The Enigma of Health

The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age

Hans-Georg Gadamer

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745694283
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della filosofia

In this book Gadamer discusses the transformations in human self-understanding, focusing on the achievements of modern medicine.

1

Theory, Technology, Praxis

The Change in the Meaning of Theory

‘There is no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.’ This famous beginning of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason surely holds too for the knowledge we possess of human beings. To begin with this includes the sum total of the ever progressing results of natural scientific research, which we call ‘Science’. But then there is the empirical knowledge of so-called practice that everyone accumulates in the midst of life – the doctor, cleric, educator, judge, soldier, politician, worker, employee, official. Not only in the professional sphere but also in everyone’s private and personal existence the experience that people develop out of the encounter with themselves and their fellow human beings continually grows. Beyond the domain of this experience, furthermore, there is that vast wealth of knowledge which flows towards each and every human being in the transmission of human culture – poetry, the arts as a whole, philosophy, historiography and the other historical sciences. To be sure, such knowledge is ‘subjective’, that is, largely unverifiable and unstable. It is, nevertheless, knowledge that science cannot ignore. As such, a rich tradition of this knowledge exists from time immemorial, from the days of Aristotle’s ‘practical philosophy’ to the Romantic and post-Romantic age of the so-called Geisteswissenschaften or human sciences. In contrast to the natural sciences, however, all these other sources of experience have a common quality: what we learn from them becomes experience only when actually integrated into the practical consciousness of acting human beings.

In this regard scientific experience possesses a unique status. The experience that can be validated as certain by the scientific method has the distinction of being in principle absolutely independent of any situation of action and of every integration into the context of action. This ‘objectivity’ conversely implies that it is able to serve every such possible context. It is precisely this ‘objectivity’ which was so quintessentially realized in modern science and which transformed broad expanses of the face of the earth into an artificial human environment. Now the experience which has been reworked by the sciences has, indeed, the merit of being verifiable and acquirable by everyone. But then, in addition, it raises the claim that on the basis of its methodological procedure it is the only certain experience, hence the only mode of knowing in which each and every experience is rendered truly legitimate. What we know from practical experience and the ‘extra-scientific’ domain must not only be subjected to scientific verification but also, should it hold its ground against this demand, belongs by this very fact to the domain of scientific research. There is in principle nothing which could not be subordinated in this manner to the competence of science.

That science not only arises from experience but according to its own methodology can be called ‘experiential’ or, more familiarly, ‘experimental science’ – an expression applicable to science only since the seventeenth century – was also articulated as a principle of modern philosophy. In the nineteenth century it led to the general conviction that people had entered into the age of ‘positive’ science and had left metaphysics behind. This conforms manifestly to philosophical ‘positivism’ in all its varieties, which rejects conceptual construction and pure speculation. But it also applies to those philosophical theories such as the Kantian which expressly point to the a priori elements in all experience. The philosophy of neo-Kantianism thus developed into a systematic theory of experience. The concept of the thing-in-itself, this ‘realistic’ element in the Kantian theory, was rejected by neo-Kantianism – as it was by Fichte and Hegel – as dogmatic, and reinterpreted as a concept marking the limit of the understanding. According to this theory, the object of the understanding poses an ‘endless task’ for definition.¹ An endless task: that is the only epistemologically tenable meaning of givenness and object. This theory has the decided merit of demonstrating the hidden dogmatism of the sensualist foundation of knowledge. The so-called givenness of perception is not given at all but presents knowledge with its task. The only ‘fact’ that merits this name is the fact of science.

There were, to be sure, extratheoretical spheres of validity, such as the aesthetic, which demanded recognition and thus brought forth within the neo-Kantian theory of knowledge the theme of the irrational. But that made for no change in the systematic restriction of all empirical knowledge to scientific experience. Nothing which is capable of being experienced can remain withdrawn from the competence of science. If we encounter anything unpredictable, accidental, contrary to expectations, the claim of the universality of science remains uncontestable for these things as well. What seems to be something irrational is, in the eyes of the scientist, a phenomenon on the frontier of science; this is how phenomena appear on that border where science finds applications to practice. What occurs in practice as the unexpected and mostly undesirable consequences of the application of science is seen as something altogether different from the irreducible irrationality of chance. According to the essential character of science, this presents nothing more than a task for further research. The progress of science is sustained by its continual self-correction. And practice which is based on the application of science likewise requires that science further and further improve, by continual self-correction, the reliability of the expectations placed upon it.

But what does practice in the above sense mean? Is the application of science as such practice? Is all practice the application of science? Even if the application of science enters into all practice, the two are still not identical. For practice means not only the making of whatever one can make; it is also choice and decision between possibilities. Practice always has a relationship to a person’s ‘being’. This is reflected in the figurative expression, Was machst Du denn?, which does not ask, literally, what are you doing but, rather, how are you? From this point of view an irreducible opposition between science and practice becomes evident. Science is essentially incomplete; whereas practice requires instant decisions. The incompleteness of all experimental science thus means that it not only raises a legitimate claim of universality, by virtue of its readiness to process new experience, but also is not wholly able to make good this claim. Practice requires knowledge, which means that it is obliged to treat the knowledge available at the time as complete and certain. The knowledge known from science, however, is not of this sort. There is thus a fundamental difference between modern science and the premodern aggregate of knowledge, which under the name ‘philosophy’ comprehended all human knowledge. This difference is precisely that what we know from ‘science’ is incomplete and, therefore, can no longer be called a ‘doctrine’. It consists of nothing other than the current state of ‘research’.

One must make clear the full significance of the innovation which came into the world with the experimental sciences and their underlying idea of method. If one contrasts ‘science’ with the whole of that knowledge of former times derived from the heritage of antiquity and which was still dominant throughout the high Middle Ages, it is apparent that the conceptions both of theory and of practice have fundamentally changed. Naturally there was always application of knowledge to practice, as indicated by the very terms ‘sciences’ and ‘arts’ (epistemai and technai). ‘Science’ was after all but the highest intensification of the knowledge that guided practice. It understood itself, however, as pure theoria, that is, as knowledge sought for its own sake and not for its practical significance. It was in the Greek idea of science that the relation between theory in this precise sense and practice first came to a critical point as a problem. While the mathematical knowledge of the Egyptian geometricians or the Babylonian astronomers was nothing other than a store of knowledge that had accumulated out of practice and for practice, the Greeks transformed this know-how and knowledge into a knowledge of principles and thus into demonstrable knowledge which one became aware of to enjoy for its own sake out of, so to speak, a primary curiosity about the world. Out of this spirit arose Greek science and mathematics, as well as the enlightenment of Greek natural philosophy and, despite its essential relation to practice, Greek medicine as well. Here for the first time science and its application, theory and practice, parted ways.

Yet this divergence can hardly be compared to the modern relation between theory and practice, which was formed by the seventeenth-century idea of science. For science is no longer the totality of the knowledge of the world and of humankind, which Greek philosophy, whether as philosophy of nature or as practical philosophy, had elaborated and articulated in the communicative form of language. The foundation of modern science is experience in a wholly new sense. With the idea of the unitary method of the understanding, as formulated by Descartes in his Rules, the ideal of certainty became the standard for all understanding. Only that which could be verified could have validity as experience. In the seventeenth century, experience thus ceased to be a source or starting point of knowledge but became, in the sense of ‘experiment’, a tribunal of verification before which the validity of mathematically projected laws could be confirmed or refuted. Galileo did not happen to acquire the laws of free-falling objects from experience but, as he himself says, they came from conceptual projection: ‘mente concipio,’ that is, ‘I conceive’ – or, more precisely, ‘I project in my mind.’ What Galileo thus ‘projected’ in the idea of a free-falling object was certainly no object of experience: a vacuum does not exist in nature. What he understood, however, precisely by this abstraction were laws within the skein of causal relationships, which are intertwined and cannot be disentangled in concrete experience. The mind isolates the individual relationships and by measuring and weighing determines the exact contribution of each; it thereby opens up the possibility of intentionally bringing out factors of a causal kind. It is thus not altogether wrong to say that modern natural science – without detracting from the purely theoretical interest that animates it – means not so much knowledge as know-how. This means that it is practice.² It would appear to me more correct, however, to say that science makes possible knowledge directed to the power of making, a knowing mastery of nature. This is technology. And this is precisely what practice is not. For the former is not knowledge which, as steadily increasing experience, is acquired from practice, the life situation, and the circumstances of action. On the contrary, it is a kind of knowledge which for the first time makes possible a novel relation to practice, namely, that of constructive projection and application. It is of the essence of its procedure to achieve in all spheres the abstraction which isolates individual causal relationships. This is the unavoidable particularity of its competence which it has to accept as part of the bargain. What in fact emerged, however, was ‘science’, with its new notion of theory as well as practice. This is a true event in the history of humankind, which conferred a new social and political accent on science.

The Impact of Technology on Modern Man

It is thus not for nothing that one calls our present age an age of the sciences. There are above all two grounds on which to justify this assertion. First, the scientific-technical mastery of nature has at this moment acquired proportions which qualitatively differentiate our century from earlier centuries. Science, obviously, has become today the primary productive factor of the human economy. But beyond this its practical application has created what is in principle a new situation. No longer is it limited to the premodern implications of techne, namely, to filling out the possibilities of further development left open by nature (Aristotle). It has moved upward to the level of an artificial counterpart to reality. Formerly, the modification of our environment was due more or less to natural causes, for example, change in climate (the Ice Age), the influence of the weather (erosion, sedimentation, etc.), droughts, formation of swamps and the like. Only occasionally was it due to the intervention of human beings. Such interventions were perhaps the deforestation of woods, which turned into barren lands as a consequence, the extinction of animal species through hunting, the exhaustion of soils through cultivation, the drying up of the resources in the ground as the result of exploitation. These were always more or less irreversible modifications. In such cases, however, mankind either saved itself by finding new places to live or learned to prevent the consequences in due time. As for the rest, the contribution of human labour, of the gatherer, the hunter, or the farmer, brought about no real disturbance to the equilibrium of nature.

Today, however, the technical exploitation of natural resources and the artificial transformation of our environment has become so carefully planned and extensive that its consequences endanger the natural cycle of things and bring about irreversible developments on a large scale. The problem of the protection of the environment is the visible expression of this totalization of technical civilization. Obviously, more significant tasks fall upon the shoulders of science, and it must plead in their behalf before that public consciousness which the effects of our technical civilization are beginning to reach. On the one hand this leads to the emotional blindness with which a mass critique of culture reacts to these phenomena, and it is necessary to avert in time the iconoclasm which threatens from this quarter. On the other hand there is the superstitious faith in science which strengthens the technocratic unscrupulousness with which technical know-how spreads without restraint. In both respects science must carry on a kind of demythologization of itself and indeed by its very own means: critical information and methodical discipline. Issues such as the city, the environment, population growth, the world food supply, problems of the aged, etc., thus justly acquire a privileged place among the scientific themes of our knowledge of man. The atom bomb proves itself more and more to be only a special case of the self-endangering of human beings and their life on this planet to which science has led, and which it has to do its utmost to avert.

Within science itself, however, there is also the threat of a similar danger of self-destruction which arises directly out of the perfection of the modern business of research. The specialization of research has long since moved away from that orientation towards the whole which as late as the eighteenth century still made possible an encyclopedic knowledge. Even in the beginning of our own century there were still enough paths of well-organized information which made it widely possible for the layperson to partake of scientific knowledge and for the researcher to partake in other sciences. Since then, however, the worldwide expansion of research and its increasing specialization have led to a deluge of information which turns against itself. Professional librarians today carefully consider how they should store and administer – and administration means here expansion – the masses of information which increase alarmingly year in and year out. Specialized researchers find themselves in need of an orientation which is similar to that of the layperson in general as soon as they look beyond the most limited range of their area of work. And this is often necessary for the researchers who find themselves no longer able to do justice to the new problems which they take up with the older methods of their own science. It remains altogether necessary for laypeople who for their political action want not only to be guided by prepared information but to form a judgement. In this flood of information the orientation of the layperson is peculiarly mediated and, hence, dependent.

With this we come to the second sphere in which science has become a new kind of factor in human life, and this is its application to the life of society itself. Today the social sciences aspire towards fundamentally altering the practice of human living together that was shaped by traditions and institutions. Science raises the claim – and it does this on the basis of the technical state of civilization today – of putting social life as well on rational foundations and of freeing the unquestionable authority of tradition from taboo. This occurs explicitly in the case of ideological criticism when it seeks to transform social consciousness by emancipatory reflection, seeing repressive compulsions at work in the structure of economic and social authority. More effective yet, however, because it touches each and every one, is the silent form in which more and more areas of human life are subjected to technical domination, where rational automata take the place of the personal decision of individuals and groups.

This represents a fundamental alteration in our life. It is the more remarkable in so far as it is a question less of scientific-technical progress as such than of resolute rationality in the application of science, which overcomes with a new uninhibitedness the durability of custom as well as the restraints present within a ‘world view’. Formerly the consequences opened up for us by the new possibilities of scientific progress remained limited at every step by the norms which prevailed, unquestioned and self-evident, in our cultural and religious tradition. One may perhaps recall what emotions were unleashed in the past by the struggle over Darwinism. It took decades until dispassionate, objective discussion became possible; and even today Darwinism still moves people’s passions. The natural scientific knowledge of Darwin is, of course, today uncontested; but its application to social life remains exposed to manifold objections. Without taking a stand about the question in this case, one may establish as a principle that the application of scientific understanding to areas where what is called today the self-understanding of man is at stake not only often leads to conflict but also necessarily invokes extra-scientific considerations which defend a right of their own.

Thus today one sees science itself in conflict with our human consciousness of value. I am thinking here of the horrifying perspectives which have been developed on the basis of modern genetics pointing to the alteration of heredity and planned breeding. That does not, indeed, have the dramatic power to shock that Darwinism formerly had. It also does not have the horrible obviousness such as that which the use of atomic energy had for the destruction of human life in Hiroshima. But in the consciousness of all researchers the warning has been emerging that they possess a heightened responsibility for the future of mankind.

When we ask ourselves how this general state of our consciousness is reflected in the main positions assumed by present-day students in anthropology and philosophy, the answer is very varied. A certain more or less well-known standpoint still remains the critique of the traditional assertion of the special place of humankind in the cosmos, which in the face of the progress of the natural scientific understanding unmasks itself more and more as a residual prejudice of theology. It enters into the themes of our knowledge of man, wherever the characterization of human beings relative to animals is at issue. This may be precisely the reason why research into behavior today is now enjoying an unaccus...