Heidegger's Philosophy of Science 9780823295838

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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: ]urgen 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. llse 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 I Trish Glazebrook.-1st ed. p. em.-(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 5 4 3 2 1 First Edition

For Geoffrey and Norma

CONTENTS Acknowledgments

ix

Abbreviations

xi

Introduction 1. Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Science

1 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 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

119

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CONTENTS

4. Ancient Science cf>ua~ As Truth 165 Aristotle's Analogy of Being 179 Theoretical versus Productive Knowledge 184 ~UVUf.A.EL Ov 191 cf>ua~ and 'te')(;VrJ 199 Conclusion 205

163

5. Science and Technology 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

207

Bibliography

255

Index

267

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 supererogatory, 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 vau; and 'tEXV'I'J) and Georgetown in 1996 (on Aristotle'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 conference 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

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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 keeping 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

An Post AWP BC BCP BdW

BPP BT BW CPR EGT EM EN ET FCM FD FT G

GM GP H

HCT IM K KM KPM MAL Met MFL MNST

Aristoteles, Metaphysik IX.l-3 Posterior Analytics "The Age of the World Picture," in QCT Basic Concepts (G) "On the Being and Conception of q:n)m~ in Aristotle's Physics B.l" "Die Bedrohung der Wissenschaft" Basic Problems of Phenomenology (GP) Being and Time (SZ) Basic Writings Critique of Pure Reason Early Greek Thinking Einfiihrung in die Metaphysik (IM) Nicomachean Ethics "On the Essence of Truth," in BW The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (GM) Die Frage nach dem Ding ''The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts," with SA Grundbegriffe (BC) Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik (FCM) Die Grundprobleme der Phiinomenologie (BPP) Holzwege History of the Concept of Time (PGZ) Introduction to Metaphysics (EM) "Die Kehre" Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (KPM) Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (KM) Metaphysische Anfangsgrunde der Logik (MFL) Metaphysics The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (MAL) "Modem Natural Science and Technology"

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ABBREVIATIONS

MSMM "Modem Science, Metaphysics, and Mathematics," in N

NI Nil

PA PGZ

Phys PRS

QCT SA

SR

su

sz VA w WCT WHD WM WMp

ww

ZG

BW/FD Nietzsche Nietzsche I Nietzsche II De Partibus Animalium Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs (HCT) Physics "Philosophy as Rigorous Science" (Husserl) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays "The Self-Assertion of the German University" "Science and Reflection," in QCT "Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universitat; Das Rektorat 1933/34: Tatsachen und Gedanken" Sein und Zeit (BT) Vortriige und Aufsiitze Wegmarken What Is Called Thinking? (WHD) Was heisst Denken? (WCT) What Is Metaphysics? Postscript to What Is Metaphysics? "Vom Wesen der Wahrheit," in W "Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft"

Heidegger's Philosophy of Science

INTRODUCTION 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"ON THE LONGEST DAY

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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 greater 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 factessences 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" (Kisiel1977:163). Heidegger's later analysis of modem science is a critique of the nihilistic metaphysics of subjectivity that he holds is essential to modem 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 modem 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 Geisteswissenschaft, 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 modem 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-

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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 Griinder 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 [gliinzenden Erfolgen ]" ("Realitatsproblem" 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, extending 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 (Kisiel1973), 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-

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INTRODUC'I'ION

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 modem 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 qruOL~, 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 modem science, since the claim to certainty on the part of scientists suc.h 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 science 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 modem 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 modem 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 modem scientific confinement to efficient causes, is nature available ideologically for appropriation to human ends and purposes in technology. Accordingly, therevealing of nature as a standing-reserve at the disposal of human being that is the essence of technology, is made possible by modemscience. Heidegger's ongoing critique of science is accordingly an account of the resolution of modernity into technology. It is a novel expression of what it might mean to be postmodem which goes beyond a metaphysics of subjectivity to other possibilities for thinking and being. Heidegger recognizes that modem 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 modem 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-

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INTRODUCTION

pretation of being as qn)aL