Heidegger on Science

Trish Glazebrook

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781438442686, 9781438442679
• eBook ISBN: 9781438442693
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Although Martin Heidegger is well known for his work on technology, he is not often discussed in the context of science broadly speaking. This volume is the first to showcase diverse perspectives on Heidegger's assessments of the sciences, looking at a number of different ways that Heidegger's writings contribute to questions concerning how we understand the world through science. With particular attention to quantum theory, natural science, technoscience, and a section devoted specifically to investigating what Being and Time has to say about science, the book will be of interest to scholars in a wide range of disciplines and traditions. It closes with consideration of questions about sustainability and ethics raised by Heidegger's engagement with the sciences.

V

REVISITING BEING AND TIME

HEIDEGGER AND THE EMPIRICAL TURN IN CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Robert P. Crease

The philosophy of technology began with a venerable first generation of thinkers, whose members included Heidegger, Jaspers, Jonas, Ellul, and Marcuse, who carried out the valuable task of pointing out the philosophical suppositions and historical conditions from which modern technology sprang.¹ This, it turned out, was only a first step to the development of a full-fledged philosophy of technology, for the work of this first generation had several shortcomings. One was that it treated technology—rather gloomily—as monolithic: Technology with a capital ‘T’. If the thinkers in this first stage mentioned specific technologies, these were generally invoked in passing as examples. Another shortcoming was that the accounts proved too abstract, sweeping and naïve; different technologies have quite different effects. For these and other reasons, a second generation of philosophers of technology found it necessary to make an empirical turn, and look, not at Technology with a capital ‘T,’ but at the nuances of specific technologies—technologies with a lower-case ‘t’—to chart their concrete development and impact. These thinkers adopted and adapted the tools of the first generation, with the tools changing in the process, giving rise to a more mature philosophy of technology. This process of adapting and transforming what has been historically and culturally transmitted to us in striving to look at the things themselves is how scholarship works.

It is time for something similar to happen to Continentally inspired philosophy of science. The first generation of Continental philosophers who attempted to address science in a comprehensive way—Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty among them—tended to take science as something monolithic, and focused on how science, its attitude and practices, were rooted in the lifeworld. These thinkers often displayed a rather paternalistic and superior attitude toward science, deeming it to be an impoverished form of revealing. This approach had shortcomings. For one thing, it treated science as something monolithic—Science with a capital ‘S’—tending to lump all sciences together. Furthermore, its accounts were often abstract, sweeping, and naïve, lacking contact with how science is actually done. It is time to carry out an empirical turn in Continental philosophy of science, and apply and adapt the tools that have been given us, taking a more nuanced look at specific sciences—with a lower-case ‘s’—and specific practices of these sciences, leaving ourselves open to revising the accounts of the first generation in the process. If we do this, it will give rise to a much more nuanced picture of science than the one Continental thinkers tend to work with at present. It will also allow us to speak about scientific practice in a way that scientists themselves are more likely to recognize and appreciate.

To put it crudely, if we want to do genuine philosophy of science, we cannot keep returning to the words and ideas of the Old Masters. Why should we? They had other interests—and they, too, sometimes nodded.² To keep thinking freshly, we cannot keep articulating what we already have, but have to keep responding to alterity, transforming what we have in the process.

Heidegger, for instance, famously had other interests: Being, the open, the clearing, the manifesting; rather than beings, what was opened up in the clearing, the manifested. He took science seriously, particularly in his earlier writings such as Being and Time, but understood it chiefly as a matter of calculating, predicting, and controlling what has been manifested. “A scientific investigation constitutes itself in the objectification of what has somehow already been unveiled,” he writes in Basic Problems (GA 24, 456/320), which it does by way of mathematical projection. Or, in the Origin of the Work of Art, he writes that science is “not an original happening of truth but always the cultivation of a domain of truth that has already been opened.” Science works by “the apprehension and confirmation” of what shows itself. If in doing so it comes to affect the open, to that extent “it is philosophy.” What interested Heidegger about science during this period was not how specific concepts emerged out of the background of the lifeworld, but how the scientific-theoretical approach tout court emerged out of the background of the lifeworld.

Nevertheless, many of the concepts Heidegger developed en route to the Seinsfrage can be adapted for understanding scientific practice in such an empirical turn. This essay will point to one, formal indication. Although Dreyfus has advanced this concept in playing a role in his so-called “robust realism,”³ my point is that the value of this concept would become much greater still with an empirical turn.

THE EMPIRICAL TURN IN CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Taking the empirical turn in Continental philosophy of science requires a few orienting steps. Step 1 is to note that scientific practice is an ongoing inquiry within a changing situation. Each scientist is historically situated within a particular historical, concept-laden discourse and within a particular historical, technological environment, interpreted according to available historical resources. Moreover, it is not a question of a solitary cognitive subject confronting a specific object or problem, or collection of objects and problems, but of a historical community of living, practically engaged researchers confronting a historical, holistic situation. This generation of researchers in a given field is not only a different community but faces a different situation from the previous generation, and the next.

Simple as this is to state, and as obvious as it may be to the hermeneutically sensitive thinker, it's all too easy to miss when thinking about science history. For then we are reconstructing, looking back at a set of past products and trying to use them to understand a present, self-creating process. It is hard to do so in a way that helps us understand the concrete present, what's happening now, what is driving science forward at this moment. The impulse of that moment is too easily lost, and when it is, we lose the present. When it does, time stops moving, and with it, science. Real science is a force, a pressure, that extends outward. Seeing the vestiges of that force in the past does not necessarily help us to understand it in the present. We can call that force curiosity, ambition, desire to help people, but that's a static conception of science. We edit out this force, and see only the remainders. Science is a process by which new forms, new concepts are created; growth and change, a movement of differentiation, is integral to it. A true philosophy of science has to not just allow for there to be fresh creations, new forms, continuous enrichment of the lifeworld, but to show the drive, pressure by which these are produced as a natural movement in inquiry.

Step 2 is to note that inquiry is spurred by dissatisfaction within that lived situation. Such dissatisfaction takes the form, not merely of discontent, nor of the experience that some knowledge is outstanding—of a lack of understanding. Rather, the dissatisfaction of inquiry is the experience of a collision between our expectations and what we encounter, of the sense that we should understand something that we do not. Dissatisfaction in science arises in many ways. In each case it involves the experience of something outstanding or obscure that, we sense, can and must be brought into the open. Inquiry is a response to this experience, in which we apply what has been historically and culturally transmitted to us in our attempts to transform the dissatisfying situation. We transform the situation in making it our own, so we are more “at home” in it. In Theodore Kisiel's clever phrase, this is the “eigen-function” of research. Yet every clarification does not finalize appearances but brings new dissatisfactions and continued inquiry.

Oliver Heaviside's remark, when he took Maxwell's frustrating and torturous equations and revamped and simplified them, resulting in a huge practical and theoretical advance in the understanding of electromagnetism, that he had inherited something from Maxwell and was simply trying to take what his predecessor had done and “see it clearly”—these words could be said by any genuine researcher, including Maxwell, who took what he had inherited about electricity and magnetism and made it clear for himself.⁴ We see such examples multiplied throughout the history of science. Richard Feynman created his famous diagrams for particle interactions, he said in numerous interviews, because he was confused about what he was hearing and wanted to put it in a form he could understand; now these diagrams has become the inherited way we understand.

The third step involves characterizing such a process of inquiry as hermeneutical. The concepts involved undergo a process of evolution as they are reinterpreted again and again in different research contexts. To understand such a continuously unfolding process, we have to pay attention to this practical process of inquiry, rather than to the beliefs or theories that are its epiphenomena or products. The world is never fully transparent, we always meet it with historically and culturally transmitted assumptions that reveal and conceal. But what appears in the acts of inquiry serves to unearth the presuppositions, expose the assumptions, that are standing in the way of the thing itself, retuning the connections between our expectations and what we encounter, and deepening our engagement.⁵

Step 4 involves identifying the role of technologically mediated experimental performances in this practical process. To pursue this kind of inquiry, it is not sufficient to consult what we already have. It is not enough to read more books or talk to more people—this will not change the situation! To further practical inquiries of science, we have to stage events that show us, that give us back, more than what we put into them. What then appears in such experimental acts forces us to reinterpret our situation, recasts our resources, and reshapes our understanding. The “how” of this process includes the designing, enacting, and witnessing of events in laboratory situations.⁶ These events are not fully transparent, and do not deliver us objects with Cartesian clarity, permanently segmented from each other, and independent of the performances that stages them.⁷

Moreover, we grasp the meaning of such events in relation to everything else that we know; these events are implicated in our understanding of the world. That is why what appears in these experimental acts is not merely a set of idle facts that we are free to ignore; they place claims on us. We are already related to these experimental events, even if they are enacted in special laboratory contexts. Thus, the fact that these events may only take place in special laboratory contexts does not mean that they are abstract and unworldly. It's the other way around: the special laboratory contexts are what make these events part of the world, and therefore are responsible for them being of pressing concern to us. A laboratory is like a garden where special cultivation and conditions allow things to grow that may not grow “in the wild,” so to speak, yet the mere existence of the things grown under such conditions makes a claim on our understanding of the “wild.”

The fifth step involves appreciating the temporality of the scientific process; how it relates to its past and future. The history of science often seems like beautiful ruins: Much of it appears in the form of structures that were obviously useful and important in their day, and that seem once to have been coordinated and mutually interdependent although in an inefficient and sometimes even incomprehensible way. In any case, these structures are no longer fully useful to us, and not coordinated and integrated with the reality we face. The real is what we encounter in the present—what we can confidently and even unavoidably reach, what appears in our horizon inevitably, and what we cannot turn away from. Yet even our present seems a little unclear, somewhat discordant, not fully grasped, with hints of another, deeper order just over the horizon. This discordance is why we inquire, and what makes newly achieved discoveries seem, strangely, to be both discovered and invented. When these discoveries arise, the greater unity thus achieved promises to turn our present into ruins. Each generation of researchers comes to terms with the unique historical world that it has inherited, and hands over a different one to the next generation.

These steps form the basis of the Continental philosophy of science, whose framework recently has been elaborated and critiqued by Dimitri Ginev.⁸ One of its earlier innovative proponents is Patrick Heelan, who identifies both Heideggerian and Husserlian elements in scientific practice.⁹ The Heideggerian element is the moment prior to object-constitution, the context or horizon or world or open space in which something appears. The Husserlian elements are the intentionality structure of object constitution, the presence of invariants through which we grasp what appears as an object in a horizon, and in the correlation of noetic and noematic poles. “The noetic aspect is an open field of connected scientific questions addressed to empirical experience; the noematic aspect is the response obtained by the scientific experiment from experience. The totality of actual and possible answers constitutes a horizon of actual and possible objects of human knowledge and this we call a World.”¹⁰ The world then becomes the source of meaning of the word “real,” which can be defined as what can appear as an object in the world. The ever-changing and always historical laboratory environment with all its ever-to-be-updated instrumentation and technologies belongs to the noetic pole; it is what makes the objects of science real by bringing them into the world in the act of measurement. As we develop and improve empirical practices (the instrumentation and techniques for handling electrons) and the background horizon (electromagnetic theory), data and object will appear differently.¹¹

This twofold picture of scientific practice appears in other Continental philosophers of science as well. Another example is found in Hubert Dreyfus, where this twofold structure supplies the basis for what he calls “robust realism.” For Dreyfus, both moments are Heideggerian, if not fully Heidegger's own. The horizon or world or open space is one moment, involving what Dreyfus calls Heidegger's “practical holis,” (or the “claim that meaning depends ultimately on the inseparability of practices, things, and mental contents”), and is captured in the idea “that human beings are essentially being-in-the-world.” This is the moment, according to Dreyfus, that “repudiates both metaphysical realism and transcendental idealism.”

But for Dreyfus there's another moment as well, one in which Heidegger acknowledges that experiences such as breakdowns show us that “entities are independently of the experience by which they are disclosed, the acquaintance in which they are discovered, and the grasping in which their nature is ascertained” (52, 183/228). This can happen when, for instance, we deworld entities and recontextualize them within theories that do not refer to our everyday practices. Then it is quite understandable how we can refer to entities as having nothing to do with these practices. Dreyfus finds that Heidegger fails to provide a satisfactory account of how this might happen, which is why Dreyfus finds Heidegger to be only a wannabe robust realist. Heidegger does not yet have, according to Dreyfus, “a practical form of non-commital reference that could refer to entities in a way that both allowed that they could have essential properties and that no property that we used in referring to them need, in fact, be essential.”

Dreyfus then supplies his own account, involving the notion of formal indication as a methodological principle. This, he says, allows one to “designate something by its contingent properties and then be bound by that designation to research its essential properties.” It allows us to “make sense of the strange as possibly having some necessary unity underlying the contingent everyday properties by which it is identified.”

Rather than follow the arguments and counter arguments to Dreyfus's defense of robust realism, I would like to suggest that this is precisely the place where the empirical turn might be of immense value. For rig...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations and Translations
• Introduction
• I. READING HEIDEGGER ON SCIENCE
• II. QUANTUM THEORY
• III. SCIENCE AND THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE
• IV. TECHNOSCIENCE
• V. REVISITING BEING AND TIME
• List of Contributors