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Hmrnal of the British Society for phenomenology, Vol. 4 no. 3, October 1973. Theodore kisiel: "phenomenology and science" is problematic in many ways. He says Husserl, heidegger had a family feud between them as yet by no means settled.
Hmrnal of the British Society for phenomenology, Vol. 4 no. 3, October 1973. Theodore kisiel: "phenomenology and science" is problematic in many ways. He says Husserl, heidegger had a family feud between them as yet by no means settled.
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Hmrnal of the British Society for phenomenology, Vol. 4 no. 3, October 1973. Theodore kisiel: "phenomenology and science" is problematic in many ways. He says Husserl, heidegger had a family feud between them as yet by no means settled.
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hmrnal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. Vol. 4 No. 3. October 1973.
ON THE DIMENSIONS OF A PHENOMENOLOGY OF
SCIENCE IN HUSSERL AND THE YOUNG DR. HEIDEGGER THEODORE KISIEL Our theme, "Phenomenology and Science,"* is problematic in many ways. Even the interpretation of the little word "and," whether it is to be taken as integrating or disjunctive, thrusts us into the ~ h i c k of the family feud between Husser! and Heidegger, as yet by no means settled among their respective followers. For Husser!, phenomenology is the science of science, and the particular sciences are to find their fulfilment as branches of the all-encompassing science of phenomenology. For Heidegger. in pursuit of what he considers to be "a more faithful adherence to the principle of phenomenology,"1 the disjunction between pheno- menology and science becomes so sharp that here he lets his most infamous pronouncement fall: "Science itself does not think." Yet the works of the very young and very Husserlian Heidegger clearly belong to the philosophy of science. And Husser! himself insisted on a difference in level between transcendental phenomenology and positive science. Clearly then, the issue between Husser! and Heidegger on this point is none too clear. What follows is dedicated in part to meas- uring the distance between Husser! and Heidegger on this issue. But there is a related and more timely ramifica- tion to our theme. Recently, from various quarters and in various ways, the possibility of applying phenomenology to the specific problems of the philosophy even of natural science has been broached. But Husserl's programme for pheno- menology as a science of science still remains programmatic, and the efforts of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty supply not so much a specific phenomenology of science as rich veins of clues yet to be mined. Current developments in the philosophy of science promoted by other schools suggest that the time is ripe on the part of pheno- menologists not only to specify precisely the tasks and bases of a phenomenology of science but finally to test its fruitfulness in specific problems: l. In continental Europe, the assumption of certain elements from phenomenology into the meta- science of ideology critique, the so-called "philosophical anthropology of knowledge" pro- posed in particular by Habermas and Apel. For example, Habermas' "cognitive interest" bears manifest relations to similar notions in Husser! and to Heidegger's comprehensive notion of "care" or "concern", and Apel's communication apriori strongly suggests the social dimension of the Jifeworld. 2. On this side of the continental divide, the emergence of a new anti-positivistic philosophy of science which emphasizes the ongoing process of research in actual historical context (Hanson, Kuhn, Toulmin), the role of subjectivity in science (Polanyi) and a "presupposition theory of meaning":! (Feyerabend and all the others just mentioned). But a confrontation of these trends by pheno- menologists soon raises the same issue we began with. For the rationalist ideals of the Enlighten- ment operative in idealogy critique, the fusion of theoretical and practical reason. and of freedom through reason as the ideal pole of history: these ideals are also operative in Husser!. But the dis- continuous movement of the history of science sketched by T. S. Kuhn is more in keeping with Heidegger's epochal schema for history. More- over, Husser! was a latecomer to the problems of a historicity of scientific reason. The task of specifying the bases of phenomenology of science *This was the announced title of the paper delivered at the Edmund Husser! Conference at DePaul University of Chicago on November 12. 1971. What follows is a somewhat longer version of what then had to be abbre- viated because of time limitations. l. Preface to William J. Richardson, S. J., Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963) pp. xiv-xv. 2. Dudley Shapere's phrase. Cf. his "Meaning and Scientific Change," in Robert G. Colodny (ed.), Mind and Cosmos (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966) p. 50. 217 is nowadays inevitably drawn into this open wound of phenomenology, into the issue of the historicity of the foundations themselves. In response to the foundational task. Husserl outlined a system of foundations which are (1) apriori in character and (2) unified by the correla- tion of intentionality. Thus Husserl's way to phenomenology through the critical effort to found the positive sciences laboriously wends its way from the empirical sciences to the formal apriori of mathematics and pure logic, then to the mater- ial ontologies of regions which culminate in the comprehensive ontology of the lifeworld, all of which receive their ultimate grounding in the transcendental subjectivity) For in Husserl's words "the function of phenomenology is to pro- vide transcendental rationality to all sciences, to give them a new and ultimate rationality, the totally different rationality of all-sided clarity and intelligibility and thereby to transform them into branches of a single absolute science."4 In fact, the positive sciences are themselves haunted by this drive toward legitimation in perfect evidence which can only be fulfilled by a science of higher dignity. Heidegger even now maintains that Husserl's approach to foundations remains completely foreign to the historicity of thought. It is in view of this central issue that Heidegger was already directly confronting Husser! as early as his contri- bution to the 1929 Husserl-Festschrift under the title Vom Wesen der Grundes (On the Essence of Rationality). This same issue will underlie our survey of each in terms of their treatment of specific problems in the phenomenology of science. We turn first to Husserl's development. Husser/'s Archeology So much is phenomenology a direct response to the critical philosophical situation created by modern science that it might even be said that science first had to manifest itself in its fullness before phenomenology could come into being. Husser! says as much in a famous letter to Lucien Levi-Bruhl. Merleau-Ponty echoes this letter in the following words: "Phenomenology could never have come about ... prior to the construction of science. It measures the distance between our experience and this science. How could it ignore it? How could it precede it?"; Even the name "phenomenology" was in part adapted or at least reinforced from a trend in physics itself, which attempted to give concrete content to scientific theories by a direct descrip- tion of their relevant phenomena. Husser! viewed this effort of the late nineteenth century on the part of Ernst Mach and others as "a reaction against a theorizing through mathematical specu- lations, which form concepts far removed from intuition. accordingly a theorizing in which an intuitive clarity into the legitimate sense and achievement of the theories is not attained."C From this. we gather that the crisis to which phenomenology responds is a crisis of distance. the distance that gradually opened between the sciences and life, thereby making it difficult to found the significance of their abstractions in and for concrete life. Such was the theme of pheno- menology not only as specified in the Crisis -- which formulation we have just paraphrased - but even the germinal task for Husser! already in his first work. Philosophie der A rithmetik. Two points in particular are to be noted in this early work: (1) Husser! attempts to reactivate the original sense of the most basic concepts of arithmetic by tracing their roots to what later will be called the Gestalt structures of perception, this at a time when Ehrenfels was just beginning to publish his pioneering papers on Gestalt psycho- 3. An account of this way is to be found in the essay ''Phenomenology as the Science of Science" in Joseph J. Kockelmans and Theodore J. Kisiel, Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences (Evanston: Northwestern U.P., 1970) pp. 5-44. . .. 4. Edmund Husser!, Erste Philosophie (1923-24) Vol. II, Husserliana Vlll, ed. R. Boehm (The Hague: NI]hoff, 1959) p. 358. . 5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Primacy of Perception and oilier cssavs, ed. James M. Ed1e (Evanston, Northwestern U.P., 1964) p. 29. 6. Edmund Husser], Phiinomeno/ogische Psychologic (1925). 1-lusserliana lX. ed. Walter Biemal (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962) p. 302. 218 Husserl is thus already moving toward a radically different conception of experience, one already thickened by a richness of human mean- ing, than that which vitiated Mach's phenomenal- ism and all positivistic philosophy of science since, of an experience described in terms of the thin immediacy of atomic sensations. Decades later, Merleau-Ponty was to go much further in developing for phenomenology a thoroughgoing theory of perception, the indispensable basis for any philosophy of science. (2) Against Frege, Husser! insists that arithmetic cannot be founded by an exhaustive formal-logical definition of its most elementary concepts, and seeks rather an intuitive description of how we come to the intrinsically indefinable concepts of number, plurality, unity and the The "ground" concepts of sciences are to be clarified rather than defined, and this task will become central in the phenomenology of science. Husser! thereby locates the ideal of knowledge in a direct intuition of the ideational order rather than in the deductive mathesis which had been the governing ideal since Descartes. And yet Husserl's next major effort moves directly into the neighbourhood of the very deduc- tive systems which remove empirical sciences from their intuitive origins. But the same drive to ultimate origins incipiently reasserts itself in another, non-psychological way in the Logical lnvesti[;ations. For the basic insight against logical p'ychologism, the doctrine of the ideal object that remains identically the same in and through the multiplicity of acts in which it is grasped, will become the basis for an ontological dimension witnin formal logic itself. When formal ontology and the concomitant theory of manifolds are adequately situated in a pure logic of meaning, the way is paved to trace their forms of a possible world back to the world in which we live. Here is Husserl's antidote to the highly techni- cal and functionalized mathematical logic then in the initial stages of its development, a develop- ment that he viewed as perfectly natural, while at the same time potentially dangerous in its un- founded status. For a logician or mathematician, like all working scientists, fortunately does not need the full clairvoyance of essential insight into his basic concepts in order to pursue his research, but only a certain "scientific instinct" coupled with his method. He is like an artist who creates without being particularly aware of the basis for his performance. He possesses a certain "technical rationality" of his science, a relative and one- sided rationality which leaves the other side in complete irrationality and obscurity. It is only in moments of crisis that the scientist feels the need to clarify the more original presuppositions under- lying his research. It belongs to the philosopher to assume this clarification as a continuing and never- ending task. This natural tendency in science toward obfus- cation of foundations, already sounded in the Logical Investigations,9 becomes an increasingly important theme for Husser!. In the later works, it surfaces as a Sinnentleerung, a process of the depletion of intuitive sense in the progressive development of a science. Husser! now sees this natural tendency to be severely aggravated and exaggerated by a naturalistic Zeitgeist. For when the philosophical temper of the times is naturalis- tic, when the irrational fact is accepted as the last court of appeal, when the task of science is reduced to mathematical manipulation of these facts, then the process of Sinnentleerung is left to reign unchecked. A scientific theory finally comes to be viewed as a mere calculating device, accom- panied by only a bare minimum of the rational insight that the Greeks honoured with the name of theory. Theorizing is reduced to a subtle mental game with symbols. in effect on a par with the typical engineering student going through his "math" problems. In Husserl's words, "one works with letters according to the rules of the 7. Cf. Philosophic der Arirhmetik, ed. Lothar Eley, Husserliana XII (The Hague: Nijhotf. 1970) pp. 210- 2Iln. 8. Ibid., p. 119. This particular critique of Frege still holds. I believe, despite Husscrl's general retraction of these pages in the Logical Investigations. trans!. J. N. Findlay (New York: Humanities, 1970) vol. I, 45. p. 179n. Cf. Marvin Farber, The Foundation of Phenomenology (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard U.P., 1943) p. 38. 9. Op. cit., 4. 54 and 71. 219 game, as in cards and chess. The original thought that gives this technique its proper meaning is thus obscured."lO Accordingly, "the rationality of exact science is in direct line with the rationality of the Egyptian pyramids." 11 Heidegger will extend this discussion of the technical character of scientific rationality. His themes of calculative thinking and of technology as an ontological power in science are already present in ovo in Husserl's description of the "technology of knowledge" in the Prologomena of 1900. Another side of the same problem is objectiv- ism. In the obfuscation of their original experien- tial senses as well as of the processes of idealiza- tion and formalization by which they are derived from the lifeworld, the algorithmic entities of science acquire a seeming autonomy and can be taught without reference to their foundations. One thereby tends to forget that these are mental constructions and therefore also the "how" of the constructive activities and that out of which they are constructed. With the apparent autonomy that the algorithmic entities acquire, it is now an easy step to the declaration that this scientific world is the really real world as it is in itself, and that the chiaroscuro lifeworld is only a world of appear- ance. The constructed universe derived through the mathematization of nature thus comes to be viewed as a replacement rather than the modifica- tion of the lifeworld that it is. It is to reverse this objectivistic tendency of the age that Husser! calls for an ontology of the lifeworld in relation to which the mathematical manifold is shown to be only an overcoat of ideas. Hence one apriori science based on eidetic intuition is evoked to counter another utilizing mathematical construc- tion. The eidetic ontology is to establish the invariant content of the perceptual and cultural experience of the lifeworld, the very same content which mathematization then transforms into the clear and distinct ideal dressing that comes to be superimposed over the intuitive given. Since the evidence of the lifeworld is the evidence of experi- ence, from Husserl's transcendental point of view it is the lifeworld truth rather than the natural scientific truth which is considered the more authentic truth. The transcendental sense of a science like mathematical physics is therefore to be established by tracing its structures back to the structures of the world-experiencing life. For the malady of our technological age, Husser! thus prescribes the thoroughgoing ration- ality of phenomenology, which seeks to rationalize even the given, the doxa of everyday knowledge. The scientific constellations of meaning are to be viewed within the context of the total field of meaning. The activities and motivations of the working scientist are to be traced to their trans- cendental origins. So, for example, in the problem of analysing fundamental concepts, it is a matter of "undressing" the concept of its logical and formal clothing in order to reveal the naked given "in the flesh" (leibhaft), and further, to determine the how of this givenness in the transcendental field of experience. It is against the background of this contextual network of meanings which precede science that a fundamental scientific concept is to be assessed. Critique One cannot help being impressed by the over- riding return to origins deeper and broader than science itself which phenomenology pursues, winning for it the etymological synonym of "archeology". But it is precisely this radicalism that has also promoted profound misgivings for phenomenologists concerned with the problematic of science itself. For does not the reduction to origins other than science place in jeopardy the entire endeavour of a phenomenology of science? Is not the archeological sense of natural science emphasized to the point that radical phenomen- ology no longer does justice to the internal sense of the science itself? In demystifying the ideo- logical claims of objectivism, which pretends to secure a world in itself, and in reducing the scientifically constructed world of formal meaning to the intuitive meanings of the lifeworld, does not Husserl at the same time "reduce" to the 10. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental PhenomenoloJ:y, transl. David Carr (Evanston: North- western U.P., 1970) 9g, p. 46. My free rendering of this passage. II. Ibid., Appendix I, p. 295. 220 vanishing point a certain limited validity of science's claim to establish a domain of sense over and above the lifeworld? Is it because the most extensive Husserlian treatment of mathe- matical physics takes place in the context of resisting the exaggerations of objectivism and the mechanical technization of knowledge that the negative theme of Sinnentleerung tends to over- shadow the positive sense of natural science? One need only to consult commentaries on these Husserlian texts in order to note the tend- ency on the part of phenomenologists themselves to equate the intrinsic sense of physics with (1) its technical sense and (2) even worse, with the aberrant metaphysical assumptions of objectivism. But quite often, the very problem of the intrinsic validity of mathematical physics is literally over- shot and overshadowed by the larger problem of "the significance of science for life"Jt How much the task of founding science in its larger human context is essentially tied to the more specific task of determining the proximate foundations of the science is generally not confronted. The solution to this difficulty lies in the recognition of the relation between the different types of foundations that science has. In this regard, perhaps the metaphor of the "ground" has not been exploited to its fullest. The ultimate foundation according to phenomen- ology is the transcendental field of the "world- experiencing life". It is in the nutritive soil of this field that the plant of science finds its roots. However. not only science but also language, art, society, morality, religion and other human endeavours are cultivated from this soil. The immediate task of a phenomenology of science is to seek out the proximate origins of science, i.e. not the soil itself. but the seed of science that took root in this soil, and to trace the growth of each of its plants according to its own guiding telos as well as in terms of its assimilation of the elements from the soil. And to extend the meta- phor further, perhaps the soil needs preparation. even a fertilizing catalyst, before the scientific plant can hope to flourish, i.e. a certain level of cultivation in the form of language and other "strata" of human culture. Moreover, underlying the efforts towards organized cultivation of the jungle of natural growth, is the possibility of the evolution of the earth itself. In other words, one must take into account the possibility of a histor- icity of the ground itself. This extended metaphor may now help to orient us in the assessment of various dimensions of the conception of phenomenology as an arche- ology. Some of the classical critiques of Husserl's phenomenology of science suggest at least the following topics for consideration: (1) the primacy of perception, (2) the significance of scientific formalization, and (3) the essence of historicity. (1) The neo-Kantians of Husserl's day already saw in his doctrine of the primacy of intuition a commitment to perception as the prototype of knowledge. Critical philosophy since Kant con- centrated on the question of the apriori conditions of possibility of theoretical objects and endeavour- ed to validate scientific knowledge by constructing these theoretical objects through the synthesis of a transcendental-logical form with a given content. From its perspective, therefore, Husserl's intuition- ism seemed to shift the locus of knowledge to the prelogical and pretheoretical. thereby doing violence to the essential character of scientific knowledge. The classical response to this objection is to be found in the almost notorious article written by Eugen Fink in 1933 and blessed by Husserl's unequivocal authorization. Fink points out that the primacy of intuition does not necessarily entail the primacy of perception. For perception is only one instance of knowledge as a self- givenness of things with evidence. Categorial intuition, for example, is not necessarily a know- ledge achieved in one stroke. but may require a long and complex process in order to be fulfilled. It is this fulfilment that is of the essence of intuition, which accordingly is primary only in relation to the signitive act, the empty intention devoid of evidence. What is new in Husser! is the 12. !bid., 2, p. 5. Menschliches Dasein is here translated as "life'' by me in keeping with its ties with the tifeworld. 221 intentional essence of evidence, of evidence as the basic mode of intentionality, which always has as its opposite the mode of empty To which might be added, to anticipate the issue of historicity, that it is from this intentional character of evidence, whose goal is self-givenness, that conscious life assumes a teleological charac- ter. And when it is finally admitted that apodictic and adequate evidence is a regulative idea, an ideal pole, then this life situates itself between the archeology and teleology of human reason and finds itself posed with a never-ending task. In its more advanced history. this life must labour mightily for its intuition, i.e. for the more exten- sive logical intuitions of the abstract structure of science. Merleau-Ponty in particular has made the 'primacy of perception" central to phenomeno- logy. And yet he also tells us that we cannot let perception have a monopoly on truthJ.I Science finds itself both motivated by the perceptual world and free in the translation of its text into formal structures. Perceptual structures are thus necessary but not sufficient conditions for science. Science is not merely a variant of perception, just as percep- tion is not an incipient science. On the one hand, science only deepens the relations already outlined in the perceived world. whose vague typicality motivates its search. But on the other hand, through its free variation, science transforms and even enriches these perceptual structures by refining them to their purity. Its contribution therefore cannot be a defect but an excess of knowledge. But in the course of the process. it introduces the distance of idealization between itself and the perceptual world. Formalization cuts both ways: The Galilean genius both discovers and conceals. Such is the price that the scientist must pay for his exactness, finding that he must constantly correct for the remotions of his idealized schematismsJ" The scientific modifica- tion of the lifeworld thus suggests a dialectic between perceptual origin and the continuing and never-ending formalization of it in the historical movement of science. The crucial issue then devolves upon the inter- pretation of the identity and difference between the terms that interplay within this dialectic. What is the ultimate sense of the structural "sameness" between science and the lifeworld that Husser! affirms in the Crisis?lfi Are the structures of the Jifeworld retained in the internal conceptual structures of science in a simple Auflzebung that leaves the former unchanged while merely ideali:J;- ing them, as Marcuse concludes?ll Or is the gulf between experience and thought unbridgeable to the point that a "certain phenomenological dis- continuity" must ultimately be affirmed. as Mohanty concludes?IS Or is a principle of contin- uity a la John Dewey,J-? which excludes both mere repetition and complete rupture. sufficient to account for the emergence of the rea 1 differ- ences instituted by the "novelty" that science is? (2) Curiously, if we follow Cavailles' interpret- ation, Husserl defines the role and significance of scientific formalization in a way that makes even the question of continuity versus discontinuity academic. Especially in his later works, Husser! seems to reinforce the overwhelming privilege of the primitive by granting to science only a tech- nical function in relation to perception. Thus the favourite theses of logical positivism in its nadir of instrumentalism and operationalism still seem to lurk behind Husserl's formulations of his own phenomenological positivism: the empty language of mathematics is applied to the invariant mass of the lifeworld merely in order to acquire a measure of predictive control over it. Physical theories are thus reduced to merely an abstract interlude and 13. Eugen Fink. "The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husser! and Contemporary Criticism," in The PhenomenoloRy of Husser/, trans!. R. 0. Elveton (Chicago: Quadrangle. 1970) pp. 73-147. e<p. 77.g3. 14. The Primacy of Perception, p. 34. 15. Cf. Kockelmans and Kisiel, op. cit., pp. 265-273. J 6. 36, p. 139. 17. Herbert Marcuse, "On Science and Phenomenology," in Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (editors), Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. II (New York: Humanities. 1965) p. 285. 18. J. N. Mohanty. Edmund Husser/'s Theory of Meaning (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964) p. 145. 19. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Holt. 1938) pp. 19, 23, 245-6. 222 useful complication in our practical concerns, and therefore can be suppressed at any time without the loss of any real knowledge.to But ever since Godel's results, the orthodox view of mathematics as a tautology, a deductive nomology in which the initial axioms implicitly contain all that comes after, cannot be maintained for most mathematical and logical systems. Cavailles even questions whether any philosophy of consciousness is capable of coming to terms with the nature of a movement which now seems to generate its own contents. The deductive model of an initial fixation from which a linear series of juxtaposed results is directly explicated is now replaced by the suggestion of a discontinuous series that brings suppression as well as resump- tion, interruptions in the movement and a compli- cated branching out into a proliferation of directions not evident from the initial positing of axioms.2J "The rational increases by reorganizing itself, by continually making new starts from enlarged bases as more and more complex rational structures establish themselves. In this way an original power is always active in the very devel- opment of rational science."2 The teleology of science thus seems to generate a surplus of sense that exceeds the promise of its archeology. Because of this unexpected turn of events. the reductive approach of .radical phenomenology falls short in its assessment of the potentials of scientific advance. Another model is thereby suggested, that of a dialectical movement between intuitive given and its formalization in and through the mutually fertilizing tension between the concretizing and the abstractive tendency of thought. Science finds its full sense between the two irresoluble horizons of given and system. The attempt to resolve these horizons always exposes an unbridgeable gap, which is at it were the fount of continual surprises in the life of science,.N (3) Thus the two issues of the primacy of per- ception and the significance of formalization inevitably lead to the third and most central for our topic, the essence of the historicity of science. And here we encounter the same reductive ambiguities, which have provoked from Cavaillcs the charge of a "myth of the return to the and from J. N. Findlay at the recent SPEP!:; meeting the charge of romantic primitivism. There is of course no question of empirical primitivism here, since the issue concerns the genesis of mean- ing and not of fact. Nevertheless, the explicit emphasis of Husserl's treatment of historicity favours the archeological regression to historical origins, to the perceived bedrock hidden under more advanced sedimentations and to the origin- ating motivations that prompted departure from it. Husserl's antiquarian interests even lead him to identify his historical investigations with a Ruckfrage toward origins. "For a genuine history of philosophy, a genuine history of the particular sciences, is nothing but the reduction of the historical sense-formations or evidences given in the present - along the documented chain of historical references - back to the concealed dimension of primal evidences that underlie them."!!/ And yet, in Husserl's favour, it must also be stated that the teleology that emerges from these origins is also kept in view. Even though genetic analysis has a way of separating the receptive experience from the predicative production, no deprecation of categorial activity is intended. The two levels always work alternately and in recipro- cal influence toward the achievement of meaning. And ultimately the vague uncrystallized meanings of prepredicative experience find their teleological fulfilment precisely in the categorial productions. The only difficulty is that our enthusiasm for the goal tends to make us forget the origin. It is precisely this tendency that Husser! seeks to 20. Jean Cavailles, "On Logic and the Theory of Science," in Kockelmans and Kisiel, op. cit., pp. 351. 401-8. 21. Ibid., pp. 404-9. 22. Suzanne Bachelard, "Phenomenology and Mathematical Physics," Ibid., p. 516. 23. Theodore Kisiel, "Husserl on the History of Science," Ibid., pp. 85-88. Cf. also the two essays by Jean Ladriere in this collection. 24. I bid., p. 408. 25. Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, New Orleans, October 28-30, 1971. 26. Crisis, pp. 372-3. 223 counteract.:!! Moreover. there is Husserl's discussion of the historical teleology of European man in the Idea of philosophy as science and the erratic modern development of science with its telos of nature as a mathematical manifold. In both cases. the goal is seen as a Platonic-Kantian ideal of an infinite pole of truth in itself. For Husserl, this becomes the goal of apodictic evidence which philosophy and its scientific branches approach asymptotic- ally. For Heidegger, by contrast. the indefinability of ground concepts is already an index of the inexhaustibility of the ground into which these concepts sink their roots. to the point that even the goal no longer remains fixed. A constant regu- lative idea is replaced by temporary teleologies which are given up as particular projects exhaust their possibilities.!,\ Which leads to a final objection: the kinds of "historical" apriori that Husserl seeks are still eidetically invariant and therefore supra-historical to the movement of history. The treatment of the historicity of history, essential to current philo- sophical problems arising from the history of science such as progress. historical continuity and discovery, is sparse. One begins to perceive the precise dimensions of Heidegger's charge that the "historicity of thought remained completely foreign to such a position."!'' The Young Heidegger' s Logical Conception of Science By contrast, Heidegger's futuristic conception of phenomenology promises a basis for the solu- tion of the very problems of the philosophy of science which Husser! does not confront head-on. And the surprising thing is that this preference for the future is already present in avo in the only work purely in the philosophy of science written by the young student Heidegger strongly under the influence of Husserl. In an article on "Heidegger's Critique of Science," Fr. Richardson opens with the follow- ing remark: "On the longest day he ever lived, Heidegger could never be called a philosopher of science."f 11 I suggest that July 27, 1915 was just such a day. For on that day, the young Dr. Heidegger held his demonstration lecture, entitled "Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft," before the philosophical faculty at the University of Freiburg, conceiving it precisely as the investi- gation of a particular problem in the philosophy of science. This lecture by the 25-year-old Heideg- ger may well serve as a basis for our venture in Heidegger's phenomenology of science. Beginning with the university student of the years 1909-1915, we discover a very Husserlian Heidegger enthralled by the Logical Investigations and deeply committed to developing their impli- cations in specific problems of logic and the philosophy of science. In one of his recent auto- biographical declarations, Heidegger speaks of the fascination which the Logical Investigations exerted on him, and of "the magic which emanated from the work".n This display of superlatives by '27. Edmund Husser), Erfahrung und Urteil (Hamburg: Claassen, 3, 1964) pp. 44, 239-240. Cf. Suzanne Bachel- ard, A Study of Husser/'s Formal and Transcendenat Logic, transl. Lester E. Embree (Evanston: North- western U.P., 1968) pp. 153-4; Robert Sokolowski, The Formation of Husserl's Concept of Constitution The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964) pp. 171-2. The need to methodically ''zigzag" (e.g. Crisis, 9g, p. 58) in analys- ing the sedimented strata is itself an affirmation of their intertwining and interplay. 28. Perhaps even the term "teleology" no longer applies to Heidegger's later metaphor of the "woodpath" which abruptly trails off into the untrodden. which meanders within the wood without leading to anywhere outside. Ct. Hannah Arendt, "Martin Heidegger at Eighty," The New York Review of Books XVII, No. 6 (October 21, 1971) pp. 50-54, esp. p. 51. Heidegger's description of his own Denkweg is thus described as "the attempt to walk a path of which I did not know where it would lead. I know only the most immediate short-range perspectives along that path, because they beckoned to me unceasingly, while the horizon shifted and darkened more than once." On the Way to Language, transl. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) p. 6. 29. Preface to Richardson, op. cit., pp. XIV-XV. 30. New Scholasticism 42 (1968) 511-536. But he condudes by suggesting how a philosophy of science could be developed within a Heideggerian framework. 31. Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1969) p. 82. "Yet I remained so struck by Husserl's work that in the following years 1 read it again and again without sufficient insight into just what fascinated me." 224 tne old Heidegger ecnoes the first published work by the young Heidegger in 1912, a progress report on research in logic, in which he refers to "Husserl's penetrating and extremely fortunately formulated investigations.";/! Engaged at first with Aristotelian-scholastic philosophy and theology and studying in the stronghold of the southwest German school of neo-Kantianism under the foremost of its exponents, Heidegger nevertheless tells us that Husserl's influence dates earlier, from the very first semester at the univers- ity, lasted longer and was more far-reaching than the others. Perhaps one could even defend the thesis that most, if not all, of the Kantian echoes one wishes to hear in Heidegger's first publications on logic and the theory of science already resound in the Logical Investigations themselves, and are merely reinforced for Heidegger by his neo- Kantian mentors. An intensive reading of the Logical Investigations during these early years is evident not only in the explicit problematic but even in the interstitial detail of these early works. It is well known that Heidegger's dissertation deals with the "Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism" after the pattern set by the Prole{?omena, and that his Habilitationschrift is an exposition of a medi- eval anticipation of the apriori logical grammar which Husser! outlined in the fourth investigation. But it is less recognized that the 1915 demon- stration lecture by the young Dr. Heidegger is equally an attempt to apply Husserl's general programme of logic as a theory of science to particular problems. And what emerges in the opening pages of Husserl's Prolegomena is a teleological definition of science which impressed Heidegger so deeply that he not only makes it the basis of his approach in 1915 but is still explicitly avowing it in his magnum opus of 1927.-JJ In his early lecture, Heidegger lays down the methodo- logical principle that the logical structures of the ground concepts of a particular science are to be determined on the basis of the aim of that science. Husser! himself sanctions just such an approach when he suggests that science in all of its facets is to be assessed in terms of its e n d J ~ And the goal of science, generally speaking, is specified by Husser! with one of those pregnant German words which seems to have fascinated the already word-conscious Heidegger. This single word, Begrundungszusam- menhang;J!j specifies first the systematic unity that all science aims at, and second, that this unity of coherence consists of grounded demonstration. The essence of science accordingly resides in the ideal unity that comes from the "systematic coherence of demonstrated grounds," a goal which is constitutive of its truth. Important for our purposes is the point that there are not only typical systematic forms com- mon to all the sciences, whose exposition belongs to pure logic, but also principles of coherence peculiar to each science according to the respec- tive objectives of each,36 whose elucidation belongs to the philosophy of those particular sciences. It is precisely on the basis of the unique structural complexes aimed at by natural and by historical science that the Heidegger of 1915 proposes to determine their respective concepts of time. No doubt other influences of that time were operative in Heidegger's formulation of his basic task. Particularly decisive could have been Jonas Cohn's book of 1908, entitled Voraussetzungen und Ziele des ErkennensJI which Husserl himself 32. "Neuere Forschungen tiber Logik," Literarische Rundschau filr das katholische Deutschland 38 (1912) column 467. 33. Sein und Zeit (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1957) pp. 11, 357. 34. Logical Investigations I, 11, p. 71. 35. Ibid., 6, 63. Cf. Gerd Brand, Gesellschaft und personliche Geschichte (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1972) pp. 16 ff. Working out of the Husserlian tradition, this book bases itself precisely on the notion of rationality as Begriindungszusammenhang. 36. Ibid., 8, p. 67. Compare Heidegger's review of Charles Sentroul's Kant und Aristoteles, in Literarische Rundschau fiir das katholische Deutschland 40 (1914), esp. column 332. Here (c. 331) Kant's problematic is said to belong to the philosophy of science. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1925-9), Heideg- ger turns against his neo-Kantian upbringing by taking Kant's problematic as fundamentally metaphysical. 37. The subtitle is Untersuchungen iiber die Grundfragen der Logik (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1908). Heidegger first cites this work in "Neuere Forschungen tiber Logik" (1912), c. 522, n. 2, along with Heinrich Rickert's Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis (Tiibingen: Mohr, 2, 1904), where the issue of the goal of science is raised on pp. 1, 8, 28, 173, 204. Cf. also Heinrich Rickert, Die Grenzen der naturwissen- schaftlichen Begriffsbildung (Tiibingen: Mohr, 1902) pp. III. 31. 36. 49, 103, 117. 124. 139. 680. 225 is known to have read soon after it appeared and praised highly.3s Cohn. a follower of Rickert, also taught at Freiburg during Heidegger's student days. As the title indicates, the book treats the paradoxical circular relationship between the pre- suppositions and goals of knowledge. The aims of knowledge, which enable it, must be presupposed from the start. In relation to science conceived as a body of propositions already on hand or as an ongoing pursuit, the conception of it in terms of its aim transforms "science" into a normative con- cept, and accordingly a sought-for but unattain- able ideal. And the grounded coherence of judgments which is the general aim of science has truth as its guiding value. This principle of judicative coherence varies with the particular science and does not necessarily prescribe a direction of coherence that progresses linearly. The problem of the truth value of science, the relation of the judicative context to the context of reality. leads to the problem of a doctrine of categories. For categories are forms that pertain to the context of reality and serve to ground its knowability. In short, the categories serve to make a context (Zusammenhang) out of reality, or more phenomenologically, to constitute reality as a context. Hence a theory of science ultimately gravitates to the categories or fundamental con- cepts of a science as to its "last objects." and these can only be justified through their necessity for the context to be investigated and determined through their methodological relation to other objects)!' As we now know from his recent autobiograph- ical statements, reference to the categories has from his Gymnasium days been for Heidegger the road to ontology.VJ Brentano's dissertation on the manifold sense of Being in Aristotle (1862), Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900-l), Cohn's book ( 1908), Emil Lask's Die Logik der Philo- sophie und die Kategorienlehre (1911), Heidegger's own thesis on the doctrine of categories of Duns Scotus alias Thomas of Erfurt (1915): all of these are early stepping stones along the way to his hermeneutical phenomenology, which crests in the doctrine of existential categories in Being and Time and the predilection for the basic concepts of the West emerging from their pre-Socratic ground. This shift from an epistemological to the onto- logical perspective lies at the background of the 1915 lecture, as evidenced by Heidegger's opening reference to a certain "metaphysical pressure''.,{] then manifesting itself in critical epistemology. and to the indispensability of an ultimate meta- physical foundation for the problems of the philosophy of science. But with this brief glance at the Zeitgeist, he then turns to the problems of exposing the "logical" foundations (or better, "epistemological," since logic is here taken in the broad sense) of the particular sciences. The expo- sition of the "logical" structure of the ground concept of time in natural and historical science is to be a contribution in this direction. And yet, as we shall see, within this epistemologically oriented lecture the ontological exigence already begins to manifest itself. Now to an outline of the essentials of the lecture. Generally speaking, the logical structure of a ground concept is to be exposed from its function in the science, which in turn is deter- mined by the aim of the science. Thus the issue of the lecture specifically formulated becomes: "What structure must the concept of time in historiology have in order to be able to function as the time-concept appropriate to the aim of this science?"J! To answer this question, no particular philosophical theory of historiology is to be presupposed, i.e. a bracketing of sorts. Instead we must go to actual historiology itself, we begin with the science accepted as a fact. 38. lso Kern. Husser/ und Kant (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964) p. 33. 39. Jonas Cohn. Voraussetzum;en und Zie/e des Erkenncns. pp. 2-6, 313-334. 353-361, 404-5, 426, 451-2. 40. "'Doctrine of categories' is the usual name of the di>cussion of the Being of beings." On the Way to Language, p. 6. 41. "Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft." Ze itschrift fiir Phi/vsophie und philvsophische Kritik 161 (1916) pp. 173-188; p. 173. 42. I bid., p. 175. 226 But in order to focus more sharply the distinc- tive character of the concept of time in historio- logy, Heidegger proposes first to conduct a parallel investigation of the concept of time in physics. The aim of physics is read off by Heidegger from the fundamental tendency - he will later call it the "project" of physics - that it exhibits from Galileo to the present, which distinguishes it from ancient and medieval natural philosophy.4J But it soon becomes evident that the determination of the aim of a particular science is no simple and direct matter. In order to elucidate the end of physics, Heidegger in fact examines the means to this end, i.e. its method, from which he exposes the determinants of the method that constitute the aim of the science. And what ultimately determines the method is the object of the science and the viewpoint from which the object is consideredJI The aim of a science accordingly manifests the structure "something as something." as the more herm- eneutical later Heidegger will put it. The object of modern physics is the law-governed system of the movements of nature, and these lawlike relations in the manifold of natural pheno- mena are considered in an idealized way and grasped mathematically. The goal of modern physics is accordingly the reduction of all appear- ances to the mathematically ascertainable basic laws of motion that constitute a general dynamics.-!; What then is the function of "time" in the mathematical determination of the systematic of natural motion? There is a manifest relation between motion and time, and in this context motion becomes the integral sum of the temporally successive positions of a material point. Time accordingly serves to enable the measurement of motion as change of place in terms of the magnitudes of velocity and accelera- tion. In order to perform its function of quantita- tive determination, its logical structure must therefore have the homogeneous character of a 43. I bid., p. 176n. 4-l-. Ibid., p. 174. 45. Ibid., p. 178. 46. Ibid., p. 183. 47. Sein 11nd Zeit, p. 393. scale or parameter that orders position uniformly. Time is the independent variable that changes in a constant way, i.e. flows without leaps from point to point. Heidcgger's treatment of historical science manifests at least the terminological influence of Rickert's theory of history. The object of histori- ology is said to be man as creator of culture and the resulting objectifications of his spirit. The point of view is their relation to value, which guides the selection of what is to be considered historical from the fullness of the given. "Accordingly the aim of historiology is to represent the operative and developmental system and interconnection of the objectifications of human life in their unique- ness. which can be understood in terms of their relevance to cultural Time functions to distinguish qualitatively one epoch from another, according to the unique character of the Zeitgeist, and thereby, on the basis of these qualitative traits, to place e.g. suspect factual sources into their proper time. The qualitative structure of the time of history, essentially related to the meaning- ful achievements of a period, involves as it were the crystallization or thickening of particular objectifications given in history. Even though chronological reckoning of historical time is possible, it is always based on a historically meaningful event (birth of Christ, founding of Rome, the Hegira). in keeping with the qualitative values of history. The Existential Conception of Science It is well-known that Heidegger in Being and Time backtracks to a more original pre-scientific time that precedes any scientific conceptualization of it. In fact, so basic is this original temporality that even the teleological "Idea" of sciences like history and mathematical physics are to be traced back to it.F According to Heidegger now, science in all of its dimensions finds its existential source and ontological structure in the temporality of Dasein. In this shift from logic to existence, from 227 epistemology to "fundamental" ontology, we find once again the reductionism of phenomenological radicalism and apriorism that shifts the center of gravity from the foundations within science to more original foundations which envelop it. But now, even though the general intent of the regress finds its inspiration in Husser!, Heidegger sees himself parting ways with his old mentor precisely on the issue "of the Essence of Ground," as he clearly indicates in his contribution bearing this title in the Husserl-Festschrift of 1929, for the sake of what he considers to be "a more faithful adherence to the principle of phenomenology". The problem is still Husserlian, namely, the transcendental constitution of the world,iS but in situating this in the temporal project of Dasein, Heidegger marks out a path that leads to the radical temporalizing and ontologizing of the conception of "phenomenological foundation"; whether of science or anything else. No longer the "living present" of a transcendental ego, but the futurizing project of Dasein; not the perceptual invariants of a lifeworld, but the intrinsically historical structures of Being-in-the-world. The genesis is no longer described in terms of a mental operation of idealization motivated by the vague typicality of the world of perception, but rather as the hermeneutical process of a mathematical project which is determined by latent senses given in one's historical situation. From the vantage point of a phenomenology of science, Heidegger thereby overrides the issue of the role of percep- tion in science, but gains in providing a basis for the problems of the historicity of science. With the centerline of discussion now in the conceptual articulation of "something as something," the ground begins to gravitate to language rather than perception. The more comprehensive ground achieved in Being and Time now gives us vantage to evaluate the approach to science employed in the 1915 lectHre. Heidegger himself still sees a limited validity in utilizing the factual content of sciences - their fundamental concepts, for example --, "but only as a possible clue to the primordial constitution of the Being of history or nature. for example ... which must itself be constantly subjected to the sort of criticism that has already taken its bearings in the fundamental problematic of all inquiry into the Being of being."i' 1 Ontological evaluation of the basic concepts of a science accordingly requires the prior determina- tion of the pre-scientific content which "consolid- ates itself" in such conceptions. Strikingly, the elements of consolidation are now discussed in terms similar to 1915, in terms of the projected "what" and "how" of the Being of the domain, 48. Cf. the first enclosure to Heidegger's letter of October 22, 1927, to Husserl, in Plziinomeno/ogisclze Psycho- logie, p. 601. Husserl's letters to Ingarden of the same period document the beginnings of his disenchant- ment with Heidegger. April 9, 1927: "You simply must go to Marburg to experience at first hand Prof. Heidegger's great and earnest originality." November 19, 1927: "Heidegger has become my close friend and I consider myself one of his admirers, which makes me regret all the more that his work (and his lectures as well) in method and content appear to be essentially different from mine. and at least at the moment none of our mutual students have provided any bridge between us. A great deal is at stake for future philosophy on how and whether he works his way through to an understanding of my general intuitions. Unfortunately. I had nothing to do with his philosophical formation. he evidently had already developed his unique style when he studied my writings. He is now a power house, absolutely honest and ambitious, directed simply to the things themselves. Every great onesidedness, that of genuinely selfmade thinkers, blazes the trail to what is new. Let us hope so." December 26. 1927: "I allow myself to become depressed by the kind of impact that my publications have and by the fact that my better students over- look the depth dimension that l point to and, instead of finishing what 1 have started, time and again prefer to go their own way. So also Heidegger, this natural power of a genius, who carries all the youth away with him. so that they now consider (which is not at all his opinion) my methodic style to be out of date and my results to be part of a passing era. And this from one of the closest of my personal friends . . . . The new article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica has cost me great deal of effort, chiefly because l again thought through from the ground up my basic direction and took into account the fact that Heideg- ger, as l now must believe, has not understood this direction and thus the entire sense of the method of phenomenological reduction." Edmund Husserl. Briefe an Roman lngarden (The Hague: Nijhoff. 1968) pp. 39, 41, 42. 43. 49. Martin Heidegger. The Essence of Reasons, trans!. Terrence Malick (Evanston: Northwestern U.P., 1969) pp. 24-6. We revert to this issue of the factual content of science in view of Aron Gurwitsch's suggestion that phenomenology no longer takes science as a fact but as a problem. Cf. his "Comments on the Paper by Herbert Marcuse." Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (New York: Humanities, 1965) vol. II, 291306. 228 which make up what Heidegger now calls the ontological constitution (Seinsverjassung) of the being under study. What in 1915 were the basic constituents of the teleological structure of a science now make up the hermeneutical structure of the scientific project, the primary "something as something," the hermeneutical "as", which guides and determines the formulation of the multiplicity of judgments in the form of the apophantic "as" and provides these judgments with their principle of coherence. The primacy of the terminating goal is simply transformed into the primacy of the inaugurating project, in a reversal that accords with the Aristotelian-Scholastic maxim of the final cause, which is "first in intention, last in execu- tion". It is therefore not surprising that, in his discussion of the "what," "how" and "toward which" (Woraufhin) in terms of the "for the sake of which" and the "who" of Dasein, Heidegger is quite conscious of a certain proximity to the Aristotelian doctrine of the four causes or "grounds" .. ;u And the notion of the "end" contin- ues to play a major role in his philosophy of radical finitude. An end not only sets limits, but at once delineates the "leeway" (Spielraum), the horizons of a field of play within which something begins to be)Z The end of science is at once its origin - which is why the 1915 lecture is not so far removed from Heidegger's later reflections on science. But the context is now broader: one can now ask about the existential as well as the logical aims of science. In Husserlian terms, the approach of 1915 serves as the noematic guiding clue to the problem of the transcendental constitution of a science. For Heidegger, it is the point of depar- ture of that stretch of the road that leads from science as a Begriindungszusammenhang, a grounded system of propositions, to science as a grounding project of Dasein. The constant in this stretch of his Denkweg is a triple foundation which can be read directly from the facticity of science: the "what" and "how" of its domain, and its most incipient articulation into fundamental categories. 50. /hid., pp. 118-9. Hence his later discussion of the hermeneutical process that lays foundations for any particular science is in terms of a unifying project whose primary functions are (l) to delineate its domain, (2) to thematize the access routes to this domain and thus provide it with methodic direction, and (3) to outline the integral structure of the funda- mental concepts which initially interprets the aspects of the object under consideration. Thus the scientific project manifests the more universal triple hermeneutical apriori of a prepossession, preview and preconception.-';! And what the unified thrust of Vorhabe, Vorsicht and Vorgrifj structures is a comprehen- sive field of meaning in terms of which the more particular something as something becomes com- prehensible. The latter so-called "apophantic as" suggests the familiar Frege-Husserl distinction between referential object and connotative mean- ing, whose model is the atomic meaning of words and things. But the priority resides with the field theory of meaning of the hermeneutical "as'' which, for example, gives an entire science its topology in the form of "paradigms" (Kuhn) or "ideals of natural order" (Toulmin), where mean- ing is first an existential of Dasein, a mode of scientifically being in the world, and not a property of things. Heidegger on this point significantly makes tacit allusion to Husserl's notion of signi- tive or "empty" intentionality: the inaugurating project opens up a space now to be "fi lied in" by the particular discoveries of science.;: Interestingly enough, the Heidegger of 1915, even before his move from a logical to an existen- tial conception of science, possessed another guiding clue for the transition, which since has become all-important in the philosophy of science. In his I 912 report on logic, he points to the inter- mediate character of the phenomenon of the question, that poses a problem "which is not to be solved either purely logically or purely psycho- logically"Ji In line with this guiding clue, the 51. Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957) p. 125; An Introduction to Mct<!physiu.. trans!. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale U.P., 1959) p. 60. 52. Sein und Zeit, p. 150. The English translation of this text translates Vorhahe, Vorsicht and Vorgriff as .. for- having," "fore-sight" and "fore-conception". 53. I hid., p. 15 J. 54. ''Neuere Forschungen iiber Logik," c. 521. 229 reduction of science to its project is notorsimply a reduction to its prescientific origins in the world of dailiness, but rather to its origin proper in the inaugural question, which points forward to a goal as well as back to a motive, where old concepts like "time" are reshaped for new tasks, where old presuppositions are channelled into the project by way of the sense or direction of the question. Later, the life style of scientists like Galileo, Newton, Bohr and Heisenberg, their passion to challenge old presuppositions, thereby creating new ways of posing questions, and above all their capacity to hold out in the questionable, will suggest to Heidegger how science too has its source in authentic existence. For the questioning mode of comportment in which scientific discov- eries are anticipated is in its way based on the radical resolve in which man projects himself into his fupdamental possibilities for truth)5 Here is the central thrust of what Heidegger calls the existential conception of science, which does not consider science in terms of its finished results in the judicative structure, as in the logical concep- tion, but as an originative process in which man discovers beings even in their being.7G The Mathematical as Apriori Another insight present in ovo in the early student work concerns the historical uniqueness of modern science when compared with the medieval scientia and the Greek episteme. A constant in Heidegger is that the distinctive trait of modern science does not reside in its empirical observation of facts, experimental verification, or the applica- tion of mathematics to the physical world in order to secure exact measurements, but rather in the character of its mathematical projectJ" For the project, in delineating in advance a particular ontological structure of the world and Dasein's mode of comportment toward this world, at once lays down the ground plan which determines the acceptable procedures for providing grounds and proofs within the science, and accordingly how facts are to be found and exact measurements are to be obtained, as well as the manner in which the experimental tests are to be set up. It might be noted that Heidegger seems once again to be basing himself on Husserlian terminology when he calls the totality of the scientific project a thematization, an act which objectifies beings and makes them available for the intuition that makes them present.;s The apriori character of the mathematical project is underscored by the broadened concep- tion of the mathematical that Heidegger develops. He traces mathematics in the narrow sense of a discipline of numbers back to a more comprehen- sive Greek sense of mathesis as a process of learning, in which we come to know what we already know. Ta mathemata, the learnable, thus refer to everything that we already know in advance: of bodies - the corporeal; of plants - the v(getative; of animals- the animate; of man - the human; and of things - ~ their thingness/;,r, The mathematical in general is accordingly any objrctive apriori whatsoever, not only the best- known and well-established apriori, the formal apriori of mathematics and logic, but also the material apriori that for Husserl enter into the foundations of the specific sciences. Heidegger thereby seems to repeat in disguised and even inflated terminology Hus,serl's reduction of each science to its respective eidos in the lifeworld. But it might be noted that Husserl himself broadens the conception of mathematics in the same direction, and even goes so far as to speak of phenomenology as a mathesis universalissima, a "mathematics" of cognitive achievements, whose 55. Sein und Zeit. p. 363. Cf. Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing? transl. W. B. Barton, Jr., and Vera Deutsch Chicago: Regnery, 1967) pp. 65-6. 56. Ibid., p. 357. 57. "Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft" p. 176n. Sein und Zeit, p. 362; What is a Thing? pp. 66-8; Holzwege (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 3, 1957) p. 70. In this way Heidegger retains the basic insight of Kant's philosophy of science. 58. Sein und Zeit, p. 363. The Husserlian terminology of "theme'' and "object" has been amplified in particu- lar by the school of Aron Gurwitsch. Cf. his The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburgh: Duquesne U.P., 1964) and Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston: Northwestern U.P., 1966) pp. 182ff. Also Richard M. Zaner, The Way of Phenomenology (New York: Pegasus, 1970) pp. 115-7. 59. What is a Thing? p. 73; Ho/zwege, p. 72. 230 noetic study carried out in pure subjectivity comprehends the Jesser mathematics of the noematic correlates of cJnsciousness.6a Perhaps Heidegger's inflation of terminology is even a veiled attack on Husser!, whose mathe- matical orientation left its mark on the invariant character of the eidos and even on the method of determining it. For in his first acknowledgment of the underlying material ontological structures already available to the sciences from prescientific experience, in the opening pages of Being and Time,lil Heidegger at once moves to overcome the static stratification that this structure conveys. In emphasizing the immanent crises which on occa- sion shift the conceptual foundations of a science and thus constitute its real movement, he already sees the material apriori in a historical and projective role. In insisting that the real progress of a science comes not so much from the accumu- lation of facts as from foundational investigations, which can revolutionize the ways in which domains of research are basically constituted, he suggests a dialectic between conceptual levels that later will find resonances in the theories of scien- tific historicity of such diverse thinkers as Jean Cavailles and T. S. Kuhn. Cavailles with his dialectic of concepts and Kuhn with his compari- son of paradigm switch with linguistic translation. both suggest Heidegger's hermeneutical model of a historicity of language. The Ariadne's thread in such investigations are the fundamental concepts, whose roots go down to the prescientific interpret- ation of the scientific domain, and whose integrated contexture suggests a hermeneutical revival of the metaphor of the "Book of Nature"Ji:2 The continual rereading of this text, which is basic research at its most philosophical, in effect leaps ahead of the positive sciences toward new founda- tional structures, thereby opening up new possibil- ities in the fields under study. The degree to which the material apriori is drawn into actual historical contexts is indicated by Heidegger's suggestion that such preliminary research which served to provide basic concepts to the sciences is concrete- ly illustrated by speculative cosmologies like Plato's Timaeus, Aristotle's De Anima and Kant's transcendental logic of nature. The entire treat- ment of the material apriori is pervaded by Heidegger's futuristic conception of human exist- ence, whereby presuppositions lie not so much behind us as ahead of us, as possibilities awaiting their projection. Science is not reduced to static eidetic structures but projected into its possibili- ties a tack which cannot but enhance it to its fullest as a positive phenomenon. The Epochal Conception of Science Up to this point, the mathematical has been discussed only in terms of its general apriori character, which makes it applicable to all sciences. But in what specific sense is modern science mathematical, if not in the narrow and usual sense that its norm, mathematical physics, suggests to us? Heidegger deals with this issue in a 1935 lecture course now published under the title What is a Thing?, in a study of the approach developed by the founding fathers of modern physics, Galileo and Newton ~ about the same time, it might be noted, that Husser! was preparing a similar study which appeared in the Crisis article of 1936 under the title, "Galileo's Mathematiza- tion of Nature". According to Heidegger, both Galileo and Newton dramatically exemplify the project that leaps ahead of factual evidence and verification through "thought experiments" of idealization which develop and posit propositions (hypo-theses) anticipating the "as" structure of facts. the thingness of things. The project thereby outlines an open field of meaning which prefigures the ways in which things are to show themselves. Inasmuch as the positing principles articulate ideal standards according to which things :ue evaluated, e.g. "freely falling body" and "friction- less plane", they are axioms in the original Greek 60. Erste Philosophie II, pp. 249-250. This manuscript dates from 1921. i.e. during the time of Heidegger's assistantship to Husser!. 61. Sein und Zeit, pp. 9-11. 62. Cf. Theodore Kisiel; "Zu einer Hermeneutik naturwissenschaftlicher Entdeckung," Zeitschrift fiir allw!meinc Wissenschaftstheorie II (1971), no. 3. An earlier and shorter English version of this text is to be found in David Carr and Edward Casey (ed.), The PhenomenoioRical Horizon (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1972), cf. e<:p. note 10. 231 sense ot the word. The mathematics of modern science is thus an axiomatic project, utilizing axioms of the type exemplified by Newton's idealized laws of motion. According to this project, nature is no longer the inner capacity of a body to determine its particular form of motion and place, as it had been in ancient and medieval science. but is now axiomatically predetermined as a uniform context of space-time relations. Because all bodies now move uniformly in space and time. it is possible and even necessary to establish a universally uniform measure for them, i.e. numerical measurement. The condition of possibility of mathematics in the narrow sense is therefore the more profound mathematical project of modern science. It is because of this axiomatic project. and not vice-versa. that analytical geometry and calculus could be and had to be developed as a "language" to articulate the instituting project. It is against the background of this more comprehensive mathematizing project that the burning question central to phenomen- ology, of the justification and limits of mathe- matical formalism in relation to the demand to return to our intuitive experience of nature, is to be assessed. This question cannot be decided by an either/or but rather on a more fundamental level. For the question of the justification and limits of the mathematical in general remains the more decisive one.fl-1 Accordingly, it is necessary to probe the deeper grounds of the mathematical spirit as it emerged in modern times. As such, it belongs to the mode of historical existence of a particular time, its basic attitude toward things and toward what is at all. Investigating the mathematical in this regard therefore takes us beyond the existential conception of science to its metaphysical sense, and this means for Heidegger its epochal sense, inasmuch as science constitutes a terminal epoch in the history of metaphysics. This history ulti- mately grounds itself not in the grounding project of Dasein but in an epochal movement that takes its course beyond human controL An account of Heidegger's reading of the history of metaphysics or even of the origin of modernity cannot be ventured Only a few sketchy remarks relevant to our topic might be presented by way of conclusion. Our most relevant point: Heidegger sees Husser! to be still under the 63. What is a ThinR?, pp. 91-5. 64. A brief summary of his reading of the origin of modernity in relation to science may at least suggest the overall style of his account. 232 In the medieval period of truth founded on faith. natural knowledge did not have its own grounds or independent foundations. With the rejection of the tradition, a new freedom toward self-grounding arose. Man no longer conceives of himself as a creature, but as a subject who freely proposes his objects to !oimself. The certitudes of faith are replaced by the self-certitude of the human subject. Everything becomes subject to the absolutely certain axiom of the Cogito and Volo. Because man falls back strictly on his own resources, the mathematical posits itself as the authoritative principle of knowledge and binds itself to self-imposed obligations. The spirit of modernity thereby becomes the spirit of the rnatlzesis universalis, the System. Man now creates his own order: he proposes to himself what is to be known. determines in advance the principles he needs to reach this goal, assures his way by means of the controls of calculative thinking. Within the mathematical project, the dimension of the point of view becomes absolutized into a worldview. The how becomes all-important, method usurps science. Scientific research becomes an indis- pensable form of the planning and conquest that enter into fulfillment of the worldview. The newly declared freedom of modernity manifests itself in the form of the thought experiments of idealization. what Einstein later characterized as the free invention of hypothesizing. The scientist enters into the Zeit- geist of the will to power. Not that the individual scientist acts outside of all controls. The axiom of the Co[?ito and Volo manifests itself more in the fact that the final tribunal for the paradigms of science lies in the scientific community, which sometimes exerts a communal dogmatism that smacks of the old ecclesiast- ical dogmatism of the middle ages. This Zeit[?eist of modernity now leaves its mark on the what. how and conceptual medium of science. Scientific domains are objectively secured, sharply divided and distributed to. distinct disciplines for their control and regulation. The objectifying approach adjusts and reworks a domain in order to be able to "count on" it. The clear and distinct categories of the subject-object relation permit self-assured specula- tion on the one hand, experimental confirmation on the other. themselves are sharply defined through measurement in order to subject them to the rigorous control of the formalized schemes necessitated by the subject-object relation. The spirit of confirmation overshadows its circuit with the inaugurating project to the point that science is defined in terms of its context of justification. The vagaries of the context of discovery are systematically excluded or explained away in terms of the "free invention'' of the scientific "genius". spell of the spirit of modernity, the period domin- ated by the axiomatic project of the mathematical. The period is characterized by the positing of self-evident and indubitable principles in order to secure the ground for a mathesis or System, especially the "I posit" of the Cogito principle that placed the subjectivity of method in the central position. And Husser! still bases himself on the Cartesian ideal of science: not a deductive mathesis. to be sure, but instead the mathesis universalissima comprehending all the sciences and based on the methodological "principle of all principles," the primordially giving intuition of the transcendental subjectivity.cr; As Heidegger sees it. the phenomenological foundation in experience is no longer fully articul- able in indubitable propositions which therefore can be clearly located within the structure of our knowledge. Because of the radical discontinuity between our immediate experience and the know- ledge that springs from it. foundational thinking involves a leap from the said to its unsaid- even to its prolongation in the unsayable. And openness to experience in the full sense at times puts us on treacherous ground. when the old ground gives way in order to prepare for the emergence of the new. Foundational thinking thus is no longer mathematical in any sense but rather hermen- eutical in the profoundest sense,liC where we learn what we don't know, what springs the limits of our knowledge and what nevertheless promises to come into its purview. For life is more than science can ever hope to be, even the self-grounding science of phenomenology as Husserl sees it. Science grounds itself in a bottomless Other which is never capable of being secured by a method or subsumed into a science. Conclusion Heidegger in this way seeks to justify his claim to radicalize the phenomenological zu den Sac/zen selbst beyond Husser!. Yet in many ways, the Heideggerian strategy is reminiscent of the 65. Zur Saclre des Denkens, pp. 69-70. Husser! of the Crisis: The history of science is con- sidered within the history of philosophy, and this in turn as a reflection of the history of the spirit of the West. Even the phases in the rise of modern science are comparable to Husserl's: The method becomes dominant and first turns metaphysical in the objectivism of the world in itself, and then turns back on itself in the absolutizing of techniza- tion. If anything, Heidegger's conception of technical rationality is even more restrictive than Husserl's. Heidegger's antidote to the crisis is likewise a call to return to sources, often marked by poetic and mystical nuances that seem remoter from science than Husserl's "world-experiencing life". As Heidegger at one point puts it, in a reference strongly suggestive of Husserl's life- world, the sciences manifest an "inconspicuous state of affairs" of an unavoidable (unumgiinglich) and indispensable presence which is nevertheless inaccessible (unzugiinglich) to the sciences them- selves and thus always passed over (iibergangen) by them. This inconspicuous state of affairs is the historical stream in which science finds its place, accessible only to a more radical reflection on its epochal sense.m Such a comprehensive reflection is intrinsic to the phenomenological return to the things them- selves, whose system of foundations installs a built-in tendency to broaden its issues beyond the cognitive to the precognitive in all its phases. It is thus that phenomenology strives to fulfil its historical mission, namely, "to measure the dis- tance between our experience and science". The natural outcome of phenomenological questioning is accordingly the larger issue of science in the context of life and of history. But here it runs the risk of overriding its initial orientation in specific phenomena. This is particularly true of the pheno- menon of science, which we are even methodo- logically instructed to bracket in favour of the prescientific. To counter the danger of overhasty metabasis and its accompanying distortions. the broader reflection on the epochal sense of science 66. Perceptive readers may have already noticed a certain overlap in Heidegger's conception of the mathe- matical and the hermeneutical. I have tried to clarify this in a paper entitled "The Mathematical and the Hermeneutical: On Heidegger's Notion of the Apriori," read at the Heidegger Conference meeting at DePaul University in Chicago on March 25, 1972. 67. Martin Heidegger, Vortriige und Aufsiitze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954) pp. 67-8. 233 must at once cultivate the more specific orienta- tions of the transcendental-existential and logical conceptions of science. The time has come for the particular and detailed investigations in a pheno- menology of science to "fill in" the broad context provided by classical phenomenology, and thereby 234 to make contact with parallel efforts which strive to overcome the positivistic misreading of the phenomenon of science. Northern Illinois University
(Analecta Husserliana 52) Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Auth.), Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (Eds.)-Phenomenology of Life and the Human Creative Condition_ Book I Laying Down the Cornerstones of the Field-Sprin