear that Heidegger separates the transcendental from the subject. He explains in Introduction to Metaphysics that insofar as Being and Time is an exposition of a transcendental horizon, ‘‘the ‘transcendental’ there intended is not that of the subjective consciousness; rather, it defines itself in terms of the existential-ecstatic temporality of human Dasein’”’ (IM 18/EM 14). Likewise, at §11(a) of The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, Heidegger re-

fuses to read transcendence for Kant as psychologistic. Rather, it is based on “the immediate relation a subject has to the being itself” (MFL 164/MAL 210). In fact, argues Heidegger, transcendence is being-in-the-world. His aim is to extricate the question of being from its entanglement in subjectivity by arguing that being is prior to understanding. Heidegger’s reading of Kant allows him to do precisely that. In his reading of the A edition of the Critique, Heidegger argues that in the ontological synthesis of imagination, the finitude of human understanding is not a collapse into subjectivity and idealism but rather the very condition for the possibility of knowledge of things. If philosophical Copernican revolution is a move

from metaphysics to epistemology, from the question of the thing to the question of knowledge, then Heidegger does not achieve it, for to do so would be to fall into idealism. If, however, the revolution takes up the question of human understanding in

the relation between the thinker and the thing, then Heidegger does achieve it. But then Marjorie Grene is right: Heidegger’s thinking is not novel, for it is simply an exposition of Kant, a retrieval of the first Critique from neo-Kantian interpretations. The metaphor of Copernican revolution has become, however, a strange way to describe Kant. Copernicus’s revolutionary insight is that human being is not central to the universe. The neoKantian commitment to idealism is precisely the reverse in that idealism puts human consciousness at the center of all that is known. Yet Heidegger’s insight into Kant on imagination is precisely such a revolution, for it culminates in a rejection of idealism in the claim made in 1935 in Introduction to Metaphysics and

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again in the Beitrage, that for the Greeks being is @uvotc. This claim is a location of the question of the human understanding

of being precisely in the relation between thinking and the things it thinks about. And it is a Copernican revolution in the sense that, by rejecting idealism, it removes human being from the center of the issue and places the thing there instead. In 1938, in §111 of the Beitriige, Heidegger argues that being was (puotc for the Greeks and prior to any understanding. Transitional to this text are Introduction to Metaphysics and Heidegger’s reading of Kant entitled Die Frage nach dem Ding, both from 1935. In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger dispenses with

the term “ontology,” which marks the traditional doctrine of taking the question of the thing to be a branch in a philosophical system. There is an alternative: ‘we can also take the word ‘ontology’ in the ‘broadest sense,’ . . . [which] signifies the endeavor to make being manifest itself, and to do so by way of the question ‘how does it stand with being?’ (and not only with the es-

sent as such)” (IM 41/EM 31). The terms “ontology” and “ontological” should be abandoned, argues Heidegger, since this question has been rejected by the schools of academic philosophy, which “strive for an ‘ontology’ in the traditional sense’”’

(IM 41/EM 31). The purpose is not to set up a traditional ontology, or to criticize the mistakes of the tradition, but to reestablish a historical relation to being. Heidegger therefore asks in Introduction to Metaphysics whether philosophy and metaphysics are historical sciences capable of such a task. His answer is that they “are not sciences at all” IM 43/EM 33). In fact, it is only philosophy, “as distinguished from all science’ (IM 44/EM 33), that can determine a fundamental relation to history in which that relation itself is historical. Heidegger’s rejection of neo-Kantianism has led him to reject the thesis that philosophy is a science. Yet as long as Heidegger raises the question of being as a question of human understanding—specifically, as the a priori pro-

jected in scientific understanding—he cannot extricate the question of being from the history of idealism, from Kant’s a priori. If being is taken as a concept, metaphysics remains embroiled in the web of transcendental subjectivity in which concepts are to be found. That Being and Time and Basic Problems of Phenomenology were never completed is not symptomatic of

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Heidegger’s failure, but of his eventual insight that being is not simply prior in human understanding, but rather prior to human understanding. In What Is Called Thinking? Heidegger argues that Kant’s claim that being is among the almost unanalyzable concepts is justified

only if one assumes that being can be grasped by a concept (WCT 179/WHD 167). What counted as evidence in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology that ontology is a misunderstood science, because its object is for Kant the concept of being reduced to unanalyzability by the tradition of metaphysics (BPP 4/GP 60), stands as evidence almost thirty years later that being is unanalyzable because it is not a concept (WCT 179/WHD 167). To be grasped as a concept is to be an object of cognition, that is, represented. Accordingly, What Is Called Thinking? is a critique of representational thinking and thereby a critique of the sciences, for which representation of an object is definitive. Heidegger argues that beings could not appear as objects unless the being of beings first prevailed (WCT 234/WHD 142), as he has always held. But his later work is predicated on the insight that being cannot be represented and analyzed as beings can. He has by 1952 given up his commitment to metaphysics and abandoned the assumption that being can be grasped as a concept. Philosophy is therefore not a science in Heidegger’s later view, such that he suggests in What Is Called Thinking? that philosophy take as its model not the sciences, but ancient téyvn (WCT 22/ WHD 10). Die Frage nach dem Ding is the first instance wherein Heidegger

takes up the question of metaphysics as a historical question without an explicit intention to extricate the question from its history through a destruction. Dissatisfied with the attempted destructions found in Being and Time, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger ap-

proaches metaphysics in What Is Metaphysics? and Introduction to Metaphysics as an explicitly nonhistorical inquiry, wherein he

prefers instead to pursue a specific question: ‘“Why are there beings at all, and not rather nothing?” What Is Metaphysics? concludes by introducing this question, and the lectures in the summer semester of 1935 begin with it. By 1935 Heidegger has given

up the thesis that philosophy is a science. When he raises the

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question of metaphysics in the winter semester of 1935-36 in Die Frage nach dem Ding, he undertakes the question of the thing as explicitly historical, but no longer as scientific.

Heidegger’s reading of Kant in his 1935-36 lecture course stands in marked contrast to his earlier accounts. It is here that Heidegger makes his final break with Kant, precisely because he has abandoned the thesis that philosophy is a science. This move arises out of Heidegger’s critique of Kant. Yet it does not bring him directly to his later account of thinking. Before he asks about the task of thinking at the end of philosophy, he raises questions about the sciences. The attempt to establish philosophy as science leads Heidegger to the sciences themselves, that is, the history of physics. The issue that draws him there is the a priori. THE A PRIORI

What interested Heidegger about Kant, he read as ontology. He sought to take up Kant’s question ‘“How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?” as an ontological inquiry. Thus he read the question as ““How is it possible that in any inquiry, being is always already understood?” He took “synthetic’”’ to mean that being is brought to, not uncovered in, experience. Aprioricity he understood as the “‘alreadiness” of being. His fascination with being is accordingly located in the fact that being is found in experience only because it is first brought to it. Hence being belongs neither to things nor to thought but to the relation between the two; it is prior to both understanding and its object. Heidegger has always taken investigation of aprioricity to be fundamental to philosophy. In Being and Time he claims that a priori analysis of scientific disciplines is what he is after, and he

adds in.a footnote that “‘A-priorism’ is the method of every scientific philosophy which understands itself” (BT 490/SZ 50, n. x). In Basic Problems of Phenomenology he cites the second task

of phenomenology as the clearing up of the meaning of this a priori. He wants to understand how being belongs to beings a priori, that is, how being always belongs to beings yet is prior to their experience. Yet Heidegger never quite cleared up the mean-

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ing of the a priori, for he missed Kant’s separation of the a priori from the pure. Kant argued that there are judgments that have empirical content but are not dependent on experience. Indeed, the task of the Critique of Pure Reason was precisely to rupture the correlation

between analytic and a priori judgments on the one hand, and synthetic a posteriori judgments on the other. Kant sets up this rupture by distinguishing the a priori from the pure. Judgments are pure for Kant “when there is no admixture of anything empirical” (B3). A “pure” representation is one “in which there is nothing that belongs to sensation” (A20/B34). A priori judgments, on the other hand, Kant does not characterize solely in , terms of whether or not they have empirical content. Rather, necessity and universality are the hallmarks of aprioricity for him, such that he claims that when one is found, the other need not be proven because they always belong together (B4). At B3 Kant

gives the example of the judgment “every alteration has its cause” as a priori but not pure, “because alteration is a concept which can be derived only from experience.” At A9/B13 he explains further, using a similar example, ‘Everything which happens has its cause,” by asking how it is that the understanding finds support for this claim when the predicate (cause) is foreign to the concept (everything which happens), yet considered connected to it. Kant answers that the source of this connection cannot be experience ““because the suggested principle has connected the second representation with the first, not only with greater universality, but also with the character of necessity, and therefore completely a priori’ (A9/B13). A posteriori judgments never contain such epistemic certitude, since there could always be some possible experience that would show them to be false. For instance, in claiming “All swans are white,”” one can never be absolutely certain that there is not some black swan somewhere that has simply not been encountered. That everything has a cause, however, carries an epistemic force that the understanding takes to be universal such that it could not be any other way. It thus follows for Kant that all pure judgments are a priori, for their freedom from the empirical gives them universality and necessity; but it does not follow that all a priori judgments are

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pure. Some a priori judgments have empirical content, even though they are not founded on experience. Accordingly, the a priori for Kant is not simply prior to experience, but rather carries a certainty, the certainty of universality and necessity. This is precisely Kant’s point in arguing that there are synthetic a priori judgments, and that the laws of Newton’s physics are exactly such claims. He seeks to show that Newtonian physics involves judgments that are not analytic, but nonetheless certain. In Heidegger’s reading, what is added to the concept in a synthetic judgment is a relation between the concept and the thing. Being is the synthetic a priori in that it brings to the concept what is not contained in it already, and it does so with a logical

priority in experience. Herein lies Heidegger struggle with being, which he has himself positioned neither in the concept

nor in experience. In thinking through Kant’s account of synthetic a priori judgments, Heidegger has always been preoccupied with their synthetic nature. In Basic Problems of Phenomenology, for example, the thrust of his analysis of Kant was the synthesis of being with an object that positions that object in actuality. Hence he read Kant’s metaphysics as committed to being as position. And the discussions of the a priori in Die Frage nach dem Ding revert quickly to consideration of the synthetic

moment in which being is projected onto things, rather than sticking with the a priori, for Heidegger’s claim, evident as early as Being and Time, that being is always already understood, col-

lapses this “alreadiness” of being with the synthesis of being and object. Synthesis and aprioricity come together in Heidegger’s understanding that being is projected, that it is found in things because it is placed there by the thinker. Accordingly, Heidegger’s claim that a synthetic a priori judgment “should bring forth something about the being which was not derived experientially from it’ (KPM 10/KM 15) fails to acknowledge Kant’s distinction between a priori and pure. He rec-

ognizes that Kant’s a priori coincides precisely with what he wants to say about being: it pertains to beings without being experientially derived. Yet Heidegger neglects the epistemic cer-

tainty that is definitive for Kant of a priori judgments. He conflates the pure and the a priori in his reading of Kant. The cause of this conflation in Heidegger’s assessment of Kant

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is his preference for the A edition of the first Critique. The exam-

ple “every alteration has a cause,” which Kant used to distinguish a priori from pure, appears there only once, yet twice in the B edition, at A9/B13 and at B3. Elsewhere where the text is common to both editions and Kant defines the pure, at A11/ B24 and A20/B34, he uses it interchangeably with the a priori. Heidegger clearly understands in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics that the A edition argues for the inseparability of sensation and understanding, while the B edition prioritizes reason in its freedom from sensation. Hence it makes perfect sense that Kant’s emphasis on the pure would become apparent in the B edition, and that Heidegger would miss it. After all, what he is interested in is precisely how being is a priori, but hardly pure, since it must for Heidegger belong to beings. He attempts therefore to retrieve the a priori from pure reason, and in doing so he fails to see the definitive characteristic of the a priori for Kant. What he takes Kant to mean by “a priori,” Kant in fact conveys by “pure.” Since purity and aprioricity often go hand in hand, this oversight would have little impact on many readers of Kant who might fall prey to it. But the consequences are severe for Heidegger, for he is intent on the question of being, and what is pure can never figure in the question of being. Rather, since the pure contains “no admixture of anything empirical” (B3), it is bound to transcendental idealism. Hence when Heidegger wishes in Die Frage nach dem Ding to pursue the question of what is already given and therefore certain in any knowledge, he does not do so on the basis of Kant’s a priori. Rather he turns to the Greeks and the mathematical, despite the fact that Kant is the subject of the course and that the Kantian a priori is the obvious candidate for such a discussion. Heidegger intends the mathematical to do exactly the job Kant assigned to the a priori. As the a priori carried the epistemic force of certainty for Kant, so the mathematical entails the certainty of givenness in Heidegger’s analysis. Accordingly, Theo-

dore Kisiel (1973) is right to identify the mathematical in Heidegger with the Kantian a priori. Yet Heidegger himself did not see this. He looks not to Kant but to the ancients to raise the issue of epistemic certitude, and he raises that issue not as the question of the a priori, but as the question of the mathematical.

METAPHYSICS, MATHEMATICS, AND SCIENCE 51 MATHEMATICAL PROJECTION: GALILEO AND NEWTON

John Sallis understands Heidegger’s mathematical in terms of Kant’s a priori, as does Theodore Kisiel, insofar as it means what is projected by the understanding onto things, that is, insofar as the mathematical is prior to experience (Sallis 1970:145ff.). Yet if

Heidegger intends merely that the mathematical is projective, then his phrase “the mathematical projection of nature” is redundant. Heidegger wants more out of the mathematical than simply that it is projective. For Heidegger, the mathematical projection of nature determines both beings and knowledge. In Die Frage nach dem Ding, Heidegger tackles the question of

what is modern science, as opposed to ancient. He argues that the claims that modern science is factual, that it is experimental, and that it is a measuring science are inadequate to distinguish it from ancient science, for these claims do not capture the fundamental feature that rules and determines the movement of modern science. This fundamental feature is its ““manner of working with the things and the metaphysical projection of the thingness of the things” (MSMM 249/FD 52). This feature is, according to Heidegger, the mathematical. Heidegger argues that modern science is not mathematical simply by virtue of the fact that it is calculative and uses numbers. He notes the modern preoccupation with the calculable and reckonable. But, Heidegger argues, the mathematical is not exhausted by numbers. Rather, calculation is a particular form of the mathematical that has come to dominance because numbers are its most familiar form (MSMM 253/FD 58). He suggests that the Greek understanding of ta waOnuata, in which the modern mathematical has its etymological root, was much broader. Which Greeks Heidegger is referring to here, he does not say. The ensuing discussion, however, echoes Plato’s Meno.

Heidegger suggests that for the Greeks, a thing could be known in different respects: insofar as it is self-moving (ta qvot.xd), insofar as it is made by people (ta moLtovpEva), insofar as it can be in use (ta YoNWaATA), insofar as one can have anything

to do with it at all (ta moayuata), and insofar as it is learnable and teachable (ta ua@yuwata) (MSMM 250/FD 53-54). The mathematical is learnable and teachable because it is what about

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the thing is already known: ‘The padyuata are the things insofar as we take cognizance of them as what we already know them to be in advance, the body as bodily, the plant-like of the plant, the animal-like of the animal, the thingness of the thing, and so

on” (MSMM 251/FD 56). The mathematical is the basis on which we encounter things as already given. It is “the fundamental presupposition of the knowledge [Grundvoraussetzung des Wissens] of things’”” (MSMM 254/FD 58).

For Heidegger, a number is an instance of the mathematical. He argues early in Die Frage nach dem Ding that although a number—5, for example—can be called a thing in some sense (FD 3),

it is not a thing in the narrow sense of what is graspable and visible (FD 4-5). It is not a spatiotemporally extended body. Rather, it is brought to the thing by the understanding. Numbers

are found in things not because they are already there, but because the understanding brings them to things as an aspect that can be known about the thing. Numbers therefore carry epistemic certainty insofar as they are found in experience by being first projected there. Reason is certain of its own creation. Heidegger means by the mathematical not just what is projective, but also what carries epistemic force. His phrase “the mathematical projection of nature” can be read as “‘the epistemically certain projection of nature.” He is interested in showing how nature is projected in modern physics as something about which certainty can be had. Later, in ‘““The Age of the World Picture” Heidegger will call this projection of certainty “rigor” (AWP 119/H 79) and once more appeal to what Ta paobnpata meant for the again unspecified Greeks. The rigor of science is exactitude, numerical precision. The relation between things and numbers as one of epistemic force clearly holds in the case of measurement. Things are mea-

surable insofar as they stand in time and space. But a clock, which measures time, cannot tell or show one what time is. This point is made both in Die Frage nach dem Ding (FD 17) and in Basic Problems of Phenomenology, where Heidegger argues that clock usage—that is, measurement of time—is possible only because of an original having of time (BPP 245/GP 347-48). Heidegger argues that we assign time to clocks. The measurement

of time is “a modification from the primary comportment

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toward time as guiding oneself according to it’ (BPP 258/GP 365).

Because things stand in space and time, they can be measured. That mathematics is numerical and calculative is derivative from

its originary meaning as ta waOnata, the respect in which certainty can be established concerning things. In Die Frage nach dem Ding, Heidegger characterizes the essence of the mathematical in its modern formulation by looking to Galileo and Newton. His early conception of science is in fact framed by two readings of Galileo, this one from 1935-36, and “Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft” from 1916. In both texts, Heidegger construes the essence of science as the mathematical projection of nature. In the earlier one he uses Gal-

ileo’s formula for the acceleration of bodies in free-fall as the definitive example of the projection of the grounding concepts (time and space) of natural science (ZG 415-33). In Die Frage nach dem Ding he uses Galileo’s free-fall experiment and Newton’s law of inertia to raise the question of the justification and limits of the mathematical. These two analyses of modern science are remarkably similar. In both cases what is noted is the projection of space and time, and therefore also of things, as uniform and homogenous. But the significance of these texts remains obscure unless read against the discussion of the theoretical attitude at §69 of Being and Time. There, the mathematical projection of nature is the hallmark of the modern scientific, theoretical attitude. The development of Heidegger’s account of the mathematical essence of modern science can be laid out over these three texts. In “Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft,” Heidegger’s intent is to distinguish physics from history on the basis of the projection of the time concept at work in each. He argues that the mathematical projection in Galileo’s free-fall experiment

is of the concepts of space and time. Space is understood as “endless, each space-point equal to any other, likewise each direction to any other.” Time also “has become a homogenous positional order—a scale, a parameter.’’? Space and time in mod1“anendlich, jeder Raumpunkt mit jedem gleichwertig, desgleichen jede Richtung mit jeder anderen” (ZG 422). “ist Zu einer homogenen Stellenordnung geworden, zur Skala, zum Parameter” (ZG 424).

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ern science are a coordinate system in which objects are located. From Galilean physics on, then, the ‘object of physics—we can

now say, in brief—is the lawfulness of motion.’ Galileo is accordingly the origin of modern physics for Heidegger in that thereafter, ‘“physics strives towards equations, in which are laid down the most general, lawlike relations with regard to the processes in the relevant areas [of physics].’* Galileo’s experiment in free-fall is decisive for modern science in the sense that he establishes physics as the search for laws of nature. Heidegger argues that this distinctive character of modern science comes about on the basis of a difference in method between the ancients and the moderns: The old contemplation of nature would have proceeded with the problem of fall such that it would have tried through observation of individual cases of falling phenomena to bring out what was now common in all cases, in order then starting from here to draw conclusions about the essence of falling. Galileo does not start with the observation of individual falling phenomena, on the contrary with a general assumption (hypothesis) which goes: bodies fall—robbed of their support—so that their velocity increases proportional to time (v = g e t), that is, bodies fall in uniformly accelerated motion.°®

Whereas Aristotle proceeded by making generalizations on the basis of a series of observations, Galileo’s method is instead to hypothesize a universal law. He makes an assumption, and then seeks its validation in experimentation. Heidegger develops this 3““Gegenstand der Physik ist—so kénnen wir jetzt kurz sagen—die GesetZlichkeit der Bewegung” (ZG 421). 4 ““strebt die Physik nach Gleichungen, in denen allgemeinste gesetzliche Beziehungen beziiglich der Vorgange auf den betreffenden Gebieten niedergelegt sind” (ZG 420).

5“‘Die alte Naturbetrachtung ware bei dem Fallproblem so vorgegangen, da sie durch Beobachtung einzelner Falle von Fallerscheinungen herauszubringen versucht hatte, was denn nun allen Fallerscheinungen gemeinsam sei, um dann von hier aus auf das Wesen des Falles zu schliefSen. Galilei setzt nicht mit der Beobachtung von einzelnen Fallerscheinungen ein, sondern mit einer

allgemein Annahme (Hypothese), die lautet: die Kérper fallen—ihrer Unterlage beraubt—so, da& ihre Geschwindigkeit proportional der Zeit wachst (v = g et), dh. die Kérper fallen in gleichmafig beschleunigter Bewegung” (ZG 419).

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view in Being and Time by exploring its metaphysical consequences. Heidegger argues at §69(b) of Being and Time that the theoretical attitude is a changeover in the projection of being at work in concernful dealings. He claims that the only way entities can be discovered is by prior projection of their state of being. What is

significant about the theoretical attitude is not that it relies on mathematics, in the ordinary sense of calculation, and hence achieves a precision and exactness, or that the facts which it exposes hold for every knower (BT 414/SZ 362). That is to say, the significance of the theoretical attitude is not to be uncovered on the basis of the precision of mathematics, or as a Kantian analy-

sis of the universality of transcendental subjectivity. Rather, what is decisive is the way in which theoretical understanding projects the being of nature. In concernful dealings, where Dasein first has a world, things

are constituted by the context of equipmentality and their involvement. In the theoretical attitude, such involvement does not belong to beings. Rather, a thing is encountered as “‘an entity with ‘mass’ . . . a corporeal Thing subject to the law of gravity” (BT 412/SZ 361). Whereas in concernful dealings, nature is pro-

jected in its readiness-to-hand, in the theoretical attitude the being of nature is projected in another way. In the theoretical attitude, nature consists in bodies that are governed by the laws of physics. Heidegger argues, as he did in “Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft,” that in modern scientific projection, place “becomes a matter of indifference . . . a spatio-temporal position,

a “world-point,’ which is in no way distinguished from any other” (BT 413/SZ 361-62). But in Being and Time he deepens that insight. He argues that a thing’s relation to its place changes in the theoretical attitude. The law of gravity holds for all beings regardless of their place, and hence no thing has any special place by which it can be distinguished from other things. The theoretical attitude homogenizes not just space and time but also the bodies that are the objects of physics. It homogenizes the objects of physics by projecting their thinghood alike. For it is

the thinghood of things that is understood beforehand in the theoretical attitude.

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It is on the basis of this prior projection of thinghood that “entities are disclosed in their possibility” (BT 192/SZ 151) by the theoretical understanding. In the theoretical attitude, a thing

is projected in its possibility as a spatiotemporally extended body constrained by laws such as the law of gravity. A hammer, for example, when not used circumspectly as a tool, regarded in the theoretical attitude as an entity with mass, is looked at in a

new way, “as a corporeal Thing subject to the law of gravity” (BT 412/SZ 361). The thingness of the thing is its extension in space and time. The genesis of modern science lies in its revision of the thinghood of the things investigated by physics. Hence the genesis of modern science is precisely a metaphysical moment. In the 1916 text, Heidegger found modern physics to be meth-

odologically distinct from ancient in that Galileo investigates laws of nature that are determined a priori. Here in Being and Time, he recognizes the metaphysical implications of this lawful-

ness of nature. The homogenization of space and time, and therefore of the bodies taken as object, has implications for the being of the beings investigated. In Die Frage nach dem Ding, Hei-

degger develops this account further by determining that metaphysical moment as the mathematical. In Die Frage nach dem Ding Heidegger repeats his claim that the projection of space and time in modern science entails a homogenization of things. The thinghood of things consists in their bodily occupation of and movement between spatiotemporal coordinates. Heidegger observes that when Galileo argues that the difference in time it takes two bodies to fall is due to the air’s resistance, not the inner nature of the bodies, he is understanding all bodies to be alike: ““All determinations of bodies have one basic blueprint, according to which the natural process is nothing but the space-time determination of the motion of points of mass” (MSMM 267/FD 71). Modern physics is the study of bodies in motion. It is this homogenization of the objects of physics that makes it possible to construe their behavior according to universal laws. Since both Galileo and Newton investigate physics in terms of universal laws, Heidegger recognizes in this text no significant distinction here between them, except insofar as Newton gives explicit formulation to what was implicit in Galileo’s physics.

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Heidegger translates Newton’s Latin: ‘“Every body continues in its state of rest, or uniform motion in a straight line, unless it is

compelled to change that state by force impressed upon it’ (MSMM 256/FD 60; cf. Newton 1960:13; Thayer 1953:25). And he argues that Newton’s First Law of Motion, the law of inertia, was discovered by Galileo, who, however, “applied it only in his last works and did not even express it as such” (MSMM 256/FD 61). He quotes from Galileo’s Discorsi (giving no more precise reference): “I think of a body thrown on a horizontal plane and

every obstacle excluded. This results in what has been given a detailed account in another place, that the motion of the body over this plane would be uniform and perpetual if the plane were extended infinitely” (MSMM 266-67/FD 70), and considers this the antecedent of Newton’s law. There is an explicit claim in Galileo’s Two New Sciences that is very similar to Newton’s law: ““we may remark that any velocity

once imparted to a moving body will be rigidly maintained as long as the external causes of acceleration or retardation are removed” (1914:243). For Galileo, however, this claim is not the point at stake. He explains that the perpetual motion here alluded to is only possible on a horizontal plane, since any inclina-

tion of the plane would be an external (ie., external to the moving thing) cause of acceleration or retardation. This claim is

therefore supportive to a corollary of his beliefs about falling bodies. That motion is determined in Galileo’s primitive formulation

and thematically by Newton on the basis of external force is, however, decisive for modern science. Heidegger contrasts the modern mathematical projection of nature with Aristotle’s view. For Aristotle, “Ouvaptc, the capacity for [a body’s] motion, lies in the nature of the body itself’” (MSMM 261/FD 66). Fiery things move upward, toward the heavens, and earthly things move downward, toward the center. Heavenly motion is circular and complete, whereas earthly motion is incomplete because it does not achieve the perfection of the circle. There are for Aristotle different kinds of motion based on different kinds of things. In modern science, on the other hand, nature is projected differently: ‘“Nature is no longer the inner principle out of which the

motion of the body follows; rather, nature is the mode of the

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variety of the changing relative positions of bodies, the manner in which they are present in space and time, which themselves are domains of possible positional orders and determinations of order and have no special traits anywhere” (MSMM 264/FD 68). This is the case, according to Heidegger, in the physics of both Galileo and Newton, whose law of inertia is about every body and makes no distinction between the motion of different kinds of bodies. On the basis of this analysis of Galilean and Newtonian physics, Heidegger summarizes the mathematical essence of modern science in six points. First, it is ““a project of thingness which, as it were, skips over the things’”’ (MSMM 267-68/FD 71). The

mathematical projection of nature establishes the domain of physics as the realm of moving bodies. This determination of the thingness of things “skips over’ the things by approaching them on the basis of a prior understanding. There is no opportu-

nity for things to speak for themselves, that is, to show themselves other than as bodies in motion. Hence modern science proceeds on the basis of a metaphysical projection into which it is not the task of that science to inquire. Later in several texts, but especially in “Science and Reflection’”’ and What Is Called Thinking?, Heidegger will argue that such self-critique is impossible for the sciences.

The second point is that the essence of the mathematical is axiomatic. The mathematical project posits beforehand “that which things are taken as, what and how they are to be evaluated”” (MSMM 268/FD 71). Heidegger argues that the Greek word for such conceptualization and evaluation was G&l6M and that such anticipatory determinations and assertions were called

aéiopuata. 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 mathematical in modern science is axiomatic. First, insofar as modern 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 access for the things within it. Heidegger argues that because modern science is mathematical 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 determines 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 modern 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. Modern science is necessarily mathematical in the ordinary, narrow sense of calculative and numerical because it is mathematical 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 measure [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, simultaneously, differential calculus. The narrow sense of the mathematical, and even much of

modern mathematics, is derivative for Heidegger from his broader sense of t& waOnHwata. Modern science is mathematical—that is, calculative—in a way it never could have been for Aristotle, because the essence of modern science is the mathematical 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-already-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

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what is already known beforehand in any understanding. Therefore it is a commitment to what counts as knowledge.

On the basis of his account of the mathematical, Heidegger reads the directive over the door of Plato’s Academy: “ayewyeTONTOS UNdeic eioitw!’” This is not the order that only those who

know geometry in the sense of knowing certain relations between lines and figures can enter the Academy. Rather, Heideg-

ger reads it as the claim that only those who know the mathematical in its originary sense may enter. Only those who have grasped “the fundamental condition for the proper possibility of knowing” (MSMM 254/FD 58) have a place in the Acad-

emy. This condition for the possibility of knowing is “the knowledge of the fundamental presuppositions of all knowledge and the position we take based on such knowledge” (MSMM 254/FD 58). Put more simply, knowledge is conditional

upon its explicit foundation and awareness of its limits. In this sense, the history of metaphysics belongs to the mathematical.

METAPHYSICS AND THE MATHEMATICAL

In Die Frage nach dem Ding, the history of modern metaphysics is so tied up with physics for Heidegger that he looks to the history

of science precisely with the intention of understanding modern metaphysics. It is when he wants to understand “‘the possibility and necessity of such a thing as Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason’’® (FD 50) that he turns to Galileo and Newton. He explores modern metaphysics by trying to bring to light the essential feature of modern knowledge as it is evident in physics. Indeed, the claims Heidegger makes in Being and Time about the shift from concernful dealings to the theoretical attitude of physics can be understood as exactly an analysis of the historical development of modern physics. Heidegger describes the transition from concernful dealings to the theoretical attitude as a shift in which the understanding of being changes over at §69(b). At §16 he discusses how the °“die Méglichkeit und Notwendigkeit von so etwas wie Kants »Kritik der reinen Vernunft«’’ (FD 50).

METAPHYSICS, MATHEMATICS, AND SCIENCE 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 concernful dealings 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/SZ 362). This ambiguity, whether the move to the theoretical attitude is to be understood 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 modern science in the texts from 1916 and 1935, Galileo is for Heidegger, although conspicuously absent from §69(b) of Being and Time, precisely the individual scientist in whose thinking mathematical physics first

arose. Accordingly, the historical rise of modern 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 ““modern natural science, modern mathematics, and modern 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 modern 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, Descartes liberated philosophy from the disgraceful petrification of academic knowledge which failed to concern human being or illuminate reality. Through a process of doubt, Descartes eventually came to the indubitable foundation of the ego cogito, for doubting has the doubter as its condition. This is the insight that

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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 Descartes the foundation of philosophy. Heidegger has a different story to tell. He argues that Descartes’s central work is Meditationes de prima philosophia and that prima philosophia is the neMtyn Miooogia of Aristotle. Such first

philosophy says nothing about a theory of knowledge but concerns 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 epistemological. 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 mathematical. They are an argument to ground the being of beings in certainty. Heidegger looks for further evidence of his reading of Descartes in an unfinished, early work published posthumously, Regulae 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 mathematical 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 mathematical to its own essence. It is here, Heidegger argues, that Des-

METAPHYSICS, MATHEMATICS, AND SCIENCE 63

cartes coins the modern concept of science, for he “grasps the idea of a scientia universalis, to which everything must be directed 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 absolutely certain and that must determine in advance the thingness of things. Descartes is thus in search of “‘the very first and highest 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 modern science is the subjectivity of the subject. Heidegger makes the connection between modern science and metaphysics on the basis of the mathematical. For in his view, the “question about the thing is now anchored 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 knowledge in the modern 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 science. He first takes metaphysics as science to ground the positive sciences, since it is the task of metaphysics to show how a regional 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

64. HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

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 modern science is in its mathematical essence precisely metaphysical. Metaphysics is no longer a science for Heidegger so much as a determining aspect of modern physics. Heidegger disentangles the claim that philosophy is a science from the claim that science is the mathematical 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 understanding 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 modern science is metaphysical insofar as its determination of its object brings with it a mathematical grounding of knowledge. 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 Heidegger 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 nature 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 turn 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 THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE is concerned in large part with the

logic and epistemology of scientific theory and practice. Heideg-

ger is certainly a philosopher of science in this sense, for his analysis of the experimental method is an ongoing consideration of the epistemological assumptions underlying scientific rationality, as well as a historical account of the practice of science

by Galileo and Newton in contrast to Aristotle. In the 1930s, Heidegger’s analysis of the experimental method is the beginning of his critique of representational thinking, for the culminating question he poses is that of the role of mathematical representation in science. He uncovers a metaphysics of subjectivity in which the certainty of the experimental method is founded upon the self-assertion of the thinking subject. Experimentation is therefore underwritten in Heidegger’s account by an epistemology seeking the clarity and distinctness of subjective representations, a Cartesian logic that secures in such representations truths from which other truths can follow. Sir Karl Popper (1959) argues that the logic of scientific development is not one of verification, not one of establishing certain-

ties and securing truths, but of the falsification of hypotheses. Kuhn (1970) maintains that the history of science consists in shifts between incommensurable paradigms, from, for example, Ptolemy’s geocentric universe to Copernican heliocentrism. The

history of science cannot be considered cumulative under Kuhn’s account, since there is no logical continuity throughout

such a shift. Lakatos (1970) defends the notion of progress against the Kuhnian view by arguing that rational reconstruction of paradigm shifts is possible. Feyerabend (1975) claims that

“anything goes,” that is, scientific progress best takes place when conflicting or incommensurable paradigms coexist in the-

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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 modern. The latter is determined by science, 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 contribution 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 representational thinking, definitive of modernity, is first and foremost found in scientific method. For this reason, Heidegger is interested in the differences between ancient and modern 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, Heidegger 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 scientific 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 1928 lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. There he argues that “all dialectic in philosophy is only the expression of an embarrassment” (FCM 187/GM 276), but in 1940 he will argue that Aristotle is decisive for what emerges in modern 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 Aristotle clearly demarcated branches of knowledge. Theoretical and

EXPERIMENT AND REPRESENTATION 67 productive knowledge merge in the common essence of modern

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 Heidegger 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 toca (IM 180ff./EM 137ff.), he preserves the pre-Socratic notion of being as presence, but abolishes being as @votc, such that the stability of the t6ga, over and against the transience of muots con-

tains the origin of the medieval distinction between existentia and essentia (IM 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 nature and spirit (BCP 224/W 243). Aristotle is the site of the original 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 modern—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

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epochal division, yet it also plays a special role only beginning to be visible to Heidegger in the 1930s. In this decade, he acknowledge the significance of physics in ancient thought. He argues in 1935, in Introduction to Metaphysics, that mvotc, nature, the object of physics, is the original determination of being for the pre-Socratics. Physics is not just a discipline within a taxonomy of knowledge, but informative of the pre-Socratic experience of being. Furthermore, it is in 1938, in ““The Age of the World Picture,” that Heidegger first sees that science is decisive for the modern epoch insofar as representational thinking informs modernity. The experiment is the tomoc wherein Heidegger 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 modern demonstrates his Lakatosian commitment to the intelligibility and rationality of shifts between epochs. Accordingly, Heidegger 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 rationality in modernity, that is, as the paradigm of representational 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 moderns. In analytic terms, then, he is an anti-realist. In 1938 Heidegger argues that the modern epoch is the age of the world as picture, that is, that representational thinking is the hallmark of modernity. Furthermore, he argues in the Beitrige 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: modern science is not just symptomatic of, but rather essential to and informative of, the modern epoch. Indeed, Heidegger’s account of representation in experimentation points to Descartes as the origin of the metaphysics of modern subjectivity, and hence of representation. Descartes’s method in philosophy, as he himself points out in

EXPERIMENT AND REPRESENTATION 69 the preface to his Meditations on First Philosophy, is borrowed from the sciences, where it has been for him successful (Descartes 1986:4). The sciences set the standard for truth and knowledge in modernity. Heidegger is, then, preoccupied with the sciences not in order to understand better their logic and development, but in order better to understand the rationality of the modern 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 Grtinder, that issues of science pervade Heidegger’s writings (1963:18). Heidegger is intensely preoccupied with questions of scientific practice and theory, with its logic and epistemological assumptions and consequences, 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 conception of modern science by looking to the experimental method. Heidegger’s conception of science is traceable back to his earliest work, that is, to his clear if superficial commitment to scientific realism explicit in 1912 in his discussion of the problem of realism in modern philosophy, and to his interest in 1916 in contrasting 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 successful. 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 modern 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 mathematical 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

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Galileo’s law of free-fall acceleration, he characterizes modern science as the a priori formulation of hypotheses which are then tested in experimentation. This 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 generalized by induction into universal law. Yet it is some twenty years until Heidegger will cite Newton’s Principia on method (MSMM 259/FD 63). In Being and Time the account is more sophisticated than it was 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 account has developed since 1916, but he holds fast to the question of the role of the mathematical projection of nature in the sciences. 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 discussion of the experimental method. The focal texts are Die Frage nach dem Ding, the Beitrige, and ‘““The Age of the World Picture.”

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 scientific 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.1 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 modern experiment is the decisiveness of a single result is justified. 1 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.

EXPERIMENT AND REPRESENTATION 71 Second, the Beitriige raises the question of the experiment by drawing a distinction between empirical evidence and ordinary experience. This is not a new issue to Heidegger. He first separates 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 119/H 78). Is nature thus investigated discovered or created 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 turn support the theory. Heidegger’s answer in “The Age of the World Picture” is that science 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. Third, I address the question of representation in science inso-

far as that representation is mathematical. In the Beitrige, the question of calculation is brought into Heidegger’s account of

the mathematical nature of modern science. Whereas previously, in Die Frage nach dem Ding, Heidegger redefined the mathematical to mean the a priori (MSMM 251-53/FD 56-58), in the Beitrage 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 mathematical 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 essence of technology. Accordingly, the work Heidegger does on

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representation and the scientific method in the 1930s is foundational 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 epistemology 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 essence of science as the essence of technology. Accordingly, the experiment plays a more significant role in Heidegger’s analysis of modern science than may be readily apparent. He claims, after all, in 1935 that the fact that modern science is experimental is inadequate to distinguish it from ancient and medieval science (MSMM 248/FD 51-52), and that to call modern science experimental is to miss its fundamental feature (MSMM 249/FD 52). He goes on to identify the fundamen-

tal feature of modern 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 modern science can be grasped. For the experiment, it seems, is an appeal 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 conceptions 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 experiment 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 modern science, he is denying that experimentation establishes modern science as the science of facts in contrast to medieval superstition. He will go on to argue that the fundamental feature of modern 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 Beitrige and “The Age of the

EXPERIMENT AND REPRESENTATION 73 World Picture,” it is clear that the projective essence of modern 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 modern 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 meaning 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 eighteenth 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 simultaneously from a height, the lighter initially descends ahead of the heavier, which then catches up and passes the lighter. His explanation 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 experiment 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

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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: experimentation. 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 Instauration, 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 success Bacon anticipated for the experimental method is evidently reached in technological achievements that have only in recent years succumbed to criticism—environmental, social, and otherwise. 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-

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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 conquest of nature. Accordingly, it is not surprising that when Heidegger turns in the 1930s from the question of philosophy as science to the sciences themselves, experimentation is the pivotal issue. The Galilean founding myth of modern science shows not so much that bodies of different weight fall at the same rate as that the experiment is methodologically decisive for modern science. Not only is experimentation definitively modern, 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 heroic 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 significantly 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 hypothesis 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 dem Ding, and his concerns about the experiment lie elsewhere. He is interested in the conditions for the possibility of the experiment in modern science. In the Beitrige, Heidegger cites “the conditions for the possibility of the modern experiment”: “1. the mathematical projection 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

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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 understand 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 Heidegger 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 philosophers of science question repeatability in a different context than that in which Heidegger makes his claim for the decisiveness of a single result. Jan 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, development, and logic of the sciences than abstract considerations of ideology. Indeed, Paul Feyerabend has shown that the gap between ideology and practice in the sciences is large, and pernicious (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 Méglichkeit des neuzeitlichen Experimentes: 1. der mathematische Entwurf der Natur, Gegenstandlichkeit, Vor-gestelltheit; 2. die Umwandlung des Wesen der Wirklichkeit von der Wesenheit zur Einzelnheit. Nur unter dieser Voraussetzung kann ein Einzelergebnis Begriindungskraft und Bewahrung beanspruchen”’ (Beitrige 164).

EXPERIMENT AND REPRESENTATION 77 beliefs about science as of its actual practice. By putting Heidegger’s analysis of the ideology of modern science against Hack-

ing’s practically based account of repeatability, and against Duhem’s and Lakatos’s denial that there are single decisive experiments 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 experiments 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 experiments. Relying on the “paradoxical generalization . . . that most experiments don’t work most of the time” (1983:230), he suggests 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). Experimental science is difficult, argues Hacking, because the phenomena are difficult to produce as stable. Repetition can be a case of advancing technically beyond earlier versions of the experiment, 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 previous 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 ita more than trivial demand scientifically? Newton made it a rule of reasoning that his experimental results could be generalized universally (Thayer 1953:3); having established experimental evidence of his hypotheses, he brought that knowledge a priori to further

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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 establishes controlled conditions within which results can be predicted, it seems, to borrow a metaphor, that repeatability as a criterion of success is much like buying several copies of a newspaper 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 repetitions are cases of different scientists wishing to see for themselves. 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 support a universal hypothesis, the question must be asked: Why have the results of significant experiments in the history of science 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 modern 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 Beitrige not only the weaker claim that

such experiments exist, but also the stronger claim that their possibility in principle is a condition for the modern 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

EXPERIMENT AND REPRESENTATION 79 least one of those hypotheses, but ‘the experiment does not designate which one should be changed” (1954:187). Likewise, Imre Lakatos rejects crucial experiments because there is no “instant rationality”’ (1970:154). Within a scientific research program, experiments 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, argues 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 crossroads. “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 experiment 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 experiment was not a onetime affair. It was first performed in 1881. The most famous version was in 1887. Michelson did the experiment five times, the last in 1925, 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 theory of light and G. G. Stokes’s account of astronomical aberration, 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-

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search program consists of a “hard core” surrounded by a protective 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 experiment to test it. The experiment can be outlined quite briefly. 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 evident in an interference effect. The experiment produced a negative result: there was no interference. 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 aberration, and thus allows his experiment to topple two, albeit interrelated, 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 experiment 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 vibrations. Horses passing the building were enough to disturb the experiment. Repetition can be, as Hacking points out, a way of > 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.

EXPERIMENT AND REPRESENTATION 81 improving the experiment, yet that is not the case here. Michelson had what he considered an adequate and satisfactory arrangement of the apparatus before he published his results. And despite the availability of the technology to improve experimental 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 abandon 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 because 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 resisted.

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 vehicle for illustrating criteria of choice. ‘“By the time they were performed,” he argues, meaning Foucault’s pendulum, Cavendish’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 produced an unexpected result. It is certainly the case, however, that the Michelson-Morley experiment produced such an unex-

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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 consistent with the ongoing repetition of the Michelson-Morley experiment. 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 relativity 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 accounted. Refusal to accept Michelson’s results in 1881 without resistance is more a reflection of human nature than it is of adherence to the criterion of repeatability for experiments. Perfectly 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 experiment, 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 community will relinquish such a powerful explanatory tool. If crucial experiments are “instances of crossroads,” then MichelsonMorley 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? Modern science has as its founding myth Galileo’s free-fall ex-

EXPERIMENT AND REPRESENTATION 83 periment, which is considered decisive between the Aristotelian and modern 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 methodology in which a single production of an observed result can topple a theory. Heidegger claims in the Beitriige that a condition for the possibility of the modern 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/SZ 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 modern 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 genesis of theoretical behavior” (BT 412/SZ 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 consciousness of the scientist), then the question of the genesis of theoretical 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 experiment 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 freefall experiment is methodologically crucial. It rejects the specula-

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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 modern experiment is central to the distinction Heidegger draws between ordinary experience and the empirical evidence of experimentation. Experience is simply not the same thing for Aristotle and for the experimental physicist.

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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 adequate 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 experience (MSMM 265-66/FD 69). He comes to these claims through a long-standing inquiry into the differences between Aristotle’s physics and Galileo’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 results of experimentation to be precisely proof in experience. Aristotle is renowned as a realist, and Heidegger himself argues as early as 1916 that Aristotle’s method is to generalize on the basis of experience (ZG 419). Yet Aristotle did not experiment. 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 modern experiment is different from any test Aristotle may have performed in that his explanations in terms of essences, generalized over many instances, are replaced by the observation of single instances that can support or undermine a hypothesis which is held by the scientist in ad-

EXPERIMENT AND REPRESENTATION 85 vance. Experimentation is not central to Aristotle’s method because he does not proceed on the basis of such hypotheses. The experimental method is peculiarly modern. As such, it establishes a novel experience of nature for the scientist. Moody speculates that “the most decisive factor in Galileo’s achievements in physics” (1951:414) may have been the “ideal of axiomatic 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 deduction’”” (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 consequences can be mathematically derived. Moody argues that Galileo took the ideal of a mathematically demonstrated dynamics from Archimedes (1951:413). His method has its roots not in Aristotle’s realism, but in mathematical idealism. For the modern 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 modern science the ideal world of mathematics overlays physical reality unproblematically, until quantum theorists raise the question of physical interpretation of their mathematical formalism. Heidegger argues in the Beitrige that the experiment is an argumentum 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 (Beitrige 162-63). The medieval preoccupation with textual interpretation is replaced in modern science by a concern for the phenomena. One can easily construe this shift as a move toward realism, a turn from word to world, as indeed the shift from Aristotle’s éutELola 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

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is determined by the abstract and generalized terms in which a problem is formulated, rather than by the commonsense empiricism of Aristotle. But, Heidegger argues, the transition from medieval doctrina to modern 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 and modern science is not new to Heidegger in the Beitrage. He raised it originally in 1916 in “Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft,”” and returned to it twenty years later in Die Frage nach dem Ding. He observed in 1916 that the modern scientific method of testing an a priori and universal law stands in opposition to Aristotle’s method of generalization on the basis of experience. 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 Aristotle 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 III, and he cites Regulae

IV: “In experimental philosophy we are to look upon propositions 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 exceptions” (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 has changed. Heidegger notes in 1935 that both Newton and Galileo argue against the evidence of ordinary experience. When 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

EXPERIMENT AND REPRESENTATION 87 is not itself visible: the air’s resistance (MSMM 266/FD 69). Likewise, 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 modern science appeals to the empirical in the experiment, it does not in fact appeal to ordinary experience. Rather, it appeals to an isolated, controllable empirical situation. Modern science returns to the empirical only insofar as it separates the empirical from ordinary experience. Heidegger’s claim that the empirical is distinct from ordinary experience is in accord with Bacon’s proposal of the experimental 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 experiment 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 produced in an experiment are different—better, in fact—than ordinary experience.

The argument that the experiment is a separation of the empirical from ordinary experience can be found in the analytic tradition of philosophy of science some fifty years after Heidegger first made it in Die Frage nach dem Ding. Ian Hacking argues that experiments do not observe so much as they “create, produce, 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 experiments 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

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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 organized. We may wish to say that “after a revolution scientists are responding to a different world” (Kuhn 1970:111). 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 incommensurable. They have different data, rather than common data upon which they disagree. Accordingly, whereas Hacking holds that experiments reproduce 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 dem 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

Realitaétsproblem in der modernen Philosophie.” In this 1912 text, Heidegger’s inclination is readily toward realism. He rejects a Husserlian philosophy of immanent consciousness and phenomenalism 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 4“Mit der Zurtickweisung des Konscientialismus und Phanomenalismus sind Setzung und Bestimmung von Realitaten als méglich dargetan” (“Realitatsproblem” 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.’’> Second, he believes that the ‘“establishing of a consciousness-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 intersubjective 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 possible. 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 Aufsenwelt) (‘Realitatsproblem” 13). And he further suggests that the determination of the real—that is, the determination of the nature 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.’ 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 ““sesunden Realismus . .. glanzenden Erfolge . .. unabweisbare, epochemachende Tatbestand” (“‘Realitatsproblem” 3-4). 6““Die Setzung von bewuftseinstranszendenten Realitaéten wird vor allem durch die Tatsache gefordert, daf$ ein und dasselbe Objekt verschiedenen Individuen unmittelbar kommuikabel ist” (““Realitaétsproblem” 12). 7 “Fine vollgiiltige, adequate Bestimmung der gesetzten Realitéten wird fir die Realwissenschaften ein ideales Ziel bleiben” (Realitétsproblem” 14). 8 “’“Neben dem materialen Fortschritt weist die Geschichte der Wissenschaften unzweideutig ein Vorwartsdrangen in der normalen Bestimmung der Objekte 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 commitment 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 idealism. 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 Aristotle’s éumetoia. 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 Gerlach’s argument—albeit cryptically, in ““Theorie und Experiment in der exacten Wissenschaft’’—that modern science had already

begun already in the Middle Ages: “If already [begun], then back to the origin of this medieval ‘modernity’: Aristotle’s eusetola.’”? I interpret him to mean that modern 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 transformations are Aufhebungen, in which something is cast off and something maintained, something abolished and something °“Wenn schon, dann zurtick auf die Quelle dieser mittelalterlichen »Modernitat«: Aristoteles, éumeioia” (Beitriige 164).

EXPERIMENT AND REPRESENTATION 91 raised up. Therefore no epoch is for Heidegger free of its history.

Something of Aristotle’s éumetoia remains in modernity in the experiment. Medieval doctrina is radically different from both

ancient science and modern science. A trace of Aristotle’s éustelola remains in what distinguishes modern science radically from medieval doctrina: the experimental method.

In Heidegger’s view, the experiment belongs in modern 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 modern 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 experiment.’”° 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 modern 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 modern experiment: the intent to order by means of a lawlike hypothesis. In §77 of the Beitriige, Heidegger raises the question of the experiment 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.”’” 10 ““Um dem Begriff des wissenschaftlichen Experimentes im Sinne der heutigen, neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft die hinreichende Bestimmtheit verschaffen zu kénnen, bedarf es eines Durchblicks durch die Stufen und Weisen des »Erfahrens«, 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, darf nicht dazu verleiten, dort, wo experimentum und experiri und experientia vorkommen, nun auch schon die Kenntnis des heutigen »Experimentes« oder auch nur die unmittelbaren Vorstufen dazu finden zu wollen” (Beitrige 159).

12“eine wahllose Ansammlung von Beobachtungen lediglich auf Grund ihrer unabsehbaren Mannigfaltigkeit und Auffalligkeit’’ (Beitrige 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 anticipation 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 mathematical is for him not simply the numerical. Rather, it is understood 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 measurable regularities. This is the sense in which the experiment is mathematical for Heidegger: a hypothesis is formulated beforehand of the regularities nature will exhibit under experimentation. Only because it is mathematical in this broader sense does modern 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 calculates with precision; rather, “it must calculate in this way because 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 necessary to modern science precisely because physics “is mathematical (not empirical), therefore is it necessarily experimental in the

sense of the measuring experiment.’ The mathematical projec8 “eine Sammlung in der Absicht auf eine Ordnung, deren »Prinzip« noch gar nicht aus den beobachteten Gegenstanden entnommen ist’’ (Beitrage 161). 4¢““dafs uberhaupt das Regelhafte und nur dieses das Gegenstiindliche in seinem Bereich im voraus bestimmt” (Beitrige 162). 6 “Weil die neuzeitliche »Wissenschaft« (Physik) mathematisch (nicht em-

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tion of nature is, he claims, “precisely the prerequisite for the necessity and possibility of the ‘experiment’ as measuring.’’° Later he argues that because modern science is exact, therefore the experiment (Beitrige 166). The experimental method is crucial to modern science, Heidegger is arguing, because modern 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 precisely and measured. Across several texts from the second half of the decade following Being and Time, then, Heidegger holds that measurement in experimental methodology is definitive of modern 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 modern epoch. In 1935, in Die Frage nach dem Ding, he is prepared to distinguish the modern 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 modern natural science is that the former “searched for the metaphysical essence and hidden causes arising in immediate actuality.’””” 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 experience. 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 messenden Experimentes”’ (Beitriige 163).

16 ““Gerade der Entwurf der Natur im mathematischen Sinne ist die Voraussetzung fiir die Notwendigkeit und Méglichkeit des »Experimentes« als des messenden” (Beitriige 163).

‘7 “suchte das metaphysische Wesen der in der unmittelbaren Wirklichkeit sich aufdrangenden Erscheinungen und deren verborgene Ursache zu erforschen” (ZG 418-19).

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ancient reliance on experience: the modern 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 Beitrige

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 delimiting 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 continuities, 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 scientist: ‘“To be sure, it was Aristotle who first understood what €ustelola (experientia) means: the observation of things themselves, 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, measurements, 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-

ern 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 ““Fs sei hier, ohne historischen Verfolg der Wortgeschichte, der Sache nach

eine Stufenfolge des »Erfahrens« und des »Empirischen« aufgezeichnet zur

oe 60). einer Wesensumgrenzung des »Experimentes«” (Beitriige 159-

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favor of a new one. The modern experimental method entails observation, but observation follows behind and is determined by theory. This arrangement precludes the possibility of interpretation according to the Aristotelian model Heidegger characterizes, in which the phenomena themselves are the basis for generalization. Likewise in the Beitriige, Heidegger argues that the modern scientific experiment is more than the “looking around” of Aristotle’s style of observation. As a going toward something (Zugehen auf etwas) and a testing (Erprobung), the experience gained through experiment is already what he calls a seeking (Gesuchtes). 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 modern scientist pursues (verfolgt) 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 interventions and under application of definite conditions of a more precise 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 examples Heidegger gives of such adaptation of the conditions of observation. But the decisive factor in the modern 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 intervene is a central thesis in Hacking’s book, Representing and Intervening. 19 “verschaffen wir uns bestimmte Erfahrungen durch bestimmte Eingriffe und unter Anwendung bestimmter Bedingungen des genaueren Sehens und Bestimmens” (Beitriige 160).

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Accordingly, the modern experiment stands not only in opposition to the (medieval) argumentum ex verbo and (ancient) speculative thinking, but in opposition to simple experience itself.”° The distinction between modern 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 without a predetermining concept.”! Likewise, the contrast between ancient and modern science is between experience as observation 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 unconcealment, for which Heidegger uses the Greek term GAn@eLa, such that the interpretation of beings that is ontic truth is deriva-

tive from their originary unconcealment. The point is to acknowledge 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/SZ 34). It is not entirely clear what 20 “Jetzt das Experiment nicht mehr nur gegen blofes argumentum ex verbo und gegen »Spekulation«, sondern gegen alles blofSe experiri’” (Beitriige 163). Cf. “Jetzt das Experiment gegen das experiri” (Beitriige 164). 21 “Jetzt der Unterschied nicht mehr gegen blofses Reden und Zusammensetzen von Meinungen, »Autoritaéten« tiber einen Sachverhalt, sondern gegen nur Besch-

reiben und Aufnehmen und Feststellen, was sich bietet, ohne den bestimmten, das Vorgehen vorzeichnenden Voregriff”’ (Beitriige 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 discussion of natural science in §69(b) of Being and Time that he says his preliminary conception of phenomenology “will be developed for the first time” (BT 408/SZ 357). Despite the fact that phenomenology is for Heidegger explicitly a method for philosophy, 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 naiveté 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 during these early years, so it could be the case that he here connects phenomenology to science on that basis rather than taking “‘science’”’ 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 context of natural science, not in the context of philosophy as a science. Heidegger is doing ontology in Being and Time according to his conception of the phenomenological method. But his discussion turns to natural science in §69 because he holds that the sciences are phenomenological: he sees the theoretical attitude as a disinterested interruption of concernful dealings. He will later find himself wrong on this point, both through the Nazi appropriation of scientific knowledge and through its appropriation toward human ends in technology. Indeed, Heidegger chooses natural science as the place to develop 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

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are discovered “’ ‘merely’ by looking at them” (BT 402/SZ 351).

The theoretical attitude is free of the interpretive fore-structure essential to everyday understanding, which is characterized by fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception (BT 191/S5Z 150). Heidegger in Being and Time seems to hold that natural science 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 Beitrage of Aristotle’s method of pursuing science 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 delimited 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/SZ 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 recent 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, although fictitious entities can readily be found in the history of science. Caloric and phlogiston are the most popularly cited examples. 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 limitation on understanding, for in the closure of the hermeneutic circle of objectivity it may well seem that beings are in fact nothing more than objects, that nature is nothing more than a coherence

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of forces that can be reckoned, calculated, and arranged to behave in a predictable manner. Accordingly, while it may be the case for Heidegger that Aristotle’s inquiry into nature was phenomenological in the sense that it did not impose a fore-conception onto the things it investigated, but drew rather its conception from them, Heidegger cannot continue to maintain the thesis that modern science is phenomenological, that it lets beings be rather than determining them by prior conception. His subsequent work on the experimental method develops what appears as a tension in Being and Time: on the one hand, Heidegger claims that the theoretical attitude 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 modern scientist only as mathematically projected in objectivity. In §80 of the Beitrige, Heidegger develops that thesis to argue further that there is not even description 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 overdetermining the thing in an a priori conception. The necessary forestructure 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 Metaphysics? and Introduction to Metaphysics, both texts that are subsequent 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 violent bursting of human being into the whole of beings, the very condition for understanding beings. Science is a rupture for Hei-

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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 moAewos in Introduction to Metaphysics is of such a rupture that opens up a world. He considers Heraclitus’s Fragment 53, in which Heraclitus says that mO\Euos is the father and king of all. Heidegger translates the fragment from Greek as ““Auseinandersetzung ist allem (Anwesenden) zwar Erzeuger (der aufgehen 1afst), allem aber (auch) waltender Bewahrer. Sie lafst namlich die einen als Gdtter erscheinen, 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 preserver. For it makes some to appear as gods, others as men; it creates (shows) some as slaves, others as freemen” (IM 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 moAeuos “is not a mere

assault on something already there’; rather, it “constitutes unity, it is a binding-together” (IM 62/EM 47). IIdAepos 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 understanding is not exhausted by this account of m0)euos. A third sense of violence can be found in Die Frage nach dem

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Ding. Here Heidegger argues that there was for Aristotle a distinction between what is “natural and [what is] against nature, i.e. violent” (MSMM 264/FD 68). This difference has disappeared in Newton’s doctrine of motion. Heidegger argues that for Aristotle, violence (Bia) 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 necessity 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 inherent tendency to violence in modern science which itself remains 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 Bia. 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 modern 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 Caelo, and appears

in the Physics as an example of the term “automatic” (197b3032). Ilistew, to fall, and its nominal form, mt@otc, 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-

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tral issue in modern 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 respond to experience. Galileo’s are formulated prior to experience 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 Heidegger’s account of science. The first is hermeneutic violence, in which any understanding must impose structures upon the object it seeks to understand. Modern science is violent in this sense, not just because it imposes an interpretive structure necessary even for description, but because it imposes on nature an objectivity that determines it as obeying laws formulated a priori. Second, science is a violent rupture into the whole of beings that makes beings available for human inquiry. In this sense science is definitive for modernity as the way the modern world is first and foremost opened up. Third, modern science is violent in the sense of Bia. 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). Modern science is violent in all three senses in Heidegger’s account.

In a lecture read to a small group in 1954, “Science and Reflection,” Heidegger argues that there is a possibility for science other than violence. He traces the word “theory” to the Greek Seweoeiv. Oeweetv 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). Modern truth has its roots in a respectful

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viewing, Heidegger argues, and there is a shadow of the earlier meaning of Oeweetv in the modern “theory.” What this alternative means for modern science is less than clear, however. In the Rektoratsrede, and again in 1937 in “Die Bedrohung der Wissenschaft,” Heidegger spoke of breaking down departmental barriers and bringing to the sciences a meaningful unity. In 1955, in “Science and Reflection,’”” he does not make this idea more concrete. Yet it seems that the alternative to modern scientific theory—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 modern term has been handed down through the Roman contemplari. The core of this word, templum, comes from the Greek téuvetv, which means to cut or divide: “In @eweia transformed into contemplatio there comes to the fore the impulse, already prepared in Greek thinking, of a looking-at that sunders and compartmentalizes’” (SR 166/VA 50-51). Theory entails an aggressive division of beings into specialized 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 science, establishes the hermeneutic circle within which that science proceeds. Specialization is a rupture that opens a world in which beings are visible in their being. And, furthermore, specialization determines the object of a science that can then be interrogated under controlled conditions. Heidegger uses Betrachtung to translate the Latin contemplatio, and Lovitt uses “‘observation” to translate Betrachtung. Heidegger asks what this observation is. Trachten is from the Latin tractare, 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/VA 51). Thus Heidegger understands observation as “an entrapping and securing refining of the real” (SR 167/VA 51-52). As Edward Ballard puts it, Heidegger “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

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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 characterizes 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 account of science as a setting up and entrapment of nature is evident in his thinking in the 1930s, some twenty years prior to the critique of technology, in the discussion of Bia in Die Frage nach dem Ding and in his critique of the experiment in the Beitrége. 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. SETTING 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 Patterns 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 argument: that there is no such thing as observation free of theoretical 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-

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sally accepted theories and adequately supported by the relevant scientific empirical evidence are indeed true” (1986:22). His

point is that, viewed from the perspective of the scientific conceptual framework, the state of affairs is how it is claimed to be in the theory, regardless of how theory-laden the empirical evidence is. His account shows how closely Heidegger’s account of truth compares with what Hilary Putnam will later call, in Representing and Reality, internal realism: within a conceptual scheme, the entities that figure in that scheme are real. But that, of course, is precisely the problem: scientific theories are supposed to describe regularities in nature, not ground consistent fantasies. The concern about observation is that even observation statements may be hermeneutically suspect, much as Heidegger pointed out about description in §80 of the Beitriige. Jan Hacking’s response to this concern in Representing and Intervening is worth singling out because the position he advances is similar to Heidegger’s analysis. Both reject the view that observation is disinterested, and both focus their critique of science on representation. Hacking argues that observation cannot be theory-loaded in a way that compromises all observation, because “[there] have been important observations in the history of science, which have included no theoretical assumptions at all’”” (1983:176), such as Herschel’s discovery of radiant heat. Sim-

ilarly, Heidegger argues in the Beitrdge that a naive description is more certain than an exact experiment because a description requires less theory (Beitriige 166). Furthermore, argues Hacking, it may be the case that technicians, who neither know nor under-

stand the theory, are better at reading results than scientists (1983:179). Being good at observing is being good at noticing things, not being adept at the theoretical manipulation of dubi-

ous data. In response to the question of the origin of two ideas, reality and representation, Hacking argues, ““There may be more truth in the average a priori fantasy about the human mind than in the supposedly disinterested observations and mathematical modelbuilding of cognitive science”’ (1983:131), in an astute collapse of cognitive psychology with the problem that theories may just be good stories, that is, fictions told with an ulterior motive. Cognitive psychology may be just such a story. Hacking takes reality

106 HEIDEGGER S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 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 intervention mesh together in modern 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 predictions 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 Reflection’”’ adds to the thinking on experimentation in the Beitriége. He

too takes exception to the modern idea that science is disinterested, that “it does not encroach upon the real in order to change it’ (SR 167/VA 52). But what for Hacking is simply a good basis for being a realist contains for Heidegger a further worry. Experimentation—"“intervention,” as Hacking calls it—is in Heidegger’s view an encroachment. Science encroaches upon the real,

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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 entities. 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 modern 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 electron as real in the experiment on quarks. Hacking’s analysis is consistent with Heidegger’s. In modern science, the real is put at the disposal of human being. But Heidegger’s point is critical. The fact that modern 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 success 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 entrapping 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 Beitrage, “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 Heidegger 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” (BT 93/SZ 64—65). A realm of possi-

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ble objects is defined in a regional ontology. But further, in Heidegger’s view, this opening of a world in modern 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 modern assault 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 essence of calculation is, for Heidegger, anticipating his later critique of technology, the will to master everything as something that can be calculated. In Heidegger’s analysis, modern 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 suggests 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 unfleshed-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 scientific 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 structures on beings in order to understand them. This imposition of structure is a rupture, an opening up of a world as a basis for

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understanding. It reckons on the basis of experiments that track the behavior of beings in artificial situations. Calculation is further 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 modern 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 science as an advance any more than we would consider Shakespeare’s poetry more advanced than that of Aeschylus (AWP 117/H 77). Likewise, one of the more controversial points implied 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 incommensurable 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 notion of progress in science in order to say that it is “impossible to say that the modern 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, preferring 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 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

the very meaning of ‘rationality’ can undergo epochal transformation. Accordingly, Heidegger asks what, if not this notion of progress, distinguishes modern science from ancient. The former is exact, whereas ancient ém.otHUN 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 distinguishes 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 delimited—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 studied 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 projection determines in advance the way in which knowledge relates 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

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objects through source criticism. History gets at its objects through its sources: ““Because historiography as research projects 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 nature 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 mathematical, an insight he previously laid out in Die Frage nach dem Ding. The broader sense is that science is projective; the narrower 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 mathematical 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 essentially research because it performs experiments; rather, the converse is true: ‘experiment first becomes possible where and only where the knowledge of nature has been transformed into research” (AWP 121/H 80). The medieval scholar is replaced by the research scientist in the modern 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 determination of what counts as an object for a particular science. For example, in the case of physics the scientific method has a priority over nature, for physics as a specialized science entails the

determination in advance of what nature is. Nature is repre-

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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 modern 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 modern physics. The representation that grounds modern science is objectification, 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 oneself and to make secure what has been set in place, as something set in place. This making secure must be a calculating, for calculability 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 unconcealment 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, 149-50/H 108)

Modern 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.

H 94). |

Hence Heidegger argues that the “fundamental event of the

modern age is the conquest of the world as picture” (AWP 134/ Modern representing is in this sense different from Greek ap-

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prehending. The Greek thinker apprehends what is, but for the modern 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 oneself as the normative realm” (AWP 131/H 91). Beings as objects must conform to the requirements of the modern 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 intellectum) rather than the adequacy of the intellect to its object (adaequatio 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 turn 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 coherence of forces determines the rigor of science as exactitude. The representation of the objects of science determines the objectsphere 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 external 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 subject’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 modern 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-

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lowed in its necessary progression, i.e., of being controlled in advance by calculation” (AWP 121/H 81). The experiment represents by establishing a measurable picture of the movements of a thing, geometrically, as in Galileo’s Two New Sciences, or statistically, as in quantum theory. In §80 of the Beitrige Heidegger asks whether the experiment determines a thing as a such and such, or whether it determines

a relation, specifically a cause-effect relation. He asks further whether this cause-effect relation already determines quantitatively, as an “if so much—then so much (wenn so viel—dann so viel)” (Beitrige 165) relation. Under the account offered in ‘The Age of the World Picture,” the answer is that the experiment does determine a quantitative causal relation. To know remains to know the cause, as it was for Aristotle, but ““cause” is construed here, as is motion, much more narrowly than in Aristotle’s account. The cause is efficient, and the motion is a change of place in Newtonian mechanics. To be able to predict measurable results successfully is to understand and control causes. Heidegger has already argued in Die Frage nach dem Ding that

all determinations of bodies in modern science have one basic blueprint, according to which the natural process is nothing but the determination in space and time of the motion of points of mass (MSMM 267/FD 71). In Introduction to Metaphysics he argued that “appearance in the large sense of the epiphany of a world, is now the demonstrable visibility of things present at hand” (IM 63).” These two claims come together in “The Age of the World Picture’ in Heidegger’s argument that the modern world is opened on the basis of the scientific determination of things as quantifiable objects, that is, bodies in motion. In Heidegger’s analysis, the scientific representation of beings is the key to the modern world as picture. Heidegger cannot accept the idea that a medieval world picture changed into a modern one. Nor could the world be as pic-

ture for the Greeks. He claims that “the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the 2 | have used my own translation here, since Manheim’s terminology is not clear out of context. The German reads: ‘“Erscheinen im grossen Sinne der Epiphanie einer Welt, wird jetzt zur herzeigbaren Sichtbarkeit vorhandener Dinge” (EM 48).

EXPERIMENT AND REPRESENTATION 115 modern age [der Neuzeit]’”” (AWP 130/H 90). But, argues Heideg-

ger, the world as picture has its origin in Plato’s eidoc: “that the beingness of whatever is, is defined for Plato as eidéoc [aspect, view] is the presupposition, destined far in advance and long ruling indirectly in concealment, for the world’s having to become picture’ (AWP 131/H 91). The eidoc is transformed in the history of thought into the idea. In the precedence of the idea over its object, the aspect or view a thing reveals of itself ceases to belong to the thing as Umoxeipevov. Heidegger defines tmoxeivevov as “that-which-lies-before, which, as ground, gathers everything onto itself’ (AWP 128/H 88). Originally, Heidegger suggests, this gathering was constituted by the unity of the thing under inquiry. The subject was the thing under question and had no special relation to human being or the “I” of Cartesian subjectivity. In the modern age, however, human being becomes the subject and the ground of the synthetic unity of the object in Descartes’s assertion of the ego cogito as the ground of knowledge. That human being becomes subject and the thing object are simultaneous events for Heidegger (AWP 133, 151/H 93, 109).

The essence of the modern epoch is, for Heidegger, the world picture. It is not a picture of the world, but “the world conceived and grasped as picture” (AWP 129/H 89). For everything that is, is only to the extent that human being sets it up and represents it, that is, only to the extent that it is picturable. Likewise, what

is not available to be represented in experiment, simply is not for science. Silvio Vietta recounts: ‘“While I was still in school Heidegger took me along on a walk and explained to me in perceiving the colors of one of the branches hanging over a garden fence, the tendency of modern science and especially physics to resolve its object into abstract measurements, here the frequency of light waves’’? (1977:234). Color is as light waves for the scien-

tist. Other possibilities, such as those for the artist or the person

strolling along a country lane, do not exist in the scientist’s 3 “Noch wahrend meiner Schulzeit nahm Heidegger mich einmal auf einen Spaziergang mit und erlauterte mir an der Wahrnehmung der Farben eines liber einen Gartenzaun hintiberhangenden Zweiges die Tendenz moderner Naturwissenschaft und insbesondere der Physik, ihren Gegenstand in abstrakte Messegréssen, hier die Frequenzwerte der Lichtwellen, aufzulésen.”

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shrunken world. This limited view of color is not an isolated interpretation of a tree, but rather part of an interpretation of an entire world. Vietta’s example is pertinent not only to show how modern scientists pursue their science on the basis of a representation of nature, for the scientific representation of beings is decisive for the modern age in Heidegger’s account. Against that ground, against the world as picture, Heidegger

argues that what is “does not come into being at all through the fact that [human being] first looks upon it, in the sense of a representing” (AWP 131/H 90). The thing is in being before human being makes it into an object of understanding. Heidegger argues in Introduction to Metaphysics that pv6ic is much richer than the modern concept of nature, that it was, in fact, being itself for the Greeks. He makes a similar point in the Beitriige, where he suggests that @v6tc is the a priori, for it is that which is earliest and first in coming to presence.*4 ®v6tc is prior to experience. He argues that the a priori came to belong to the

subject by means of Plato’s idea. With the idea, the a priori becomes the perceptio and accordingly the ego percipio that is allo-

cated to the subject. Hence it comes to precedence in representation.** But there is something prior to subjective representation. Heidegger’s point throughout the 1930s is that being is prior to understanding. Accordingly, scientific representation produces only illusory control of nature. Research calls beings into account according to the extent that they can be “put at the disposal of representation” (AWP 126/H 86). But there is more to @v6uc, the original Greek interpretation of what is of its own accord, than there is

to the modern interpretation of nature as object. Likewise, Heidegger implies, there is more to nature than the modern conception acknowledges. There are not just beings that are represented by the human subject. There is also being. But being cannot be set up and mastered as a picture. Being cannot be represented. Heidegger noted the difficulty of pictur24“’Das Fritheste, Erst-Anwesende, die Anwesung ist die mvu6tc selbst’’ (Beitriige 222).

5 “Das Apriori wandelt sich mit der idea zur perceptio, d.h. das Apriori wird dem ego percipio und damit dem »Subjekt« zugewiesen; es kommt zur Vorgangigkeit des Vor-stellens’’ (Beitriige 223).

EXPERIMENT AND REPRESENTATION 117 ing being in the early pages of Basic Problems of Phenomenology (BPP 13/GP 18). In his later years, in What Is Called Thinking?, he holds to his claim that being cannot be grasped as a concept: ““If

we stop for a moment and attempt, directly and precisely and without subterfuge, to represent in our minds what the terms ‘being’ and “to be’ state, we find that such an examination has nothing to hold onto’ (WCT 225/WHD 137). The German for “concept” is Begriff, from greifen, meaning to grasp or lay hold of. Heidegger’s argument that being is not a concept is the claim that an examination of being has nothing to hold onto. Being cannot be set up and mastered as a picture, a representation. Hence its forgottenness in the age of the world picture. And hence in particular its forgottenness in modern science: the experimental method, so successful in physics, is useless in metaphysics. For beings can be set up in an experiment, but being cannot.

CONCLUSION

Heidegger’s critique of the experimental method is therefore sig-

nificant for both the analytic and the Continental traditions of philosophy. It promises a bridge to the analytic tradition, a bridge that is long overdue across a distinction that is more of a

hindrance than an asset to contemporary thinkers. I have pointed to some of the places where connections can be forged, both to treat concerns from Heidegger in analytic terms and to respond to analytic philosophy of science with a Heideggerian view. Furthermore, Heidegger’s critique of experimentation proves foundational to his later critique of the modern epoch. His critique of technology would not come into being without the account of representational thinking he gives in the context of the experimental method in science. Heidegger’s treatment of the experiment reveals that the modern epoch, in its determination by representation, is determined by science. Modern science is not just one aspect of the modern age among others, but rather the basis from which Heidegger brings the modern epoch as a whole to light critically in ““The Age of the World Picture.” For

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representational thinking, which underwrites modernity, has its

genesis in the scientific method. Modern science is not just symptomatic of the age of representation. That is to say, it is not the case that representation informs modern science because it

informs modernity and modern science is therein located. Rather, modern science determines the modern epoch as the age of representation. The experiment is the tomoc where Heidegger develops his account of representational thinking that stands at the basis of his critique of modernity.

3

Science in the Institution AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO is to be found Massey College,

a residence housing about sixty graduate students, with three rooms set aside for the Canadian Institute of Theoretical Astrophysics. At breakfast, residents regularly meet physicists of international repute or postdoctoral fellows. Among the latter, a common worry is expressed: when the one-year postdoc runs out, “Should I take a job teaching high school physics, with almost no prestige, not much of money, and no future in research? Or should I take a well-paid, prestigious research job working for the American military?’” What happens to knowledge when scientists face such a choice? Who decides the direction and focus of research? The Nazi appropriation of the German university toward po-

litical ends presented academics of that day with such a dilemma. Heidegger’s analysis of science in the institution is a developing critique of the university when it is thus appropriated. In his account, the sciences stand at the core of the mod-

ern university, and the latter is a place in which to unify knowledge and evaluate it by asking the question, What is worth knowing? Heidegger’s eye-opening experience as rector in Freiburg disillusioned him with respect to the possibility of raising such a question within the academy. He objected to the political

appropriation of the university and its conversion into professional schools. And he witnessed his university in the 1930s powerless to resist its appropriation to a political program. Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis began with his election to the post of rector of the university in Freiburg. His infamous Rectoral Address upon assuming that position is central to his critique of the Betriebscharakter of the sciences in the university. Accordingly, there are ethical and political reasons for coming to grips with the question of science in the institution in Heidegger’s thinking. But I do not intend to contribute to the

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burgeoning body of literature prompted by Farias’s condemnation of Heidegger in 1987. Hugo Ott, Karsten Harries, Luc Ferry and Alain Renault, Richard Wolin, Julian Young, Gtinther Neske and Emil Kettering, Pascal David, Thomas Sheehan, and Ernst Nolte, to name but a few, have established the debate concerning the historical, ethical, and political consequences of Heidegger’s Nazism, and I leave the implications of his critique of the university in the context of his Nazism to them. My concern is rather to understand Heidegger’s conception of the place and role of the sciences in the university. I intend to show that for Heidegger, the sciences are a human destiny realized as nihilism in the fate of the university. The texts that must be read to lay bare Heidegger’s view of the sciences in the university are What Is Metaphysics? and the Rektoratsrede. In both, Heidegger attributes to the university a role in human destiny. He suggests that the university can overcome the fragmentation of knowledge into particular disciplines by asking what it is valuable to know. If this question, What is worth knowing?, is set up as a context in which to interpret Heidegger on nihilism, then the sciences are central to his critique of modernity and his suggestion of an alternative task and conception for thinking. Heidegger’s analysis of science in the

institution thus raises the question that will drive his later thought, while underscoring his political naiveté with respect to the task and power of the university. First, I trace Heidegger’s account of the nothing. In Being and Time and Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger argues that

the nothing is at the core of Dasein. Since this core is Dasein’s temporality, his readings of Hegel and Aristotle on time in these texts are crucial moments in understanding the connection for Heidegger between the sciences and the nothing in the very structure of human understanding. The nothing is for Heidegger both the possibility of ontology, in that Dasein’s temporality opens the question of being, and the condition for the possibility of the ontic sciences. Subsequent to Being and Time and Basic Problems of Phenome-

nology, Heidegger argues in What Is Metaphysics? that the sciences are a project erected in the face of the nothing. With the intent of shedding new light on Heidegger’s account of nihilism

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 121 by reading it with respect to the sciences, I show that Heidegger takes the sciences to be a human destiny and that this destiny is nihilism. This line of thought culminates in his treatment of nihilism in the Nietzsche lectures. Here nihilism is read not just as a philosophical position in modernity, but rather a destiny that

began with Plato. This account is absurdly reductionist of the history of philosophy, yet it contains the analysis that is the basis for Heidegger’s later critique of modernity, for his various previ-

ous destructions and reconstructions of the history of philosophy are superseded here by a single broad sketch of that history. The significance of this sketch is not as an account of the history of philosophy. Rather, it lies in the fact that in these lectures Heidegger first comes to the question of technology, and it is this vision of quintessentially modern nihilism that sets the stage for his analysis of the poverty of representational thinking. Sandwiched between the earlier treatments of the nothing and the later discussion of nihilism are to be found Heidegger’s claims about the sciences institutionalized in the university. Against the background of the nothing and nihilism, I examine what Heidegger says about the university in What Is Metaphysics? and the Rektoratsrede: the task of the university is to unify the sciences in order to ask what it is valuable to know. By 1937 Heidegger is disillusioned and no longer sees the university as the place to raise the question of what is worth knowing, yet this question stays with him and remains for him a question of reflection upon the sciences. I conclude by arguing that an alternative possibility to the nihilism of representational thinking—an alternative that grows in Heidegger’s work to an explicit call for thinking and reflection, and which is recognized among his readers as the possibility of thinking beyond the confines of the history of metaphysics—is for Heidegger, insofar as he explains it at all, possible only through and as reflection upon the sciences.

The significance of Heidegger’s critique of institutionalized science to his philosophy of science is his insight that the sciences are not value-free. In Being and Time he argued in §69 that the movement to the theoretical attitude is a move away from the involvement of readiness-to-hand, that the scientific object is freed in its objectivity from concernful dealings. Heidegger’s

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critique of the university renders it impossible to hold that scientific objectivity is free of social, political, and historical interests. His philosophy of science owes its critique of representational thinking in large part to his resistance to the notion of objectivity in the sciences. In 1927 he accepted the objectivity of the sciences easily. Beginning in 1929, his critique of institutionalized science

in the face of the political appropriation of the university contains the insight that the sciences are a politically and historically situated hermeneutic project rather than the interest-free pursuit of objectivity. Heidegger argues in What Is Metaphysics? that the university is determined by science. He suggests that this is because science has become the passion that determines the existence, in a com-

munity of researchers, teachers, and students, of those who attend his address (WM 96/W 103). There are two points that must be made about this claim. First, Heidegger here envisions science not as simply an existential project, that is, not as the understanding of particular, individual Dasein that was described in §69 of Being and Time as switching over from concernful dealings to the theoretical attitude. Rather, he takes scientific understand-

ing to constitute and in turn be constituted by a community of thinkers. Imre Lakatos claims likewise that science progresses in “‘research programs” (1970:132), communities of scientists, rather than through the work of individual scientists. Thomas Kuhn argues that paradigms provide ““membership in the particular scientific community with which [the scientist] will later practice’ (1962:110). Science is not the project of an individual scientist so much as of a community of researchers. For Lakatos this insight is significant for his claims about the historical character of science (1970:120), and likewise for Kuhn it is the basis for a

historical analysis of science. Patrick Heelan goes so far as to argue that contemporary problems in quantum physics cannot be solved without an adequate philosophical understanding acknowledging social and historical processes and requiring “‘a perspective of the kind provided by Heidegger” (1995:581), a perspective in which science is understood to take place in a historically and politically situated community. Although I cannot readily accept that every quantum measurement is “‘a social

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 123 and historical intervention’’ (Heelan 1995:581)—since it seems to

me a fallacy to draw such a conclusion from the fact that quantum theory is itself a historically situated project, and nor do I hold that theoretical problems in quantum physics can necessarily be solved by historical analysis—nonetheless acknowledg-

ment of the hermeneutic nature of science, of the fact that science is a communal project not free from a basis in history, is an insight whose impact is not yet complete. Enlightenment and positivistic ideals of transhistorical truth have been superseded

by, for example, the feminist analyses of Sandra Harding’s standpoint theory, and Nancy Tuana. They argue not just that gender has an impact on the history of science, but also that the history of science is gender-biased (cf. Harding 1991:28ff.; Tuana 1989:147ff.). Heidegger’s hermeneutic account of truth, evident as early as §44 of Being and Time and explicit in “On the Essence of Truth,” conduces a sense of the historical and political situatedness of the science. It is not surprising, then, that Heidegger recognized that science happens in a community of researchers in 1929 when he claimed that science determines the existence of his audience in a community. That the sciences and the university are socially, politically, and historically situated is, in fact, the basis for Heidegger’s critique of the university. Second, Heidegger understands the university in terms of the

sciences, not the humanities where he himself teaches. This seems a much different view from his later claims about the impotence of the sciences (SR 176/VA 60), and the claim made re-

peatedly in What Is Called Thinking? that “science does not think.” In the latter text, however, this claim is made against the background that ““most thought-provoking in our thoughtprovoking time is that we are still not thinking” (WCT 4/WHD 2). It is not just science which does not think here, but an unspecified “we.” I read that “we” as ““we academics.”” The later Hei-

degger is disillusioned not just with the sciences, compared to his view of their significance and power in 1929, but also with the university. I suggest that for Heidegger the sciences and the university remain inextricably tied, for the university is the home of knowledge in modernity, and the sciences are paradigmatic and determinative for that knowledge. Heidegger gives priority in the university to the sciences in 1929 because by 1929

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his insight that the sciences are definitive of modernity is incipient.

THE NOTHING

Heidegger argues that reflection on the fact that the university is determined by science uncovers a controversy: the controversy of the nothing. The question of the nothing arises because “‘scientific existence is possible only if in advance it holds itself out into the nothing” (WM 111/W 121). The sciences always take a particular realm of being as their object, and therefore they deal only with beings and want to know nothing of the nothing. As Heidegger puts it in 1935, one “who wishes truly to speak about nothing must of necessity become unscientific’ (IM 25/EM 1920), for nothingness remains inaccessible to science. To proceed with a science, one must assume its object in a denial of nothingness. Nonetheless, reflection on the sciences comes to the question of the nothing (WM 98/W 106). The university, in its essence as science, is founded on the nothing. What sense can be made of this claim? Heidegger offers three propositions to illuminate the existence

of the thinker in the university, whom he calls ‘the scientific man (der wissenschaftliche Mensch)’’:

That to which the relation to the world refers are beings themselves—and nothing besides.

That from which every attitude takes its guidance are beings themselves—and nothing further. That with which the scientific confrontation . . . occurs are beings themselves—and beyond that nothing. (WM 97/W 105)

The sciences are such that beyond, further, and besides the beings they investigate, there is nothing. Knowledge questions beings in opposition to the nothing, and, further, is grounded in that very opposition. For it is only in the face of the nothing that one wonders about beings and questions them. For, Heidegger argues, the human pursuit of science is “the irruption of one being called ‘man’ into the whole of beings... in such a way that in and through this irruption beings break

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 125 open and show what they are and how they are” (WM 97/W 105). He has already held in Being and Time that human being has an understanding of being which grounds it existentially. In Basic Problems of Phenomenology he expressed this claim as the thesis that human being stands in the ontological difference, that

is, the difference between being and beings. Here, in What Is Metaphysics?, Heidegger claims that beyond beings, there is nothing. This claim stands in marked contrast to his earlier claim that beyond beings, there is being. In 1929 Heidegger has taken to heart the Hegelian proposition that ‘Pure Being and pure Nothing are therefore the same”’ (qtd.

at WM 110/W 120). The nothing, he suggests, belongs to the being of beings such that the problem of being is not so much expressed in the old proposition that ex nihil nihilo fit (nothing comes from nothing) as in the proposition that ex nihilo omne ens qua ens fit (from nothing comes every being as a being). The central question of metaphysics is then for Heidegger in 1929, ““Why

are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?” (WM 112/ W 122). This question is so central for him that he poses it in 1935 in Introduction to Metaphysics as the fundamental question of metaphysics. Heidegger has long been critical of accounts of the nothing that take it to be derivative. In Basic Problems of Phenomenology he criticizes Kant for taking negation to be the opposite of reality (BPP 35/GP 47). He argues that the Kantian thesis that being is not a real predicate renders possible a positive determination of being only as position. Heidegger wishes to read the question of being more deeply than the claim that ‘perception and absolute position are the sole character of actuality’”’ (BPP 47/GP 64). He further objects to the logical conception that a negative judgment is derivative upon a positive one, arguing that such interpretations of the copula suffer a want of radical inquiry (BPP 201ff./ GP 286). In both cases the complaint is the same: interpreting negation as determined primordially by affirmation, the nothing as derivative upon being, forecloses upon the inquiry into being. Heidegger calls instead for a radical inquiry. There is, he suggests, a deeper sense of the nothing. In both Basic Problems of Phenomenology and Being and Time, he uncovers the nothing in the constitution of Dasein itself. In the former text he argues

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that negation can only be taken as derivative upon affirmation because absence is a modification of presence. He does not intend to make presence prior to absence when he calls the latter a modification of the former, but rather to suggest that absence and presence belong together at the core of Dasein’s understanding of being. This is only possible, he argues, through Dasein’s temporality (BPP 311/GP 442). In Basic Problems of Phenomenology, reading Aristotle’s treatise

on time at Physics 4.10-14, Heidegger quotes Aristotle’s claim that time is the “number of a motion with respect to the prior and the posterior” (Phys 4.11.219b1). Time is for Aristotle contin-

uous, and within that continuity the “now” functions not as a discrete moment of some particular duration, but as the demarcation of the past from the future. Accordingly, Aristotle holds that the “now”’ is not time, but rather an attribute of time. Hence Heidegger claims that time is for Aristotle horizonal in nature: “time is this, namely, something counted which shows itself in

and for regard to the before and after in motion or, in short, something counted in connection with motion as encountered in the horizon of earlier and later” (BPP 235/GP 353). Indeed, for Aristotle, time is a measure of motion, which always happens in

the present. The latter, as the “now,” serves to distinguish the past from the future. If time is then a manifold of “nows,”’ it is a manifold of nonexistent nows, that is, of the no-longer-now of the past which is prior, and the not-yet-now of the future which is posterior (BPP 247/GP 349). Most of the nows that make up the manifold of

time are non-existent. Accordingly, “time ... has two arms which it stretches out in different directions of non-being”’ (BPP 233/GP 331). It is this reading of Aristotle on time that begins

Heidegger’s account of the nothing at the core of Dasein, for Aristotle’s definition of time gets at Dasein’s temporality, which stretches horizontally between past and future. What is described in Aristotle’s account of time is therefore more originary in Heidegger’s view than the common conception of time that is found in clock usage. Aristotle’s account of time is certainly historically prior to clock usage. But Heidegger is more interested in a logical priority: time in the common sense of what is measured by clocks is derivative upon the more ori-

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 127 ginary experience of time which is Dasein’s temporality. Dasein has time, Heidegger argues, in the following sense: Dasein takes

time into account in its daily activities. It projects itself into a future. For instance, Heidegger explains, when he looks at his watch during the lecture, it is to see how much time is left until the scheduled end at nine o’clock. Reckoning time with a clock is ““a modification from the primary comportment toward time as guiding oneself according to it’’ (BPP 258/GP 365). One can guide oneself according to time by using a clock only because time is the horizon from which Dasein understands being. Temporality is the basis for understanding time in clock usage be-

cause temporality is what makes any understanding at all possible. Furthermore, clock usage gives temporality a publicness. Here Heidegger finds something to time that he claims Aristotle and the tradition of philosophy have overlooked (BPP 262/GP 370). Time has “‘the character of significance’ (BPP 262/GP 370) in a sense Heidegger says he already had in view in another context, by which I take it he intends Being and Time, where significance is described in much the same terms and is also said to make up the structure of the world (BT 120/SZ 87) and to be the ontological condition of language (BT 121/SZ 87). Significance is the “‘to-

tality of relations of the in-order-to, for-the-sake-of, for-thatpurpose, to-that-end” (BPP 262/GP 370). This feature of time, significance, characterizes, he argues, the world as world in general, and hence, although time is originally as temporality constitutive of Dasein, it is reckoned as world-time. Temporality, then, as a horizon from the no-longer of the past to the not-yet of the future, is fundamental to Dasein’s being in a world and to its being with others publicly. Heidegger argues in Basic Problems of Phenomenology that it is only on the basis of Dasein’s temporality that Dasein can find something missing. Dasein’s being has as its essential character-

istic transcendence, Heidegger argues, its overstepping and going beyond that makes Dasein “exactly not the immanent” (BPP 299/GP 425). Transcendence means to understand oneself from a world, to exist beyond the here and now of the present, to be already outside oneself among other beings. Dasein is in a world only because Dasein anticipates a future and, in doing so,

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stands outside itself. Hence the ecstatic nature of temporality, from the Latin ex, meaning “out of,’”” and sto, stare, stiti, statum, meaning ‘to stand.”’ The nothing that is Dasein’s temporality is constitutive of Dasein’s very existence. Heidegger argues late in Basic Problems of Phenomenology that Hegel is “‘on the track of a fundamental truth when he says that

being and nothing are identical, that is, belong together” (BPP 311-12/GP 443). This brief reference to Hegel is less than enlightening, and only makes sense if both being and the nothing are understood to be at the core of Dasein in its temporality. That the nothing is at the core of Dasein is abundantly clear from Basic Problems of Phenomenology. But how is it the case that being

is also at the core of Dasein such that being and nothing can be taken to belong together? In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that the nothing is constitutive of Dasein’s temporality, and hence of Dasein, in a further sense. He argues that in anxiety, Dasein “finds itself face to face with the ‘nothing’ of the possible impossibility of its existence” (BT 310/SZ 266). Being-towards-death is precisely this anxiety. Later he says that anxiety in the face of the nothing “unveils the nullity by which Dasein, in its very basis, is defined” (BT 356/SZ 308). This nullity is faced authentically in anticipatory resoluteness, that is, in Dasein’s unflinching thinking toward its own death. Hence Heidegger answers “Certainly” to the question, “does not anxiety get constituted by a future?” (BT 393/SZ 343). Anxiety, and therefore authenticity too, is temporal and experienced through Dasein’s self-aware finitude, that is, through its absolutely certain yet thoroughly indefinite death. The nothingness at Dasein’s core is its own potential nonbeing. But in authenticity lies for Dasein also the possibility of the question of being. In its temporality, then, Dasein encounters its own finitude, in the face of which it experiences anxiety. In §82 of Being and Time,

Heidegger explicates Hegel’s interpretation of time by arguing that for Hegel time is experienced fundamentally as the possibility of one’s own nonbeing. He sees Hegel as making much the same move he did himself earlier in Being and Time when he argued that the nullity by which Dasein is defined in its very basis is as thrownness toward death (BT 356/SZ 308). Dasein’s

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 129 temporality is both its authenticity, its being toward its own death that makes inquiry into the question of being possible, and its anxiety, in the face of which it loses itself among beings in the sciences. According to Debra Bergoffen’s Lacanian account, the scientific passion for knowledge is an Oedipal response to the nothing, that is, “the emptiness of the Thing” (1995:575). Indeed, Heidegger argues in 1929 that the sciences institutional-

ized in the university are made possible by their opposition to the nothing. Hence temporality singles out Dasein as the one who stands in the ontological difference: the difference between being and beings. Being is not a being: it is the nothing in the face of which Dasein holds itself out in a stance toward beings. The sciences, Heidegger argues in What Is Metaphysics?, are precisely such a taking of a stance toward beings. The nothing is at the very core

of Dasein’s temporality and is the condition for the possibility of understanding. Against the background of his interpretation of Aristotle and Hegel on time in Being and Time and Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger makes the claim in What Is

Metaphysics? that the sciences hold themselves out into the nothing. Accordingly, the nothing at the core of Dasein has both ontological and ontic significance. At the very heart of Dasein’s exis-

tence is the possibility of ontology in that Dasein’s own possibility of nonbeing is its authenticity, its access to the question of being. At the same time, however, Dasein’s existence is inseparable from what Heidegger calls, in ““On the Essence of Truth,” insistence, its preoccupation with beings that is manifest as the ontic sciences. The nothing constitutes Dasein’s temporality pivotally: Dasein can embrace the nothing in the question of being, or flee the nothing by busying itself with the sciences. Heidegger maintains explicitly in What Is Metaphysics? that only because the nothing is manifest in the ground of Dasein can the strangeness of beings overwhelm human being (WM 111/W 121). In Being and Time Heidegger spoke of this strangeness as an uncanniness: Dasein is unheimlich, thrown into the world as the “‘not-at-home” (BT 321/SZ 276-77). Dasein calls silently to being in the face of its own anxiety of being-towards-death. In Dasein’s everyday existence, argues Heidegger, this uncanniness

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is covered up. It is only the silent call of being, which Dasein calls to itself, that retrieves Dasein to authentic existence, that is, to the question of being. In Being and Time Heidegger argues that

Dasein flees in the face of the anxiety of encountering the nothing, that this fleeing is not a turning away so much as a turning thither “towards entities within-the-world by absorbing itself in them” (BT 230/SZ 186). In What Is Metaphysics? Heidegger suggests that Dasein loses itself among beings in pursuing the sciences, and that only the

exploration of the sciences that uncovers the nothing upon which they are founded comes to this strangeness. This strangeness evokes wonder, he argues, such that then the ““why?” looms before human being, which responds by inquiring into grounds (WM 111/W 121)—but as a metaphysician, not as a scientist. The possibility of ontology and the possibility of the ontic sciences are interruptions of each other. Each can only be pursued to the exclusion of the other. Here, in What Is Metaphysics?, lies the ori-

gin of the claim of which Heidegger will later make so much: there are questions that the sciences cannot ask, questions about their own being. The sciences investigate some realm of beings at the expense of the question of their own regional ontology. Evidence that Heidegger’s claim about the impotence of any science with respect to itself has its origin in What Is Metaphysics?

is to be found at the end of the essay. Heidegger appeals there to the Hegelian thesis that being and nothing are the same. Ontology is therefore precluded by the sciences in their exclusion of the question of the nothing. Heidegger argues explicitly from early in What Is Metaphysics? that the sciences wish to know

nothing of the nothing, and instead turn toward beings. As human beings, ““we usually lose ourselves altogether among be-

ings in a certain way” (WM 106/W 116), a movement he will call “erring” (ET 135/W 196) in “On the Essence of Truth.” The sciences, he holds in What Is Metaphysics?, are precisely such a way in which we lose ourselves among beings. In 1929, then, the sciences are for Heidegger a human project set up in opposition to the nothing. On the one hand, the nothing is what makes scientific inquiry possible, as it is the source of Dasein’s existence as inquirer; on the other hand, the sciences are Dasein’s refusal to face the nothing as the question of being

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 131 in its preference for inquiry into beings. Accordingly, Heidegger’s interest in science in 1929 is accounted for by the fact that he sees reflection on the sciences as the route to the question of being. Since the sciences are the way in which modern human being loses itself among beings, they are precisely what must be

thought through to reach the question of the nothing that is being. The route to ontology is the thoughtful recognition of its preclusion by the sciences. Yet how is this vision of science one which scientists would take seriously? Those best equipped for the reflection suggested by Heidegger may not readily agree that they are driven to their inquiry as a means to flee to beings in response to the anxiety of facing the nothing. Heidegger is claiming to have a deeper account of the sciences than scientists themselves, a psychologistic account in which he attributes to the scientist a false consciousness, an unconscious response to the fear of death and the nothingness it implies to human existence. Against such criticism, however, Heidegger has a bigger picture in view. He is not so much interested in the psychology of the individual scientist as he is in the human project of knowing manifest as the sciences in his contemporary university. Indeed, in a later analysis of Nietzsche he suggests that in the age of the devaluation of all values, ‘‘the need to establish a truth concerning beings simply grows more pronounced” (N 3:204/NII 248). The story he tells in What Is Metaphysics? about the sciences and the nothing is not the story of any particular scientist, but the story of the destiny of nihilism. By reading the claims made about destiny, in both What Is Metaphysics? and the Rektoratsrede four years later, against the accounts of destiny found earlier in Being and Time and later in the Nietzsche lectures, this story of nihilism as human destiny can be told. DESTINY AS NIHILISM

Aristotle maintained in the opening line of the Metaphysics that all human beings by nature desire knowledge (980a22). Likewise, Heidegger argues in Being and Time that Dasein has inquiry as a mode of its being (BT 26—27/SZ 7). In fact, he takes Dasein

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to be “ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it’ (BT 32/SZ 12), and that this having its own being as an issue is a constitutive state of Dasein. Dasein is essentially that being which inquires, particularly into its own

being. ,

Yet he argues at exactly that point in Being and Time that “’Scientific research is not the only manner of Being which this entity can have, nor is it the one which lies closest’”’ (BT 32/SZ 11). The sciences are for Heidegger in Being and Time simply one possible

kind of inquiry for human being. Only two years later, in What Is Metaphysics?, Heidegger treats the university as the institutionalized expression of the human desire to know. The sciences housed in the university have become for him more than simply

a possible way for human being to manifest its nature as inquirer. Science is no longer for Heidegger in 1929 what it was in

1927. It is not one way among others in which human being realizes its essence as inquirer. Rather, it is the essential determi-

nation of what it means to be a knower in the modern epoch. It is a destiny. The issue of destiny first appeared in Heidegger’s thought in Being and Time in his account of facticity. Dasein’s facticity is that

its existence is for it a fact. It understands its being as presentat-hand. Yet its presence-at-hand is different from the presenceat-hand of other things in the world. For this facticity “implies that an entity ‘within the world’ has Being-in-the-world in such a way that it can understand itself as bound up in its ‘destiny’ [Geschick] with the Being of those entities which it encounters within its own world” (BT 82/SZ 56). Dasein’s existence is different from the being of other things in the world. Dasein is constituted by being-in-the-world, by finding itself always already thrown in among and involved with beings. Dasein is singled out as the being that is so involved with other beings. How is this a destiny? Dasein is the being which definitively questions its own being. Its essential tendency is to be the inquirer (BT 27/SZ 7). In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger calls questioning “a fundamental human force [urspriingliche Macht]’’ (IM 6/EM 5). It is through self-inquiry that Dasein comes to the question of being. Heidegger’s strategy for getting at the question of being in Being

| SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 133 and Time is the hermeneutic circle from a particular being, Dasein, to being. The destiny of human being is for Heidegger its historical situation in an epoch of the history of being. In §74 of Being and Time, Heidegger draws a distinction between Dasein’s destiny (Geschick) and the fate (Schicksal) of individual Dasein. He explicates Dasein’s fate in its connection with the fate of other Dasein (BT 435-37/SZ 384-85). Dasein’s fate lies in its historizing, in its giving itself over to a tradition that it

both inherits and chooses. Once Dasein understands that its being is essentially a being with others, “its historizing is a cohistorizing and is determinative for it as destiny [Geschick]’’ (BT 436/SZ 384). But, Heidegger argues, this destiny is not a putting

together of individual fates. Rather, individual fates “have already been guided in advance” (BT 436/SZ 384) by that destiny. The question of being, whether asked or neglected, is for Heidegger a destiny that determines the existence of any particular Dasein. That destiny (Geschick) is a sending, playing on schicken,

“to send,” from being. Dasein’s destiny is the history of being, and its fate is its location within that history. The history of being is a destiny of being to which human being is in Heidegger’s account essential. In “On Time and Being,” that destiny is described as neither accidental nor necessary, but historical, for the destiny of being is the history of being that unfolds in a sequence of epochs (On Time and Being 9).

This notion of destiny is behind Heidegger’s account of the university at issue in What Is Metaphysics?, for in Heidegger’s

view the fate of the researcher in the modern university is guided by destiny, is determined within an epoch of the history of being. Dasein as inquirer questions itself, and it questions

other beings. Its destiny in modernity is tied to that of other beings which it determines for questioning as objects of science. The destiny of beings in modernity is to be the objects of scientific research in the context of the university, and the destiny of Dasein. as knower is research. Heidegger makes explicit that the essence of science is research in “The Age of the World Picture’’ in 1938. This is the sense in which Heidegger argues in What Is Metaphysics? that “only because we can enquire and ground is

the destiny of our existence placed in the hands of the researcher” (WM 111/W 121). Yet how this destiny is a nihilism,

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despite its entanglement with the nothing in Dasein’s flight away from the nothing toward objects of science, does not become explicit for Heidegger until the Nietzsche lectures. It is there that he connects the nothing at the core of Dasein to nihilism as destiny. For in 1940 he argues on the basis of reading Nietzsche that the history of being is the history of nihilism. In the lecture course entitled ‘“European Nihilism,” Heidegger argues that the nothing at the heart of being and human being goes much deeper than the superficial analyses of his day conceive. He suggests that his contemporaries do not wish to see the concealed essential connection between being and time as a destiny of nihilism, because to do so would be “to admit that the foundations on which they continue to build one form of metaphysics after another are no foundations at all’ (N 4:163/NII 195). Nietzsche, Heidegger argues, understands a deeper sense of nihilism, one in which nihilism is a history. This nihilism “constitutes the essence of Western history because it co-determines the lawfulness of the fundamental metaphysical positions and their relationships” (N 4:53/NII 79). It is not the cause of the decline of values in modern Europe, but rather the inner logic of that decline. For European nihilism “is not simply one historical movement among others [but] the fundamental impulse of our history” (N 4:74/NII 100). It is not peculiar to modernity, Heidegger argues, but rather belongs always and essentially to the history of metaphysics. Yet it has a formulation that is peculiar to modernity. That history begins for Heidegger with Plato. He suggests that the essence of nihilism is concealed in Plato and that it comes completely to appearance in Nietzsche. Plato began that history when he thought “the dya0ov as idea, as the idea of ideas” (N 4:168/NII 201). Heidegger reads this move by Plato as the first moment in a history of valuative thinking whereby Plato interprets @ya8ov to mean “the suitable, what is good for something and itself makes something else worthwhile. . . . Being comes to be what makes a being fit to be a being” (N 4:169/NII 201). Such valuative thinking conceals nihilism, Heidegger argues, in that the fulfillment of such thinking puts into question the notion of value itself: the devaluation of the uppermost values and the call for their revaluation by Nietzsche is the culmination of a history

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 135 of metaphysics as valuative thinking. Hence Plato took a decisive step for the history of metaphysics in Heidegger’s account. Heidegger traces valuative thinking through Descartes and Kant to argue that Nietzsche’s call for the revaluation of all values is the unfolding of the innermost possibility of metaphysics. Nietzsche is the culmination and fulfillment of the history of metaphysics for Heidegger, for Nietzsche’s claim that truth is a necessary fiction brings nihilism to a new stage: “outright disbelief in anything like a meta-physical world” (N 4:34/NII 58). The supersensuous world can no longer be appealed to in the face of the valuelessness of the world of becoming, and that world of becoming shows itself to be the only reality. The uppermost values are devalued, and being is revealed as an empty concept. Yet if being is, as Heidegger maintained in Being and Time, the most universal and hence the emptiest concept, Heidegger himself resists an interpretation of being such that it is an empty and huge receptacle, arguing instead that ‘Being is what is emptiest and at the same time it is abundance” (N 4:192/NII 224). This is how Hegel’s thesis that being is nothing was read by Heidegger in 1929 as the thesis ex nihilo omne ens qua ens fit. Being

hilism.” |

is the nothing from which every being takes its being. This thesis

has come to its most explicit culmination in “European NiNietzsche’s thinking is therefore for Heidegger the fulfillment of the history of metaphysics that began with Plato. The history of the West is the history of metaphysics, and of metaphysics as

nihilism at that. Between 1944 and 1946 Heidegger filled this account out in a lecture not published until 1961, ‘“Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being.’” He argues explicitly here that ““Metaphysics as metaphysics is nihilism proper’’ (N 4:205/NII 309). And he traces the path of metaphysics to its formulation in Leibniz as the question that Heidegger took in What Is Metaphysics? and Introduction to Metaphysics to be basic: ““Why are there beings at

all, and why not rather nothing?” (N 4:208/NII 313). This central question of metaphysics hinges on holding that beyond beings,

there is only nothing. Heidegger has held fast since Being and Time and Basic Problems of Phenomenology to the Hegelian thesis

that being is nothing, but now he is interested in that thesis as the history of being. Rather than simply conceding the thesis, he

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is now concerned with an immanent critique of metaphysics as a history in which there is essentially nothing to being itself. In this history, being is absent. It stays away, withdraws. And metaphysics fails to see this withdrawal of being. Hence the history of metaphysics is for Heidegger a double omission. First, the withdrawal of being; second, the omission of the thinking of this withdrawal from the history of metaphysics (N 4:219/NII

324-25). For this withdrawal cannot be thought from within metaphysics itself. Heidegger argues that since there is nothing to being for metaphysical thought, the “very path into the experience of the essence of nihilism is therefore barred to metaphysics’ (N

4:220/NII 326). If this text is read against What Is Metaphysics?, where the destiny of Dasein in modernity is as researcher, while beings are researched as objects of science, Heidegger is arguing

in 1940 that modern science is a destiny of metaphysics upon which metaphysics is powerless to reflect, as he suggested in 1929 that the sciences are incapable of self-reflection. In ‘European Nihilism,” as in Being and Time, Heidegger talks of the homelessness of historical human being within beings as a whole (N 4:248/NII 358). In the latter he suggested that Dasein is “fascinated by . . . its naked uncanniness [Unheimlichkeit]”” (BT

394/SZ 344), which, from an existential-ontological point of view, is the ““more primordial phenomenon” (BT 234/SZ 189) than being-in-a-world. It is in such uncanniness that Dasein understands that authenticity and inauthenticity are possibilities for it, and ultimately that Dasein is “the caller of the call of conscience” (BT 321/SZ 276). Put less obscurely, in uncanniness lies Dasein’s possibility of thinking the question of being, of doing metaphysics, under the account of Being and Time. Likewise, here in the mid-1940s Heidegger argues that there is a possibility for human being other than homelessness among beings. Being needs human being as its abode (N 4:244/NII 354).

Also in 1946, he wrote to Jean Beaufret that “Language is the house of being. In its home man dwells” (BW 193/W 313). For Heidegger, the truth of being can unfold for human being, even in its default. But he speaks of a danger, the danger of what he calls the nonessence of nihilism, in which the omission of being from metaphysics remains concealed “in the age of the darkening of beings, our age of confusion, of violence and despair in

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 137 human culture, of disruption and impotence of willing’ (N 4:245/NII 355). This is the nihilism diagnosed by Heidegger’s contemporaries that he sees as superficial. Against that nihilism, the nihilism Heidegger has described as the history of being is precisely the possibility of thinking the nothing of being as its withdrawal. Heidegger’s nihilism is thoughtful, but it stands outside the history of metaphysics. Heidegger privileges his own position as thinker. Capable of immanent critique but not confined to the metaphysics of his epoch, he takes himself to have a destiny that reaches beyond the fate of the researcher. Yet Heidegger himself will experience the tension between fate and destiny, the confinement of the thinker within history, precisely in his administrative involvement in the university. The Betriebscharakter of the sciences within the university is their politicization in a destiny Heidegger will experience as not just human, but also peculiarly German, as not philosophical, metaphysical, or even nihilistic, but simply bureaucratic. The insights to which Heidegger privileged himself have not overcome the effect of his Nazism on his reception as a thinker. He is as much a victim as a product of his time. Nor can the withdrawal of being be reached from within any science. Heidegger concludes “European Nihilism” by arguing

that such a thinking of the withdrawal of being “‘is neither grounded on science nor can it ever find its way by setting itself

off against science” (N 4:249/NII 359-60). Any thinking that thinks nihilism as the destiny of human being in modernity must for Heidegger be radically different from the sciences, for the sciences are nihilism’s concealment. They are nihilistic for Heidegger in the same way as for Nietzsche, who is immersed in the history of metaphysics. They take as their object what is empirically available for study, that is, the world of becoming and not some supersensuous world of being. The sciences are too busy with beings to see past them to nihilism. Hence Heidegger claims that in his “‘today,” his historical epoch, “indifference to Being in the midst of the greatest passion for beings testifies to the thoroughly metaphysical character of the age’”’ (N 4:195/

NII 228). That great passion for beings has been thought again and again in Heidegger’s work in the domination of the sciences in this age. In “On the Essence of Truth,” Heidegger called Da-

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sein insistent: it “holds fast to what is offered by beings” (ET 135/W 196). The sciences are exactly such insistence. They are the human form of knowing in modernity that not only manifests the withdrawal of being by occupying itself with beings, but that also overlooks that very withdrawal in favor of the certainty of scientific knowledge.

In the modern epoch the scientific object is complicit in the default of being. The unconcealment of beings that is scientific study goes hand in hand with the concealing of being and its forgottenness. Beings are revealed and held fast in the modern epoch as the objects of science. This is why Heidegger looks to the history of science in Die Frage nach dem Ding to understand why it was possible and necessary for Kant to write his first Critique (FD 50), and why Heidegger singles out science from the five essential phenomena of the modern age as the ground from which the essence of the modern age is to be apprehended (AWP 117/H 76). The sciences are not just one cultural phenom-

enon among others, but rather are the realization of Dasein’s essential possibility as knower in modernity. And hence the sciences are the realization of the intertwined destiny of being, be-

ings, and human being as nihilism. Within that destiny, Heidegger envisions a task for the university. In What Is Metaphysics?, Heidegger holds that the university is the structure that holds the specialized sciences together in their

determination and pursuit of their object. Since knowledge is housed in the university, and science determines the university in Heidegger’s view, the knowledge that questions beings in modernity is in his view scientific. Hence “our contemporary existence [is] determined by science” (WM 98/W 106). And thus Heidegger’s contention is that “the destiny of our existence [is]

placed in the hands of the researcher’ (WM 111/W 121). Not because some researcher holds the destiny of human being in her or his hand, but because knowledge itself has become research in the university. This situation of the sciences in the university sets a task before the university in Heidegger’s view. The sciences are a human destiny, and the task that Heidegger envi-

sions for the university is that of bringing the sciences a meaningful unity. Heidegger questions how the university serves the function of

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 139 unifying the sciences. The sciences are held together by a technical organization in the university. Their unificatory function has atrophied, Heidegger says, to a merely superficial technical or-

ganization. There can be a deeper unity: “the only meaningful source of unity [is] .. . the practical establishment of goals by each discipline” (WM 96/W 104). Heidegger does not see this task as one of only internal concern to the institution. Rather, science and its institution have an obligation that extends beyond the walls of the university. For the question of the scientific essence of the university is for Heidegger, I have argued, the question of human destiny. Heidegger holds that the university is in a position of service, which “evolves in such a way as to become the ground of the possibility of a proper though limited leadership in the whole of human existence” (WM 97/W 104-5). The university can succumb to its fate by housing the sciences in a meaningless and endless technical organization of disciplines, or it can function by providing a place for the unified pursuit of knowledge to fulfil the destiny of Dasein, the inquirer. The university can lead human existence in Heidegger’s account because it is a place of knowledge. He holds that knowledge has become fragmentary and meaningless insofar as the individual disciplines have lost any goal that would tie them together meaningfully. His call in 1929 is to reestablish that unity of purpose such that the university can guide human destiny. SELF-ASSERTION: KNOWING VERSUS AMASSING INFORMATION

Heidegger argues again in the Rektoratsrede of 1933 that the university has the task of providing leadership and direction to the community wherein it exists. Whereas Lakatos and Kuhn argue that science takes places in a community of researchers, Feyera-

bend argues further that the scientific community exists in a larger community and is under obligation to that larger group (1975:307). Heidegger argues likewise in 1933 that science exists “for us and through us” (SA 471/SU 11). Despite the absolutely

unclear scope and reference of the “us,” it is clear through the Rectoral Address that Heidegger is considering the question of

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science in its relation to the larger community, beyond the university’s walls. He asks under what conditions science can exist if it is to be “for us and through us,’”’ and he answers that it can only exist “if we again place ourselves under the power of the beginning of our spiritual-historical being [Dasein]”” (SA 471/SU 11). This beginning is Greek philosophy. Heidegger does not change his mind on this point. From 1933 onward his thinking is permeated by a nostalgia for the Greeks. This nostalgia is not merely sentimentalism, however, but is based on the view that the Greeks are the origin of the intellectual history of the West. Heidegger still claims in “Science and Reflection” that modern knowing “needs the Greek knowing in order to become, over against it, another kind of knowing” (SR 157/VA 43). He sees science as a destiny of being as early as 1929, but it is in the Rectoral Address that he points to the origin of that destiny in Greek thinking. The overcoming of the fragmentation of modern science into specialized disciplines is only possible when its coming to be is understood. There will be no change, progress, or alternative to modern science, in Heidegger’s view, until its essence is made clear in a dialogue with ancient thinking. For the origin of modern knowing lies in the Greek experience of knowledge, which cannot be overcome until it is thought through. In Heidegger’s account, it is in Greek philosophy that human being first stood up to the totality of what is. He argues in 1933

that “[all] science is philosophy, whether it knows and wills it—or not. All science remains bound to that beginning of philosophy” (SA 472/SU 11). Heidegger’s intent with this claim is not to blur the distinction between philosophy and the sciences, as he did with his earlier argument in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology that philosophy is a science. Rather, his point is that the sciences and philosophy both have their beginning in ancient Greek thinking. The sciences are philosophy for Heidegger in the sense that Greek thinking, which in its origin made no distinction between philosophy and science, is the beginning of both what is known in modernity as philosophy and what has come to be the sciences. There are, Heidegger argues, two distinguishing properties of the original Greek essence of science that must be regained if

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 141 modern science is to live up to its task of leadership in human destiny. The first characteristic of science to be retrieved from

Greek thinking is the acknowledgment of the impotence of knowledge, that “all knowing about things has always already been delivered over to overpowering fate and fails before it” (SA

472/SU 11). This is the fate of human being to become researcher and to lose her-or himself in research rather than questioning its end, for no science is capable of questioning its own essence. Its essence is what Heidegger will later call, in ““Science and Reflection,” das Unumgéngliche, that which is not to be gotten around (SR 175ff./VA 60). For example, no experiment in physics can show what physics is; nor can what mathematics is itself be calculated. The essence of a science is inaccessible from within that science. To regain the Greek sense of the impotence of knowledge would be to recognize that knowledge needs a purposive guidance that no science can give itself.

The second of the two distinguishing properties to be retrieved from the Greeks is questioning as the highest form of knowing, rather than simply as a transitional step that immediately gives way to an answer. The pursuit of theoretical knowledge is for Heidegger an activity, and presumably the point at stake in calling for a retrieval of this property of the Greek essence of science is the recognition that knowing is something that human being does first and foremost. Knowing is an activity distinct from the mere collection of information. In fact, Heidegger argues that without the retrieval of these two points from the Greek account of knowledge, science serves “to further a mere progress of information” (SA 474/SU 13) rather than a genuine knowing. He contrasts knowing in this sense with the mere amassing of information by the sciences. This contrast between knowing and the meaningless collection of information appears in one form or another in many other places in Heidegger’s work. In “The Turning” he contrasts thinking with mere wanting to know (QCT 42/K 71-72). In “The

Question Concerning Technology” the contrast is between “catching sight of what comes to presence in technology .. . [and] merely staring at the technological” (QCT 32/VA 36). Even observations, Heidegger suggests in the Beitrige, can be gathered on the basis of their interminable diversity and conspicuousness;

142 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

or they can be collected according to an ordering principle (Beitréige 161). In “The Age of the World Picture,” Heidegger distin-

guishes ongoing activity from mere busyness, which it can nonetheless become: “Ongoing activity becomes mere busyness whenever, in the pursuing of its methodology, it no longer keeps itself open on the basis of an ever-new accomplishing of its projection-plan, but only leaves that plan behind itself as a given; never again confirms and verifies its own self-accumulating results and the calculation of them, but simply chases after such results and calculations” (AWP Appendix 2, 138/H 97). An inherent danger in ongoing research is that the scientist will cease to question the projection and method that ground some object sphere, instead simply collecting results. Ongoing activity continually runs the risk of becoming mere industriousness, as in, for example, Kuhn’s “normal science.”” What makes science as

research capable of enduring is, in Heidegger’s account, precisely the forgetting of the distinction between ongoing activity and mere busyness such that the scientist remains uncritical of the science itself. Specialization and the meaningless binding to-

gether of the sciences on an institutional basis alone conduce precisely a preoccupation with results that remains uncritical. A year before Heidegger gave this analysis in ‘The Age of the World Picture,” he described just such a preoccupation with the superficial, a blind reckoning and frenzy of explanations (BdW 16) in the German university. It would seem, then, that the university of Heidegger’s day has fallen into precisely this danger of allowing research to become busyness. In the third of the Nietzsche volumes, Heidegger makes this contrast in terms of two possibilities for the sciences: “The sciences can take shape in the direction of an increasingly comprehensive and secure mastery of objects, can arrange their mode of procedure accordingly and find satisfaction in that. Yet at the same time the sciences can develop as genuine knowledge and on that basis set for themselves the limits of what it is scientifically valuable to know” (N 3:42/NI 469). It is here that the alternative

that the university can offer can be given a concrete account. Rather than providing the sciences with a superficial, technical organization, the university can provide them with an organization in which researchers can determine what it is valuable to

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 143 know. In 1929 Heidegger argues that the essential task of science is ““not to amass and classify bits of knowledge but to disclose

in an ever-renewed fashion the entire region of truth in nature and history” (WM 111/W 121). Providing evaluation of and direction for knowledge by asking what it is valuable to know would be precisely to perform such a decisive task for human destiny if that destiny is taken, as Heidegger takes it, as the destiny of knowledge to become scientific research in the university. Science is political in Heidegger’s account in the sense that its

direction and worth are to be determined in the context of the mOAtc. Rather than providing an almost monastic withdrawal from life and its activities, the university, Heidegger holds, belongs to life. He is calling in the Rektoratsrede, as he did in 1929, for a knowing on the part of the university that he later calls “for the Greeks, Biog Bewentixdc, the life of beholding, [which] is,

especially in its purest form as thinking, the highest doing” (QCT 164/VA 48). Reflection, this “‘purest form of thinking,” is not simply theorizing, but the highest activity. The German university of 1933 remains unable, in Heidegger’s view, to engage

in such activity, to draw the distinction between knowing and the mere collecting of information, until it retrieves this Greek insight. What Heidegger wants to retrieve science from in 1933 is spe-

cialization. He argues that questioning understood as the highest form of knowing “shatters the division of the sciences into rigidly separated specialties, carries them back from their endless and aimless dispersal into isolated fields and corners, and exposes science once again to the fertility and the blessing bestowed by all the world-shaping powers of human-historical being [Dasein]’”’ (SA 474/SU 13). The purpose of overcoming the

division of knowledge into fragmentary specialties and disciplines is to bind the sciences together into a science that is an authentic knowing rather than simply a directionless gathering of information. He sees the sciences as obligated not only to objectivity but also to the larger spiritual-historical world of the community outside the university. For the sake of binding the sciences together into meaningful knowledge, Heidegger calls for spiritual legislation by the faculty, and he asks that the specialized sciences submit to that legislation in order to tear down

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departmental barriers and overcome ‘‘what lets professional training lose itself in what is stale and counterfeit” (SA 478/SU 17). He is after the essence of science as a retrieval of knowledge from the mere amassing of information on the part of fragmentary disciplines for the sake of training professionals. Hence he

argues that knowledge does not serve the professions; rather, “the professions effect and administer that highest and essential knowledge of the people concerning its entire being” (SA 477/ SU 16).

Heidegger’s claims about the role of the university in human destiny arise, then, not, as J. S. Porter recently suggested, because “Heidegger sought philosopher-king status in service to his Fithrer” (1998:D10), but precisely because he attributes to the uni-

versity the highest authority and social responsibility in determining the function and direction of knowledge. He is interested in an academy that determines human destiny on the basis of its own paternalistic authority and not that of a government or military. Accordingly, what is worth knowing for Heidegger is not simply what has immediate practical application in technology for the sake of utility. In 1941, in the lecture course entitled Basic Concepts, Heidegger takes up this question of the claim (Anspruch) on humanity to which humanity must attend (BC 3/G 4).

He argues that there are two claims upon human being, the claim of needs and requirement and the claim upon the essence of historical human being. Human being responds to what is needed and has utility, or to what can be done without. In response to the second claim, human being “does not calculate under the compulsion of utility and from the unrest of consumption” (BC 4/G 5). It is only in the domain of the second claim, the exhortation (An-sprechung) to human being to attend to what can be done without, that Heidegger suggests a ‘“‘realm”’ (Reich)

can be founded (BC 4-5/G 5). This claim is the claim upon human being from being. It is the exhortation to stand in the ontological difference and reflect upon being. The task of the university that Heidegger envisions is the realization of the full essence of science in precisely that sense. He wishes the university to respond to this claim rather than the claims of utility. In confirmation of this reading, Heidegger argues in the Der Spiegel interview of September 1966, not published until after

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 145 his death ten years later, that the Rektoratsrede was an argument against the devaluation of science in favor of the practical needs

of the people. He sees himself as having argued that a new meaning for the university could come out of reflection on the tradition of Western European thought. He did argue so in the Rektoratsrede (SA 470/SU 9). In 1966 he says that what was needed was “above all a discussion of the relationship between philosophy and the sciences, for the technical and practical successes of the sciences make thinking in the sense of philosophy

appear today to be more and more superfluous” (“Only a God .. .”” 283). Echoing his claims against utility in 1941, he is calling here for a different kind of thinking, one that does not take philosophy to be superfluous in the face of the practical success of the sciences. In his 1945 retrospective essay on the rectorate, “Facts and Thoughts,” written shortly after the collapse of National Socialism and first published in a bilingual French-German edition of the Rektoratsrede in 1982, Heidegger suggests again that he wanted to ground the sciences in the experience of the essential region of their subject matter (FT 487/SU 27). He argues that “reflection on the realm to which science belongs by its essence, reflection that also confronts that essence, must take place in every science if that ‘science’ is not to be without knowing” (FT 489/SU 29). For the sciences to achieve knowledge meaningfully, questions about the essence of science must be raised. He explains the Rektoratsrede as the argument that “by returning to the essence of truth itself instead of persisting in a technical organization-institutional pseudo-unity, [the university] was to recover the primordial living unity that joins those who question and those who know” (FT 482/SU 22). Thus he saw his task as rector of Freiburg University to be the retrieval of knowledge from its fragmentation under a superficial organization, a return to a living unity of questioner and knower. What is common to and clear in What Is Metaphysics? and the Rektoratsrede is that Heidegger sees himself as offering the university an alternative to its superficial organization into specialized disciplines.

Likewise, in “Facts and Thoughts” Heidegger argues that there is a danger in the old view, that is, the commitment to specialty. He became rector, he suggests, with the hope of providing the inner self-collection of the people with a measure (FT

146 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

483/SU 23), and I take it he means here that his intention was to achieve a meaningful unity of the knowledge in the university. But no such hope was realized: the address ““had been spoken into the wind and was forgotten the day after the inaugural celebration” (FT 493/SU 34). No colleagues discussed it with him.

Rather, the university was to become split into professional schools (FT 494/SU 35). He describes the experience of the rectorate as ‘‘a sign of the metaphysical state of the essence of science, a science that can no longer be influenced by attempts at its renewal” (FT 497/SU 39). In other words, his time as rector of Freiburg University showed that his hope for the retrieval of science had failed. There are therefore adequate grounds to believe that Heidegger objected to the Nazi appropriation of the university into the service of the people. His concern is the larger destiny of being and human being rather than global conquest. There is a sense in which he sees the university in the service of humanity, but this sense is not one in which he envisions the university in the service of the German people. Rather, he sees the university as the locus for a turning to reflection on being that would retrieve for knowledge a meaningfulness. That his vision for the university is distinct from the Nazi vision is further evident in his attack on the notion of worldview. Heidegger attacks the notion of worldview originally in Basic Problems of Phenomenology, where he argues that philosophy

must be scientific rather than worldview philosophy. He says that the notion of a worldview first appeared in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, where it was “a beholding of the world as simple apprehension of nature in the broadest sense” (BPP 4/GP 5-6). Schelling shifted the meaning from sense-perception to intelligence, Heidegger argues, such that “the meaning we are familiar with today [is] a self-realized, productive as well as conscious way of apprehending and interpreting the universe of beings” (BPP 5/GP 6). After citing several usages of the term, Heidegger concludes that “what is meant by this term is not only a concep-

tion of the contexture of natural things but at the same time an interpretation of the sense and purpose of the human Dasein” (BPP 5/GP 7). The notion of worldview is for Heidegger an active understanding rather than a passive apprehension. It implicates both beings and human being in a world.

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 147 Following Robert Bernasconi’s analysis, then, to say with Hei-

degger that he had answered the question of the relation between philosophy and worldview would no doubt be to say too much. But Heidegger displaces the opposition between scientific

philosophy and worldview philosophy in such a way that a place is found for ethics whereby it is no longer simply subordinated to ontology and so reduced to some kind of supplement or appendage (Bernasconi 1988:54). Heidegger’s treatment in Basic Problems of Phenomenology of the question whether philosophy is

worldview or scientific is an early stirring of the answer he will give to Jean Beaufret in 1946 when the latter asks about the relation between ethics and ontology. Heidegger answers in ‘Letter on Humanism” that ontology is always already an ethical movement (BW 234-35/W 356). Indeed, Heidegger argues in Basic Problems of Phenomenology that positing—that is, the positing of a being which is—is the essence of a worldview. Sciences are positive because they relate positively to beings in this way. Since philosophy does not relate positively to beings, but instead to being, philosophy cannot be worldview philosophy (BPP 10-11/GP 15). As a worldview is ontical, so philosophy is ontological. It would seem, then, that Heidegger’s insistence on a separation of philosophy and worldview in 1929 is at the same time a conjunction of the sciences and worldview. The positive sciences are in this account precisely at the essence of worldview. This is the second sense of “world” in the four given in Being and Time, in which the world of the mathematician “signifies the realm of possible objects of mathematics” (BT 93/SZ 64-65). The positive sciences are ontical in that they begin with a regional ontology that is a setting up of a worldview. But less than ten years later, Heidegger is no longer prepared to support the conjunction of the sciences and worldview as a sufficient account of the sciences. His thinking on theory as a human activity has brought him to the conclusion that the sciences are part of, and not a withdrawal from, life. They are not a theoretical pursuit free of practical interests, goals, and concerns. Indeed, by 1937 Heidegger will recognize through the Nazi appropriation of the university that the sciences determine their world within the world of his third account in Being and

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Time: the world “ “wherein’ a factical Dasein as such can be said to ‘live’ ”’ (BT 93/SZ 65). He will come to understand the situation of the sciences within the larger political realm of his day as posing a political threat. But Heidegger has not yet made this critical move in 1933. In

1933 the specialization of the sciences means for him that the sciences succumb to errancy. He evaluates the sciences not in terms of their truth or falsity, but on other grounds. Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman offer a feminist evaluation of theory in which they likewise claim that a theory is not just the kind of thing that can be true or false. They suggest that theories can

be true, but also bad insofar as they are, for example, “useless, arrogant, disrespectful, ignorant, ethno-centric, imperialistic’ (1993:26). Decisions need to be made about what it is valuable and worthwhile to know versus what is useless, arrogant, and so forth, if science is to be directed. For Lugones and Spelman, however, the threat is not just that unevaluated theory is a meaningless collection of information, but that it can be imperialist and, in short, dangerous. Heidegger holds that the university is the place where science can be evaluated and directed, but in 1933 his interest is still intellectually innocent. His concern is to guard science against errancy, not its use as a tool of domination or oppression. By 1937 that has changed.

THE THREAT OF SCIENCE | In 1937, Heidegger read a paper entitled “Die Bedrohung der Wissenschaft” (“The Threat to Science’’), published in 1991, to the Faculty of Natural Science and Medicine at Freiburg University. In this text he again attacks the notion of worldview, but here specifically in the context of the Nazi account of science and

their program for the university. Just as worldview was inadequate to philosophy understood as science in the analysis given in Basic Problems of Phenomenology, so here it is inadequate in the case of science in general. For Heidegger maintains that an account of science on the basis of the notion of worldview blocks the possibility of science itself. In 1937 worldview is central to

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 149 the threat to science he lays bare. That threat is the National Socialist appropriation of the sciences and the university.

The idea that science is grounded in a worldview is simply inadequate in Heidegger’s analysis. The notion of worldview gets, he claims, at nothing essential in science.! If science is carried by a worldview and is nothing in itself, he asks, then what does this ground carry—that is, for what is it a ground?? He argues that the beliefs that science is valid in itself, happy to have a worldview behind it, or that a worldview grounds a science that is valid only for that worldview, are both confused (verworren) conceptions that make neither science nor worldview clear in their relation to each other. If science is not able to work as law-making and opening with respect to the essence of truth, then it has no more meaning as intellectual power and becomes

instead a technology (Technik) of knowing and the training in different techniques (Techniken) and practices.’ I suggest that for science to work as law-making and opening with respect to the essence of truth, a decision must be made as to what is worth researching.

In his retrospective essay on the rectorate, ‘Facts and Thoughts,” Heidegger speaks of an incompatibility between his philosophy and the National Socialist worldview. He claims that “a rift separated the National Socialist conception of university and science from [his] own, which could not be bridged” (FT 497 /SU 38). In the Der Spiegel interview he says that in the lectures

on Nietzsche, anyone “with ears to hear heard in these lectures a confrontation with National Socialism” (“Only a God... .” 274). Those lectures, from 1936 to 1940, conclude with an attack on metaphysics as worldview. What distinguishes the latter is that in metaphysics as worldview “the differentiation of Being and beings which sustains metaphysics itself essentially and necessarily remains an unquestioned matter, a matter of indif1“"Man gibt Weltanschauung zu, aber hdlt sie ftir die Wissenschaft an sich nicht wesentlich” (BdW 16). 2““Aber wenn das, was getragen werden soll, nichts ist in sich, was soll dann der Grund denn tragen und wozu Grund sein?” (BdW 16). 3““Wenn die ‘Wissenschaft’ nicht in der Hinsicht der Wesenswahrheit geset-

zgebend und erdffnend zu wirken vermag, hat sie keinen Sinn als geistige Macht; sie wird eine Technik des Kennens und der Abrichtung in den verschiedenen Techniken und Practiken’”’ (BdW 22).

150 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

ference” (N 4:196/NII 229). In 1937 Heidegger connects worldview explicitly with the Nazi program for the university and the renewal of the sciences. Against the Nazi program for a renewal of science in the ser-

vice of the people as part of the German worldview, there is a need for a renewal of science in Heidegger’s view also. Yet in spite of this agreement that renewal is called for, Heidegger argues that a National Socialist worldview should not be brought to bear on science.* He sees the manufacture of fertilizer and grenades as proof of the fact that science stands in the service of the people, but objects that such production does not do anything for science or for the people, as a historical knowing would and could do.> He objects vehemently to the Nazi program of a

new science because it deals in worldviews which stand in the way of the desire to question. He argues that “the balance between science as pure theory and science as world-view has... above all prevented all powers of willing questions,’’® and it glosses over the confusion surrounding the possibility of a new beginning and a change. He is critical of the Nazi appropriation of science and the university for the people, which he sees as an abolition of philosophy for the sake of popularity, and a worldhistorical suicide.’ The criticism of science and worldview in this text is clearly politically directed. The text is reminiscent of What Is Metaphysics? and the Rektoratsrede, where Heidegger’s concern is the role of science in the university, and of the university in the cultural life of Germany. But by 1937, “the dreaded picture that Heidegger saw,” as Patrick Heelan puts it, was “that science was and would remain essentially a form of social control unless it were 4 “Soll ‘die’ nationalsozialistische Weltanschauung auf ‘die’ Wissenschaft angsewendet werden?” (BdW 16).

5“Dafs sie »die Wissenschaft« in den Dienst des Volkes stellen, ist richtig. Das gilt von der Herstellung der Diingemittel und der Granaten ebenso! Nur ist damit ja nicht bewiesen, dafs sie irgend etwas fiir »die Wissenschaft«, und d.h. fiir das Volk als ein geschichtlich wissendes tun und tun kénnen” (BdW 27).

der Ausgleich hat ... vor allem alle Krafte des Fragenwollens unterbunden” (BdW 24).

7“Die Deutschen bei der Abschaffung der Philosophie—in Absicht auf die

uns 27).

des vélkischen Wesens!—weltgeschichtlicher Selbstmord”” (BdW

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 151 able to discover or recover its ‘saving power’ ”’ (1995:586). Hei-

degger has lost his faith in the university as a cultural-political leader and a source of renewal and change. He continues to hold, as late as the text ““Science and Reflection,”” that the sciences offer the possibility of an alternative to the mere amassing of information, that they offer human being the possibility of knowing in a definitively human sense, of reflection (Besinnung),

but he gives up the idea that the university is the institution within which the sciences can fulfill this role. He argues instead that the university is at an end, neither luckily nor unluckily, but rather necessarily, in that a new beginning is now possible.® Heidegger calls for this new beginning against the Nazi call in which the power of the sciences unified into an institution can

be appropriated. He suggests that the university is not under obligation to wider ends and uses, but rather that science has its real creativity in having to do with knowledge itself.? Understood on this basis, science has nothing to do with the German university contemporary to Heidegger. Once it is politically appropriated, the university can serve no creative function with respect to knowledge itself. Heidegger’s demands for the university thus fall into a tension that he is unable ever to resolve. On the one hand, the sciences institutionalized in the university should serve the people; on the other hand, there is danger in their serving the state. Heidegger does not answer how the university can serve the one and not the other. But he retains his call for a renewal of science, while abandoning the idea that the university is the place for his vision of science to become a reality. Heidegger has realized that the saving power of the university

with respect to historical destiny carries the danger of political appropriation. For if the threat of science is that it can be used as a tool for social control, likewise the threat is to science itself, 8 “Es ist weder ein Ungltick noch ein Gliick, dafs die Universitat zu Ende ist,

sondern nur eine Notwendigkeit und eine lang vorbereitete; heute wird ihr nur eine verbesserte Gelegenheit gegeben, an den Tag zu kommen” (BdW 25). 9“An der Universitat: nicht sich nehmen lassen als die noch Geduldeten, als die, die man fiir das Weitere noch braucht und ausnutzt oder mit denen man gelegentlich sich zeigt, sondern als die eigentlich Schaffenden, die mit der Universitat nichts zu tun haben, aber mit dem Wissen” (BdW 25).

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that science so appropriated to the goals of the state is no longer science in its fullest sense of definitively human knowing. His envisioned task for the university culminates in his assumption of the rectorate in 1933, but his resignation less than a year later is evidence of the failure of his attempt to retrieve the university

from its fragmentation into specialized disciplines and of the appropriation of the university by the Nazis. The thrust of ‘Die Bedrohung der Wissenschaft” is that the fragmentation of the sciences, in which specialized disciplines do not unite to think through and set goals for the sciences, leaves the sciences vulnerable to political appropriation. True to his claim that the university is at an end, Heidegger ceases to discuss the university, but he still remains preoccupied with institutionalized science. This is in fact the theme he pursues when he seeks out the essence of the modern age in “The Age of the World Picture” soon after his address to the Faculty of Medicine at Freiburg. In 1938, in ““The Age of the World Picture,” Heidegger questions the demarcation of subject area on the part of the sciences in a way that is different from his earlier complaisance about the specialization of the sciences. In The Basic Problems of Phenome-

nology, he argued that “Historically, the actual partitioning of domains comes about .. . in conformity with the current research problems of the positive sciences” (BPP 13/GP 18). The uncovering of new research problems brings with it further specialization of the sciences under this earlier account. In “Age of the World Picture,”” however, Heidegger does not argue that research and specialization go hand in hand in modern science, or that research is the basis for subsequent specialization. Rather he argues the reverse, that research takes place as a direct consequence of specialization. The move from accepting specialization as a historical fact in the history of science, much as it appears in the descriptive analysis of §3 of Being and Time, to interpreting it as at the very essence of science, as he will in What Is Called Thinking?, is very

much under way here in “The Age of the World Picture.” For Heidegger argues in 1938 that science is essentially an ongoing activity of research that is thus capable of being institutionalized under specialized disciplines. Specialization makes research possible, which in turn makes the organization of disciplines

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 153 in the university possible. Accordingly, Heidegger argues that “institutions are necessary because science, intrinsically as research, has the character of on-going activity” (AWP 124/H 8384). Heidegger, however, having ceased to specify the university as the institution that houses science, offers no alternative. Instead of pursuing the question of the organization of the sciences, and their bureaucratic arrangement in the university, Heidegger moves to the issue of ideology, that is, to representation and the construction of the thinking subject as scientist. He argues that to do experimental science is “to get into the picture ... to set whatever is, itself, in place before oneself just in the way that it stands with it, and to have it fixedly before oneself as set up in this way” (AWP 129/H 89). The representation stands before the scientist with a being at its focus, a being set up in certain conditions that map out a system. The specialization of the sciences entails representations that, in placing nature into the picture, also place the scientist “‘into the picture.’”” Heidegger’s comments here are about representation in general. Since the lecture has, however, modern science as its specific focus (AWP 117/H 76), | apply the arguments directly to the topic. This “getting into the picture’’ is much more than just having a worldview. Continuing the critique of worldview established in “Die Bedrohung der Wissenschaft,” Heidegger argues that the scientist does not simply grasp a picture of the world in representing the object of a science. Rather, the scientist is established in the picture only insofar as “the world is conceived and grasped as picture” (AWP 129/H 89). Human being can only have a worldview when the world for it becomes picture. Science as research “is an absolutely necessary form of this establishing of self in the world” (AWP 135/H 94). Thus the modern world is established as a picture in which both the scientist and her or his object appear. This establishing of the self in the world is, for Heidegger, one of the ways the modern age is fulfilled. Fulfillment here entails the notion of destiny, not in the nationalistic sense, but in the sense in which the destiny of human being is determined by the history of being. As the destiny of being is to withdraw in the unconcealment of beings, so the destiny of human being is a

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metaphysics of subjectivity in which human being is itself put in the picture as the representing subject. The scientist does not ultimately enter as the individual knowing subject, however, in Heidegger’s account. Heidegger argues explicitly that he is not talking about a subjectivism in the sense of individualism. Rather, betraying the fact that he still holds that science is an activity within a human community, he claims to be arguing “against individualism and for the community as the sphere of those goals that govern all achievement and usefulness” (AWP 133/H 92-93). The establishing of knowledge by science is understood by Heidegger not in terms of the individual scientist, who is dwarfed by the institution, but in terms of a system (AWP 129/H 89), an organized institution. In that system, physics is necessarily experimental insofar as it pictures its objects as measurable. The institutionalization of science, necessary because of specialization, is complicit in the representation of nature in an experiment. What appears in the experiment is what has been determined as object in specialization. A science determines its particular object, and on the basis of representing that object devises its experiments. Heidegger argues later, in ‘““The Question Concerning Technology,” that physics is not experimental because it questions nature using apparatus, but rather that it questions nature using apparatus because it is experimental in the sense that it understands nature as calculable (QCT 21/VA 25).

Heidegger views the experimental method as representational in that it proceeds on the basis of a representation of its object.

He does not see institutionalization as simply a more efficient way to do science, but rather as essential to the way science determines the modern epoch. It is in institutionalized and specialized science, for which physics is paradigmatic, that the world first becomes picture such that nature can then be the object of human control in technology. In Heidegger’s analysis of science and the university, his later critique of science and technology is incipient. His attitude toward the university is always critical. He initially sees a possibility for a change in the university, a retrieval of the sciences from debilitation through fragmentation. His entanglement with the Nazis during his brief time as rector and the years following

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 155 demonstrated how naive his early beliefs were. In later years he continues to hold that no science takes its meaning from within itself, but he abandons the idea that the university can provide that source of meaning. Heidegger still sees specialization in an institutional arrangement as a threat. When science takes the world as picture, he argues, “‘an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety” (AWP 130/H 89-90). That the sciences stand in a position of historical decisiveness remains his claim, both before and after his infamous turn. In fact, the only real change in Heidegger’s account of science and the institution is his later abstention from political claims about the university. Heidegger’s vision of the university was not that it be appropriated to the political ends of designing better hand grenades and researching better fertilizers. Once he experienced the political appropriation of the university, he continued to hold that a decision must be made as to what it is valuable to know. Heidegger holds, however, that the question of what it is valuable to know cannot be answered through the ongoing research of specialized disciplines. For such disciplines have no access to their essence, which is precisely the topic at stake. Rather, decisions are called for about the relation between human being and nature; whether, for example, nature is exhausted by human resource and analysis, or whether weapons technology should be the largest economic motivation for research in theoretical physics. The questions of being and of human being cannot be sepa-

rated in Heidegger’s view, and they may turn out to be that simple, providing the question of being remains open. The laws of physics do not distinguish the falling apple from the falling bomb. Heidegger has argued from 1929 until 1937 that the task of the university is precisely to ask such questions: to evaluate what is worth knowing. Yet in the text where the issue of the reevaluation is precisely the focal issue, that is, in the Nietzsche volumes, the sciences are given little and passing reference. He mentions them to claim they are not the solution to the homelessness of modern humanity, but they escape the thematic critique to which they have previously been subject. Heidegger holds explicitly in 1929 and in 1933 that the university has a role to play in human destiny in that it is the place in which to evaluate what is worth knowing.

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And he holds equally explicitly that the sciences are the modern form of human knowledge. Yet he does not raise the question of science in his lectures on Nietzsche in 1940. These lectures ad-

dress exactly the question of valuative thought. I argue that in the lecture course of 1940, Heidegger withdraws his attention from the sciences because his earlier accounts—his call for decision about value in 1929 and 1933—are embroiled in the very destiny of nihilism these lectures describe. His call for the reevaluation of what is worth knowing is an expression of his immersion in the metaphysics and hence destiny of his age, a valuative

thinking of which he is by 1940 critical. Heidegger is disillusioned with respect to his earlier vision, yet he never gives up the call for reflection upon the sciences. VALUATIVE THINKING AND DISILLUSIONMENT

Heidegger has in 1940 recognized the sciences as the fulfillment

of the destiny of the West as nihilism. He sees the sciences as inherently metaphysical, and he himself struggles with an overcoming of metaphysics. In an essay written from 1944 to 1946, “Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being,” Heidegger explains what ““overcoming”’ means: ““To overcome signifies: to

bring something under oneself, and at the same to put what is thus placed under oneself behind one as something that will henceforth have no determining power. Even if overcoming does

not aim at sheer removal, it remains an attack against something” (N 4:223/NII 330). Leaving out the question of the sciences is not therefore to have overcome them, but to experience their nihilism inauthentically. He suggests that ““metaphysics’

utmost entanglement in the inauthenticity of nihilism” (N 4:231/NII 339) comes to language in the desire to overcome. To seek to overcome the sciences is to remain entangled in the metaphysical stance toward beings that they embody. Any struggle

over nihilism, he suggests later, whether for or against it, will decide nothing, but rather ‘“will merely seal the predominance of the inauthentic in nihilism” (N 4:240/NII 348). Since the destiny of being is for Heidegger nihilism, it cannot be overcome. For to overcome nihilism would be to overcome being, and the

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 157 human being who overcomes being is no longer human since being is a destiny precisely for human being (N 4:223/NII 330). Hence it cannot be that Heidegger neglects the sciences because he has overcome the determination of the metaphysics of his age. Another answer to the question of the omission of the sciences

from the discussion of nihilism is that the question of the value of the sciences has already been answered by their application in and subservience to technology. Heidegger argued in 1940, in Basic Concepts, that the claim upon human being can be taken as the claim of utility, or as a claim upon the historical essence of human being. The latter is what human being can do without, for it is the question of being and leads to nothing useful. Under the former, human being “calculate[s] under the compulsion of utility and from the unrest of consumption” (BC 4/G 5). The human being who responds to this claim has determined what is valuable to know as that which can be applied in machine technology. The sciences give way to practical application in technology when human knowing responds to the claim of utility. Heidegger leaves out the question of the sciences when he

analyzes valuative thinking, not because they are inherently metaphysical in their nihilistic evaluation, but because the thought is incipient to him that the sciences are already determined on the basis of a valuation: the value of knowledge is its applicability in technology. The academy is not the place to ask what it is valuable to know, since this decision has already been made. Yet Heidegger does not yet see the thesis he will come to in the 1950s: the essence of science lies in the essence of technology. Heidegger hence finds in his academy of 1940 that knowledge is suffering from decay, a degeneration that arises from “chasing after what is necessary for the most convenient possible arrangement of professional training” (BC 12/G 14). The academy is not a place for knowledge for the sake of knowledge, what Aristotle called 8e@euLo and under which he classified metaphysics, mathematics, and the study of nature; rather, it has become a training

eround for professionals, and a research institute to support technological development. Indeed, Heidegger suggested seven years earlier, in the Rektor-

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atsrede, that students ‘““who have dared to act as men” (SA 476/ SU 16) will no longer permit their bond to the spiritual mission of the German people, known as ‘Knowledge Service” (Wissens-

dienst), to be “the dull and quick training for a distinguished profession” (SA 477/SU 16). The Greeks took three centuries ‘Sust to put the question of what knowledge is upon the right basis and on a secure path” (SA 478/SU 17-18), so Heidegger does not expect the question of knowledge to be asked and answered in one or two semesters. Nonetheless, if the German university is to establish what Heidegger is herein calling for as an essence of science, it will do so, he suggests, in a battle of wills between the faculty and the student body. This battle is the selfexamination and assertion of the university. It is a willing of the essence of the university as science, against its decay into a training ground for the professions.

In “Facts and Thoughts,” Heidegger explains that notion of battle by reference to Heraclitus’s Fragment 53 (FT 488/SU 28—29), a text he also looked to in Introduction to Metaphysics, where

he argues that this struggle is the conflict wherein human being first stands up to beings as a whole and opens up a world (IM 62/EM 47-48). This struggle could remedy the atmosphere of confusion in his university, wherein “the most diverse political power constellations and interest groups intervened in the university with their claims and demands” (FT 492/SU 32). This was a different kind of struggle, a struggle for political power, in which the Ministry of Education struggled to secure an autonomy against Berlin, professional associations demanded the removal of professors they found troublesome (FT 492/SU 32), and Heidegger himself struggled against the Nazis’ and students’ demands for the posting of the Jewish proclamation (“Only a God .. .” 269) and for book burnings (“Only a God .. .” 271), faculty power plays for promotion, and the education minister’s request for the dismissal of Jewish professors, over which Heidegger subsequently resigned (“Only a God . . .” 273-74). Heidegger understands these political struggles in opposition to the struggle he was calling for: “reflection on the ethos that should govern the pursuit of knowledge and on the essence of teaching” (FT 492/SU 32). He loses the administrative and political battle, and gives up discussion of the task of the university and

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 159 its role in the larger human community. But he has come to the question of ethical and evaluative reflection upon the sciences, and the question of the relation between science and technology is NOW incipient.

CONCLUSION

In the 1930s, Heidegger watches the university become compromised by mundane politicization. He finds the university powerless to renew a conception of the sciences that goes deeper than

worldview to a meaningful confrontation with the essence of human being as knower. It is impotent to raise the question of what is worth knowing, since its faculty, students, and governmental ministry are complicit in its conversion into professional schools and have already answered that what is worth knowing is what has immediate application in technology.

It is not clear that the contemporary university is any more capable of raising such a question than was Heidegger’s, nor that it can resist the function of providing job training to professionals, and appropriation by government toward cultural pro-

paganda. The contemporary university faces in fact a double threat of appropriation: on one side by the state; on the other, by industry. In 1919 the Twentieth Century Fund was founded and endowed in New York by Edward Filene as an independent

research foundation to undertake policy studies of economic, political, and social institutions. In 1984 the fund assembled a task force chaired by Robert Sproull, president of the University of Rochester, in order to question whether funding arrangements “threaten the independence and the special values of the university” (Rossant et al. 1984:v). The “special values” at stake were the freedom and independence of ideas and information such that individuals can ‘pursue knowledge for its own sake” (Rossant et al. 1984:3). The report produced by the task force uncovered that federal funds make up about two-thirds of the total spent on research in the United States since the 1960s, and that the era of government support for basic research on campuses was ushered in by the successful development of radar and advanced weapons by university-trained scientists in World

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War II. The report argues that since the remaining third of the research funds came from industry, and since corporate ties “provide useful leverage in dealing with the government” (Rossant et al. 1984:7), corporate support helps preserve the traditional independence of the university. To what tradition, however, is the Twentieth Century Fund’s report referring? The history of church, government, and corporate involvement in the university renders unclear exactly when researchers in the university were ever free to pursue “knowledge for its own sake,” or even what this phrase could mean in the contemporary academy. Research is today driven by competing interests, those of government, including the military, and corporations whose concerns are of financial return in the age of consumer culture. As Ursula Franklin has pointed out, there “seems to be an increasing crossbreeding and drift towards monoculture in our institutions” (1994:10): universities are judged in market terms and try to act like business enterprises, while banks speak out on education and the future of research. The university is itself both a competing interest and a mediator between researchers and their funding sources. Heidegger holds by 1938 that the university is no longer the place where it is possible to raise the issues of the ends and value of knowledge. Reflection upon such questions reveals them as homeless. They cannot be raised from within the sciences, but the larger forum of the university also proved inadequate. Such questions do find a home in Heidegger’s work, but the results are largely unsatisfying. Heidegger faces bureaucratic issues about the organization and institutionalization of science in the 1930s, and he recognizes that the sciences are institutionalized in “‘research programs,” as Lakatos will name them in 1970. But he leaves these insights to dissipate into claims about the institutionalization of science as research. Heidegger has raised, despite his unsatisfying treatment of it, what remains a largely untouched question in philosophy of science: who should determine the goals of the sciences? For, if Heidegger’s talk of the “saving power” of the sciences was unsatisfying in 1937 in that he does not go on to say what the saving power of the sciences is, what is saved, and how, then nonetheless he does not relinquish the issue. But the role of the

SCIENCE IN THE INSTITUTION 161 sciences in that “saving power”’ will change for Heidegger upon reflection. In What Is Called Thinking? he says that thinking is not practically useful like the sciences (WCT 159/WHD 161), but he is clear that what is called for is thinking about the sciences. Likewise in “Science and Reflection,” he argues that reflection on the sciences is needed to get at that “which is worthy of question-

ing” (SR 182/VA 66). Whereas in the 1930s Heidegger saw a worth in the sciences themselves as the location of the definitively human desire to know, his questioning of the setting of goals for the sciences led him to the insight that reflection upon the sciences is called for, reflection they are incapable of undertaking themselves. The question of establishing goals for the sciences is now just as pressing as it was when Heidegger raised it. The phrase “knowledge for its own sake” is at best unclear. It has its origin in Aristotle’s taxonomy of knowledge, of which three kinds— metaphysics, mathematics, and physics—had neither action nor production as their goal. Their purpose was simply to become one with the thing known. In the Rektoratsrede, Heidegger argued for a retrieval of two properties of the original essence of Greek science: the impotence of knowledge and the value of questions over answers, without specifying whom he intends by “the Greeks.” I argue that he is suggesting a retrieval of Aristotle’s notion of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. But is his account of knowledge for its own sake any less unthought, any less empty and unexplored rhetoric, than it is in the “Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on the Commercialization of Scientific Research,” for whom it is an unexplained and seemingly empty intention? Certainly in the 1930s, Heidegger’s consideration of what is worth knowing comes to the fore as a question in his thought. In the years to come he will continue to raise this question, not just as the question of the Betriebscharakter, the institutionalization and bureaucratization of the sciences, but as an ideological concern for what is worth knowing. It will remain for him always the question of reflection upon the sciences, and will be taken as one of his most thought-provoking and significant contributions to philosophy: that there is something for thinking at the end of modernity that is radical in the sense of going to the

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very root of both thinking and human being. This possibility is a new thinking, a deep reflection beyond science and beyond metaphysics. Heidegger will call it both thinking (Denken) and reflection (Besinnung). He will come to this possibility through an analysis of modern science in contrast to ancient science, an analysis that began for him in 1916 when he contrasted Aristotle with Galileo.

4

Ancient Science HEIDEGGER’S ACCOUNT of ancient science is a crucial moment in

his philosophy of science, for it is in Parmenides’ and Heraclitus’s understanding of nature that Heidegger sees another possibility to the metaphysics of modernity. He interprets the preSocratics to hold that being is puoi. Accordingly, the representational thinking of modern science stands in marked contrast to its origin in Greek thought. Heidegger’s analysis of science is thus clarified as a critique of modern science: it is only over and against ancient science that representation in exact science is the hallmark of modern science for Heidegger. Differences between ancient—particularly Aristotelian—and modern thinking have always figured in Heidegger’s work, but it is his analysis of ancient science from 1935 to 1940 that consolidates those insights into a reading of the history of the West, and hence into a basis for critiquing modern science and technology. On the basis of his vision of the ancient interpretation of @votc in Parmenides and Heraclitus, with its last echo in Aristotle, Heidegger envisions alternative possibilities for being and thinking. These possibilities underwrite his later call to thinking. That insight into ancient puoic is a ground upon which an environmentalist philosophy of nature can be erected that goes well beyond Heidegger’s project itself. For Heidegger’s reading of the Greeks on nature is a two-sided vision: on the one hand, the exposition of an incipient logic of domination; on the other hand, the possibility of another relation to nature. It could be argued that no environmental phenomenology is free of Heidegger’s influence, but certainly Robert Corrington’s ecstatic naturalism has a basis in Heidegger’s early works, Val Plumwood’s feminist ecology draws on Heidegger’s analysis of technology, and John Llewellyn’s environmentalist insights have Heideggerian roots. Yet a full-fledged Heideggerian eco-logic has still to be written, and can only be sketched here in broad strokes. His interpretation of

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the ancient experience of muotc is a basis for a philosophy of nature that asks the contemporary thinker to revise our understanding of nature: nature is not a small part of a human world filled with technology, to which it can be understood analogously, but rather the ground upon which technology is possible, and the basis from which it is derived. Hence Heidegger’s account critically opposes a postmodern obliviousness to what precedes and exceeds the technological. Heidegger finds his vision of alternative possibility in Heraclitus and Parmenides. He first argues in Introduction to Metaphysics that for these pre-Socratics, being was @vou. He interprets them

according to a metaphysics of presence in which being, truth, and nature belong together in Aoyos in that AOyos is a gathering

together into being that only later comes to mean language. In Heidegger’s account, other possibilities were lost. Initially he attributes this loss to Plato’s decisive influence on Greek thinking; that is, he argues in 1930, and again in 1935, that Plato subsequently confines }oyoc to human subjectivity when he interprets being as idea, and that this move is the origin of truth as correctness. Truth as correctness is definitive for Heidegger of the rep-

resentational thinking of modern sciences, and hence the Platonic turn to idealism is crucial to the sciences. Furthermore, in the Nietzsche volumes Heidegger will locate original nihilism in Plato’s metaphysics, a metaphysics that culminates in Nietzsche’s inversion of the Platonic erection of being and idea in the Good, that is, in valuative thinking. In 1940, however, Heidegger locates the decisive turn from the pre-Socratics in Aristotle. Aristotle is for him a cusp, both echoing the pre-Socratic insight into being as @uotcs and analogizing puots to téxyvn. Heidegger will subsequently argue that in the ensuing history of the West, science and technology evolve, that is, decay into a shared essence. His critique of modern science and technology is accordingly a historical analysis that holds a place for both Plato’s idealism and Aristotle’s realism. It is made possible by the assessment of Greek philosophy he makes from 1930 to 1940.

To explicate that assessment, I begin with an account of Heidegger’s treatment of truth, particularly in its relation to AOyos. The analysis starts with his reading of Aristotle from Being and

ANCIENT SCIENCE 165 Time in order to uncover Heidegger’s dissatisfaction with locating truth in the assertion. Focusing on Introduction to Metaphys-

ics, but treating texts that discuss Aoyoc from 1930 to 1944, I show that in Heidegger’s analysis, Heraclitus and Parmenides understand being as mvotc, and that therefore @voic is the origi-

nal Greek experience of truth. Heidegger here reads Aoyos in

terms of \éyetv as precisely the laying of quot before the thinker, its appearance for thought. I show how in Heidegger’s account, Plato’s idealism transformed Aoyoc into language and reason, which belong not to being but to the thinker. Against that background, I argue that Heidegger, reading Aristotle’s analogy of being in terms of actuality and potentiality, is a last echo of the pre-Socratic insight that being is muotc as well as the origin of the decay of theoretical physics into technology. ®vouc As TRUTH

In Being and Time, Heidegger offers a new interpretation of the traditional Aristotelian claim that the locus of truth is the assertion. He argues that the truth of the assertion is derivative upon

unconcealment; that is, the apophantic nature of the assertion lies in the logically prior revealing of beings. Coupled with a rejection of transcendental subjectivity, this novel account of

truth provides Heidegger with a basis on which to rethink hoyos. He argues in 1935 that in the pre-Socratic experience of truth, Aoyos is @muoic, the gathering of a being into being. He further connects Adyog with cidoc in the argument that both

terms belong to being, and only to the thinker insofar as the thinker thinks and talks about beings. The argument culminates in the claim that for the pre-Socratics, Aoyos is GAnBeta in that it is the truth of being. Heidegger’s analysis of truth begins in Being and Time as a rejection of the traditional reading of Aristotle, and it brings him to what he claims is the original Greek experience of truth. In his account, the Greek experience of nature as truth was prior to propositional truth and was displaced to human subjectivity by Plato’s interpretation of being as idea. Thus is made possible truth as correspondence, the traditional account of truth at work

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in the sciences. Heidegger’s interpretation of truth in antiquity is accordingly fundamental to his philosophy of science, for he holds that the original Greek experience of votes is the basis for the modern experience of truth in the sciences. In §44 of Being and Time, Heidegger analyzes the connection between being and truth in Parmenides and Aristotle by dividing this task into three parts: to lay bare the ontological founda-

tions of the traditional concept of truth; to show how that concept is derivative from the primordial phenomenon of truth;

and to clarify both what it means that there is truth and the necessity of the presupposition that there is truth. He characterizes the traditional concept of truth by three theses: “(1) that the ‘locus’ of truth is assertion (judgment); (2) that the essence of truth lies in the ‘agreement’ of the judgment with its object; (3) that Aristotle, the father of logic, not only has assigned truth to the judgment as its primordial locus but has set going the definition of ‘truth’ as ‘agreement’ ’”’ (BT 257/SZ 214). The theses boil down to the claim that Aristotle is responsible for establishing truth as an assertion’s agreement with its object. But Heidegger argues that there is another way to read Aristotle on truth. He reinterprets Aristotle by arguing that propositional truth is derivative upon a more originary phenomenon. Certainly at Metaphysics 9.10, Aristotle speaks about truth as belonging to statements and assertions. And he holds that truth is agreement, as evident in his claim that “he who thinks that what is divided is divided, or that what is united is united, is right; while he whose thought is contrary to the real condition of the objects is in error” (1051b4—5). Truth unites or separates in thought what is united or separated in experience, while falsity unites in thought what is separated in experience, or separates what is united. In order to have truth, then, thinking must agree with what it thinks about. But, Heidegger argues, it is not at all clear what the agreement of an idea content of judgment with a thing means. He suggests that this relationship of agreement may become clear in the context of demonstration. What is demonstrated, however, in the example of someone with his back to the wall making the true assertion that ‘the picture on the wall is hanging askew” (BT 260-—61/SZ 217-18), is simply the ““Being-uncovering of the as-

ANCIENT SCIENCE 167 sertion” (BT 261/SZ 218). That is to say, all that is shown is that the assertion points to and uncovers some entity as askew. The assertion is true only on the basis of the entity’s showing itself as askew. Assertion is simply one way of being toward entities in which entities are revealed. It is apophantic. If there were no unconcealment of entities, the truth of an assertion would not be possible. Hence for Heidegger, the phenomenon of truth is only

possible on the basis of being in a world, wherein entities are revealed to Dasein. Thus Heidegger argues that the correspondence theory of truth is derivative from this primordial and original phenomenon of unconcealment. He develops this claim more fully in the 1931 essay ““On the Essence of Truth.” Heidegger appeals in both

texts to the Greek word commonly translated as “truth”: aAn8eva. The alternative translation he suggests is Unverborgen-

heit, which Sallis translates as “unconcealment’” in “On the Essence of Truth,” while Macquarrie and Robinson use “unhiddenness” in Being and Time. Heidegger argues that to translate GAnGeta with Unverborgenheit is to show how Dasein is in the

truth, that is, that Dasein is the being to which entities in the world are uncovered. Dasein is existentially constituted as the being who is in the truth. Dasein can also, however, be in untruth. Heidegger develops the view over three decades that truth has untruth at its very essence. In §44(b) of Being and Time, Dasein is in untruth in fallenness (BT 264/SZ 221-22). What is uncovered is disguised and closed off by idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity, wherein beings

show themselves in the mode of semblance. Dasein’s falling is not some accidental feature but rather an essential part of facticity: it is ““a basic kind of Being which belongs to everydayness”’ (BT 219/SZ 175). Heidegger argues that in Parmenides’ poem, the goddess of Truth offers two pathways precisely to signify that Dasein stands in both truth and untruth. In 1930 the belonging together of truth and untruth is thought in “On the Essence of Truth” as a double concealment. In the disclosure of particular beings, being is concealed. This concealment of being is itself concealed in errancy, which is the “‘insistent turning toward what is readily available” (BW 135/WW 196), the preoccupation with beings which precludes the ques-

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tion of being. This wandering around in beings, which is etymologically betrayed by error’s root in the Latin erro, errare, is not “like a ditch into which [human being] occasionally stumbles,” but rather “belongs to the inner constitution of the Da-sein into which historical man is admitted’” (BW 135-36/WW 196). But now Heidegger argues that necessity of untruth to Dasein’s existence lies in the very relation of being to human being, that is, in the very nature of understanding. The condition for the possibility of the unconcealment of particular beings is the concealment of being. Hence Heidegger does not read the “a” of d-AnOeta as privative. Concealment is not a privation, but rather is logically

prior to unconcealment. For Heidegger, truth and untruth belong together fundamentally. This thesis comes to its fullest expression in ““Nihilism as De-

termined by the History of Being,” written between 1944 and 1946 but first published in 1961. Here Heidegger argues again that the concealment of being is itself concealed in the unconcealment of beings. Hence “Being itself remains unthought, [and] the unconcealment of beings too remains unthought’ (N 4:212/NII 317). When human being “lapses into beings” (N 4:233/NII 342), sets them up as object, orders them, and secures them as stockpiles, both being and truth defer to beings. This is not for Heidegger an accident of history, but rather the destiny of metaphysics. He privileges himself as able to uncover this destiny, despite its withdrawal from the history of thinking. In Being and Time, Heidegger offered a novel reading of Aristotle. In ““Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being,” he credits

himself with an insight apparently precluded by the history of metaphysics: he can ask the questions of being and truth. I suggest that the latter is contingent upon the former: Heidegger privileges himself as seeing through the history of metaphysics precisely because he thinks anew the origin of that history in Greek thinking. The idea that the primordial phenomenon of truth is covered over in the history of metaphysics is not new to Heidegger in 1944. In §44(b) of Being and Time he argues that the history of metaphysics in its incipience covered up truth. A metaphysics of presence covers over the primordial phenomenon of truth by rendering it an agreement of two things present-at-hand: the as-

ANCIENT SCIENCE 169 sertion and the entity under discussion. He suggests that this way of understanding being was first mastered and developed as a branch of knowledge by the Greeks. He must here mean Aristotle, for it was Aristotle who first defined metaphysics as a branch of knowledge (cf. Met 4.1, 6.1). Indeed, Heidegger argues that “the primordial understanding of truth was simultaneously

alive among [the Greeks] . . at least in Aristotle” (BT 268/SZ 225), for Aristotle, rather than simply holding truth to be the agreement of an assertion with a state of affairs, understands the derivative nature of propositional truth. He claims for Aristotle that the “most primordial ‘truth’ is the ‘locus’ of assertion; it is the ontological condition for the possibility that assertions can be either true or false—that they may uncover or cover things up” (BT 269/SZ 226). In other words, it is only because Aristotle

understands that truth is unconcealment and concealment that he can take assertions to be paradigmatic and hence explanatorily effective for truth and falsity. Aristotle is accordingly an ambiguous figure for Heidegger. He both establishes and resists truth as propositional, both conceals and acknowledges unconcealment. This tension in Aristotle’s metaphysics appears again for Heidegger in 1940 in his reading of the Physics, where he argues that Aristotle contains both the last echo of the pre-Socratic insight into @votc and the origin of the reduction of vous to téyvyn through analogy. But. the significance of Aristotle to Heidegger’s thought does not end here. Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle on truth in 1927 already contains his move away from transcendental subjectivity, and hence Aristotle presents to Heidegger in 1940 an opportunity to retrieve something of the history of the thinking of being that is prior to Plato’s idealism. Although Aristotle follows Plato in that history, his Physics resonate for Heidegger with the pre-Socratic experience of being as @uotc. In Being and Time, Heidegger sees his phenomenological investigations as “veritas transcendentalis” in that their inquiry is into being, and “Being is the transcendens pure and simple |das transcendens schlechthin]’’ (BT 62/SZ 38). The transcendence of

being was the first reason Heidegger gave for the trivialization and forgottenness of the question of the meaning of being: being is the most universal concept. It belongs to every being, but lies

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beyond every being, beyond every characteristic a being may possess, beyond every class and genus. Heidegger intends to rethink the universality of being such that rather than rendering being the emptiest concept, it is grounds for a retrieval of Aristotle’s analogy of being, that is, for the problem of the unity of being. Heidegger’s inquiry is transcendental in that he wants to uncover the question of the meaning of being. And his strategy is to do so through an investigation of a particular being, Dasein. But Heidegger rejects a move to transcendental subjectivity. In §44(c) he resists the ideal subject because it is “a fanciful idealization” (BT 272/SZ 229). Rather than accepting accounts of the a priori in terms of a “pure I” or “consciousness in general,” Heidegger argues that the ‘Being of truth is connected primordially with Dasein” (BT 272/SZ 230). He holds that Dasein is in the truth, but he does not want to take the traditional route of transcendental idealism to explain its being there. In fact, Dasein is literally for Heidegger precisely such a ““being-there,”” and he says explicitly in Introduction to Metaphysics that the ‘’transcendental” intended in Being and Time “‘is not that of the subjective consciousness” (IM 18/EM 14). In the early 1930s Heidegger twice rejects transcendental subjectivism, specifically in the context of truth. In “Plato’s Doctrine

of Truth” he argues that ““No attempt to ground the essence of unhiddenness in ‘reason,’ ‘spirit,’ ‘thinking,’ ‘Aoyoc,’ or in any kind of ‘subjectivity,’ can ever rescue the essence of unhiddenness” (Pathmarks 182/W 238). In “On the Essence of Truth” the crucial move for understanding GAnGeva is in Section 4, “The

Essence of Freedom.”” Here Heidegger places the essence of truth in freedom, but not the freedom of subjectivity; rather, “freedom now reveals itself as letting beings be” (BW 127/WW 188). Beings reveal themselves to human beings, and freedom consists in allowing beings to do so. This account of the essence of freedom echoes the maxim of phenomenology cited in Being and Time at §7(c): ‘To the things themselves!” For Heidegger, the

freedom at the essence of truth does not belong to the transcendental subject, but rather is the freedom the thinker must allow to the object of thought if the thinker is to stand in the truth. This issue of freedom appears again in 1938 in “The Age of

ANCIENT SCIENCE 171 the World Picture.” Here Heidegger diagnoses that in modern thought, which begins with Descartes, freedom belongs to the transcendental subject. He argues that Descartes’s metaphysical task was “to create the metaphysical foundation for the freeing of man to freedom as the self-determination that is certain of

itself. That foundation, however, had not only to be itself one : that was certain, but since every standard of measure from any other sphere was forbidden, it had at the same time to be of such a kind that through it the essence of the freedom claimed would be posited as self-certainty” (AWP Appendix 9, 148-49/H 107). The Cartesian truth is founded on the truth of the indubitable cogito, and therefore the subject assumes a special role in the truth. The ego cogito is the basis of truth insofar as all truth is founded on its self-certainty. The self-certainty of the subject is not one truth among others, but sets the measure for all truth. Heidegger’s argument for an alternative conception of freedom, in which it belongs to beings rather than the self-certain subject, is a rejection of the claim that human being is the source of truth. Heidegger is again resisting in 1938 the distinctively modern move to transcendental subjectivity, a move he laid bare in 1935 as Cartesian through an analysis of the cogito sum in Die Frage nach dem Ding (FD 76-82/MSMM 273-80). Heidegger reveals the medieval influence on his thinking by holding that truth is transcendental not in the modern sense of having its source in the structure of human understanding, but in the sense of having its source in being and therefore transcending any particular being, including Dasein. This is the source of his critical resistance to Descartes found in “The Age of the World Picture” and Die Frage nach dem Ding. It is a rejection of idealism which, Hei-

degger argued (in the same year as the latter text), has its roots in changes Plato made to Adyosg when he interpreted being as Wea.

Heidegger’s rethinking of AOyoc is a long-term project. In Being and Time he argues that Aoyoc is apophantic. Truth traditionally belongs to Adyos in that it belongs in language, in the assertion. Aoyos is a “mode of making manifest in the sense of letting something be seen by pointing it out” (BT 56/SZ 32). In language, things are pointed out as things, and this apophanticas-structure is the basis for the synthesis in virtue of which state-

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ments are true or false. Heidegger finds this interpretation in Being and Time of apophantical discourse sufficient “to clarify the primary function of the Ao0yoc” (BT 58/SZ 34).

The inadequacy of this clarification, however, and the depth and complexity of the question of hoyoc are evidenced by Heidegger’s return to the issue in Introduction to Metaphysics, again in the lecture course on Aristotle’s Physics in 1940, and again in “Logic” in 1944. The most significant conclusion Heidegger draws from rethinking Adyos is that pvotc is originally d\nOeua. This move is tied to his rejection of transcendental idealism, for he makes it by displacing A0yoc from the transcendental subject to nature. By tracing Aoyoc back to the verb héyetv, Heidegger argues that nature is where Aoyoc began in the Greek experience of being. He first makes this connection in Being and Time, but it is in Introduction to Metaphysics that the significant development takes place. In Being and Time, Heidegger was content to connect Aoyos to bmoxeluevov through Aéyetv. “Yoxeipevov is the subject: it “lies

at the bottom of any procedure addressing oneself to it or discussing it” (BT 58/SZ 34). As subject in the sense of what is spoken about, it belongs to the subject in the sense of the thinker who is the speaker. The ambiguity in the word “subject” is apparent in this text implicitly. In ‘“The Age of the World Picture” in 1938, Heidegger argues that ““man becomes subject’ (AWP 128/H 88) when voxeivevov becomes subiectum. By 1952, when he gives the lectures that make up What Is Called Thinking?, Heidegger has explicitly rethought tmoxetpevov such that the sub-

ject has been pulled away from transcendence. Here he takes vItoxelwevov to mean for the Greeks ““what lies before us” (WCT

200/WHD 117): it is neither the thinking nor the speaking, but the thing that figures in and therefore is prior to both. Heidegger is careful to make explicitly clear that, of such things that lie before human beings, only a minute fraction is laid down by human being. In fact, even what human being does create de-

pends on the presence of some other being beforehand: the “stones from which the house is built come from the natural rock” (WCT 200/WHD 117). Most of what lies before human

being, to be thought and spoken about, is natural, that is, is (PUOLC.

ANCIENT SCIENCE 173 In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger argues that for Parmenides and Heraclitus, h\oyos and mucous are the same. Adyoc

and vous are the same in that Adyos is the “steady gathering, the intrinsic togetherness of the essent, i.e. being” (IM 130/EM 100). Aoyosg and qvotc are the gathering of a being into being. Heidegger asks how this can be the case, when Adyos means “word” and “reason,” both human capacities and functions, and says nothing about nature beyond human nature. He looks to Heraclitus for an answer. Heidegger interprets Heraclitus’s doctrine of the Aoyos on the basis of Fragments 1 and 2. He argues that for Heraclitus, Aoyoc means gathering together into being, and only on this basis can it mean anything to do with speaking or hearing. ®votc and hoyos are the same for Heraclitus (IM 130-31/EM 100), Heidegger says, in that both are being. He argues that the tradition has falsified Heraclitus’s doctrine of the Ao0yoc and that likewise Par-

menides has been misunderstood (IM 136/EM 104). In the case of Heraclitus, Heidegger argues that Christianity is responsible for the interpretation of Aoyos as word, in particular the word of Christ (IM 126-27/EM 97). In the case of Parmenides, the “‘familiar German view [landliiufige Auffassung|’’ (IM 137/EM 105) reads Parmenides’ claim that thinking and being are the same as an anticipation of idealism. Heidegger wants not to collapse being into thinking and therefore into subjectivism in interpreting Parmenides, but rather to understand \oyos in relation to being. That is, in Heidegger’s reading, puoig and Aoyos have in both Heraclitus and Parmenides an original unity. In the lectures from 1940 on Aristotle’s Physics, Heidegger again pulls both eidocg and Adyos away from transcendental idealism, precisely as he did earlier for truth. Eiéoc¢ does not mean originally the t6ea in the mind of the subject in Heidegger’s account. Rather, it means what presents itself to be seen, the aspect or appearance that a thing offers as visible: ‘“Eiéoc means the appearance of a thing and of a being in general, but appearance in the sense of the aspect, the ‘looks,’ the view, t6ea, which it offers and only can offer because the being has been put forth into this appearance and, standing in it, becomes present of itself—in a word, is. "Idea is ‘the seen,’ but not in the sense that it becomes such only through man’s seeing. Rather, t6ea is what

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something visible offers to the seeing, it is that which offers a view, the sightable’” (BCP 249/W 275). Echoing the account he gave of phenomena as appearances in §7(a) of Being and Time, Heidegger is arguing that a thing offers an appearance, but not in the sense of a seeming. The idea is originally for the Greeks, he claims, the visible aspect a thing offers, whether or not someone is there to see it. He connects this reading of eido¢ to Adyos by means of his retrieval of Aé€yetv.

Heidegger argues that eidoc is understood only when one realizes the role of a thing’s appearance in the thing being what it is for language. A€yew means “‘to bring together into a unity and to bring forth this unity as gathered, i.e., above all as becoming present; thus it means the same as to reveal what was formerly hidden, to let it be manifest in its becoming-present’”” (BCP

252/W 279). Aoyos is precisely this bringing together into a unity. A thing presents an appearance when it is gathered together into a unified thing that lies before the speaker such that it can be spoken about as that thing. Laying (A€yetv) and saying (AOyos) belong together, for one speaks about what lies present; indeed, speaking about something is a way of bringing it to presence. Heidegger has known this since he called language apo-

phantic in Being and Time. He retains this insight into the connection between laying and saying, and in fact repeats it in lectures as late as 1952 (WCT 200/WHD 117). Both Aoyoc and Aéyew belong with eidoc in that what lies before the speaker, the thing spoken about, is present for the speaker in the visible aspect it proffers. In 1944 Heidegger gave a lecture course on hoyoc entitled “Logic.” It was never published, but a brief, revised account was read to the Bremen Club in 1951 and published that same year in the Festschrift fiir Hans Jantzen. It is found in Vortrige und Auf-

sitze, and appears in translation in Early Greek Thinking under the title “Logos (Heraclitus, Fragment B 50).’”” Here Heidegger argues that AOyos is the same as GAnOEta: disclosure (EGT 70/ VA 212). He again traces its etymology to A€yew, and again he asks how something that means to lay can come to mean saying and talking (EGT 61/VA 200). The answer he gives was incipient as early as 1926 in his lectures on Heraclitus wherein he explained Aoyoc as the principle of beings by connecting it with

ANCIENT SCIENCE 175 Méyewv and vmoxeiuevov (Gesamtausgabe, Band 22:59). In 1940 he

argued that “eiSoc is genuinely understood as eidocg only when it appears within the horizon of the immediate statement about the being” (BCP 250/W 275). In 1944 the account of AOvyos is explicit against the background of truth as dAnOeta, unconcealment, in the argument on the basis of Heraclitus’s Fragment B 50 that Aoyos is GAnOEta.

Aoyog is, under Heidegger’s assessment of the pre-Socratics, the distinguishing characteristic of human being, but only insofar as human being stands in relation to being. It is not a property among others but definitive in that human being is precisely the one that stands in the truth. It can be so in Heidegger’s view only because \0yos was for the pre-Socratics not just the human capacity for language or reason, but rather was being as @votc. Heidegger has not simply redefined words in his explanation of GANOeLa. Rather, he has inscribed eidoc, Adyos, and bots in a new constellation. His claim is that this constellation of meanings is the original Greek experience of truth. That truth is the unconcealment of what already lies present, that is, of beings as a whole as @votcs, and the concealment of that presencing in the

assertion. Traditional truth as correspondence overlooks its ground in GAnOeta, just as traditional accounts of nature overlook its fundamental significance to human being. For they understand nature as a particular sphere of beings, not as being. This originary moment in Greek philosophy, in which being, puotcs, Aoyoc, and GAnOEta are thought together, is, however, quickly eclipsed in the history of philosophy. In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger calls Plato ““the completion of the beginning” (IM 182/EM 139), and in his analysis of nihilism in the Nietzsche volumes he reads Plato as the beginning of Western metaphysics. As the beginning of that history, Plato is an end of the pre-Socratic insight into being as qvotc and the interpretation of being as eidoc. Heidegger argues that in this transition lies the origin of the medieval distinction between essentia and existentia, since a thing’s whatness is more decisive for its being than its thatness. For being as tea is a model, an ideal model at that. Hence ta @muoixa are taken as mere copies. This certainly accords with Plato’s account in Book II of the Republic, and Plato

has no place for the study of nature in his education system,

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since the natural realm is the realm of becoming, whose instability precludes truth. A few years prior to Introduction to Metaphysics, in ‘’Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” Heidegger argues that education and truth

belong together in an original and essential unity (Pathmarks 167/W 124). Reading the cave analogy, he interprets the task of the teacher in Plato’s view to be education of the soul in order that it might properly see. Accordingly, with Plato, “aAnOeLo comes under the yoke of the t6ea”’; it becomes “the correctness of apprehending and asserting’ (Pathmarks 176-77/W 136). Rather than belonging to beings themselves, Heidegger argues, truth has thus become a characteristic of human comportment toward beings. Plato’s idealism is for Heidegger subjectivistic. Likewise in Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger argues that Plato’s interpretation of being as t6ea is a crucial moment in the history of being. That moment is “a decline [Abfall] from the first beginning” (IM 189/EM 144). The decline is the transformation of mvots and Aoyos, decisive not because muoics becomes charac-

terized as t6ca, but insofar as thea becomes “the sole and decisive interpretation of being” (IM 182/EM 139), an interpretation again described as a decline, an AbDfall. It is a decline into idealism, in which “vision makes the thing’’ UM 183/EM 140) such that vision is more decisive than the thing in constituting its whatness. Plato is for Heidegger the originary turn to idealism, which has consequences for truth. Plato transforms truth from unconcealment into correctness. He is therefore the origin of the truth that Heidegger will uncover at the essence of representational thinking, that is, at the essence of modern science. Parmenides has a role in the turn to idealism in Heidegger’s account. His connection of Aoyoc with xoQivetv interprets AOyoc in opposition to mvotc, Heidegger argues, for herein “‘Adyosc as

gathering becomes the ground of being-human [Menschsein]’’ (IM 174/EM 133). Hence the question of being is inextricably bound with human being, for ‘‘at the very beginning of Western philosophy it became evident that the question of being necessarily embraces the foundations of being-there” (IM 174/EM 133). There is herein already a trace of the double essence of being Heidegger will make so much of in the Nietzsche lectures on nihilism. For it seems that from its beginning in Greek think-

ANCIENT SCIENCE 177 ing, the opening of the possibility of the question of being is in each case the opening of the possibility of its interpretation according to transcendental subjectivism. Taken to its fullest extreme, that possibility unfolds as the nihilism of representational thinking at the essence of science and technology.

Aristotle, however, chooses realism over idealism. He is an ambiguous figure for Heidegger. On the one hand, he is responsible for locating truth in the assertion. The movement in which truth is no longer the event of unconcealment, but has come to mean “to say something about something,” is a transition of hoyos from uotc to language that culminates, Heidegger says, in “Aristotle’s proposition to the effect that Aoyos as statement is that which can be true or false’ (IM 186/EM 142). Yet on the other hand, Aristotle stands, with his strong interest in the sciences, especially biology, in marked contrast to Plato’s denigration of the sciences. Heidegger has already argued in Being and Time that Aristotle can be interpreted on truth differently than he has been traditionally in the history of philosophy. In fact, I suggest that Heidegger’s rethinking of Aristotle on truth in Being

and Time aligns Aristotle with the opening claim of “Letter on Humanism,” that “Language is the house of being,” rather than with the traditional claim that truth belongs to the assertion. It would seem, then, that there is something to Aristotle on @votc that warrants further thought, given the tension between the rereading of Aristotle on truth and Adyos found in Being and Time and the claim made eight years later that he is the culmination of Plato’s move to idealism. In ‘“Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” Heidegger likewise found Aristotle to be ambiguous. On the one hand, at Metaphysics 9.10.1051a34 Aristotle thinks truth as the fundamental trait of beings. On the other hand, he claims at Metaphysics 6.4.1027b25 that truth and falsity are not in things but in the intellect (Pathmarks 178/W 138). Heidegger subsequently turns to Aristotle, and interestingly enough, it is the Physics to which he moves.

In summary, in the interpretation that Heidegger gives the pre-Socratics, especially Heraclitus, being is puotc. As early as 1930, Heidegger suggests that when human being first experienced unconcealment for the first time by asking what beings are, then “being as a whole reveals itself as uoic, ‘nature,’

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which here does not yet mean a particular sphere of beings but rather beings as such as a whole, specifically in the sense of emerging presence” (BW 129/WW 189-90). This notion of emergence in connection with @vots comes to the fore again in 1935. In Einftihrung in die Metaphysik, Heidegger describes quotc as denoting “‘self-blossoming emergence (e.g. the blossoming of a rose), opening up, unfolding, that which manifests itself in such unfolding and perseveres and endures in it; in short, the realm of things that emerge and linger on” (IM 14/EM 11). ®votc is not simply nature under this account, but the power by which things come to be, by which they are available to be encountered in their presence for human being. It is in this sense of “physics,” the thinking of @votc, that Heidegger claims that “[from] the very first ‘physics’ has determined the essence and history of metaphysics .. . [and that] metaphysics has remained unalterably ‘physics’ ’” (IM 17/EM 14). Where being is mvotc, metaphysics is physics. In 1969, Karl Léwith echoed this sense of muotc in a paper given at a colloquium honoring Heidegger’s eightieth birthday. He asked, “What is nature supposed to be if it is not the one nature of all beings, whose power of generation permits everything which in any way is—thus even man—to proceed from it and to pass away again?” (1970:310). ®votc in this sense is, how-

ever, much more than is denoted by the contemporary word “nature.” For the history of human thinking about nature is for Heidegger one of reduction, such that “the actual philosophical force of the Greek word [qvotc] is destroyed” (IM 13/EM 10) by its Romanization into natura. For nature was being, Heidegger argues, at the beginning of Western philosophy. He goes on to describe beings in terms of a metaphysics of presence: “The thing ‘sits.’ It rests in the manifestation, i.e. emergence, of its essence. .. . For the Greeks ‘being’ basically meant this standing presence’ (IM 60-61/EM 46). In this reading, to be is to be present for thinking and conversation. What unconceals itself originally and foundationally to all other experience is @vots. This is Parmenides’ point, argues Heidegger, in saying that being and apprehension belong together (IM 183/EM 140; cf. Parmenides, Fragment 5).

This interpretation of the pre-Socratic constellation of

ANCIENT SCIENCE 179 dAOEia, KOyos, eidoc, and qvotc is the background against which Heidegger reads Aristotle’s Physics in 1940. In “On the Being and Conception of @votc in Aristotle’s Physics, B.1,’” Heidegger interprets Aristotle’s ovota as the focal instance of being

in the Greek sense of \éyetv, a laying before the speaker of an appearance, an eidoc. But obvoia is not mots for Aristotle, in Heidegger’s account. Both are being, but the conception of being

is not the same. For Aristotle, there are many ways a thing can be said to be. Truth belongs to the assertion—derivatively so, Heidegger has argued—but it belongs there nonetheless. For Heraclitus, on the other hand, ““®votc is aAnOeva’’ (BCP 269/W

301). On the basis of this account of truth, Heidegger argues in 1940 that @uotg cannot be understood by analogy with téyvn. That is to say, in his 1940 lecture course on Aristotle’s Physics, Heidegger explains how Aristotle narrows the pre-Socratic account of @votc.

Heidegger argues that the pre-Socratic view has its last echo in Aristotle. Yet Aristotle also brings about a transition in the history of being that is decisive for all subsequent metaphysics, in fact for the subsequent relation between physics and metaphysics. For, if for the pre-Socratics being was @votc, and hence physics and metaphysics know herein no distinction, Aristotle’s account of being in terms of form and matter reduces nature to an analogue of the artifact. Heidegger looks for an alternative by giving Mvotc a priority over téxvy on the basis of Aristotle’s account of actuality and potentiality, that is, in terms of one of the many ways a thing can be said to be according to Aristotle’s analogy of being. ARISTOTLE’S ANALOGY OF BEING

Heidegger argues in 1940, reading Aristotle’s Physics, that the pre-Socratic interpretation of puois is narrowed in Aristotle’s conception. For Aristotle, Heidegger suggests, puots is ambiguous. On the one hand, the pre-Socratic vision is echoed in Aristotle’s claim that @votc is that which moves of its own accord. On the other hand, Aristotle’s claim that @votc is both form and matter, with priority given to form, narrows the pre-Socratic

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conception and lays the basis for understanding natural things by analogy to artifacts. The latter are produced by an artist, and things in nature are simply self-created, or divinely crafted artifacts.

Heidegger claims, however, that pvots cannot be understood by analogy with téyvn, that is, artifacts. If one interprets Aristotle in the light of the claim that being is first and foremost form, then the coming into being of a thing can be construed as the imposition of form onto matter. Although this is an adequate account of production, Heidegger argues that the coming into being of nature distinguishes it in Aristotle’s thought from production. Heidegger lays out an alternative reading of the Physics by thinking through Aristotle’s analogy of being in terms of actuality and potentiality. There is a marked difference between this account and the view Heidegger struggled with in the 1920s and early 1930s. There he took metaphysics to ground physics. Here, in his account of Aristotle, the demarcation between the two is for Heidegger more than blurred. In fact, in reading Aristotle’s Physics he argues that ““‘meta-physics is “physics’’” (BCP 223/W 241). Heidegger’s ear is attuned in reading Aristotle to an echo of a pre-Socratic insight: being is puotc. This is the crucial point that makes Aristotle’s analogy of being significant for Heidegger. Heidegger’s acquaintance with and understanding of Aristotle’s analogy of being goes well beyond Brentano’s reading by way of the categories. Heidegger reads the analogy in 1940 in

terms of actuality and potentiality. Aristotle’s taxonomy of knowledge, in which he distinguishes theory from production, serves as an initial demarcation of muotcs from téxvy since they are ends of different branches of knowledge. Against that background, the Aristotelian distinction between qvotc and téyvy can be drawn as a difference between the relation of matter to form in each. In Heidegger’s interpretation of Aristotle, puotc takes a priority over téxvy since that relation is one of appropriation in production, but appropriateness in nature. That is, form and matter belong together necessarily in muotc, but incidentally iN TEXV1.

In Heidegger’s analysis, however, the distinction between pvotc and téxvy is unsustainable in modernity. In fact, accord-

ANCIENT SCIENCE 181 ing to Heidegger, what were for Aristotle clearly demarcated branches of knowledge are subsequently collapsed. Modern science is essentially technological. Heidegger’s view of Aristotle’s

Physics therefore not only stands on its own as an account of the early stages of the history of science, but also serves as the foundation upon which his critique of modern science unfolds. It is preparatory to that critique. And it hinges upon Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle’s analogy of being. In Aristotle’s analogy, one of the many ways a thing can be said to be is actually or potentially. A further analogy, between puots and téxvn, is either implied or precluded, Heidegger argues, depending upon how Aristotle’s notion of potentiality— that is, the dvuvaye. Ov—is interpreted. Under Heidegger’s reading of the Physics, the potential, matter, stands in a different relation to actuality in the case of nature and in the case of things

produced. To understand form in all cases as an imposition upon matter is to preclude interpreting the relation between matter and form in the case of nature. This relation is one of necessity. Trees, for example, must be made of wood. ‘To fail to see that form and matter are inseparable and equally necessary

in nature is to fail to grasp the difference between nature and artifacts. Aristotle’s distinction between theoretical and productive knowledge is based precisely on that difference. Heidegger’s intent in “On the Being and Conception of ®votcs in Aristotle’s Physics B.1”’ is to show that Aristotle’s account of the many ways in which a thing can be said to be contains both the possibility of interpretation of puots by analogy to téxvn and the possibility of a different interpretation. Aristotle lists the sev-

eral senses in which a thing can be said to be at Metaphysics 6.2.1026a33—b1: ‘““one was seen to be the accidental, and another

the true (‘nonbeing’ being the false), while besides these there are the figures of predication (e.g. the ‘what,’ quality, quantity, place, time, and any similar meanings which ‘being’ may have), and again besides all these there is that which ‘is’ potentially or actually.” A thing can be said to be accidental, true (or false), by way of the categories, or finally, actually or potentially. These are the many ways a thing can be said to be, for Aristotle. They take their meaning from a focal instance of being: substance. This is Aristotle’s analogy of being.

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An analogy between gvotc and téxvy is conspicuously absent

from the list. Thus it is apparent that Heidegger has his own agenda in choosing to lecture on Aristotle’s Physics. His intent is

not simply to teach his students to read Aristotle, but to show how the Stagirite is a founding moment in the history of Western

thought, which subsequently interprets nature by analogy with production. Yet this is not to say that Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle is superficial or concocted. The move from Aristotle’s many ways a thing can be said to be to Heidegger’s claim that on this basis mvotcs and téxvy are subsequently understood to be analogous in the history of Western thought, is a move that requires careful explication, the focus of which is the fourth way in which a thing can be said to be: potentially or actually. For Heidegger will argue that understanding matter as the potential onto which an actualizing form is imposed is the basis for the analogy between gvotc and téxv1. The Aristotelian problem of the analogy of being is not new to Heidegger in 1940. According to Thomas Sheehan (1975:87), it is common knowledge that the analogy, first encountered by Heidegger in 1907 in reading Brentano’s dissertation, On the Manifold Sense of Being According to Aristotle, served as the driv-

ing force behind Being and Time twenty years later. Heidegger confirms this fact in ““The Understanding of Time in Phenomenology and in the Thinking of the Being-Question” (Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 10:210) and in his inaugural address to

the Heidelberg Academy of Science, where he says that the “quest for the unity in the multiplicity of Being . . . remained, through many upsets, wanderings, and perplexities, the ceaseless impetus for the treatise Being and Time’’ (Seigfried 1970:4).

The analogy of being was a central issue in Heidegger’s philosophical development. Furthermore, in his lectures on Metaphysics 9.1-3 in 1931, Heidegger’s explication of moed¢ Hv equivocals (AM 26-48, esp. 38-

40) makes it clear that he understands how the analogy of being works. Aristotle explains at Metaphysics 4.2.1003a34-b1 the many senses in which a thing can be said to be by analogy with the many ways a thing can be said to be healthy. One thing is called healthy because it preserves health, another in that it produces health, another is symptomatic of health, and another be-

ANCIENT SCIENCE 183 cause it is capable of health. Heidegger explains that the different meanings of “healthy’’ stand in their difference nonetheless in a unity, and he asks what the character of that unity is (AM 40). All these uses of “healthy”’ take their meaning from and refer back to a single thing: health. Their meaning comes by analogy to this focal instance. Likewise, Aristotle continues, there are different senses in which a thing can be said to be medical, but all are relative to

the medical art. One possesses the art, another is naturally adapted to it, another is a function of it. There are other words used similarly to these, says Aristotle, and likewise “‘there are many senses in which a thing is said to be, but all refer to one starting-point’ (1003b6). All senses in which a thing can be said to be take their meaning from a focal instance: substance (ovoia). Aristotle makes his point on the way to arguing that there is one science to investigate being qua being (1003b11-19). That single science is metaphysics. Heidegger’s discomfort with metaphysics is well evident by 1940. He has ceased to talk of metaphysics as scientific philosophy. He does not stand at the incipience of metaphysics, as does Aristotle, whose interest is precisely in establishing metaphysics as a science. Rather, Heidegger stands at the end of a problematic tradition. He is in 1940 uncomfortable with the analogy of being that determines the science for Aristotle, for substance (ovolc) is not just the focal instance by which all senses in which a thing can be said to be take their meaning. A quick review of these senses shows that one of them is by way of the categories, of which one is the ““what.” Substance is itself a category. There-

fore all the other senses in which a thing can be said to be must take their meaning from this category. This is to say that potentiality and actuality, as well as being in the sense of being true,

have their meaning from the category of substance. Some twenty-five years after reading Brentano on the subject, Heidegger can argue that nineteenth-century thinkers, above all Bren-

tano, therefore had a tendency to recognize potentiality and actuality as categories (AM 45). And he concludes himself that the analogy of being is the title for the most difficult amogia within which ancient and all subsequent philosophy is enwalled (AM 46).

184 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Several years ago, Father Joseph Owens asked me if Heidegger read anyone other than Brentano on Aristotle’s analogy of being. It is clear on the basis of Heidegger’s lecture course in 1940 on the Physics that Heidegger did not follow Brentano and read the

analogy solely by way of the categories. Rather, the lecture is a painstaking reading of the analogy in terms of actuality and potentiality. It comes out of a long and critical acquaintance with the analogy on Heidegger’s part.

Against that background, the late and unexplained reference to Aristotle’s many ways a thing can be said to be in the 1940 lecture is not as obscure as it at first seems. The lecture is explicitly about breaking the analogy of quotc to téyvn, and on the way to that rupture, it is a rethinking of the relation between on the one side ovoia, and on the other, actuality and potentiality. It is an attempt to raise the question of being by way of vote. Aristotle’s interpretation of puots is more systematized than the pre-Socratic, since @vous is for him what is studied in natural science in distinction to other branches of knowledge. What is under discussion, however, in Heidegger’s account is the things, not the ways of knowing that get at those things. Potentiality and actuality are that by which quotc and téyvn are to be separated in Heidegger’s reading. The implications of that separation concern the possibility of another beginning for thinking beyond representational thinking. In Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle’s analogy of being lies the possibility of a reconception of nature, an alternative to science and technology, a thinking beyond modernity. THEORETICAL VERSUS PRODUCTIVE KNOWLEDGE

Heidegger has previously attributed the account he has of @votc

to “the Greeks.”” Although he sometimes treats Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaximander explicitly, at other times he refers to “the Greeks” as if they constitute a unified whole. On the basis of context it seems that he usually means the pre-Socratics, but little evidence is available in most instances to pin the term down any further. The effect of this term is to give Heidegger’s

reading of ancient philosophy on occasion the feel of a “once

ANCIENT SCIENCE 185 upon a time” rather than careful and diligent analysis. Where there is no evidence to do otherwise, one must simply and uncomfortably reproduce his generalization. Heidegger’s treat-

ment of Aristotle shows, however, that his reductionist generalizations about ‘the Greeks” are not always hermeneutic hand-waving so much as moments of interpretive synthesis arising from years of detailed analysis. His reading of Aristotle is an example of such sustained interpretation. In 1931 he reads Metaphysics 9.1-3 in a semester-long course, and in 1940 he does the same with Physics 2.1. In this lecture course, the reason Heidegger gives for his inter-

est in Aristotle is that the Stagirite is both a culmination and a foundation in the history of Western philosophy. In the Physics is found the “‘first explanation of the Being of qucig where the way of questioning effected a coherence of thought . . . [the ful-

fillment and] last echo of the original (and thus supreme) thoughtful projection of the Being of quotc as this is still preserved for us in the fragments of Anaximander, Heraclitus and Parmenides’” (BCP 224/W 242). Aristotle’s interpretation of q@vouc both captures the pre-Socratic understanding, insofar as it constitutes a unity, and “sustains and guides all succeeding interpretations of the Being of ‘nature’ ”’ (BCP 224/W 243). In that earlier interpretation, “@uotc is GAjOeLa, unconcealment’”’

(BCP 269/W 301). It is truth understood not as the correctness of a proposition, but as the unconcealment of beings on the basis of which propositional truth is possible. Bvotc is to be wondered about, contemplated in Bios Bewentixoc, because, to use Heidegger’s formulation of the question of metaphysics at the closing of What Is Metaphysics? and the opening of Introduction to Metaphysics, puotc is the source of the beings in the question, ““Why

are there beings at all, and not rather nothing?” For it is from @uotc 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, puotc is not simply “nature” 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” (IM 61/EM 47). This reading of mvots stays with Heidegger such that twenty years later,

186 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

in “The Question Concerning Technology,” he argues that muouc

is xoinotc, where the latter does not mean poetry or even specifically téyvn, that is, production, but rather “a bringing-forth” (QCT 10/VA 15) in general of what is present for human encoun-

ter. In téyvn a being is brought into being by the artisan, but @voig is motinotcs in the highest sense, for ‘““what presences by

means of @vouc has the bursting open belonging to bringingforth, e.g., the bursting of a blossom into bloom, in itself” (QCT 10/VA 15). Heidegger finds an echo of this interpretation of vous in Aristotle, but also something else that is a constriction and limitation of this interpretation. Aristotle suggests at Physics 2.1 that puoi can be spoken of in two ways. It is “the immediate material substratum of things

which have in themselves a principle of motion or change” (193a29), and it is “the shape or form specified in the definition

of the thing” (193a30). Bucs can be spoken of as both matter and form. Father Richardson gives a concise account of how matter and form belong together (1964:59-61). Heidegger finds the distinction not “adequately founded” (Poetry, Language, and Thought 27/BW 157) in his discussion of the thingly character of

the work of art. The twofold nature of quots is derivative and a narrowing of the earlier interpretation of being as Mvotc, in Heidegger’s account. For he interprets muotc in Aristotle as a kind of being among others, rather than being itself. Heidegger’s account of Aristotle on @votc in 1940 explicates the tension within Aristotle. What is crucial about Aristotle’s interpretation of mvotsc is his tripartite division of knowledge. It is not Aristotle who first di-

vides knowledge into a system in ancient Greece. Plato distinguished the theoretical sciences from the applied arts. Yet it is Aristotle who, by dividing knowledge according to its end, first establishes the taxonomy Heidegger is after. Aristotle establishes divisions between theoretical (OeWeua), practical (7EGEts),

and productive (téyvn) knowledge most clearly in the Topics at 145a14-18 and 157a10-11, and in the Metaphysics at 1025b18-—26

and 1064a10-19. Aristotle further divides theoretical knowledge

into metaphysics, mathematics, and physics. Here Aristotle parts ways with Plato, for Plato would not include natural science in theoretical knowledge. In fact, Plato does not recognize

ANCIENT SCIENCE 187 physics as knowledge at all (Cornford 1941:236), since knowledge is of the eternal and not of transient ta muowd. Heidegger is accordingly interested in Aristotle’s taxonomy of knowledge, since his analysis of the subsequent history of metaphysics concerns the contrast between theoretical and productive knowledge. Aristotle discriminates theoretical, practical, and productive knowledge on the basis of the end (ig\os) of each. @e@eua. has

as its end the thing known. It is knowledge for the sake of knowledge, and seeks only to become one with its object. Ileaétc is practical knowledge, consisting in ethics and politics, and has its end in action. Téyvy is productive knowledge under which fall, for example, the knowledge of the craftsperson and the art of the doctor. Teyvy has its end in the thing produced: the work. A carpenter produces a house, a doctor, health. Aristotle makes a further threefold division within 8e@eua. Since the end of all Oe@eua 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 objects, 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 O8edeua, 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 generation 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 object 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 Oewoua is the study of nature (@vouc), and natural things move

in all ways. Aristotle claims that the fact that they move must be

188 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

taken for granted by physicists, because it “is indeed made plain

by induction” (185a14). They come into being, grow, change their place and qualities, and eventually are destroyed. The claim that ta @uoimd move entails for Aristotle that living

things cannot be defined without reference to their matter, for materiality goes hand in hand with motion. ®votc is analogous to “snub,” for “snub” cannot be defined without reference to matter (Met 6.1.1025b32-1026a6). What is snub is a concave nose,

whereas concavity itself ‘is independent of perceptible matter” (1025b33): its definition does not require mention of a nose. If something is muotc for Aristotle, it is in motion, and that means it must have matter. Thus he claims that “the necessary in nature, then, is plainly what we call by the name of matter, and the changes in it’”’ (Phys 2.9.200a30).

Matter plays therefore a central role in Aristotle’s account of otc. But it is crucial in understanding that account to see that Aristotle is not a strict empiricist or materialist in his conception of natural philosophy. He does not hold that knowledge comes about through perception alone. Hence he argues (in several places, most notably De Anima 3.7, Metaphysics 1.1, and Nicomachean Ethics 3.2) that animals are not capable of knowledge, though they perceive. Rather, Aristotle states explicitly in the Posterior Analytics that knowledge is of the universal, whereas perception is always of a particular thing (87b27—33). Likewise, he claims at 71b15 and 73a21 that the object of scientific knowledge “cannot be other than it is.” Universality brings necessity. The discussion of scientific knowledge in Book 6 of the Nicoma-

chean Ethics confirms that it is of things that are universal (1140b31-—33), that is, necessary, eternal, ungenerated, and imperishable (1139b23-24). Ta muotxa are of course never eternal;

rather, they are generated and perishable. They are never universal, but always particular, always a “‘this.’” Yet knowledge of

ta Pvoixd is universal for Aristotle in that it is knowledge of a particular thing in a certain respect, that is, in respect of its univer-

sality. Aristotle’s universal has no separate (from matter) existence: it is never found independently of a “this,” a particular substance. He tells us in the opening chapter of the Metaphysics that the universal is elicited from several groups of singulars, that is, from experience (980b25; cf. An Post 100a6—9). In experi-

ANCIENT SCIENCE 189 ence, both the skill of the craftsperson and the knowledge of the student of science have their source (981lal1). For in experience

the universal is stabilized within the soul as a single identity. Scientific knowledge is accordingly of what is necessary, ungen-

erated, and imperishable—that is, the universal—in that which is itself neither necessary nor eternal but constantly changing. So although Aristotle insists that natural science is knowledge of that which has matter, he cannot be called a materialist. Furthermore, Aristotle argues in the Metaphysics that natural science must fall into one of three classes—practical, productive, or theoretical—and that it cannot be either of the former two (1064a19). Natural science is, then, theoretical (1025b25), in contrast to téyvyn, which is productive. The most obvious distinction between @uotcs and téxvn is readily discernible in Aristotle’s tax-

onomy of knowledge. Téxvn is a division of knowledge, as are BeWoua and woGEtc. Pvouc, on the other hand, is the end, the object of a particular branch of Oeweta; it is the thing under study. Yet this difference, between a way of knowing and a thing known some other way, plays a role in neither Aristotle’s nor Heidegger’s account. In The Basic Works of Aristotle, Hardie and Gaye translate Physics 2.1.193a31 as follows: “For the word ‘nature’ is applied to what is according to nature and the natural in the same way as ‘art’ is applied to what is artistic or a work of art.” Heidegger translates this passage his own way: “Just as we (loosely) call by the name téyvn those things which are produced in accordance with such a know-how, as well as those which belong to this kind of being, so also we (loosely) call by the name qvotc those things which are in accordance with mvotc and hence belong to beings of this kind”’ (BCP 250/W 276). Hei-

degger has added the word “loosely” parenthetically to his translation. Although one recoils at the thought of a translator simply adding words to render the desired interpretation of the text under scrutiny, Heidegger’s move here cannot be taken as cavalier. For indeed, to Aristotle, physics and productive knowledge are different ways of knowing precisely in virtue of the fact that they are directed at differing things. The distinction between knowledge and its object is simply not as crucial to Aristotle as to modern philosophers. In fact, for Aristotle, when one

190 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

knows, one becomes one with the thing known. Exactly what that means is unclear, particularly under the influence of a modern epistemology in which the knowing subject remains opposed by the object known: the thing remains other. Aristotle’s explanation is that in knowing one receives the form without the matter. This is not overly helpful, although in the case of perception, it is further explained by the analogy of a signet ring impressing its form but not its matter into wax (De Anima 2.12.424a17-24). In Aristotle’s account, knowledge consists in having the form in the soul, and different kinds of knowledge do so differently because they have different ends. In fact, that the form is stabilized in the soul through experience in physics, whereas in production the artist has the form in the soul prior to production, is the crucial distinction between @vots and téxvy for both Aristotle and Heidegger.

Accordingly, I accept Heidegger’s addition of the word “loosely” to his translation of 193a31 as pedagogical. He is highlighting Aristotle’s point. For when Heidegger, following Aristotle, uses the terms téyvyn and @votc, he is talking about things

and not kinds of knowledge. What is at stake in Heidegger's discussion is the distinction between natural things and things that are produced: it is the difference between things that both Heidegger and Aristotle wish to elucidate. This is why Aristotle is the philosopher at stake in Heidegger’s account of ancient science. It is Aristotle whose taxonomy of knowledge makes possi-

ble a clear distinction between quous and téyvy when he distinguishes both theoretical and productive knowledge from practical knowledge. The separation of the applied arts from practical knowledge—whose end is an action, not a thing— grounds Heidegger’s analysis not of knowledge, but of things. Accordingly, I cannot follow Dennis Schmidt, who argues that Heidegger is after an economy of production in his 1940 lecture course on the Physics. Heidegger’s intent is not to distinguish kinds of knowledge. His point is precisely that pvotcs cannot be understood by economies of production, that is, by analogy with texvy. Schmidt, reinvesting in an economy of production, is interested in a retrieval of witnotis from representation to repetition. This question of pipnous is a thoroughly interesting issue, and to pursue it is a task worth doing; in fact, Schmidt’s account

ANCIENT SCIENCE 191 does the job well. Yet, Heidegger’s task in 1940 is not to complete

that task. His critique of representational thinking will come in the 1950s. The reading of Aristotle in 1940 is one of the building blocks on the basis of which that later critique will be made. Hence, Schmidt’s interest in this text confirms the lectures as a significant development in Heidegger’s thinking toward that end. But Schmidt mistakes the preparatory for the substantial, and prematurely reads the incipient as the expressed. Indeed, Heidegger’s explicit purpose in the 1940 lecture is not a critique of representational thinking, but rather the severing of an analogy between uotc and téyvn. The basis on which Heidegger pries apart muots and téyvy—that is, things that come to be from nature and things that are produced—is what is generally known in the English tradition of Aristotelian scholarship as potentiality. AVVOUEL OV

In “On the Being and Conception of @votc in Aristotle’s Physics B.1,"" Heidegger acknowledges that Aristotle’s interpretation of

uots is drawn in part from Antiphon. Heidegger reads Antiphon as an idealist who holds that the real is not what is experienced (BCP 242-—43/W 266-67). We experience sensible things, but reality consists rather in the four elements prior to their formation into things. Things appear when some form is imposed upon those material elements. Sensible things are, however, perishable, and thus are merely transitory appearances in contrast to the eternal elements. Actuality, that is, what is experienced, is accordingly illusory in Antiphon’s account, whereas the duvawet ov, that is, the potential, which consists in unformed matter, is permanent and thus real. Antiphon takes the dUvapet ov to be matter that is available to receive the form and thus to be ordered by its imposition. Under Aristotle’s interpretation of the twofold nature of @uotc, this interpretation of the relation between matter and form also holds. Heidegger’s criticism of Antiphon’s view is that it contains “a misinterpretation of d6vuvapet 6v, which changes this from ‘the appropriated’ to something merely ‘order-able’ and ‘on hand’ ”

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(BCP 267/W 298). This is Thomas Sheehan’s translation of Heidegger’s lecture. The translation of das Geeignete as “‘the appropriated” is helpful to the reader of Heidegger in that it suggests a connection with Ereignis, which appears in Heidegger’s think-

ing in the 1960s as the event of being, and is often translated as “Appropriation.” Yet it is a problematic translation for my purposes. I wish to retain the notion of appropriateness and suitability, but I wish also to avoid a certain confusion. The difference between qvoic and teyvy lies in the different relation of form to matter in each. The distinction is between what is appropriate (i.e., suitable and proper) and what is appropriated (i.e., borrowed or taken). This distinction cannot be made if das Geeignete is translated as “the appropriated,” for it is here that appropriateness but not appropriation is called for. Accordingly, I translate differently the charge against Antiphon: his view is grounded “in a misinterpretation of the duvawet Ov, of the appropriate [des Geeigneten], as a mere thing at one’s disposal and on hand” (W 298). Antiphon’s position on the nature of things has as its basis a construal of the relation between form and matter that does not acknowledge a difference in that relation for nature versus artifacts. Heidegger’s intent in his 1940 lecture course is to explicate a different view of the relation between matter and form in Aristotle’s Physics by means of a different account of potentiality. Under this account the potential is not simply matter that is on hand or at one’s disposal to be ordered by some form, but rather matter is the potential that is appropriate to some form. The question of poten-

tiality and actuality is inseparable from the question of matter and form. Heidegger will use this different account of potentiality to call for an interpretation of mvotc that does not reduce it to téyvn by analogy. The difference between the criticized interpretation and the view that Heidegger finds as only an echo in Aristotle is the difference between a relation of matter and form that is an imposition or an appropriateness, respectively. Before the question of what this appropriateness consists in can be answered, a reading of Aristotle on potentiality and actuality must be laid out. Though the role of matter in @votc is crucial in Aristotle’s ac-

ANCIENT SCIENCE 193 count, he assigns to form a priority over matter. Heidegger analyzes this move on the basis of “‘the basic notion of Western metaphysics” (BCP 255): évteAéxeta. “Evtedéxera, commonly rendered in English as “actuality,” is the subject of no little debate among scholars. The issue of what “actuality’” means is fur-

ther complicated by the fact that Aristotle uses évtedéyeta virtually interchangeably with évégyeva. Heidegger separates the two words perhaps more cleanly than Aristotle did, for he argues in his lectures on Physics 2.1 that the goyov at the core of évéoyeta distinguishes the work, what is produced, from évteiévela, which has téAoc at its core. Hence he uses the words to capture the difference between mvotc and téyvn. Yet, as George Blair notes, ‘every single instance of évteA€yeta. has a use of évégyeta that exactly parallels it’’ (1978:110). There

are two words. And further, neither of these words is found in Greek before Aristotle, contrary to his usual strategy of appropriating existing words. He must have had a specific purpose in mind to coin these words. Blair’s work on these two words establishes a basis on which to understand Aristotle’s notion of actuality such that what Heidegger is after for the sister term, potentiality, can become clear. "Evéoyeta is the earlier word, first appearing apparently in the Protrepticus before Aristotle left the Academy, although this is not an extant text. Blair translates it as “activity” rather than “actuality” on the basis of etymology. As did Heidegger, Blair seeks to understand the word by looking to the “work” (€oyov) contained within. He suggests that Aristotle uses the word to stress the idea of “doing’’ and theorizes that Aristotle introduced the word precisely in opposition to Plato’s static sense of form (1978:109). Quite intentionally, Aristotle never defines éveoyela explicitly, stressing instead that it must be grasped by analogy: Actuality, then, is the existence of a thing not in the way which we express by “potentially”; we say that potentially, for instance, a statue of Hermes is in the block of wood and the half-line is in the whole, because it might be separated out, and we call even the

man who is not studying a man of science, if he is capable of studying; the thing that stands in contrast to each of these exists actually .. . it is as that which is building is to that which is capa-

194 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE ble of building, and the waking to the sleeping, and that which is seeing to that which has its eyes shut but has sight, and that which has been wrought to the unwrought. Let actuality be defined by one member of this antithesis, and the potential by the other. (Met 9.6.1048a31-b5)

For the sake of clarity, I offer the following list of potentialities set against their corresponding actualities:

Potentiality Actuality

block of wood statue of Hermes

half-line line scientist not studying scientist studying

builder not building builder building

sleeping person person awake seer with eyes closed seer seeing

the unwrought the wrought It is pretty clear how the actualities of the scientist studying, the

builder building, the seer seeing, and even the person who is awake are cases of activities—of “doing,” as Blair wishes to understand évégyeia. But a statue of Hermes, a line, and something that has been wrought are actualities that do not give themselves so easily to a contrast against the static form. Statues, lines, and things wrought just do not seem to do much. Blair’s suggestion

is that Aristotle coined the word évtehéxeva precisely to look after this problem. For, if évteAéyeva means “having its end inside it,” as Blair suggests (1978:114), then the actuality of a thing

that does not in fact do much is easier to grasp: “’a statue is a statue when it contains the end (téAoc) of a statue” is perhaps more apt than “a statue is a statue when it does what statues do.”” Yet the explanatory victory here is perhaps Pyrrhic. It is still unclear how being a statue, a line, or a thing wrought is an activity.

Furthermore, once Blair has explained why the second word is introduced, he is faced with the question of why this use of Evtehexela, is subsequently superseded by évéoyeta, the earlier term. For apparently Aristotle introduced the second word only to discover eventually, by slipping into using évégyeia in precisely the way he intended évteA€éxeua, that in fact a thing’s hav-

ANCIENT SCIENCE 195 ing its end inside it is a kind of activity. If it is the case that évéoyela is activity, and its primary sense movement, as Aristotle says at Metaphysics 9.3.1047a31, and that évégyeva and évted-

éxela are not meaningfully distinct for Aristotle, then Heidegger is right to claim that understanding this “basic notion of metaphysics’ depends on understanding Aristotle’s concept of mo-

tion. In order to say what it means to hold that actuality is an activity, Heidegger has chosen the only reasonable direction in which to move his account: motion.

Motion is, however, much more complex in Aristotle’s account than the modern word implies. A better word to under-

stand all that is carried in Aristotle’s account of motion is “change.” In Book 1 of the Physics, Aristotle begins by asking the number and nature of the first principles of nature. He answers that there are two or three principles, depending upon whether one considers them as composites or simply. Taken as composites, for example, the unmusical man becomes the musical man. There are two principles, composite in that the substance and its accident are named. Taken simply, the man goes from being unmusical to being musical. There are three principles: a substance and two contraries. Either way, the model underlying the inquiry into nature is one in which some attribute changes and some substance persists throughout. Generation and destruction will, then, be special cases of motion for Aristotle, since they are motions in which a substance comes into being or passes away, and therefore cannot persist throughout. Indeed, Heidegger argues that Aristotle excluded yéveouc from his introductory characterization of motion (xivyoics) as change (uetapoAn) at 192b15, because “‘to it he reserved the task of marking out the Being of @voic’” (BCP 259/W 288). It is precisely generation that will provide the fulcrum by which Heidegger will pry vot apart from téxvy in Aristotle’s thought. He argues that for Aristotle, pvots comes into being and moves toward its end differently from téyvy, and that this is because the relation between matter and form is different for each. An analogy between @uoic and téxvn is possible on the basis of Antiphon’s account of motion, but can only be found in Aristotle if one fails to grasp Aristotle’s rejection of Antiphon’s account. According to Heidegger, Antiphon held the difference be-

196 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

tween motion and rest to be that between the fleeting and the eternal (BCP 243/W 266-67). Eternal are the elements, which are

the material substratum of the ever-changing things encountered in experience. But, points out Heidegger, the process of growth and decay happens without interruption. The substratum may be permanent, but that does not distinguish it from the changeable, because change is also a constant for the Greeks (BCP 245/W 270).

An alternative interpretation of motion is put forward in Heidegger’s enigmatic claim that the Greeks conceived motion in terms of rest (BCP 255/W 283): “The purest manifestation of

being-moved is to be sought where rest does not mean the breaking off and stopping of movement, but rather where beingmoved gathers itself up into standing still, and where this ingathering, far from excluding being-moved, includes and for the first time discloses it’’ (BCP 256/W 284). Rest does not happen when movement stops, but rather is a fulfillment of being moved. This

is the sense in which for Aristotle having its end in itself is an activity on the part of a thing. ’Evtedeyeta is an activity that is also a stillness, a gathering up of movement into an end. The activity that is movement toward an end does not cease when that thing reaches its end. The end is a tension that gathers that very movement together in the thing, and thus includes and discloses what that movement is a movement toward. Almost ten years earlier, in his lectures on 9.1-3 of the Metaphysics, Heidegger gave the example of a runner at the starting line immediately prior to a race in order to explain this notion of a stillness that is a gathering together into movement. The runner is still, but the

stance and composure of the runner are a gathering together that can only be dissipated by subsequently running. It is in this moment of tension in stillness immediately prior to running that the runner is most clearly actualized (AM 218). ‘True to Aristot-

le’s refusal to account for évégyera other than in conjunction with the duvauet Ov, it is by way of the latter that Heidegger has reached his account of the former. Heidegger’s adeptness with this topic is perhaps due to the fact that 1940 is not the first time he works with dvUvauts in a lecture course. The earlier lectures on the Metaphysics from the summer semester of 1931, from which I took the example of the

ANCIENT SCIENCE 197 runner, deal exclusively with the concept of dUvayts xata xivnow. Heidegger deals first with the question of the human power to create, moinots, but his ultimate concern is with the power of a thing to move itself, that is, to become what it is in the sense that an acorn becomes an oak tree. These two senses of “power”

capture precisely the difference at stake in the 1940 lecture

course. For the difference between an artifact and nature is the difference between what needs an artist to come into being and what does not. Heidegger will in 1940 pick up the thread of a thought he previously put down in 1931.

In the third and final section of the lectures on the Metaphysics, Heidegger deals with Aristotle’s rejection of the Megarian thesis that reality consists not in potentialities but rather only in actual-

ities. Heidegger argues that duvautc is also real: beings can be potentially. In 1940 he argues that beings can be potentially, but further, that évéoyeta and évteAéxeta, in contrast to 6vvauic, are real in a way that is prior. He focuses on Aristotle’s claim at Metaphysics 9.8.1049b5: “actuality is prior to potency.” This is Ross’s translation, found in The Basic Works of Aristotle.

Heidegger offers an alternative translation and explanation of this claim: eveoyelo, more originally fulfills what pure becoming-present is insofar as it means the having-itself-in-the-end such as has left behind all the ‘‘not-yet-ness” of [appropriateness] for . . . , or better, has precisely brought it forth along with it into the realization of the fulfilled appearance. The basic thesis that Aristotle has put forth concerning the hierarchy of évtedéyera and Suvapic can be expressed briefly as follows: évtehéyeta is ovoia “to a greater degree” than duvauic is. évteAtyeta. fulfills the conditions of Being, as constantly and of itself becoming present, more fundamentally than duvayuis does. (BCP 258)

Auvauts is always a “not-yet” in that the potential does not appear in unhiddenness the way the actual does. The actual is quite simply more present than the potential in that the potential is on the way but not yet present. Heidegger reads the priority Aristotle assigns évéoyeia over the 6vvapet Ov consistently with Aristotle’s claim that “there are many senses in which a thing may be said to “be’” (Met 4.2.

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1003a32). Heidegger attempts to put those ways into a hierarchical rather than linear relation. His account of the priority of actu-

ality is simply his reading that actuality better fulfills the conditions of substance (ovoia) than potentiality does. Revealing a commitment to a metaphysics of presence, Heidegger argues that the presence of the potential is not the same as the presence of the actual.

Aristotle’s account is about talking about things. It is about when a thing can be said to be. What is present for language is ovoia, often translated as “‘substance.”” Heidegger has insisted that ovota be read as ““becoming-present”’ throughout the 1940 lecture course. The understanding of ovoia herein called for must be based on the opposition between unhiddenness and seeming. In fact, Heidegger claims that understanding this difference is “the condition for understanding at all Aristotle’s interpretation of mvois” (BCP 245/W 270). For Antiphon, a thing is made present in semblance. The real

is matter onto which a form has imposed an appearance that is a semblance, a passing shape. For Aristotle, on the other hand, ovoia is a making present in unhiddenness, in truth. A thing that appears in unconcealment, that can be spoken about as what it is, is an appearance, but not a semblance, Heidegger argues, much as he distinguished appearance from semblance in §7(a) of Being and Time. To be unhidden is to appear, but not to seem. It is the unhiddenness of a thing in the stillness that is evtedeyeta. that “most perfectly fulfills what ovoia is: the becoming-present in the appearance, constantly and of itself’” (BCP

257 /W 286). Heidegger’s claim, then, is that the priority of évégyea and

EVTEAEVELA Over SUVaLS consists in the fact that évéoyela and

evtedexeta. fulfill becoming-present (ovoia) better than Suvapic . does. For, consistent with Physics 2.1.193b6-8, ‘“a thing is more properly said to be what it is when it has attained to fulfillment than when it exists potentially.”” A piece of bronze is not called a statue, other than potentially, until it looks like one. An acorn can in some sense be called a oak tree, but one says “oak tree” properly when an oak tree presents itself. Likewise, a collection of wood, concrete, nails, and rebar can be in some sense called a

house when these things are on the way to becoming a house,

ANCIENT SCIENCE 199 but the completed house, which stands present as a fulfillment of what a house’s appearance (eiéo0s) is, is more properly called a house. One talks about a house when the thing being talked about looks like a house. This is the sense in which the form (uoegn) “is not an ontic property present in matter, but a mode of Being. .. . [It is] the act of standing in and placing itself into the appearance, in general: placing into the appearance” (BCP 250/W 276). The form, then, has a priority with respect to évéoveld, for it is the form which governs a being’s actuality. And it does so first and foremost in vote, for it is puotc that this placing into appearance brings itself about. It is in this relation of form to being that Heidegger sees in Aristotle the possibility of interpreting @vots not by reduction to téxvy by analogy. Dvolcs AND TEXVY

Heidegger argued in 1935 in Introduction to Metaphysics that for “the Greeks . . . pvotc is being itself’ (IM 13-14/EM 10-11). In

the 1940 lecture course on Aristotle’s Physics he holds to this interpretation, arguing that for Aristotle, puouc is ovoia: “@vots is ovota, beingness—that which distinguishes a being as such; in a word: Being” (BCP 238/W 260). He suggests further that the “decisive principle which guides Aristotle’s interpretation of q@uouc declares that mvois must be understood as ovota, a man-

ner and mode of becoming-present” (BCP 239/W 261). In the ‘“becoming-present” that is ovoia, form and matter together present the thing which can be encountered in experience. Both téexvy and vot are fulfilled in the activity that is evégyea, but it is only @votc that moves itself and is always so moving toward its end. In Heidegger’s analysis, pvotc has a priority over téxvn:

voc is definitively évteAeyeta and definitively ovoia. It is the relation between matter and form that determines this priority. As Aristotle makes clear in the first chapter of the Metaphysics,

to know is to understand the cause. In the Physics, muoic is “a source or cause of being moved or at rest” (192b22-23). And it is a generative cause, for of things that exist, ““some exist by (vols, some from other causes” (192b8). Téyvn is precisely another such cause. Heidegger notes that these are not efficient

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causes, for ““cause’’ here does not mean “the manner and mode in which one thing ‘acts on’ another’ (BCP 227/W 245). Each is

an cexy but not in the sense of “the starting-point of a push, which pushes the thing away and leaves it to itself’’ (BCP 233/ W 254). Rather, mvous and téyvn are generative causes in that each is a starting point and governing principle from which a thing comes to be what it is, whether it be a thing in nature such as a tree, for example, or an artifact such as a house. ®votc and TEYVN are generative causes: they cause yéveots. Hence, as Goxat

they bring into being and determine development. That is to say, they stand in a special relation to the final cause. In fact, in the case of both @vous and téyvn, the aoxr is also the final cause (téAoc). The end of uous is muois in that things that come from nature move toward other things that are specifically identical. Things in nature reproduce. Likewise in the case of téxvn, the final cause is the dexr, for, as put clearly in Parts of Animals, the final cause “‘is the reason, and the reason forms the starting-point, alike in the works of art and in works of nature” (639b15). The origin of téyvy is the elooc in the head of the artist. The end of téyvy is the thing made in conformity with that etdoc. Accordingly, Aristotle claims that “Art indeed consists in the conception of the result to be produced before its realization in the material’”’ (640a32; cf. EN 1140a13).

The difference between qvotc and téxvy is that in the case of voic, the Gexn and tédos are uote itself. But when something is produced, it is the thing that is both Geyn and téAoc, and not

téxvy itself. A doctor produces health, not medicine, and a builder produces a house, not carpentry. In some sense, doctors do produce medicine and builders, carpentry, for they can teach or learn more about their craft. But they do so toward the further ends of health and houses, respectively. On the other hand, a tree comes about from a tree, and tends toward generating other trees. This difference is tied to the fact that in the case of teyvn,

the efficient cause is external to the thing produced. It is the artist who has the thing in mind before its realization in the material. Natural things come to be analogously from a moving cause, but in their case this cause is internal (cf. PA 641b12-16). The externality of the efficient cause of an artifact has crucial implications for the relation between matter and form in an arti-

ANCIENT SCIENCE 201 fact versus that relation in a natural thing. Aristotle’s claim in the Physics is that the artist chooses material ‘with a view to the function, whereas in the products of nature the matter is there all along” (194b7-8). The “matter is there all along” in that the process of growth in which the form shapes the matter is continuous. One does not find the matter without or prior to the form. Trees are always already growing. Pvotc is, as it were, always on the way to guotc. Accordingly, wood is not incidental to a tree, which cannot but be of wood. A statue, on the other hand, is made by a sculptor, not by a statue. The matter is incidental to the statue, for not only could a statue be made from other material—bronze, for example—but also wood that is made into a statue could just as easily have been made into something else, such as a shield or a house. Form and matter belong together necessarily in nature, but incidentally in art. Matter is potentiality in Aristotle’s account, but Heidegger’s developed account of potentiality gives him access to a reading of Aristotle’s Physics in which votc is not analogous with but rather prior to téyvn. His thinking underwent substantial formulation in the lectures on the Metaphysics from 1931. Here Heideg-

ger uses the traditional translation into German of dvvaute: Kraft. Kraft is usually rendered into English as “power,” and thus Heidegger’s translation is consistent with the English translation of dUvauts as “potentiality.” In 1940, however, Heidegger

chooses not Kraft but Eignung and Geeignetheit to translate dUvautc. Both these words translate comfortably into English as “suitability”’ or “appropriateness.” Heidegger chooses Eignung and Geeignetheit, | suggest, because they better capture the difference between the relation of matter to form in @vots and in teyvy. There is a suitability or appropriateness of wood to trees, for example, that is different from the appropriation of wood to a ship, or bronze to a statue.

Because in artifacts there is no necessary relation between form and matter, an artifact has no tendency to growth and decay within itself, except insofar as it is made of some natural material. Wood rots because it is wood, not because of but rather in spite of the fact that it has been made into a bed. Art does not

destroy the original relation between matter and form; rather, the tendency of nature toward its own end persists throughout

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production. Aristotle credits this observation to Antiphon: “‘Antiphon points out that if you planted a bed and the rotting wood acquired the power of sending up a shoot, it would not be a bed that would come up, but wood—which shows that the arrangement in accordance with the rules of art is merely an incidental

attribute, whereas the real nature is the other, which, further, persists continuously through the process of making” (Phys 2.1.193a13-17). The imposition of form onto material by the art-

ist does not overcome the tendency of that material to change governed by the form to which it is not incidental. Accordingly, the artist borrows from material which is still subject to the originary form. Heidegger’s claim is that Aristotle cites Antiphon not for the

sake of scholarly completeness, nor to establish a contrast against which to argue. Rather, Antiphon’s point about planting a bed is intended to be set “on the only road that can lead to an adequate definition of the Being of @votcs as Aristotle envisions it’ (BCP 242/W 266). For Aristotle, as for Antiphon, @votc is prior to téxvy in that the material which is ordered by téxvy is

still governed in its changes by qvotc, from which it has its source. Nature continues to govern artifacts. Téxvn is in fact dependent on vote, for, in the case of the art of medicine, for example, ‘““téyvy can only cooperate with @votec,

can more or less expedite the cure; but as téyvn it can never replace @vots and in its stead become itself the cGexn of health as such” (BCP 235/W 257). Matter is formed by qvotcs with an

appropriateness which is not merely an ordering of what is on hand the way an artist organizes material into the work. ®voic is ‘the origin and ordering (GexN) of the being-moved of something which moves on its own” (BCP 242/W 266), rather than an ordering imposed from outside. It is self-generated movement toward an end. Aristotle’s distinction between qvots and teyvy is not a simple contrast between equals. The insurmountable difference is that tT& @muotxa move according to an inner nature, whereas artifacts are brought into being by an external cause that can only borrow the material. The artifact reaches its end differently than a thing that comes to be from nature. An artifact reaches its end when it has been made present by production. As Heidegger points out: ““teyvn

ANCIENT SCIENCE 203 has a special kind of rest . . . characterized as having-been-completed, having-been-produced, and, on the basis of these determinations, as standing-“forth’ and lying present before us” (BCP

230/W 250). This is indeed a crucial distinction between voc and téxvn. At 9.6 of the Metaphysics, Aristotle distinguishes ““motions’’ (xwvyoetis) from “actualities” (€vegyetas) on the basis that

the former are incomplete (GteA¢ic), that is, do not contain their end (téAoc). The examples he gives of incomplete motions are the processes of thinning, becoming healthy, learning, walking, and building. In contrast, he argues, ‘“we see and have seen, un-

derstand and have understood, think and have thought” (1048b23). His point is reflected nicely in the ambiguity of the English word “end,” which means both “goal” and “finish.” Some processes finish when they reach their end, others do not. Dieting stops when the goal is reached; likewise, building. In both of these examples, the activity is a means to the goal. But not so with thinking and seeing: the actualization is the activity. With artifacts, production is incomplete in the sense that once the end is reached, production stops. The activity and the actualization are not the same. Heidegger, citing 1048b23, uses this point to distinguish @uotcs from téxvyn (BCP 256/W 284).

And I suggest that this is precisely the point Heidegger has in mind when he reads Physics 2.1.192b20. He argues that for Aristotle, ‘the issue here is to show that artifacts are what they are and how they are precisely in the being-moved of production and thus in the rest of having-been-produced” (BCP 230-31/W 251). Artifacts move—that is, reach their end—differently than nature. Where the matter is incidental to the shape, as in the case of an artifact, the shape guides production but does not itself do the producing (BCP 260-61/W 290). Rather, the artist does. Hence the artist requires something beforehand: an idea or model of what is to be made (mxagddetyua). If mvots required a maoadetyyua, “an animal could not reproduce itself without mastering the science of its own zoology” (BCP 261/W 290). Definitive of téyvy is that the appearance (eidoc) of the thing to be produced precedes its appearance (yéveouc) as a thing in that the

idea exists in the mind of the craftsperson prior to production. Production is the imposition of form on matter. Téyvy is the knowledge of how to bring things into being this way. ®votc,

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on the other hand, is that which comes into being of its own accord. This is for Heidegger the original Greek distinction between @votc and Téeyvn.

In Antiphon’s account, however, nature and artifacts are understood in the same terms. Nature is simply a self-making artifact. Heidegger’s reading of the history of Western metaphysics is the story of the failure of Antiphon’s analogy between qvotc and téyvy to break down, the failure of the insight that nature moves differently from the artifact. According to Heidegger, the distinction between @uotc and téxyvy is simply not sustained in the Western tradition of thought. It is not even sustained in Aristotle’s thinking. For even though Metaphysics 4.1 raises the question of the being of beings as such in totality, 4.3 gives the same information about mvoic as the Physics: ““@uois is one kind of ovota”’ (BCP 268/W 299). As one kind of being among others, it is on a level with those others, such that it can be understood by analogy. Téyvy consists in the imposition of form onto matter, and voc as a parallel kind of being can be understood as form imposed on matter. The only difference is that in téyvn, the artist imposes the form on the matter, whereas in qvotc, the form is imposed on the matter by nature. Heidegger’s criticism is that this view falls short of what the thinking of the pre-Socratics had already achieved. It encourages a reduction of vot to téxvyn by analogy. The older conception of muots would preclude an analogy to artifacts, rather than conducing one. Such an analogy “fails from every conceivable point of

view. That means: we must understand the Being of @vots entirely from itself, and we should not detract from the astonishing fact of puotc ... by overhasty analogies and explanations” (BCP 262-63/W 292). In Heidegger’s account, muots is not simply a self-making artifact but rather the self-placing into appearance of what is encountered as already there. It is the astounding fact that there are beings rather than nothing at all. Therefore mvotc must be understood for Heidegger on its own terms, not by reduction to a derivative kind of being by analogy. It is Heidegger’s contention that the history of the concept of nature since the Greeks is sustained and guided by Aristotle’s interpretation of @uotcs. Aristotle’s assertion that being is mucus

is “barely expressed ... an echo of the great origin of Greek

ANCIENT SCIENCE 205 philosophy” (BCP 268/W 300). What is heard more loudly, however, from Aristotle’s Physics is the twofold nature of mvotc

as both matter and form. And accordingly, the analogy rather than the separation of muoig and GAnB_eta comes to hold sway in, for instance, the toca that nature is a creation of a divine craftsperson. Hence Aristotle is a cusp, a thinking of nature that is a peak in Heidegger’s account. He is the culmination toward which the pre-Socratics rose, and the height from which subsequent metaphysics are decadent. Since 1915 Heidegger has been considering Aristotle’s natural philosophy in contrast to modern science. In 1940 he leaves the contrast aside and looks to Aristotle alone. He spends, in fact, an entire lecture course on one chapter of the Physics, drawing upon the Metaphysics only when he seeks to buttress his thesis that uous is being. The significance of this account of ancient science to Heidegger’s thinking is easy to overlook. Yet now Heidegger’s phenomenology has found something to hold onto. In Basic Problems of Phenomenology, one of the components of the phenomenological method was destruction: “a criti-

cal process in which the traditional concepts . . . are deconstructed down to the sources from which they were drawn” (BPP 23/W 31). The 1940 lecture course on Aristotle does exactly that with the concept “nature.” Heidegger finds that Aristotle’s account of nature is determinative for the subsequent history of metaphysics. He finds in that account both the groundwork for a reduction by analogy of nature to production, and the possibility of the retrieval of something else. CONCLUSION

Heidegger’s preoccupation and concern with natural science— that is, physics—after 1940 is a critical thinking of the modern relation of human being to nature. In those subsequent years, he will argue that the essence of science is the essence of technology. I suggest that Aristotle’s taxonomy of knowledge and the insight that the subsequent tradition of thinking in the West reduces puoic to téyvyn by analogy are at the basis of this claim.

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Hence I argue in the following chapter that in Heidegger’s analysis, modernity is determined by the essence of science, which

lies in the essence of technology. In Heidegger’s analysis, the history of Western metaphysics is a collapse of theoretical science into productive technology. The logic by which that history moves is a dialectic, but of decay, not elevation, into representational thinking. Heidegger’s critique of modernity is a negative dialectic that seeks to open up possibilities for thinking beyond representation in reflection. Heidegger’s reading of the Physics is persuasive as a piece of Aristotle scholarship, but it is also compelling as a basis for an

| environmental phenomenology, a philosophy of nature. Why Heidegger’s account of puots is compelling is evident in the following anecdote. I recently led an informal discussion entitled

“Nature versus Technology.” A colleague joked before we began, “I put my money on technology.” Overwhelmed by tech-

nology and underwhelmed by nature, the modern thinker can readily favor the powers of technology. Yet, under Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle, technology can never win. For nature is the very ground on which technology stands. Nature is simply prior, and technology derivative. The priority of nature does not consist just in the fact that nature provides the materials that technology appropriates, although it must come first as material resource. Io see nature in this way as resource is already to see from within technology, as Heidegger makes clear in “The

Question Concerning Technology.” Rather, to see nature through eyes opened by Heidegger’s account of ancient science is to retrieve the claim that nature is that which moves of its own accord. It is at best borrowed, not overcome by technology. And hence modern science, in its essence as technology, threatens not to destroy nature, but to destroy human being.

a

Science and Technology IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS I have traced Heidegger’s analysis of

science from its incipience in phenomenology, through its treatment of experimentation and its entanglement with the political, to its vision of latent new beginnings in the ancient legacy. The logic of that movement is governed by the notion of projection. In this chapter I focus on writings from the 1950s—What Is Called Thinking?, “Science and Reflection,” and ““The Question Concerning Technology’’—in order to explore the relation between science and technology that still preoccupied Heidegger in 1976.

In reading Aristotle, Heidegger uncovered projection not in physics, but in téyvn. In the 1950s he argues that the essence of science lies in the essence of technology because a trace of ancient téyvy remains in modern science. That trace is the mechanism of a priori projection that Heidegger names “Ge-stell.’” The relation between ancient téyvy and modern technology is mediated by science. Accordingly, science plays a much more significant role in Heidegger’s critique of modernity than has been acknowledged by his critics, for science informs the modern age, and Heidegger’s description of its limits is also a vision of what lies beyond them. In “The Age of the World Picture,” Heidegger identifies five phenomena that are essential to the modern age: machine technology, science, aesthetics, culture, and the loss of the gods. He asks what interpretation of truth, what understanding of what

is, lies at the foundation of science. He argues that if he can uncover the ground of science, “the entire essence of the modern

age will have to let itself be apprehended from out of that ground” (AWP 117/H 76). The modern epoch can be understood by means of an account of science. Heidegger chooses science here to uncover the metaphysics of modernity, since science

stands in a crucial position with respect to that metaphysics. As early as 1935, Heidegger attributes the genesis of modern

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metaphysics to Descartes, a scientist who applied his method, so successful in the sciences, to philosophy (Descartes 1986:4). For Heidegger, science is not just one phenomenon among several: it is the determination of the metaphysics of modernity.

It is in this same text, “The Age of the World Picture,” that Heidegger first considers science in its relation to technology: “Machine technology is itself an autonomous transformation of praxis, a transformation wherein praxis first demands the employment of mathematical physical science” (AWP 116/H 75). Here is Aristotle’s threefold division of knowledge into Oewmeua, MEELIS, and téyvy in a modern constellation. Technology trans-

forms practice such that for the first time it deploys theoretical science.

Thomas Kuhn also argues that science and technology come together in modernity: “[they] had been separate enterprises before Bacon announced their marriage in the beginning of the seventeenth century, and they continued separate for almost three centuries more” (1977:142). Like Heidegger, who objects in “The Question Concerning Technology” to the idea that technology is simply applied science, Kuhn complains that historians tend to conflate science and technology. Yet, suggests Kuhn, something happened in the late nineteenth century. Until then, technological innovation almost never came from scientists. Rather, it came from practitioners and craftspeople, to whom the inventor was a bit of a joke. In fact, “almost no historical society has managed successfully to nurture both [science and technology] at the same time” (1977:143). Yet there have been

three kinds of interaction. First, scientists have sometimes gained a better understanding of nature by looking to practices established by technologists. Second, on occasion technologists have borrowed method from the sciences. And third, scientific research results in products and processes that require further development by people with scientific training. A transformation in the history of science has taken place, Kuhn argues, at the third point of interaction. The coming together of science and technology has turned science into a socioeconomic force. Accordingly, both Heidegger and Kuhn are interested in the impact of science on human experience. And certainly, both acknowledge that in modernity, science itself becomes a tool for

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 209 industry, capitalism, and politics. Yet for Heidegger this analysis

is not enough. In “The Question Concerning Technology” he finds the modern conception of technology as applied science disquietingly inadequate, even dangerous because of the complacency it conduces. The analysis Heidegger gives of the relation between science and technology can be explored by means of two claims he makes throughout What Is Called Thinking?: science does not think, and the essence of science lies in the essence of technology.

I explicate the first claim by showing first that for Heidegger, science is essential to the modern epoch. Hence the claim that science does not think is a critique of modernity that looks beyond the limitations of representational thinking. Thinking is not reducible for Heidegger to the latter, the scientific paradigm of knowledge that has contaminated modern philosophy. Next I explicate the claim that the essence of science lies in the essence of technology by looking first to the essence of science as set out in “Science and Reflection,” and then to the essence of technology treated in ‘The Question Concerning Technology.” I argue that each has its Ge-stell, its a priori projection of the being of

beings. I conclude by showing that for Heidegger, quantum physics remains within the essence of modern science. My central thesis is that for Heidegger, the essence of science is the essence of technology. The “is” here is an “‘is’” of identity, but an identity of structure, not content. I argue that science and technology are both essentially Ge-stell: projective revelation of beings. But whereas technology reveals beings as standing-reserve, science reveals them first as object. This reading of Hei-

degger is radical. I am arguing that what is taken to be one of Heidegger’s most significant contributions to philosophy, his critique of technology, derives from a thinking through of the question of science that drove his thinking for sixty years. Indeed, for Heidegger, the essence of technology arises out of the essence of modern science. EPOCH AND ESSENCE

Heidegger claims in What Is Called Thinking? that he is not speak-

ing against the sciences, but in fact for them, that is, “for clarity

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concerning their essential nature” (WCT 14/WHD 49). That essential nature is found in the essence of technology. With this suggestion, Heidegger is recognizing in science a deeper significance than that by which it is construed as a cultural phenomenon: ““When we decide to look for the essential nature of contemporary science in the essence of modern technology, this approach posits science as something in the highest sense worthy of thought. The significance of science is ranked higher here than in the traditional views which see in science merely a phenomenon of human civilization” (WCT 22/WHD 53). Heidegger lays the groundwork for the decision to look for the essence of science in the essence of technology by considering science in its worthiness for thought. Science has for Heidegger a significance so fundamental that he himself only begins to recognize it in 1952.

In Being and Time, Heidegger says in §69(b), when he lays bare

the theoretical attitude, that his idea of phenomenology is now to be developed for the first time. In 1935 Heidegger looked to the history of science in order to be able to understand modern knowledge and metaphysics (FD 50). In 1938 he chose science as that aspect of the modern age from which to analyze the whole (AWP 117/H 76). That science should warrant attention in these places shows that it is not incidental to modernity for Heidegger. Rather, science is essentially modern; that is, the modern era holds sway in science. Modern science is for Heidegger the culmination of the history of metaphysics. That history comes to its final configuration in nihilism. Heidegger reads the latter as the default of being in which being’s withdrawal pushes beings to the forefront. In the second of the volumes on Nietzsche, the fourth in the English translation, in “Nihilism as Determined by the History of Being,’ Heidegger argues that “being remains unthought in metaphysics because metaphysics thinks the being as such. What does it mean to say

the being as such is thought? It implies that the being itself comes to the fore. It stands in the light. The being is illumined, is itself unconcealed. The being stands in unconcealment’” (N 4:211/NII 316). In his earlier years, especially in Basic Problems of

Phenomenology, Heidegger called the difference between being and beings the ontological difference. The not new—for it is evi-

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 211 dent in Heidegger’s treatment of the theoretical attitude in §69 of Being and Time—but now rethought proposal is that in the modern epoch, beings are determined as object by science. Science inquires not into being, but into beings. The modern epoch is for Heidegger nihilistic precisely in its preoccupation with beings understood as the objects of science, and the concurrent forgetting of the question of being. Accordingly, the sciences are not incidental, and nor is their consideration supplementary to the question of what calls for thinking. The sciences are at the heart of this question; for they are central to modern thoughtlessness, and, in company with modern philosophy, they are blind to the question of being. The question of the essence of science is the question of the history of metaphysics in its modern epoch. Accordingly, a consideration of science is crucial to a reading of Heidegger’s account of that history. And likewise, he considers science essential. But what Heidegger means by “‘essential’”” here needs explanation.

Given that Heidegger’s doctoral work was on medieval philosophy, it makes sense that he first thinks the question of essence in the context of the medieval distinction between essentia and existentia. This is the difference between what and that something is. In Basic Problems of Phenomenology Heidegger attempts

to search out the common origin of these two terms in Greek thinking by understanding “the Greeks better than they understood themselves” (BPP 111/GP 157). He suggests that essentia

refers back to “productive comportment toward beings” (BPP 110/GP 155), in contrast to ‘“‘pure beholding [which] is fixed as the proper access to a being in its being-in-itself”’ (BPP 110/GP 155). This contrast mirrors the difference between things that are

produced and “the being of that which is already extant’ (BPP 116/GP 163-64). In a move that foreshadows his 1940 reading of Aristotle’s Physics, Heidegger suggests that production always makes use of material which is already there. In the 1940 account he takes that to mean that @vouc is prior to téyvn, since the latter must always appropriate its material from the former. Here in 1927, however, he suggests that it is only through productive comportment that the understanding of being as that which is already extant is possible. Productive comportment, then, determines something as what it is, and gives access to the fact that

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something exists already which can be made into something else. Heidegger’s subsequent thinking will, however, cease to take the distinction between essence and existence for granted.

In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger argues that “‘essence’”’ becomes ambiguous when Plato interprets being as toea. It is with Plato that ‘“essence’”” comes to mean that something is and what something is, the ambiguity that makes the distinction between essentia and existentia possible. But, argues Heidegger,

the “substantive ‘Wesen’ did not originally mean ‘whatness,’ quiddity, but enduring as presence” (IM 72/EM 55). When Plato changes its meaning to “whatness,” @vois no longer means

what is, but rather means a copy, a mere appearance (IM 183-84/EM 140). Heidegger seeks to retrieve the earlier meaning of mvoic, and hence an earlier possibility for essence, in the notion of enduring presence. This account of essence figures prominently in ““The Question

Concerning Technology.” Here he argues that technology “makes the demand on us to think in another way what is usually understood by ‘essence’ ’” (QCT 30/VA 34). This usual un-

derstanding is essence in the medieval sense of quidditas, whatness. The essence of “tree,” for example, is the whatness of trees, that is, ““treeness.”” The latter is the genus under which all trees fall and which captures the whatness that belongs to every tree. But the essence of a tree is not itself a tree. Heidegger objects to the generic account of essence and resists its universality. In place of the traditional, generic understanding of essence, Heidegger suggests what he described already in Introduction to Metaphysics. He wants an account of essence that contains a notion of endurance, but not the permanence in which an essence is what something is, always has been, and always will be. He

draws his alternative meaning from the German word for essence, Wesen, which is derived from the obsolete verb wesen. He

argues that this verb has the same meaning as wéhren, which means “to last or endure.” Thus in the case, for example, of the essence of a house or a state, Heidegger does not mean the generic type, but rather “the ways in which house and state hold sway, administer themselves, develop and decay—the way in which they ‘essence’ [Wesen]” (QCT 30/VA 34). That essence (Wesen) belongs with lasting or enduring (wéhren) is something

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 213 Heidegger holds to in “Science and Reflection” in 1954 and in his 1957-58 lecture course published as “‘The Nature of Language” in On the Way to Language (Unterwegs zur Sprache 201/ On the Way to Language 94-95).

Under such an account, essence no longer has the permanence

of the eternal universal. It is not what a thing is, always has been, and always will be. Rather, “essence” has for Heidegger a historical fluidity. An essence is a coming to presence that then

endures. It is the determination, not of an eternal truth, but rather of a historical epoch. The essence of technology is for Heidegger the way in which technology comes to presence and endures in the modern epoch. It is the holding sway of technology

in modernity. Likewise, the essence of science is the way in which science holds sway in the modern epoch. Heidegger’s claim that the essence of science lies in the essence of technology

is the claim that science and technology hold sway in the same way: they reveal beings in the same way. Heidegger argues in ““The Age of the World Picture” that science does not simply happen to appear in modernity. Rather, it

is grounded in the metaphysics that determines the modern epoch: science is based on the understandings of what is and of

truth that are the basis on which the modern age is formed (AWP 115-17/H 75-76). The question of the essence of science is therefore for Heidegger the question of an epoch in the history of being. This is the epoch of nihilism, in which being is forgotten in the face of scientific and technological success with beings.

Accordingly, the essence of science cannot be understood through some definition that would be applicable to all instances of science, be they ancient, medieval, or modern. The question

of the essence of science seeks no such definition. Rather, the essence of science is particular to the modern epoch, for it is in the modern epoch that science holds sway in the determination of the being of beings as nihilism. Heidegger’s account of the essence of science is his critique of modernity, his account of how modern human being’s projection of its world comes about and endures. It is in this sense that ““essence’” must be understood in Heidegger’s analysis of the essence of science. And it is in this sense that science is essential for Heidegger: it is formative of the modern epoch.

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Given this historical notion of essence, such that science is, for

Heidegger, essential to modernity, his claim in What Is Called Thinking? that “science does not think” is a critique of the modern epoch. Indeed, it is a critique of representational thinking. Heidegger’s distinction between thinking and the sciences corresponds to a distinction between being and being represented. He offers an alternative account of thinking that relies upon an etymological connection with thanking. Once the difference between thinking and thanking, and hence between being and being represented, is laid out in order to make sense of the claim that science does not think, the second claim, that the essence of science lies at the essence of technology, can also be explicated. I treat the first claim by reading What Is Called Thinking?, and the second by looking to Heidegger’s account of science in “Science

and Reflection,” and of technology in “The Question Concerning Technology.” I argue that the essence of science is Ge-stell, and that it is on this basis that the relation between science and technology is, in Heidegger’s view, one of essential identity. “SCIENCE DoEs Not THINK”

In the first lecture course he gave since 1944 and the last before his formal retirement, at Freiburg in the winter and summer semesters of 1951 and 1952, Heidegger argued that science does not think. That this claim is a disparagement is ““emphatically not the case” (WCT 13/WHD 49). It certainly sounds like one, however, and the scanty consideration given to science by Heidegger’s readers is consistent with its being taken so. Likewise, Efraim Shmuéli’s (1975) reading is very much that technology is an evil spirit for Heidegger. Cyril Welch claims that Heidegger and, following him, Macomber, in The Anatomy of Disillusion, both “see in science and technology something of the devil’s work” (1970:145). Macomber claims, however, that Heidegger does not oppose science and technology so much as he seeks to understand them (1967:208). Both are right insofar as Heidegger wants to understand science and technology, but also he under-

stands them as something that threatens human being. He certainly opposes the blind progress of either without consider-

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 215 ation of their essence and implications to human being. To see Heidegger's critique of science and technology as simply condemnation and alarmism is to neglect his reference to Hélderlin in ‘The Question Concerning Technology”: “But where danger is, grows / The saving power also.” Heidegger holds that technology is neither good nor evil, but certainly never indifferent. The danger is not technology, but an unthinking relation to it on the part of human being. The claim that science does not think is more often than not followed by the statement that “most thought-provoking in our thought-provoking time is that we are still not thinking” (WCT 6/WHD 3). Heidegger’s view is not that the sciences are somehow deficient in comparison to philosophy, but rather that neither science nor philosophy is thinking in the modern epoch. Kockelmans contrasts science with philosophy in Heidegger’s thought on the basis that science does not “think radically,” whereas philosophy does (1970:147—49). It is not precisely clear what thinking radically would mean here, but it seems Kockelmans intends the phrase to convey an alternative to the onesidedness of science Heidegger describes in What Is Called Thinking? (WCT 32/WHD 56). To fail to see the thoughtlessness of the modern epoch in both science and philosophy is to overlook the significance Heidegger attributes to science in the history of the

West. He does not see science as a symptom or consequence of the modern epoch. Rather, it is essential to modernity: it is the basis on which modernity holds sway. Kockelmans begins by noting that the “prevailing world-view of our contemporary Western civilization is largely controlled by the sciences” (1970:147), but he goes on to read Heidegger’s philosophy as one that simply cannot ignore science if it wishes

to make the fundamental problems of the modern epoch its theme. I argue the stronger position that Heidegger makes science his theme because he finds it not only symptomatic but also formative of the modern epoch. Modern philosophy is also therefore grounded in the essence of science rather than offering an alternative. I believe Heidegger sees himself to be in the Augenblick he speaks of in Being and Time (BT 437/SZ 385); that is to say, he offers insight into his age. His insight is that modern human being is determined by the essence of science.

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Heidegger is convinced that the sciences are essential to modernity, but that their essence is different from what is imagined in the university, the locus of organization of scientific disciplines. Modern science, institutionalized in the university, does not think, but “nonetheless science always and in its own fashion has to do with thinking” (WCT 8/WHD 4). Thinking is a leap for the sciences: between them and it lies an unbridgeable gap, traversed by contemporary human being only with “makeshift ties and asses’ bridges” (WCT 8/WHD 5). The question to be addressed in the first half of What Is Called Thinking? is precisely what the sciences have to do with thinking. Heidegger argues that “‘all the sciences have leapt from the womb of philosophy” (WCT 18/WHD 52). They have come out of philosophy and, having parted from it, they cannot by their own power as sciences make the leap back into their source. Nonetheless, it is arrogant, Heidegger maintains, to believe that thinking knows more than the sciences. The latter have infinitely more knowledge than thinking. Yet the sciences have a limit: heavy on knowledge, light on self-scrutiny, they are one-sided insofar as no science has access to its own essential nature. History can explore a historical period, but by way of history, one cannot say what history is. Nor can a mathematician say mathematically what mathematics is. This is not a new claim for Heidegger. In 1937, in an address given to the Faculty of Medicine at Freiburg University, he argued that “[with] respect to the question of the character of reflection on science is above all to be noticed a basic fact, which we cannot think through often enough. Namely: no science can know from itself about its own fulfilled form of knowing. We cannot

reflect on physics as a science with the help of the procedure of physics. The essence of mathematics lets itself neither determine mathematically nor at all raise questions about mathematical methods. Geology does not let itself be investigated geologically, as little as [does] philology philologically.’”" The strongest for1“Hinsitlich der Frage nach dem Charakter der Besinnung auf die Wissenschaft ist vor allem eine Grundtatsache zu beachten, die wir nicht oft genug durchdenken kénnen. Naémlich: Keine Wissenschaft kann von sich selbst wissen von der von ihr selbst vollzogenen Wissensform. Auf die Physik als Wissenschaft k6nnen wir uns nicht besinnen mit Hilfe des Vorgehens der Physik. Das Wesen

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 217 mulation of this point is in ‘““Science and Reflection,” where Hei-

degger calls it “that which is not to be gotten around (das Unumedngliche)” (SR 177/VA 60). In What Is Called Thinking?, he

calls it one-sidedness. A science can know the objects that appear in its sphere, but every science has another side which it cannot reach: “‘the essential nature and origin of its sphere, the essence and essential origin of the manner of knowing which it cultivates” (WCT 33/WHD 57). Heidegger’s claim is that when the one-sidedness of the sciences is lost to sight, then the other side is also lost. On the other side is being. The one-sidedness of the sciences is a preoccupation with but a single side of the ontological difference: beings. The erection of a science consists in the delimitation of its sphere of objects, that is, in Husserlian terminology, in a regional ontology. In Being and Time, Heidegger calls that which is determined in such regional ontologies the “basic concepts (Grundbegriffe)”” (BT 29/

SZ 9) of the sciences. Such basic concepts establish a world in the second sense of the term Heidegger elaborates in §14 of Being

and Time: “indeed ‘world’ can become a term for any realm which encompasses a multiplicity of entities: for instance, when one talks of the ‘world’ of a mathematician, ‘world’ signifies the

realm of possible objects of mathematics” (BT 93/SZ 64-65). Once a commitment to a specialized area of object is made, a science looks only to that world. The other side of the ontological difference, being, is the concern of thinking. Since the sciences have no access to this concern, Heidegger claims that the sciences do not think (WCT 33/ WHD 57), and further, that it is the good fortune—understood as “meaning the assurance of its own appointed course” (WCT 8/WHD 4)—of each science not to think. For sciences investigate

beings, and cannot get started without a prior determination of their object. The delimitation of a sphere of objects is a necessary condition for a science to be able to proceed. It is thus essential to a science precisely not to think, that is, not to question being, but rather to proceed with the investigation of its objects. Thinkder Mathematik 1afst sich weder mathematisch bestimmen noch tiberhaupt nach mathematischer Methode zur Fragen machen. Die Geologie lafst sich

DD 12). geologish erforschen, sowenig wie die Philologie philologisch” (BdW

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ing is, however, more than simply the determination of the objects of the sciences prior to their investigation. For Heidegger, thinking is a craft and skill. It can be learned. The lectures that make up What Is Called Thinking? are in fact his

attempt to teach thinking. Heidegger characterizes thinking as what the Greeks called téyvy—that is, it is a producing. Yet he is not attempting here simply to reinscribe thinking in an economy of production. Thinking is a producing that is not the production of an artifact. A builder produces houses, but not all things

produced are quite so tangible. Aristotle, for example, frequently used medicine as an example of téyvy. A doctor produces health. If thinking is human being’s “simplest, and for that reason hardest, handiwork’”’ (WCT 16-17/WHD 51), and “the handicraft par excellence’ (WCT 23/WHD 53), then the ques-

tion arises of what, exactly, thinking produces in Heidegger’s view.

I argue that for Heidegger, thinking produces neither being nor ideas. He explicitly rejected the suggestion that thinking produces being in 1943 in the postscript he added to What Is Metaphysics?, where he argues that it is more likely that thinking is an occurrence of being than that being is a product of thinking (WMp 356/W 308). Indeed, being calls for thinking in What Is Called Thinking?, and it could hardly call for what will produce it. Furthermore, since Introduction to Metaphysics in 1935, Heidegger has held that being is the a priori, that is, prior to thinking. Nor does thinking produce ideas. In What Is Called Thinking?, Heidegger argues explicitly that thinking does not produce representational ideas. The question of what calls for thinking can, he argues, easily be heard as “‘what is this—to form a representational idea [das Vorstellen]?’’ (WCT 44/WHD 60), since this is the traditional view of thinking. Further, producing ideas is “the

universally prevailing basic characteristic of traditional thinking” (WCT 54-55/WHD 62), and “the long since dominant kind

of thinking . . . [is] ideational or representational thinking” (WCT 64/WHD 63). Accordingly, the traditional answer to the question of what thinking produces is representational ideas. Heidegger rethinks the relation between production and representational ideas. In Aristotle’s thought, which Heidegger laid bare on the topic

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 219 of production in 1940, the role of the idea (eid0c) in téyvn is clear. Production begins with the eiSoc. The craftsperson has an idea beforehand of what is to be made, and this idea is the origin

of what is to be produced. The origin of that eiéoc is another question. It is precisely what, in fact, for Heidegger, gives food for thought (WCT 45/WHD 60). Heidegger problematizes the relation between production and ideas quite rightly; even for the clear-thinking Stagirite, production is not the origin of the idea, but rather the idea is the origin of production. It is no accident, however, that production enters the question of the sciences. To argue that the essence of science can be found in the essence of technology is to experience the first glimmering of the suggestion that something of that ancient notion of téyvy remains for the sciences. The delimitation of a sphere of objects consists precisely in the determination of an cidoc, an appearance that represents the object then to be investigated. The sciences operate on the basis of an a priori determination of their object, as did ancient TEyv1.

Yet for Heidegger, an account of thinking in terms of ideas will always be inadequate: ““we must not imagine it to be enough for [anyone] merely to inhabit the world of [their] own represen-

tational ideas, and to express only them. For the world of this expression is shot through with blindly adopted and un-reexamined ideas and concepts” (WCT 231/WHD 140). It is not the case that one lives only in the world of one’s ideas. On the contrary, “as concerns thinking, we are living in the domain of a two-and-

one-half-thousand year old tradition’ (WCT 231/WHD 140). This is the tradition of Western thinking that has its origin in Greek thought, whose legacy must be examined if it is to be overcome.

To overcome does not mean to be done with, such that one could then set this tradition aside or somehow begin again. It means rather to question the meaning and truth of being, and also, therefore, the being of truth in that tradition. Overcoming is a refusal to remain complacent about, and therefore determined by, traditional answers. In “The Age of the World Picture,” Heidegger explained what it would mean to overcome Descartes: ‘Overcoming means here, however, the primal asking of the question concerning the meaning, i.e., concerning the

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realm of the projection or delineation, and thus concerning the truth, of Being—which question simultaneously unveils itself as the question concerning the Being of truth’ (AWP 140-41/H 100). To overcome Descartes would be to work through his as-

| sumptions in order to retrieve the question of being and truth. Heidegger elucidates further in a lecture course in 1940 on Nietzsche and nihilism: ‘“To overcome signifies: to bring some-

thing under oneself, and at the same time to put what is thus placed under oneself behind one as something that will henceforth have no determining power. Even if overcoming does not aim at sheer removal, it remains an attack on something” (N

4:223/NII 330). Heidegger seeks to disempower tradition through understanding, to unveil what remains unthought in thinking: assumptions. Heidegger holds that the thoughtlessness of the modern age can only be questioned through the taking up and reconsideration of the Greek legacy. Hence his preoccupation with the Greeks is not a nostalgic Hellenism, but rather an attempt to see

where human being stands in the modern epoch. He looks to the dawn of Western thinking to come to terms with das Abendland, the West. The leap to thinking is therefore a leap “onto the

soil on which we really stand” (WCT 41/WHD 17). Human being does not stand on representational ideas, but within a tradition that makes the very notion of an idea possible. Heidegger’s intent in What Is Called Thinking? is to overcome the idea of “idea.” To think is not to form representational ideas, each for oneself; rather, thinking entails understanding what thinking has produced. This is not a question about the solitary thinker; on the

contrary, it is a historical question. It is an inquiry into what thinking has produced historically. On the basis that Heidegger argues that the sciences cannot leap back into their source, and that the move from science to thinking would be such a leap, I conclude that his answer to the question, asked historically, of what thinking has produced is that thinking has produced the sciences. Historically, the sciences arise out of thinking. Greek philosophy is for Heidegger the origin of the modern sciences. In “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” Heidegger speaks precisely of “the sciences into which philosophy dis-

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 221 solves” (BW 387/Zur Sache des Denkens 74). The appearance of the sciences is accordingly neither incidental nor any great sur-

prise in both the history of metaphysics and his account. The sciences are the culmination of a path of thinking upon which the Greeks set the West. Yet at the end of philosophy understood as this history, a task remains for thinking. What thinking means here is laid out in What Is Called Thinking?

Heidegger’s claim that thinking is a craft is played out in an analogy between thinking and cabinetmaking. It may seem odd that he wants to account for thinking by means of such an analogy to production, but what he is getting at here is that thinking is, as Aristotle knew, an activity. In 1943, in the postscript appended to What Is Metaphysics?, Heidegger called ‘essential thinking” (WMp 359) an activity. In What Is Called Thinking? he wants his students to learn how to do this activity that is thinking. He uses the example of cabinetmaking to explain what it means to learn. Heidegger argues that we learn nothing from teachers, “if by ‘learning’ we now suddenly understand merely the procurement of useful information” (WCT 15/WHD 50). Nor is learning “mere practice, to gain facility in the use of tools” (WCT 14/ WHD 49-50), or collecting knowledge about the forms of things that could be made. Rather, to learn means “to make everything we do answer to whatever essentials address themselves to us at a given time” (WCT 14/WHD 49). Learning pays attention to what is essential, and in cabinetmaking it is a relatedness to wood that determines this craft (WCT 23/WHD 54). The cabinet-

maker must “answer and respond above all to the different kinds of wood and to the shapes slumbering within wood—to wood as it enters into [human] dwelling with all the hidden riches of its nature” (WCT 14/WHD 50). A good cabinetmaker understands wood not just as the material to be worked over,

but as something that emerges into the human world and to which human being has a relation. If what maintains the craft of cabinetmaking is a relation to

wood, likewise, what maintains thinking is a relatedness to being: “We are thinking . . . we are attempting to let ourselves become involved in this relatedness to Being” (WCT 86/WHD 75). Accordingly, for Heidegger, the single question that tradi-

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tional thinking must be brought to face is precisely “this relation existing between man’s nature and the Being of beings’ (WCT 79/WHD 74). To learn thinking, therefore, Heidegger’s students

are asked to “unlearn what thinking has been traditionally” (WCT 8/WHD 5). They must unlearn the history of metaphysics. To call thinking téxvn is not, however, to say that it is technol-

ogy. In the history of metaphysics, the withdrawal of being arises in conjunction with the domination of the sciences and the

overrunning of the globe by technology. Most thought-provoking in Heidegger’s account of what calls for thinking is the withdrawal of being, and because this withdrawal prevails, the essence of technology remains hidden (WCT 25/WHD 55). A fog

also surrounds the essence of the sciences, such that “‘we still seem afraid of facing the exciting fact that today’s sciences belong in the realm of the essence of modern technology, and nowhere else” (WCT 14/WHD 49). The question of what calls for thinking is the question of the essence of the sciences. This in turn belongs in the essence of technology. The obscurity of both

these questions is their belonging together in the history of metaphysics, in the withdrawal of being. The task in What Is Called Thinking? is precisely to think the

withdrawal of being in the belonging together of science and technology, in opposition to the standing apart of thinking and the sciences. In the modern epoch thinking is definitively repre-

sentational, and it is in representational thinking that science and technology coincide. The problem with representational thinking is its limitation to the object. For example, approached as an object, a tree appears in a severely limited way. When we face a tree in bloom, the sciences tell us that what we see is not a tree, but “in reality a void, thinly sprinkled with electric charges here and there that race hither and yon at enormous speeds” (WCT 43/WHD 18). To admit that one is simply stand-

ing before a tree is to admit a naive, pre-scientific view. This view, Heidegger argues, only confirms “that those sciences do in fact decide what of the tree in bloom may or may not be considered valid reality” (WCT 43/WHD 18).

Likewise, Heidegger commented in 1940 in “Logos” on the scientific analysis of sound: ““One can demonstrate that periodic oscillations in air pressure of a certain frequency are experienced

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 223 as tones. From such kinds of determinations concerning what is heard, an investigation can be launched which eventually only specialists in the physiology of the senses can conduct. In contrast to this, perhaps only a little can be said concerning proper hearing” (EGT “Logos” 65/VA 206). The sciences say nothing about hearing in the everyday, practical sense. Heidegger asks in What Is Called Thinking?, ‘Whence do the sciences—which necessarily are always in the dark about the origin of their own

nature—derive the authority to pronounce such verdicts? Whence do the sciences derive the right to decide what [human being’s] place is, and to offer themselves as the standard that justifies such decisions?” (WCT 43/WHD 18). His question is, by what right do the sciences, which cannot even raise the question of their own origin, determine the real? This is no trivial question, and it is complicated by the relation between science and technology. It is science that determines the thing as object; and it is the object that figures in representational thinking. Technology as a way of revealing depends on representational thinking, that is, on scientific objectivity. Heidegger argues that technology is possible only by means of scientific objectivity: “only by such objectivity do [beings] become available to the ideas and propositions in the positing and disposing of nature by which we constantly take inventory of the energies we can wrest from nature” (WCT 234/WHD 142). The point here is not simply that the modern approach to nature has as its necessary condition scientific objectification, but rather that human being’s relation to nature in modernity has its source in the essence of technology. In the first lecture course of What Is Called Thinking?, Heidegger holds that the essence of science lies in the essence of technology, but he offers neither explanation nor justification for this insight. Thinking has been uncovered as téxyvn, but also sharply distinguished from the sciences. Nonetheless, a clue to the essence of science has been uncovered in that the delimitation of the sphere of objects of a science provides each science beforehand with its eiSoc, much in the same way that Aristotle suggests téyvy proceeds. An echo of ancient téyvyn remains in modern science. Before laying bare, however, that trace of ancient teyvy which remains in modern science in Heidegger’s view, I will give sub-

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stance to Heidegger’s vision of what thinking is beyond the representational thinking of the sciences. THINKING As THANKING: BEING AND BEING REPRESENTED

The second lecture course in What Is Called Thinking? “makes clear, though only indirectly, the relation between philosophy and the sciences” (WCT 132/WHD 90). Heidegger recapitulates that the sciences rest on presuppositions that cannot be estab-

lished scientifically, but only demonstrated philosophically (WCT 131/WHD 90). Philosophy can investigate the regional on-

tology that establishes a science by determining its sphere of objects, a moment in the genesis of a science to which the science itself has no access. This is, however, now called “‘the lesser re-

latedness of thought to the sciences” (WCT 135/WHD 155). There is also for Heidegger an essential relatedness which is determined by a basic trait of the modern era: “It might be briefly

described as follows: that which is, appears today predominantly in that object-materiality which is established and maintained in power by the scientific objectification of all fields and , areas’ (WCT 135/WHD 155). In the first lecture, Heidegger asked by what right the sciences determine the real. Here he thinks that determination through and argues that scientific objectification determines the real as material object. Given the account of the measuring experiment and experience in Die Frage nach dem Ding and the Beitriige, this is not a naive position on empiricism. Rather, it is a claim about how human being opens up its world in understanding. Heidegger argues that a preoccupation with the material as real does not originate in any “separate and peculiar power-bid on the part of the sciences” (WCT 135/WHD 155), but that the power of scientific objectification arises from something in the nature of things that modern thinkers still do not want to see. He indicates it by means of three propositions: 1. Modern science is grounded in the nature of technology. 2. The nature of technology is itself nothing technological.

3. The nature of technology is not a merely human fabrication

| which, given an appropriate moral constitution, could be sub-

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 225 dued by superior human wisdom and judgment. (WCT 135-36/WHD 155)

The second, and for Heidegger more important, relatedness of thinking to the sciences is for thinking to question how the modern sciences are grounded in the essence of technology and how that essence, itself nothing technological, is not merely a human fabrication. In Heidegger’s account, to think is to be gathered and concentrated on what is most thought-provoking (WCT 143/WHD 94). Proper use of a thing “brings the thing to its essential nature and keeps it there” (WCT 187/WHD 114); it is “to let a thing be what it is and how it is” (WCT 191/WHD 168). The proper use of the human capacity to think is not a mere utilization but an essential human activity. Neither technology nor science nor

thinking can be understood simply as a human activity. As Moyos was definitive of human being for Aristotle, so thinking is a definitive human activity for Heidegger. Technology, science,

and thinking are things that people do, but for Heidegger it is crucial to see that they are also more. They are a relation to being, what he called in Being and Time and the Nietzsche volumes “a destiny.” For in Heidegger’s account the origin of thinking, and therefore of both science and technology, is being. Heidegger suggests that the dominance of the sciences in the modern epoch arises because the demands set for traditional thinking have become untenable. He specifies four weaknesses on the part of thinking: it does not bring about knowledge, as do the sciences; it does not produce usable, practical wisdom; it solves no cosmic riddles; and it does not endow one directly with the power to act (WCT 159/WHD 161). Because thinking has failed traditionally to meet these demands, the sciences have gained a dominance in the modern epoch through their ability to do so. The sciences do bring about knowledge, produce usable wisdom, solve cosmic riddles, and give one the power to act.

In 1937 Heidegger called this very success a threat to science: “The sharpest threat to modern science arises in that it goes so well for it as never before, that is, it is confirmed and encouraged

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in its usefulness and obtaining of progress.’ It is a threat in 1937 because the success of science is so readily appropriable for the Nazi program of a new science for the people. The threat in What Is Called Thinking? is not so politically situated, but it is equally historical. That threat is thoughtlessness, rampant in the epoch of nihilism. For Heidegger argues that the success of the sciences is conducive to the refusal of human being to acknowledge that science is determined by the essence of technology. That essence is representational thinking. Representational thinking, which thinks by means of subject and object, conceals the fact that something more originary than

the idea calls to human being, that human being itself is that gathering of subject and object (WCT 144/WHD 157). Heidegger

explains thinking in terms of its etymological root: thanc. The etymological relations in German between denken and danken are

mirrored in English by “think” and “thank,” which in fact share their root with the German words. Compared to thanc, which is at the root of “thank” and danken, ‘‘thought in the sense of logical-rational representations turns out to be a reduction and an impoverishment of the word that beggar the imagination” (WCT 139/WHD 92). Representational thinking reduces thinking to ideas.

Through the root thanc, Heidegger explicates thinking as thanking and memory. Thought needs ““memory, the gathering of thought [das Gedfichtnis|’”’ (WCT 138/WHD 91). How is mem-

ory to be understood here? Early in the first lecture, Heidegger distinguished memory from “merely the psychologically demonstrable ability to retain a mental representation, an idea, of something which is past’”” (WCT 11/WHD 7). Rather, memory belongs with “original thanking [which] is the thanks owed for being [das Sichverdanken]’’ (WCT 141/WHD 93). Memory is an “inclination with which the inmost meditation of the heart turns toward all that is in being’ (WCT 141/WHD 93). Thinking as thanking and memory is, for Heidegger, the thinking of being. 2“Die scharfste Bedrohung der heutigen Wissenschaft besteht darin, da es ihr so gut geht wie noch nie, d.h. in ihrem Nutzen und ihrer Fortschrittbeschaffung bestatigt und ermuntert wird” (BdW 7).

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 227 The sciences, however, cannot think in this sense of thanking and memory. Based on a regional ontology, to which it has no access, a Science is never in a position to think being. It may be entirely unclear what Heidegger means by “inmost meditation of the heart,” as often his suggestions for an alternative to representational thinking appear mystical and largely unexplained. Yet it seems clear that, whatever inmost meditation of the heart entails, the sciences, preoccupied as they are with results and the production of facts, are incapable of it. Indeed, the paradigm of rationality in the sciences is objectivity, the indifferent application of the mind from which the heart has been rigorously excluded. This model of rationality has in recent years been criticized on an international and interdisciplinary basis. Heidegger’s criticism of scientific rationality is explicit as early as 1930, when, in “On the Essence of Truth,” he calls “insistent”

the “turning toward what is readily available’ (ET 135/WW 196). As insistent, Dasein turns away from being toward beings.

This essay characterizes precisely the human preoccupation with the sciences in modernity. Heidegger describes the openedness of beings as prevailing precisely ‘““where beings are not very

familiar to man and are scarcely and only roughly known by science” (ET 131/WW 192). It is precisely at the limits of a science that beings, and therefore being, is open to thinking. Modern philosophy can think being through thanking and memory where the sciences cannot, at their limit. Yet modern philosophy does not take up the task of thinking being in Heidegger’s account. It looks rather, he argues, for the presuppositionless question. Think, for example, of the Cartesian method wherein one searches for the thought that requires no further ground; or of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology that attempts to rethink the Cartesian Meditations in order

to ground thinking radically. The thought discovered as selfgrounding and hence requiring no presupposition is the cogito ergo sum. To hold, however, that thinking begins with doubting obscures its origin in Heidegger’s account (WCT 211/WHD 127).

He argues that the question of what calls for thinking is never a presuppositionless inquiry. He suggested earlier that the very task is precisely to go toward and become involved in the presuppositions that belong to thinking (WCT 160/WHD 162). The

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idea, for example, that Parmenides can be read objectively with no imported presuppositions “rests on the stubborn and widespread prior assumption that one can enter into dialogue with a thinker by addressing him out of thoughtlessness’”” (WCT 176/ WHD 109). The task is to uncover the suppositions that make a thinker’s thinking possible, not to purge thought of its assumptions. That is, the task of interpretation of a thinker is the uncovering of the thinker’s relation to being. Representational thinking, whether in science or philosophy, can never think being in Heidegger’s view. For a being can be represented, but being cannot. Kant’s claim that being is among the almost unanalyzable concepts is based on the assumption that being is graspable as concept (WCT 179/WHD 167). Heideg-

ger argues that being is not a graspable concept: “If we stop for a moment and attempt, directly and precisely and without subterfuge, to represent in our minds what the terms ‘being’ and ‘to be’ state, we find that such an examination has nothing to hold onto” (WCT 225/WHD 137). Being is not a thing that can appear as a representation. Since Heidegger has argued that thinking is a relatedness to being, and being cannot be grasped in a representation, he concludes that thinking is not a grasping: it is ““nei-

ther the grasp of what lies before us, nor an attack upon it... thinking knows nothing of the grasping concept (Begriff)’”” (WCT 211/WHD 128).

Representational thinking, fundamental to science which grasps the thing as object, can therefore never think being. The success of the sciences stands in the way of raising this question of their inadequacy. They progress successfully in their inquiry into beings. Accordingly, it is ““our modern way of representational ideas [that] blocks its own access to the beginning and

thus to the fundamental characteristic of Western thinking” (WCT 213/WHD 129). That fundamental characteristic of West-

ern thinking that is its origin is being. Hence the epoch domi-

nated by representational thinking is the epoch of the withdrawal of being, its default in nihilism. Heidegger holds that human being succumbs to the default of being in modernity. In the modern epoch, human being prefers the accumulation of facts about beings to the task of thinking. For Heidegger, that task is reflection on the question of being.

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 229 He distinguishes reflection from the chatter of the sciences: “What is demanded here is not the nimble tongue chattering away of all and everything, but a héyetv of the Aoyos, and only through these the xgtvewv: to discriminate one thing from an-

other, to bring out one thing and put another into the backsround” (WCT 199-200/WHD 122). This A€yevv, “saying” in the

Greek sense, is a laying before the thinker, and does not herein make its first appearance in Heidegger’s thought. It received full attention in a lecture course called “Logic” in 1944 which was eventually published as “Logos” in 1951, not too long before What Is Called Thinking? What lies before the thinker is there for the thinker to address, both to think and to talk about. Reflection discriminates what is to be reflected upon, what is thought-provoking, only through addressing the question of what lies before the thinker. The gathering of thought that is thanking and memory for Heidegger distinguishes what provokes thought in its lying before the thinker from the mere accumulation of facts about beings. Thinking sees beyond beings to being. But only a small part of what lies before human being is laid down by human being, “and even then only with the aid of what was lying there before’ (WCT 200/WHD 122). What was lying there beforehand, according to Heidegger, the Greeks called uous. Heidegger argued as early as 1935, in Introduction to Metaphysics, that muotc is being for the Greeks. In What Is Called Thinking?, that which lies before the thinker that the thinker must address in reflection is nothing other than being. What lies before human being as something already there is what makes technology—as well as Christianity, the Enlightenment, and the definitive aspect of any age—possible in Heidegger’s account (WCT 204/WHD 170). These epochs of human history are only possible insofar as human being stands in relation to being, whether the question of being is taken up or left in its withdrawal. To think is to address the modern age from within the ontological difference, to respond to the question of being as the Greeks did from Parmenides to Aristotle (WCT 235/ WHD 143). Heidegger’s call for a retrieval from the Greeks is the call to understand the modern epoch by addressing what is

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definitive for Heidegger of any epoch: its response to the question of being. The development of Western thinking is, however, a limitation and confinement of that rich origin of Greek thinking. In the account given in Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger argued that Plato confined being to eidoc. This move “led to the secession of the logos, which became the starting point for the domination of reason” (IM 179/EM 137). Plato’s narrowing of the

thinking of the pre-Socratics was a confinement of being to which Heidegger attributes responsibility for bringing about the end of Greek philosophy. Plato is an ambiguous character in the history of philosophy: he is a beginning for Western philosophy as the origin of the domination of reason over being. But he is a

beginning that conceals a more original beginning in which being is thought as pvotc. And further, he begins the end of that originary thinking. The account given of Aristotle in 1940 makes him equally ambiguous in the history of philosophy. In “On the Being and Conception of mvots in Aristotle’s Physics B.1,"” Heidegger describes how Aristotle’s Physics on the one hand contains the last echo of the pre-Socratic thinking of @uvotc, that is, being, yet on the other hand exhibits explicitly a narrowing of the notion of @votc. @uotc is taken as simply one kind of being among others. Hence TO MVOUNG are understandable by analogy to another kind of being: téyvn, that which is produced. Aristotle narrowed the rich thinking of the pre-Socratics when he reduced vuotc to téyvn by analogy. Heidegger describes another confinement of thinking wherein the Greek aitia becomes the causa efficiens. He discusses this transition in ““The Question Concerning Technology” (QCT 6-10/VA 11-14) and goes on to point out the continued shrinking of causality in technology (QCT 23/VA 26-27). Modern sci-

ence and technology, in fact, deal with an impoverished conception of both causality and motion. Whereas Aristotle held that there were four kinds of cause (material, formal, efficient, and final), Newton’s physics concerns itself with one kind: the efficient cause. Whereas Aristotle held that there were four kinds of motion (alteration, growth or decrease, locomotion, and the

special cases of generation or destruction), Newton’s physics

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 231 concerns itself with one kind: locomotion. Modern science is a narrow configuration of the rich thinking of the Greeks about causation and motion. In What Is Called Thinking?, Heidegger raises the question of the narrowing of thinking itself. The conjunction of Aéyewv and voeiv was not a grasping, an attack, or a manipulation. It knew nothing of the concept. The history of thinking is, however, its restriction to representational ideas. This confinement of thinking “is then, of course, not considered a loss or defect, but rather the sole gain that thinking has to offer once its work is accomplished by means of the concept” (WCT 212/WHD 128). For the sciences succeed where thinking has shown its inadequacies. Hence the paradigm of successful science is Newtonian physics, which construes motion and causation in an impoverished way. _ Yet, argues Heidegger, the success of the sciences is only possible because being prevails in the presence of the object. He

supports this claim with the argument that if being did not therein prevail, then the question of the object’s objectivity could not even be asked (WCT 234/WHD 142). There must be beings for their objectivity to be a problem. The development of system-

atic philosophy is, in Heidegger’s analysis, an assurance in the face of the questionable. The objectivity of the object can be left unquestioned in the face of the success of representational thinking in the sciences. Systematic philosophy promotes a quietude in the assurance that questions are answered and thinking has secured itself. Heidegger wishes to disrupt that quietude and to leave the question of being open, as it remained open for Aristotle (WCT 212/WHD 128). The second half of What Is Called Thinking? poses the question

of the relation between the sciences and thinking only indirectly,

for Heidegger’s immediate concern is the relation between thinking and being. What has been established is that represen-

tational thinking, in which the sciences have their success through the positing of their object, is a narrowing and confinement of the much richer thinking of the Greeks. Further, that modern philosophy, which takes thinking to be the forming of representational ideas, has been as it were “scientized” in Heidegger’s view. That is to say, philosophy is dominated in moder-

nity by precisely what belongs not to thinking but to the

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sciences: representational ideas. Hence science is not just one occurrence among others in the modern epoch, but rather determinative of that epoch. How, then, does the scientific determination of the real as object dominate the modern epoch? The answer to this question lies in the essence of technology. Heidegger first treats the essence of technology by arguing in What Is Called Thinking? that the essence of science lies in the essence of technology. In 1954 and 1955 he read two papers that explore this claim: ‘Science and Reflection,” in which he raises and responds to the question of the essence of science, and ““The

Question Concerning Technology,” in which he does the same with the essence of technology. THE THEORY OF THE REAL

In 1954, Heidegger read “Science and Reflection” (‘“Wissenschaft und Besinnung’’) to a small group in preparation for a conference in Munich the following year. William Lovitt translates Besinnung as “‘reflection,’” but he issues a caveat as to how the word should be understood. He notes the inadequacy of the English “reflection,” which does not connote directionality or following after, and he excludes the connotation of thought turning back on itself from his use of the word. Rather, Besinnung means “‘recollection, reflection, consideration, deliberation ... [and the] reflexive verb, sich besinnen, means to recollect, to remember, to call to mind, to think on, to hit upon” (SR 155, n. 1). He therefore defines “reflection” as “a recollecting thinkingon that, as though scenting it out, follows after what is thought. It involves itself with sense [Sinn] and meaning, and is at the same time a ‘calm, self-possessed surrender to that which is worthy of questioning’ ’” (SR 155, n. 1; quotation from SR 180/VA 64). In “Science and Reflection,” Heidegger draws a distinction between science and this thinking that is reflection. He is calling, much as he did in What Is Called Thinking?, for reflection on science.

Heidegger argues that it is not enough to consider science simply a cultural activity, as if one day human being could once again dismantle it. Rather, it must be recognized how reality is

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 233 “determined on an increasing scale by and in conjunction with that which we call Western European science” (SR 156/VA 41). Much in the same vein as he in 1928 first described technology, “which rages about in the ‘world’ today like an unshackled beast” (MFL 215/MAL 279), Heidegger argues in 1954 that West-

ern European science has a power never previously met as it spreads over the entire globe. Something rules in science that is larger than a mere wanting to know on the part of human being. Hence to be clear about what science is, it is not enough to describe the scientific enterprise of the day, Heidegger argues (SR 157/VA 42). To see how science intersects with all organizational forms of life, first it is necessary to experience its essence. Heidegger expresses that essence in a single statement: “Science is the theory of the real” (SR 157/VA 42).

Heidegger points out that he intends modern science, not medieval doctrina or ancient émuotyun, with the word “science” (Wissenschaft). Nonetheless, he maintains that modern science is erounded in the ancient knowledge of the Greeks: “the distinctive character of modern knowing [Wissens] consists in the deci-

sive working out of a tendency that still remains concealed in the essence of knowing as the Greeks experienced it, and that precisely needs the Greek knowing in order to become, over against it, another kind of knowing” (SR 157/VA 43). Hence the question of modern science has once again drawn Heidegger back to Greek thought. The overcoming of modern science is only possible when its coming to be is understood. There will be no change, progress, or alternative to modern science, in Heideg-

ger’s view, until its essence is made clear in a dialogue with ancient thinking. For the origin of modern knowing lies in the Greek experience of knowledge, which cannot be overcome until it is thought through. Heidegger suggests that ancient thinking is still present today “in the rule of modern technology” (SR 158/VA 44). In “Science and Reflection,” as in What Is Called Thinking?, there is both identity and difference between modern technology and science, and between ancient and modern knowing. The question is precisely

how the rootedness of modern knowing in ancient determines the modern relation between science and technology. Heidegger explicates this ancient tendency, still concealed in modern

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knowing yet being worked out decisively, in the history of knowing by examining how “theory” and “real” belong together essentially in the claim that science is the theory of the real. He does this in two etymological accounts, first of “real” and then of “theory,” that serve both to retrieve an originary meaning and to explain its decay. First, the real (das Wirkliche) connects etymologically in German with “the realm of working [des Wirkenden], of that which works [wirkt]’’ (SR 159/VA 44). It is unfortunate that a translation

can do no justice to that etymology. Heidegger traces wirken through the Middle Ages, when it meant “the producing of houses, tools, pictures’”’ (SR 160/ VA 45), and through its narrowing to producing in the sense of sewing, embroidery, or weaving.

He argues that to work in this sense means to do (tun). To “do” shares its etymological root, the Indo-Germanic dhe, with the Greek 6¢otc, which Heidegger translates as “‘setting, place, position” (SR 159/VA 45). He distinguishes this from human agency, arguing that “the holding-sway of nature (@votc), is a doing, and that in the strict sense of Oéous’”’ (SR 159/VA 45): “quot is BEouc:

from out of itself to lay something before, to place it here, to bring it hither and forth [her- und vor-bringen], that is, into presencing” (SR 159/VA 45). Neither the argument that Oéotc is a laying before, a setting in position distinct from human agency, nor the priority here given to q@vots is new to Heidegger's thinking. In What Is Called Thinking? Heidegger argued that Oéo1c ““does

not mean primarily the act of setting up, instating, but that which is set up; that which has set itself up, has settled, and as such lies before us’ (WCT 200/WHD 122). He claims that accordingly vmo0eotc is “that which is already given to and lies before the mathematicians: the odd, the even, the shapes, the angles” (WCT 201/WHD 122-23). @éouc is then what is set up, and first and foremost, that which sets itself up. Furthermore, in 1935 Heidegger argued in Introduction to Metaphysics that @votc was being for the Greeks (IM 61/EM 47). His work on Aristotle’s

conception of mucous at Physics 2.1 is the clearest statement of Heidegger’s claim that for the Greeks, mvouc presences, that is, is, more fundamentally than anything else. In “Science and Reflection” these two thoughts are brought together in the claim

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 235 that muotc is Béouc. For to work is to bring something forth, and it is pvotc that does that originally. Only later do muots and 6€otc come into opposition.

Heidegger contrasts this bringing into presence that is work with the Latin efficere and effectus. Even when Aristotle speaks of

what the Romans call the causa efficiens, he does not mean the bringing about of an effect. What brings itself forth in the Greek €gyov is what presents itself “‘in the genuine and highest sense’ (SR 160/VA 46), that is, in actuality. Aristotle names this presence éveoyeta and évtedéxera. Accordingly, évéeyera can only be properly translated, Heidegger argues, as Wirklichkeit (reality) when wirken is understood in this sense of a bringing forth into

unconcealment. The work can be brought forth by a human being, but the self-bringing-forth of @uotc is the primary sense of “work” for Heidegger. The possibility of this meaning of évégyeia, the real as the work, has been suppressed in favor of the Romanized usage. Heidegger’s claim that the Romanization of aitia into causa efficiens 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 Heidegger puts off the question of how the notion of cause (Gexn and aitica.) belongs in the Greek experience. Ground and cause, principium and causa, are the ways in which these notions have 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 translation there is concealed, rather, a translation of Greek experience into a different way of thinking. 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. 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

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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 theory and the real is to show how objectivity is a representing. Heidegger traces “theory” to the Greek Oeweetv and gives two accounts of this word. First he examines the word as built from 8éa and 6edw. 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 siéos. Oeweetv 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, Bioc Sewentixoc—that is the highest doing of which human being is capable.

The second account of O8eweetv is given in terms that share etymological roots with the first: 0e¢a and wea. The former is a goddess whose name is found in dAnBeia. Heidegger has argued since Being and Time, most notably in “On the Essence of Truth,” that GAnGeva is a more originary notion of truth than correspondence 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 ’AAnGeta that unconcealment— that is, truth—appears to Parmenides. At what in the Greek experience of truth is Heidegger trying to get in tracing the modern word “theory” back to the goddess ’AAnOein? Heidegger spoke of the goddess *AAnOeta in “Moira (Parmenides 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 understood 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 relation not just to beings but to being. If this account is brought to bear on “Science and Reflection,” then Heidegger’s reference there to Oca and ’AAnGeva 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 ®ea in terms of respect, honor, and esteem. Thus he defines 8eweetv as “the beholding that watches over

truth” (SR 165/VA 49), and he connects the German Wahrheit with both ®ea and 69aw. Modern truth has its roots in a respectful 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. Oeweetv is not representational thinking; it is not speculation about that which stands over and against the subject as object. Rather, Oeweeiv belonged to the Greeks in their Biog BeweENtiXOoc, not to modern

human being’s way of approaching its object in representational thinking. Under both etymologies, Oeweetv 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 Oemeetv with the modern 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 promise of further wealth (SR 181/VA 66) in that reflection promises something that can never be encompassed in scientific reckoning. 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

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what has been thought, but to surrender it, to give it up to further 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 modern 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 earlier meaning of Oeweetv in the modern “theory.” The modern term has come to us, however, through the Roman contemplari. The core of this word, templum, comes from the Greek téuveuwv,

which means to cut or divide: “In 8eHeua transformed into contemplatio there comes to the fore the impulse, already prepared in Greek thinking, of a looking-at that sunders and compartmentalizes. 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 impulse to division is prepared for in Aristotle’s division of knowledge and in his account of the many ways for a thing to be, of which votes 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 physics, 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 surveyable series of related causes” (SR 168/VA 52). This is the a priori determination of nature by modern science. Nature is accordingly for physics “das Unumgéingliche’’: “that which cannot be gotten around” (SR 174; cf. 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

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 239 prevents the representing and securing that correspond to it from ever being able to encompass the essential fullness of nature” (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 176/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 modern epoch more securely than ever. The inaccessibility of What they cannot get around remains inconspicuous. The sciences lie in such inconspicuousness, Heidegger argues, “‘as a river lies in its source” (SR 179/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 questioning” (SR 180/VA 64). It is different from the knowing of the sciences. Heidegger’s argument is that the poverty of the uselessness 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 particular 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 181-82/VA 66). The task of thinking

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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 application, 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 beforehand. 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 interpreted. The essence of technology is Ge-stell. Science too has its Gestell. In explicating this claim, I show how it is only on the basis of the scientific object that modern technology is possible for Heidegger. That is, the essence of technology arises from the Gestell of science.

GE-STELL

Much work has been done on Heidegger’s critique of technology, but the question of the relation between science and technology 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 technology” (WCT 135/WHD 155). Yet he also argues that technology 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 modern nat-

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 241 ural science the foundation (Grundlage) of modern technology—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 “groundlaying.”” Heidegger is asking whether modern 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 Heidegger, 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 téyvyn 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: modern technology is possible because its essence is already to be found

in science. That is, a trace of ancient téyvn remains in modern science, and that trace makes technology possible. That trace is projection. As ancient téxvy began with the idea in the mind of the artist prior to production, so modern science and technology both have their a priori projection of being. That projection Heidegger names Ge-stell. The Ge-stell of technology is standing-reserve—beings appear as resource. The Ge-stell of science is objectivity—beings appear as object. I will support this interpretation 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 ““Technology 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, GAnBe_eva. He translates GAn8eva as Unverborgenheit, uncon-

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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 universal, transhistorical truth and gives instead an account in which truth is a stance human being takes toward being, an attunement that informs an epoch and evolves over time, an opening 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 [stellen] nature’ (QCT 15/VA 18) to unlock and expose its energy for stockpiling. Technology sets up beings as standing-reserve. The inadequacy of the instrumental and anthropological definition of technology is its failure to acknowledge 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 revealing that holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfold into a bringing-forth in the sense of motnous’”’ (QCT 14/ VA 18). Modern technology does not reveal as does ancient moinous, the creative act in which something is brought into being. Hence technology, though etymologically connected to téxvn, the branch of knowledge that was for Aristotle production, is different from that ancient way of bringing things forth into being. Technology does not bring forth in Heidegger’s ac-

count, yet nor does it reveal things on their own terms, as it were. Rather, technology challenges forth.

In that challenging forth, a claim is made upon human being to order what is: ““We now name that challenging claim which

gathers [human being] thither to order the self-revealing as standing-reserve: ‘Ge-stell’ [enframing]’”” (QCT 19/VA 23). Wil-

liam Lovitt, who translates Ge-stell as ‘“Enframing” in “The

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 243 Question Concerning Technology,” argues elsewhere that the term is impossible to translate (1973:52). Ge-stell is for Heidegger

the essence of technology. It is a way of revealing things in which things are challenged to show themselves in a particular Way: as a standing-reserve at human being’s disposal. In technology, then, human being orders the real. Yet the control thus felt by human being is illusory. Rather than being the master of technology, human being is called upon in Heidegger’s view by technology to be the one who orders the real. Technology, then, although a human creation, is a claim upon human being. Heidegger argues that “the herald of Ge-stell, a herald whose origin is still unknown” (QCT 22/VA 25), is modern physics. Physics is the herald of Ge-stell in that it prepares the way not simply for technology, but for its essence. The ordering attitude and behavior at work in technology was first visible in modern science as exact, experimental science: “Because physics, indeed already as pure theory, sets nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance, it therefore orders its exper-

iments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way” (QCT 21/VA 25). This view of nature, that it is available for human being to set it up in some determined way, is what makes possible the further ordering of nature as standing-reserve. Without the scientific object, therefore, technology would not be possible. I would add to this argument. In Aristotle’s account, nature is teleological (199b31). Ta muotxd are for him those things which

move of their own accord, that is, by some internal impulse (192b15). Motion he defines as the realization of that potential to change (202a6). Hence Aristotle’s world is filled by things that are on the way to self-fulfillment, by t& muvoiuxa which propel

themselves toward their own ends. Newtonian physics, however, reduces motion to locomotion, and causation to efficient causes. Hence it has no conception of motion as actualization, and it renders nature purposeless. That is, the purposiveness attributed by Aristotle to ta quota no longer figures in the modern scientific account of nature. Hence the modern scientific conception of nature renders things in nature available to be appropriated toward human purposes, goals, and uses. Physics is

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the herald of Ge-stell in this sense: it appears first and announces what is to follow. Accordingly, Heidegger argues that science is chronologically prior to technology. Modern physical science began in the seven-

teenth century, whereas technology developed only in the second half of the eighteenth century (QCT 22/VA 26). Earlier, Heidegger says that “mathematical physics arose almost two centuries before technology” (QCT 21/VA 25). One cannot help but ask at this point, what does Heidegger mean by “‘technology ’’? It is fairly clear throughout Heidegger’s writings that by “modern science’” he means mathematical and experimental physics, for which Galileo is a beginning, Newton a culmination, and quantum theory an extension. But what he means by “‘technology” is at best opaque. The earliest discussion, for example, in the Nietzsche volumes, is of ‘“machine technology,” and it makes sense given the dating relative to science that for Heidegger technology begins with the industrial revolution. Thomas Kuhn would dispute this view. He talks of technology as if it has always existed, or at least as long as there has been science. He argues that they were separate enterprises until late in the nineteenth century. Developments in the organic-chemical dye industry in the 1870s and in electric power in the 1890s, argues Kuhn, made science suddenly “a prime mover in socioeconomic development” (1977:142) and brought technology and science together. Previously science and technology interacted in three ways, he argues. First, scientists advanced their understanding of nature—for example, of magnetism, chemistry, and thermodynamics—by looking at the practice of craftspeople. Second, starting in the eighteenth century, methods, and sometimes scientists, borrowed from sciences have been deployed in the practical arts, but with unclear effectiveness. Third, the continuing development of products and processes from prior scientific research is a locus of interaction between science and technology. In fact, argues Kuhn, technology flourished without substantial input from the sciences until the late nineteenth century. Heidegger’s account is consistent with Kuhn’s in that both pinpoint a significant and dramatic change in the relation between science and technology in the late nineteenth century. For Kuhn, this is the beginning of science as a socioeconomic force.

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 245 For Heidegger, it is the emergence of technology as that which is commonly and superficially understood to be applied science, and which he wishes to understand in its essence. Kuhn, then, holds the instrumental, anthropological definition of technology which Heidegger wishes to reject. Nor is Kuhn interested in the genesis and implications of technology. Indeed, Heidegger’s interest with science and technology is ultimately concern with nihilism. In the Nietzsche volumes, where he first spoke of machine technology, he described nihilism as the devaluation of all values. Certainly, Kuhn is interested in the logic and history of science, both theory and practice; but the value or threat of science and technology is not an issue for him. Heidegger spoke of threat in the context of science in 1937 in ““Die Bedrohung der Wissenschaft,” and of technology in 1955 in ““The Question Concerning Technology.” Although the latter issue has been a cen-

tral focus for Heidegger scholars, the former point has been neglected. In 1955 Heidegger argues that the threat of technology—that it sets upon nature and “‘drives out every other possibility of revealing” (QCT 27/VA 31) until even human being is reduced to standing-reserve—is made possible by modern science. It is the ordering of nature into scientific object that prepares the way for its further ordering into standing-reserve.

Heidegger’s point is that modern science has as its essence already in its very beginning, the essence of technology. This is not to say simply that modern science is technological, although scientists do not get far, even as undergraduates, without access to a fair amount of technology. Heidegger’s claim that the essence of science lies in the essence of technology does not take its basis from the fact that the sciences are technological, because for Heidegger the essence of technology is itself nothing technological. Ge-stell is nothing technological: it is not a thing at all, but a way of revealing. Likewise, modern science has its Ge-stell: object. Science is also a way of revealing, and only because modern science reveals as object can technology reveal as standingreserve. Heidegger’s claim about such foundational notions for knowl-

edge as nature, motion, causation, and theory has consistently been that they have their origin in Greek thinking, and that the Greek legacy has come down to the modern era severely nar-

246 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

rowed. Some trace of the Greek interpretation and understanding remains in the modern era. This is true also of technology. Heidegger’s analysis is that a trace of téxvy remains in the modern epoch in Ge-stell.

For Aristotle, the ancient craftsperson began work with an idea of what was to be made (PA 640a32;EN 1140a13). This was | in fact definitive of téyvn. Modern science likewise begins with an idea that establishes its object beforehand. In physics, nature is represented as ‘’a coherence of forces calculable in advance” (QCT 21/VA 25), and on this basis is pursued and entrapped. Heidegger has pinpointed the essence of technology in Ge-stell, in the challenging forth of nature that lets what presences come forth into unconcealment by ordering it. In technology, nature is

challenged forth and ordered as a standing-reserve at the disposal of human being, which extracts and stores its energy. In modern science, nature is ordered as a calculable coherence of forces, and as such set up to reveal itself in the experiment. Science and technology both have their Ge-stell, their challenging of

nature to reveal itself in a determined way. Projection of an a priori determination of beings is at the essence of both. Hence Heidegger’s claim originally made in 1949, that the essence of technology is Ge-stell, and his much earlier claim from Being and Time, that science is the mathematical projection of nature, can be read together in the claim from What Is Called Thinking? that the essence of science lies in the essence of technology. Both science and technology belong essentially to the modern epoch, the age of the world picture. I argue that the age of the world picture is determined by science, since scientific objectivity is the formative moment in representational thinking. Science is not symptomatic of modernity, but determinative. Scientific representation in objectivity makes technology possible.

Modern science precedes technology in history, in Heidegger’s account, and makes it possible in that the essence of technology is already found in the modern epoch in the essence of science. Technology got under way only when it could be supported by modern exact science (QCT 21-—22/VA 25); but the essence of that science was already the essence of technology. The projective representation definitive of ancient téyvy is present in

the essence of modern science. It projects an understanding and

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 247 determination onto nature in its representational thinking, basic concepts, and experimental method. Only because the essence of science is thus already collapsed into the essence of technology can technology present the illusion that it is applied science. It is in fact much more. It is the human response to the default of being, in which beings are revealed as objects for science, and resources for technology. QuANTUM THEORY

The most technological science of all is quantum physics. Father

Richardson’s central argument for his claim that Heidegger is not a philosopher of science is that Heidegger’s conception of science is based on Newtonian physics and is not adequate to the new science: quantum theory. Richardson argues that Heidegger’s notion of the subject-object relation “seems to be basically that of spatial exteriority and separateness of parts outside of parts” (1968:535). But quantum theory has different concerns,

in Richardson’s analysis, such that what is decisive in the subject-object relation ‘is not opposition and separation (i.e. spatial separation) but interdependence between subject and object, therefore unity with distinction” (1968:535). He cites Heisenbere’s uncertainty principle as a classic example of this interdependence. There are a few responses to this criticism of Heidegger. First of all, the notion of exteriority is not so clearly basic to Heidegger’s account of the subject-object relation. He argues in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology that for Dasein, “there is no outside’’ (BPP 66/GP 93), and this “outside” would be precisely the

exteriority of object to subject that Richardson finds basic to his account. Heidegger finds the traditional account of intentionality “‘inadequate and external” (BPP 161/GP 230) because it does not conceive the belonging together of subject and object radically enough. He disallows discussion of an inner and outer in

attempting to understand Dasein’s commerce with things, for this precludes understanding being in a world as fundamental to Dasein. Likewise, in Die Frage nach dem Ding, Heidegger ob-

jects to the determination of a thing as a “this,” here and now,

248 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

such that space and time are construed as containers for the thing (FD 11-24). In characterizing the thing, the interiority and exteriority of space and time are simply not adequate. Furthermore, Heidegger objects in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology to Kant’s separation of subject and object in his ac-

count of perception because “it does not make possible any access to the unity of the phenomenon” (BPP 314/GP 447). And Heidegger argues that the subject-object relation is a correlation,

and that the concepts of subject and object require each other (BPP 156-57/GP 222-23). Accordingly, it is not so clear that Heidegger’s account of the subject-object relation focuses on opposi-

tion and separation rather than unity and interdependence. Second, Heidegger was not completely uninformed on the topic of quantum theory. Joseph Kockelmans points out with reference to Carl von Weizsacker’s report on his meeting with Heidegger, Heisenberg, and his uncle, Victor von Weizsacker, that “it becomes clear that Heidegger had a remarkable know!edge of both physics and biology and that he was able to conduct a penetrating discussion on important topics with leading scientists’ (1985:17).° In the young von Weizsacker’s account of that meeting, Heisenberg finds Heidegger’s insights satisfactory, when the issue at stake is precisely how the subject-object relation is to be understood in quantum theory. Finally, it is not the case that Heidegger fails to address the question of quantum theory in his analysis of science. In his writing he cites Heisenberg, Bohr, and Planck. His comments are sparse, but this is not because he has nothing to say on the issue. Rather, it is because what he does have to say makes it clear that he sees no essential difference between Newtonian physics and quantum theory. He recognizes that they are not identical. For example, in Die Frage nach dem Ding, as early as 1935, Heidegger suggests that in quantum theory, the relation

between matter and space is not so simple as in Newtonian physics, but nor is it fundamentally different (FD 15). And in “Science and Reflection’ he acknowledges that the geometrical point mechanics of Newtonian physics is different from the sta3 Kockelmans’s reference is to von Weizsacker, 1977, but see also von Weizsdcker, 1977a.

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 249 tistical mechanics of quantum theory. In both texts Heidegger sees differences between Newtonian physics and quantum theory, but he also makes it clear that he recognizes no essential difference. They have the same Ge-stell, the same preconception of nature. For Heidegger, nature is confined in modern science to its interpretation as a coherence of forces calculable in advance. Not only Newtonian physics, but also quantum mechanics pursues its object as such a calculable coherence of forces for the purposes of making the energy contained within the atom available to be extracted, stored, and at the disposal of human being. Heidegger’s reflections upon the atomic age found in The Principle of Reason make this explicitly clear. In this lecture course from 1955-56, Heidegger argues that the “unleashing of this natural energy occurs through the work of the most modern natural sciences that ever more unequivocally prove to have the normative function and form of the essence of modern technology” (123). Accordingly, he recognizes no essential difference between Newtonian and quantum physics. If modern science is, as Heidegger argues, essentially technological, then quantum physics is nothing different, but rather an intensification of that essential identity. Under Heidegger’s view, the mathematical projection of nature as the essence of science is first evident in the work of Galileo, who was the crucial figure in the transition from Aristotle’s method of generalization on the basis of observation to the modern method of formulating universal hypotheses which can then be tested in experimentation. In “Science and Reflection,’ Heidegger maintains that quantum theory is simply a narrowing of the realm of validity of Galileo’s and Newton’s physics. This narrowing also confirms “the objectness normative for the theory of nature, in accordance with which nature presents itself for representation as a spatiotemporal coherence of motion calculable in some way or other’ (SR 169/VA 54). Method—that is, how a science entraps and secures its object—is of decisive con-

cern, and in quantum theory as in Newtonian physics the method is to secure the object in measurement.

This is particularly evident in Bohr’s view of quantum mechanics. Bohr introduces the principle of completeness: a prop-

250 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

erty of a quantum particle or photon (e.g., position, momentum, or spin) has no definite value until it is measured. Prior to measurement, the quantity is represented by a wave packet describ-

ing a super-position in which all possible outcomes of measurement are to be found. Measurement collapses the wave function and only a single outcome remains, the one measured. Only on such a basis can what is called the measurement problem come about in quantum theory: if what is measured is in an indefinite state, a super-position, prior to measurement, how can

measurement collapse the wave function that describes that super-position such that a single value is measured? Wigner deals with this problem by maintaining that the intervention of consciousness is what collapses the wave function (Wheeler and Zurek 1983:324—41), and he gives a convenient overview of other

solutions (Wheeler and Zurek 1983:288-94). It seems that Heidegger’s claim that Newtonian physics and quantum physics are essentially the same—that is, they share a mathematical projection of nature in which the real is quantifiable, measurable, and calculable in advance—is neither uninformed nor unreasonable. In fact, the crucial experiment to decide between Bohr’s quantum theory and Einstein’s realism, which led Einstein to argue that quantum theory is incomplete, is based precisely on obtaining predictions under each account and showing that the realist predictions of Bell’s inequality are violated. An outcome is predicted for each account, and Bohr’s account is vindicated experimentally. The claim in quantum physics is not, then, simply that the real is measurable, but that it is measured. Heidegger follows the weaker reading, and he cites Max Planck’s statement: “’That is real which can be measured” (SR 169/VA 54). Heidegger takes Planck to mean that the real can be reckoned, that is, set up as an object of expectation, consistent with his view that the essence of modern science is Ge-stell. In quantum theory, in fact, the real is what has been measured. But this point only strengthens Heidegger’s argument that the essence of science is the mathematical projection of nature. Heidegger does, however, recognize that Newtonian physics and quantum theory are not identical. In physics, “nature manifests itself as a coherence of motion on material bodies” (SR 171/

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 251 VA 56). The difference between classical physics and quantum theory is that the latter represents its objects with reference to a nucleus or field, whereas the former represents its objects by means of geometrical point mechanics. In classical physics all aspects of an object’s motion can be calculated in advance, but in quantum theory the coherence of knowledge with its object is of a statistical nature. The objectness of material nature is different in each case, but they both remain for Heidegger “physics, Le., science, i.e., theory, which entraps objects belonging to the real in their objectness, in order to secure them in the unity of objectness” (SR 172/VA 56).

Heidegger quotes Heisenberg, who seeks to write ‘one single fundamental equation from which the properties of all elementary particles, and therewith the behaviour of all matter whatever, follow” (SR 172/VA 57).4 Heisenberg’s method is therefore not for Heidegger distinct from Galileo’s. It is in fact more Galilean than Galileo, for if Galileo proceeds on the basis of universal a priori hypotheses, Heisenberg seeks the ultimate such hypothesis. What has not changed in quantum theory is that “nature has in advance to set itself in place for the entrapping securing that science, as theory, accomplishes” (SR 172—73/VA 57). Both Newtonian physics and quantum theory have their essence in the essence of technology: Ge-stell. CONCLUSION

Hence one might wish to ask Heidegger if he holds that the modern epoch is over. On the one hand, it is no longer science but rather technology that is the essential determination of the age and of human being in the late twentieth century. Yet technology is not essentially different from science in Heidegger’s account. His diagnosis and critique of technology began as early as the 1940 lecture course on European nihilism. His anticipation of the global dominion of technology has proven astute. The question remains: Does human being stand at the cusp of an epoch? Heidegger argues that science and technology belong to4 Heidegger is quoting Heisenberg 1948:98.

292 HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

gether essentially, such that the modern epoch is the age of science and technology. Under this account, the postmodern is not novel, but simply a devolved and quintessential modernity. In 1976 Heidegger raised the following question during his last public address: “Is modern natural science the foundation of modern technology—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 realized and organized machinations of modern technology?” (MNST 3). An account of the development of Heidegger’s thinking over the sixty years from 1916 until his death in 1976 answers this question: Modern natural science is already the basic form of technological thinking. Science shares its es-

sence with technology such that technological representation, Ge-stell, can intervene in modern technology. Science is not simply the foundation of modern technology, but rather its essence and origin.

Heidegger himself comes to this view only after long and careful struggle with the question of science. He began with two theses: that philosophy is a science, and that natural science is

the mathematical projection of nature. Through resisting neoKantianism, Heidegger began an extensive critique of subjectivity which led him to reject both Kantian idealism and the former of his two theses. He developed the second thesis by reflecting on the experimental method, and discovered therein that the thesis characterizes modern, not ancient, science. Looking back to ancient philosophy, he confirmed his rejection of subjectivist metaphysics by thinking being as the a priori, that which is prior in understanding. The thesis that modern science is the mathematical projection of nature remained with Heidegger and from 1950 onward informed his account of technology. Ge-stell, in fact, captures precisely the notion of projection at work in Heidegger’s account of modern science, such that he argues that science and technology are essentially one. His critique of science is the background against which his understanding of the history of metaphysics unfolds. Heidegger’s analysis of the projection at the core of science leads him from basic concepts to representation to Ge-stell. It is a development that flourishes as a critique of representational

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 253 thinking’s determination of modernity. The pre-Socratic experi-

ence of nature witnesses the possibility for other human rela-

tions to nature than a reductive appropriation of nature as resource. Heidegger can be put into a dialogue with the analytic

tradition of science concerning issues about the nature and method of scientific theory and practice. Furthermore, the contemporary environmental crisis suggests that the significance of Heidegger’s thinking to philosophy of science is to raise such questions as, for example, who determines what is worth knowing? how do science and technology underwrite the human rela-

tion to nature reductively? and to establish a tomoc for envisioning other possibilities for science. Thinking through Heidegger’s philosophy of science is preparation for an ecological ethic. Heidegger’s philosophy of science has its roots in the philosophical project of securing the sciences upon a certain foundation. The collapse of this Enlightenment project is the anti-realist recognition that understanding is always hermeneutic, that science is always interpretive. Heidegger’s questions are therefore of the limits and possibilities for such interpretation. Questions concerning science run so deeply in Heidegger’s thinking that

their significance is not easy to see. I have argued that issues pertaining to science lie behind Heidegger’s rejection of metaphysics, his entanglement with the university, his nostalgia for the Greeks, and his critique of modernity. I have further shown that Heidegger’s thinking can be put constructively into dialogue with the analytic tradition of philosophy of science. I do not believe that I have said all there is to be said on such topics in Heidegger’s thinking. Rather, I hope to have awakened in others an interest in Heidegger’s philosophy of science.

BLANK PAGE

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INDEX abandonment, 19, 28 Aristotle / Aristotelian, 7-11, 35, acceleration, 53, 57, 70, 86 39, 43, 54, 57, 59, 62, 65-67, 69, actuality, 10, 20, 49, 93, 125, 165, 75, 83-86, 90, 93-95, 99, 101-2, 179-81, 183-84, 191-93, 195, 109, 114, 120, 126, 131, 157, 161-

197-99, 203, 235 66, 168-70, 172, 177, 179-207,

aether, 70, 79-82, 107 211, 218, 221, 223, 225, 229-31, “Age of the World Picture, The,” 234-35, 238, 242-43, 246, 249 1, 52, 59, 63, 68, 70-73, 85, 92, artifact, 10-11, 179-81, 192, 197,

94, 109-17, 138, 142, 152-55, 200-204, 218 170-72, 207-8, 213, 219-20 axiom/axiomatic, 58-59, 63, 85 Alderman, H., 108 analogy of being, 10, 165, 170, Bacon, EF, 6, 74, 78, 85, 87, 102, 208

179-84 Ballard, E. G., 103

analytic judgments, 40, 48-49 Basic Concepts, 144, 157, 217 analytic philosophy /analytic phi- basic concepts, 3, 5-6, 15, 87-88, losophers, 3-5, 9-10, 70-72, 76— 247, 252 77,79, 83, 87, 104, 117, 253 Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 9, ancient science, 8, 10, 51, 91, 96, 14-18, 20-30, 40, 45-47, 49, 52-

109-10, 162-63, 252 53, 112, 117, 120, 125-29, 135, Anima, De, 187-88, 190 140, 146-48, 152, 205, 210-11, anthropology /anthropological, 240, 247-48

20, 37-38 Basic Works of Aristotle, The, 189, Antigone, 17 197 Antiphon, 191-92, 195, 198, 202, Basic Writings, 96, 113, 136, 147,

204 167-68, 178, 186, 221, 237, 242 anti-realism/anti-realist, 68-69, Beaufret, J., 136, 147 71, 253 becoming-present/presence/

anxiety, 38-39, 128-31 presences, 11, 17, 20, 32, 39, 67, a priori, 5-6, 9, 17, 19, 28-29, 35- 116, 126, 164, 168, 174, 178, 186, 36, 39-41, 45, 47-50, 102, 105, 198-99, 212-13, 231, 234-36 116, 170, 207, 209, 218-19, 238, ““Bedrohung der Wissenschaft,

240, 246, 251-52 Die,” 103, 148-53, 216-17, 226,

Aristoteles’ Metaphysik [X.1—3, 245

182-83, 196 being, 2, 6-11, 14, 16-20, 23-25,

268 INDEX 28-35, 38-42, 44-47, 49, 55-56, 93, 107, 113-14, 200, 202, 230, 60-64, 66-70, 83, 100, 103, 116-— 235, 238, 243, 245

17, 120, 125-38, 140, 144, 149, circular motion, 57 155-57, 163-65, 167—70, 172-73, cogito, 6, 61, 63, 113, 115, 171, 227

175-80, 183, 185-86, 195, 199, Cooper, L., 73-74, 101

202-5, 209-11, 214, 217-18, Copernican revolution, 30-32, 38,

220-22, 225-31, 236-37, 242, 41—47

247, 252 Cornford, E, 187 “Being and Conception of mvotc Corrington, R. S., 163 in Aristotle’s Physics B.1, On Critique of Judgement, 24, 146 the,” 174-75, 179-81, 185, 189, Critique of Pure Reason, 9, 19, 27,

191-93, 195-200, 202-5, 230 31-32, 35-40, 42-44, 48-50, 60, Being and Time, 1-2, 7-9, 11, 14, 63, 72, 138 16-18, 20-21, 25-30, 34, 38-39, crucial experiments, 3, 9, 70, 73-

42-47, 49, 53, 55-56, 60-61, 64, 84, 250 70, 83, 87, 90, 93, 95-99, 107-8,

120-23, 125, 127-28, 133, 135- , 36, 147-48, 152, 164-67, 169-70, na een ee GL OF ion 172, 174, 177, 182, 210-11, 215, nm amy An aan an

217, 225, 236, 246 122, 126-34, 136-40, 143, 146, Beitriige, 45, 68, 70-72, 75-76, 78, 148, 167-68, 170-71, 227, 287

83-86, 90-96, 98-99, 101, David, F-, 120

104-7, 114, 116, 141-42, 224 death, 128-29, 145 Bell’s inequalities /the Bell in- default of being, 138, 228

equality, 12, 77-78, 88, 250 Denken, 8, 162

Bergoffen, D,, 129 Descartes, R., 18, 23, 2/7, 59, 61-63, Bernasconi, R., 147 68-69, 107, 113, 115, 135, 171, Besinnung, 2, 108, 151, 162, 232, 208, 219-20

237, 239 destiny, 7, 10, 120-21, 131-34,

Betrachtung, 103 136-41, 143-44, 146, 151, 153, Betriebscharakter, 10, 119, 137, 155-56, 168, 225

161 Duhem, P,, 77-78

Blair, G., 193-94

Bohr, N., 248-50 Early Greek Thinking, 174, 223, 236 Brentano, EF, 10, 180, 183-84 ecology /ecological, 163, 253 Eignung, 201

Caelo, De, 101 Einftihrung in die Metaphysik, 44calculation, 108-9, 111, 142 45, 67, 100, 114, 124, 132, 158,

Caputo, J., 1-2, 98 170, 173, 175-77, 178, 185, 199,

Carnap, R., 42 212, 230

Cartesian Meditations, 23 Einstein, 82

cause/causes/causation, 7, 33,50, empirical/empiricism, 7, 21, 42,

INDEX 269 48-50, 71, 84, 87-92, 94, 96, 96, 101-2, 116, 127, 136-37,

101-2, 105, 224 145-46, 188-89, 191, 199, 208,

“End of Philosophy and the Task 212, 224, 235 of Thinking, The,” 220, 237 experiment/experimentation/

environment/environmental, experimental, 6, 8-9, 53-54, 59,

163, 206, 253 64—66, 68-88, 90-91, 93-97, 99,

epistemology /epistemological, 101-2, 104-7, 109, 111-15, 117-

190 247, 250, 252

23-24, 28, 30-32, 42, 44, 62, 65, 18, 141, 154, 224, 239, 243-44, epoch, 7, 11, 63, 67, 69, 91,93, 109, extantness, 27—28 111, 115, 117, 132-33, 137-38, 154, 207, 209, 211, 213-15, 220, _facticity, 132, 167

225-26, 228-30, 232, 238-39, Farias, V., 120

241-42, 246, 251-52 fate, 133, 137, 141 epoché, 18, 20, 23, 68 Ferry, L., 120

Ereignis, 192 Feyerabend, P. K., 65, 68, 76 errancy, 38, 148, 167 finitude, 37-39, 41, 44, 128

essence /essences, 33, 76, 83-85, form, 11, 179, 181-82, 186, 190-93,

93-94, 110, 114-15, 132, 134, 195, 198-205, 221 139-40, 144-45, 147, 149, 155, Frage nach dem Ding, Die, 9, 14, 17-

158-59, 164, 166, 170, 176, 178, 19, 40-41, 46-47, 49-53, 56-59,

205-7, 209, 212-15, 217, 233, 61-64, 70-72, 84, 86-88, 92-94,

239-40, 242, 246 100-101, 104, 107, 111, 114, 138, essence of science, 1-3, 5-10, 12, 171, 210, 224, 247-48 53, 58, 63-64, 67, 69, 71-73, 141, Franklin, U., 160 144—46, 152, 157-58, 205-7, 209, free/freedom, 96, 122, 159, 170-71 211, 213-15, 219, 222-23, 232- free-fall, 19, 53-54, 70, 75, 82-83,

33, 241, 245-47, 250, 252 101

essence of technology, 5, 7, 12,64, Fundamental Concepts of Metaphys-

67, 71-72, 157, 206-7, 209-10, ics, The, 15, 19, 66 213-14, 219, 222-23, 225-26, fundamental ontology, 6, 14, 16,

232, 240-41, 243, 245-47, 25, 33-34 251-52

“Essence of Truth, On the,” 31, Galileo, 3, 5-6, 9, 14, 18-19, 51, 38-39, 96, 113, 123, 129-30, 53-54, 56-58, 60-61, 64-65, 69— 137-38, 167, 170, 227, 236, 241 71, 73-75, 82-86, 94, 102, 109,

essentia, 67, 175, 211-12 114, 162, 244, 249, 251

168, 188 192, 201 existentia, 67, 175, 211-12 Geisteswissenschaft, 3

existence, 26—28, 67, 129-33, 138, | Geeignete, das/Geeignetheit, die,

experience, 23, 37, 40-41, 47-49, geometry, 9 52, 71-72, 76, 83-84, 86-88, 90-— Gesamtausgabe, 4, 20, 88, 175

2/0 INDEX Ge-stell, 3, 5, 207, 209, 214, 240, 22, 230-31, 234, 236, 245-46,

242-46, 249-52 252

gravity, 74-75 History of the Concept of Time, 18, Great Instauration, 74, 102 20, 24, 28

Greeks, the, 12, 41, 45, 50-52, 66, Hofstadter, 23 68, 109, 114, 116, 140, 143, 158, | Hodlderlin, 215 163, 169, 172, 174, 178, 184-85, —_ Holzwege, 52, 59, 71, 92, 94, 109-16,

196, 199, 204, 211, 220-21, 229, 138, 142, 153-55, 171-72, 207-8,

231, 233-34, 236, 238, 253 210, 213, 220

Grene, M., 42-44 horizon, 39, 44, 98, 126-27, 175 ground/grounding, 6,9,14,16- — Husserl, E., 5-6, 18-25, 31, 88, 19, 25, 29, 31-34, 38-42, 53, 62- 217, 227 64, 98, 100, 105, 110, 115, 125,

iy oe ee 149, 206-7, idealism, 5-6, 8-9, 28, 30, 41-42,

canter 1 $5, 872,05 5,1 Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, Die, 14, 09-93 ‘ coe

15, 66 ’

Griinder, K., 4, 12, 69 Ideen, 23 Grundprobleme der Phinomenologie, imagination, 36-38, 44

Die, 15, 22-24, 26-30, 46, 52-53, noe /law of inertia, 57—58, 73,

| sae 25, 146-47, 152, 211, Introduction to Metaphysics, 14, 17, 41, 43-46, 67-68, 99-100, 107,

; 114, 116, 124-25, 132, 135, 158, ee ee 164-65, 170, 172-73, 175-78,

Hanson. NR. 104 185, 199, 212, 218, 229-30, 234

Har ding S 123 intuition, 36-38 Harries, K. 120 irruption, 99, 124 Heelen, P, 2, 122—23, 150

Hegel, G. W. E, 18, 120,125,128, Kant, L, 5, 8-9, 18-19, 23-28, 30—

130, 135 91, 55, 60, 62-63, 72, 90, 125,

Heidegger Studies, 108 135, 138, 228, 252

Heisenberg, W., 247-48, 251 Kant and the Problem of MetaphysHeraclitus, 100, 158, 163-65, 173, ics, 25, 31-38, 43, 46, 49-50

174—75, 177, 179, 185 Kant und das Problem der Metaphyhistory, 4, 14, 26, 39, 53, 61, 65-69, sik, 19, 31-38, 49 74,77, 89-91, 94,98, 103,110—- “Kehre, Die,” 141 11, 115, 121, 123, 133-37, 140, Kettering, E., 120 143, 152-53, 156, 160, 168-69, Kisiel, T., 2, 5, 50-51 177-79, 181-82, 185, 187, 204, Kockelmans, J., 18, 104, 215, 248 206, 208, 210-11, 215-16, 221- Kuhn, T., 3, 7, 15, 65, 68, 81-82,

INDEX 2/1 87—88, 90, 94, 109, 122, 139, 142, mathesis universalis, 63

208, 244-45 matter, 11, 55, 78-79, 87, 145, 149, 179-82, 186, 188-93, 195,

Lakatos, I., 65, 68, 77, 79, 90, 109, 198-205

122, 139, 160 McNeill, W., 16-17, 70

language, 13, 127, 136, 156, 164— measurement/measuring, 52, 59,

65, 171, 174-75, 177, 198 81, 92-94, 122, 249-50 law of gravity, 55-56 Meditations on First Philosophy, 62, law of motion/laws of motion, 19, 69, 227

58 metaphysica generalis, 35

laws /lawfulness, 19, 21, 54-58, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic,

64, 73, 87, 94, 102, 134, 155 The, 16, 23, 32-33, 44, 233

laws of nature, 21, 54, 56 metaphysica specialis, 35 Leibniz, G. W,, 26, 59, 135 Metaphysics, 39, 131, 166, 169, 177, “Letter on Humanism,” 147, 177 181-82, 185-89, 194-95, 199,

Llewellyn, J., 163 201, 203-5

logic, 2-3, 8-9, 24, 32, 37-38, 66- metaphysics, 2-3, 5-6, 8-9, 12-13, 67, 69, 72, 79, 90, 101, 134, 163, 14—20, 25-28, 30-35, 37, 39-42,

166, 206, 245 44-46, 49, 60-68, 84, 90, 113,

“Logic,” 172, 174 117, 121, 125, 134-37, 149, 154,

Logical Investigations, 20 156-57, 161-64, 168-69, 175, “Logos,” 174, 223, 229 178-80, 183, 185-87, 193, 195-—

Logos, 21 98, 204—5, 207-8, 210-11, 213, Lovitt, W., 103, 232 221-22, 252-53

Lowith, K., 178 Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Lugones, M. C., 148 Logik, 16, 23, 32-33, 44, 233 metontology, 16-17

Macomber, W. B., 214, 235 Michelson, A. A., 80-81

Macquarrie, J., 167 Michelson-Morley experiment,

Manheim, R., 100, 114 70, 79, 81-83

Marburg school, 24, 42 modernity, 1-2, 11, 66—69, 90-91, mathematical, the, 5, 9, 14, 17, 19, 102, 118, 120-21, 123-24, 13350-53, 56, 59-64, 72, 92, 108, 34, 136-38, 140, 161, 163, 180,

111 184, 206-10, 213-16, 227-28,

mathematical projection of na- 231, 246, 252 ture, 1,3, 9, 14, 16-19, 51-60, 64, ““Modern Natural Science and

69-72, 75, 92-93, 97, 99, 246, Technology,” 4, 11, 241, 252-53

249-50, 252 “Modern Science, Metaphysics

mathematics /mathematical, 3, 8, and Mathematics,” 51-52, 56— 12, 53, 55, 62, 64, 101, 111, 141, 63, 70-72, 84, 86-87, 92-93, 101,

147, 157, 161, 186-87, 208, 107, 114, 171

216-17 Moody, E. A., 73, 85

272 INDEX motion, 19, 54, 57-58, 101, 110, object, 6, 8, 18-19, 21, 25-27, 31-

113-14, 126, 186-88, 195-96, 32, 36-37, 40-41, 46-47, 56, 63, 203, 230-31, 243, 245, 249-51 68, 78, 95, 98, 107, 109-11, 113,

Motu, De, 73 115-16, 124, 134, 137, 142, 150,

154, 166, 168, 190, 217-19, 223-

Nationa socialism /Socialist, 10, 24, 226, 228, 231-32, 238, 240,

, — 243, 245, 247-49, 251

nature, 6-8, 10~12, 24, 26, 39, 41, objectivity, 21, 23, 29, 41, 75, 92, 55-59, 67-68, 70-76, 87-88, 92-— 98-99, 102, 121-22, 136, 143,

09“Oy if ab te~bik 227, 231, 236, 239, 241, by209, y y223, , 246 Pe ee Ten eT IRA Re hae observation, 9, 70-73, 34, 91, 93-

J J OF, Os s 96, 98, 103-5, 238

soa. . oon 39 on 35820 “Only a God Can Save Us,” 145,

ed , a ees 149, 158

Naneewissensenan eee aa ontological difference, 29, 125, or 129, 144, 210, 217, 229, 237 Nazi ern my eh Tee oe ontology /ontological, 6, 14, 16,

Neco eske, G.oO oe 18-19, 23, 25-35, 43, 45, 47, 97,

pe 120, 130-31, 147, 166

Newton, L, 3, 5-6, 8-9, 18-19, 49, “Origin of the Work of Art. The.”

51, 53, 56-60, 64-65, 70-71, 74- yas ans 75, 7/—-/8, 86-87, 94, 101, 114, Ott H. 120

230-31, 243-44, 247—50 er

Nicomachean Ethics, 188, 200, 246 a3 2, 140, 143, 156, 219, Nietzsche, E W,, 131, 134-35, 137,

149, 156, 164, 210, 220

Nietzsche, 69, 121, 131, 134-37, paradigm, 3, 15, 65, 68, 87-88, 109, 142, 150, 155-57, 164, 168,175- _ 122, 209, 227, 231

76, 210, 220, 225, 244-45 Parmenides, 163-67, 173, 176, 178,

Nietzsche I, 142 185, 228-29, 236

Nietzsche II, 131, 134-37, 150, 156- Parts of Animals, The, 200, 246

57, 168, 210, 220 Pathmarks, 170, 176-77

nihilism, 69, 120-21, 131, 133-38, Perception, 27, 125, 146, 187-88,

156-57, 164, 175-77, 210, 213, 190 220, 226, 228, 245, 251 phenomenology /phenomeno“Nihilism as Determined by the logical, 5-6, 16, 18, 20-23, 25, History of Being,’ 135-37, 168, 28, 47, 95-97, 100, 102, 108, 163,

710 169-70, 182, 205-7, 210

Nolte, E., 120 “Philosophy as Rigorous Scinothing, the, 38-39, 120-21, 124- ence,’ 20-22

26, 128-31, 134-35, 137 philosophy of nature, 163-64 Novum Organum, 74, 78 philosophy of science, 1, 3-5, 12-

INDEX 27/3 13, 65, 72, 98, 121-22, 163, 166, —_ projection, 5-8, 14-17, 51-53, 55-

253 59, 63-64, 70, 72, 96, 98, 104,

Physics, 7, 11, 67, 101, 126, 169, 110-11, 142, 207, 209, 213, 241,

172-73, 177, 179-82, 184-86, 246, 252 188-90, 192-93, 195, 198-99, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des

201-6, 211, 230, 234, 243 Zeitbegriffs, 20, 24 physics, 3,5, 19, 31-32, 34, 47, 49, pure, 48—50 53-56, 58, 60-61, 64, 68-69, 71, Putnam, H., 105 73, 84-85, 92, 101-2, 107, 11112, 117, 119, 141, 154, 161, 165, quantum theory /quantum phys-

Me 30. a oan. 50 a aa ics /quantum mechanics, 3, 8,

/ ’ / ’ 12, 77-78, 85, 87-88, 114, 122—

246-48, 250-51 23, 209, 244, 247-51

Pisa, 73-74, 86 “Question Concerning Technol-

Be ee te os 5 ogy, The,” 104, 108, 112, 141, Plato, 8, 29, 51, 60, 67, 115-16, 121, x te 206-9, 212, 230, 232,

134-35, 164, 169, 171, 175-77, ;

186. 193. 212. 230. 236 Question Concerning Technology “Plato's Doctrine of Truth,”’ 67, and Other Essays, The, 112, 141,

170, 176-77 143, 154, 186, 212, 214-15, 230,

Plumwood, V., 163 241-46

Poetry, Language, and Thought, 186 Popper, Sir Karl, 65 ready-to-hand /readiness-toPorter, J. S., 144 hand, 55, 61, 97, 121 position, 27, 30-31, 40, 49, 58,125, teal, 26-27, 89, 104-7, 125, 202,

227, 234, 239, 250 223-24, 232, 234-38, 242-43,

positive sciences, 15, 25-29, 31- 250-51

34, 63, 147, 152 realism/realist, 4, 6, 9, 69, 71, 76,

Posterior Analytics, 188 78, 84-85, 88-90, 104-5, 164, potentiality, 10, 165, 180, 183-84, 177, 250

191, 192-94, 197-98, 201 “Realitatsproblem in der moder-

presence / presences /becoming- nen Philosophie, Das,” 4, 88-89 present, 11, 17, 20, 32, 39,67, _—‘reality, 26-27, 69, 83, 104-8, 135,

116, 126, 164, 168, 174, 178, 186, 232, 235 198-99, 212-13, 231, 234-36 reason, 37, 50, 173, 175, 200, 230,

present-at-hand, 61, 97, 132, 168 249

Principia, 70, 74, 86 recoil, 16 Principle of Reason, The, 249 “Rectoral Address,” 139-40 production, 67, 180, 182, 190, “Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and 202-3, 205, 211, 218-19, 221, Thoughts, The,” 145, 149, 158

227, 241-42 reflection, 8, 103, 119, 121, 131,

274. INDEX 136, 143, 146, 151, 161-62, 206, Seigfried, H., 182 216, 228-29, 232, 237, 239-40 Sein und Zeit, 15, 20, 26-30, 34, regional ontology, 5-6, 14-15, 17— 55-56, 61, 83, 87, 96-98, 107,

18, 22, 25, 29, 32-34, 63, 108, 127-33, 136, 147, 166-67, 169112, 130, 147, 217, 224, 227, 240 70, 172, 215, 217

Rektoratsrede, 103, 120-21, 131, “Selbstbehauptung der deutschen 139, 143, 145-46, 150, 157-58, Universitat, Die,” 139-41, 143-

161 45, 158

relativity, 82 “Self-Assertion of the German Renault, A., 120 University, The,” 139-41, 143repeatability, 76-77, 82 45, 158 representation, 1, 8-10, 36, 46, 48, — sensation, 50, 89

65, 68, 71-72, 105-7, 112, 116- Sheehan, T., 120, 182 18, 153-54, 163, 190, 206, 226, Sherover, C. M., 43

228, 239-41, 249, 252 Shmuéli, E., 214

representational thinking, 6, 12— space, 53-54, 56, 64, 114, 248 13, 29, 46, 65-66, 68, 113, 117-— specialization, 103, 142-43, 148,

18, 121-22, 163, 176-77, 184, 152-54, 238 191, 206, 209, 214, 218, 222-24, — Sniegel, Der, 144, 149

226-28, 231, 237, 241, 246-47, Spelman, E., 148

252-53 standing-reserve, 7, 209, 241-43,

research, 6, 10, 71, 79-81, 94, 97, 945-46

110-13, 116, 133, 138, 141-42, Structure of Scientific Revolutions,

152-53, 159-60 The, 87,90, 109

Resnick, R., 80 subjectivity /subjectivism, 2, 7, 41,

resource, 206, 241, 247, 253 42, 44, 63, 65, 68, 115, 154, 164Richardson, W. J., 1, 4, 69, 186, 247 65, 170, 952

rigor, 92, 71, 92, 110-11, 113 substance, 183, 187-88, 195, 198

Robinson, E., 167 synthesis, 36-37, 39-40, 44, 49,

Robinson, T. M., 100 171, 185

Rossant, M. J., 159-60 synthetic a priori judgments, 35— Sache des Denkens, Zur, 221, 237 42, 47, 48-49

Sallis, J., 51 synthetic judgments, 40-41 Schelling, 146

Schmidt, D., 190 technology, 1, 4-5, 7-9, 11-13, 64, Schrynemakers, 11 66-67, 72, 81, 84, 97, 104, 108, “Science and Reflection,” 1, 15, 117, 121, 141, 144, 154-55, 157, 58, 71, 102-4, 106-8, 123, 140- 159, 163-65, 177, 184, 205, 207-

41, 143, 151, 161, 207, 209, 213—- 10, 212-15, 222-26, 230, 232-33,

14, 217, 232-40, 249-51 240-47, 249, 251-53 scientific method, 9, 66, 70, 72,75, temporality, 16, 29, 30, 44, 120,

85, 102, 111, 118, 208, 249 126-29

INDEX 2/5 thank/thanking, 224, 226-27,229 understanding, 37-39, 41-42, 44-

Thayer, H. S., 57, 74, 77-78 45, 48, 50, 58, 75, 99-100, 109, theoretical attitude, 14, 16, 26, 53, 116, 120, 125-26, 129, 164, 168—

55-56, 60-61, 70, 83, 97-99, 69, 171, 182, 195, 198, 224, 244,

121-22, 210 246-47

theory / theoretical, 3, 9, 30-31, 35, university, 8, 10, 38, 119-24, 129, 62, 65-66, 69, 70-71, 74-75, 79- 132-33, 137-40, 142-46, 148—

82, 95, 99, 102-7, 109, 147-48, 55, 158-60, 216, 253 150, 180, 184, 186-87, 189-90, Unterwegs zur Sprache, 213 206, 208, 232, 234, 236-38, 243, . Unumgangliche, das, 15, 141, 217,

245, 249, 251, 253 238

thinking, 3, 7-8, 12-13, 47, 89, 108, Unverborgenheit, 167, 241

120-21, 137, 143, 145, 161-63, , Lae

169-70, 173, 178, 182, 184, 209, arent thinking, 134-35, 156— All, 214, 216-19, 221-32, 234, value/valuable, 8, 120-21, 134-

237-99, 241, 292-93 35, 142-43, 148, 155-57, 159-60

threat, 148, 155, 159, 225-26, 245 Vick CG. 43 co ’ time, 14, 39, 52—56, 59, 64, 69-70, Vi ott, a, S. 115-16

14, 120, 126-28, 182, 246 violence/violent, 96, 99, 100-102,

Time and Being, On, 133 104, 107-9, 136 ,

vronevenddence /transcendental von Weizsacker, C. F, 248 D825 31 39, 95 #2, aks, 50, VE und Ate 15, 102-8

HLS, 127, 169, 170-72, 177 161, 174, 186, 212, 217, 223, 230, transcendental idealism, 3, 50, 173 233-39, 941— 46, 949-5] transcendental subject/transcendental subjectivity, 28, 31, 35, Was heifst Denken?, 13, 46, 117, 123,

43-45, 55, 165, 169, 170-72 161, 172, 174, 210, 214-29, 231, truth, 2, 13, 24, 31-33, 43, 64, 66, 234, 240 69, 83, 96, 102, 104, 113, 128, Way to Language, On the, 213 135-36, 143, 145, 148-49, 164— Weber,S., 104 67, 169, 170-71, 173, 175-77, Wegmarken, 38-39, 96, 99, 110, 113, 179, 185, 198, 213, 219-20, 236-— 122, 124—25, 129-30, 133, 136,

37, 242 138-39, 143, 147, 170, 174, 176—

Tuana, N., 123 77, 180, 185, 189, 191-92, 195-— “Turning, The,” 141 96, 198-200, 202-5, 218 Twentieth Century Fund, 159-61 | Welch, C., 214

Two New Sciences, 57, 114 Weltanschauung, 5, 21-22, 24 Wesen, 76, 93, 150, 212

Umschlag, 16 ““Wesen der Wahrheit, Vom,’’ unconcealment, 96, 153, 165, 167— 167-68, 178, 227, 242 69, 175-77, 185, 198, 210, 236, What Is Called Thinking?, 1, 13, 16,

241-42, 246 46, 58, 117, 123, 152, 161, 172,

276 INDEX 174, 207, 209-10, 214-29, 231- Wolin, R., 120

34, 238-40 world, 8, 15, 43-44, 55, 68, 85, 88— “What Is Metaphysics?,”” 38-39, 89, 100, 102-3, 106-8, 112-17, 42,46, 99, 107, 110, 120-22, 124— 124, 127, 130, 132, 136-37, 14625, 129-33, 135-36, 138-39, 143, 47, 153, 158, 167, 217, 219, 221,

145, 150, 185 233, 246-47

“What Is Metaphysics?: Post- worldview / world-view, 22, 24—

script,” 108, 218, 221 25, 83, 146-50, 153, 215

Wheeler, J., 250

Wiener, E., 250 Young, J., 120 Wissenschaft, 3, 90, 103, 148-50,

152—53, 216-17, 226, 232-33, “Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswis-

245 senschaft, Der,’” 1-2, 14, 53-56, withdrawal of being, 17-18, 136— 69, 84, 86, 93

38, 168, 210, 222, 228-29 Zurek, W., 250

INDEX OF GREEK EXPRESSIONS ayabov, 134 Oedota, 103, 157, 186-87, 189, 208, CYEWLETONTOS UNdEic E€oitw, 60 238

aitia, 230, 235 Oewmoetv, 102-3, 236-38 aANOEta, 96, 165, 167-68, 170, 172,

174-76, 179, 185, 205, 236,241 idea, 67, 116, 134, 164-66, 173-76,

Adi Get, 236-37 205, 212 GELOM, GEvOuwata, 58

amoota, 26, 183 “LVIOLs, xLvOELs, 195, 203 Cox, Govat, 200, 202, 235 “xolvetv, 176, 229 atedeic, 203 Aéveuv, 165, 172, 174, 179, 229, 231

Bia, 101-2, 104 Moyos, 164-65, 170-77, 179, 187, Biog Bewonttixdc, 143, 185, 236-37 225, 229

véveoic, 195, 200, 203 ta wabnuata, 51-53, 59 uetaBoAn, 195

SvUvaet Ov, viii, 181, 191-92, WET TA TPVOLKG, 34

196-97 uinnotc, 190 Suvaics, 57, 196-98, 201 uoegr, 199 SUVALLS KATO Xivnotv, 197

voetv, 231

eidoc, 115, 165, 173-75, 179, 199-

200, 203, 219, 223, 230, 236 0000, 236-37 éumerota, 9, 85, 90-91, 94 ovoia, 179, 183-84, 197-99, 204

254 maoaderyua, 203

EVEOYVELA, EveoyEetac, 193-99, 235,

evteAeyeta, 193-98, 235, 254 mimtetwv, 101

emtotryun, 110, 233 mtOoEewoc, 100

goyov, 193 motnous, 186, 197, 242 TO WoLoVvMEVa, 51 Bea, 236-37 mMOoMic, 143

Béa, 236 TO TOAYUATA, 51

BEotc, 234-35 ModE, 186-87, 189, 208

278 INDEX OF GREEK EXPRESSIONS

MOOG Hv, 182 (~lAoocogia, 62

TEWtY Pirooogia, 62 to puoixd, 51, 53, 175, 187-88,

mt@otic, 101 202, 230, 243 téeuvetv, 103, 238 -VOLG, Viiii, ix, xi, 6, 8, 10-11, 41téxvn, viii, ix, 10-12, 46, 164,169, 172-73, 179-82, 184-93, 195, 179-82, 184, 186-87, 189-93, 198-205, 211, 212, 229-30, 234-— 195, 199-204, 207-8, 211, 218- 35, 238, 258, 260 19, 222-23, 230, 241-42, 246

tomo, 68, 118, 253 to Yorata, 51 umo8eEotc, 234

umoxetwevov, 115, 172, 175 woa, 236-37