Contributions To Phenomenology  70

Babette Babich
Dimitri Ginev  Editors

The
Multidimensionality
of Hermeneutic
Phenomenology
The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic
Phenomenology
 CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHENOMENOLOGY

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Volume 70

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Babette Babich • Dimitri Ginev
Editors

The Multidimensionality
of Hermeneutic
Phenomenology
Editors
Babette Babich Dimitri Ginev
Fordham University St. Kliment Ohridski University
New York, NY, USA Sofia, Bulgaria

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Foreword

The Universality of Hermeneutics in Joseph Kockelmans’s

Version of Hermeneutic Phenomenology

In an autobiographical sketch, Joseph Kockelmans (2008) reflects on his Denkweg

in a manner that allows him to delineate the profile of his version of hermeneutic
phenomenology. Based essentially on this sketch, I should like in what follows to
bring into focus three principal moments of his “journey into phenomenological
philosophy” that allude to his idea of the universality of interpretation in all cultur-
ally specified modes of being-in-the-world. I will call these moments respectively
(a) the phenomenological reformulation of the Greek episteme; (b) the integration
of the ontological difference in the theory of scientific truth; and (c) the historicity
of objectifying thematization.
There is in Professor Kockelmans’s works from the 1950s a gradual transition
from Nikolai Hartmann’s theory of the ontological modalities and categories
(addressed in its capacity to serve as a prerequisite for reconstructing the onto-
logical assumptions of basic scientific theories) to a kind of hermeneutic ontol-
ogy. This transition is especially palpable in his reading of Hartmann’s “Philosophy
of Nature.” In Hartmann’s categorial metaphysics of knowledge Dasein and
Sosein (as ways of being) are subordinated to the modes and spheres of being. The
transition was by no means accomplished via a direct borrowing of Heidegger’s
concept of Dasein. It is rather the idea that the very metaphysics of knowledge
should seek to make sense of the ontological categories by having recourse to the
interrelations of Dasein and Sosein within the scope of scientific knowledge. A
true “Philosophy of Nature” cannot avoid addressing the revealing of nature’s
being in these interrelations.
Professor Kockelmans’s subsequent transformation of Hartmann’s concept of
Dasein in terms of ek-sistence as a pre-categorial way of being opened the avenue
to hermeneutic phenomenology. The constitution of meaning is the “facticity”
which the theory of categories presupposes, being unable at the same time to reflect
upon it. Yet important motifs of a categorial metaphysics of knowledge were retained

v
vi Foreword

in the new philosophical project. These motifs precisely informed the desire for a
rehabilitation of the Greek episteme within the ontological framework. Still in his
Dutch period, Professor Kockelmans adopted the view that philosophy is neither a
meta-scientific world-view nor can it be “naturalized” by recasting its problematic
in scientific terms and languages. The constitution of meaning in human ek-sistence
is the subject which philosophy has to address. Philosophy can master this task by
developing a kind of hermeneutic ontology that leaves enough room for epistemo-
logical investigations. It is the rehabilitation of the Greek episteme that provides the
chance for reconciling such investigations with the ontological search for meaning
constitution and truth as un-concealment.
But what kind of epistemology does this rehabilitation imply? An answer to that
question is to be found in Professor Kockelmans’s long-standing critical encounter
and dialogue with the post-empiricist philosophy of science. Roughly speaking,
in this dialogue he was after an epistemology that is capable to complement
hermeneutic phenomenology in a manner that can bridge the analytic of meaning
constitution with a theory of epistemic-thematic articulation of various kinds of
objects. Obviously, such a theory has little to do with the established (in the analytic
philosophy) concept of epistemology as a normative theory about “justified true
beliefs.” By exploring the leeway released by the combination of the Greek episteme
with the Greek phronēsis, Professor Kockelmans unfolded in diverse directions
the claim that there is a horizonal understanding at the root of all specific forms of
articulated knowing. It is this understanding that is a subject shared by both, herme-
neutic phenomenology and the kind of epistemology which he looked for. Reflecting
on horizonal understanding provides the access to both the transcendence of the
world, i.e. to what is at issue in the ontology of the potentiality-for-being, and to the
ongoing fore-structuring of knowing by contextualized epistemic practices and
procedures. Kockelmans (1993, p. 101) made the case that horizonal understanding
“has in itself the eksistential structure of being a projection.” Because of this structure
it acquires epistemological relevance.
Understanding as “grasping by anticipation”—so the argument goes—fore-
structures the formation of each epistemic-thematizing attitude toward the world.
(Professor Kockelmans was preoccupied in the first place with the triads of
fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception that characterize the kinds of scien-
tific thematization qua objectification of the world.) The “anticipatory sighting” of
what gets constituted by epistemic practices assures the passage from hermeneutic
ontology to hermeneutically pertinent epistemology. Horizonal understanding is at
once a constitutive ontological phenomenon and (via its interpretative specifica-
tion) the fore-structure of each kind of knowing (including the knowing achieved
by procedures of idealization in the natural sciences). In his long-standing
elaborations on the “being of knowing,” Joseph Kockelmans gained deservedly the
reputation of the philosopher who in the most profound manner succeeded in
demonstrating the hermeneutic-phenomenological unity of (non-metaphysical)
ontology and (non-representationalist) epistemology.
In working out the variety of epistemology which takes into account the “being
of knowing,” Professor Kockelmans dedicated serious efforts to criticizing the
Foreword vii

holist epistemological strategies (offered by Lakatos, Kuhn, Stegmüller, Hübner

and several others) for their reflexive deficits and characteristic failures to make
intelligible the fore-structuring of (the production of) scientific knowledge. Yet the
focus on this fore-structuring did not promote a search for a radicalization of the
intrinsic hermeneutic tendencies (as these have been most clearly exhibited in
Mary Hesse’s work) in the post-positivist historicism. It was rather a criticism
aimed at a retrieval of what has gotten lost in the post-empiricist turn. In this regard,
Professor Kockelmans undertook an original rendering of logical empiricism’s
problematic of meaningfulness with the intent to “repeat” this problematic in a
hermeneutic-phenomenological framework. At stake was the eradication of the
empiricist foreclosing of any approach to theory-observation interrelations that
might take into consideration the interpretative contextualization of scientific the-
matization—the contextualization which is to be strongly distinguished from the
contextual-epistemic interpretability implied by the post-empiricist thesis of the-
ory-ladenness. Against logical empiricism Professor Kockelmans made the point
that the interpretative nature of scientific thematization cannot be recast in terms of
logical semantics. Finally, the hermeneutic approach to the fore-structuring of sci-
entific knowing (as an approach that mediates between ontology and epistemol-
ogy) calls into question basic assumptions shared by all parties in the realism-debate.
The procedural-empirical laying bare of formally symmetric structures that unite
measurable and quantifiable entities as domains of research proved to be a shared
doctrine of constructive empiricism (as a particular position in this debate) and
Kockelmans’s program for a hermeneutic phenomenology of the natural sciences.
On constructive empiricism, not the relationship of correspondence but that of
constructive co-interpretability of theoretical models and data models (as deliver-
ances of experimental and observational experience) is at the heart of scientific
enterprise. The epistemological counterpart of the relationship of co-interpretability
is the empirical adequacy of a theory (in van Fraassen’s technical sense). The great-
est merit of constructive empiricism is the overcoming of the static subject-object
relation’s epistemology. The hermeneutic circle involved in the mathematical saving
of phenomena, on which van Fraassen insists in his earlier work, strongly bears
resemblance to the circularity of the horizonal understanding’s epistemic
specification within the objectifying research of the natural sciences. Yet the
constructive empiricist skips the possibility to reflect on the hermeneutic circle of
saving phenomena in a manner that would allow her to reinstitute the problematic
of scientific truth by means of transcendental arguments. By amending her concep-
tion through such arguments, the constructive empiricist would be able to arrive at
a concept of truth beyond the technical discussion of theory’s empirical adequacy,
avoiding at the same time making concessions to scientific (and structuralist)
realism. More generally, since constructive empiricism offers only a subtle and
cogent “description of what from an empiricist point of view it means to be an
empirical scientist” (Kockelmans 1993, p. 138), this doctrine ignores the transcen-
dental dimension of scientific objectification whose approaching reinstitutes
the problematic of scientific truth against the background of the ontological differ-
ence. Reflecting on the constructive-hermeneutic circularity of models and data
viii Foreword

(appearances) should open the way from epistemology of science’s empirical

adequacy to the ontological specification of what scientific truth is.
The way in which Professor Kockelmans puts in his earlier work the
fore-structuring of scientific knowledge first leads to the second principal moment
in his philosophical journey. This moment gets expressed by a principal thesis to
be found in several papers of him in the 1970s: With regard to the kinds of
fore-structuring of thematizing knowledge that mediates between the ontological
disclosure of scientific domains and the epistemic organization of scientific
research, three basic hermeneutic situations of scientific thematization are to be
distinguished related accordingly to the objectification through mathematical
projection, phenomenological description of profiles that remain invariant within
manifolds of variations (as this is shown in particular by phenomenological
psychology), and interpretative-dialogical reflexivity in making sense of cultural
phenomena. Though these three kinds of scientific thematization correspond to a
certain extent to three types of scientific disciplines (objectifying [empirical]
sciences, descriptive-phenomenological social sciences, and interpretative human
studies), Professor Kockelmans has good reasons to insist that he is dealing with
hermeneutic situations of doing research and not with institutionalized disciplines.
Each of the situations may in principle take place in every scientific discipline.
Thus, the second moment in his philosophical journey is the triple specification of
the research processes’ interpretative nature with regard to three kinds of science’s
basic hermeneutic situations.
Let me stress some important consequences that Professor Kockelmans drew
from the way in which he spelled out the concept of hermeneutic situation of scien-
tific thematization. The first one is the argumentation against the strategy of shifting
essentialism from science’s cognitive structures to invariants (groups of symme-
tries) of pre-scientific perception. Perception, however elementary it could be, is
always already in a (pre-scientific or scientific) hermeneutic situation. In other
words, there is no perception that precedes the constitution of meaning. All percep-
tive acts are contextualized by meaning-constituting practices. A paradigmatic
alternative to the hermeneutic-contextual view of perception is suggested by various
structuralist doctrines. Thus, Cassirer’s gestalt-psychological view (expressed for
the first time as early as in the conception of the symbolische Prägnanz from the
1920s, and clearly formulated in his celebrated paper “The Concept of Group and
the Theory of Perception”) restores the spirit of epistemological essentialism on a
pre-scientific level by emphasizing structural invariants in the sensory flux of
perception. Cassirer tried to advocate the view that it is not (only) the formal struc-
ture of scientific knowledge, but also the “structure of perception” that remains
invariant/symmetric with respect to a group of transformations. On Kockelmans’s
argument, since symmetries of perceptual spaces and perceptual objects inevitably
take place in a context, it is the meaning-constituting contextualization (and not the
symmetries) that has to be taken as a point of departure of epistemological analyses
within the scope of hermeneutic philosophy.
Another consequence from the scrutiny of the concept of hermeneutic situation
is the new argumentation against the hypostatization of mathematical essences.
Foreword ix

A domain of scientific research gets disclosed not through the projection of a

mathematical formalism. A domain’s being-disclosed is always in a hermeneutic
situation in which practices and procedures of idealization and the related to them
ongoing projection of formal structures come into being. The formation of basic
mathematical formalism is always interpretatively contextualized.
The hermeneutic situation in which the regimes of epistemic practices get
established and a particular domain of knowing gets disclosed is not outside the
reality of being-in-the-world. It belongs to that reality which becomes at once
revealed and concealed by being disclosed in a hermeneutic situation. This observa-
tion has a substantive implication for the specificity of scientific truth: The
characteristic way of revealment/concealment defined by the hermeneutic situation
of a scientific thematization is the ontological truth of that thematization. In stress-
ing this kind of truth that is ignored by the analytical philosophers of science, Joseph
Kockelmans does not go on to get rid of the epistemic (correspondent, coherentist,
consensualist, pragmatic, instrumentalist, and so on) kinds of scientific truth. Yet he
argued that the ontic truth (either of particular scientific propositions and statements
or of holist conceptual frameworks like those of scientific theories) is to be circum-
scribed in semantic and epistemological terms only when one manages to determine
the ontological truth of the basic scientific thematization (for instance, the themati-
zation by means of which the domains of classical physics are disclosed). The
rationale for this claim is that the formulation of all epistemological/semantic
criteria for truth as well as the carrying out of all formal and non-formal procedures
of verification take place in a reality that is always already disclosed by a scientific
thematization. The ontological truth of the latter stipulates the conditions of
possibility of the ontic truth within scientific knowing. The truth of formal invari-
ants and groups of symmetries “shows itself” also in a hermeneutic situation of
thematization. This is why it is also only a kind of ontic truth.
The third moment in Joseph Kockelmans’s philosophical journey is his
conception of the “critical studies in the history of science.” His hermeneutic
vision of science’s historical dynamics opposes the post-empiricist division
between internal and external history of science. The treatment of the historical
horizon of scientific thematization resists any relegation in the competence of
one of the two types of historiography. Within this horizon there is a constant
interplay of practices belonging to various discursive formations. To be sure, one
has to distinguish clearly between two cases. For the sake of brevity, think on
bacteriology and quantum electrodynamics as typical manifestations of these
cases. Bacteriology became disclosed within a heterogeneous discursive forma-
tion that involves non-scientific practices and administrative policies as well as
clinical activities and research practices of physiology, classical immunology,
cytology, zoology, and chemistry. The objectifying thematization and delineation
of relevant objects of inquiry had been “prepared” by meanings of various kinds
constituted by this discursive formation. Accordingly, the research articulation of
the domain of bacteriology “found” in the period of its inception “ready-made
entities” already distinguished by hygienic, clinical, and biological meanings. As
Bruno Latour in particular shows, entities like contagiousness, miasma,
x Foreword

aetiologic agents, different kinds of microorganisms, “model organisms” and so

on circulated with important functions in spaces of political power. The initial
objectifying thematization in bacteriology transformed these entities into scien-
tific objects. Thus, the founding hermeneutic situation in bacteriology involves
the task of scientification of “life-world’s entities.” This task is completely alien
to the inception of quantum electrodynamics. The domain got disclosed by
recasting of objects constituted entirely by research practices of older domains.
There was no “provocation” from external problems arising out of non-scientific
social practices. The founding hermeneutic situation involved the task of “enfran-
chising” of already existing scientific objects. Accordingly, the objectifying
thematization was determined by research practices entitled to accomplish the
recasting in question—computations based on perturbation theory, conceptual
practices of overcoming incompatibilities between special relativity and quan-
tum mechanics, formal practices of searching for covariant formulations of
experimental results, etc.
Yet regardless of the way in which the domain had been historically disclosed—
so Professor Kockelmans’s basic argument goes—the hermeneutic situation of
thematization makes the constitution of meaningful scientific objects a function
solely of research practices. In other words, once disclosed, a scientific domain is
characterized by a research process that projects its own horizon of possibilities.
This is also the horizon of relevant problematization within the everydayness of
scientific research. Once brought into play in a characteristic hermeneutic situation,
the research process is dependent only on the possibilities projected by the practices
of this process.
On Kockelmans’s conception, the “rational reconstruction” of science’s historical
dynamics is a hermeneutic task. This does not mean that social-pragmatic interests
have no impact on the research process. They certainly make enormous impact. Yet
this impact gets refracted by the horizon of research possibilities. The very refrac-
tion provides a protection against cognitive deformations of scientific research
caused by external pressure on the research process. It is a protection that is again
of hermeneutic nature: Within the hermeneutic circle of the constitution of meaning
and meaningful objects in scientific research, the external aims and interests get
“translated” in possibilities of doing research that are proper to the articulation of
the respective scientific domain.
Hermeneutic phenomenology of the natural sciences seems to be both a highly
esoteric and a too exotic initiative. Yet it is of prime importance for everybody
who champions the post-metaphysical universalizing of hermeneutics. Without
approaching the interpretative nature of the natural sciences, philosophical herme-
neutics would be essentially restricted. Without doing this it would have had to
refrain from laying claim to the conceptually most sophisticated form of culture.
Professor Kockelmans dedicated a great deal of his work to the removal of this
restriction imposed for several historical reasons on philosophical hermeneutics.
In his final work he concentrated his efforts on supplementing the natural sci-
ences’ hermeneutic ontology with various approaches developed in methodical
hermeneutics (Kockelmans 2002). At issue are the formation of textual traditions
Foreword xi

and the effective-historical series of contextualization of classical texts in the

history of physical disciplines. This was an additional contribution of his to the
post-metaphysical universalizing of hermeneutics.

Sofia, Bulgaria Dimitri Ginev

References

Kockelmans, Joseph J. 1993. Ideas for a hermeneutic phenomenology of the natural sciences.
Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Kockelmans, Joseph J. 2002. Ideas for a hermeneutic phenomenology of the natural sciences.
Vol. II: On the importance of methodical hermeneutics for a hermeneutic phenomenology of
the natural sciences. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Kockelmans, Joseph J. 2008. My journey into hermeneutic phenomenology of the natural sciences.
In Aspekte der phänomenologischen Theorie der Wissenschaft, ed. D. Ginev, 99–113.
Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann.
Contents

Foreword .......................................................................................................... v
Dimitri Ginev
Introduction ..................................................................................................... xv
Babette Babich

Part I Science, Cognition, Hermeneutics, and Lifeworld

A Paradox of Cognition .................................................................................. 3

Nicholas Rescher
The Articulation of a Scientific Domain from the Viewpoint
of Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Case of Vectorial Metabolism ........ 7
Dimitri Ginev
One Cognitive Style Among Others: Towards a Phenomenology
of the Lifeworld and of Other Experiences .................................................. 31
Gregor Schiemann
The Infinite Science of the Lifeworld: Steps Toward
a Postfoundational Phenomenology .............................................................. 49
Giovanni Leghissa
Hermeneutics in the Field: The Philosophy of Geology .............................. 69
Robert Frodeman
The Metroscape: Phenomenology of Measurement ..................................... 81
Robert P. Crease

Part II Hermeneutic and Phenomenological Philosophy

of Science and Technology

Consciousness, Quantum Physics, and Hermeneutical Phenomenology ........ 91

Patrick Aidan Heelan

xiii
xiv Contents

Die ewige Wiederkunft wissenschaftlich betrachtet.

Oskar Beckers Nietzscheinterpretation im Kontext .................................... 113
Michael Stöltzner
Heidegger and Our Twenty-first Century Experience of Ge-Stell ............. 137
Theodore Kisiel
Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr/The Danger ................ 153
Babette Babich
Heidegger and the Reversed Order of Science and Technology ................. 183
Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel
Logos and the Essence of Technology............................................................ 207
Holger Schmid

Part III Philosophical Truth and Hermeneutic Aesthetics

On the Manifold Meaning of Truth in Aristotle ........................................... 227

Graeme Nicholson
The Twofold Character of Truth: Heidegger, Davidson, Tugendhat .......... 243
Jeff Malpas
What Can Philosophy of Science Learn from Hermeneutics:
and What Can Hermeneutics Learn from Philosophy of Science?
With an Excursus on Botticelli ...................................................................... 267
Jan Faye
The Classical Notion of Person and Its Criticism
by Modern Philosophy .................................................................................... 283
Enrico Berti

Part IV Hermeneutic Science and First Philosophy, Theology

and the Universe

Philosophie des sciences et philosophie première......................................... 299

Pierre Kerszberg
A Re-Reading of Heidegger’s “Phenomenology and Theology”................. 317
Adriaan T. Peperzak
The Remainders of Faith: On Karl Löwith’s
Conception of Secularization ......................................................................... 339
Rodolphe Gasché
The Hermeneutics of God, the Universe, and Everything........................... 359
Simon Glynn

Notes on Contributors .................................................................................... 387

Index ................................................................................................................. 393

Introduction

Babette Babich

The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology:

From Philology through Science and Technology to Theology

Studies of hermeneutics have historically invoked horizons and numbered

dimensions1 and hermeneutic phenomenology is inherently multidimensional. In
part this is due to the different disciplines to be reviewed, such as the essential
connection between hermeneutics and philology, attesting to the relevance of
Nietzsche as well as Heidegger.2 In addition to the hermeneutic tradition of classi-
cal philology, there is theology and law and there is the historical and specifically
methodic legacy of Wilhelm Dilthey. Hence Joseph J. Kockelman’s 2003 Ideas for
a Hermeneutic Phenomenology of the Natural Sciences invokes “The Importance
of Methodical Hermeneutics.”3 With this description, echoing the contributions of
his friend and long-time colleague, Thomas Seebohm, Kockelmans himself relates
Dilthey to Boeckh and thus to the classic tradition of hermeneutics including
Gadamer.4 Hence speaking of methodical hermeneutics, what Kockelmans (and to

1
See E. D. Hirsch, Jr. (1972) in addition to the collection edited by Günter Figal and Hans-Helmuth
Gander (2005) as well as an earlier collection featuring both legal and literary contributions,
Winfried Hassemer (1984), in addition to Ronald Bontekoe’s overview (1996), etc.
2
See here the contributions to Helmut Flaschar, Karlfried Gründer and Axel E.-A. Horstmann
(1979). See too for a discussion with reference to Gadamer as well as Husserl and Heidegger,
István Fehér (1999) or (2001).
3
Kockelmans (2003). See for a discussion of Boeckh and Dilthey, Otto Friedrich Bollnow’s (1982)
as well as Thomas M. Seebohm’s monograph (2004) in addition to Seebohm’s (1984). See too
in connection with Boeckh’s teacher, Schleiermacher, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. (1975). In connection
with Nietzsche, see Whitman (1986) as well as Poschl (1979) and more recently Christian Benne
(2005).
4
Kockelmans, Joseph (2003). See for a discussion of Boeckh and Dilthey, Otto Friedrich Bollnow’s
(1982) and, adding, methodical hermeneutics, Thomas M. Seebohm’s (2004) monograph as well
as his (1984) essay on Boeckh and Dilthey and see too in connection with Boeckh’s teacher,
Schleiermacher, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. (1975). Giovanni Leghissa also includes a discussion of Boeckh
in his contribution to the current volume.

xv
xvi Introduction

be sure what Seehohm) understood as hermeneutic phenomenology comprised the

full scope of the scholarly and ‘scientific’ traditions of classical philology just
where classical philology subsumes under its aegis not only archaeology but the
disciplinary breadth of aesthetics and history as well as philosophy and theology.
In this methodical fashion, classical philology—like Husserl’s famous phenome-
nological call to the ‘things themselves’—refers to nothing less than the ‘words’
themselves.
Although even otherwise hermeneutically sensitive scholars routinely limit their
conception of Nietzsche to his supposed proclamation of the death of God,5 such a
limitation can obscure Nietzsche’s explicitly hermeneutic philology. Indeed, what
can be seen to be Nietzsche’s hermeneutic phenomenology is clearly expressed in his
philological study of ancient Greek lyric and tragedy out of what he called “the spirit
of music.”6 Thus philologically, i.e., attuned to the words themselves, Nietzsche there
undertook to ‘hear’ Greek lyric and tragic poetry, hearing ‘with his eyes’ as he
described the philological task in question. For Nietzsche, aesthetics, defined as a
science corresponded to the rigorously methodical and thus scientific question of his
own discipline of ancient or classical philology. And he had posed this question even
before his first book inasmuch as the critical perspective Nietzsche urges beginning
with his inaugural lecture in Basel is also the reason he concludes that lecture with a
conversion of Seneca’s dictum: philology is to become philosophically critical which
is also to say that philology must be set on the path of a critical science.
In this sense, we can begin to comprehend Nietzsche’s otherwise difficult to
understand self-critique (or self-defense), as he claims that in his first book, The
Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music , he found himself grappling with
what we may here describe as the ‘multidimensional’ problem of the multidi-
mensionality of science itself: “something frightful and dangerous, a problem
with horns … in any case, a new problem … science considered for the first time
as problematic, as questionable.”7 Asking how science, as such, is possible qua
science (which is what I have elsewhere described as a critical philosophy of
science),8 Nietzsche was in this sense the first to propose a hermeneutics of
science.
Nietzsche would go on to address physics itself, characterizing the natural scien-
tist’s ‘interpretation’ of nature as a “lack of philology,”9 invoking his own scientific
expertise or authority (“speaking as an old philologist”), to accuse natural scientists

5
See Adriann T. Peperzak’s contribution in the essays below in addition to Kockelmans’ own
(1983).
6
See Babich (2005) as well as Christophe Corbier (2009) and see the final chapters of Babich
(2013) for more discussion and further references. Damir Barbarič (2005) explores the question of
hearing in an effort to differentiate Heidegger’s rhetorically attuned hermeneutics from Gadamer’s
hermeneutics but he does not raise the question Nietzsche does in terms of the music of words, that
is to say of the sounding of the text.
7
Friedrich Nietzsche (1980a).
8
Thus see Babich (2010a, 2009).
9
Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, §22; Nietzsche (1980), Vol. 5, 37.
Introduction xvii

of misinterpreting their interpretations, that is to say: of forgetting that their

interpretations corresponded to “interpretation rather than text.”10
In my own Nietzsche-indebted overview of different approaches to continental
philosophy of science—including philosophies of science other than the traditional
preoccupation with physics that characterizes mainstream or analytic philosophy of
science—I discuss both philology and method, echoing Karl Jaspers’ along with
Karl Reinhardt’s additional reflections, in order to argue for the clear multidimen-
sionality of the philosophy of science itself: “The Case for -P Philosophies of
Science, where P = Physics.”11
Kockelmans alludes to Nietzsche’s famous reflections on science as interpretation
in Beyond Good and Evil, focusing in his case on the issue of text qua text.12 To be
sure, Kockelmans’ own concern was methodical hermeneutics, and like others,
Kockelman’s does not speak as Nietzsche speaks of ‘text,’ i.e., as a metaphor for the
object as such but conventionally, i.e., with respect to the traditions of scientific
interpretation. For Nietzsche however, as for Heidegger, the ‘text’ when it comes to
natural science will be its objects, or else, as Patrick Heelan has also offered several
hermeneutic studies of these, its instruments, its ‘readable’ technologies.
The relevance of hermeneutics and science in particular must be foregrounded as
it is central to the current collection but also given the sometimes peripheral presence
of such approaches in mainstream histories and philosophies of science. Although
one can also explore this peripherality in terms of the analytic or mainstream ten-
dency to distinguish the history of science (and its more traditionally text-based or
historiographically hermeneutic orientation) from the philosophy of science (and its
traditional orientation to theory and experiment), one can also, as noted above, trace
this back to the old distinction, in Dilthey’s formulation, nature we explain, the life
of the mind we understand: Die Natur erklären wir, das Seelenleben verstehen wir.13
This distinction has been decisive, especially for what would become today’s ana-
lytic and even expressly logical positivist philosophies of science (e.g., von Wright’s
1971 Explanation and Understanding).14 To this day we continue to contrast the
natural and the human sciences, whereby the natural sciences dominate our ideal
notion of science as science. Hence physics is the pre-eminent or archetypical
science (the “-P-sciences” mentioned above are no less natural sciences but include
the philosophy of chemistry as well as the earth sciences including geology, as well

10
Ibid.
11
See Babich (2010a), 359ff. On Nietzsche and Reinhardt and history, see Wolfgang Müller-Lauter
(1999) and see too for a discussion of Löwith and history, Rodolphe Gasché’s essay, “The
Remainders of Faith: On Karl Löwith’s Conception of Secularization” in the present collection
below.
12
See Kockelmans (2003), ix. Kockelmans here refers to Paul van Tongeren’s (2000).
13
Wilhelm Dilthey (1916–1967), Vol. VII, 144 See further, Dilthey (1991). Sabine Müller, a philo-
sophical physicist includes Dilthey along with an explicit reference to hermeneutics in her (2004)
but even where Dilthey is not mentioned by name he remains influential—rather in the Hegelian
spirit that is marked by a disinclination to draw connections to other authors.
14
Georg Henrik von Wright (1971).
xviii Introduction

as biology).15 The human sciences, by contrast, include history and literary studies as
well as art history and theology but they also traditionally include the more quantifi-
ably promising disciplines of psychology, sociology, ethnography and political
science in addition to other so-called social sciences. Thus in his 1930s Nietzsche
lectures, Heidegger highlights the academic tendency to connect the arts and the sci-
ences, less a conjunction than a contest, an agonistic tension nicely expressed in
Rorty’s pragmatic bon mot as “physics envy.”16 Rorty’s phrase captures the relation
to the natural sciences particularly asserted by analytic philosophy, evident in the
conflict that has in the interim peaked (without for that being fully resolved) under
the rubric of the so-called science wars17 but also in the ongoing debates on the
relevance or irrelevance of philosophy (as expressed from the point of view of
physicists like Stephen Hawking),18 where what counts as philosophy excludes
hermeneutic and phenomenological kinds and is pretty much defined as Paul or
Patricia Churchland define it, i.e., as good will advocates for brain scans or as
dedicated, in P.M.S. Hacker’s more pithy phrase, to “singing the Hallelujah chorus
for the sciences.”19 Indeed, Hawking’s and other scientist’s complaints would seem
to make it plain that the scientists see themselves as perfectly capable of bandleading
on their own behalf.20
Dilthey’s contrast between explication and understanding is a clear one and
articulates an importantly hermeneutic truth when it comes to the relation between
subject and subject in the human sciences. This recurs in Gadamer’s existential
emphasis in his reminder that we always understand otherwise, when we understand,
inasmuch as, in this very Diltheyan sense, understanding is always understanding
another—an other, any other’s—understanding. But despite its clarity and
correctness (as Heidegger distinguishes ontic truth), Nietzsche challenges that
although we may give our science the name of “‘Explanation’… it is ‘description’
that distinguishes us from older stages of knowledge and science. Our descriptions

15
See my above cited: “Towards a Critical Philosophy of Science” for this distinction and for
extensive references to the philosophy of chemistry, including Eric Scerri as well as Jaap van
Brakel—whose work appears in a different context in the present collection—as well as the phi-
losophy of geology, including the work of Rom Harré and Bob Frodeman (and this collection
features some of Frodeman’s work), in addition to the philosophy of biology (and to which Dimitri
Ginev’s contribution in this collection also belongs) including the complex case examples of
Haeckel and Franz Moewus as well as Rupert Sheldrake, Lynn Margulis and the molecular cancer
researcher and AIDs epidemiologist, Peter Duesberg.
16
Richard Rorty (1994). See for further references, Babich (2010b).
17
The science wars were instigated by disgruntled thinkers on the side of physics and traditionally
positivistic philosophy of science. See for complete references and a hermeneutic account Babich
(2002b). See also the introduction to the same volume: Babich (2002c).
18
Hawking has been saying this for some time—and it is complemented by his ambition to be
heard as a philosophically as well as scientifically in his A Brief History of Time. See for one
account in the popular press: Matt Warman (2011). For this, see Stephen Hawking and Leonard
Mlodinow (2010).
19
In interview with James Garvey (2010). For a measured discussion, see Maxwell R. Bennett and
Peter M. S. Hacker (2003).
20
This I emphasize in an interview: Babich (2011).
Introduction xix

are better—we do not explain any more than our predecessors.”21 As Nietzsche goes
on to reflect:
How could we possibly explain anything? We operate only with things that do not exist:
lines, planes, bodies, atoms, divisible time spans, divisible spaces. How should explana-
tions be at all possible when we first turn everything into an image, our image!22

Nietzsche later observes that “It is perhaps just dawning on five or six minds that
physics, too, is only an interpretation and exegesis of the world (to suit us, if I may
say so!) and not a world-explanation.”23 Explanation turns out to be little more than
a redescription of the unfamiliar in familiar terms, whereby the unknown is able to
be ‘taken’ as known, as if known—a point not lost on the neo-Kantian philosopher
Hans Vaihinger.24
In addition to Nietzsche’s hermeneutic and phenomenological thinking,25 the
range of approaches to hermeneutic phenomenology including but not limited to
the philosophy of science characterizes the breadth of not only Martin Heidegger
in his writing on science and technology but also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in
addition to a range of philosophers of science cutting across the contemporary
analytic-continental divide, where some are patently analytically minded and
others more traditionally, or classically, continentally framed. The term can be
applied, arguably—by which I mean descriptively—to many thinkers and schol-
ars including, anthropologists and sociologists and even poets of science, like
Gaston Bachelard, theorists and historians of science, such as Günther Abel,
Karl-Otto Apel, Babette Babich, Gaston Bachelard, Nancy Cartwright, Peter
Caws, Bob Crease, Martin Eger, Jacques Ellul, Paul Feyerabend, Dagfinn
Føllesdal, Dieter Freundlieb, Steve Fuller, Carl F. Gethmann, Ronald Giere,
Dimitri Ginev, Trish Glazebrook, Ian Hacking, Lee Hardy, Patrick Heelan, Kurt
Hübner, Peter Janich, Pierre Kerszberg, Ted Kisiel, Joseph J. Kockelmans, Bruno
Latour, Hans Lenk, Reinhard Löw, Alfred Nordmann, Gerard Radnitzky, Joseph
Rouse, Thomas Seebohm, Michel Serres, Isabel Stengers, Bas C. van Fraassen,
and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, John Ziman, among many others. Although
hardly to be reduced to any one tradition, if only to the extent that each of the
above names—and many more could be added—represent sometimes opposed

21
Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, §112; (1980), Vol. 3.
22
Ibid.
23
Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, §14; (1980), Vol. 5.
24
See Vaihinger (1924). I discuss Vaihinger and Nietzsche together with the philosopher of chem-
istry and early interpreter of Nietzsche and science, Alwin Mittasch in Babich (1994). For a related
discussion but particularly with refernce to Robert Julius Mayer, see Günter Abel (1998).
25
Gadamer had already written about Nietzsche and hermeneutics some time ago along with Paul
Ricoeur and Gianni Vattimo, in addition, of course, to almost everyone who has ever written on
Nietzsche and interpretation. And anyone concerned with Nietzsche and science was perforce
reflecting upon yet another dimension of hermeneutic phenomenology, to wit Vaihinger as well as
Mittasch but also Walter del Negro and Reinhardt Löw, Jean Granier, Friedrich Kaulbach,
Wolfgang Müller-Lauter and others. Several collections have appeared drawing out the lines of
Nietzsche and phenomenology, most recently and most comprehensively, Élodie Boubil and
Christine Daigle (2012).
xx Introduction

but always distinct philosophical approaches in their own right, along with their
own specializations, the breadth of these hermeneutic and phenomenological
approaches to the history and philosophy of science is highlighted to an astonish-
ing degree in Kockelmans’ several approaches to the philosophy of science
beginning with a concern with the history and philosophy of mathematics26 and
physics27 and, as he himself emphasizes,28 with Husserl.29 On his own account of
this and after his initial work in the philosophy of mathematical physics,
Kockelmans’ intellectual development works through Merleau-Ponty30 as well as
Heidegger’s philosophical reflections on science in Being and Time and through-
out his later writings (including Heidegger’s reflections on art),31 before
Kockelmans goes on to offer his own overview in his two-volume study, the first
volume published in 1993 and the second volume almost a decade later in 2002:
Ideas for a Hermeneutic Phenomenology of the Natural Sciences.32
Heidegger had argued that reflective or meditative thinking or philosophy is
questioning—meaning that it both presupposes and that it entails—questioning. In
this questioning hermeneutic sense, the Heidegger of 1929/1930 is able to contend
that “all science is perhaps only a servant with respect to philosophy.”33 The same
spirit of this early suggestion can be heard in the later Heidegger’s provocative
dictum on science in his What is Called Thinking that, and above all: ‘science does
not think.’34
In this sense, the Gadamerian hermeneutic philosopher, Jean Grondin, seemingly
argues that continental philosophy is hermeneutics—as it were—all the way down.35
But traditional practitioners of hermeneutic philosophy have tended to keep them-
selves well clear of the broad themes of philosophy, especially epistemology but
above all philosophy of science, emphasizing as students of hermeneutics tend to
do, a focus on text or literary traditions of the same. The result can lead to mispri-
sions in the classic debates over the years between Gadamer and Habermas or the
debate specifically relevant to the current context, between Patrick Aidan Heelan and

26
Joseph J. Kockelmans (1953).
27
Kockelmans (1958, 1962).
28
See for this emphasis: Kockelmans (1993), ix ff.
29
See for example, Kockelmans (in Dutch) (1964), (in English as 1967) as well as his (1987). See
too Kockelmans’ monograph on Husserl which begins with a reprint and translation of Husserl’s
1928 article on “Phenomenology” in the Encyclopedia Britannica: Kockelmans (1994) as well as
Kockelmans (1970).
30
Joseph J. Kockelmans (1970) as well as (1964).
31
Kockelmans (1985).
32
Kockelmans (1993, 2002).
33
Heidegger 1995, 5. The focus on questioning is the meaning of critique, foregrounded as essen-
tial in Kant and post-Kantian thought in Nicholas Rescher’s contribution to the current volume.
See also Richard Tieszen (2005) who emphasizes the importance for Gödel of this likewise
Husserlian emphasis on the role of philosophy.
34
Heidegger (1968), 8ff. For discussion see Jean-Michel Salanskis (1995), Babich (2003). Ginev
(1997).
35
See Jean Grondin (2000).
Introduction xxi

György Markus.36 Markus takes the literary scholar’s conventional understanding

of the hermeneutic tradition as his point of departure, invoking the “cultural organi-
zation of the Author-Text-Reader relation.”37 Markus then goes on to insist that
when it comes to the philosophy of science, meaning the natural sciences, “writings
explicitly addressed to such an undertaking are very rare.”38 But this circular
insistence exemplifies what Nietzsche called the acoustic (ceteris paribus: cogni-
tive) illusion, that where one hears (or can conceptualize) nothing, there is nothing.
Thus if we have not bothered to read widely—and many of us, even many of the
more scholarly among us, do not bother—we assume that what we have read
exhausts the extant texts, which then allows us to go on to say that such approaches
are either nonexistent or rare. The tendency is self-confirming and convenient.
Coupled with the tendency scholars have to focus on just a few names at the tip of
the fashionable disciplinary iceberg, the attention deficit disorder Nietzsche called a
‘lack of philology’ continues to this day.
But the problem is worse than a lack of research. For a hermeneutics of natural
science goes beyond the texts themselves in the very phenomenological direction of
the things themselves, indeed towards a hermeneutic phenomenology of natural
science. Thus in order to contend in 1987 that there is “No Hermeneutics of Natural
Sciences,” Markus was required not only to overlook Heidegger himself—who
offers a precisely hermeneutic account of the natural sciences and specifically nam-
ing physics as such and thereby amplifying Husserl’s phenomenological project for
the sciences in Heidegger’s 1927 Being and Time—but also, and more expressly,
Heelan’s 1965 monograph on Heisenberg’s philosophy of science,39 as well as
Kockelmans’ 1966 monograph on the philosophy of physical science (leaving out
Kockelmans’ earlier Dutch language studies),40 in addition to, among excluded
others, Heidegger’s successor in Freiburg after the war, the Hungarian philosopher
of science, Wilhelm Szilasi who published a very hermeneutical minded study of
science (in Heidegger’s spirit) in 1945 and so on.41
The history of the philosophy of science itself, in the meetings of the American
Philosophy of Science Association and in its publications, which in the 1960s
received the work of Kockelmans as it also received Heelan’s contributions with an
openness that was as striking as it would prove to be short-lived, has yet to be
written, but any account would need to review the changing rubrics that must rule
the reference to hermeneutics.42 Thus Kockelmans pointed out that he himself
originally spoke of “existential phenomenology” and only later came to speak of the

36
See here Gyorgy Markus’s patently circular (1987), as well as Heelan’s patient rejoinder (1989).
Largely engaging Markus, see Dimitri Ginev (1997). See yet more broadly, Heelan (1998).
37
Markus (1987), 5.
38
Ibid., pp. 5–6.
39
Heelan (1965).
40
See Kockelmans (1966), which in turn was a translation of an earlier text written in Dutch (1962).
41
Wilhelm Szilasi (1945) as well as Szilasi (1961).
42
Heelan’s own biographical reflections, (for a beginning and a chronological review of
Kockelmans’ as indeed of Heelan’s own publications in this matter) can also be revealing.
xxii Introduction

same as “hermeneutic phenomenology”43 and Heelan too would experiment with

terms like context-dependence and interpretation.
Another part of the problem may well be traceable to my own teacher, Hans-Georg
Gadamer, who maintained, perhaps because his own father was a well-known pro-
fessor of chemistry, a certain distance from the sciences, and who, when he did
engage the sciences in his long life, did little to supersede the effects of this same
distance. Thus Gadamer’s Reason in the Age of Science repeated Dilthey without
going beyond him.44 More troublesome was the conventional distinction lent to
studies of the social sciences (already burdened by the old fact/value distinction as
sciences of ‘spirit’ in a German context) by authors who did not really introduce
hermeneutics at all into books that were nonetheless so titled, such as Zygmunt
Bauman’s Hermeneutics and Social Science which was rather more of a primer for
anthropological sociology than anything else.45 By contrast, of course, Kockelmans
always sought to include both phenomenology and hermeneutics in his own
discussions of the social sciences.46
Nevertheless there are significant signs that things are changing. I read Alfred
Nordmann’s “Getting the Causal Story Right” as an important step in such a direc-
tion interior to mainstream philosophy of science, beyond the continued damage
done by Markus’s limitation of hermeneutics to the “interpretive encounter of a
reader with a text”47 rather than and as Kockelmans himself had read Heidegger’s
hermeneutic transformation of the phenomenological return to Husserl’s things
themselves in the schemes that Heidegger contended made up the region or
delimited an individual science qua science, or as Merleau-Ponty saw this as

43
This is also to be seen in the original title for the largest society for the study of continental
philosophy in North America, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Some
years ago there was talk of changing the name of the society to reflect not only hermeneutics but
other significant trends. Similar emphases also can be seen in the leading journal for continental
philosophy which was originally called Man and World and is now called, obviously enough, The
Continental Philosophy Review.
44
Gadamer (1981). But of course all of this collection is about showing the precise relevance of
Gadamer’s thinking to science as exemplified, just for one example by an essay featuring medical
and nursing professionals among the collective authors: Nancy J. Moules et al. (2013).
45
Simon Glynn’s concluding essay, “The Hermeneutics of God, the Universe, and Everything”,
offers an exception to this claim. See Zygmunt Bauman’s (1978) also avoided significant engage-
ment with Gadamer, reading hermeneutics to be sure as a literary tradition. I should also note that
although Richard Bernstein’s study of pragmatism and hermeneutics invokes science in the title of
his book, Bernstein does not in fact speak to philosophy of science. Similarly, the rhetoric of sci-
ence can fail to engage the broad tradition of hermeneutics as can be seen by more rather than less
conventional studies such in evidence in monographs and collections such as Allan G. Gross and
William M. Keith (1997). By contrast and although also analytically inclined Chrysostomos
Mantzavinos (2005) offers a systematic approach to what may count, very provisionally, as a new
beginning.
46
Thus see in particular Kockelmans’ important essay (1975) as well as his (1976), his (1978) and
(1979) essays.
47
Alfred Nordmann’s (2008).
Introduction xxiii

informing sense-perception including measurement, as Heelan would also argue in

both Heidegger’s and Husserl’s sense, as well as theory.
If Heidegger could call Husserlian phenomenology the Urwissenschaft in 1919,48
his signal contribution was his articulation of an explicitly hermeneutic phenome-
nology. Thus if the Heidegger of 1925, almost in the very same terms that Husserl
uses, refers to the “crisis of philosophy as science,” he reflects in the same spirit—
and indeed one that will recur almost verbatim in the early section of Being and
Time—that all “sciences and groups of sciences are undergoing a great revolution of
a productive kind that has opened up new modes of questioning, new possibilities,
and new horizons.”49 Heidegger goes on to detail the theory of relativity in physics
along with the crisis of foundations in mathematics, to which one must add quantum
mechanics along with the movement against mechanistic thinking in the biological
sciences. For Heidegger, what is at issue is the constitution of modern technological
and mathematizable (measurable, calculable, model-oriented) science, conceived in
both the Husserlian phenomenological sense and the mechanically explicit sense of
standardized manufacture and institutional technology.50
But it would be difficult to characterize Joseph Kockelmans’ approach better
than Ted Kisiel has where Kisiel also has recourse to the above-mentioned
distinctions and contrasts to do so:
Contrary to Patrick Heelan and me, Joe K’s hermeneutic approach to the philosophy of
science consistently follows an (to me unremarkable) approach sketched out by MH in SZ
363 of “thematizing objectification” with math physics as its ultimate model, which via
mathematical projection abstracts and demarcates a domain of objects, which it regards as
Nature, for research by way of formalization and other such theoretical systematizations.
All this summarized in his book (Kluwer, 1993) entitled Ideas for a Hermeneutic
Phenomenology of the Natural Sciences.51

To this extent, and as we may, following Kisiel here, review Kockelmans’ own
philosophical trajectory in the philosophy of science, Heidegger himself also fol-
lowed and complemented Husserl’s own approach to science. In the same way, as
Kockelmans has also foregrounded this conjunction, both Heidegger and Husserl
significantly regarded phenomenology as an approach needed for any philosophy of
science that might come forth as such.52 But in the same spirit, and this is where

48
Heidegger (2000), 3, 11ff . See further Ted Kisiel (2002), 17ff.
49
Heidegger (2002), 148.
50
This is a complex point, and later the same Heidegger who will foreground Gelassenheit,
suggests in the 1930s that the trajectory of modern technology may be described as a “humanism”
— reading humanism here as Nietzsche speaks of the human, all too human. See for this reading
of the Beiträge of the 1930s and 1940s, Babich (2012a) as well as my own essay included in the
collection below on Heidegger’s 1949/1950 lectures as well as, for a critical account relevant to our
own times, Babich (2012–2013).
51
Ted Kisiel, email to the author. 12:00 AM, 11 June 2013.
52
Indeed although the great majority of the contributions show the dominant influence of analytic
philosophy, the contributions to Carlo Ierna, Hanne Jacobs, and Filip Mattens (2010) illustrate this
point as does R. L. Tieszen (1989) as well as Ginev (1997) and the contributions to Babich (2002a)
as well as Glazebrook (2012).
xxiv Introduction

many readers of Heidegger’s philosophy of science will tend to shy away, recognizing
this as a critical reservation, Heidegger also opposes sense-directed reflection
[Besinnung] to the rational, calculative project of Western technologically articu-
lated and advancing science. Thus Heidegger discusses the relation between science
and philosophy in Being and Time, noting as he does there that philosophical logic
can either ‘limp along’ after the sciences,53 or else it can leap ahead, as a literally
“productive logic.”54 For Heidegger this generative logic that leaps ahead “into
some area of Being, discloses it for the first time, in the constitution of its Being,
and, after thus arriving at the structures within it, makes these available to the
positive sciences as transparent assignments for their inquiry.”55
Reflecting on the “future” of hermeneutic philosophy, Otto Pöggeler, along
with Bas C. van Fraassen, a contributor to Tim Stapleton’s edited Festschrift in
Kockelmans honor,56 could observe that no possibility that is not adequately antici-
pated or sufficiently met can come to be. What is then lacking is not a failure of
possibility with respect to what has or what might come to pass but a deficiency in
the prerequisite or condition for the possibility of matching such a possibility in
advance and as point de départ in the present time.57
Kockelmans’ own Ideas for a Hermeneutic Phenomenology of the Natural
Sciences58 begins with a sober recollection of the breadth of his background in his
introduction to this collection, going back to his fairly patently hermeneutic 1958
study on Time and Space.59 Although it bears directly on the issue at hand, i.e.,
although it is precisely relevant to the multifarious dimensionality or dimensionali-
ties of hermeneutic phenomenology of science precisely qua philosophy of science,
there is here no way to detail the history of reception and lack of reception, i.e., to
explicate the antecedents and consequents of what are (or what become) received
viewpoints vs. the unreceived viewpoints that collectively make up the hermeneutic
constellation of what is routinely included within and what is excluded from what is
called philosophy of science. Some of this is due to what is widely condemned as
scientism or analytic philosophy’s ‘physics envy’ quoted from Rorty above.60 Other
elements are doubtless due to a related trend on the part of analytic philosophy to
bar from its ranks anything, anyone and indeed any themes that might compromise
analytic philosophy’s ongoing effort to be taken as the sole arbiter of science and
reason—even in place of scientists as such—but may also be accounted to the

53
Heidegger (1962), 31.
54
Ibid., 30.
55
Ibid., 31.
56
See the contributions to Timothy Stapleton (1994).
57
See here Otto Pöggeler (1994).
58
Kockelmans (1993).
59
Cited as: “Time and Space: The Meaning of Einstein’s Relativity Theory for a Phenomenological
Philosophy of Nature (Haarlem: Bohn, 1958)” in Footnote 2 of Kockelmans, 1993: “Preface”, ix.
Original (1958).
60
Rorty (1994) and see, again, for further references and discussion, Babich (2010b).
Introduction xxv

extreme rigor of hermeneutic phenomenology which from the start conceived its
own approach as scientific, and of the very first rank.
It is in this fashion that Heidegger reflects on the reflexive contradiction of
the claim that “there is no absolute certainty.”61 Like Nietzsche’s claim that
there is no truth (only interpretation), Heidegger does not dispute the argument
countering that this claim advances “a claim to absolute certainty that there is
no absolute certainty.” Nevertheless and just as Nietzsche does not dispute but
much rather encourages the critic who observes that the claim that ‘everything
is interpretation’ is itself an interpretation, the issue for philosophical and logi-
cal reflection is exactly, as Heidegger points out, that “this apparently unshak-
able argument nevertheless carries no weight.”62 At issue is the lived dynamic of
philosophy or “freedom” for Heidegger, a freedom which also corresponds to an
“innermost ambiguity,”63 the same ambiguity that appears in Nietzsche’s writ-
ings as “change” or “becoming.” It is because of the “turbulent” freedom of
philosophizing, as human beings must philosophize, that everything that belongs
to the human condition “belongs just as essentially to the truth of philosophy.”64
Hence and in a Nietzschean (and indeed Avenarius-cum-Machian) moment
reflecting on the economy of knowledge, Heidegger observes that “No knower
necessarily stands so close to the verge of error at every moment as the one who
philosophizes.”65
For Heidegger—and this reflects the overall spirit of the present collection on
the multidimensionality of hermeneutics—philosophy is called upon to think on
science. But Heidegger also contends not only that science is infamously inno-
cent of thought but in what we may now see to be an echo of Nietzsche’s remarks
on physics and interpretation in Beyond Good and Evil, Heidegger also writes
that “Physics as physics can make no assertions about physics.”66 To this extent—
and this is why hermeneutics cannot be dispensed with, perhaps particularly
when it comes the natural sciences—Heidegger’s objections are, logically, for-
mal ones. As Ted Kisiel explains Heidegger’s gnomic pronouncement on error:
“In order to reflect on any science, it is necessary to transcend that science and
adopt a transcendental vantage point, to put it in Kantian terms.”67 For Heidegger,
a scientist philosophizes, with all the risks of the same, as a philosopher and not
as a scientist when reflecting on the foundations of his own discipline.
When Kockelmans concludes the first volume of his Hermeneutic Phenomenology
of Natural Science by reflecting on the same foundations with respect to the history
and philosophy of science, his point concerns the conceptual framework of science

61
Heidegger (2001), 18, cf. 17.
62
Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 18.
63
Ibid., 19.
64
Ibid.
65
Ibid.
66
Heidegger (1977), here 176.
67
Kisiel (1970), 167–183, here 170.
xxvi Introduction

as this itself “essentially depends on its mathematical character.”68 In this sense

Kockelmans stresses, as Hilbert had already argued as necessary point of departure
for mathematics as a science, the foundational point Heidegger makes above, that
“mathematics is not a means to express a rationality that is already there” but much
rather that mathematics “constitutes the rationality of our description of the observed
phenomena.”69 The essays to follow exemplify this rigor and above all they testify
to the multidimensionality of hermeneutic phenomenology not only in the philoso-
phy of science but also for the philosophy of technology as well as metaphysics and
epistemology, and including aesthetics, as well as explorations of the history of
philosophy and theology.

Plan of the Text

In his lead essay, “A Paradox of Cognition” in the first section, Cognition,

Bio-Hermeneutics, and Lifeworld, Nicholas Rescher offers a reflection on the
classical ironic circumstance that finds us increasingly aware of the limitations of
our knowledge the more we know. Rescher takes his point of departure from Kant’s
observation that every answer to our questions provides new materials for the devel-
opment of further questions. As knowledge expands, the lineaments of our igno-
rance are brought even more clearly into sight. Questioning is thus an earmark of
hermeneutic phenomenology. In his essay to follow, Dimitri Ginev turns to a case
study drawn from vectorial biochemistry in his “The Articulation of a Scientific
Domain from the Viewpoint of Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Case of Vectorial
Metabolism.” Ginev’s case study involves both theoretical objects related to aniso-
tropic processes of trans-membrane transport and objects of inquiry contextually
ready to hand within a configuration of scientific practices, especially including the
hermeneutic fore-structure of scientific research in terms not only of scientific
practices but also hermeneutic and horizontal possibilities as well as spaces of
representation in addition to readable technologies.
The next essays take up the social sciences. Gregor Schiemann in his contribution,
“One Cognitive Style Among Others: Towards a Phenomenology of the Lifeworld
and of Other Experiences,” addresses the work of Alfred Schütz in the phenomenol-
ogy of the social sciences. Schiemann emphasizes Schütz’s pluralist theory of
experience. Speaking not only on cognitive styles but of the lifeworld as a world of
perception as Husserl expressed it but also of the layer-model of the lifeworld devel-
oped by Schütz and Thomas Luckmann, Schiemann shows that “lifeworld” does not
denote a category that encompasses culture or nature but refers to a delimited
action-space and goes on to deploy Schütz’s criterion-catalogue to characterize both
experimental science and subjectivity. Then, in his essay to follow, “Steps Toward a
Postfoundational Phenomenology,” Giovanni Leghissa explores the problem of

68
Kockelmans (1993), 281.
69
Ibid.
Introduction xxvii

historicity together with the paradoxes of foundation for the sake of a more
comprehensive inquiry into the concept of lifeworld. Drawing upon Husserl and
Blumenberg, Leghissa explores the relationship between history and the lifeworld
as well as the paradoxes contained in the Krisis.
The concluding essays in this first section turn to practical hermeneutic dimen-
sions in the natural sciences, including the philosophy of geology as well as mea-
surement. Robert Frodeman discusses “Hermeneutics in the Field: The Philosophy
of Geology,” arguing that geological reasoning provides a rich and realistic account
of both the power and limitations of scientific reasoning. Frodeman shows that
geological reasoning highlights the hermeneutic and historical nature of reasoning,
scientific or otherwise, in addition to the neglected kinship between reasoning in
the sciences and the humanities. To conclude this first section, Robert Crease
examines measurement as an ‘emblematic technology’ in his essay, “The Metroscape:
Phenomenology of Measurement.” Reading measurement to develop and extend
Heidegger’s concept of Gestell, Crease argues that measurement is more than one
tool among others, such as rulers, scales, and other instruments, measurement is a
fluid and correlated network that is smoothly and intimately integrated into the
world and its shape. This essay proposes the concept of metroscape to develop and
extend Heidegger’s concept of Gestell.
The second of the four sections in this collection, “Hermeneutic and
Phenomenological Philosophy of Science and Technology” leads with an essay by
Patrick Aidan Heelan, “Consciousness, Quantum Physics, and Hermeneutical
Phenomenology” who begins with a powerful metaphor comparing Friedrich
Schleiermacher’s ‘hermeneutic’ transformation of Kant’s anthropology (in order to
include then-newly discovered peoples that Captain Cook had discovered in the
South Sea Islands) to Kockelmans effort to update Kant’s notion of natural science
to include the phenomenological lifeworld syntheses of classical, relativity, and
quantum physics. In this hermeneutical move, the ‘observer’ is ‘embodied con-
sciousness’ and ‘measure-numbers’ represent ‘observable presence.’ For Heelan, the
quantum notion of an “observable” introduces into the discursive language of phys-
ics the common sense lifeworld notion of “contextuality” as Heelan himself had
earlier developed the notion of a context-dependent logic. In the next essay, Michael
Stölzner begins by noting that usual treatments of Nietzsche’s thesis of eternal
recurrence tend to highlight its ethical or anthropological rather than its more scien-
tific aspects. Stölzner reviews Oskar Becker’s 1936 effort to defend the scientific
and logical basis of Nietzsche’s writings, noting that although Becker endorses Abel
Rey’s Le retour éternel et la philosophie de la physique (1927), he neglects the work
of the mathematician Felix Hausdorff, particularly his Das Chaos in kosmischer
Auslese (published in 1898 under the pseudonym Paul Mongré). For Stölzner,
Becker’s argument rests upon the constructivist standpoint in the foundations of
mathematics and the Heideggerian underpinning of it by the temporality of mathe-
matical thought that he had already given in his 1927 Mathematische Existenz.
From this set-theoretical and cosmological perspective, the rest of the contributions
in this section take up Heidegger and technology, beginning with Theodore Kisiel’s
essay “Heidegger and Our Twenty-first Century Experience of Ge-Stell,” where he
xxviii Introduction

proposes an etymological translation of Ge-Stell, Heidegger’s word for the essence

of modern technology, from its Greek and Latin roots as “syn-thetic com-posit[ion]
ing.” For Kisiel, the virtue of such a compound translation shows that Heidegger’s
Ge-Stell presciently portends our twenty-first century experience of what Kisiel
calls “the internetted WorldWideWeb,” with its virtual infinity of ‘websites’ in
‘cyberspace,’ but also Global Positioning Systems, interlocking air traffic control
grids, world-embracing weather maps, the 24/7 world news coverage of cable TV
networks like CNN, etc.,—all of which are structured by the complex programming
based on the computerized and ultimately simple Leibnizian binary-digital logic
generating an infinite number of combinations of the posit (1) and non-posit (0).
Kisiel argues that the sharp contrast between the global time-space technologically
foreshortened into instantaneity and simultaneity and the radically local time-space
of our situated historical existence illuminates nothing less than the temporal-spatial
tension between Ge-Stell and Da-Sein and Kisiel accordingly seeks to bring them
together in contemporaneous compatibility. Babette Babich’s essay, “Constellating
Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr/The Danger,” revisits the original 1949 lec-
tures to the Club of Bremen arguing that a hermeneutic not only of Heidegger’s
reflections on technology but the context in which he offered his lecture series can
offer insight into some of the more controversial passages in these texts. Like Kisiel,
Babich adverts to today’s media context, particularly the ecology of modern techni-
cized consciousness (underlining that we are still in need of a greater integration of
Heidegger’s thinking and critical theory), as well as the increasing real-world
ecological pressures of our own day to rethink, once again, the related notions of
event [Ereignis] and ownedness [Eigentlichkeit]. Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel, in
their jointly authored essay, “Heidegger’s Thinking on the ‘Same’ of Science and
Technology,” begin by noting that as opposed to the common view that modern
technology derives from modern science, Heidegger presents a reverse picture in
which science originated in the essence of technology, wherein Being speaks. Ma
and van Brakel contend that in this sense Heidegger speaks of the Same [das Selbe]
of science and technology as ultimately grounded in the history of Being. From
1938 to the end of his life in 1976, Heidegger constantly explored the question
concerning the relation of science and technology and kept himself well-informed
of both traditional and new types of technology and science, including quantum
physics, nuclear technology, and biophysics. Ma and van Brakel argue however that
one cannot ascribe to the Heidegger the view that these new developments originate
a new Epoch of Being. In his concluding contribution to the first half of this collec-
tion, “Logos and the Essence of Technology,” Holger Schmid contends that current
convictions that nature is not ‘nature’ but social construction corresponds to the
self-accomplishment of metaphysical Platonism, thereby opening a common her-
meneutic horizon for two articles of Heideggerian doctrine: namely, that technology
has a non-technological ‘essence’ and that the final outbreak of the ‘principle of
reason’ follows an incubation period of more than two millennia. What thus unfolds
for Schmid is the philosophic history of the word ‘logos’: not speech, as Heidegger
rightly urges, but ‘laying.’ In this fashion, and including important references to
Wilhelm von Humboldt on language and, more subtly, to Friedrich Georg Jünger on
Introduction xxix

technology, Schmid continues to argue that today’s technoscientific worldview

increasingly determines the way reality is perceived, privileging the framework of
the natural as opposed to the human sciences.
The second half of the collection begins with the section Philosophical Truth,
Hermeneutic Aesthetics, and History of Philosophy. Graeme Nicholson, in his lead
essay here, “On the Manifold Meaning of Truth in Aristotle,” makes the case that
when Aristotle treats true and false statements in his logical treatises, what is
demonstrated is that truth and falsity are the pre-supposed, non-discursive grounding
for statements themselves. Nicholson goes on to note that it is even more salient that
Aristotle’s ethical treatises show that intellectual virtues are constituted by truth
whereas the Metaphysics shows that truth in thinking is sustained by the truth of
being. As Nicholson argues, these diverse studies can be connected to one another by
way of the Greek term for truth, aletheia, as Heidegger has treated it. Jeff Malpas’
essay, “The Twofold Character of Truth: Heidegger, Davidson, Tugendhat,” contin-
ues Nicholson’s focus on the concept of truth as aletheia, or ‘unconcealment.’ Malpas
differs from Nicholson’s analysis in that he places his emphasis on Tugendhat’s
influential criticism of Heidegger’s identification of truth with aletheia together with
Donald Davidson’s account. Malpas seeks to show why it remains the case that ale-
theia is to be understood as a mode of truth, arguing that this involves understanding
a certain transcendental-topological structure as pertaining to aletheia, thereby
understanding truth as standing in an essential relation to place or topos constituting
the ground for genuine questioning or critique. In his essay, “What can Philosophy
of Science Learn from Hermeneutics—What Can Hermeneutics Learn From
Philosophy of Science?” Jan Faye challenges the traditional supposition that herme-
neutics and phenomenology were the dominant positions in the philosophy of the
humanities, whereby the validity of these constitutive acts of meaning depended on
the historical situation of the interpreter and of the object of interpretation. Although
agreeing with the hermeneutic-phenomenological tradition, Faye proposes a view of
interpretation and understanding resting on the idea that human cognition is a natural
phenomenon. Thus Faye argues that objective understanding exists in the humanities
in the sense whereby the validity of an interpretation, like an explanation in the
sciences, is independent of the interpreter’s historical situation. As the concluding
contribution to this section, Enrico Berti’s “The Classical Notion of Person and its
Criticism by Modern Philosophy” illustrates the definition of person given by
Boethius as “an individual substance of a rational nature,” and as derived from
Aristotle. Berti explores the criticisms of this notion formulated by both modern and
contemporary philosophers from David Hume to Derek Parfit and details the redis-
covery of the classical notion of person, or of its Aristotelian elements, by Saul
Kripke, David Wiggins, Paul Ricoeur, and Martha C. Nussbaum.
The concluding section, Hermeneutic Science and First Philosophy, Theology,
Hermetics and the Universe, begins with a contribution that recollects the purview
of the collection as a whole. In his essay, “Philosophie des sciences et philosophie
première”, Pierre Kerszberg argues that ever since the institution of Galilean
science, the mathematical science of nature has wanted to surmount the deceptive
appearances of everyday experience. Yet reference to familiar experience is
xxx Introduction

insurmountable even for contemporary theory. Kerszberg, thus undertakes the proj-
ect of first philosophy in terms of the horizon of a mathesis universalis in order to
explore the possibilities of an epistemology that eliminates both the fantasy of abso-
lute control of what is as well as the skepticism that inevitably follows the frustra-
tion of the same fantasy. For Kerszberg, Kant’s transcendental phenomenology
opens a path to such, including the contributions of modern and contemporary sci-
ence to invent kinds of evidence that would engage anew the gestures of the body
translated into the spaces of thought. Adriaan T. Peperzak’s “A Re-Reading of
Heidegger’s “Phenomenology and Theology” in dialogue with Kockelmans own
engagement with theology raises the question of the status of both science and
theology, motivated by critical questions concerning his basic statements about the
presence and absence of certain relations between faith and philosophy. Perperzak
invokes traditional theological debates as well as a reflection on Franz Overbeck,
usually noted in connection with Nietzsche but who was important for many con-
temporary debates on theology.
In the penultimate article in this collection, “The Remainders of Faith: On Karl
Löwith’s Conception of Secularization,” Rodolphe Gasché’s essay explores
Löwith’s notion of secularization. Gasché argues that this notion presupposes a
conception of faith found only in the religions of the Book. For Gasché, Löwith’s
analyses of history, no matter whether eschatological or progressive, are adum-
brated against the background of the Greek experience of the physical cosmos as
this is characterized by cyclical time. The final contribution by Simon Glynn, “The
Hermeneutics of God, the Universe, and Everything,” offers a comprehensively
global perspective on hermeneutic interpretation as a means of clarifying and
resolving apparent incoherencies and contradictions within the scriptures as well as
legal, classical, and other texts. Explicating such wide-ranging application within
these diverse fields of human inquiry, Glynn concludes, along with Heidegger, that
hermeneutic interpretation is central to all epistemological understanding, as it is to
human existence.

Acknowledgments

Permission from Bildagentur dpa to reprint the photograph included in Babette

Babich, “Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr/The Danger” is
gratefully acknowledged.
Robert Frodeman’s contribution has appeared in earlier variations as Frodeman,
“Geological reasoning: Geology as an interpretive and historical science,” GSA
Bulletin 107 (1995): 960–968 as well as Frodeman, Geologic: Breaking Ground
between Philosophy and the Earth Sciences (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2003). An earlier version of Enrico Berti’s “The Classical Notion of Person
and its Criticism by Modern Philosophy” was initially published under the title of
“The Classical Notion of Person in Today’s Philosophical Debate” in the collection
edited by Edmond Malinvaud and Mary Ann Glendon, Conceptualization of the
Introduction xxxi

Person in Social Sciences, Proceedings of the Eleventh Plenary Session of the

Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Vatican City (2006): 63–77 and was repub-
lished in part with the title “The Classical Notion of Person and its Criticism by
Modern Philosophy” in International Academy for Philosophy, News and Views,
New Series, Vol.1, No 1, 22 (Spring 2009): 9–19. The first instauration of Rodolphe
Gasché’s essay was published in Divinatio. Studia Culturologica Series, Sofia:
MSHS, vol. 28 (2008): 27–50. An earlier version of Holger Schmid’s essay was
published in the Proceedings of the 35th Meeting of the Heidegger Circle. On
Heidegger’s 1976 Letter to the 10th Meeting of the Heidegger Circle in Chicago
(New York: Fordham University, 2001): 101–114.
The co-editor of this collection, Dimitri Ginev, conceived the idea for this collection
in honor of the memory of one of the pioneers of hermeneutic phenomenology, Joseph
J. Kockelmans. Both editors together worked to bring the contributors here included
in the present volume. This volume is both a tribute to Joseph Kockelmans as well as
an invitation to read—and to re-read—Kockelmans’ work.
As the corresponding and working coeditor, the present author thanks the
reviewers of the volume for their helpful suggestions and Anita van der Linden-
Rachmat as well as the series editor, Dermot Moran. In addition to my gratitude to
Joseph Kockelmans, Jr. and Veronique Foti, I am also grateful to Tim Stapleton,
Patrick Aidan Heelan and Dimitri Ginev. William J. Richardson, S.J., Richard
Cobb-Stevens, and David B. Allison also provided helpful discussions. But my
deepest tribute of thanks is owed to Ted Kisiel, who worked with Joe Kockelmans
in Pittsburgh and who has inspired me in the years since I first encountered Ted in
my reading of the collection he edited with Joe Kockelmans and again when I met
him in person, for the first time, in Berlin and ever since.

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Kockelmans, Joseph. 1970. The mathematization of nature in Husserl’s last publication. In:
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 Part I
Science, Cognition,
Hermeneutics, and Lifeworld
A Paradox of Cognition

Nicholas Rescher

Abstract The paper deals with variations on the theme of the ironic circumstance
that the more we know the ampler our realization of the extent of our ignorance.
For, as Kant already observed, every answer to our questions provides new materials
for the development of further questions. The expansion of our knowledge thus
brings the lineaments of our ignorance even more clearly into sight.

Knowledge narrows the range of acceptable possibility. If I know nothing about the
matter, it is possible, as far as I am concerned, that a lion is on the mat—or that the
mat is unoccupied. But if I know that the cat is on the mat, then these possibilities
are eliminated.
However, while knowledge narrows the range of possibility, it expands the range
of appropriate questions. For all questions hinge on presuppositions, and the more
one knows, the more presuppositions are at one’s disposal. Thus once I know that
the cat is on the mat, then all sorts of new questions pop up on the agenda: Why is
the cat on the mat? What age is the cat on the mat? And so on. So the more one
knows, the larger the range of what one can meaningfully ask and wonder about.
The coming to be and passing away of questions is a phenomenon that can be
mooted on this basis. A question arises if it then can meaningfully be posed because
all its presuppositions are then taken to be true. And a question dissolves if one or
another of its previously accepted presuppositions is no longer deemed acceptable.
Any state of science will remove certain questions from the agenda and dismiss
them as inappropriate. Newtonian dynamics dismissed the Aristotelian question
“What cause is operative to keep a body in movement (with a uniform velocity in
a straight line) once the impressed force that set it into motion has ceased to oper-
ate?” Modern quantum theory does not allow us to ask the classical “What caused

N. Rescher (*)
Department of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA
e-mail: rescher@pitt.edu

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 3

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_1,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
4 N. Rescher

this atom on californium to disintegrate after exactly 32.53 days, rather than, say,
a day or two later?” Scientific questions should thus be regarded as arising in an
historical setting. They arise at some juncture and not at others; they can be born
and then die away.
A change of mind about the appropriate answer to some question will unravel the
entire body of questions that presupposed this earlier answer. For if we change our
mind regarding the correct answer to one member of a chain of questions, then the
whole of a subsequent course of questioning may well collapse. If we abandon
the luminiferous aether as a vehicle for electromagnetic radiation, then we lose at
one stroke the whole host of questions about its composition, structure, mode of
operation, origin, and so on. The course of erotetic change is no less dramatic than
that of cognitive change.
Epistemic change over time accordingly relates not only to what is “known” but
also to what can be asked. Newly secured information opens up new questions.
And when the epistemic status of a presupposition changes from acceptance to
abandonment or rejection, we witness the disappearance of various old ones through
dissolution. Questions regarding the modus operandi of phlogiston, the behavior of
caloric fluid, the structure of the luminiferous aether, and the character of faster-
than-light transmissions are all questions that have become lost to modern science
because they involve presuppositions that have been abandoned.
The second of those aforementioned modes of erotetic discovery is particularly
significant. The phenomenon of the ever-continuing “birth” of new questions was
first emphasized by Immanuel Kant, who in his classic Critique of Pure Reason
depicted the development of natural science in terms of a continually evolving cycle
of questions and answers, where, “every answer given on principles of experience
begets a fresh question, which likewise requires its answer and thereby clearly
shows the insufficiency of all scientific modes of explanation to satisfy reason.”1
This claim suggests the following Principle of Question Propagation—Kant’s
Principle, as we shall call it: “The answering of our factual (scientific) questions
always paves the way to further as yet unanswered questions.”
There is a fundamentally relational pathway to new knowledge. Suppose I know
that item No. 1 has the property F but not G, while No. 2 has G but not F. Over and
above these two individual facts, a whole host of relational issues now arises. Why
do the two differ in point of F-G? How did those come about? Must it be so? Is there
a connection here of such a sort that if No. 1 changes in this regard, No. 2 must do
so as well. And so on. Plural facts invariably pose relational issues and open the way
to further knowledge. Combining facts engenders new questions. When physicists
postulate a new phenomenon they naturally want to know its character and modus
operandi. When chemists synthesize a new substance they naturally want to know
how it interacts with the old ones.
This circumstance has ominous cognitive implications. New answers breed new
questions. And the more the merrier. The ironic fact is that the more one knows the
greater the arena of one’s recognizable ignorance becomes.

1
Kant (1911), Sect. 57; 352.
A Paradox of Cognition 5

The process at work here is that new facts are generated (both substantively and
cognitively) by interrelating (conjoining, coordinating, combining) old ones. In this
way it will always be possible to extrude from n facts at the least n2 additional ones.
But now if—under steady-state conditions regarding inquiry—the body of known
fact grows linearly while the body of fact involucrated therein grows (at least)
exponentially, then it is clear that the ratio of accessed to accessible fact will always
diminish. With the development of knowledge, the manifold of undeniable ignorance
grows ever larger. As we know more, the range of what we cannot but acknowledge as
unknown grows ever larger. For the ironic fact of it is that as our determinate
knowledge grows, the range of our determinable ignorance grows ever faster since
every determination opens a doorway to further detail.
To be sure, various cognitive resources can countervail against our ignorance.
One of these is generalization. For knowledge can be either generic or specific. It is
one thing “to know that all lions have manes” (Kx (∀y) (Ly⊃My)), and something
quite different “to know of every lion that it has a mane” (∀y) Kx (Ly⊃My). Specific
knowledge of universal facts is generally inaccessible to finite knowers. But
generalization will often alternate the deficiencies of knowledge.
Then too, approximation can also help here. If asked about the present population
of Los Angeles I could not claim exact knowledge of the answer. But I would
unhesitatingly say that it is:
• A great many
• Roughly ten million
• More than five million and less than fifty
Many questions that we cannot answer—strictly speaking—exactly become
answerable once approximation is admitted.
This line of consideration indicates the cognitive value of detail and precision.
For what we usually understand by knowledge is precise knowledge and by answers
to questions we mean exact answers. The growth of knowledge is not betokened by
the range of questions that we can answer correctly, but by the range of questions
that we can answer with precise detail!
Clearly if we relax these conditions/requirements, the range of our “knowledge”
could be vastly expanded. The situation stands as per the following diagram which
illustrates the reciprocal complementarity on the volume and precision of our
knowledge (Fig. 1).
We frequently have recourse to this circumstance. All too commonly we settle
for imprecise answers to difficult questions. The extent of our ignorance is then
hidden away in a cloud of unknowing.
So, what can we say about the substance of our ignorance? A crucial
consideration here is the unmeetability of the challenge: “Give me an example of
a fact you do not know.” One is obviously stymied at this point. For one cannot
coherently claim in one and the same breath that something is a fact and that one
does not know it to be so. We can know that there are facts we do not know
individually or collectively. But we cannot identify specifically an individually
what they are.
6 N. Rescher

Volume

Precision

Fig. 1 Volume and precision of knowledge

The geography of our ignorance cannot be mapped with exactitude; its boundaries
cannot be pinpointed.
At this point the difference between knowledge and wisdom becomes critical.
For wisdom requires us to grasp that the cognitive life extends beyond the limits of
knowledge, and that we do not adequately honor the priceless value of our knowledge
if we fail to acknowledge that it also has its limits and limitations.

Reference

Kant, Immanuel. 1911. Prolegomena to any future metaphysics that will be able to present itself as
a science prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten
können. In: Kant’s Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 4 of the edition of the Koeniglach Preussischen
Akademie. der Wissenschaften, 255–383. Berlin: G. Reimer.
The Articulation of a Scientific Domain
from the Viewpoint of Hermeneutic
Phenomenology: The Case of Vectorial
Metabolism

Dimitri Ginev

Abstract By making use of an approach stemming from hermeneutic phenomenology,

this paper explores the constitution of meaningful objects in the domain of vectorial
biochemistry. At stake are both theoretical objects related to anisotropic processes of
trans-membrane transport and objects of inquiry contextually ready to hand within a
configuration of scientific practices. The concept of the hermeneutic fore-structure
of scientific research is discussed. The domain’s formal, conceptual and experimen-
tal articulation gets fore-structured in the horizon of possibilities projected by
the interrelated practices. The appropriation of possibilities constitutes meaningful
objects. Some basic trends of the domain’s articulation are addressed through
analyzing three aspects of interpretative fore-structuring.

1 The Concept of Hermeneutic Fore-Structure

of Scientific Research

There is a mythical moment involved in science’s objectifying thematization. This

seemingly extravagant claim has been most successfully advocated not by Paul
Feyerabend or Kurt Hübner. Its true champion is Joseph Kockelmans. In trying to
elucidate this qualification, let me start out with a disclaimer. Kockelmans’s position
has nothing to do with a kind of New Age mythologization of scientific theories
aiming at a new world-view. His program for a hermeneutic phenomenology of
science is the most irreconcilable antagonist to all distorted and confused holistic
Weltanschauungen. Kockelmans is a decisive opponent to the view that mythical
forms of understanding and mythical narratives might serve the function of counter-
parts of scientific reasoning. What he advocates is rather an elaborated version of

D. Ginev (*)
St. Kliment Ohridski University, Sofia, Bulgaria
e-mail: dimiginev@abv.bg

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 7

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_2,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
8 D. Ginev

the conception that the mythical mode of making the world meaningful is part and
parcel of the scientific attitude itself, insofar as this mode seems to be implied in the
formulation of basic theoretical assumptions (Kockelmans 1993, pp. 164–169).
The mythical moment in objectifying thematization is to be understood by hav-
ing recourse to Kockelmans’s interpretation of “man’s mythical mode of Being”—
an interpretation that unfolds Heidegger’s ideas developed in the seminal review of
the second volume of Cassirer’s The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. In this mode of
Being (which is closest to the characteristics of the primordial being-in-world) the
mythical bringing into being a totality of meaning embraces primary horizons of
world’s understanding, initial forms of world’s discursive articulation, and kinds
of primordial attunement to the world.1 Accordingly, what gets disclosed in the
mythical mode of Being is the world as a totality of meaning. On Kockelmans’s
conception, all basic theoretical assumptions in science presuppose tacitly such
a disclosure of the world. Otherwise, the objectifying projection of the world
would be impossible. This disclosure institutes the primary horizon of scientific
thematization. By implication, it plays the role of a fore-structure of the constitution
of scientific objects and the articulation of domains of scientific research. What
takes place in scientific research through the mythical disclosure of the world is a
unity of fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception of how a meaningful domain
is to be articulated in objects of inquiry. Once involved in the objectifying projection
(and the related theoretical assumptions), it becomes a unity that constantly
operates in the research process. I call this unity a hermeneutic fore-structuring of
scientific objectification.2 Due to the changeability of fore-having, fore-sight, and
fore-conception in the constitution of meaningful objects, the hermeneutic fore-
structuring constantly contextualizes in an intrinsic manner the research process.

1
Kockelmans strongly distinguishes his Heideggerian interpretation of the mythical understanding
from the established mythological paradigms in cultural anthropology and the phenomenology of
religion. The disclosure of the world’s totality of meaning within the mythical mode of Being does
not demand a narrative that relates the time of the historical events to the pre-historical time of
origins, or a narrative that is capable to found rites. In fact, Kockelmans’s conception is closer to
Bultmann’s program of demythologization which aims at revealing the primary mythical horizon
of religious imagery. It is the existential interpretation of the Holy Script that reveals this horizon.
2
In analyzing the way in which Heidegger spells out the expression “to let be” with regard to sci-
entific discovery and the formulation of scientific laws, John Haugeland reaches the conclusion
that “it is little odd to say that the law of gravity was not true before Newton discovered it… And
there remains the question of what to say about Einstein’s discovery that there is (was and will be)
no force of gravity—just curved space-time. Does this mean that, through Newton, his laws
became true, but only for a while?” (Haugeland 2007, 100) In my view, the way in which Haugeland
formulates and tries to address and settle such questions indicates a naturalist treatment of
Heidegger’s claim that there is (scientific) truth only so long and so far as Dasein is. Because of the
situated transcendence of Dasein-as-epistemic-subject (and the finitude of all ontic knowledge) the
theoretical formulations known as scientific laws are always already hermeneutically fore-
structured. It is this hermeneutic fore-structuring that Haugeland does not take into consideration
in his interpretation of Heidegger’s claim. An additional shortcoming of this interpretation is the
avoidance of the distinction between ontic/epistemic and ontological truth. On the alternative inter-
pretation I am going to subscribe in this essay, each scientific law is true within a characteristic
hermeneutic situation that reveals and conceals the objectified world in a specific manner.
The Articulation of a Scientific Domain from the Viewpoint of Hermeneutic… 9

In the remainder I will be preoccupied with the ongoing hermeneutic fore-

structuring of the formal, conceptual, and experimental articulation of a scientific
domain. Following Kockelmans’s ideas, I will treat hermeneutic phenomenology
as a philosophical approach to the constitution of meaningful objects within settings
of interrelated practices. The hermeneutic philosophy of science applies this approach
to the dynamics of scientific practices in the process of articulating a domain
of research.
To begin with, the notions of understanding and interpretation get a special
construal in hermeneutic phenomenology. They are no longer treated as particular
cognitive procedures. Understanding and interpretation are rather attributed to the
ongoing becoming of the reality of what gets articulated. Accordingly, these notions
undergo an ontological reformulation. Understanding is the horizon whose projec-
tion discloses entities in their possible usability. More specifically, an entity within-
the-world is projected upon the totality of its possible involvements in contexts of
configured practices. Thus considered, entities have meaning within the projected
horizon of understanding of the contexts in which they are ready to hand for possi-
ble manipulations. It is the reality of the entities contextually ready to hand that is
in a state of ongoing interpretative articulation. The latter consists in a constant
appropriation and actualization of projected possibilities for manipulating the enti-
ties that are already understood in their contextual usability. This is the paradigm of
the constitutional analysis of meaning suggested by hermeneutic phenomenology.3
It admits that the interpretative articulation of what gets understood proceeds
through appropriation of possibilities whose actualizing constitutes meaning. In
scientific research the articulation concerns the domain’s structure and its particular
objects of inquiry.
The research process is at any given moment situated in a configuration of
practices of formulating hypotheses; introducing appropriate mathematical
idealizations; constructing systems of differential equations, phase diagrams,
mathematical plots, and other formal tools; developing experimental systems;
replicating experiments; measuring parameters of such systems and constituting
data-models of measurements; creating and calibrating instruments; accomplishing
computer simulations; elaborating on the empirical reading of theoretical concepts; etc.
The outcome of performing the concerted and configured practices is a step in the
domain’s articulation.
For the sake of illustration consider the following configuration of practices in
cytology. At stake in the research process are issues of the investigation of the
mitochondrial cytochrome systems (for instance, the cristae membrane of mam-
malian mitochondria). Such a system consists of a class of colored proteins that

3
In its classical formulation this paradigm is to be found in Heidegger (1927/1962, 188–203). The
basic concepts here are the “fore-structure of understanding” and the “as-structure of interpreta-
tion.” The interplay between the fore-structure qua horizon of possibilities and the as-structure qua
ongoing articulation of meaningful units takes on the form of hermeneutic circle. The hermeneutic-
phenomenological analysis of a particular interrelatedness of practices (like the practices in a
domain of scientific research) requires an interpretation of the way in which the hermeneutic circle
operates in articulating the domain disclosed by that interrelatedness of practices.
10 D. Ginev

play crucial roles in oxidative processes and energy transfer during cell metabolism
and cellular respiration. A cytochrome system is an electron carrier. In serving
this function a mitochondrial cytochrome system is responsible for the coupling
between respiratory mechanism and proton transport.4 The configuration of
scientific practices in the early 1960s was devoted to the identification of electron-
carrying and hydrogen-carrying components across the mitochondrial mem-
branes. This configuration includes practices of developing conceptual models
that relate the enzyme-mediated chemical group (or electron) transfer to the catal-
ysis of solute transport mediated by the mobility of specific molecules; elaborat-
ing on new mathematical plots about enzyme kinetics; creating controlled
experimental systems for observing the role the protons transfer plays by enzymes
like the ironsulphur-flavoprotein dehydrogenases; measurements of substrates
concentrations in the proton-translocating redox process; spectrophotometric
measurements; measurements of trans-cellular electric currents; cytomechanical
investigations of mitochondria membrane structure; observations of patterns for-
mation of fluctuations arising within a homogeneous cellular region; constructing
data-models for proton- and electron-conducting pathways; and many others.
Each of these practices was distinguished by a particular space of representing
what is under investigation.
In their interrelatedness the configured practices project a leeway of possibilities
for doing research by manipulating contextually various entities. Yet the same
practices appropriate and actualize the possibilities. Each configuration of practices
in the research process projects and partially appropriates its own leeway of possi-
bilities. In the practices’ performance certain possibilities remain necessarily not
actualized. They get either forgotten (pushed aside) or recast in a new context of
inquiry brought into being by another configuration of practices. Furthermore, the
appropriation of possibilities by performing practices generates new possibilities
that transcend the leeway projected by the current configuration. This leads to the
emergence of a new configuration of practices, and accordingly, to opening a new
leeway of possibilities. Thus, the research process is at any moment at once situated
in a configuration and transcended by possibilities that cannot be appropriated and
actualized by this configuration. Because of this “situated transcendence” the
research process is constantly moving in an open horizon of possibilities.
On this account, not only the research process but also the formal, conceptual,
and experimental articulation of a domain is in a state of situated transcendence.
This is why the domain’s articulation is “always already” projected upon possibili-
ties. A scientific domain’s “being as actual presence” is always a derivative from the
potentiality-for-being of this domain.
The way of performing each particular practice in a certain configuration entails
a kind of “reading something.” Thus, one is reading instruments, experimental

4
With regard to the catalysis of solute transport of specific molecules across lipid membranes this
conclusion is drawn for the first time by Davson and Danielli (1943), pp. 72–79. This classical
work is also the pioneering study of the thermodynamic aspects of the vectorial processes of
cellular physiology, in particular processes running against the concentration gradient.
The Articulation of a Scientific Domain from the Viewpoint of Hermeneutic… 11

systems, semantic models of theoretical concepts, differential equations, diagrams,

and so on. In other words, a “readable technology” (Heelan 1983, 1998) is indi-
spensably embedded in each particular scientific practice. The three dimensions
(structural, conceptual, and experimental) of the domain’s articulation which
takes place in a configuration of practices are functions of reading that appropriates
possibilities through its formal, theoretical, and empirical technologies. The con-
figuration in cytology from the early 1960s I am discussing managed to articulate
a formal apparatus for describing and calculating the effects of the electric
membrane potential difference and the pH difference across a certain cytochrome
complex on the electronic spin and redox states of the haem iron centers (Quagliariello
et al. 1976; Mitchell 1976). This was a step in the domain’s structural/formal
articulation. New idealizations and new kinds of conceptualizing the topological
arrangement of various cytochromes as represented by equations about the
dynamics of trans-membrane flows contributed to the domain’s conceptual articula-
tion. Experiments aimed at verifying predictions of working hypotheses regarding
the coupling between proton/electron transport and respiratory mechanism (for
instance, experiments with varying the electric membrane potential, the pH
membrane potential, and the total protonic membrane potential) provided new
data-models that articulated the domain empirically.
Let me return to the way in which hermeneutic phenomenology is applied in
this paper. On this philosophical approach, there is a nexus of understanding and
interpretation that gets revealed in terms of the triad of fore-having, fore-sight, and
fore-conception of “something that becomes meaningful as something.” The orien-
tation toward entity’s meaning as an outcome of configured practices is a fore-
having. The expectation of visualizing that meaning (within a scientific space of
representation) is a fore-sight. In the articulation of a scientific domain the most
important is the visualization of the meaning of the domain’s theoretical objects.
Accordingly, the visualizability refers to the possible spaces of the trans-empirical
entities’ visual representation by means of things that are immediately ready
to hand. The fore-sight accomplishes the primary specification of what has
been taken into one’s fore-having. Finally, the anticipation of possible further
contextualization of entity’s meaning is a fore-conception. Whenever something
is interpreted as something in a context of practices, the triad of fore-having,
fore-sight, and fore-conception characterizes interpretation of entities that are
ready-to-hand in the performance of practices (Heidegger 1927/1962, 191).5 The
unity of these three moments does make sense in two ways which correspond to
two basic hermeneutic dimensions of scientific research. I will accordingly convey
the dimensions to the concepts of “hermeneutic fore-structure” and “characteristic
hermeneutic situation.” Both of them refer at once to the contextualization of
readable technologies, the contextual appropriation of possibilities for doing

5
Fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception are three relationships between fore-structure of
understanding and as-structure of interpretation. In other words, they are three characteristics of
the hermeneutic circle which operates in the articulation of a domain disclosed by an interrelatedness
of practices. See also Kockelmans (1986).
12 D. Ginev

research, and the constitution of contextually meaningful objects of inquiry. In this

paper I will be entirely preoccupied with the concept of hermeneutic fore-structure.
Against the background of the foregoing considerations the concept of the
hermeneutic fore-structure of scientific research comes to the fore as a result of
the efforts to specify the fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception with regard
to the appropriation of projected possibilities by making use of readable technolo-
gies. Those who are involved in the research process taking place in a given
domain understand the domain in the first place as possibilities (of structural,
conceptual, and experimental articulation) whose ongoing appropriation comes to
pass in scientific spaces of representation. Implementing readable technologies
creates at the same time such spaces in which objects of inquiry become
constituted. On another formulation, one appropriates possibilities for doing
research by employing readable technologies that bring into play series of defer-
ring and displacing one another spaces of representation within a configuration of
scientific practices. By making use of the expression “deferring spaces” I mean
that the outcome of a particular representation is always already in another space
of representation. Thus, for instance, the outcome of a given experiment gets
meaning in the space of constructing data-models of measurements; represented
as diagrams these models are already in a space of representation provided by a
theory’s mathematical formalism; the calculations based on theoretical models
developed through this formalism get meaning through devising a new kind of
measurements that become possible through the construction and calibration of
new instruments; the results of instrumentation get meaning in the space of repre-
senting the empirical contents of theoretical concepts; etc. Put differently, what
becomes deferred in any space of the chain of deferring and displacing one another
spaces of representation is the constituted meaning of the objects of inquiry. The
meaning is dispersed/deferred in the totality of readable technologies and spaces
of representation of the configuration of practices.
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (1997, p. 108) observes that “scientific objects come into
existence by comparing, displacing, marginalizing, hybridizing, and grafting
different representations with, from, against, and upon each other.”6 One articulates
the domain of research by actualizing possibilities of making readable what
circulates in the spaces of representation. In this regard, interpretation is appropria-
tion of possibilities by means of readable technologies, whereby the actualized
possibilities within spaces of representation articulate the domain of research. Now,
any particular space does not represent isolated objects but objects entangled in
structures that are informed by mathematical idealizations. Like the objects, the
(formal) structures are in statu nascendi during the research process. The domain’s
interpretative articulation consists in the constitution of objects of inquiry that
(formally) depend on the structures’ symmetry groups. A space of representation
visualizes contextual objects of inquiry embedded in changeable structures.

6
Rheinberger commits this claim also to a “dialectic of fact and artifact” taking place in the consti-
tution of the scientific research’s “epistemic things”.
The Articulation of a Scientific Domain from the Viewpoint of Hermeneutic… 13

To sum up, the hermeneutic fore-structure of scientific research refers to

having, seeing, and grasping in advance of what gets meaningfully constituted in
the domain’s structural, conceptual, and empirical articulation. (For reasons that
will be clarified later, I intentionally refrain from taking a position here with
regard to the debate on whether structures have an ontological priority over
objects, or vice versa.) Understanding (the domain of research as a horizon of
possibilities) and interpretation (that articulates meaningful objects-embedded-
in-structures through readable technologies in spaces of representation) are in
constant interplay during the domain’s potentially infinite articulation. It is
this interplay that I treat as an ongoing fore-structuring of a domain’s
(three-dimensional) articulation. In the remainder the fore-structuring of the
domain of vectorial metabolism (as it came into being through research practices
introduced in the first place for approaching protonmotive systems) will be scru-
tinized. No doubt, the configuration of practices in cytology being considered so
far has much to do with the formation of this domain.
The changes of the domains’ architectonic in biology leading to the emancipation
of new domains are usually attributed to the rise of new hypotheses. Doubtless,
Mitchell’s chemiosmotic hypothesis which will be discussed later provoked such a
change that eventually led to the formation of the domain of vectorial metabolism.
This is why some authors are speaking of a “chemiosmotic revolution” as the point of
departure for exploration of molecular parts and functional wholes (Harold 1991, 348;
Weber 1991, 581). Douglas Allchin (1997, 5) makes convincingly the case that in
the ox-phos controversy (between the believers in chemiosmotic hypothesis and the
believers in the existence of high-energy intermediates of oxidative phosphorylation)
one of the main point of disagreement was about the boundaries of the domain of
cellular bioenergetics. This disagreement contributed to the emancipation of the
domain of vectorial metabolism. In fact, however, the new domain was disclosed
within a broad configuration of scientific practices through which the classical
bag-of-enzymes biochemistry and membrane biochemistry were recast in terms of
transport. The practices of topological osmochemistry (not to mention the practices
devoted to revealing patterns of morphogenesis) were by no means a simple
continuation of the chemiosmotic hypothesis. Much more correct is the conclusion
that the formulation of hypotheses regarding the osmotic trans-membrane transport
(like Mitchell’s hypothesis and Lehninger’s 1960 hypothesis that there is in mito-
chondrial membrane a geometrical structure that controls the regime of components’
interactions) was a particular practice in the configuration being mentioned. I will try
to address the interpretative fore-structuring of scientific research in the genesis of
the domain of vectorial metabolism. In so doing, my concern will be the contextual
constitution of meaningful objects of inquiry through reading/representing spatially
oriented metabolic reactions. The standard story about this domain goes as follows.
In 1961 Peter Mitchell introduced in the domain of enzymology and bioenergetics
a theoretical scenario for the coupling of respiration and ATP synthesis. (More
specifically, this was a scenario of coupling between redox reactions and phosphor-
ylation or dehydration reactions.) It is designed to provide explanation of the energetic
resources for the phosphorylation step from ADT to ATP. On Mitchell’s account,
14 D. Ginev

the coupling of respiration and ATP synthesis is mediated by an electrochemical

gradient of protons across the mitochondrial membrane. The emphasis was placed
on the causal link between the flow of electrons through the respiratory chain
enzymes and the translocation of protons across the inner mitochondrial membrane.
This account was deliberately forged as an alternative to the chemical mechanism of the
oxidative phosphorylation which appeals not to anisotropic flaws but to enzyme-bound
chemical compounds (Griffiths 1965). The chemical approach was advocated at that
time by such authorities in biochemistry like Fritz Lipmann and Bill (E.C.) Slater.7
Allchin (1996, 32) nicely summarized the wrong assumption of those biochemists
who laid stress on the possibility to identify stable high-energy compounds in the
phosphorylation of ATP: “Chemists wanted to isolate and identify a set of high-energy
intermediate molecules, but found the task unduly difficult. They began to suspect
that the compounds might be tightly bound to membrane proteins. That, at least,
could account for their persistent failures.”
In trying to find a way beyond the wrong assumption and the persistent failures,
Mitchell admitted that the membrane plays a “topological” role in oxidative phos-
phorylation. Accordingly, the removal of a molecule of water in the synthesis ATP
from ADP follows two opposite direction: The hydrogen ion (proton) and the
hydroxyl ion are removed to the opposite side of the membrane. The osmotic poten-
tial provides the energy for ATP synthesis. The respiratory chain in its turn drives
the flow of ions in the opposite direction. The reactions of this chain act also vectori-
ally. On this account, the enzyme ATPase that phosphorylates ADP to ATP is
responsible for the return of the protons, thereby enabling the energy currency of the
cell. In the perspective of the standard story, it was Mitchell’s chemiosmotic theory
alone that initiated the research work in the domain of “vectorial metabolism.”
The orientation of further research work was indicated by Mitchell’s interpretation
of oxidative phosphorylation—the mechanisms of coupling membrane-transport
systems and metabolic systems. Due to this orientation the domain of vectorial
metabolism became situated between biochemistry and physiology. The initial
structure of chemiosmotic hypothesis (and later theory) combined the physiology of
the mitochondrial membrane with the chemistry of moving ions across the membrane.
Let me now move on to a more detailed historical synopsis.

7
There is a long history of sociological, historical, and philosophical reconstructions (case studies)
of Mitchell’s chemiosmotic hypothesis and the subsequent ox-phos controversy. At the beginning
of this history is Gilbert and Mulkay’s (1984) study designed in terms of a sociological discursive
analysis. The significant value of this study is due to the way in which the authors make use of
interviews with 34 participants in the ox-phos controversy. The historical reconstruction of Allchin
(1997) presents not only the genesis of Mitchell’s hypothesis, but also a quite vivid picture of the
development of the chemical theory. Weber’s (2002a, b) nice philosophical reconstructions of
Mitchell’s research program and its experimental verifications (a reconstruction that takes into
consideration also the problematic of incommensurability) try to evaluate the positions in the ox-
phos controversy in terms of normative epistemology, whereas Prebble (2001) investigates in a
highly original manner the role of the “personal knowledge and tacit knowing” (in the sense of
Michael Polanyi’s conception) in the formation of Mitchell’s philosophical and scientific views.
The Articulation of a Scientific Domain from the Viewpoint of Hermeneutic… 15

2 The Domain of Vectorial Metabolism

The ideas of vectorial biochemical processes that subsequently lead to models of

pathways of morphogenesis are to be traced back to the pioneering studies of Elmer
Lund from the mid 1920s. He devised experimental practices for investigating
trans-membrane vectorial reactions. Lund managed to discover patterns of directive
force (attributed to cell functions) in the formation of new structures. At that time,
however, there was not in biochemistry a stable configuration of practices devoted
to the investigation of the topological arrangements of coupled metabolic reactions
that can generate morphogenetic processes. The plausibility of such a configuration
was rather adumbrated by some negative research results. Thus, in 1930 Vladimir
Engelhardt described for the first time the mechanism of oxidative phosphorylation
as a link between the oxidation-reduction reactions and the synthesis of ATP. Within
the existing interrelatedness of scientific practices the link had had to be discovered
as chemical intermediates. Albeit several proposals for chemical mechanism of sub-
strate phosphorylation were formulated, the long search (running from the model
for substrate-level phosphorylation of succinyl coenzyme A in the early 1950s to the
late 1960s when more than dozen mechanisms of chemical transfer were under
scrutiny) for “scalar” chemical intermediates that are capable to transfer energy
from molecule to molecule failed to find them. Biochemistry still had to wait for a
configuration of research practices through which the spatial organization of the
metabolic processes could have been objectified as a reality of specific entities
whose interpretation would have gone hand in hand with the appropriation of new
possibilities for doing research.
The rise of this configuration proceeded step by step. Due to Linus Pauling’s
work in the early 1950s a trend of research took shape that paid much attention to
the enzymes catalyzing group transfer by lowering the free energy of the transition
state. By the same time Fritz Lipmann advanced the view that the group-potential
gradient gets transmitted between coupled reactions. Lipmann’s attention was con-
centrated on phosphate derivatives arising in the process of group activation through
phosphoryl transfer from ATP. The original idea of the anisotropic nature of metab-
olism in biochemistry stemmed from the work of Henrik Lundegårdh (1945) who
suggested that cytochrome pigments might provide an electron-conducting pathway
across plant cell membranes so that oxygen could be reduced on the one side while
hydrogenated substrates were oxidized on the other side.8 Lundegårdh generalized
cytochrome-catalyzed electron translocation by introducing the concept of enzyme-
catalyzed group translocation. A particular result of his work (that made him a

8
Mitchell indicates that Malcolm Dixon in his 1941 lecture course at Cambridge had presented for
the first time the notion of group transfer as a spatial migration of a donor group to an acceptor
group. For Mitchell, however, Dixon had been not committed to the view of a vectorial mechanism
of group translocation. Nevertheless, the very vectorial representation of diagrams of enzymes had
been of great importance for Mitchell’s orientation toward vectorial chemistry. (See Prebble and
Weber 2003, 35)
16 D. Ginev

forerunner to Mitchell) was the observation that the uptake of ions was driven by the
vectorial flow of hydrogen ions across the plasmalemma (Larkum 2003).
In addressing the question as to which are the prime movers in metabolically-
coupled translocation reactions, the search for patterns of spatially extended
chemiosmotic proton circulation acquired currency. An important event on the way
to the inception of research work in vectorial metabolism was the introduction of
spectrophotometric measurements that suggested the existence of anisotropic pro-
tonmotive forces. Another experimental practice invented by Albert Claude (1946)
showed the osmotic stabilization of mitochondria by the organic compound sucrose.
This finding was later re-contextualized in the articulation of vectorial biochemistry.
Though not directly related to the research of ions translocation across membranes,
Waddington’s formal models about how gene regulatory products could generate
developmental phenomena are also to be mentioned in this historical context.
Waddington’s ideas got new actuality in the domain of vectorial metabolism and
morphogenesis in the late 1980s when it was realized that the relationship of genes
to cell form is not like that of genes to proteins.
By the end of the 1950s a configuration of practices pertinent to the topological
arrangements of intracellular metabolic and physiological processes came into
being. Within this configuration it was realized that the distinction between vecto-
rial chemistry and vectorial physiology is a matter of degree. There is no difference
in principle between reading (through experiments and instruments) the topology
of enzyme catalyzed reactions and the topology of physiological processes. A par-
adigmatic example became a muscle contraction whose directionality in cellular
space expresses a joint chemical-physiological spatiality. The configuration
brought into play contexts of theoretical and instrumental/experimental reading in
which new research objects got constituted. Their total interconnectedness made
plausible the existence of a research domain sui generis that might call into ques-
tion traditional borderlines between biochemistry and physiology. This was a
domain in which the search for proton circuits promised the discovery of patterns
of vectorial intracellular processes. The configuration involved practices of
experimentation with inserting enzymes into a membrane in such a manner that the
reaction pathway crosses the barrier, measurements that have to establish the
translocation of a chemical group across the membrane, construction of theoretical
models of group transfer reactions that proceed along spatial trajectories within the
protein molecules, observation of how enzymes become integrated in larger
structural complexes that determine the directionality of chemical processes, and
devising data-models of energy transduction.
A joint research work of Peter Mitchell and Jennifer Moyle in the late 1950
proved that enzyme systems are the conductors of membrane transport and that
metabolic energy is converted to osmotic work by the formation of covalent links.
More specifically, they (Mitchell and Moyle 1958) were able to demonstrate a
transfer of phosphate group vectorially through an enzyme. The idea of metabolic
directionality was introduced with respect to the different directions the two sub-
strates are approaching the active site of an enzyme from in order for the transfer to
take place. This initial idea of a vectorial metabolism placed emphasis on the
The Articulation of a Scientific Domain from the Viewpoint of Hermeneutic… 17

membranes of mitochondria which supposedly act as chemiosmotic links between

the media that they separate. In investigating the group translocation as a form of
trans-membrane transport, Mitchell and Moyle managed to integrate the metabolic
inter-conversions and fluxes across the various cellular membranes into a single
mechanism. This was a decisive step in disclosing the domain of vectorial metabo-
lism as an autonomous domain of scientific research whose focus is the mechanisms
of coordination of transport with metabolism. Parallel to Mitchell and Moyle’s
research work Robertson carried out investigations of gastric acid secretion which
were also guided by anisotropic spatial model of reactions. He assumed that the
act of secretion depends on the separation of positive and negative charge in the
electron transport system.
At this point I have to mention again the role of the chemiosmotic hypothesis in
instituting the new domain. In its original form (Mitchell 1961) this hypothesis
stated that the coupling between oxidoreduction and phosphorylation systems could
be due to the channeling of translocation of protons which could play the part of the
donor/acceptor intermediate between the oxidase and ATPase systems.9 This
hypothesis required a complex experimental verification that included investigations
of mitochondria membrane impermeability to protons, the “proton-pump” created
by the respiratory chain, the rate of proton translocation during oxidoreduction, the
magnitude of the total protonmotive force across the membrane, and the identifica-
tion of proton-coupled porter systems in the membrane that regulate the internal pH,
thereby maintaining osmotic stability. In fact however, Mitchell’s (1962) ambition
was not restricted to this verification, but to developing a unifying framework for
addressing the processes that underlie metabolism, transport and morphogenesis.
With the rise of chemiosmotic hypothesis the “vectorial mystery” of the cellular
space became the new domain’s kernel problematic. By the late 1950s it was a
matter of belief in this mystery; a belief that abstractly denied that there are uniden-
tified molecules with a high-energy bond (as this was postulated in Slater’s 1953
“chemical hypothesis”). The further theoretical conceptualization and experimental
verification of the chemiosmotic hypothesis transformed the abstract belief into
assumptions integrated in new research everydayness. It was the everydayness of
performing research practices devoted to deciphering that structural integrity of
membrane barrier which separate in a special way inside and outside compartments,

9
Initially, it was a hypothesis that mitochondria ejected protons and that proton gradient drives
ATP synthesis. It had been introduced as an explanatory mechanism of the coupling of electron
transport to phosphorylation. What was challenged by this hypothesis was the view that transport
and metabolism were essentially separate processes. As an experimentally verified theory the
chemiosmotic one concerns the process of energy conservation in mitochondrial and bacterial
respiration and in photosynthesis. Its main cellular object of inquiry is the inner membrane where
is the site of the enzyme ATPase for ATP synthesis. It is important to be indicated that chemiosmotic
theory was regarded by Mitchell as a special case of nowadays is called “vectorial metabolism.”
Yet Prebble (2001), 447 is right when stressing that “the notion of vectorial metabolism is given
its most fulsome treatment almost concurrently with promulgation of the chemiosmotic theory.”
The linkage between the coupled reactions catalyzed by two osmoenzymes depends on the electro-
chemical potential gradient generated by one reaction and consumed by the other.
18 D. Ginev

thereby creating orientation of enzyme catalyzed reactions. At the same time, the
alternative research everydayness in which biochemists were looking for high-
energy intermediates of oxidative phosphorylation became significantly enriched
with new practices of constructing theoretical models, experimentation and invent-
ing novel techniques of measurement. Nonetheless, this kind of normal science did
not obtain positive results. Allchin (1997, 17) goes on to summarize the fate of this
failed research work in two ways: “(a) researcher could not generalize their findings
from one set of experiments to a wider domain or scope of phenomena, or (b) results
interpreted as fitting within one domain or causal network were late found to fit in a
different domain. In the former, prospective facts were discarded; in the latter, the
facts were displaced.”
Mitchell changed radically the research work (for several authors this was a revo-
lutionary paradigm shift in biochemistry)10 by assuming that the oxidation-reduction
reactions were so arranged in the membrane that they were coupled to transfer of
protons outwards across the membrane. Thus, the mechanism of electrochemical
gradient got introduced according to which the oxidation-reduction reactions are
mediated by a proton gradient and its accompanying membrane potential. By impli-
cation, the intermediate between the oxidation in the respiratory chain and the
ATPase would have had no longer to be conceived of as a specific chemical sub-
stance. Though the chemiosmotic hypothesis was conceptually coherent and com-
plete (especially after Mitchell 1967 enriched it with the concept of “solute porters”
which facilitate the solute between the two aqueous areas), several historical case
studies demonstrate that one is not able to single out a particular historical moment
at which the ox-phos controversy could be counted as resolved in favor of the
chemiosmotic theory. As Marcel Weber (2002a) shows, it was the change of the
situation (including the emergence of new research practices) by 1975 which
brought decisive arguments for the acceptance of Mitchell’s hypothesis. He analy-
ses the reasons why several experiments in the 1960s and the early 1970s (including
the earlier experimental search for reconstituting oxidative phosphorylation in
Racker’s laboratory) failed to resolve the controversy (or failed to play the role of a
crucial experiment), and reaches the conclusion that while the role of the membrane
was highly ambiguous around 1970 and impeded an independent test that can
resolve the controversy, the final reconstitution experiments (creating cellular
artifacts from isolated components) in conjunction with new knowledge about the
membrane functions provided sufficient base for ruling out the chemical hypothesis
and accepting the chemiosmotic one (Weber 2002a, 43–45). In another historical
case study John Prebble (2001) lays particular emphasis upon the research
community’s “implicit knowledge” which resisted the search for designing
appropriate experiments for checking up whether mitochondria ejected protons,
whether a proton gradient would drive ATP synthesis, and whether the mitochondrial
inner membrane was impermeable to protons. More specifically, the community’s

10
See, in particular Prebble and Weber (2003, p. 3), Weber (2002b), Mulkay and Gilbert (1984),
Skulachev (1987). This view is supported even by Slater (2003), one of Mitchell’s major
opponents.
The Articulation of a Scientific Domain from the Viewpoint of Hermeneutic… 19

implicit knowledge prevented (or at least restricted the leeway of) the elaboration on
research scenarios uniting chemical with physiological mechanisms.
In the mid 1960s Mitchell extended his original theory by assuming that the
electron-carrying arm of the redox loop could include a photoelectric reaction so
that the potential of this reaction could be transformed into protonmotive force. In
the context of this extension Mitchell launched the view that the conformational
mobility of the translocation catalysts is associated with their normal group-
translocation and solute-translocation functions. This view was consonant with
several principal new ideas in biochemistry and enzymology from the early 1960s
like Koshland’s induced-fit interpretation of enzyme kinetic data, the hypothesis
that the activation energy for group transfer may be lowered by the balancing of
stress–strain relationships, and Perutz’s elaborations on conformational changes in
haemoglobin molecules during oxygenation. These ideas paved the way to the cog-
nitive institutionalization of the domain of vectorial metabolism (Mitchell 1972).
The research work in this domain was concentrated on effective translocations of
protons. “Mitchell bade us look upon cell growth as a grand symphony of transport”
(Harold 1991, 365). Morphogenesis is a function of vectorial metabolism.
Configurations of scientific practices were designed for studying reactions leading
to chemiosmotic coupling. Two possible types of such coupling were recognized—
one taking place on molecular-level enzyme associations, and the other applying to
associations of enzymes in subcellular vesicles.
In fact, Mitchell came to the scenario of “chemiosmotic coupling in energy
transduction” (so the technical expression he proposed) in following a particular
scientific practice—the one of drawing analogies. In his case, the analogy was
between the osmotic translocation reactions (for instance, the coupling of phosphate
translocation against arsenate translocation) and the enzyme catalysed group-
transfer reactions (Mitchell 1972). There was nothing unusual in pursuing this
thoroughly conventional scientific practice. Mitchell’s scenario was by no means an
exotic hypothesis since the “primary chemical coupling” was known as early as the
1930s when a research group reported on coupling in group-transfer reactions in
studying the role of the NAD coenzyme. Nonetheless, until the mid 1960s the
“chemiosmotic mechanism” of energy generation implied by Mitchell’s scenario
remained without resonance in scientific community. This mechanism brings into
play theoretical objects like “the transmembrane electrochemical potential powering
the enzyme of the mitochondrial ATPase,” “the anisotropic enzymes requiring two
aqueous phases separated by a membrane,” “the phosphorylation reactions driven
by proton-motive force,” and most of all “the electrochemically based vectorial
metabolism” (i.e. metabolism whose catalytic systems are distinguished by a spatial
orientation of the reactions’ dynamics).
It was the change of the configuration of practices that made possible the spaces
of representation/reading of vectorial metabolism of respiration. Based on the
assumption that protons might be directly involved in the oxidative phosphoryla-
tion, several laboratories undertook experiments on proton gradients. In addition,
more precise methodic of establishing the location of phosphorylating enzymes was
introduced. Later on the practice of measuring protons translocation in respiring
20 D. Ginev

mitochondria came on the scene. As Marcel Weber (2002b) makes it clear, thanks to
this practice several predictions made by Mitchell’s initial theory were confirmed.
Though many of the experimental results obtained explanations also in the frame-
work of the chemical theory, the confirmation through independent tests provided a
rationale for legitimizing (at least some) of the theoretical objects in whose exis-
tence the supporters of the chemiosmotic theory believed. However, much more
important was the new hermeneutic fore-structure provoked by the (relatively small)
change of the configuration of practices. New possibilities for doing research
became projected, including possibilities whose appropriation was in line with the
assumptions of the anisotropic flows of energy and the vectorial metabolism. The
theoretical objects envisaged by chemiosmotic theory were significantly specified
and “inscribed” on the horizon of new possibilities. Also a “conversion to the belief
in Mitchell’s objects” took place. Whole laboratories launched research programs
inspired by the belief in the existence of these objects. As a result, several research
groups started to articulate the domain of enzymological bioenergetics in accordance
with possibilities for instantiating the chemiosmotic mechanism via data-models
which was one the ways leading to the emancipation of vectorial biochemistry.
Although accepted by the most members of oxidative phosphrylation research
community, there are still influential opponents of chemiosmotic theory. Thus, for
instance, Mitchell’s hypothesis is accused for not having acquired a status of a genuine
theory. More specifically, the critical point is that the depiction of group translocation
has never been documented in scientific literature. Saier (2000) makes the case
that Mitchell’s hypothesis can be transformed into a theory if the mechanisms of
trans-membrane group transport can be recast in terms of “molecular phylogeny.”
The constitution of three-dimensional structures of integral membrane transport
proteins qua specific objects of inquiry provides new possibilities for studying the
evolutionary histories of transport proteins.
In the second half of the 1970s and the 1980s the domain’s research everyday-
ness was dominated by studies of the ways in which chemical and osmotic forces
are balanced against one another. Very important research objects became the
proton-coupled reversible ATPases. It was established that these enzymes consist of
two parts, one located in membrane that has no enzymatic function and another that
catalyzes ATP hydrolysis. The research work in Racker’s laboratory demonstrated
that the membrane-located part acts as a proton-conducting channel when the
catalytic part is detached. In this context, the chemiosmotic theory underwent a
transformation through a revision of the claim that hydrolysis of ATP is reversed by
a current of protons driven though the catalytic part of the enzyme. On the new
version, it is the membrane-located part that acts as a reversible proton pump being
conformationally coupled to the enzymatic part (Mitchell 1991, 330–333). Another
significant trend of research in the 1980s that essentially articulated further the
domain was the experimentation with uncouplers of oxidative phosophrylation
(inhibitors of ATP synthesis that prevent the coupling in a manner that the energy
produced by the redox cannot be used for phosphorylation). The uncouplers do not
affect the activities of electron flow and ATPase, but ATP synthesis cannot occur.
In particular, studies in protonophoric uncouplers (such ones that allow protons to
The Articulation of a Scientific Domain from the Viewpoint of Hermeneutic… 21

cross lipid bi-layers) revealed mechanisms of induction of biological activities by

modification of the state of a specific membrane protein. Some results helped one in
extending the domain of vectorial biochemistry toward studies in molecular and
cellular morphogenesis.
The search for patterns of morphogenesis on the level of cellular physiology
became a “natural continuation” of the inquiry into topology of enzyme catalyzed
reactions. Thus, the problematic of the spatiality of growth, morphogenesis, and
self-organization is intimately related to the domain of vectorial metabolism. The
contemporary studies in vectorial metabolism are dealing with spontaneous emer-
gence of regular spatial patterns. The notion of morphogenetic field consisting of
diffusible molecules acquired a special importance. The spatial and temporal fea-
tures assure the passages between molecular biology and physiology. The ions play
the role of cellular morphogenes (i.e. genes dedicated to the task of cell shaping).
A promising trend of inquiry in the domain’s articulation is the investigation of
how ionic currents localize morphogenetic events (Goodwin and Trainor 1985).
The latter are mediated by diverse enzyme activities. (Harold 1990) Experimental
practices with “morphogenetic mutants” whose aim is to establish the patterns of
transition from molecular morphogensis to cellular growth and morphogensis. To
be sure, Prigogine’s dissipative structures (and more generally, the doctrine that
thermodynamic consequences of metabolism are responsible for spatial organiza-
tion of physiological processes) provide patterns and models in this regard.
However, there is no configuration of scientific practices that constitutes objects of
inquiry through which nonlinear, autocatalytic chemical reactions might be
connected to cellular morphogenesis. The integration of the paradigm of self-
organization at chemical level in the domain of vectorial biochemistry remains a
desideratum. The same conclusion is to be drawn with regard to the study of the
genetic specification of biochemical topology.

3 The Hermeneutic Fore-Structure of the Research Domain

of Vectorial Metabolism

The preceding presentation provides, I hope, a summarized picture of the main lines
of structural, conceptual, and experimental articulation of the domain of vectorial
biochemistry. My aim now is to address the hermeneutic fore-structure of the
research process in that domain. In line with my foregoing considerations, the talk
of a new hermeneutic fore-structure is to be comprehended as a new specification
(thanks to the readable technologies and the spaces of representation) of the fore-
having, fore-sight, and fore-conception in the articulation of an emerging domain of
scientific research.
The fore-having is the orientation within (what seems to be) a familiar horizon of
understanding the domain’s contextualized entities. What Mitchell’s research work
from the early 1960s managed to change was precisely the horizon of understanding
of the biochemical processes’ specificity. Those who were affected by the new way
22 D. Ginev

of looking at the problematic of cellular bioenergetics began to lose their “feeling of

familiarity” in dealing with what is ready to hand in the “chemical” configuration of
scientific practices that became displaced and replaced (at least in certain laborato-
ries) by practices constituting research objects of protonmotive forces and trans-
membrane transport systems. As a result of Mitchell’s research work, the horizon of
possibilities for investigating the relevance of topologically arranged osmotic pro-
cesses and ionic currents to the cellular organization became a horizon of research
everydayness. Brought into being was the understanding of chains of biochemical
reactions in the perspective of making them meaningful entities that take place
in elaborately organized systems and organized complexities. Furthermore, the
research process’s horizon of understanding was projected as a horizon of possibili-
ties for investigating the anisotropic protein structure as providing the chemical
foundations upon which rests the spatial organization of biological activities. In this
new horizon, the spatio-temporal organization was conceived of as the biological
activity itself.11 Briefly, the fore-having of the research process consists in one’s
understanding upon all possibilities one can appropriate in treating the biological
activity in anisotropic terms.
This horizon of understanding called into question the strong dominance of ana-
lytical methods and attitudes in biochemistry. The possibilities of exploring growth
and morphogenesis cannot be appropriated by means of these methods. (Even the
simplest scenarios of morphogenesis studies like that of the spontaneous association
of macromolecules into structures of higher order cannot be devised by traditional
analytical methods.) The understanding of the “biochemical world” as the world of
proton circuits and groups translocation was initiated not only by projecting the new
horizon but by inventing spaces of representation of the actualized possibilities
as well. In appropriating the possibilities within the emerging configuration of
practices, the readable technologies provided not only readings of particular
items (experimental results, measurements, calculations, etc.). They manage in
their synergy to create a whole “text of vectorial metabolism” whose “units” are the
domain’s meaningful objects.
Yet this text which (since the domain’s inception) has remained always open to
further revisions and extensions in the horizon of possibilities for doing research
was never given as a pure presence. The text has existed through the contextualized
readable technologies which constantly re-create it within the configuration of prac-
tices. On this account, the readable technologies are not reproducing meaning
already produced before (or independent of) their implementation. Reading by

11
Hermeneutic phenomenology of scientific research is to be distinguished from the studies of the
hermeneutic pre-understandings of individual scientists. Prebble (2001) provides an excellent
example of such a study in which at issue are Mitchell’s philosophical pre-understandings as tacit
knowledge. The author manages to show how the philosophical concept of fluctoid underlies as a
tacit element the development of Mitchell’s formulation of the chemiosmotic hypothesis and its
verification as a theory. The hermeneutic fore-structure of scientific research has a trans-subjective
status, and accordingly cannot be regarded as belonging to the personal knowledge. Fore-having,
fore-sight, and fore-conception are not to be attributed to the tacit (including collective) knowledge
as well.
The Articulation of a Scientific Domain from the Viewpoint of Hermeneutic… 23

means of these technologies is an ongoing textualization that always transcends the

formation of stable textual structure. In accordance with the paradigm of
constitutional analysis advanced so far, the textualization constitutes meaning by
appropriating the possibilities projected by the configuration of practices. Stressing
the priority of textualization over textual structure amounts to insisting on the
inevitable hermeneutic fore-structuring of textual structure as this occurs in the con-
stitution of meaningful/readable entities. The text gets continuously re-created by
changing the meaning of objects of inquiry already constituted and by incorporating
in it new meaningful units. Per definitionem, the total interconnectedness of the
objects of inquiry constituted within a configuration of practices is a “text” that
exists in the variability of its contextualization and its ongoing textualization.12
The new fore-having of the biochemical entities in the formation of vectorial
metabolism domain was informed by a configuration of scientific practices that
brought into play readable technologies of the organization of processes in the cel-
lular space. More specifically, this was the idea that the directionality of all cellular
processes is ultimately built upon molecular anisotropy. Granted that the aqueous
environment of the cell cytoplasm is an isotropic medium, the fore-having of the
research process oriented the work within the new configuration of practices toward
identifying the processes which can give rise to a vectorial reaction. The success in
this regard hinged on the way in which the hypothetical object of enzyme-catalyzed
group translocation will be represented by visualizable research objects which are
contextually ready-to-hand in various research situations. Different kinds of phosphoryl
group and substrates served in Mitchell and Moyle’s work the function of such
objects. Quite indicative for the new fore-having is F. Harold’s (1991, 348–349)
observation that “protein molecules are regular and shapely bodies, not blobs. They
come with clefts, cavities and sometimes channels, undergo ordered changes of
conformation and possess intrinsic asymmetry or polarity. This is a commonplace
today, colourfully illustrated in every textbook, but in the fifties it was a speculative
and pregnant notion.”
However novel this fore-having (orientation) of the research process in the early
1960s had been it was still consonant with established prejudices (here I am using

12
Another aspect of the text’s openness is to be spelled out in terms of Rheinberger’s conception
where the semiotic aspect of constituting “epistemic things” in scientific research is presented as
constant creation in the research process of inscriptions, traces, and graphematic articulations. In
this perspective, textualazing amounts to creating not a codified text, but a textual whole of
traces—production of traces within the deferring spaces of representation engendered by the con-
figuration. Thus, the text is intimately related to what Rheinberger calls a tracing game. For him,
in scientific research there is a permanent replacement of any presumed signified by signifier
(Rheinberger 1997, 104). What is read in a certain space of representation takes its meaning not
from things that are beyond the research process but from what is read in other spaces of represen-
tation. Within a configuration of scientific practices as readable technologies the potentially
endless production of traces becomes foreseeable. It is this fore-sight that makes the totality of what
gets read in a configuration a relatively homogeneous (but by no means a structurally codified)
text. Following further Rheinberger’s characterization, it is a text without “referent” and without
assignable “origins.” Furthermore, it is a text that is doomed to be radically recast and re-
contextualized in new configurations of scientific practices.
24 D. Ginev

this notion in the sense of hermeneutic philosophy as a pre-judgment) incorporated

in central doctrines of cytology and biochemistry. Thus, a case in point is the “topo-
logical idea” that a semi-permeable membrane serves as a selective barrier between
the cytoplasm and the environment, thereby transporting actively substances into
the cell. A further specification of the primary horizon of understanding as a fore-
sight led to an alternative (to that of traditional biochemistry) “normal science”
(research everydayness). The new fore-sight set the stage for a normal-scientific
research guided by the intention to single out conditions under which scalar reac-
tions (like the most enzyme reactions) would become vectorial with regard to the
reactants arrived on the one side of the membrane and the products left on the other.
Along the normal-scientific orientation of biochemical inquiry toward revealing
important phenomena related to the topology of metabolic reactions the expectation
came to the fore of obtaining visualized representations of the vectorial properties
of the catalysts of the respiratory chain inlaid in the lipid membrane. One expected
to disclose patterns and mechanisms of the chemiosmotic reactions. The normal
scientific everydayness within the new configuration of practices was distinguished
by the search for electron- and proton-conducting pathways across the membrane.
Initially, it was confined to simple electrostatic interpretation of the electric potential
difference caused by the migration of ions. Later on, the domain’s normal scientific
work brought into being more sophisticated models of topological arrangements of
coupled reactions. Generally speaking, in generating the fore-sight (the search for a
visualization of what is admitted to have a contextual meaning) the fore-having in
this case concerns the way of “having in advance” the coupling between proton
translocation and electron transfer in key metabolic reactions.
The new fore-sight consisted in the ways of making visible (theoretical) objects
projected on the new horizon of understanding (Ginev 2008).13 Fore-sight is the
specification of this horizon through visualizing such objects. Roughly speaking,
these were objects presupposed in approaching enzyme-catalyzed group transfer
reactions in terms of topological translocations of ions. The visualizability refers in
the first place to the translocation of a chemical group or of the reaction product(s)
across the membrane. The most decisive step in visualizing vectorial metabolism’s
theoretical objects was the emergence in the 1970s of experimental practices of
producing “cellular chimeras” (a mosaic of components stemming from different
organisms that is entitled to demonstrate how the cell production of ATP comes into
play). Douglas Allchin (1996, 34–36) who is the author of the philosophically most
interesting historical reconstruction of the “experimental and conceptual chimeras”
in biochemistry, draws the attention to the fact that it was the failure to provide
in vitro visualization of oxidative phosophorylation (as this is the case with the
experimental visualization of the critic acid cycle, for instance) that brought into
being the creation of “surrogate reality” in the attempts at identifying hypothetical
objects. The practices of production of “chimeras” (composed by fragments stemming

13
A theoretical object is projected upon a horizon of research possibilities when the ongoing
actualization of these possibilities in various contexts of research contributes to visualizing contex-
tually the properties ascribed to the object by the respective theory.
The Articulation of a Scientific Domain from the Viewpoint of Hermeneutic… 25

from evolutionary divergent groups like bacteria, plants and animals) were designed
to proving experimentally a visualized vindication of the chemiosmotic hypothesis.
(The artificial chimeric composition had had to have to demonstrate how mitochon-
drial vesicle transfers energy necessary for generating ATP.) At stake was the
experimental visualization of how cytochromes create a proton membrane gradient.
This was a visualization that broke the borderline not only between in vivo and in
vitro experiments, but between the factual and the artificial too. Eventually, each of
the theoretical elements of the chemiosmotic hypothesis was visualized by the
artificial chimeric mitochondrial vesicles. Yet this visualization would have
been impossible without the fore-sight operating in the constitution of vectorial
metabolism’s objects.
There is a proto-normative function of the fore-sight that poses requirements to
the ways of reading/representing the specific theoretical objects: Given that the
visualization of the theoretical objects takes place in spaces of representation,
the objects’ treatment within the configuration of practices has to incorporate the
topological arrangements of electron-carrying and hydrogen-carrying catalytic
components in the spaces of representations that visualize the objects. It is hard to
imagine how whatever visualization might be addressed to Mitchell’s chemiosmotic
theory which Leslie Orgel (1999) many years after the domain’s institutionalization
still qualified as a deeply counter-intuitive idea. The ongoing visualization (of this
idea that is in conflict with the commonsensical visualizability) took place not when
the hypothesis’s validity was demonstrated in the energy transduction in oxidative
and photosynthetic phosphorylation but when the hypothetical theoretical objects
involved in the investigation of the coupling between chemical transformation and
transport in biochemistry became integrated in deferring spaces of representation.
More specifically, the visualization required spaces of representation that united
scalar chemical entities and vectorial physical and physiological processes. It is the
dualist nature of these hypothetical objects that demands visual representations of
scalar-vectorial unities.14 In recapitulating his work Mitchell (1991, 298) writes
that a main preoccupation of him had been to foster “a self-consistent research
process based on simple principles” that may have scalar attributes and osmotic
transport attributes.
As early as the late 1960s there were various possible trajectories of a vectorial
biochemical process’ visualization taking place in the deferring spaces of represen-
tation that circulate within the configuration of practices. To reiterate, due to the
ongoing deferring the outcome of a particular representation is always already in
another space of representation. By the end of the sixties the domain of vectorial

14
Actually, the interpretations of the dualist nature led to articulation of objects of inquiry that
transcended the scope of the domain of vectorial biochemistry. Allchin (1997, 22) is absolutely
right when reaching the conclusion that however strong the domain of vectorial biochemistry
became emancipated, “Mitchell’s alternative theory and experimental gestalt did not wholly
eclipse all aspects of the chemical hypothesis or its domain. Many of the findings that initially led
biochemists to search for the intermediates were ‘composted’ into other areas of research practice
or domains that are not addressed by the chmiosmotic model.”
26 D. Ginev

metabolism was characterized by an ongoing interpenetration of such spaces of

representation as equations representing types of transfer mechanisms, flow
diagrams of equations representing the transpositions of ubiquinone couples,
diagrams representing the topology of proton-motive forces, electron spin resonance
measurements representing values of quantifiable variables, spectrophotometric
measurements representing stability constant of certain anions, data-models
representing various types of cytochrome system of mitochondria, invention of
instruments capable of measuring/representing the miniscule electric fields
generated by single cells in the surrounding medium, measurements of potential
differences in the nanovolt range, searching for patterns of trans-cellular electric
currents providing clues to the mechanisms of generation of spatial order,
experiments with cytochromes in rat liver and pigeon heart mitochondria represent-
ing transport systems, experiments designed to invalidate the loop models of the
classical cytochrome system, experiments with antimycin inhibition, and computer
simulations of spontaneous generation of spatial patterns from reaction schemes.
Within the whole circularity of deferring and displacing each other spaces the
vectorial metabolism was represented as transport systems that are linked through
the thermodynamic parameters of substrate concentration and electrical potential,
slow diffusion of ions through cytoplasmic space, transducting proteins of bacterial
chemiotaxis, microtubules and microfilaments as polarized structures due to intrin-
sic asymmetries, kinds of molecular polarity conferring physiological direction,
patterns of enzyme kinetics that take into account molecular anisotropy, coupled
activities of osmoenzymes, sodium fluxes that support ATP synthesis, the role of
potential gradient as driving force for the uptake of amino acids, a kind of ATPase
that expels potassium ions in exchange for hydrogen ions, complementarity between
molecular asymmetries and cellular vectors, and so on. The total interconnectedness
of these meaningful (hypothetical, theoretical, formal, and experimental) objects of
inquiry (as projected upon a horizon of possibilities for their further manipulability)
was the “original text” of vecorial metabolism which was contextualized in diverse
ways by the readable technologies and spaces of representation within the initial
configuration of practices.
The fore-conception of the domain’s research process is the anticipation of
further possible contextualization of the “original text.” It is this anticipation that
informs changes of current agenda in the research process due to implementation of
new readable technologies in new spaces of representation. Such changes imply
revisions and extensions of the whole text which gets read in a new context.
The fore-conception refers to anticipating integral re-contextualization of the text.
It is the fore-grasping of possibilities that will be actualized in an essentially new
context. A typical example for an early extension of the vectorial metabolism’s
original text is the actualization of possibilities to distinguish between primary and
secondary transport systems. By means of this distinction a more resilient view
about the balance between anisotropic and isotropic trans-membrane transport was
gained. The former was attributed to actions catalyzed by osmoenzymes that create
transport systems whose mechanism is based on covalent bonds. Such a transport
system is characterized by a mutual reinforcement of chemical reactions and
The Articulation of a Scientific Domain from the Viewpoint of Hermeneutic… 27

osmotic processes. By contrast, the secondary transport systems do not involve

covalent bonds and mediate translocation of solutes isotropically (Mitchell 1967).
In the context of this distinction the “original text” was recast with regard to
ascertaining the way in which membranes act both as barriers and as links. One got
a clearer view about why the conventionally scalar process of group transfer
becomes the vectorial process of group translocation. Furthermore, new vectorial
pathways were involved in the “original text.” Mitchell’s (1975) introduction of the
model for Q-cycle (a mechanism whereby protons due to oxidation of ubiquinol
to ubiquinone move across the membrane) provides another illustration for an
extension of the “original text”.
From the viewpoint of hermeneutic phenomenology, scrutinizing the fore-
conception reveals the situated transcendence of the text (being at once situated in
readable technologies and spaces of representation and transcended by an open
hrorizon of still not appropriated possibilities). It is this dual status of what gets read
that enables the text’s openness to further readings and re-contextualization.
The fore-conception makes possible that direction of the domain’s research process
which enables the transition from vectorial biochemistry to molecular and cellular
morphogenesis. It operates in this regard as anticipations of text’s extensions that
reflect the transition. I would like to conclude this paper by indicating two prominent
examples of such extensions.
The first one is the contextualization of vectorial metabolism’s original text
within practices of studying systems of biochemical reactions as dissipative
structures by means of appropriate mathematical models and computer simulations.
At stake are stable patterns of chemical reactions that arise in systems far from
thermodynamic equilibrium. A second contextualization (starting with Wolpert
1969) is achieved through practices of exploring diffusible morphogen gradients
and positional information that include transplant experiments and experiments on
intercalation. Practices of studying morphogenetic fields (like endogenous electric
fields, Nuccitelli 1988) provide a third example of contextualization in which spatial
order is paralleled with a timeframe, and the whole “chronotope” of morphogenesis
is related to new conceptions of the cytoskeleton’s functions. However, the skepti-
cism this kind of contextualizing the original text of vectorial biochemistry
provokes is not to be ignored. Thus, Davies (2005, 8) cogently argues that “the idea of
morphogenetic gradients and fields is very useful for providing a high-level view of
events, but it cannot be a part of a molecular-level explanation because a gradient is,
by definition, non-local and cannot be sensed directly by a single molecule.” Several
authors champion the view that the quest for mechanisms of morphogenesis
should be based on the assumption that accounts of the shape changes at the scales
of cells and tissues are to be given in terms of events that take place only at the scale
of individual molecules.
The continuous reading of the vectorial metabolism’s original text is carried out
through readable technologies and spaces of representation that (in contrast to the
initial, one-dimensional entities) constitutes three-dimensional contextually mean-
ingful objects of inquiry. Cases in point are the so-called “morphogenetic mutants”
which are defective in the cell division cycle. They are used in experiments in which
28 D. Ginev

growth is arrested at a particular morphological stage. Some of them generate

grossly aberrant shapes. Quite pertinent to the passage from vectorial metabolism to
cellular morphogenesis are those mutants which are defective in enzymes (like
adenylate cyclase) that catalyze reactions at metabolic branch points (Harold 1990).
Yet the identification of “morphogenes” that are dedicated to the task of cell shaping
is still a trend of research in the domain being discussed as well as in the develop-
mental biology without significant successes. Sure for the moment is only that
molecular morphogenesis is directly gene-controlled.
New possibilities for bridging the gap between vectorial biochemistry and
topological physiology have emerged. This gap is still the domain’s basic unsolved
problem. Perhaps, the domain is waiting for a new configuration of scientific prac-
tices in which a text will be constituted that will unite the topology of the bio-
chemical autocatalytic reactions systems characterized by self-organization with
cytological mechanisms of the ways in which cells can translate commands to
make shape into that shape itself. These mechanisms which operate on physiolog-
ical level belong supposedly to the repertoire of morphogenesis. Indications that
the new configuration will arise provide the interrelatedness of experimental and
theoretical practices of studying phenomena of vectorial metabolism in terms of
adaptive self-organization. A configuration of practices that will be capable to
appropriate the possibilities projected by it, and to read and represent the objects
of inquiry it constitutes still does not guarantee that it will bridge the gap I men-
tioned. Yet in revealing the mechanisms in question, it will integrate in a unitary
text supramolecular complexes and morphogenetic processes in individual cells.
To be sure, this is an indispensable step in the transition from vectorial biochem-
istry to topological physiology. Undertaking this step promises one to give mean-
ing to the concept of emergence of a topological arrangement that runs through
molecular, cellular, and supracellular-physiological level.

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One Cognitive Style Among Others:
Towards a Phenomenology of the Lifeworld
and of Other Experiences

Gregor Schiemann

Abstract In his pioneering sociological theory, which makes phenomenological

concepts fruitful for the social sciences, Alfred Schütz has laid foundations for a
characterization of an manifold of distinct domains of experience. My aim here is
to further develop this pluralist theory of experience by buttressing and extending
the elements of diversity that it includes, and by eliminating or minimizing
lingering imbalances among the domains of experience. After a critical discussion
of the criterion-catalogue Schütz develops for the purpose of characterizing
different cognitive styles, I move on to examine its application to one special style,
the lifeworld. I appeal, on the one hand, to Husserl’s characterization of the lifeworld
as a world of perception, and on the other hand to the layer-model of the lifeworld
developed by Schütz and Thomas Luckmann. A consequence of this approach is
that the lifeworld appears as a socially definable context that is detached from other
experiences but on an equal footing with them with respect to their claim of validity.
The term “lifeworld” does not denote a category that encompasses culture or nature
but refers to a delimited action-space. Finally, I draw upon Schütz’s criterion-catalogue
to characterize two domains of experience outside of the lifeworld, which play
a central role for the process of differentiation of experience in modernity and
for the phenomenological analysis of types of experience: experimental science
and subjectivity.

G. Schiemann (*)
Philosophisches Seminar & IZWT, Bergische Universität Wuppertal,
Gaußstr. 20, D-42119 Wuppertal, Germany
e-mail: schiemann@uni-wuppertal.de

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 31

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_3,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
32 G. Schiemann

1 Introduction

In his pioneering sociological theory, which makes phenomenological concepts

fruitful for the social sciences, Alfred Schütz has laid the foundations for a
characterization of a manifold of distinct domains of experience.1 Alongside
science and the lifeworld, one can distinguish among others the domains of dreams,
fantasies, religious practices, children’s play and insanity.2 Schütz characterizes
these different domains by attributing to each its own distinctive “cognitive style”
[Erkenntnisstil]. His understanding of “cognitive” [erkenntnismäßig] is expressed
by his view that knowledge is experience that we take to be real.3 “Cognitive,”
here, does not refer to justified belief but, on the contrary, to beliefs that are
assumed not to require justification because the reality of their objects is taken to
be sufficiently firm.4
My aim here is to further develop the pluralist theory of experience by buttressing
and extending the elements of diversity that it includes, and by eliminating or
minimizing lingering imbalances among the domains of experience. One of the
achievements of Schütz’s social phenomenology is that the lifeworld, which remains
the most socially important non-scientific domain of experience, has been estab-
lished as an object of enquiry for sociology.5 Following Edmund Husserl’s lifeworld
analysis, he ascribes a foundational status to this domain, which is an ineliminable
determinant of all other experiences—partly just as a presupposition, partly as a
fundamental, universal structural property.
Schütz justifies the privileging of the status of the lifeworld by appealing to its
character as a world of working. “Working” [Wirken] refers to all bodily movements
performed to carry out “action in the outer world, based upon a project,”6 which
are centered around objects lying within the perceptual field of an individual.
The core of the lifeworld includes the telephone that an individual uses, for
example, as well as the voice of her interlocutor, but not the interlocutor herself.
Cognitive styles outside of the lifeworld, in contrast, are primarily characterized by
forms of action that are directed not toward objects of perception but toward past
impressions, present products of imagination, or abstract entities. They rest upon
different background presuppositions than the lifeworld, follow from divergent
social relations, and stand at a certain distance from the demands of everyday life.
In granting a special status to the lifeworld, Schütz invests his conception with an
absolute claim to validity, for his conception of the lifeworld refers to an historically

1
On Schütz’s sociology, see Natanson (1970); List and Srubar (1988); Embree (1999).
2
Schütz (1971), 266.
3
Ibid., 265.
4
The foundation for this approach are spelled out in “On Multiple Realities” (1945), and “Symbol,
Reality, and Society” (1955), in: Schütz (1973), 207 ff. and 287 ff.
5
On Schütz’s theory of the lifeworld, cf. Grathoff and Sprondel (1979); Srubar (1988); Endress,
Psathas and Nasu (2004).
6
Schütz (1971), Vol. 1, 243.
One Cognitive Style Among Others: Towards a Phenomenology of the Lifeworld… 33

and culturally invariant structure, without which human life and its various modes
of experience would be unimaginable.7 One potential advantage of assuming such a
universal matrix is that it could conceptually do justice to the relatively inalterable
basic conditions of human life that may obtain.
If, on the other hand, one conceives of the cognitive styles as products of a
typically modern process of differentiation of experiences, it is no longer possible to
regard the lifeworld as an unqualified point of reference. Contemporary non-
lifeworld cognitive styles are—I would submit—no longer as integrated within the
lifeworld as they once were. Instead, they have become autonomous and partially
professionalized, and attained an influence as such upon the lifeworld. Artistic,
religious, scientific and other modes of experience outside of the lifeworld make the
lifeworld appear to be unreal. Along with the lifeworld, they form a pluralist
structure in which different domains border on each other and determine individuals’
lives with specific intensities and durations. As a rule, individuals are not simultane-
ously in different domains of experience. Action in the lifeworld does not leave
space for scientific work; dream-worlds extinguish waking consciousness; religious
practice is not normally acquainted with the open-endedness of fantasy etc. The switch
from one domain to another, which can already take place several times during one
single day, implies the possibility of boundary experiences.
Correcting Schütz’s conception of cognitive styles makes it possible to
distinguish among various autonomous domains of experience. The dissolution of
the foundational status of the lifeworld leads to a manifold of equally justified
contexts, which represent the plurality of experiences that is characteristic of
modernity. The non-lifeworld experiences mentioned by Schütz can be supple-
mented by further cognitive styles belonging, for example, to professional domains,
to more finely differentiated scientific domains of experience, and to the public
domain as a generally accessible sphere of societal communication, the objects of
which are, to speak with Kant, “whatever necessarily interests everyone,”8 or
subjectivity as an experience in which a subject’s attention is directed toward its
own conscious events or conscious states.
Schütz developed a catalogue of criteria for characterizing different cognitive
styles. There are only a few, easily corrected, places where the catalogue reflects
Schütz’s privileging of the lifeworld. Section 1 will be devoted to presenting a modi-
fied version of the catalogue and illustrating it with examples. Then I take a closer
look at its application to the lifeworld. I will be drawing, on the one hand, upon
Husserl’s definition of the lifeworld as a world of perception, and on the other hand
on Schütz’s and Thomas Luckmann’s leveled model of the lifeworld. Consequently,
the lifeworld appears as a socially bounded context that is distinct from other, equally
valid, experiential domains. The term “lifeworld,” then, does not refer to a category
that encompasses the entirety of nature and culture, but to a restricted space of action
in (next section). Finally, I will use Schütz’s catalogue of criteria to characterize two

7
Cf. Heller (1986), 154.
8
Kant (1900 ff.), Vol. V, B 868.
34 G. Schiemann

non-lifeworldly domains of experience that play an prominent role in the modern

process of differentiation of experience and for the phenomenological analysis of
types of experience: experimental natural science and subjectivity (Sect. 3).

2 Schütz’s Conception of Cognitive Styles

A “certain set of our experiences” qualifies as “a finite province of meaning”

according to Schütz, “if all of them show a specific cognitive style and are—with
respect to this style—not only consistent in themselves but also compatible with one
another.”9 Schütz can refer to a domain of meaning as “finite” because the condition
of compatibility does not apply among cognitive styles: “that which is compatible
with the province of meaning P be also compatible within the province of meaning
Q.”10 For Schütz, it is by virtue of the lifeworld that communication among domains
of meaning is nevertheless possible.11
The expression “cognitive style” makes it clear that Schütz is not so much
interested in the content as in the form of knowledge. The term “cognitive” does not
refer only to true beliefs but also to “valid as well as the invalidated [experiences],”12
insofar as they exhibit the same style and are thus held with conviction to be real.
The exclusive restriction to domains of meaning, however, invests the concept of
knowledge with a statical character that underestimates the significance of bound-
ary experiences, which alone enable the transformation of the conditions for the
constitution of meaning. If one presupposes a division among domains of meaning,
experiences arising from an overlap of cognitive styles can result either from the
transgression or from the dissolution of borders. Schütz describes such experiences
with a terminology that is also suitable for the transition between incommensurable
worlds. Thus, the shift between domains of meaning does not occur gradually but
suddenly, and is connected with an emotional shudder that Schütz compares with
“Kierkegaard’s experience of the ‘instand’ as the leap.”13 Among other things, the
“shock of falling asleep as the leap into the world of dreams; the inner transformation
we endure if the curtain in the theater rises […]; the radical change in our attitude
if, before a painting, we permit our visual field to be limited by what is within the
frame […], our quandary, relaxing into laughter, if, in listening to a joke, we are for
a short time ready to accept the fictitious world of the jest as a reality.”14

9
Schütz (1971), Vol. 1, 264.
10
Ibid., 397 (267).
11
Ibid., 296ff., 392 and 395.
12
Ibid., 265.
13
Ibid., 266 (267).
14
Ibid., 266 (397f.).
One Cognitive Style Among Others: Towards a Phenomenology of the Lifeworld… 35

In order to make it possible to characterize conceptually “at least some of the

features”15 of the cognitive styles specific to domains of meaning, Schütz formulated
his catalogue of criteria. As already noted, I will be making some modifications to
the catalogue that result from criticism of the foundational status Schütz attributed
to the lifeworld. In its social-phenomenological orientation, the catalogue presup-
poses an egological structure that rests upon subjective experience (which Schütz
does not invest with a specific cognitive style), and then integrates phenomena of
intersubjectivity. The catalogue of criteria includes six features, the concise
definitions of which are supplemented by Schütz with examples to illustrate their
relationship with the domains of meaning.16
1. The foundational criterion, modeled upon Bergson’s “attention à la vie,” is the
so-called “tension of consciousness,”17 which is understood as an “orienting
toward and attending to life.”18 Schütz distinguishes various intensities of
attention, as well as various resultant degrees of reality. Since it is “the meaning
of experience and not the ontological structure of the objects which constitutes
reality,” reality is dependant upon the attentional structures of the conscious.19
Following Bergson, Schütz ascribes to the lifeworld the highest degree of
attention, the “wide-awakeness,”20 and to the dream-world the lowest degree, a
merely “passive attention.”21 By characterizing “wide-awakeness” with refer-
ence to “normal […] adults”,22 Schütz distinguishes the lifeworld from fantasy
worlds—which he also regards as characteristic for children—and from worlds
of (pathological) insanity. I will be adopting this point of reference, along with
the attention toward external objects, as a criterion for the lifeworld’s intuitive
orientation, and will be using Husserl’s concept of perception in order to
fine-tune it to this orientation.
In order to revoke the privileged status of the lifeworld, it is necessary to
abandon the ranking of attentional intensities as a means of individuating cognitive
styles. The principally equal justification of cognitive styles implies that they have
equivalent possibilities for validity claims upon reality. By no means, however,
does this undermine the necessity of the criterion of tension of consciousness.
For all cognitive styles remain “names […] of one and the same consciousness,
and it is the same life […], which is attended to in different modifications.”23

15
Ibid., 265.
16
This presentation of the criterion catalogue follows Schiemann (2002), 86ff.
17
Schütz (1971), Vol. 1, 243ff. and 265, in the original not emphasized, as for all further character-
izations of the criteria.
18
Ibid., 243.
19
Ibid., 264 (393).
20
Ibid., 265.
21
Ibid., 244.
22
Schütz and Luckmann (1979), 47.
23
Schütz (1971), Vol. 1, 297.
36 G. Schiemann

Taking part in the “stream of consciousness” is thus a necessary condition for

cognitive styles that could not otherwise determine the experiential space of one
individual with varying intensities and duration.
2. The next criterion is concerned with different contents of attention, and captures
the “prevalent form of spontaneity” within a cognitive domain.24 Unlike the
tension of consciousness, which refers to an internal attitude, it marks out a
relation between the subject’s working and the experiences she takes to be real.
The distinctions among forms of spontaneity arise from the qualitative experiential
differences between thinking and conducting [Verhalten], and between acting
[Handlung] and not acting. Among the forms of thinking action, for example,
fantasizing differs from contemplation by virtue of the absence of any intention
to make the fantasy real.25 Moreover, dreaming lacks a structuring of action, as
the subject does not have the freedom to direct the flow of events.26 Hence,
dreaming is neither an experience of being conducting nor one of performing
actions. The paradigm of a subject performing actions is the lifeworld. As already
noted, its prevalent spontaneity is, for Schütz, working [Wirken].
Following Oswald Schwemmer, I would like to further restrict the spontane-
ity prevalent of the lifeworld by pointing to its unprofessionality. Lifeworldly
action can “just as well be performed by and expected of others as from us,”
since we “attribute competency in principle to everyone.”27 With this further
characteristic, the scope of lifeworldly action becomes far narrower, and the
lifeworld loses its status as universal mediator for communication among
the cognitive domains. This characterization can probably be connected with the
following, negative, criterion of the “epoché.”
3. Although the word “epoché” is borrowed from Husserl, Schütz uses it in a
different way, namely to refer to the bracketing or suspending of particular
aspects of reality.28 Schütz adds a hierarchization, similar to that of the tensions
of consciousness, when he claims that it is only in the lifeworld that all doubts
about reality are suspended and it is accepted as self-evident.29 Nevertheless, this
ranking does not lead to the privileging of the lifeworld, as the doubts about the
validity of reality in other domains of experience apply only to particular phe-
nomena. To formulate it as a paradox: the general epoché of the lifeworld, which
is characterized by a complete absence of doubt, is the specifically lifeworldly
epoché. For other domains of meaning, Schütz himself introduces examples of
specific epochés: thus, dreaming experience is not concerned with the validity of

24
Ibid., 265.
25
Ibid., 270.
26
Ibid., 277.
27
Schwemmer (1987), 207.
28
Schütz (1971), Vol. 1, 263 and 265.
29
Ibid., 265 and 268.
One Cognitive Style Among Others: Towards a Phenomenology of the Lifeworld… 37

“certain logical axioms”30; scientific reflection puts aside, among other aspects,
the bodily existence of the researcher “as psycho-physical human being”.31
4. While the characteristics mentioned so far have to do with the subjective
constitution of objects and meaning, the next one introduces the specific “form
of sociality”32 as a further definitional feature. Roughly speaking, it distinguishes
the domains of meaning that are experience exclusively alone (e.g., dreams, con-
templation) from those that can be experience only together (e.g., lifeworld) also
from those that can be experienced alone or together (e.g. fantasy, religion and,
according to Schütz, science). On Schütz’s view, as I will elucidate further below,
the familiar/well-known essence of lifeworldly social forms results from a mini-
malization of the typification of social relations.
5. Possibilities for the production of complex relational networks within and
between domains of meaning are opened up by the two final criteria:
“time-perspectives” and “experiencing one’s self.”33 The criterion of different
“time-perspectives” is closely tied to the aforementioned criterion of sociality. It
refers to the objective time of the world that is beyond control, to biological
times (bodily rhythms, seasons, etc.), to individual biographical time, to the sub-
jective time of the stream of consciousness with internal duration, and to the
social time of the calendar and standardized intersubjective time.34
6. The criterion of “experiencing one’s self,”35 which I merely mention here,
postulates the emergence of patterns of personal identification that are
specific to different domains of meaning and that are dependent upon validity
elements to reality.

3 The Lifeworld as a Restricted Perceptual World

Three of the characteristics formulated by Schütz can be conceived as necessary

criteria for the lifeworld’s cognitive style: “wide-awakeness” as a specific tension
of consciousness; the prevalent form of spontaneity characterized by unprofessional
action that is directed toward objects within the perceptual field of an individual;
and the specific epoché that places the validity of reality beyond doubt.36 The
lifeworldly form of sociality discussed by Schütz, namely familiar/well-known

30
Ibid., 279.
31
Ibid., 286.
32
Ibid., 265.
33
Ibid., 265.
34
Schütz and Luckmann (1979), Vol. 1, 73.
35
Schütz (1971), Vol. 1, 265.
36
The concept of a context of lifeworldly experience, which draws upon Husserl and Schütz, has
been elucidated further in Schiemann (2005), chapter 1.1.2. Along with a given background
knowledge, the three criteria form a sufficient condition for lifeworldly experience, cf. ibid.
Chapter 1.1.2, paragraph 3.1.2.
38 G. Schiemann

intersubjectivity, does not in my view count among the necessary criteria, since
individuals (such as Robinson Crusoe) can also live alone in a lifeworld. Insofar as
an individual has a perceptual world bound to its body, that perceptual world deter-
mines the familiarity and intuitiveness of the things that can be altered by direct
(unprofessional) actions. What an individual of course conceives as a uniform world
constitutes a subjective lifeworld, around which are concentrically arranged spheres
of what can only be experienced indirectly. There are as many subjective lifeworlds
as there are normal adult individuals, and as many shared lifeworlds as made
possible by the integration of different subjective worlds into unified worlds in
social action spaces.
In order to give a more precise characterization of the lifeworldly tension of
consciousness, the next step will be to base the specific epoché upon Husserl’s
notion of perception. Lifeworldly attention has to do primarily with perception of
the outer world of bodies that is not symbolically mediated. This characterization
will make it possible for me to apply Schütz’s and Luckmann’s layered model for
specifying the prevalent forms of spontaneity, time-perspective, and sociality.
The absence of—or freedom from—doubt leads to the emergence of a core of
unshakable certainties, the objects of which are not any particular contents but the
validity of the world. This self-evident world-belief is what Husserl refers to as a
“general thesis of the natural attitude” [Generalthesis der natürlichen Einstellung].37
The lifeworld is unquestioningly accepted as a unity and as existence that is inde-
pendent of the act of knowing. Husserl’s general thesis is to a certain extent within
the Cartesian tradition, insofar as the given world that corresponds to this natural
attitude is primarily conceived as being given to intuition. Where reflection about
experience or knowledge does not occur, it is the testimony of perception that
dominates. The lifeworld is the “world of perception,” because it is a world that is
taken as self-evident in its being.38 “Perception,” refers exclusively to the “mode of
self-presence” of an appearing object, which Husserl calls the “original mode of
intuition,” [Urmodus der Anschauung] in contrast to the recollective or anticipatory
intuition of a currently absent object.39 This “originally giving” [originär gebende]
experience is oriented toward “mere bodiliness.”40 “Through sight, touch, audition,
etc., bodily things are simply there for me in the different ways appropriate to the
various senses and in some particular spatial distribution.”41 In this sense, the
lifeworld encompasses the things within the visible surroundings of the subject that
are currently present and point as signs to an Other. In a broader sense, it also
extends to things that are invisible, occluded or absent at the moment but are present
in memory in a “conscious sense” [bewußtseinsmäßig].42

37
Husserl (1977), 63f.—also emphasized in the original.
38
Husserl (1976), 49f., 171; Husserl (1968), 58f.
39
Husserl (1976), 107.
40
Husserl (1948), 54.
41
Husserl (1977), 57.
42
Ibid.
One Cognitive Style Among Others: Towards a Phenomenology of the Lifeworld… 39

Husserl applies the general thesis not only to the “world of things” [Sachenwelt].
The same world is there “in the same immediacy as world of values, world of goods,
practical world.”43 In the lifeworld, bodies do not appear independently of their
cultural, social and practical evaluations—and neither, in turn, do these evaluations
attain an autonomous existence: “In order for something to be given as usable, beau-
tiful, terrible, frightful, attractive or whatever else, it must be somehow present to
the senses.”44 The perception of meaning presupposes the perception of bodies,
which is why the lifeworld remains, even from a socio-cultural perspective, primarily
a world of perception.45
In subscribing to the assumption of bodily primacy, I conceptualize the lifeworld
as a cognitive style that is founded upon the achievements of outer perception.
Schütz and Luckmann have used the term “stratifications” [Aufschichtungen] to
refer to the structures of such a domain of experience. I will be using this model in
order to specify the circle of necessary conditions for a restricted social context. In
so doing, I will be pursuing the strategy of limiting the scope of the claims to valid-
ity of the definitions I am borrowing from Schütz and Luckmann in order to make
space for consideration of experientially different contexts. The spatial stratification
specifies the prevalent spontaneity of direct action that is characteristic of the life-
world and which takes on foremost significance in a world of perception. Schütz
and Luckmann, who characterize the lifeworld through socially mediated as well as
through immediate experience, follow the same ranking. The temporal and social
stratifications confirm the structural features of the spatial stratification and provide
additional definitions.

3.1 Spatial Stratification

The centerpoint of the spatial structure is the locus of the bodily presence of the
lifeworldly subject. The scope of its direct actions spans the so-called “primary zone
of efficacy” [primäre Wirkzone]. This zone contains all the things and people that
the subject can influence solely through bodily movement (within a present that
spans a certain time interval)—including the use of technical devices (tools, means
of locomotion, etc.). A “secondary zone of efficacy” [sekundäre Wirkzone] includes
the use of technical devices to alter bodies outside of the primary zone. The primary
zone is entirely, and the secondary zone partially, within the sphere of perceptible
things. The “world currently within reach” [Welt der aktuellen Reichweite], which
is made up of these two zones, can be divided according to sensory modalities
(what is visible in the distance can only seldom be smelled, whereas what can be
smelled generally has a broader spatial range than what can be touched or tasted, etc.).

43
Ibid., 59—emphasized also in the original.
44
Husserl (1948), 53.
45
Ibid., 55.
40 G. Schiemann

It borders upon the “world potentially within reach [Welt der potentiellen Reichweite],”
which includes objects that are not currently present but can be in the future.46
The notion of spatial stratification can be illustrated with the example of a
student’s domestic workspace (which may be sufficiently similar to Husserl’s rather
inadmissibly tidy lifeworld): her primary zone of efficacy includes the computer
she was just using a moment ago as well as the part of the speaker and door opener
she is presently using. The secondary zone of efficacy contains visible and invisible
things: the door-opening mechanism itself (invisible), the front door (partially
visible) and the person outside who just rang the doorbell (invisible). Along with the
inventory of the primary zone of efficacy, the world that is currently within the
student’s reach also contains perceptible objects outside of the action-radius—
including, for example, objects that her gaze falls upon outside the window (houses
across the street, distant stretches of landscape). It does not however include the
person who has not yet entered, although this person may be part of the world
potentially within reach. None of these worlds contains invisible components of
mechanical-electronic devices, such as keyboards and speakers, unless the user has
an interest in their function and would thus draw them into the world potentially
or even currently within her reach. As far as modern technical devices are
concerned, the lifeworld is a world of button-pushing. It is only concerned with
relevant in- and outputs, and does not normally extend beyond the surface of
technical apparatuses.

3.2 Temporal Stratification

The temporal structures of the lifeworld that Schütz and Luckmann investigate are
exceedingly complex, and can be contrasted with other closed domains of meaning
by virtue of the flowing together of otherwise separate forms of time.47 The spatial
stratification in fact already implies the basic structure of the temporal stratification:
the present occurs primarily in the world that is currently within reach; future events
and (shared) experiences make up the world that is potentially within reach.
The state of the world beyond its potentially reach effects a subject in a different
way temporally than spatially. Whatever is spatially out of reach tends to escape her
interest and also her knowledge. Lifeworlds, in their essential locality, are only mar-
ginally involved with distant events. Of the events that are temporally out of reach,
however, there are two that have unconditional significance for individual subjects:
one’s own birth and death. One cannot have any direct lifeworldly contact with
these events.48 One knows about them only through the accounts of others, and
assumes that one’s own birth and death must be similar to those of others. Of course,

46
Schütz and Luckmann (1979), Vol. 1, 63ff.
47
Ibid., 73ff.
48
Ibid., 74f.
One Cognitive Style Among Others: Towards a Phenomenology of the Lifeworld… 41

the mediacy of these experiences is not symmetrical. One’s own birth is far more
removed from one’s experience than one’s death, which announces its approach in
bodily aging and dying.
For Husserl, Schütz and Luckmann, the transcendence of birth and death is the
basis of the strict generational orientation of a lifeworldly context, in which much
older and much younger people appear only at the margins. The zenith of efficacy
of one’s predecessors, which is manifest in cultural achievements, belongs to the
past, while the coming generation participates in adult life only partially.

3.3 Social Stratification

According to Schütz’s and Luckmann’s starting premise, each individual subject

assumes unquestioningly “that other men exist.”49 The social stratification deals
with a differentiation of social experience according to degrees of anonymity:
anonymity stands in, so to speak, an inversely proportional relation to the immediacy
of experience, while no social experience is so immediate that it could do entirely
without the application of anonymous definitions. “Anonymity” refers to typologies
that are applied to people, i.e. the formation and use of types for identifying
people (“our mailman Mr. Martin,” “an enemy of the people,” etc.).50 It concerns
aspects of actions less in the primary zone of efficacy than in the world potentially
within reach.
For Schütz and Luckmann, the reach of the socially stratified lifeworld fades off
into indeterminacy. They impute not only the weakest but even the strongest forms
of mediacy of social experience to the lifeworld, which retains its midpoint but
extends to the entire social and cultural world. Such radical openness corresponds,
on the one hand, to the horizonedness [Horizonthaftigkeit] of lifeworldly experi-
ence, on the other hand it precludes a classification of social experience in which
lifeworldly experience stands alongside other kinds of experience. In contrast to
Schütz and Luckmann, I would therefore like to apply the criterion of anonymity in
such as way as to highlight the part of the social world that is already restricted
by the spatial stratification. Anonymity should deliver definitions that make it
possible to distinguish at least roughly between people with whom one shares a
lifeworld and people who appear in one’s lifeworld but do not properly belong to it.
In carrying out such a demarcation, it is possible to build upon Schütz’s and
Luckmann’s conception of the lifeworld as a world of perception. Experience in
which anonymity is as minimal as possible can only be had, according to Schütz and
Luckmann, in “face-to-face situation,” i.e. through bodily presence. The term
for one subject’s attentively turning to the other is the “thou-orientation,” and the
other who is experienced as an equal person is a “fellow being” [Mitmensch].

49
Ibid., 87.
50
On lifeworldly typologies, cf. Schiemann (2005), chapter 1.1.2, paragraph 3.1.2.
42 G. Schiemann

Whenever this orientation is mutual, the social relationship can be called a

“we-relationship.”51
We-relationships can be classified according to the degree of anonymity. The more
concrete, detailed and presumably also persevering an unmediated social relationship
is, the less important typologies become in the “thou-orientation.”52 The alter ego may
appear as a singular individual that cannot be captured adequately by any typology at
all. Higher degrees of anonymity arise through the successive replacement of immedi-
ate social experience by typologies. In the extreme case, typologies can fully take the
place of social experience. Since we-relationships depend upon a turning of attention
for which typologies can provide no substitute, they are progressively destroyed by
increasing anonymity. It is in we-relationships with minimal degrees of anonymity
that I see the essential social feature of the shared lifeworld.

3.4 A Proto-Concluding Characterization

As a world of perception, the subjective and the shared lifeworlds have a centric
nature. The shared lifeworld, which has been the focus here, appears to individu-
als as a familiar social space in which they linger sometimes with more attention
and sometimes with less, but which they can also sometimes leave and to which
they can again return. One knows the objects and people in one’s lifeworld on
their own terms. That is the way in which they remain in one’s memory when they
are no longer present or when one is outside of one’s lifeworld (while dreaming or
fantasizing, while being in public, at work, etc.). Other spaces of experience are
layered upon the lifeworld in varying degrees of familiarity, and partially overlap
with it. Persons, which enter the lifeworldly domain coming out of these spaces of
experience, remain distincted from the lifeworld at first. Since everything that
belongs to the lifeworld must be perceptible, its temporal modus is essentially the
present. The past is the source the experiences come that make perception possi-
ble and orientate action, and it is toward the future that desires, expectations and
action plans are directed.
As an equal cognitive style alongside others, the lifeworld does not lose its
foundational significance for the conceptualization of processes of modernization.
Increasing professionalization can only be understood against the backdrop of the
existing unprofessional spaces of experience, which find their very core in the
re-defined lifeworld. Moreover, the integration of the lifeworld into a manifold of
differing domains of meaning offers the possibilities for conceiving of the lifeworld
as a cultural phenomenon that arises only within a plurality of historically changing
lifeworlds. The cultural-historical process of differentiation of experience leads to a
multiplication of non-lifeworldly cognitive styles.

51
Schütz and Luckmann (1979), Vol. 1, 90f.
52
Ibid., 95ff.
One Cognitive Style Among Others: Towards a Phenomenology of the Lifeworld… 43

4 Examples of Non-Lifeworldly Cognitive Styles

Using examples of two non-lifeworldly experiences—experimental natural

science and subjectivity—I would now like to discuss the application of Schütz’s
criterion catalogue to the demarcation of different cognitive styles. Schütz and
Luckmann never mention these two experiential contexts as closed domains of
meaning. Only in a few places do they speak—very generally—about science and
about the “scientific contemplation” that they impute to science.53 Without being
able to give any convincing justification, Schütz contrasts the latter with the
lifeworld. Moreover, his understanding of scientific contemplation has less in
common with cognitive styles found in the sciences than with Husserl’s concept
of subjective experience.54
Since Schütz and Luckmann do not consider subjectivity as a closed domain of
meaning, they overlook the constitutive significance that this cognitive style has for
modern self-understanding. In his persuasive study of modern forms of identity,
Charles Taylor refers to what he calls the three “sources of the self”: alongside the
“voice of nature” and the “affirmation of ordinary life” that is bound up with the
lifeworld, there is also the “inwardness” that characterizes the demarcation of reason
from the outside world as well as its formation as an autonomous site of knowledge
and action.55 The mainstream discourse on subjectivity in early modernity got
underway with a ritual turning away from the lifeworld, which opened up newfound
space for loneliness.56 Subjectivity soon became the subject of methodological
analyses, which subsequently influenced introspective procedures in psychology
(Wundt, James, Titchener and the Würzburg school with Külpe) as well as phenom-
enological method of reduction (Husserl).57 Finally, it has, as a space of sensory
qualities, experienced an unanticipated renaissance in the past few decades in the
philosophy of mind.58

4.1 Experimental Natural Science

Schütz’s concept of a cognitive style offers the possibility of a classification within

the plurality of modern modes of experience in the first approximation. Thus, the
uniform characterization of the experience that is characteristic for experimental
science is also only sensible by virtue of the contrast to other cognitive styles.

53
Ibid., 48f., 356ff.; Schütz (1971), Vol. 1, 281ff.
54
Cf. Schiemann (2002).
55
Taylor (1992), 109ff., 207ff. I use the concept of modernity here in a sense that encompasses
modernity in its contempary period; cf. Schiemann (2009).
56
Cf. Bürger (1998).
57
Varela and Shear (1999).
58
Smith and Thomasson (2005); Kriegel and Williford (2006).
44 G. Schiemann

It cannot claim to do justice to the diversity of scientific methods, domains and

conceptions. A conceptual demarcation of experimental science is of crucial
importance. These disciplines have been a—perhaps the—motor driving the
scientification and technologization that is characteristic of modernity.
Experimental procedures in the natural sciences present a context of purposive-
rational action, which aims to state or to create phenomena, and serves to develop,
evaluate or criticize knowledge of objectifiable reality.59 It is found in just about all
natural sciences and can be invoked as their defining feature. The term “phenome-
non” here refers to events, processes or states that are expected or that have been
demonstrated to admit of conceptual description, to appear regularly under the
appropriate conditions, and to accessible to theoretical explanation. In a broader
sense, it can also (or alternatively) be used to refer to regularity itself. Thus, the
experimental creation of phenomena need not impose any particular conception
upon them. Countless phenomena have indeed been discovered in experiments that
were not devised with that aim. In general, it can be said that the minimization of
parameters and variables that is necessary for the systematic investigation of phe-
nomena necessitates a demarcation of the objects of the experiment from their sur-
roundings. In order to fulfill this condition optimally, experiments are often
conducted in technically manipulable apparatuses. Experimental phenomena are
perceived or observed. “Perception” refers to the acquisition of sensory impressions
from external bodies, such as also are encountered in the lifeworld. “Observation,”
on the other hand, is the empirical referral to theoretical entities (electrons, atoms,
genes, black holes, etc.) that is mediated by the apparatus. Many scientific experiments
have to do with properties that are too small, too large, too distant or too transient
for perception. If observations can be made with the help of or through measurement
devices, sensory perception may be limited to reading information from dials or
other presentations of results, i.e. interchangeable representations of data of theoretical
entities. Observations, however, are also mediated by the senses insofar as they
arise through actions. The ongoing automatization of experimental techniques has
however made forms of observation possible that are only peripherally or not at all
dependent upon human perception.
The aforementioned condition of demarcation from the surroundings allows
for a spatio-temporal localization of experiments. Its intended claim to validity is,
however, not local but universal. Scientific knowledge is supposed to be testable
under reproducible conditions, and stakes a claim upon unrestricted intersubjective
validity. This claim to universality is matched by the boundary expanding structure
of research organizations. The bearers of experimental science are not single indi-
viduals but the worldwide, networked “scientific communities” of the various
disciplines. The knowledge they produce has only a relative objectivity, though,
insofar as experimental science—like science in general—is essentially a socio-
cultural endeavour. Hence, scientists follow changeable and replaceable “thought
styles” (Ludwik Fleck) in their beliefs, or they organize their work within

59
For overviews of recent literature on experimentation, see Heidelberger and Steinle (1988);
Radder (2002).
One Cognitive Style Among Others: Towards a Phenomenology of the Lifeworld… 45

changeable and replaceable “paradigms” (Thomas S. Kuhn). Under these historically

contingent conditions, the predominant rationality of the experimental sciences
has proven itself to be instrumental. It answers, roughly speaking, partly to the
inner dynamics of acquisition of knowledge through problem-solving, partly to
the external societal factors that support or hinder the development of methods
and investigations of object-domains.
This admittedly rather rudimentary description of experimental science can be
re-formulated and made more precise with the terminology of Schütz’s criterion
catalogue. Experimental science shares the “wide-awakeness” of acting subjects that
is characteristic of the lifeworld and inscribed in the first criterion of tension of con-
sciousness. But this attentional intensity can in the context of experiments be directed
to things that function as signs for results that cannot themselves be accessed percep-
tually, as the discussion of observation showed. It follows that the spatial structure of
experimental design does not necessarily point back to perceptual conditions. Rather,
it varies with institutional, methodological and object-dependent requirements. The
spectrum can span from a narrowly bounded locality up to an earth encompassing
global level. Modern communication systems make it possible to carry out experi-
ments, if necessary, in spatially very disparate locations, and to evaluate the data
somewhere else altogether. The second criterion, too, is relatively independent of the
reach of an individual’s perceptual field: the prevalent spontaneity of experimental
action is directed toward the design, the execution and the evaluation of experiments,
as well as to the development and application of the attendant conceptual and theo-
retical constructions. Successful experiments demand a high-degree of professional-
ism in practical and systematic respects, which is normally guided by thought styles
or paradigms. As an example of the specific epoché, the third criterion, Schütz men-
tions the bracketing of the bodily existence of the researcher as a “psycho-physical
human being” (see above). The form of sociality, the fourth criterion, describes the
organization in “scientific communities.” If the experimental praxis also requires an
ability that may resemble lifeworldly forms of action, the claim to universality, on the
other hand, requires the interchangeability of acting subjects. Finally, the definitions
discussed so far, and the limits of their applicability to the diversity of varieties of
experimental science, are reflected in the final criterion of specific time-perspectives.
A common element could be portrayed more closely with Hans Blumenberg’s
concept of “world-time” as “core of all conceivable chronologies” and contrasted
with the “life-time” typical of everyday praxis.60

4.2 Subjectivity

Subjective experience is experience in which a subject’s attention is directed

toward her own conscious events or states in experiencing or reflecting upon them.
Husserl’s transcendental epoché is one example of subjective experience, as are the
forms of affective involvement (Betroffenheit) and of self-consciousness with

60
Blumenberg (1986).
46 G. Schiemann

self-attribution described by Hermann Schmitz.61 People to whom subjective

experience is ascribed have privileged access to that experience. Their reports have
the status of uncorrectability, and are given in the first-person singular. The features
of the corresponding cognitive style are related in a partially complementary fashion
to those of the lifeworld.62
The direction of the tension of consciousness is, so to speak, contrary to that of the
lifeworld: in the lifeworld, attention is directed toward external objects of perception,
whereas, in the case of subjectivity, it is directed to one’s own conscious states (sensa-
tions, perceptions, thoughts, attitudes, moods, etc.), which are withdrawn from their
everyday, practical meaning. Whereas the locus of bodily presence is the immovable
midpoint of the spatial structure of the lifeworld, it can be left aside in subjective
experience. Thoughts that are not tied up with perception and sensations are free of
the necessity of a spatial localization. It is possible to go to a particular location merely
in thought, or to be lost in thought and forget one’s actual physical location. While the
prevalent spontaneity of a person in the lifeworld aims toward specific interventions
in an external world that is shared with fellow human beings, in subjective experience
it is conducted as an invisible act within the inner world of consciousness, and does
not primarily have an agentive but, rather, an experiential or a reflective character.
Professionalism, which need not be present in the lifeworld, can indeed be formed in
subjectivity. Individual awareness of one’s own inwardness does not presuppose any
specific competency, because the possibility of its realization is an integral component
of modern self-understanding. But, on the other hand, the methods of introspection
and phenomenological reduction, which are available for systematic mental self-
exploration, must be acquired through learning and practice. The subjective epoché
does not bracket out doubts about the reality of external objects but the practical goals
that are prominently bound up with them in other worlds. The questions that arise
within a subjective cognitive style are not concerned with properties of perceived
objects that are relevant for action but with the experiential qualities, thoughts or prop-
ositional attitudes that are connected with perception, how their mode of presentation
depends upon spatio-temporal position, etc. With respect to its form of sociality,
subjective experience is not communalized but essentially lonesome experience, and
not limitlessly shareable with other people. Time-perspectives, finally, focus upon
dimensions of inner time-consciousness that are not at issue within the lifeworld.

5 Conclusion

In order to illustrate Schütz’s conception of cognitive styles, I have discussed three

domains of meaning that are of significance for modern processes of differentiation
of experience: the lifeworld can be seen as the core of unprofessionalized spaces

61
Schmitz (1990).
62
The definitions belonging to a subjective context of experience were developed in Schiemann
(2005), Chap. 1.2.2, and are discussed critically in relation to Schütz’s concept of “scientific
contemplation” in Schiemann (2002).
One Cognitive Style Among Others: Towards a Phenomenology of the Lifeworld… 47

of experience, experimental natural science is to be regarded as a central motor

driving scientification and technologization, subjectivity is foundational for human
self-understanding today.
The three areas, however, also have particular relevance for phenomenological
analysis. Traditionally, the phenomenology of the lifeworld coming from Husserl
has been accorded a foundational role in two senses: it has been thought to present
the foundation of human experience in general and of scientific knowledge in par-
ticular. Against this characterization, which conflicts with the currently predomi-
nant plurality of experience, I have drawn upon Schütz in order to establish not only
the lifeworld but also experimental science as autonomous contexts.
Husserl was right in pointing out that the analysis of the lifeworld must avail
itself of a perspective external to the lifeworld. This insight must be generalized in
two respects. Every analysis of a domain of experience requires a reference point
that does not lie in the domain. The plurality of experience delivers just such refer-
ence points by bringing out the differences among various cognitive styles.
Subjectivity—the decisive domain of meaning for the phenomenological analysis of
the lifeworld—is among them. Subjectivity is no more a privileged context than the
lifeworld. It is not the “subjectivity that creates all world-validities with their
contents and in all pre-scientific and scientific ways.”63 Rather, it corresponds to a
cognitive style that other experiences do not require exclusively for their validity.
It owes its existence to an attitude that can be taken by anyone, with or without
practice, and which can be more or less beneficial.64 Subjectivity is in this sense a
generally accessible cognitive style, but one that can be experienced only individually
and which is typical for modern self-understanding.

References

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Bürger, Peter. 1998. Das Verschwinden des Subjekts: eine Geschichte der Subjektivität von
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63
Husserl (1976), 70.
64
Husserl compares the change in attitude that occurs in the transition from the natural to the
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The Infinite Science of the Lifeworld: Steps
Toward a Postfoundational Phenomenology

Giovanni Leghissa

Abstract This essay considers the problem of historicity together with the
paradoxes of foundation. The concept of lifeworld has been studied mainly in order
to clarify two orders of problems, the first concerning the relationship between
history and the lifeworld, the second concerning the paradoxes contained in the
Krisis regarding the possibility to attain a new foundation of transcendental
phenomenology. Both issues must be taken into consideration before we question
the possibility of a science of the lifeworld.

1 The Problem of Historicity and the Paradoxes

of Foundation

The concept of lifeworld has been studied mainly in order to clarify two orders of
problems, the first concerning the relationship between history and the lifeworld,
the second concerning the paradoxes contained in the Krisis regarding the possibil-
ity to attain a new foundation of transcendental phenomenology. Both issues must
be taken into consideration before we question the possibility of a science of the
lifeworld.
On the one hand, starting from Ricoeur’s and Landgrebe’s pioneering essays,1
much attention has been paid to the problem of historicity. The aim was not to show
how Husserl, a philosopher with strong interests in mathematics, succeeded in
structuring a coherent philosophy of history at the end of his career, after decades

1
Ricoeur (1949), Landgrebe (1963, 1968, 1982).
G. Leghissa (*)
Dipartimento di Filosofia e Scienza dell’educazione, University of Turin,
Via Sant’Ottavio, 20, Torino 10124, Italy
e-mail: giovanni.leghissa@unito.it

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 49

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_4,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
50 G. Leghissa

spent in a deep and, to a certain extent, ambiguous dialog with Dilthey’s historicism.2
Much more interesting was the explanation of the strategies adopted by Husserl in
developing a transcendental historicity, which can be seen as a consequence—and a
deepening—of some aspects of Husserl’s philosophy developed during the Twenties,
that is, time consciousness, passive synthesis and intersubjectivity. It could be dis-
appointing not to find in the late Husserl’s philosophy a fulfilled project culminating
in a philosophy of history, the scope of which should be the unfolding of all the
intentional ties binding together human knowledge of the world and human
self-positioning in the world itself. Nevertheless, we must be content with the result
accomplished by Husserl—and with the well grounded supposition that this result
was precisely what Husserl himself aimed at: the theory of the lifeworld has not
been conceived to found a new concept of historicity, it is rather the tool needed
by phenomenology in order to achieve a solid point of departure that makes a
phenomenologically oriented reflection on both the natural and the scientific
attitude possible.3 (I will return to this point later).
On the other hand, it is the paradoxical structure that characterizes Husserl’s path
towards transcendental phenomenology that has drawn much attention. This para-
doxical structure seems to be no obstacle, but rather a rhetoric necessity within the
argument set out in the Krisis; more precisely, it seems to be intrinsically related to
the impossibility of maintaining a distinction between the transcendental and the
empirical subject (Hua VI 1954, 182–185).4 What we discover after having accom-
plished the reduction, is nothing but the interweaving of ourselves and the general
structure of the world, the latter considered as the sedimentation [Sedimentierung]
of the never-ending human activity of sensemaking. Surely, according to what
constitutes the main achievement of Husserl’s philosophy since the Prolegomena,
all sensemaking relies on logical structures, the validity of which does not depend
on their being accomplished within a singular act of judgement. However, the kind
of intentional analysis developed by phenomenology makes it necessary to make
evident not only how their instantiation—for example within a singular act of
judgement—constitutes the condition of possibility for the world to be known by
any subject whatsoever, but also how the subject itself plays a role in constituting
the way in which pieces of the world appear in time. The analysis of constitution
shows that it is not possible to consider the constituting subject as if it were an
external moment of the process of constitution itself. The phenomenological domain
described by the term subjectivity is the result of a peculiar way of looking at the
process of constitution, thanks to which we can point out the role played by the
subject; but, as a result of the phenomenological analysis, what reveals itself to
be peculiar to the domain described this way is the fact that the subject which
constitutes the objects that appear in the flow of consciousness and confers them
with identity and stability, at the same time constitutes itself and its own persistence
as an identical pole of the subjective processes.

2
Ströker (1987), 160–186.
3
Carr (1974), Ströker (1987), 139–159.
4
Ströker (1987), 115–138.
The Infinite Science of the Lifeworld: Steps Toward a Postfoundational Phenomenology 51

From this interconnection of constituting and being constituted stems the fact that
it becomes more and more difficult to maintain the purity that should characterize
the transcendental sphere of the ego—which is another way to articulate the afore-
mentioned difficulty of maintaining the distinction between the transcendental
and the empirical. This state of affairs becomes more evident as soon as we consider
that the ego envisaged by phenomenological analysis is not simply the individual
self, but rather a pole belonging to a more extended intentional process. This exten-
sion encompasses not only the intentional life of an individual consciousness, but
also everything that links this individual consciousness to previous acts of constitution,
accomplished by other subjects. Every present intentional act of mine is surrounded
by a living horizon within which a complex set of relationships is still operating,
and precisely these relationships form the context outside which no individual belief
could be meaningful: every singular belief is thus interwoven not only with my past
experience, but also with a wider texture of beliefs constituting the shared meaning
of the world (Hua VI 1954, 152, 169). Therefore, the whole generative intersubjec-
tivity, meant as the alternation of human generations within the course of history,
cannot be detached from the idiosyncratic styles of perceiving and conceiving the
world that are peculiar to each subject (Hua XI 1966, 218f).
In stressing the importance of the intersubjective structure of the lifeworld,
Husserl underlines the fact that there is no access to any shared and common
experience without our being affected bodily by other subjects: the mere presence
of others, their actual being here, within my own Umwelt, or their having been pre-
sent as a member of a historical community I still belong to, constitute the founding
moment of any actual experience. In this way, phenomenology extends the reach of
its own analysis to fields where the boundary of the egological sphere reveals not the
mark of a closure, but rather what allows exteriority to affect the inner structure of
the subject. Intersubjectivity, otherness, corporeality build up together a unit of
themes the articulation of which shows how much dimension we could qualify as
anthropological matters for the self-fashioning of the transcendental sphere.5
Thus, both Husserl and his interpreters have to cope with the uncomfortable
paradox contained in the fact that the subject, called—or, better, summoned—to
guarantee for the validity of every act of constitution, depends for its own constitu-
tion on what belongs to a sphere of exteriority affected by a relentless contingency.
The efforts made by Husserl to sidestep this difficulty could be interpreted as the
expression of the desire to save both the transcendental role played by the subject
and the awareness that it is impossible to bestow on the transcendental ego the
properties required by the agent supposed to guarantee for what classical philoso-
phy called Letztbegründung. Regardless of Husserl’s own intentions, one could say
that phenomenology has simply substituted any form of Letztbegründung with the
infinite operativity (Fungierung) of intersubjective life, or, which amounts to the
same, with the uninterrupted work of constitution carried out by the human
community. If one wants, on the contrary, to take into account the intentions that

5
Zahavi (2003), 79–140, stresses the importance of the connection between time, corporeality, and
intersubjectivity in order to understand the meaning of the life-world.
52 G. Leghissa

animated the Husserlian project, the main effort should consist in clarifying the
reason why a philosophical account of reality should have its point of departure in the
subject, as it is the case within the phenomenological version of the transcendental
argument, and why precisely the argumentative structure of such an account marks
the difference between phenomenology and other forms of discourse claiming for
their part to shape through linguistic categories a persuasive description of human
being in the world.
However, what is at stake here is not a defence of Husserl’s attempts to maintain
the ‘purity’ of the transcendental sphere. Much more important is the question
concerning the benefit we can obtain in accepting the transformation that the
transcendental stance undergoes within the Krisis. And, again, the way we deal with
this transformation is important not to measure our fidelity to the Husserlian project
of a transcendental phenomenology, but to give us the possibility of saving the
epistemic goal pursued by phenomenology even in absence of a transcendental
foundation.
This sounds like a strong claim and therefore requires a more extensive explana-
tion. As we have seen, no matter whether we take into consideration the problem of
history, or the question of what is needed to accomplish a transcendental founda-
tion, we encounter the following questions: is it still possible to speak of a foundation
if the transcendental subjectivity that should sustain the burden of it coincides with
the process of constitution itself? Are we forced to see in the Husserlian solution
nothing but a doomed attempt to elude the fact that the transcendental domain
coincides with the domain of history—a domain affected by an irreducible finiteness?
An answer should not be attempted too hastily. There are good reasons, in fact, for
questioning any attempt to let phenomenology flow into hermeneutics too quickly,
which would be precisely the result of an assumption that transcendentality and
historicity coincide. Even if we feel uncomfortable with the term ‘transcendental,’
we must recognize that the rhetorical function it exerts cannot be renounced too
easily: the transcendental stance is plainly the philosophical stance meant as the
possibility of a critical attitude towards reality, as the uninterrupted work of ques-
tioning every realm of the world with no reference to an agency supposed to
transcend the world itself. In Husserlian terms, it is the attitude we attain whenever
we keep the world at a distance in order to reflect on our being engaged in the world,
or, better, on our being engaged in that given network of relationships that make
possible the validity of the common knowledge of the world (Hua VI 1954, 153).
Furthermore, forcing Husserl’s late philosophy into any form of historicism
yields little benefit in philosophical terms. The battle fought by Husserl against any
form of psychologism—with historicism as one of its forms—belongs to the peren-
nial effort made by philosophy to state that concepts like ‘truth,’ not to mention the
concept of ‘concept,’ are not parts of a whole called ‘nature,’ or the ‘empirical
world’ if you prefer. It could be more appropriate, then, to find the solution for the
questions posed above precisely in turning the paradox into an epistemic resource.6
As we shall see, what is aimed at in this way is not the validation of Husserl’s efforts

6
Even if with different aims, a similar solution has been suggested in Dodd (2004).
The Infinite Science of the Lifeworld: Steps Toward a Postfoundational Phenomenology 53

to safeguard the transcendental character of phenomenology at any rate. Much more

important is the yield obtained by investing in a philosophical project the gen-
erative element of which allows for the renouncing of any foundational stance.7
Postfoundationalism means here not only to assume that phenomenology achieves
its significance as a philosophical project only through its capability of establishing
only the conditions of possibility of validity, and by far not the conditions of possi-
bility of experience; it also means that the possibility of a transcendental questioning
depends on historical factors, an exhaustive analysis of which is, in principle,
impossible. The coincidence between empirical and transcendental ego seen by
Husserl as the paradox of transcendental phenomenology could be thus interpreted
as the clue of the fact that a transcendental questioning remains a possibility, which
each subject can always put into operation, yet without being able to justify the
necessity of accomplishing it.
Truly, there is no phenomenological self-positioning in the world if the subject
avoids carrying out the epoché, as it can be stated, for example, by looking at the
sense of the controversy between Husserl and Heidegger during the late Twenties.
In other words, a theoretical necessity, deeply rooted in the phenomenological mode
of thought, brings Husserl to establish the epoché as the doorway to phenomenol-
ogy. But this necessity, I argue, is largely rhetorical in nature and related to the
difficulties phenomenology meets when it has to articulate, at the argumentative
level, its own paradoxical position. As Husserl himself states, carrying out the
epoché is an exercise (Hua VI 1954, 140; Hua VII 1959a, 279f; Hua VIII 1959b,
11f), a praxis which can not be justified only in theoretical terms; or, better, it is a
performance carried out by a subject that was not otherwise able to manage its own
position as a transcendental agent in the awareness that this position does not mean
exteriority with respect to experience. Considered this way, the epoché loses its
foundational character, but it maintains its role within a transcendental argument,
the core of which is to be displaced differently from the traditional way of under-
standing it, that is, it is to be repeated and re-shaped as a figure of speech which
performs the accomplishment of that stance which we can at best define through
the adjective ‘critical.’
The core of the argument I am putting forth here consists of the aforementioned
fact that the position of the subject exercising the critique cannot be considered as
the point of departure that allows access to an absolute exteriority. On the one hand,
Husserl’s phenomenology pursued as its deepest aim the destruction of any form of
ingenuous realism, that is, of the idea that reality can be approached with immedi-
acy—or, if we prefer to say the same in more poetic terms, phenomenology could
be seen as the rebellion against the tyranny of the sense data. According to Husserl,
this tyranny must be fought principally in the name of a methodological clarification
of what informs the scientific construction of reality. On the other hand, the decision
to bring scientific constructs back to the lifeworld in order to show that they depend

7
Even if oriented towards issues that differ from the one discussed here, the question of a postfoun-
dational attitude within the phenomenological project is also raised and discussed in Mensch
(2001) and Drummond (1990).
54 G. Leghissa

on intersubjectivity is not motivated by the goal to substitute scientific realism with

that form of realism which accompanies our ordinary experience of the world.
The latter, in fact, knows its own way to conceal the role played by intersubjectivity
as a presupposition for any human sensemaking, and therefore is not structurally
different from the scientific attitude, if we look at both from the perspective of
phenomenology. The problem is that the phenomenologist finds herself in a position
that is rooted in the field of intesubjectivity as well: a position that allows looking at
the processes of constitution from outside this field simply does not exist. This is the
reason why critique pursued by phenomenology finds its ultimate motivation in
an ‘existential’ choice, of which it is not possible to give an account thoroughly
articulated in purely conceptual terms (Hua VI 1954, 60).
Along with the path just traced, where we suggested that the relationship between
transcendentality and historicity should be interpreted as the starting point for the
articulation of a postfoundational position, it becomes possible to put the question
concerning the science of the lifeworld on a basis that should reach beyond the
impasses met by Husserl. If we are not afraid of considering the coincidence
between transcendental and empirical as the normal status of the phenomenological
investigation whenever the question of foundation is at stake, and, furthermore, if
we are ready to accept that anthropology is the final destiny of phenomenology, then
to put in practice a science of the lifeworld should not mean to describe the structures
of a realm the existence of which is needed to establish the system of all that exists;
it could rather mean to describe the possibility of invariants within given forms of
experiencing the world. In this sense, I will argue—and this constitutes the main
goal of the present essay—that the place the humanities occupy within the encyclo-
paedia is the only possible site where we can find the accomplishment of a science
of the lifeworld.

2 Positing the Lifeworld, or How to Supplement

the Transcendental Position

In order to pursue this aim, it should be shown what characteristics could be

attributed to the lifeworld. The first thing to be kept in mind is that the lifeworld is
not a place you can go through, you can inhabit, or where you can smell aromas or
touch objects. It is not the world of everyday life.8 Of the latter it is possible to have
a descriptive science, able to provide us with the main tools needed to build up a
theory of social action. A theory of social action, to put it briefly, has to explain
why human groups, or communities, act in a particular way under circumstances
that are given each time. Of course, a social theory which does not confine itself to
a simple collection of case studies can provide good—or bad—explanations for the
reason why a motivation is not precisely a form of causation, that is, it can frame

8
Grathoff (1989), 91–121.
The Infinite Science of the Lifeworld: Steps Toward a Postfoundational Phenomenology 55

its own conceptuality in such a way that it is possible to distinguish the realm of
human actions from the realm of natural events. Nevertheless, a social theory is not
forced to give any account of the constitutive operations that led to its own estab-
lishment. In other words, there is no need for it to practice a second order reflection
on its own tools and operations. If this is the case, we are looking at a social theory
that reveals an influence either by Husserlian phenomenology,9 or by another phil-
osophical stream.10 Precisely the absence of such a second order reflection makes
a given social theory not very different from a natural science, which is character-
ized, according to Husserl, by the claim of being able to account for the deep
structure of reality without exposing the subjective operations that brought about
the shaping of its own theoretical edifice. What the phenomenologist wants to
provide, instead, is a theory of intersubjectivity, the function of which is to explain
how the social construction of reality works—including that peculiar form of social
construction we usually call ‘scientific knowledge.’ The point here is that Husserl
needs to create a ‘place’ (a ‘stage,’ I would even say) where the intersubjective
construction of reality is made evident—is made visible in absolute purity. Without
stressing this ‘purity,’ Husserl would hardly be able to attribute a transcendental
character to intersubjectivity itself. This is also the reason why Husserl emphasizes
so much the evident character of the objects met in the lifeworld—an emphasis
which renders the lifeworld a ‘place’ where ordinary events use to happen almost
regularly, where we expect to meet a given set of objects and not others. In other
words, in the lifeworld we are expected to encounter all the possible objects,
whereas it is the inner legality governing this totality that determines the way we
encounter them (Hua VI 1954, 142f).
No need to say that the lifeworld is a ‘world’ where even the philosopher would
be out of place.11 Philosophy is a very peculiar form of sensemaking, universal in its
forms of expression. “Wonder” [thaumazein] was the name given by Greek
philosophers to the attitude enabling us to question the mere ‘givenness’ of things,
in order to grasp what makes the world to be what it is. A similar will to look at the
things we find in the world without trusting the immediacy that characterizes tour
experience and knowledge of them is surely to be found among all human cultural
traditions. This ubiquity of the philosophical gaze at the world must be stressed in
order to correct the conviction, expressed by Husserl, according to which philoso-
phy is strictly tied with the cultural development of the Western cultural tradition.
But, apart from any concern for the relationship between philosophy and the
cultural context in which it arises, what must be put in evidence now is the fact that
philosophy gives expression to the desire both to investigate the intimate nature
of things, and to explore the possibility that things could be different from what
they are. Strictly related to that desire is the awareness, which increases through
methodical observation, that we cannot exclude the possibility that, sometimes,

9
Luhmann as well as Bourdieu are the authors that could be mentioned in the present context
(see in particular Bourdieu 1977 and Luhmann 1995).
10
For example: Winch (1958) and Bloor (1976).
11
Blumenberg (2010).
56 G. Leghissa

there could be a discrepancy between perception and belief, or between how we

represent the world and how the world effectively is. In other words, it is peculiar
to what we call philosophy to pose the question of truth. Further refined, this
question gives rise to complex forms of knowledge, thanks to which, if properly
institutionalized, it becomes possible not only to establish some statements supposed
to be true about reality, but also to justify why they should be held for true. Yet if the
lifeworld is the place where evidence characterizes the encounter with every object
that can be found in it, then the philosophical questioning about the condition of
possibility of truth remains pointless.
In the lifeworld the philosopher would know exactly what grounds those
harmonious experiences that she, like any other human being, must presuppose in
order to cope with any possible alteration of validity. Within our usual intercourse
with objects it can occur—and in fact occurs—that harmony disappears and our
experience ceases to be harmonious; both thanks to the corrections I can make,
and thanks to communalization of what is perceivable, that is, thanks to the fact that
the world I perceive is the same world that is perceived by others, whose communi-
cation of what they perceive completes what I perceive, it is always possible to
re-establish a harmonious experience. But such a common understanding of the
world, such a communalization reached through the uninterrupted re-agreement
between what I perceive and what is, or has been perceived by others, is possible
only because I ‘know’ that other human beings are related to same world: both the
individual subject and others have a common horizon which encompasses the totality
of all possible things to be met in the course of experience (Hua VI 1954, 167).
What Husserl points at by describing the transcendental character of this horizon, is
the fact that it operates as a presupposition within each form of human intercourse.
Without having signed any contract, an agreement is always possible as regards the
concordance of what is perceived within the world. This concordance (or ‘harmony,’
the English translation for Einstimmigkeit) is precisely the result of the awareness
that the horizon is always operating as a presupposition held to be present both by
myself and by others. But it would be misleading to think that this concordance,
once achieved, coincides with the lifeworld; the lifeworld itself is to be found rather
on the side of the horizon. In this sense, the lifeworld names the total system of
multiplicities that makes possible the unity of human experience of the same world.
This unity can even be missed on occasion, but what counts is the possibility of
it—a possibility that, according to Husserl, accompanies every single act of
perception. In itself, however, the horizon cannot become an object we can grasp or
perceive (Hua VI 1954, 145f).12 What can be perceived intuitively is, rather, the
legal character of it, that is, the fact that the structure of the lifeworld is subject to
the same inner logic found in every system of multiplicity.
However, if we state that the lifeworld is no place for philosophers, because
within its realm there is no need for any philosophical investigation about the
reason why the harmony of our experience can sometimes fail, what brought
Husserl to establish the necessity of the life-world? Why did he choose to introduce

12
Held (1991).
The Infinite Science of the Lifeworld: Steps Toward a Postfoundational Phenomenology 57

this concept? The answer is well known and sounds quite naive: because he needed
a new point of departure for phenomenology. According to Husserl, this point of
departure must maintain the purity that is proper to any realm supposed to play a
transcendental role. Nevertheless, there is something that induces us to think that
the lifeworld is more or less a phenomenologist’s invention: both the average man
and the scientist keep on living in the world and experiencing the world without any
knowledge of the fact that their living in the world or experiencing it presupposes
the lifeworld. Put like this, it does not sound as serious as it should. Yet, the invention
I am talking about must meet the requirements that characterize the conceptual
objects philosophers are used to dealing with. In fact, without the positioning (in the
strong sense of Setzung) of the lifeworld, there would be nothing to justify the peculiar
self-positioning of the philosopher in front of both the natural and the scientific
attitude.13 In this sense, I argue, the lifeworld is supposed to be the proxy of that
transcendental position that should exist if the philosopher could hold it. We can at
best explain this argument by turning it into the question about the origin of the
lifeworld. At a first glance, the lifeworld, being the horizon of our experience, has
no origin for its own. Not very differently from what happens with the law of logic
investigated first in the Prolegomena, and then in Formale und transzendentale
Logik, what we envisage when we meet the lifeworld is an object the property of
which is to exist without any reference to space-time: omnitemporality
[Allzeitlichkeit] is the expression used by Husserl to describe the way of existence
peculiar to such logical entities. Nevertheless, Husserl did not withdraw from the
task of phenomenologically investigating the fact that even logical forms and laws
can be analysed in relation to their being intentioned by a subject. Precisely this
investigation marked the gap between his position and Frege’s from the beginning
of their philosophical contention.14 Furthermore, it is a radicalisation of Husserl’s
displacement of what defines the logical form within a theory of intentional
consciousness that led him to add the genetic method to the previous static one.
Thus, it is no surprise that the thematisation of the lifeworld, which made its appear-
ance in correlation with the establishment of the genetic method, has been carried
out by Husserl in such a way that the question about the origin of the lifeworld is far
from being irrelevant.
But how can the lifeworld be originated on its part if its function is precisely to
make every form of origination possible? It is important not to forget that the
lifeworld is the result of a two-fold reduction accomplished in relation both to the
natural attitude and to the scientific attitude.15 Within the social exchange that char-
acterizes our every day life, we meet other people and objects, or we deal with
institutions; in none of these circumstances are we aware of the fact that every form

13
Ströker (1987, p. 87f).
14
Mohanty (1982), Willard (1984).
15
What follows is an oversimplification, in the sense that I won’t account for the steps necessary to
pass from the epoché of the natural attitude to the reduction of the scientific one to the evidences
we can seize in the life-world. For a more detailed account, see Dodd (2004), 175–206. As far as
the peculiarity of the reduction of the scientific attitude is concerned, see also Kisiel (1970).
58 G. Leghissa

of human relationship, every meaningful experience of the external world, as well

as every commitment we met to the various forms of sociability, formally or
informally institutionalised, stems from our being involved in a broader web of
intersubjective relationships (Hua VI 1954, 149). Precisely these relationships make
it possible for our multifaceted exchange with the world to maintain a constant
meaning. But they remain constantly concealed: we keep on acting individually as
if we were detached from the broader context made up by intersubjectivity, a con-
text that frames all our individual action. As far as the concealment of this universal
frame is concerned, not far more different is the situation that characterizes the
scientific attitude.16 In the case we decide to investigate the world from a scientific
perspective, we can then attain a comprehensive knowledge of the world from
which we would be precluded if we were still involved in the natural attitude.17 But
each member of the scientific community works on her own research program,
closely with other colleagues, without questioning the operations needed to attain
scientific knowledge itself. In Husserl’s terms, the scientific interest that motivates
each member of the scientific community is such as to induce a forgiveness of the
intersubjective operations that brought both to the establishment of science, meant
as a peculiar way of approaching reality, and to the construction of singular scien-
tific theories or doctrines, meant as given instantiation of what science is (Hua VI
1954, 134).18 In order to establish the visibility of those intentional ties that connect
both our every day experience of the world and the systematic knowledge of the
world furnished by science to the web of intersubjective relations, it is thus neces-
sary, according to Husserl, to perform the phenomenological reduction—or, better,
a twofold one: the first in order to bracket the natural attitude, the second in order to
disconnect the scientific one. As a consequence, the lifeworld is what remains, is
what we can see operating as system of intersubjective relations presupposed both
by the natural and by the scientific attitude. What must be stressed in the present
context is the fact that the subject performing the reduction can only be the phenom-
enologically oriented philosopher, with ‘philosopher’ not referring to a particularly
gifted person: the philosopher in question is simply someone who shares the same
word in its facticity with others, and can, on occasion, decide to investigate the
world scientifically, but presently makes up her mind to perform the reduction in
order to disclose the operativity [Fungierung] of intersubjectivity. Truly, we have to
do here with an individual position, which, in principle, everybody can partake in—

16
Held (1991) has made the point very clear by defining the scientific attitude as a second-level
natural attitude.
17
As stated by several passages from his work, Husserl nor put in doubt the achievements of
scientific knowledge, neither was willing to disrupt the idea that scientific knowledge is the only
one giving us the possibility to access the ‘true’ world. Whether the Husserlian conception of the
relationship between scientific knowledge and truth can still be maintained, is an issue we cannot
address here. On the subject, see Hacking (1992).
18
Fleck (1979) and Bourdieu (2001) not only move in the same direction as Husserl, but also show
how productive a phenomenologically oriented sociology of knowledge could be; nevertheless,
these contributions still find scarce recognition within Anglo-Saxon sociology of knowledge (even
if Fleck’s work was issued in 1935).
The Infinite Science of the Lifeworld: Steps Toward a Postfoundational Phenomenology 59

and such a possibility guarantees for the fact that this position maintains affinity
with the universality supposed to characterize the transcendental subjectivity. But
this affinity cannot efface the irreducible contingency affecting the position of the
subject that wants to perform the reduction.
Thus, it seems to be justified to claim that the lifeworld is a sort of ‘invention’ by
phenomenologists in order to make the phenomenological stance possible. The
latter reveals to be one possibility, one among others, of looking at the world; other
attitudes, which are motivated by other interests, can underlie different ways of
looking at the world, which, of course, still remains the same world we all have in
common as human beings. As a consequence, the contingent character of the
motivation that underlies the phenomenological attitude thoroughly affects the
structure of the lifeworld as well: if taken as the result of a peculiar way of looking at
the role played by intersubjectivity in order to better understand how the uninterrupted
work of sensemaking come to existence, the lifeworld seems to be nothing but the
result of the individually chosen positional act that produces its visibility. What stems
from this contingency is that the lifeworld is to be understood more as an archive of
some invariant patterns than as the totality encompassing all what exists within
human experience. If the lifeworld is the place where these invariants are to be found,
and if phenomenology is to be the science of the lifeworld, we must now identify the
peculiarities of the phenomenological inquiry with respect to other disciplines that
claim, on their part, to be better appointed to carry out the same inquiry.

3 The Encyclopaedia of the Humanities as Infinite

Description of the Lifeworld

As a result of the previous analysis, what we want to achieve now is the possibility
of a science of the lifeworld that coincides with the definition of the anthropologi-
cal bases needed to understand the most general pattern of human behaviour. This
science could claim to be still understood as ‘philosophy’ because of the fact that
it coincides neither with the natural nor with the scientific attitude. What it loses,
nevertheless, is the adjective ‘transcendental,’ of which Husserl is so fond. Hans
Blumenberg has spent a lot of philosophical energy showing that the obsession
with the purity that should characterise the phenomenological discourse prevented
Husserl from allowing phenomenology to turn itself into a philosophical anthro-
pology.19 If phenomenology remains a transcendental discourse, than purity is
safeguarded. However, this does not offer a great advantage: a ‘pure’ science of the
lifeworld seems to have a limited descriptive power; as Husserl knew, in fact,
psychology (as well as history) can offer better accounts of how human beings act
in the world. Furthermore, a ‘pure’ science of the lifeworld seems to have a limited
prescriptive power as well: as we have already pointed out above, both the scientist

19
Blumenberg (2006).
60 G. Leghissa

and the human beings who find their way about in the world by taking advantage
from that shared knowledge we call ‘common sense’ are not aware of the evidence
that informs the lifeworld, and nevertheless they keep on doing what they do
seemingly very well (whereas ‘very well’ means ‘in an adaptive manner,’ or ‘in a
satisfying manner from an adaptive point of view’). The result of Blumenberg’s
analysis is that renouncing a transcendental stance is a benefit, and not a loss—a
benefit I would describe as an injection of anthropological flesh into the skeleton
of the lifeworld.
We cannot follow the whole argument made by Blumenberg in order to
demonstrate both why Husserl was not able to accept an anthropological stance,
and why an anthropological turn within phenomenology could be seen as an
improvement; nevertheless, one point should not be overlooked, and this point can
be seen as a development of Blumenberg’s whole argument. The reason why
phenomenology needs to be turned into anthropology, which obviously has as a
result the loss of transcendentality, is tightly related with the transcendental stance
itself. If the transcendental subject reflects upon its own self-positioning, and takes
into account the finiteness that marks its position, the consequence that must be
drawn is that the subject, precisely for transcendental reasons, is subdued to this
finiteness, or, to put it differently, that the subject must ascribe to its own finiteness
a transcendental character. The finiteness we are dealing with here is not a meta-
phorical designation for our being mortal, it is rather the main property of our
being related to the network of the intentionally structured sensemaking processes
that constitute the common world and are all together called ‘intersubjectivity’ by
the phenomenologist: the subject can access this network only through a given
number of entrances, each of which, in part, is shaped in conformity with the social
and communicative competences achieved by the subject itself. Thus, this finiteness
is the condition of possibility of our being in the world. Questioning the function-
ing of the relationship between the aforementioned entrances and competences can
precisely constitute the task of a philosophical investigation of intersubjectivity.
This investigation will maintain an affinity with the transcendental analysis of
the lifeworld in order to define itself as philosophical, but it will at the same time
spread through the whole complex of disciplines gathered together under the
title of Humanities, and will therefore coincide, at least in part, with an analysis
thoroughly anthropological in character.
The question is whether such an anthropologically oriented philosophy still
maintains a relationship with the phenomenological project. By thematizing the
lifeworld as an object we can describe and analyse, that is, as an object we can expe-
rience, the phenomenologist is not claiming to be able to put herself in a position
that is external with respect to the lifeworld itself, as the latter is a totality that
encompasses both the evidences presupposed by the subjects who act within the
natural or the scientific attitude, and the phenomenologist’s self-positioning that
makes the coming-to-light of the lifeworld possible. A phenomenological analysis
of the lifeworld is simply the result of a different way of looking at the lifeworld, a
way that posits it as the ground [Boden] for all what is presupposed by any subject
that looks at the world from a point of view different from the phenomenological
The Infinite Science of the Lifeworld: Steps Toward a Postfoundational Phenomenology 61

one. We can adopt this solution because we have already stated that the lifeworld
can emerge and become visible only if the phenomenologist’s glance performs its
emergence and its visibility. Should Husserl have formulated two different con-
cepts, one for the lifeworld meant as the totality that encompasses both the subjects
who experience the world and their reflection upon the world, and another one for
the lifeworld meant as the ground of all validity?20 If we answer in the affirmative,
we run the risk of missing the productive character of the paradox enunciated by
Husserl, namely the paradox of a twofold lifeworld, which splits up in order to make
possible for the subject to reflect upon that totality in which it still remains included.
And the productivity of this paradox can be shown precisely in the moment in which
we deal with the necessity to submit the lifeworld to analysis.
Husserl himself can figure out the analysis we are talking about only in the form
of an anthropological analysis. As is to be expected, he makes enormous efforts to
avoid drawing all the consequences implied by such an analysis. However, it is not
without significance that he speaks of invariants in order to define the object of this
analysis. These invariants should constitute the object of investigation of an a priori
anthropology, which is to be understood as an ontology of the world as well
(Hua XXXIX 2008, 57). Without this a priori anthropology the various ways of
sensemaking, differing from each other both historically and geographically could
not be perceived as variations of the same world. The world that is supposed to
remain the same is the world we are familiar with, it is the world that, thanks to its
own presence and consistence shapes our habits, or, better, makes the emergence of
habits possible. Now, the fact that the never changing structure of the world is
strictly interwoven with the possibility for human habits to change both from time
to time, and from region to region seems to be the presupposition Husserl needs to
state the identity of an ontology of the world with an a priori anthropology. When
he asks which is the main characteristic of mankind, that is, which is the peculiarity
all human beings must share in order to understand themselves as human beings, the
answer is: their historicity (Hua XXXIX 2008, 344). No reader of the Krisis will be
surprised by this answer. What could be—if not surprising, perhaps a little disturb-
ing—is the way Husserl depicts this historicity. What Husserl points at, in fact, is
the rootedness of each individual in its community, where it was born, has acquired
acquaintance with the world, and has gained the opportunity to turn the world itself
into the mute horizon both of human experience in general, and of its own experi-
ence in particular. The same holds for human groups, no matter whether their
dimension is small or big as in the case of a nation. Historicity, in this case, means
to be rooted in a country that allows a strong form of identification—a country,
therefore, which can be understood in terms of homeland. It is in our homeland that
the world becomes familiar to us. In fact, there would be no familiarity with the
world without that form of acquaintance with shared values and shared forms of life
we can gain only when we participate in the common work that is necessary to
guarantee the prosecution of the tradition we belong to. Thus, historicity coincides

20
The problems concerning the plurivocity of Husserl’s notion of life-world are discussed in
Claesges (1972).
62 G. Leghissa

with the persistence of a generative tradition, with the power possessed by a tradition
to live on, to reproduce itself and overwhelm the opposite power of time to destroy
the traces human beings have left on the earth. Following this train of thought, we
can find in the third appendix of the Krisis, namely in the text Fink titled The Origin
of Geometry, a historicity that coincides with the capability to leave traces, whereas
the vitality of a tradition consists of the capability to institutionalize the way in
which these traces are both reproduced and interpreted (Hua VI 1954, 371).
The argumentative strategy Husserl adopts to describe the connection between
the rootedness in a Heimat and the historicity that marks the essence of mankind
could recall the similar tones we find in Heidegger’s commentaries of Hölderlin’s
hymns “Germanien” and “Der Rhein.”21 But it would be misleading to follow the
superficial resemblance of tones, even if the temptation to do so could seem
appealing (especially if we consider that the text where Husserl speaks of human
historicity is more or less coeval with Heidegger’s lecture courses). Notwithstanding
his insisting on the völkisch dimension that is taken for characteristic of any human
rootedness in a country, Husserl is able to draw a connection between the feeling of
belonging to one country and the human capability to cross boundaries and to per-
ceive the whole of humanity as an extension of our homeland: even if the way I
perceive the world is biased by the manner in which the human group I belong to
has always perceived it, nevertheless what I perceive is the same world I share with
the rest of humanity. Precisely the possibility to turn back to the unique world,
meant as the source of all objectivity, allows me also to perceive the unity encom-
passing all different cultural traditions (Hua XXXIX 2008, 340). In this sense, we
must recognize how deep Husserl’s commitment to the tradition of the Enlightenment
was, a statement that does not apply to Heidegger’s philosophical position. At the
same time, we must recognize how strong, even in Husserl’s case, has been the
temptation, which never ceased to haunt the European tradition of the Enlightenment,
to identify the history of Europe with the most successful example of a unitary
cultural tradition, which would have revealed itself capable of overwhelming its
own internal differences (Hua XXXIX 2008, 349).22
Now, regardless the rhetoric of ‘belonging’ that affects Husserl’s description of
human historicity, what must be underlined here is the fact that Husserl’s late
reflections are able to provide a convincing account of the reason why historicity is
to be considered as the ultimate horizon of human experience.23 Above all, it must

21
Heidegger (1999).
22
Derrida (1991).
23
It is worth taking notice that historicity, according to Husserl, constitutes even the ultimate hori-
zon of animal life in general. If the way a subject can experience historicity depends on its rooted-
ness in a territory, then an experience of the world that can be defined as historical cannot be denied
with respect to animals. However, animals are not able to generate a tradition, which remains a
peculiarity of human beings. On the other hand, the source of the human capability to generate a
tradition, that is, to make sense of the experience of the world we all share as human beings, is
deeply rooted in a biologically based characteristic, namely in the fact that we can produce signs
by using the expressive potential of our corporeality (Hua XXXIX 2008, 344–346). Even if con-
fined to a footnote, this clue of how complex Husserl’s analysis of historicity is seems to me no less
important than the main objective I want to pursue within the present essay.
The Infinite Science of the Lifeworld: Steps Toward a Postfoundational Phenomenology 63

be stressed that the horizon that is at stake here is to be referred not only to the
human Umwelt, namely to all that surrounds human experience in both geographical
and cultural terms (belonging to a territory, speaking a language, sharing a given set
of historically determined values, and so on). If it were so, nothing but the empirical
dimension of our being rooted in the world would be affected by historicity. Husserl
seems also to be tempted to confer a historical character even to the transcendental
dimension that makes possible both the emergence and the formation of objectivity.
Indeed, he claims that every act of knowledge, every form of knowledge, every
formation bearing in itself the result of an act of knowledge (Gebilde is the expres-
sion used by Husserl) is motivated. This means that knowledge, not differently from
any other human activity, is part of a tradition, or, which is the same, is rooted in the
unity of human history. Husserl makes this statement in a context introduced by a
question concerning the absence of presuppositions that is supposed to characterise
knowledge (Hua XXIX 1993, 343). It is a common-sense statement that the absence
of presuppositions is precisely the main characteristic of any scientific undertaking.
But here we are taught not only that knowledge does not occur in absence of presup-
positions, but also that its own historicity is precisely that which knowledge presup-
poses at a deepest level. Husserl goes on with his argument as follows. Acts that
confer a meaning on an object, and do so in a way that raises this meaning to the
level of universal validity, cannot be detached from the historical horizon to which
they belong, nor from the objects the validity of which they attempt to establish.
Notwithstanding its being generated within the horizon of history, this established
validity of objects does not cease to inform the complex of scientific knowledge. If
we operate at the level of the latter, as scientists or so, we can be forgetful of the
historical process that generated it. But if we continue to adhere to the phenomeno-
logical way of looking at scientific knowledge, we cannot overlook the dependence
of acts conferring objectivity upon the broader context of intersubjectivity. Thus, the
objectivity possessed by the objects of the lifeworld is thoroughly historical
(Hua XXIX 1993, 347f).
Some important consequences can be drawn from the relationship between
historicity and the self-positioning of phenomenology as a science of the life-
world. On the one hand, phenomenology can turn itself into an ontology of the
lifeworld—or, an a priori anthropology—without losing its transcendental charac-
ter only if the task of this ontology consists of an investigation of the invariants
that mark the human being in the world. Yet, if the main invariant, to which all
other invariants are to be traced back, is historicity, then there is no place at all for
an investigation that is supposed to differ essentially from the one carried out by
Humanities. If we consider the research project that informs the humanities in
general, we potentially gain a complete description of the different ways of inhab-
iting the world, a description that includes even those invariants that are to be
found within every cultural tradition. This description may be a finite one at a
given moment of its own internal development, but it is virtually infinite in the
sense that the horizon within which it takes place is precisely the infinite horizon
of human history. On the other hand, in the present context an important role is
played by the relationship investigated by phenomenology between the realm of
logical forms and the extent to which they suspend their peculiar onmitemporality
64 G. Leghissa

to become part of the structure of meaning the subject needs in order to build up
a coherent and consistent account of the world. If this relationship forms one of
the most important issues of phenomenological investigation (if not the most
important one), and if the result of this investigation, as we have seen above,
brings us to acknowledge the insurmountable historicity of those processes that
lead to the formation and establishment of objectivity, then it turns out to be
inevitable to suppress any difference between phenomenology and a critical
epistemology. The aim of the latter is precisely to make evident which historical,
cultural, and political biases must be taken into consideration to explain the
emergence and the sedimentation of any form of knowledge.24
Are the consequences just drawn above a strained interpretation of some isolated
passages of Husserl’s late reflection? Probably not, however, if we want to be
consistent with respect to the main goal we are pursuing here, namely to explore the
possibility of a postfoundational phenomenology, what we are concerned with
should not be biased by this question. The interconnection between the empirical
and the transcendental subject, which goes through Husserl’s reflection on the
lifeworld (Hua VI 1954, 190, 214, 268), is the point of departure we need to justify
our attempt at moving from a ‘pure’ phenomenology to a phenomenologically-
oriented stance that understands itself as a discourse that cannot be detached from
the field occupied by the Humanities. The transcendental subject is the last instance
to which the process of foundation must terminate; the final result of the latter is the
discovery that every sense-formation [Sinnbildung] depends on intersubjectivity,
and this is the reason why Husserl insists on emphasizing the fact that even the
objectivity that characterizes scientific knowledge is subject-relative. A part of this
discovery is the historical nature of the problems discussed by phenomenology as a
science of the lifeworld (Hua VI 1954, 378). Husserl was surely close to claiming
that only by taking seriously the historicity of the lifeworld itself would it have been
possible to achieve the final scope promised by a radical phenomenological founda-
tion. What he was not ready to recognize, however, was that this radical foundation
should have been understood in terms of a thorough historicisation of subjectivity
as well.25 As a clue of the resistance offered by Husserl against this historicisation,
we should look at the way in which he speaks, in some passages, of the invariants
that are also constitutive of human experience of the world. Differently from the
above quoted passages where the anthropological nature of these invariants has
been stated very clearly, Husserl tries sometimes to define these invariants in
opposition to what could be the result of the efforts made by a historian in order to

24
A good example of what could be understood as a sound and convincing accomplishment of a
critical epistemology can be found in Foucault’s work (especially in Foucault 1972, where the
interweaving of empirical and transcendental within the production of scientific discursivity has
been made explicit as an object of investigation). It is also worth mentioning the relationship
between Foucault’s philosophy and the way in which Cavaillès took up and modified Husserlian
phenomenology: in doing so, Cavaillès prepared the ground necessary to every further develop-
ment along the path we are suggesting here (see Cavaillès 1947).
25
Ströker (1993), 165–205.
The Infinite Science of the Lifeworld: Steps Toward a Postfoundational Phenomenology 65

describe the process of sense-sedimentation [Sinnsedimentierung]. Husserl gives

indeed the impression that it is always possible to distinguish the empirical work
of the historian from a transcendental analysis of the invariant structures of the
historical world. The meaning of these structures could be caught and perceived
with evidence thanks to a reflection on the historical material the aim of which is to
purify it from its empirical character (Hua XXIX 1993, 241). Once again, the
obsession with ‘purity’ seems to be Husserl’s main concern.
However, for the argument we are putting forth here it is above all worth drawing
our attention to how Husserl understands the method we need to attain the knowledge
of the invariants that underlie any form of given experience of the world. Husserl
simply refers to the already well-functioning method of free variation. The method
has been available within phenomenology for a long time and has been applied
whenever the old question of the universal needed to undergo a phenomenological
investigation. As in the previous cases, Husserl attempts to preserve the purity of the
essence attained thanks to the free variation; further, he does not seem to deviate from
the conviction that the pure essence of the singular object starting from which the
variation begins is nothing but what the object has always included as a constitutive
part of its own object-like character. On one hand, we could reproach Husserl for
having not discussed the difference (if any) between the free variation and the classical
method of induction. On the other hand, we could observe that the method is caught
in a vicious circle, in the sense that certain knowledge of the universal is already
presupposed whenever we choose a given singular object and decide to ‘extract’ the
essence it contains by applying the method of free variation. At any rate, we cannot
really address here the objections the method of free variation could easily undergo.
In order to do this, we should engage in a deeper discussion of the whole issue.
In the present context, the only thing we should not overlook is the coincidence
between the phenomenological method of free variation and the comparison
between similar states of affairs that can be found within the praxis of the Humanities.
The world that surrounds me refers to an infinite horizon that includes both events
and processes that occurred in the past, and events and processes that are taking
place now elsewhere. At the same time, I also know that it is always possible to refer
to the general structure of the lifeworld (Hua VI 1954, 142). The latter, as we have
seen above, makes both the cultural and the historical crossing possible. What I
perceive along with those crossings can be recorded, measured, tested, analysed,
accounted for: in other words, scientific knowledge of both historical and cultural
differences is possible. The epistemic basis for any scientific recording of and
accounting for cultural and historical data is given by my capability to put forth a
continuum that begins with the already-known and moves to the unknown all the
possible forms of historical existence. Husserl claims that this modalisation of
my own horizon is not completely free, in the sense that it is still subdued to the
spatial and temporal biases that make up every human experience of the world
(Hua XXIX 1993, 63–65). We can easily agree with this claim without evoking
once again the aforementioned difficulties related to the method of free variation.
But there is a further step to be taken, namely to notice that a methodology based
66 G. Leghissa

on the progressive extension of horizons has been constituting the core of any
form of scientific knowledge since the humanities began to reflect on their own
epistemic status.
A clear awareness of this issue can be found in the discussion about the
reliability of our historical sources concerning ancient Rome. This discussion,
which took place during the first part of the eighteenth century, came before the
establishment of a self-confident historical discipline, but it is worth mentioning
because it clearly shows that the historical consciousness, once raised, bears with
itself the necessity to cope with questions of methodological nature. Some
decades later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, on German soil, which
has been understood as the cradle of a rigorous philology since that moment, we
encounter a Friedrich August Wolf, who was able to state very clearly the hypo-
thetical nature of all assertions made within the historical reconstruction of the
past—a hypothetical nature that does not imply a diminished rigour. But it is due
to August Boeckh if we can better grasp the fact that any historical knowledge
rests on the possibility to modify our own horizon until we reach a sound under-
standing of what makes up the peculiarity of other cultures and other historical
ages. “Erkenntnis des Erkannten” (“knowing of the known”) was the formula
uttered by Boeckh in order to make clear the necessary relationship between the
point of departure of scientific knowledge, that is, the living horizon within
which I act as a subject, and the alien world that must be submitted to investiga-
tion. Not different from the modalisation of the horizon within which the subject
of knowledge operates is the procedure adopted by the anthropologist. The
anthropological discipline, born officially in the second part of the nineteenth
century, is in fact based on a method that can be seen as an application of the
philologist’s method in a field where we cannot rely on written sources as far as
the access to otherness is concerned.
The examples that could be mentioned here are innumerable—and if I do not go
into details, it is not because the length of the present contribution would not allow
it: more simply, it is the whole history of the Humanities during the modern age that
should be taken into consideration here.26 But the point that deserves our attention
remains the aforementioned similarity between the methodology suggested by
Husserl in order to capture the invariants of the lifeworld and the method effectively
applied within the Humanities in order to achieve the necessary acquaintance with
alien forms of life.
The last—and conclusive—point of our investigation concerns the question
whether an autonomous place for a philosophical questioning can be maintained.
The proposed postfoundational phenomenology could be read as a suggestion
to merge any philosophical inquiry with the encyclopaedia of the Humanities.
But there is a specific function that is still to be accomplished by philosophy.

26
In Leghissa (2007), there is a more detailed account of the epistemic structure of the Humanities
with special reference to classical philology, which has been the first discipline among the
Humanities to develop the methodological awareness we are dealing with here.
The Infinite Science of the Lifeworld: Steps Toward a Postfoundational Phenomenology 67

As Husserl knew very well, scientific disciplines do not always bind together the
theory they attempt to shape of a specific field with the epistemology the same
theory rests on (Hua XVII 1974, 8, 32). To elucidate the various forms taken by
the relation between the two would be precisely the task of a phenomenologi-
cally-oriented philosophy. Such a task would not coincide with a ‘transcendental
foundation’ of the sciences of the lifeworld, as the phenomenologist’s glance is
entirely internal to the level where the description of the lifeworld takes place. It
would rather mean to turn the phenomenological attitude from a ‘reflection
above’ the validity of the world into a ‘reflection within’ the historical processes
that inform the intesubjective constitution of the world. Put in this way, we can
bestow a new meaning on Husserl’s seemingly obscure remarks on the einströ-
men. Under this notion, which is present both in the Krisis (Hua VI 1954, 115,
213) and in the related texts (Hua XXIX 1993, 77–83), Husserl referred to the
fact that phenomenology, as well as any other form of theory that brings in itself
the awareness of the subjective-relative character of knowledge, ‘flows into’ the
lifeworld it reflects on. Such a ‘flowing into,’ or einströmen, can be well under-
stood as the form phenomenology assumes in the moment in which it decides to
accompany the efforts made by human beings when they keep the world at a
distance in order to gain a critical attitude towards it. Not different from other
forms of critical theory, but perhaps better equipped than they are as far the exer-
cise of distantiation is concerned, phenomenology can then present itself as a
praxis, more precisely as that specific form of exercise that is required whenever
we have to deal with the paradox generated by the intersubjective constitution of
the world.

References

References to Husserl’s works are enclosed in parentheses (round brackets) and embedded in the
text. First comes “Hua,” which is the abbreviation of the German Complete Edition
(Husserliana—Gesammelte Werke), and then the volume number followed by the page
number.
Hua VI. 1954. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänome-
nologie. Herausgegeben vonW. Biemel. Den Haag: Nijhoff.
Hua VII. 1959a. Erste Philosophie (1923–1924). 1. Kritische Ideengeschichte. Herausgegeben von
R. Boehm. Den Haag: Nijhoff.
Hua VIII. 1959b. Erste Philosophie (1923–1924). 2. Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion.
Herausgegeben von R. Boehm. Den Haag: Nijhoff.
Hua XI. 1966. Analysen zur passiven Synthesis: Aus Vorlesungs- und Forschungsmanuskripten,
1918–1926. Herausgegeben von M. Fleischer. Den Haag: Nijhoff.
Hua XVII. 1974. Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft.
Herausgegeben von P. Janssen. Den Haag: Nijhoff.
Hua XXIX. 1993. Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale
Phänomenologie. Ergänzungsband. Texte aus dem Nachlass 1934–1937. Herausgegeben von
R.N. Smid. Dordrecht-Boston-London: Kluwer.
Hua XXXIX. 2008. Die Lebenswelt. Auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution.
Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937). Herausgegeben von R. Howa. Dordrecht: Springer.
68 G. Leghissa

Further Literature

Bloor, D. 1976. Knowledge and social imagery. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Blumenberg, H. 2006. Beschreibung des Menschen. Aus dem Nachlaß herausgegeben von
M. Sommer. Frankfurt am Main: Suhkamp.
Blumenberg, H. 2010. Theorie der Lebenswelt. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a theory of practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bourdieu, P. 2001. Science de la science et reflexivité. Paris: Editions Raison d’agir.
Carr, D. 1974. Phenomenology and the problem of history: A study of Husserl’s transcendental
philosophy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Cavaillès, J. 1947. Sur la logique et la théorie de la science. Paris: Presses Universitaire de France.
Claesges, U. 1972. Zweideutigkeiten in Husserls Lebenswelt-Begriff. In Perspektiven transzen-
dentalphänomenologischer Forschung, eds. U. Claesges and K. Held, 85–101. Den Haag:
Nijhoff.
Derrida, J. 1991. L’autre cap, suivi de la démocratie ajournée. Paris: Minuit.
Dodd, J. 2004. Crisis and reflection. An essay on Husserl’s crisis of the European sciences.
Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Drummond, J.J. 1990. Husserlian intentionality and non-foundational realism. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Fleck, L. 1979. In Genesis and development of a scientific fact, eds. Trenn, T.J. and R.K. Merton.
Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.
Foucault, M. 1972. The Archeology of Knowledge. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York:
Pantheon Books.
Grathoff, R. 1989. Milieu und Lebenswelt. Einführung in die phänomenologische Soziologie und
die sozial-phänomenologische Forschung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Hacking, I. 1992. The self-vindication of the laboratory sciences. In Science as practice and
culture, ed. A. Pickering, 29–64. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.
Heidegger, M. 1999. In Hölderlins Hymnen “Germanien” und “Der Rhein” (Wintersemester
1934/35), ed. S. Ziegler, (GA Bd. 39). Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Held, K. 1991. Husserls neue Einführung in die Philosophie: der Begriff der Lebenswelt. In
Lebenswelt und Wissenschaft. Studien zum Verhältnis von Phänomenologie und
Wissenschaftstheorie, ed. C.F. Gethmann, 79–113. Bonn: Bouvier.
Kisiel, T.J. 1970. Phenomenology as the science of science. In Phenomenology and the natural
sciences, eds. J.J. Kockelmans and T.J. Kisiel, 5–44. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Landgrebe, L. 1963. Der Weg der Phänomenologie. Gütersloh: Mohn.
Landgrebe, L. 1968. Phänomenologie und Geschichte. Gütersloh: Mohn.
Landgrebe, L. 1982. Faktizität und Individuation. Studien zu den Grundfragen der Phänomenologie.
Hamburg: Meiner.
Leghissa, L. 2007. Incorporare l’antico. Filologia classica e invenzione della modernità. Milan:
Mimesis.
Luhmann, N. 1995. Social systems. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Mensch, J.R. 2001. Postfoundational phenomenology: Husserlian reflection on presence and
embodiment. University Park: Pennsilvania State University Press.
Mohanty, J.N. 1982. Husserl and Frege. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Ricoeur, P. 1949. Husserl et le sens de l’histoire. In Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale
54: 280–316. Now in Ricoeur. 2004. A l’école de la phénoménologie, 19–64. Paris: Vrin.
Ströker, E. 1987. Phänomenologische Studien. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Ströker, E. 1993. Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Willard, D. 1984. Logic and the objectivity of knowledge. A study in Husserl’s early philosophy.
Athens: Ohio University Press.
Winch, P. 1958. The idea of a social science. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Zahavi, D. 2003. Husserl’s phenomenology, 79–140. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Hermeneutics in the Field: The Philosophy
of Geology

Robert Frodeman

Abstract Geology has had a marginal place within the philosophy of science; its
processes and results have not matched our traditional ideas concerning the nature
and outcomes of scientific reasoning. This is a reflection of the fact that philosophy
of science has been, with few exceptions, implicitly or explicitly the philosophy of
physics, and more generally the philosophy of lab science. In actuality, geological
reasoning provides a rich and realistic account of the power and limitations of
scientific reasoning. It also highlights the hermeneutic and historical nature of
reasoning, scientific or otherwise, and the neglected kinship between reasoning in
the sciences and the humanities.

In what follows I argue for the importance of the field sciences as a model for
understanding the nature of scientific reasoning. This is in opposition to the long-
held disciplinary bias across the sciences, where truth has been defined in terms of
that which can be walled off from outside forces. In seeking to shift our model of
reasoning from what obtains the lab to what happens in the great world beyond we
set aside some of the arrogance and presumption that has attached to scientific
knowledge.1 This is not done with the goal of refuting science or reducing scientific
reasoning to simply one among many different outlooks or worldviews. Rather,
I seek to promote an Aristotelian mean, where science is understood as a vibrant but
far from unequivocal way of gaining knowledge about ourselves and the world.
The upshot is that scientific reasoning comes to be seen as a humanistic enterprise,

1
I have made similar arguments concerning the nature of philosophy, which also has been
excessively disciplined, and which needs greater exposure to the field perspectives (e.g., Frodeman
2010, 2013).
R. Frodeman (*)
CSID/Philosophy, University of North Texas, 1155 Union Circle #310920,
Denton TX 76203-0920, USA
e-mail: frodeman@unt.edu

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 69

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_5,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
70 R. Frodeman

elevating our conception of the humanities at the same time we deflate some of our
presumptions concerning science.
The great creative leap of Greek thought was to imagine the possibility of
logos—that the world and its occurrences were not random. But order can take
many forms. The Greeks came to focus upon a specific type of logos, directing the
rational gaze upward, toward the stars, and inward, toward a pure mental order.
They abstracted from the world as we find it, or rather saw this world, our world, as
merely a dim reflection of another perfect world. The Greek search for logos thus
became a quest for a very particular type of order—one that was distant, regular,
immutable, and certain.
The motivation behind this is clear enough. Our knowledge of things in the sensi-
ble world is constantly changing, and thus always questionable. Temporality can be
seen as the enemy of rationality, rendering every truth claim inconclusive and suspect.
Thus the message above the portal to Plato’s Academy: “Let no one deficient in geom-
etry enter.” Only in the realm of thought, and in the celestial sphere, a region thought
to be beyond material corruption, would we find the proper conditions for truth.
This notion of rationality has placed us in a peculiar situation. It has given us an
unprecedented control over the world; we have conquered many diseases, and now
can satisfy our desires at the touch of a button. But it has also deformed our personal
and social relations, prompting a culture-wide nihilism for those aspects of life (eth-
ics, politics, metaphysics, aesthetics, and religion) that cannot be parameterized and
controlled and which are immersed in time and contingency.
The effects of our traditional definition of logos upon geology—the discipline
ostensibly concerned with understanding the Earth—are also clear. The limitations
of what counts as “understanding the Earth” can be revealed, in part, by a compari-
son with medicine. What would we think of an “understanding of health” that
wasn’t concerned with actually making people healthy? For a normative element to
knowledge is, or should be, as fundamental to the Earth sciences as it is to medicine.
But rather than moving toward a grand synthesis, a geo-logos that would end in
geo-ethics, geologists have been trained to search for lawlike generalizations.
These presumptions about rationality have influenced not only how the Earth
sciences are constituted, but also their very origins. The study of the heavens has
been pursued for over two millennia, while the systematic study of the Earth is
barely 200 years old. The Earth has been thought to be beneath us, a subject too
earthy to be worthy of serious attention. In contrast to the clarity of mathematics, or
the mathematicized heavens, the Earth was inaccessible, impenetrable, and subject
to sudden and unpredictable violence. And even before the discovery of geologic
expanses of time, the vast expanse of the Earth, in both space and time, mocked the
very idea of grasping it whole.
Except for a few early studies of mineralogy and metallurgy, the science of geol-
ogy dates from Hutton’s and Werner’s investigations at the end of the eighteenth
century. We have only recently (i.e., since the 1960s) gained an overall (if still
incomplete) logos of the natural world, where an understanding of plate tectonics is
combined with links to processes across land, ice, ocean, air, and biota. But our
greatest task still lies before us: integrating Earth scientific knowledge and
Hermeneutics in the Field: The Philosophy of Geology 71

perspectives into our social, political, and spiritual lives. Grappling with the issues
of global climate change, the loss of biodiversity, and the geologically immanent
loss of natural resources requires the marriage of the Earth sciences and the humani-
ties. By enlarging geology in this way we will gain a better purchase upon our
environmental challenges.
Overall, geology has received little attention from the humanities (but see
McPhee 1981, 1983, etc.). Contemporary philosophy has hardly recognized the
field as a subject worthy of reflection.2,3 There is no philosophy of geology or of the
Earth sciences as there are philosophies of physics and of biology. The two main
schools of contemporary philosophy, analytic and continental, are one in ignoring
geology.4 It has been assumed (few thought to argue the point) that examining the
Earth sciences was unnecessary to understand the nature of science. Statements by
philosophers on the status of geology sound a common refrain: “Geology is a
science just like other sciences, for example physics or chemistry.”5
Nothing shows this disregard of geology better than the lack of attention human-
ists have paid to the concept of geologic time. The discovery of deep, or geologic,
time parallels in importance the widely acknowledged Copernican revolution in our
conception of space.6 The concept of time plays an especially prominent role within
contemporary continental or European philosophy. Nevertheless, philosophers and
historians have ignored the Huttonian and Wernerian revolution’s decisive role in
reshaping our sense of time. In fact, the typical conclusion drawn from the terrific
span of geologic time is that it renders all our human efforts insignificant. Geologic
time opposes human time, rather than encloses it, mocking our efforts (cf. Shelley’s
Ozymandias) rather than being seen as part of and ennobling them.
Insofar as it has been considered at all, geology has been viewed as a derivative
science, consisting of a few rules of thumb (e.g., the principles of uniformity and
superposition) that guide the use of mathematics and the application of the laws of
chemistry and physics to geologic phenomena. Geology, it was thought, suffers from
a host of problems that undercuts its claims to real knowledge: incomplete data,
because of the gaps in and the poor resolution of the stratigraphic record; the lack of
experimental control that is possible in the laboratory-based sciences; and the great
spans of time required for geologic processes, making direct observation impossible.
The geologic community itself has been the main source of reflection on the
philosophic aspects of geology. Gilbert’s and Chamberlin’s essays (e.g., 1886 and
1890), dating from the classic era of nineteenth century geology, embody the

2
Cf. Laudan (1987).
3
Exceptions to this general neglect include David B. Kitts (1977), W.V., Engelhardt and J. Zimmermann
(1988 [1982]), Ronald Giere (1988), Oreskes et al. (1994), Frodeman (1995, 2003), Rom Harré
(2000), Robert John Inkpen (2009), and Bechtel and Herschbach (2010).
4
In addition, Babich (2010) features a section on “Philosophy of Geology or Modelling and Its
Discontents,” 362ff. in addition to Babich (2013) for a section “Grounding Physical Science:
Geology and Deep Time,” 271ff.
5
Nelson Goodman (1967).
6
But see Cervato and Frodeman (2012).
72 R. Frodeman

attitudes of natural philosophy. In the twentieth century, a few geologists have

reflected upon the methodology underlying particular subfields of geology or
have offered general accounts of geological research.7 The work of Stephen Jay
Gould is especially notable, but the writings of Niles Eldridge, Peter Ward, and
Edward Wilson show that the tradition of natural philosophy isn’t entirely extinct.8
Nonetheless, Earth scientists continue to practice “the reverential reference”—
treating physics as the paradigm of reasoning, trolling within physics or mathematics
for an approach (relativity, quantum mechanics, fractals, complexity theory) that
gives a patina of legitimization to their “softer” discipline.9
Are the Earth sciences best understood as merely applied and imprecise physics,
vainly attempting to achieve the degree of resolution and predictability typical of
(some parts of) physics? I offer a different view: geological reasoning exemplifies
both the power and limitations of reasoning, scientific and otherwise.
According to some, there is no distinction to be made between analytic and
continental philosophy.10 There is only good philosophy—a claim usually made by
analytic philosophers, who refuse to recognize the possibility that there could be
distinctive approaches to what counts as the philosophic project. From a continental
point of view, however, two points concerning science stand out: (1) whereas science
offers us a powerful tool for the discovery of truth, science is not the only, or even
necessarily the best way that humans come to know reality, and (2) the belief there
is one distinctive scientific method is a myth. Science has neither primacy in the
discovery of truth, nor the unity and cohesiveness of one identifiable method, nor
the distance from ethical, epistemological and metaphysical commitments that
analytic philosophy had claimed.
When we view the Earth sciences from the perspectives of continental philoso-
phy, certain features that had been left in the shadows begin to show themselves.
Consider first the perspectives of hermeneutics, one of the most characteristic
tools of nineteenth and twentieth century continental philosophy. A text (by which
is meant, typically, a literary work, but which I want to expand to include the
outcrop) is a system of signs the meaning of which is not apparent, but must be
deciphered. This deciphering takes place when we assign differing types or degrees
of significance to the various elements making up the text. The status of this
deciphered meaning has been the source of some dispute: in the nineteenth century
some claimed that, when properly applied to a text, hermeneutic technique resulted
in knowledge as objective as that of the natural sciences. In the twentieth century,
however, hermeneuts have claimed that the deciphering of meaning always involves
the subtle interplay of what is “objectively” there in the text with what presuppositions
and expectations the reader brings to the text. Hermeneutics rejects the claim that
facts can ever be completely independent of theory.

7
E.g., Stanley A. Schumm (1991) and Derek V. Ager (1993).
8
See Stephen Jay Gould (1997 [1987]), Niles Eldredge (1995), Peter D. Ward (1998), Edward O.
Wilson (1998).
9
Doreen Massey (1999).
10
Leiter 2007.
Hermeneutics in the Field: The Philosophy of Geology 73

In the twentieth century, hermeneutics moved from being a rather straightforward

methodology of the Geistwissenshaften to a more general account of knowing.
Hermeneutic philosophers such as Heidegger have argued that all human
understanding is fundamentally interpretive. Not only books, but all of reality is a
text to be read: rarely do we find completely objective data or information that is
“purely given.” How we perceive a thing is always shaped by how we conceive
and act upon it with the sets of tools, concepts, expectations and values that we
bring to it.
We are all familiar with the hermeneutical aspect of understanding, the shift in
our awareness of an object when we approach it with a fresh set of concepts or
expectations. It is an experience that happens regularly to students when they are
first introduced to a subject. In an introductory art history course each class may
begin with lights dimmed, the professor showing a slide of a famous work of art and
giving the students a few minutes to consider it on their own. Typically—especially
at the beginning of the semester—students will see nothing of any significance. Yet
after a few minutes of lecture, the piece undergoes the most striking transformation.
Aided by concepts introduced by the professor, the piece of art reveals itself for
the first time. Like art history, with which it shares a strongly visual component,
geology is a deeply hermeneutic science; the outcrop typically means nothing to the
uninitiated until the geologist introduces concepts for seeing the rock.11
The claim that all human knowledge is fundamentally hermeneutic—that our
perceptions are always to some degree structured by our conceptions—has porten-
tous implications for our understanding of the nature of scientific knowledge, and
for the relation between science and society at large. For it makes the question of
human interests, personal, ethical and political, and metaphysical, intrinsic rather
than extrinsic to the work of science. The theoretic assumptions that the scientist
brings to his or her work—what counts as significant, and what research is worth
doing—structure all that is examined, seen and reported to 1° or another.
Contemporary hermeneutics claims that this mix of percept and concept is
fundamental to all human understanding. For Merleau-Ponty, all understanding is a
combination of eye and mind.12
Hermeneutics does not offer methodological principles analogous to how
analytic philosophy understood the scientific method. The role of hermeneutics is
not to develop a set of rules for proper interpretation, but to clarify the general
conditions under which understanding takes place. Nevertheless there are three
concepts that play a fundamental role in any hermeneutic process, including
geological reasoning: the hermeneutic circle, the fore-structures of understanding,
and the historical nature of knowledge.
Heidegger argued that understanding is fundamentally circular: when we try to
comprehend something, we understand the meaning of its parts from their relation
to the whole, and conceive the whole from an understanding of its parts.13 So the

11
Martin J. S. Rudwick (1976).
12
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1993).
13
Martin Heidegger (1962).
74 R. Frodeman

meaning of this sentence is understood in terms of the entire essay, and vice versa.
Similarly, our understanding of a rock outcrop is based upon our understanding of
the individual bedding layers within it, which are in turn made sense of in terms of
their relation to the entire outcrop. This back-and-forth process operates on all
levels; wholes at one level of analysis become parts at another. Thus our under-
standing of a region’s geology is based on our interpretation of the individual out-
crops in that region, and vice versa; and our interpretation of an individual bed
within an outcrop is based upon our understanding of the sediments and structures
that make up that bed.
Circular reasoning is viewed as a vice. But Heidegger argued that this type of
circularity is not only unavoidable; it is also the process through which understand-
ing progresses. Understanding begins when we develop an intuition of the object’s
overall meaning. Without this initial conception, we would lack a criterion for
judging the pertinence of a given piece of evidence. This provisional interpretation
is called into question when details in the object or text don’t jibe with our overall
sense of things. This forces us to revise our interpretation of the whole as well as our
interpretation of the other particulars. Comprehension deepens in this circular fashion,
as we revise our conception of the whole by the new meaning suggested by the
parts, and our understanding of the parts by our new understanding of the whole.
One consequence of the hermeneutic circle is that it puts to rest the claim that it
is possible to approach an object in a neutral manner. Rather, we always come to our
object of study with a set of prejudgments: an idea of what the problem is, what type
of information we are looking for, and what will count as an answer. What keeps
these prejudgments from slipping into dogmatism and prejudice—what makes
science still possible as distinguished from ideology—is the fact that they are not
blind. We remain open to correction, allowing the text or object to instruct us and
suggest new meanings and approaches.
In Being and Time Heidegger identified three types of prejudgments. First are our
pre-conceptions, the ideas and theories that we rely upon when thinking about an
object. Concepts are not neutral tools; rather, through them we get hold of an object
in a specific way, opening up certain possibilities while closing off others. “Liberal”
and “conservative” structure our political conversations, just “ophiolite complexes”
and “accretionary terranes” affect what we see in the field. These pre-conceptions
include our initial definition of the object as well as the criteria used to identify the
significant facts and the insignificant ones. Second is our pre-sight, our idea of our
inquiry’s presumed goal and our sense of what will qualify as an answer. Without at
least a vague sense of what type of answer we are looking for, we would not
recognize it when we find it. Third, we approach our object of study with a set of
practices that Heidegger calls our pre-having. These are our culturally acquired sets
of implements, skills and institutions. In field geology, implements include the geol-
ogist’s hammer, 0.10 % HCl, a measuring tape, a hand lens, a Jacob’s staff, pencil
and paper and a Brunton compass. In the lab, there is another set of tools: purified
chemicals, mass spectrometers, computers, and a scanning electron microscope.
With a different set of tools, we might gather new data that would give us a different
(possibly quite different) sense of the world.
Hermeneutics in the Field: The Philosophy of Geology 75

Heidegger’s “pre-having” also includes the various skills that the scientist learns
in the field or the laboratory: map-making, measuring strike and dip, preparing
samples, cleaning and preserving specimens, and even wielding a hammer properly
to split the rock without destroying the fossils within. Just as crucial, and often
ignored, are the social and political structures of science: professors, graduate
students, research groups, and professional associations. Science is a social as well
as a mental activity depending on having colleagues to bounce ideas off of, profes-
sional societies and journals to define hot topics and favored lines of research, and
graduate students to help run the labs and collect samples.14
Hermeneutics also emphasizes is the historical nature of understanding. The
claim here—distinct from the argument below—is that the particular prejudgments
we start with have a lasting effect. Some assume that, no matter what assumptions
or goals we begin with, the scientific method will eventually bring us to the same
final understanding of objective reality. Hermeneutics claims that our original goals
and assumptions result in our discovering certain facts rather than others, which in
turn lead to new avenues of research and sets of facts—a point known in economics
as ‘path dependence.15 As decisions get multiplied over the decades, bodies of
scientific and political knowledge come to have strongly historical components.
A further feature of geologic reasoning is worth highlighting: its nature as a his-
torical science. A historical science (which includes other disciplines such cosmology,
paleontology, and anthropology) is defined by the role that historical explanation
plays in its work. Explanations within the historical sciences involve the tools
common to all sciences (e.g., the deductive-nomological model of explanation),
but are also distinguished by three additional elements: the limited relevance of
laboratory experiments, the problem of natural kinds, and the role of narrative.
To the degree that scientific research is based on laboratory experimentation, it is
essentially non-historical. In principle, the particularities of space and time in
principle play no role in the reasoning process. Not only is the space idealized, set
up so that other researchers can recreate the experiment’s identical conditions within
their own laboratory; in a fundamental sense, history does not exist. Of course, time
and history are inescapable parts of every instance of scientific research: a chemical
reaction takes time to complete, and every chemical reaction is historical in that it
has some feature, no matter how insignificant, that distinguishes it from every other
reaction. But our interest in chemical reactions lies not in chronicling the specific
historical conditions affecting a given reaction, but rather in abstracting a general or
ideal truth about a class of chemical reactions. A particular chemical reaction is
approached as an instance of a general law or principle, rather than as a part of the
great irretrievable sweep of historical events.16
In the historical sciences, the specific causal circumstances surrounding the
subject of investigation—what led up to it, and what issued from it—are the
researcher’s main concern. In geology, for instance, the goal is often not to identify

14
Andrew Pickering (1992), Karin Knorr-Cetina (1999).
15
Paul A. David (2000).
16
Cf. Nancy Cartwright (1983).
76 R. Frodeman

general laws, but rather to chronicle the particular events that occurred at a given
location (at an outcrop, for a region, or for the entire planet). Hypotheses are not
testable in the way they are in the experimental sciences. Although the geologist
may be able to duplicate the laboratory conditions of another’s experiment (e.g.,
studying the nature of deformation through experiments with play-doh), the
relationship of these experiments to the realities of the Earth’s history (e.g., the
formation of the Rocky Mountains) will always remain uncertain.
The crucial point here is that the historical sciences are distinguished by a
different set of criteria for what counts as an explanation. To borrow and adapt an
example from David Hull, when we ask why someone has died, we are not satisfied
with the appeal to the law of nature that all organisms die, true as that is.17 We are
asking for an account of the particular circumstances surrounding that person’s
death. Similarly, in the Earth sciences we are largely interested in the specific histo-
ries of historical phenomena (a particular stream, a region such as the Western
Interior Seaway, a trilobite species). We might identify general laws in geology that
have explanatory power; but the weight of our interest lies elsewhere.
A second aspect of the historical sciences merits our attention. Historical entities
present a unique challenge to the researcher; for how does we define our object of
study? In some sciences, the objects appear as “natural kinds”: for instance, the
nucleus of an atom consists of neutrons and protons, a distinction well grounded in
the very structure of the atom. But historical entities do not spring into being fully
formed, nor do they remain unchanged until their destruction. For instance, in inves-
tigating the history of the Colorado River (which seems to have run in different
directions at different times in its history), we first face the riddle of when it first
became the ‘Colorado River.’18 The researcher of historical entities is faced with
identifying the set of characteristics that define the particular individual, and with
deciding how much change can occur before we have a new individual rather than
simply a modification of the old.
Hayden White argues that the concept of a central subject allows us to construct
historical explanations.19 A central subject is the organizational identity that ties
together disparate facts and incidents. In human history, a wide variety of entities
can function as central subjects: individuals or social groups, corporate entities (for
instance, nations), even concepts (the idea of progress). In the Earth sciences there
is a similar range of historical individuals: the Animas River, the Rocky Mountains,
the species Mytiloides mytiloides, and the Pleistocene. Central subjects provide
the coherence needed to construct an intelligible narrative out of a seemingly
disconnected set of objects or events. But since these subjects are not natural kinds,
they can be defined in different ways.
Finally, the historical sciences are distinguished by the role that narrative plays
in their accounts. In the experimental sciences, predictions are produced by combin-
ing general laws with a description of initial conditions. But the historical sciences

17
Hull (1976).
18
Ivo Lucchitta (1990).
19
Hayden White (1963).
Hermeneutics in the Field: The Philosophy of Geology 77

are not primarily in the business of making predictions: rather than explaining an
event by subsuming it under a generalization, they make sense of it by integrating
the event into the flow of a story.20 To make sense of a river, an outcrop, or a political
event is to show how it is part of, and contributes to, a larger narrative. In science,
narrative is commonly ignored: it is seen as a mere literary form lacking the logical
rigor and evidential support necessary for real truth claims. But this dismissal
ignores the fact that narrative has its own distinctive logic—and begs the question
of whether scientific explanation itself depends upon the logic of the story.
Continental philosophers have been prominent in arguing that scientific explana-
tion and narrative understanding in fact complement one another—science provid-
ing facts that parameterize an issue, narrative providing the overall goal and moral
purpose of research. In Time and Narrative, Paul Ricoeur claims that narrative is our
most basic way of making sense of experience. In Ricoeur’s view, scientific expla-
nation itself depends on a preceding narrative: framing the scientific project and
making sense of its results depends upon the place that this project occupies within
one or more storylines. These storylines (e.g., the pursuit of fame or riches, the
righting of a public or private wrong, the desire for truth, or the wish for a better
common future) provide the essential contexts for science. For instance, the devel-
opment and testing of global circulation models (GCMs) gains its rationale in terms
of the story we tell ourselves about the possible dangers of global climate change.
Such “Earth stories” as how much oil or copper do we have left? How likely is a
catastrophic flood or volcanic eruption? What are the possible scenarios for our
climate’s future? make sense only when it is placed within the structure of a story.
Finally, it is worth noting that narratives are distinguished from scientific knowl-
edge by the fact that the former have an inherent moral structure. Narratives look to
the future, not in the scientific sense of making predictions, but in Aristotle’s sense
of being concerned with final causes. A story always expresses a moral vision of
what the future should look like (in the case of dis-utopias, through dialectical
reversal). Historians, philosophers, and littérateurs excel at creating and interpreting
the stories used to frame the work of the sciences, bridging the chasm that separates
science and society.
The Earth sciences only partially live up to the classic model of scientific
reasoning. But rather than viewing itself as a lesser or derivative science, geological
reasoning provides an outstanding model of another type of scientific reasoning
based in the approaches of hermeneutics and the historical sciences. Geology is a
preeminent example of a synthetic science, combining a variety of logical tech-
niques to solve its problems. The geologist exemplifies Levi-Strauss’ bricoleur, the
thinker whose intellectual toolbox contains a variety of tools that he or she selects
as is appropriate to the job at hand.21

20
Naomi Oreskes (2000).
21
I offer versions of this argument in Frodeman (1995) as well as Frodeman (2003).
78 R. Frodeman

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The Metroscape: Phenomenology
of Measurement

Robert P. Crease

Abstract Measurement is an emblematic technology: it is ubiquitous, transforms

our experience, withdraws into the background, and is noticed primarily when it
breaks down. Measurement is not merely one tool among others, belonging only to
separate elements such as rulers, scales, and other instruments, but a fluid and
correlated network that is smoothly and intimately integrated into the world and
its shape. This paper proposes the concept of metroscape to develop and extend
Heidegger’s concept of Gestell.

Measurement is an emblematic technology: it is ubiquitous, transforms our

experience of the world, withdraws into the background, and is noticed primarily
when it breaks down. Once measuring is embodied, and metrology becomes a social
institution open to issues of trust and distrust, it is no longer a neutral activity but
tied to justice, the good, and human enrichment—with a dark side having to do with
injustice, exploitation, and alienation. The story of measurement therefore
encompasses more than the tale of how today’s network of standards, instruments,
and institutions came to be, but includes the changes that take place in measure-
ment’s meaning. Every age has a metrosophy, a shared cultural understanding of
why we measure and what measuring delivers to us, an understanding that evolves
over time and across cultures.1 Metrosophy is more difficult to discuss than the
material network of standards, instruments, and institutions. But it is an important
feature without which any discussion of measurement is incomplete (Crease 2011).
Prior to the advent of the metric system, measuring systems arose from local
resources and practices to serve local needs. Systems from different communities

1
The principal person to promote the concept of metrosophy is Hans Vogel, who applied it to the
Chinese context (1994). However, I am vastly expanding the scope of this term.
R.P. Crease (*)
State University of New York at Stony Brook,
250 West 90th St. #P3B, New York, NY 10024, USA
e-mail: robert.crease@stonybrook.edu

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 81

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_6,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
82 R.P. Crease

were as original and varied as their artworks, political systems and other forms of
cultural life, and the views of the point and purpose of measurement equally diverse.
The more important a society viewed some aspect of the environment—gold in
West African cultures, salt in Mesoamerican communities, court ritual in China,
distance in nomadic tribes, agriculture in pre-modern Europe—the finer and more
elaborate measures of this aspect tended to be, and the more these measures were
specified and regulated. Witold Kula’s study of European measures goes so far as to
claim that measures are key to the character and vitality of pre-modern European
life.2 Those who do not understand the use and abuse of European measures,
according to Kula, cannot understand Europe itself.
Within a short time, historically speaking—about 200 years—virtually all such
systems became consolidated into one universal system of measurement—the
metric system, now the SI—adopted by virtually every country on the planet. Most
historians of metrology seem to feel that metrology thereby evolved beyond metros-
ophy. Even Kula, that eminent and sensitive decipherer of the social logic of
European medieval measures and how closely they integrated into human life,
shared this view. True, in Measures and Men he often dropped remarks to the effect
that the metric system is “sheer convention,” has “no practical social meaning,”
lacks a connection to “social values,” and has “no inherent social significance
whatsoever.” Nevertheless, he grudgingly admits to being an “admirer” of the
metric system, which has brought about a “higher level of mutual understanding
among people,” and “taken us very far along the road of more effective and fruitful
international understanding and cooperation”3 The book’s final sentence—“And in
the end, a time will come when we shall all understand one another so well, so
perfectly, that we shall have nothing further to say to one another”4—however
ironic, makes it clear that Kula faults the modern world, not the modern system of
measurement so perfectly adapted to its realities.
The great scholar has nodded. The modern system of measurement is not devoid
of social meaning, of metrosophy. The thoroughgoing project of stripping the
imprint of regions, products, and times from measures, of abstracting measures
from each and every local context in order to make the world measurable, calcula-
ble, and universal for human beings and to put it at our disposal, has a deep social
meaning indeed. Heidegger’s famous concept of Gestell points to this meaning.
This paper aims to show that this meaning can be further elaborated via the concept
of metroscape, a concept to capture the idea that measurement is not merely one tool
among others, belonging only to separate elements such as rulers, scales, and other
instruments, but a fluid and correlated network that is smoothly and intimately
integrated into the world and its shape.
The suffix “-scape” commonly refers to a kind of space (landscape, seascape, or
cityscape) that is extended, produced by human interaction with nature, has a
particular character, and shapes how human beings relate to nature and each other.

2
Kula (1986).
3
Kula (1986), 121.
4
Ibid., 288.
The Metroscape: Phenomenology of Measurement 83

In words like soundscape and ethnoscape, the suffix is applied to more virtual kinds
of spaces with a similar impact. A “-scape” is neither simply material nor mental but
both at once; it inhabits the world and its features and simultaneously the way we
perceive and relate to this world. The modern metroscape is not the doing of the SI,
which is a consequence rather than a cause of the metroscape.
A contrast between two images can serve to begin a discussion of the metroscape.
Consider first of all da Vinci’s famous and much copied and caricatured drawing
known as the Vitruvian Man, for he evidently had that architect’s passage about
measures in mind. This Vitruvian Man displays how the proportions of the human
body, and the units drawn from it, participate in an ideal of beauty. The Vitruvian
Man shows us the organization of measures can have symbolic and spiritual signifi-
cance. Now consider an image by early twentieth century industrial designer Henry
Dreyfuss of a pair of archetypical human beings, “Joe” and “Josephine,” whose line
drawings and measurements—the fruit of decades of data collection and research—
were intended to allow engineers to incorporate human form and behaviors into
products and machinery. Joe and Josephine are the new Vitruvian Man, gendered
into a couple and measured over their entire lifespans. Joe and Josephine are utterly
devoid of the boldness, nobility, and beauty of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. Their rea-
son for being—why they were created and what they show us about the world—is
not beauty and symmetry but efficiency. They do not help connect us humans with
something beyond the world, but help engineers and the individual human beings
for whom the engineers design to get a better grip on this one. The central feature of
the modern metrosophy is efficiency.
The modern metroscape, illustrated by this contrast, involves a new relation
between measurement and how we relate to the world and each other. This
metroscape—which tends to hide but can be brought to light—shapes what we
make, what we purchase, how we classify things, and what we consider real. It shapes
products, workers, markets, and businesses, and reflects and reinforces social, political
and economic currents. Busch and Tanaka have explored how this works in the
agriculture of canola, a seed used to produce oil. “[G]rain grades link farmers to
elevator operators. Seed quality tests link seed producers to farmers. Measures of oil
content and composition link large sellers to buyers of canola. Measures of shelf life
link processors to retailers…. Tests are measures of nature at the same time as they
are measures of culture.”5 The role of measures they detect in the production and
consumption of canola is found in nearly every other agricultural product.
Plato reminds us of two different ways of measuring. One involves numbers,
units, a scale, a beginning point. It establishes that one property is greater than or
less than another, or involves assigning a number to how much of a property
something possesses. We can call this “ontic” measuring. Histories of measurement
technology relate how ontic measurement developed from improvised body
measures and disconnected artifacts into a single network that relates different
kinds of measurements and soon will tie them all ultimately to physical constants.

5
Busch and Keiko (1996), at 23.
84 R.P. Crease

Another kind of measuring does not involve placing oneself next to a stick or in
a pan. This is what Plato said is guided by a standard of the “fitting” or the “right.”
This measuring is less an act than an experience; the experience that things that
we’ve done, or we ourselves, are less than they could or should be. We cannot carry
out this kind of measuring by following rules, and it does not lend itself to quantifi-
cation. Is this only “metaphorical” measuring? It is comparison against a standard.
Placed alongside the fitting or the right example, our actions—even our selves—do
not have enough being; there is more to be. We feel we are not measuring up to our
potential. We can call this “ontological” measuring.
Ontological measuring involves no specific property, in a literal respect, for it
involves nothing quantitative. Calculate all we please, we will never produce this
kind of measurement. No method can lead us to it. Ontological measurement
connects us with something trans-human, something in which we participate, not
something over which we command. While in ontic measurement we compare
some object with another object exterior to it, in ontological measurement we
compare ourselves, or something we have produced, with something in which our
being is implicated, to which it is related—such as some concept of the good,
the just, the beautiful. Ontological measurement is ontically measureless.
Scholars of the ancient world were mostly confident that standards for our
potential existed, and that human beings could find such standards and use them as
measures. Aristotle described the moral man as a “measure” in the Ethics. By this
he meant, not that a moral man is something against which we can physically or
even symbolically compare ourselves, but that our encounters with genuinely moral
human beings “call us out of ourselves,” making us want to be better humans.
Ontological measuring is the measuring that good examples invite. The history of
literature and art is replete with great works and performances that each artist can
experience as intangible yardsticks, so to speak, for measuring his or her own achieve-
ments. To be sure, traditions change, and with it ideas of what is good and what not.
But tradition provides an authenticating horizon in which artists experience a measure
of what is good and what not, what original and what an echo, what vibrant and full
of life and what deficient. The “call of conscience” involves ontological measurement,
a secular variation on the old spiritual idea of being “called back to yourself.”
Conscience, like other forms of ontological measurement, requires opening ourselves
to being able to say, “I could be better,” to being able to experience ourselves as
ontologically deficient—a positive thing.6 This is the foundation of ethics.
Human beings practice both kinds of measuring all the time. But the two kinds
of measurements are often confused, with damaging results. Stephen J. Gould’s
book, The Mismeasure of Man, is about the fallacy that “worth can be assigned to
individuals and groups by measuring intelligence as a single quantity.” Shakespeare’s
play Measure for Measure—an allusion to Matthew 7:1–2—is about the need to
temper literal application of legal measures with empathy and mercy in order to live
up to what it means to be fully human. Moral thinking begins with the distinction
between ontic and ontological measures.

6
Crowell (2008).
The Metroscape: Phenomenology of Measurement 85

Heidegger was fond of citing Holderlin’s passage: “Is there on earth a measure?
There is none.” If so, it reflects an odd state of affairs: as the modern world has
progressively improved and perfected its ontic measures, it has diminished its ability
its ability to measure itself ontologically. How? The reason is that, in the modern
metroscape, ontic measuring can distract from, and even have a corrosive effect on,
ontological measurement.
The capacity and new tools for measurements in our lives seems continually on
the increase, and can appear to be an unqualified good. A web site, “The Quantified
Self,” bills itself as providing “tools for knowing your own mind and body.” These
tools are means for collecting data about the times we spend in such activities as
working eating, sleeping, having sex, worrying, cleaning up, having coffee, and
every other aspect of everyday life. “Behind the allure of the quantified self,” wrote the
site’s co-founder in the New York Times, “is a guess that many of our problems come
from simply lacking the instruments to understand who we are.”7 How fortunate,
therefore, that we are to be able to quantify every aspect of our lives in this high-speed,
rapidly changing world! No ambiguity here. Measurement is an indispensable tool of
self-knowledge. The better we do it, the more we know of our selves.
By contrast, “Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained,” a 40-min video by
the American artist Martha Rosler (1977), depicts measurement as simply
dehumanizing. Most of the video consists of a 33-year old woman being measured
by two white-coated men, one of whom makes the measurements, the other writes
them down. At first they have her stand against the wall and draw a Vitruvian-man-like
measured image of her with outstretched limbs. Then they ask her to take off more
of her clothes as they measure more intimate parts of her body, culminating in her
“vaginal depth.” They have her lie down horizontally in front of her measured
image. As she is being measured and the one male announces each of her measures
to the other, he calls it “below standard” (whereupon the soundtrack has a razzing
sound), “above standard” (a beep), or “standard” (pleasant chimes). Meanwhile, a
feminine voiceover characterizes what’s happening in apocalyptic terms, referring
to rape, dehumanization, degradation, exploitation, eugenics, and tyranny; the
voiceover says that the woman is being indoctrinated to manage her image, to view
her body as parts, and to lose track of her self, and quotes Sartre to the effect that
“Evil is the product of the ability of humans to make abstract that which is con-
crete.” After the male measurers have their way with the woman, she puts clothes
back on in two sequences: in one she dons a wedding dress and veil, in the other a
hot little black dress. The wedding dress sequence has her returning to the wall to
stand demurely and compliantly next to her measured image; in the black dress
sequence she darts off in the opposite direction. The video ends by returning to the
two male doctors addressing another woman: “Next!”8

7
Wolf (2010).
8
According to a web site about the film, “Rosler’s distanced depiction of the systematic,
institutionalized ‘science’ of measurement and classification is meant to recall the oppressive tac-
tics of the armed forces or concentration camps, and to underscore the internalization of standards
that determine the meaning of women’s being.”
86 R.P. Crease

No ambiguity here, either. Measuring is doing bad things to us. What is wrong is
not simply misplaced precision; too much of a good thing. Measuring is far more
sinister, a tool of oppression. It destroys our selves, or at least those of women; men
evidently either had no selves to begin with, or shed theirs long ago. Best for those
who still have selves to renounce measurement.
The metroscape means that the environment in which we measure is not neutral;
this of course is Heidegger’s point about the Gestell. In the modern atmosphere,
measuring tends to dazzle and distract us. We tend to look away too much from
what we are measuring, and why we are measuring, to the measuring itself.
Measuring certainly works, and helps us to get around—but in the modern
metroscape, it can lead us to think that it is all we need to get around.
The Vitruvian Man was an ideal image, something that connected human beings
with beauty, perfection, and other trans-human goals, goals towards which measures
could at best only serve as signposts. Joe and Josephine are something different;
they are models, things that designers need as a means to achieve the efficient
creation of interfaces between human beings and the world. Trans-human goals are
absent; Joe and Josephine assist the aim of putting the world at the disposal of the
wants and needs of human beings. The digital avatars that consumers can now create
for themselves on 3D scanners in retail stores like Brooks Brothers and Victoria’s
Secret are still more remote from Vitruvian man and even Joe and Josephine. It is a
means for us as individuals to purchase clothes whose measurements are perfect for
our bodies.
How can we keep an eye on the difference between ontic and ontological
measurement, and prevent the one from interfering with each other?
One way is to ask about what, if anything, is missing from the measurements
delivered by the modern metroscape. Even in the modern metroscape, measuring
does not thrust the rest of human life permanently in the background—the question,
“Why do we measure?”—if we pay attention. We have to may more careful attention
than ever to the goals we are trying to achieve with measurements, rather than
simply to measurements. We have to focus on our dissatisfactions, on what measur-
ing does not deliver. We have to address these dissatisfactions, not by discarding the
measures we have and seeking to find newer and better ones, for these, too, will
eventually turn out not to do what we want and eventually need to be renounced, nor
by assuming that what we are after lies “beyond” measuring. Rather, the modern
metroscape requires us to articulate more carefully what and where our measure-
ments do not deliver.
Another way to keep an eye on the difference between ontic and ontological
measurement in the modern metroscape is to reflect, not simply on how individual
acts of measurement are carried out, but on the metroscape itself, and what it does
to us. We can do this in part by retelling the story of measurement—reminding
ourselves how the modern metroscape came to be, what the alternatives were,
why we rejected them, and what we gained but also lost by rejecting them.
The Metroscape: Phenomenology of Measurement 87

References

Busch, Lawrence, and Tanaka Keiko. 1996. Rites of passage: Constructing quality in a commodity
subsector. Science Technology & Human Values 21:1(Winter): 3–27.
Crease, Robert P. 2011. World in the balance: The historic quest for an absolute system of
measurement. New York: Norton.
Crowell, Steven. 2008. Measure-taking: Meaning and normativity in Heidegger’s philosophy.
Continental Philosophy Review 41: 261–276.
Kula, Witold. 1986. Measures and Men Trans. R. Szreter. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Rosler, Martha. 1977. “Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained,” video performance available
at the Modern Museum of Art, New York City.
Vogel, Hans Ulrich. 1994. Aspects of metrosophy and metrology during the Han period. Extrême-
Orient Extrême-Occident 16/16: 135–152.
Wolf, Gary. 2010. The data-driven life. New York Times Magazine, April 28.
 Part II
Hermeneutic and Phenomenological
Philosophy of Science and Technology
Consciousness, Quantum Physics,
and Hermeneutical Phenomenology

Patrick Aidan Heelan

Abstract Two hundred years ago Friedrich Schleiermacher (See Wellmon 2006)
modified Kant’s notion of anthropology—‘hermeneutically,’ as he said—so as to
make it inclusive of the tribes that Captain Cook found in the South Sea Islands.
This paper honors the late Joseph J. Kockelmans for making a similar hermeneutic
move to update Kant’s notion of natural science so as to make it inclusive of the
phenomenological lifeworld (For ‘lifeworld,’ see Husserl’s The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy, 1954, 121–148, and the ‘lifeworld’
theme throughout the Crisis.) syntheses of classical, relativity, and quantum
physics. The new synthesis is in fact not alien to the views of some of the founders
of quantum mechanics, notably Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, Paul Dirac,
Werner Heisenberg—possibly even Albert Einstein. In this hermeneutical move,
the ‘observer’ is ‘embodied consciousness,’ and ‘measure-numbers’ represent
‘observable presence.’ The new theoretical synthesis of physics is a representation

NOTES ON SOURCES: Some of the sources used in this paper are listed in the references below.
Most of the referenced Heelan texts can be found on the website, https://gushare.georgetown.edu/
heelanp/ or http://fordham.bepress.com/phil_research/. In the field of mathematics and theoretical
physics, I have learned from my physics mentors: from the lectures of Erwin Schrödinger and John
Synge on classical non-Euclidean geometries, and from personal communications with and the
publications of Nobelists Eugene Wigner (cf. 1963, 1967) and Werner Heisenberg (cf. 1950) on the
role of subjectivity in assessing the rationality of the quantum theory. I have also profited from
discussions on cognitive science with Karl Pribram and his writings (cf. 1971, 1991) on the build-
ing of a scientific model of human embodied consciousness. In linguistics, I have learnt much
about language from my colleague in German Linguistics, Heidi Byrnes at Georgetown University.
I owe a special debt to Babette Babich, at Fordham University, my former student, who has been a
constant partner in scholarship for many years. These, among many others too numerous to men-
tion, are the principal dialogical and dialectical sources of the rational heuristic I have used to
explore the nature of the human consciousness and the Spirit that raises it up above pure Nature.
P.A. Heelan (*)
William Gaston Professor of Philosophy
Georgetown University, Georgetown, USA
e-mail: Babich@fordham.edu

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 91

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_7,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
92 P.A. Heelan

of a physical system as a dynamic Hilbert Vector Space; empirical ‘observables’

are represented by projection operators, each of which maps a subspace of
definite measurable values. Among these projection operators, some pairs are
‘complementary’ and share a common subspace of the Hilbert Space where they
can be precisely measured together in a common laboratory setting. Some pairs,
however, are ‘non-complementary’ and do not share a common subspace; these lead
to Uncertainty Principles of the quantum mechanical kind. The quantum notion of
an “observable” introduces into the discursive language of physics the common
sense lifeworld notion of “contextuality.” This analysis completes Husserl’s
analysis of science in the Crisis, so well articulated and developed by Kockelmans
(See Kockelmans’ contributions to the phenomenology of natural science in
Kockelmans and Kisiel (1970)).

1 Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Quantum Theory

It is only when we arrive at consciousness as the universal medium of access of whatever

exists and has value, including the lifeworld itself, that our research for foundations reaches
its final destination. In other words, our ontology of the lifeworld reaches its ultimate
foundation only in the constitutive analyses of transcendental phenomenology.
— Joseph Kockelmans1

Physicists and philosophers of science are persuaded that epistemologically

quantum mechanics departs radically from classical physics. Few, however, take
seriously the insight of three of the founders of quantum physics—Erwin
Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg, and Eugene Wigner2—that the strangeness of
quantum physics involves the emergent epistemological and ontological role of
embodied human consciousness in the process of measurement.
I am reminded of the following story told to me by Heisenberg in 1965. In April,
1926, before his paper on the Uncertainty Principles in Quantum Mechanics was
published, Albert Einstein invited him to speak to the senior physicists in Berlin on
this topic; Einstein presided at the meeting and, when Heisenberg had concluded
his presentation, he spoke saying that all this uncertainty talk was nonsense.
Much taken aback, Heisenberg responded that he was only applying the principle
Einstein himself used in his 1905 relativity paper—that the measure-numbers of
the mathematical theory described reality. To this, Einstein responded: “The

1
Ibid, 67.
2
I am a physicist who studied (1946–1948) relativistic cosmology with Erwin Schrödinger and
John Synge at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies; later I studied as a post-doc (1960–1962)
in high-energy quantum physics with Eugene Wigner at Princeton; and in 1962–1964, I visited
frequently with Werner Heisenberg in Munich while writing a book on Heisenberg’s philosophy of
science (Heelan 1965). Out of my many discussions with them, I developed an interest in the way
these three Nobel Prize physicists, interested in Husserl’s philosophy, attributed a fundamental role
to human consciousness in quantum physics.
Consciousness, Quantum Physics, and Hermeneutical Phenomenology 93

measure-number is to that which is measured as the number on your cloakroom

ticket is to your overcoat—it tells you nothing about your overcoat.” Einstein then
invited Heisenberg to walk with him while they discussed the problem of quantum
uncertainty. They walked and talked for an hour, and when they returned to the
conference room, those who awaited their return asked what the outcome was.
Einstein replied that he and Heisenberg now understood one another and were in
agreement. When pressed to state what their agreement was, Einstein refused to
speak about it. At that moment I asked Heisenberg what was their agreement. He
replied that a distinction has to be made between the ‘presence’ of the ‘real’ and any
‘intuition’ that may have accompanied the sense of presence. I will return to this
topic below. The aim of this paper is to reflect on and attempt to articulate the content
of the agreement between Heisenberg and Einstein on that occasion in 1926.
In the tradition of classical physics, the observer is a disembodied mind external
to nature, and the objective essence of nature is revealed in the mathematical
intuition of its structure. In quantum mechanics, however, the observer is not a
disembodied mind, nor does the mathematical intuition represent an ‘objective’
presence but the probability of a presence.3 In quantum mechanics, the observer is a
human consciousness embodied in instruments that serve as a bodily extension of
the observer’s embodiment. The empirical observations of quantum physics
consequently involve a bilateral relation between the observer’s enhanced embodied
consciousness (on the subject side) and what is observed (on the object side), each
having its place and context within the lifeworld of Nature as culture.4 The concepts
and judgments of quantum physics consequently are contextualized subjectively
and objectively by the ‘natural world’ as structured by science.
Human consciousness makes meanings from its sensory engagement with nature
through practices that are learned and later function at an unconscious anticipatory
intentional level.5 For a deeper understanding of this process, I draw, not from
Carnap’s logical empiricism, but from the post-kantian German philosophies con-
temporary with the development of quantum mechanics. While quantum mechanics
was taking shape in Göttingen, Leipzig, and Munich, where Heisenberg studied and
worked, the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl was academically prominent.
Later, Heisenberg was also one of a circle of professional scientific intellectuals
who met regularly during the summer with Martin Heidegger in the Black Forest.6
In Germany, phenomenology and hermeneutics were wissenschaftlich approaches
to psychology, art, literature, music, and natural science, establishing them both
as ‘scientific’ and ‘philosophical,’ on a par academically with the role of logic
and analysis in the contemporary USA.7 In addition to Husserl and Heidegger,

3
See Kockelmans (1970a, c) in Kockelmans and Kisiel (1970).
4
See ibid, Kockelmans (1970b).
5
See ibid, Kockelmans and Kisiel (1970).
6
Heisenberg contributed an essay on the Uncertainty Principle to a Festschrift to honor Heidegger
on his 70th birthday.
7
See Kisiel (1970a, b) in Kockelmans and Kisiel (1970).
94 P.A. Heelan

Dilthey’s work on history, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work on perception,8 and

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s work on literature and art also inspired a strong current in
European academic culture before and after the war. These currents of thought also
inspired Michael Polanyi, who was Wigner’s scientific mentor. Looking back on his
life as a physicist, Wigner told his chronicler, Andrew Szanton:
My chief scientific interest in the last twenty years has been to somehow extend theoretical
physics into the realm of consciousness.… Consciousness is beautifully complex. It has
never been properly described, certainly not by physics and mathematics. It is shrouded in
mysteries. And what I know of philosophy and psychology suggests that these disciplines
have never defined consciousness either. (Szanton 1992, p. 309).

2 Human Consciousness as the ‘Governor of Mental Life’

What is ‘human consciousness’? Few cognitive scientists are willing to define it,
perhaps, because a human subject trying to define it objectively leads to an infi-
nite series of recurrent questions! Human consciousness certainly processes
information signals—but so does Deep Blue, the IBM computer chess champion;
but, in addition, it has sensory experiences, produces new insights, tests for rel-
evant truth in the world, and makes free value-laden decisions on the basis of the
information it gets—Deep Blue lacks all of these. I think the best functional
account of human consciousness is given by the distinguished Canadian neuro-
psychologist, Merlin Donald. He calls it “The Governor of Mental Life” which
functions as the meaning-maker and manager in science, culture, and religion.
About this he wrote:
What consciousness is really about, at least in the human species … is much deeper than the
sensory stream. It is about building and sustaining mental models of reality, constructing
meaning, and asserting autonomous intermediate-term control over one’s thought process,
even without the extra clarity afforded by the explicit consensual system of language.
The engine of the symbolic mind, the one that ultimately generates language to serve its
own representational agenda, is much larger and more powerful than language, which is
after all its own (generally inadequate) invention.9

Meaning-making—otherwise called “meaning-constitution” or “intentional

activity”—is the making of concepts, predications, judgments against an appropri-
ate a priori background of lifeworld, context, and practices. They all involve
dialogically the specific subjective embodiment of the speaker as well as an
intended environmental context for the discourse. For scientific discourse, a
dialogical community lives in the context of a theoretical language and a scientific
laboratory. In this analysis, I follow the way of hermeneutical and phenomenological
thinking according to Edmund Husserl ([1952] 1989, 1966, [1901–1913] 1970a,

8
The terms “perception” and “observation” are used in this article as synomynous.
9
Donald (2001), 75.
Consciousness, Quantum Physics, and Hermeneutical Phenomenology 95

[1954] 1970b),10 Martin Heidegger (1962, 1967, 1982, 1995, 1999, 2002a, b),
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962), Kockelmans and Kisiel (1970), and others.11

3 Hermeneutics as the Universal and Transcendental Process

of Meaning-Making

The universal and transcendental process of meaning-making is a circular or cyclic

process that is often called the ‘hermeneutical circle/cycle.’12 Each circle—or
cycle—follows a sequence of four phases—a. experiencing/observing, b. theory-
making, c. theory-testing, and d. deciding—each phase giving access to new insights;
each cycle leading to a partially transformed beginning of a new cycle in which
further development is made. Each cycle revises and improves the previous cycles
of inquiry until the basic queries have been sufficiently explored dialogically.
To exemplify the process of the hermeneutical circle, I will tell the story of the
distinguished psychologist James J. Gibson’s discovery of the non-Euclidean
geometry of human vision while training young pilots to fly during the war. So
many of these young men killed themselves when landing their planes that he came
to suspect that the problem was not an engineering problem, but a human one related
to spatial vision. He suspected that ‘natural’ human vision systematically estimated
vertical altitudes differently from the way they are estimated by scientific measure-
ment. Thus he was led to the hypothesis that the visual space of humans had a
different geometry from the Euclidean. Some time in the early seventies, I was
invited by the MIT Psychology Department to speak on the occasion of the celebra-
tion of Gibson’s 70th birthday. I spoke about the work I was doing on the curved
Riemannian geometry of Van Gogh’s paintings and I spoke of the experimental
studies of von Helmholtz and others on the non-Euclidean geometries of visual
space.13 Gibson was pleased with my talk and responded by telling his story about
why so many student pilots killed themselves when trying to land their planes
because human vision without instruments is not adequate for flying. He said that
based on this experience, he formulated a rule—now universally mandatory for all
pilots—that, when landing a plane, they must rely exclusively on technological
guidance, such as on-board instruments, instructions from the airport tower—or

10
For an excellent guide to Husserl, see Welton (2000).
11
All of these are linked with the ancient Greek and scholastic tradition through Bernard Lonergan’s
reflection on the transcendental process of meaning-making, and the importance of what he calls,
‘interiority’ Lonergan ([1957] 1992, [1972] 1990); ‘interiority’ is the awareness of oneself as being
an embodied consciousness and as such, the Governor of one’s Mental Life.
12
See Kisiel (1970b); also Heidegger (1962). The scholastic tradition is a bridge that connects the
classical tradition and phenomenology; for this reason, I find Bernard Lonergan helpful; see
Lonergan ([1957] 1992).
13
See Heelan (1983/1987).
96 P.A. Heelan

lacking these—they must follow the now standard “Gibsonian” markings on the
ground approaching the airport.14
The four phases of the hermeneutical circle can easily be discerned when applied
to Gibson’s story: the experience of pilots’ failures15; the theory/hypothesis of
non-Euclidean vision; the theory-testing in experimental studies of binocular visual
geometry16; and the decision to apply the consequences of binocular visual
geometry to piloting planes.17
In his reflections on visual space, Gibson also asked himself about binocular
vision in the context of human evolutionary history—whether a ‘natural’ binocular
space, which is curved and of finite size, would have served early human communi-
ties in their ‘natural’ environment better than an infinite flat Euclidean space to
which modern culture is accustomed. He concluded that ‘natural’ binocular curved
visual space would be more useful, first because it highlights a nearby quasi-
Euclidean frontal zone for good eye-hand coordination, while more distant objects
are projected without depth onto the visual dome, the one that rests on the horizon
and rises to become the background for the clouds during the day and the stars during
the night. From the point of view of cognitive science, however, the account of
pure vision given above seems to be consistent with the dual visual neurological
pathways that neuroscientists have found.18 For our early ancestors, however, and
for ourselves today—should we strip away what science teaches us—the ‘natural’
meaning of pure vision is neither Galilean nor Einsteinian, but what comes from
Grimm’s fairy tales.19
Perhaps of even greater critical importance is the hermeneutical criticism of
classical scientific research on human vision—such as Galileo’s—in overlooking
the dual role played by light—for light is a physical medium subject to electro-
magnetic laws and it also carries a visual message about the environment. This
dual function is often overlooked and—in the familiar words of Marshal
McLuhan—“the medium is the message.” The objects of visual experiences—
what we see—are not just the photons/rays of light falling on the retina but the

14
See Gibson (1979).
15
Ibid.
16
See Heelan (1983/1988), passim, and the Appendix in which the history of the geometry of
curved visual spaces is presented.
17
Gibson found the hypothesis was reasonable in the light of biological evolution; that many every-
day phenomena seemed to support it, and that the laboratory scientific made by H. von Helmholtz
(c. 1876) and others such as R. Luneburg, A. Blank, T. Indow, J. M. Foley and others provide posi-
tive evidence.
18
Jacob and Jeannerod (2003), Jacob (1988), Pribram (1991).
19
The Visual Space of our early human ancestors was constituted by a nearby virtually Euclidean
zone that Arnheim (1974) called the ‘Newtonian Oasis,’ and a far zone that surrounds it where the
depth of field diminishes rapidly to zero Heelan (1972, 1983, [1983] 1988), Part I and Appendix;
Luneburg (1947, 1985). In theory, the non-Euclidean geometry of natural human visual space can
be derived a priori from stereoscopy. The characteristics of this general structure have been con-
firmed by testing (Luneburg 1947, 1895 ; Heelan 1972, 1983, [1983] 1988).
Consciousness, Quantum Physics, and Hermeneutical Phenomenology 97

information they carry about the environment; what the photons/rays show is not
themselves but the presence of distant three-dimensional environmental bodies
which are their source. As human visual organs receive the incoming stream of
photonic messengers, they draw from them environmental information appropri-
ate for action. Among such action are the coordination of hands, eyes, limb
movements, and possibly instrumental controls.20 As physical entities the pho-
ton-messengers move in Galilean/Euclidean physical space, but they invite inter-
pretation by human embodied consciousness, who consequently sees an
illuminated space of physical objects in the curved visual space inherited from
our biological ancestors. In this curved space, there is a local privileged zone
where hand–eye coordination is quasi-Euclidean. Distant objects, however, are
given only in superficial profiles on the surrounding celestial dome. The geomet-
ric family of such visual spaces, as I have said, can be inferred a priori from the
theoretical treatment of binocular stereoscopic vision. The curvature of such
visual spaces plays an active—and often disconcerting and dangerous role—
particularly, in engineered environments, such as modern highways, and—as
Gibson found—in guiding planes to safe airport landings. The conclusion that
Gibson came to was, that ‘natural’ human vision was shaped for terrestrial living
and not for living in the air like birds.
The hermeneutical circle, as I have said, is the structure of the transcendental
rationality of dynamic human consciousness.21 This is not simply what is usually
understood as Enlightenment Reason or objective science. Self-awareness of this
transcendental dynamic embodied function constitutes a rare virtue that Bernard
Lonergan calls ‘interiority’22 which is discernable in the writings of ancient and
modern authors, from Plato and Aristotle to Aquinas, and up to the present time.
Heraclitus once said that human consciousness loves to hide itself—a sentiment
shared with many psychologists, cognitive scientists, social scientists, physicists,
and philosophers.23 Such a sense of the embodied-self-in-the-world is reflected in a
special way in the phenomenological writings of Husserl, particularly in his later
works, also in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1962), and in
Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927/1962).
‘Interiority’ ts a virtue of human consciousness that is also exemplified in the
views of at least the four physicists I mentioned at the head of this article,
namely, Schrödinger, Wigner, Dirac, and Heisenberg. ‘Interiority’ makes deep
demands on philosophers and cognitive scientists, especially on those concerned
with the rationality of contemporary physics, cognitive science, ethics, and reli-
gious faith.

20
See Berthoz and Petit (2008).
21
See Heelan (1994, 1998).
22
See Lonergan (1957/1992).
23
See Hadot (2006), Chap. 1.
98 P.A. Heelan

4 The Governor of Mental Life and Meaning-Making

The Governor of Mental Life—human consciousness—makes meanings of different

kinds. We turn next to meaning-making in the natural sciences. Many different
kinds of meanings are made in the natural sciences, such as concept and category
formation, theory formation, theory testing in the laboratory, and theory affirming.
About concept/category24 formation: We ask first: What are ‘concepts’ ontologically?
How are they constituted? Are they ‘local/contextual’ invariants/likenesses/
symmetries25 of an a posteriori set of particular empirical instances/events held in
the memory as alike in some categorical way and likely to be changeable over time?
Or are they a priori ‘unchangeable/transcendental’ ideals, expressed, say, in mathe-
matics or pure logic, with respect to which any empirical instance/event absolutely
and necessarily conforms?
Whatever concepts are, and however constituted, they are represented by math-
ematical and linguistic media of communication: It is then necessary to distinguish
the two uses of the representing medium: the medium as messenger, and the infor-
mation carried by the messenger for delivery to appropriate interpreters—speakers
and hearers. The nub of Heisenberg’s and Einstein’s problem referred to above was
how to distinguish and relate the medium and the message in order to make sense of
the quantum Uncertainty Principles.
About theory formation: In particular, what are the distinguishing linguistic roles of
mathematics and logic in the formation and use of theory? In terms of “grammar”
and “lexicon,” the ‘lexicon’ of a science refers to what is ‘observable’ in the process
of measurement, and the ‘grammar’ of the science refers to its mathematical
theoretical structure where ‘intuition’ has its place.
About theory testing: Theory testing leaves a residue of meaning uncertainty due to
the contingency of empirical evidence. Contingency is a function of the variety of
possible contextual26 circumstances implicitly intended in the instantiation of an
‘observable,’ such as the evidentiary horizon of the laboratory, the social demand
for cultural and institutional agreement, the historical dimension of languages,
practices, cultures, institutions, etc. These implicate social, cultural, and historical
aspects of natural science, as well as, say, the philosophical and theological culture
of the local environment. They demand of the speakers/hearers an attitude of
continual prudent review and revision. The natural sciences are evidently not
finished products. Ethical, aesthetic, and religious meaning-making, as well as
other value-added aspects of decision-making, serve to condition the choices of the
inquirer as well as the chosen circumstances of the inquiry.

24
For the purposes of this paper, I do not distinguish between “concept” and “category.”
25
I use the terms “invariant,” “likeness,” and “symmetry” interchangeably; they define the same
group-theoretical quality which remains constant despite merely perspectival changes—
represented usually by group-theoretic transformation laws of space and time.
26
See Heelan (1974, 2003) and Hasan (2010).
Consciousness, Quantum Physics, and Hermeneutical Phenomenology 99

The complex canvas sketched out above is large, but I intend to cover just as
much as is necessary to show how phenomenological and hermeneutical consider-
ations force one to move beyond current science-speak to find the observable
(ontological) reality that science noetically and epistemologically intends.27
Evolutionary Concept/Category Formation: Descriptive category formation is part
of the general story of human evolution! What is it about category-making that makes
the human sciences hide the emergence of human consciousness in the story of evo-
lution? Human infants do not enter the world conscious of knowing anything about
it, but they enter equipped with all that is necessary to learn from their environment.
They learn from adults around them by ‘reading their minds,’ communicating by
‘mimicry,’ and later by ‘language,’ exploring their environment for observable
content, and eventually expressing what they mean in the language of the family or
caregivers. Finally, they learn to collaborate with their family and caregivers who by
their natural authority introduce them to their local world, and to the means to share
it, and to represent it through language as members of a human community.28
Concept/Category Formation of Observable Objects: The process of observation
(perceptual recognition) supposes a descriptive category that is associated with a
lexical name, an observational praxis, and a standard sensory medium of representa-
tion. How is the category that goes with that lexical name constructed? A Husserlean
phenomenological analysis29 would describe its intentional constitution as the cre-
ation or recognition of a symmetry (an invariant and repeatable pattern or likeness)
present in a set of individuals ‘given’ to observation amid the flux of sensations by
the human learned art of interpreting visual stimuli.30 Learning of this kind is an
interpretative/hermeneutical process structured both by nature and by culture.31 It is
more primitive than, say, the reading of a text, since the reading of semiotic textual
signs already presupposes an acquired cultural resource from which to draw. One
function, then, of the Governor of Mental Life is to reveal an intuited meaningful
symmetry that is ‘given’ in observation because ‘found’ in a flux of local embodied
sensation within a local enframing practical context of observer and observed. The
mathematical structure in this account supposes an intuited group-theoretic sym-
metry, made present by a learned praxis of observing, by rendering meaningful by
‘interpretation,’ the sensory flux. Something—let us call it a “symmetry”—is found

27
Kisiel and Kockelmans address these philosophical questions from within the language of
Husserl and Heidegger; I approach them here from the scientific side, showing how scientists have
failed to reach out hermeneutically beyond their models and their “data” in order to re-discover
what is ontologically present but hidden in the measured “datum”; ref. Kisiel and Kockelmans
(1970), especially Kisiel (1970c) and Kockelmans (1970b).
28
See Tomasello (1999).
29
See Jacob and Jeannerod (2003), Jacob (1988), Pribram (1991).
30
Husserl makes an important distinction between (1).‘experience’ which is intentional in relation
to ontological reality and the core of the pure phenomenology of experience, and (2). ‘experience’
which is ‘inner consciousness/perception’ and the content of the former, see Husserl (1970a),
Investigation V, 542–545. See also Cassirer (1944).
31
See Tomasello (1999).
100 P.A. Heelan

and defined by a common likeness among the set of canonical exemplars, chosen to
be held in memory. Each canonical exemplar held in memory is related to the others
then as (Husserlian) ‘profiles’ of the same symmetry. The members of the canonical
exemplifying set are updated periodically, with new exemplars replacing old ones,
leading thereby to a shift in the meaning of the symmetry. The category is then
defined by the symmetry exemplified by an appropriate set of canonical particulars
(‘profiles’). The category represents an invariant that involves the observer, a
canonical set of observed exemplars in memory, and a standard enframing of physical
and cultural context.
However, canonical exemplars which exemplify a particular symmetry, say,
being a ‘ball,’ can nevertheless fail to exemplify other symmetries, such as “round-
ness”—for a ‘football’ (in the USA and in the case of rugby in the UK) is not round,
though it is round in the rest of the world. The category of ‘ball’ then has an
uncertainty relation to ‘roundness.’
Concept/Category Formation by Measurement: Measurement gives a ‘numbered
datum.’ Returning to the Heisenberg/Einstein problem referred to above, a num-
bered datum in quantum physics could be no more than a present messenger. The
message it carries, however, has to be ‘read’ from the messenger-taken-as-code,
the messenger as ‘information.’ To get the message from the information, the coded
message has to be ‘interpreted.’ In the case of a measurement, the message is
the datum; the datum is real, and present in the laboratory (together with the other
theoretical observables functionally related to it). However, nothing more is com-
municated by the messenger-as-code than the ontological presence in the laboratory
of the ‘observable’ —now as the ‘observed.’ But while ‘observation’ is generally
accompanied by the intuition of place, shape, size, color, etc. these common
lifeworld qualities are absent and seemingly irrelevant. An act of quantum measure-
ment then is an ‘observational’ act, performed by an ‘observer’ conscious of being
embodied in the laboratory, but blind to the common sensual intuitions of the
lifeworld; in the paradigmatic way, the quantum observer ‘embodied’ in the laboratory
has the “consciousness of a blind man” ‘embodied’ in his cane, inhabiting it with his
bodily sensibility, and capable, for instance, of intuiting his local lifeworld space,
but incapable of intuiting its colors.32

5 The Role of Theory and Laboratory Context

in Meaning-Making

Pure Mathematics, Anschaulichkeit/intuition, Meaning Uncertainty: Puremathe-

matics is the pure science of meaningful structure, it is a set of defined formal relation-
ships among a lexicon of postulated mathematical entities—whether numbers, figures,
or patterns—that inhabit the space of the mathematical (algebraic or geometrical)

32
See Merleau-Ponty (1962), Heelan ([1983] 1988).
Consciousness, Quantum Physics, and Hermeneutical Phenomenology 101

imagination. These mathematical entities exist only as intuited—in German, as

anschaulich—in the esthetic space of the mathematical logic or imagination.
Theoretical Physics and Mathematical Models in Physics: The essence of
modern science is historically the mathematizing of the measured world.
Mathematical points, lines, and surfaces, however, are not empirical bodies in the
world; they are pure—non-empirical—elements defined within mathematical
intuition by algebraic or geometric functions. In relation to the real sensible world,
an intuited representation in the imagination is no more than a semiotic element like
a lexical word of text or like a syntactical structure of grammar.33 It can be used,
however, in a predication of experience the way a pure concept is used; such a
predication instantiates the mathematical representation of a physical exemplar.
How is this done? A theoretical computation is a function in the field of mathe-
matics. The classical mathematical field is the field of Anschaulichkeit, the field of
logical structures and functions intuitable in Space and Time as imagined.34
Mathematical formulas can be used to symbolize operations in the ‘real’ sensible
world, usually through the instrumentality of measurement, thereby associating a
network of measure-numbers with a network of related and named physical proper-
ties. Through such a mathematical model, real aspects of the empirical spatio-temporal
world of human culture can be ordered and controlled.35
As a function related to human evolution, mathematical intuition is a cultural
development of the primordial human ability to see, hear, touch, taste, and feel the
world perceptually by recognizing recurrent patterns in the sensory flux, such as
the numbers—measure-numbers—supplied by a laboratory measurement. These
real patterns of measure-numbers, accessible by measurement, can then be used to
represent an ontological entity—sometimes misleadingly called a ‘theoretical
entity.’ The measure-number is not ‘what is meant,’ it is itself no more than a
messenger that is a symbol of the empirical presence of something real in the
space-time of the laboratory but which possibly is not imaginable or intuitable.
Observation in this way is organized mathematically by measurement as a medium
to explore ‘what is’ but what may not be imaginable/intuitable in any of the space-
times with which we are familiar. Mathematics as coding introduces the essential
evolutionary function of mathematics which has its own esthetic and practical
value while it also has the capacity to point beyond itself to something ontological.
Though mathematics has a transcendent esthetic beauty for professional mathema-
ticians, it is not a divine language, as some distinguished physicists have piously
speculated. It certainly is a human language as its history shows; it is one, however,
that serves rather the function of a ‘grammar’ than that of a ‘lexicon,’ and is closely
connected with the way we embodied humans organize our world by number
codes, naming recurrent patterns among exemplars despite evident differences
among them that produce uncertainties.

33
See Hasan (2010). For a more phenomenological presentation, see Kockelmans (1970a) in
Kockelmans and Kisiel (1970).
34
For the hermeneutic foundations of mathematics, it is worth looking at Lakoff and Nunez (2000).
35
See Ryckman (2005), Heelan (2003, 2004).
102 P.A. Heelan

Among the basic organizational skills we have is the native ability to find patterns
in the sensory flux to which we assign a meaning that is public, and shared through
language (or a language substitute) with our cultural community.36 Such shared and
recurrent meanings are based on two kinds of recognized patterns in the sensory
flux: anschaulich (intuitively meaningful) space-time patterns, and intensional,37
(categorically meaningful). The former is the symmetry (invariant) that characterizes
abstract mathematical intuitions that are universally valid in principle for all
mathematically oriented communities; the latter is the symmetry (invariant) that
characterizes observation and measurement, both of which are contextualized by
local empirical circumstances, communities, needs, and goals.
Classical physics is the natural science which has faith in assuming that the
observational world is simply the instantiation of culture-free a priori ideal mathe-
matical objects. It is clear, however, that in certain situations elementary particles
have to be treated differently from geometric points in space and time. Quantum
physics seems to have good theoretical and experimental reasons for giving up faith
in the identity of physics with mathematics.38
This should not have been a surprising discovery in the context of human evolu-
tion, since there is little likelihood that human visual and tactile perception would
have been shaped by any other practices than those that coordinate the local actions
of eyes, ears, hands, and legs which privilege a range of what turns out to be non-
Euclidean finite visual spaces.39 Cosmological matters of human interest, such as
seasonal and weather changes, were treated by reading the signs in the heavens and
in other ways; while matters of health and nourishment were managed by taste and
smell, and by reading Nature’s ‘signatures’ in plants and animals. There is then no
a priori reason from evolutionary principles to justify universal scientific trust in the
Anschaulichkeit criterion of the modern scientific human imagination. Such a trust
was inherited mostly from the early modern period of European cultural history
when the mathematization of the physical world—small, medium, and large—came
to be incautiously accepted as fundamental. In recent times, it has gradually become
evident that the very small and the very large need their own lexicon—linked pos-
sibly to a common overarching transcendental ‘grammar.’ An important contribution

36
For the grammar of scientific discourse, see Rheinberger (1997), Berthoz and Petit (2008), and
also below.
37
The terms ‘extension’ and ‘intension’ belong to mathematics and classical logic; extension
connotes quantitative meanings (numbered or spatio-temporal), intension connotes cognitional
(conceptual, logical) meanings. However, contrast this with the term ‘intention,’ differing slightly
in spelling, on which account it is regularly confused with ‘intension.’ ‘Intention’ connotes purpose
or intent and is related to action and experience. A derivative term, ‘intentionality,’ is central to a
kind of philosophy that deals with how the meanings we make involve human action and
experience. This is the philosophical ‘phenomenology’ associated with Edmund Husserl, Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, and Martin Heidegger.
38
See Heelan (1965, 1974, 1975, 1979, 1987, 1988).
39
See Heelan ([1983] 1988), Appendix.
Consciousness, Quantum Physics, and Hermeneutical Phenomenology 103

to this end was made by Wigner and others40 in introducing (what is now called) the
‘standard’ form of the quantum theory; this is a Hilbert (infinite-dimensional vector)
representation of Space that functions like a ‘grammar’ in which both classical and
quantum entities can be represented, the classical by universal symmetries, and the
quantum by local contextual symmetries.41
Hilbert Vector Space as the Grammar of a Science: Operators on Hilbert Space
vectors represent practical measurement procedures that link human consciousness
observationally with the micro-systems represented by the vectors in a Hilbert
Space.42 The ‘grammar’ of those micro-systems represents not ‘what is,’ but how
‘what is’ is structured and structurally related. The scientific world we live in is then
constituted existentially of universal ‘absolute’ symmetries, such as free classical
entities, and ‘local contextual symmetries’; this is the micro-structure of the labora-
tory world. Quantum physics has discovered a strange new property of spin that
reaches across all Space and Time to function as a global link among micro-systems
in cosmic nature. This global linkage exemplifies one of the kinds of global
“entanglement”43 in the scientific world. Such properties, while they stretch the
powers of scientific intuition and observation beyond their natural (instrument free)
human limits, serve to supply the intelligible foundation for the difference between
the stable objects familiar in the everyday world we live in, and the instability of its
dynamic foundations. Classical Space and Time can be seen in this perspective as
the invariant (or symmetry) of a stable, but historically changing, human environ-
ment, rather than an invariant of the pre-existing unstable foundational world, the
existence of which humans have come to recognize only lately. Other spaces, such
as the variety of cultural visual and musical spaces in the course of historical time,
belong to the domain of local contextual spaces and times. Quantum entities—as we
know them today—seem to belong contextually to the unstable dynamic foundation
of stable local historical cultural worlds.
How then are we to understand and represent to ourselves the ‘quantum
micro-realities’ that appear fleetingly in laboratory experiments, or the anomalous
‘cosmological macro-realities’—such as ‘dark matter’ and ‘dark energy’—that
appear in astronomical studies of the cosmos? Each makes its ontological ‘presence’
known in the laboratory where its measure-numbers appear. According to Heisenberg
and Einstein (see above), however, the measure-number is no more than a ‘code for
presence’ of what Heisenberg called “the observable,” and not a ‘description’ of
what exists ontologically. The ontology then—if knowable—has to be expressed in
a (more) fundamental grammatical/mathematical language—(let us call it) “F-space-
time”—which is ‘beyond’ and ‘deeper than’ the ‘mathematical space-time’ of labo-
ratory measurement. ‘What is’—namely, the observable—is not describable in the
space-time occupied by the messenger-lexicon, but (presumably) in some currently

40
See Wigner (1962, 1963, 1967), also Wheeler and Zurek (1983), Dirac (1930), von Neumann
(1955).
41
See Heelan (1974, 1979), Bracken (2003).
42
See Wheeler and Zurek (1983), Heelan (2004).
43
See Aczel (2001), Shimony (1997), Gernert (2005).
104 P.A. Heelan

unknown “F-space-time,” which is the context of the lexicon’s message; F-space-time

would then be the (currently unknown) foundational ‘grammar’ for the lexicon’s
message-language.
In summary, in the present state of micro- and cosmo-physics, both affirm the
ontological laboratory presence of fundamental physical systems, but fail to be
able to describe them ontologically in any current intuitive version of laboratory
space-times. Let us suppose that there is yet a more fundamental logical and episte-
mological space-time beyond that of any current laboratory—F-space-time—in
which those entities can be described, and about which the measure-numbers
‘speak.’ Such a fundamental space-time would (presumably) continue to be charac-
terized by (grammar-based) epistemological intuition regarding the context of that
about which the measure-numbers ‘speak.’
This conclusion agrees with the outcome reached by Heisenberg and Einstein
in Berlin in 1926. They agreed that the laboratory measure-numbers indicate the
ontological presence of a micro-system—the ‘observable’—within a context of
measurement that does not provide an ontological description of the ‘observable’
micro-system in terms of the space-time of the measuring laboratory. What does the
latter part of this claim mean?
In a phenomenological analysis, it means first, that the laboratory with its
measuring instruments belongs to ‘the extended body’ of the observer, and thus, that
the observer is ‘the embodied human consciousness so extended.’ Consequently, the
observer lives in and through the laboratory measuring instruments as oriented
towards practice; this is the channel of his/her ‘noetic’ intentionality. Under such
circumstances, the measure-number becomes just a coded messenger, and like the
photons received by the eyes in seeing, the message delivered by the measure-
numbers is interpreted within the context of the measurement. In vision, it is not the
photons which are ‘observed’ by the culturally prepared viewer, but the illuminated
objects; so also in measurement, the measure-numbers are not what are ‘observed’
by the culturally prepared ‘observer’ but what they point to beyond themselves,
namely, the presence of micro-systems in the laboratory situation, unaccompanied,
however, by any intuitive description of them in the space-time of the laboratory.
Clearly then the ontology of quantum micro-entities in current quantum physics
is not defined by human intuition [Anschaulichkeit]. To the extent that mathematical
theory is the formal structural criterion of the ‘language of physics,’ its function is
closer to that of grammar in linguistics that structures the lexicon of the lifeworld
antecedent to observing and describing events in the lifeworld. The lexicon, how-
ever, names the categories of the things, actions, and values which exist for a local
dialogical community. The criterion of Anschaulichkeit then is not, in this historical
phase of human scientific culture, the basis of universal natural laws.
The Uncertainty of Meaning-making: ‘Thin’ versus ‘Thick’ Descriptions.44
1. ‘Thin’ description: Laboratory science and other abstractive academic disciplines
give thin descriptions. These are descriptions that are narrowly contextualized, and

44
See Geertz (1973), Chap. 1, and Williams (1985), 129–152.
Consciousness, Quantum Physics, and Hermeneutical Phenomenology 105

theoretically (abstractly) defined. The life of a modern scientific community,

shielded as it is from having to take account of the diversity of surrounding cul-
tures, horizons, agenda, styles, and goals, etc. is permeated with thin descriptions
2. ‘Thick’ description: Thick descriptions are practical ‘world-guided’ descrip-
tions of actions or events that take account of the local, historical, multi-con-
textual, and multicultural niches where dialogue takes place. Thick descriptions
permeate practical common life. Cultural knowledge is thick because it
involves inter-contextual discourse among speakers and hearers whose skill in
such discourse is not narrowly disciplinary but culturally dialogical. Aristotle
included it under the character of prudence, “phronesis.” This kind of discourse
requires respect for the complexity and diversity of issues and authorities that
characterize human cultural activity. The structure of the communicative
exchanges in this kind of discourse is more like that of quantum theory, that is,
one based on the choice of some relevant localized contextualized symmetry
shared by all parties to the discourse.

6 Dialogical Syntheses and the Grammar of Hilbert Space

‘Thick’ dialogical discourse is exemplified in the history of science, for example, in

the work of Ludwik Fleck (1979) who discovered the nature and source of the
venereal disease, syphilis. He narrates how this discovery came to him. It was by
re-interpreting a selection of old ‘facts’ from dialogical sources as diverse as ‘old
wives tales’ and odd pieces of popular medical lore, in addition to the outcomes of
his experimental work. He found in his community’s public memory many of the
ingredients from which he retrieved the insights which led him to define the two
new scientific facts that have made him famous: the disease now known as ‘syphilis,’
and the ‘spirochete’ that causes it.
Rational Dialogical Synthesis: Classical and Quantum Science. The initial conflict
between classical and quantum physics is a version of the pre-Socratic question:
If Nature hides behind classical physics, what of the Nature that hides behind
quantum physics? Can they be the same Nature? The key terms in the dispute often
seem to be ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity,’ but in fact the key notions relevant to the
transition from classical to quantum physics are ‘intuition’ [Anschaulichkeit] in
the mathematics of quantum physics and ‘measurement’ in data acquisition and
management. These terms, basic for understanding Niels Bohr’s notion of
‘complementarity,’45 are today clamoring for re-examination.
Wigner and Dirac proposed a resolution of the dialogical conflict: The grammar
and lexicon of both kinds of physics could be represented by a Hilbert Vector Space.
In such a Space, a quantum system in pure (unobserved) motion is represented as
developing under the influence of the appropriate Schrödinger equation; observed

45
See Beller (1999).
106 P.A. Heelan

data, however, are represented mathematically by the ‘eigen’ (definite proper)

values of the data operators acting on the state vector representation; these eigen
values are codes for observable states of the system.
A dialogical conflict arose about the ontological and epistemological criteria of
‘truth’ and ‘reality’ in physics; it came to focus on the question of how mathematical
intuition can be reconciled with observations to produce a coherent human under-
standing of the ‘natural’ world. Mathematical intuition is the a priori working space
of the theoretical physicist; it structures—as it were grammatically—the a priori of
the quantum narrative. Measurement defines the a posteriori observational space of
the experimental physicist by providing the codes—measure-numbers—which
enable the narrative of the observed data to be told. By introducing ‘complementar-
ity,’ Bohr fudged the answer by attributing reality—of a classical kind—to the pure
(ideal) objects of mathematical theory, while placing limits on observational
access to these classical realities by measurement. In Kantian (and Neokantian)
terms, mathematics describes the noumenon, while ‘complementarity’ restricts the
observed phenomenon.
Deeply involved in all of this is the function of mathematics in any pure (non-
empirical) discourse about the real world. In classical physics, its traditional
function was to provide the intuition—Anschaulichkeit—of a generalized universal
pure Space and Time that comprehensively ‘represented’ the physical world. This
intuition was the sole reality guarantee of the ‘representation’ provided by physical
theory. Such a view of mathematics goes back to Plato’s ‘likely story’ in the Timaeus.
Two millennia later, we find ourselves telling a different story!
Currently, there is a breakdown in dialogical common sense, because the tradi-
tional classical (Platonist) connection between a universal anschaulich space-time
and its atomic contents fails in both quantum and relativity physics. The break-
through was made by Eugene Wigner, Paul Dirac, and John von Neumann. Wigner46
was the key figure in this proclamation.47 He was trained as a physical chemist and
crystallographer, familiar with the chemical laboratory. His mentor was Michael
Polanyi48 also a physical chemist and later a well-known philosopher of science.
Wigner applied to quantum theory the kind of dynamic group theoretic mathematics
that crystallographers use to describe the production of crystalline symmetries in a
solution, and to explain mixed crystalline forms in ways that foreshadowed the
uncertainties of quantum physics. Wigner represented the state of a quantum system
by an infinite-dimensional vector in a Hilbert Space governed by a dynamic law of
change and development inspired by Schrödinger.
Wigner was Hilbert’s assistant at the University of Göttingen from 1927 till
1931. There he reflected deeply on the higher purpose of physics, it was “to elevate
the material side of the world, to make daily life easier for all the world’s people.”49

46
See Szanton (1992), 309.
47
Wigner was also the brother-in-law of Dirac, and a schoolboy chum of von Neumann in his
native Hungary.
48
See Scott and Moleski (2005).
49
Szanton (1992), 111; see also 308–309.
Consciousness, Quantum Physics, and Hermeneutical Phenomenology 107

The academic environment at the university was steeped in Husserl’s philosophy

and the notion of “invariance/symmetry” that defined its core. Wigner introduced
what is now the standard form of the quantum theory. In this representation, states
of the quantum system are represented by an infinite-dimensional vector in mathe-
matical Hilbert Space. In the new mathematical representation, observables—
properties of the system empirically accessible—are represented by projection
operators on the Hilbert Space. A projection operator generates a subspace of the
Hilbert Space in which the relevant observable has a definite (‘eigen’) value. Other
observables applied to this subspace are permitted to have definite values provided
their projection operators are compatible with it (by algebraic commutation), but
not otherwise. What is new about the Hilbert Space representation is its capacity to
represent and encode contextuality: pairs of observables which share a common
context can be measured together, while pairs which do not share a common con-
text, cannot be measured together with certainty. Relative then to quantum systems,
observables are context-dependent; some pairs can be measured accurately together,
other pairs cannot be measured accurately together and suffer uncertainty. The great
achievement of Wigner and Dirac was to generate a mathematical representation of
the context-dependency of observables in quantum mechanics.50
In the standard [Hilbert Vector Space] view of quantum physics, the ‘properties’
of physical objects are expressed as a combination of locally context-dependent
‘observables’ (represented by contextual ‘invariants’ or ‘symmetries’) within the
universal symmetry group of space-time. Classical physics knows nothing about,
and ignores local context-dependent properties. Hilbert Space quantum physics
revolutionized the science of physics because, by allowing for different local and
mutually incompatible contexts or horizons of empirical research, the physicist can
unify her search by drawing on a broader heuristic question: whether the unknown
X (that is sought) defines a universal symmetry of the Hilbert Space or a local
context-dependent symmetry—representing the relevant subspace—of the Hilbert
Space. If I am researching a local symmetry, then I must design the kind of
laboratory bench that allows me to observe the context-dependent effects of the
local symmetry. The real world model now unifies both universal and local symmetries
in a common synthesis.
The synthesis takes note of the presence and role of the embodied consciousness
of the local observer as it functions in the measurement process, and who by choice
and agency enters into the definition of the local group theoretic symmetry. Quantum
physics then has to recognize the dependence of observables on the context-
dependent physical platform of the chosen laboratory bench, insofar as the labora-
tory bench is an extension of the embodied character of the consciousness of the
scientific observer. In contrast with observations in classical physics, observations
in quantum mechanics from different local physical platforms (represented by
different subspaces of the Hilbert Space) do not simply add up to a coherent objective
culture-free scientific account.

50
For these insights, Dirac received the Nobel Prize in physics in 1933; Wigner, for his part, in
1963.
108 P.A. Heelan

One consequence is that in quantum physics, it is not possible in principle to give

a comprehensive empirical description of a unified and objective ‘world’ for all
observers. There is no more than a unified and comprehensive grammar of the pure
world-for-any-observer—namely, the Hilbert Space with its systems of vectors and
operators; but for any individual observer, the observables of the world constitute
context-dependent branches peculiar to that observer and that observer’s choice of
what to measure. All such knowledge is partial, relative, scientific, but culturally
perspectival.
Is this, you ask, the little we are left with when natural science promised so much
more? We should not forget that the little we know of the quantum world is accom-
panied by the bonus of knowing something about ourselves—namely, awareness of
the interiority of the work of human consciousness embodied in the process of sci-
entific measurement, just as in every act of perception/observation. This reflection
warns us that we are an evolutionary product of Nature and cannot assume that we
can study Nature ‘objectively’ from beyond the horizon of Nature. We rule Nature
from within Nature—not as monarchs of Nature—but as its gardeners.

7 Is a Theory of Human Consciousness?

Phenomenology is concerned with human consciousness. Human consciousness,

the Governor of Mental Life, is the agent that produces and recognizes the categories
for a strict theoretical science. Can human consciousness produce the category to
define itself?
Human consciousness produces categories and recognizes instances of the
various categories by becoming aware of recursive patterns of form and function in
the sensory flux. If the only source of categorial knowledge is the embodied sensory
flux, then the question becomes: Has human consciousness access to the kind of
embodied sensory flux that reveals the category to which human consciousness
belongs? A category is a‘symmetry’ (‘invariant’ or ‘property’) among a core set of
embodied exemplars; it is normative for all instances of its kind; a categorial sym-
metry is theoretical to the extent that elements of the set can substitute for one
another as exemplars of the symmetry. Human consciousness is peculiar in that
while we have no trouble in practice recognizing exemplars of human conscious-
ness—we call them “persons”—we are nevertheless hesitant to say that they can
substitute for one another under a ‘category’ of ‘persons,’ in the way we count
instances of cups, saucers, birds, and beasts. Persons can substitute for one another
in specific ways, as car buyers, as music lovers, as sports’ fans, as Democrats, as
Republicans, Yes! but … as ‘human consciousnesses’? No! because people do not
share their personal identity. Personal identity is expressed existentially in the
individual’s living ‘interiority’ or ‘being-in-the world.’ If others are ‘persons’ like
me, they will be fundamentally different knowers and doers, though sharing many
cultural contexts. Isn’t this then what it means to understand oneself as a person, and
as an exemplar of human consciousness? But this is not a categorial understanding
of human consciousness, for there are few if any universally true and absolute
Consciousness, Quantum Physics, and Hermeneutical Phenomenology 109

deductive inferences that can be drawn from the descriptions of individual persons.
Phenomenology, as the study of human consciousness, leads to a theoretical study
of the dynamic, normative structures of intentionality, meaning-making, and
decision-making, but not to the existential choices and practices that individually
shape the human consciousness that is a Governor of Mental Life.

8 Recapitulation

To summarize what has been said in this paper: This paper seeks to exemplify how
hermeneutical phenomenology can analyze the implicit meaning and context of the
natural sciences, in particular the epistemological and ontological problems of
quantum physics. In this light quantum physics is shown to be fundamentally a return
from the transcendental world of classical physics to the lifeworld of human experi-
ence, in which the contextuality of scientific discourse is exemplified in observation,
and the human subject becomes the human embodied consciousness of the observer
which mediates the epistemic engagement with the ontology of the observed datum.
New insight is given on the deeper meaning of the quantum uncertainty principles
when examined philosophically from the viewpoint of hermeneutical phenomenol-
ogy. The new emphasis is on the distinction between embodied subjectivity and
observable objectivity, from which flow the epistemology and ontology of quantum
physics. The ontology of quantum physics is clearly not culture-free and history-free,
but whether progress can be beyond the present social and historical inventions of
human consciousness within Nature still remains to be seen.
In this essay I claim that a Hilbert Space, exemplified by quantum physics,
represents an existential grammar of the physical properties of the quantum system
that is capable of synthesizing hermeneutically both universal and existential
context-dependent concepts/categories. Quantum theory is then a phenomenologi-
cal and hermeneutical theory of the phenomena of human consciousness, as claimed
by Schrödinger, Wigner, and Heisenberg—and possibly Einstein. It is a theory of
how embodied human consciousness—which is the Governor of Mental Life—acts
as a new norm, extending the notion of human rationality beyond the classical
norms of rationality to include hermeneutic norms and so to show the fundamental
dependence of science on the lifeworld, as Husserl claimed and Kockelmans so bril-
liantly defended.

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Die ewige Wiederkunft wissenschaftlich
betrachtet. Oskar Beckers
Nietzscheinterpretation im Kontext

Michael Stöltzner

Abstract Within the literature on Nietzsche’s thesis of eternal recurrence, the

­discussion of its ethical or anthropological aspects prevails. From the viewpoint of
today’s physical cosmology, this is hardly surprising. Yet during the first half of the
20th century a couple of eminent scholars have treated eternal recurrence as a
serious if speculative scientific idea, either to justify its validity or to find it worthy
of an elaborated criticism within the science of the day. My paper critically investi-
gates the 1936 attempt of the logician and philosopher Oskar Becker to justify both
a physical and a logical argument he spots in Nietzsche’s writings. While Becker
endorses Abel Rey’s 1927 book Le retour éternel e la philosophie de la physique, he
remains silent about his former colleague at the University of Bonn, the mathemati-
cian Felix Hausdorff and his 1898 book Das Chaos in kosmischer Auslese (pub-
lished under the pseudonym Paul Mongré). The reasons for this silence were, to my
mind, not only that Hausdorff had been forced out of his job under the Nuremberg
laws while Becker showed a constantly growing sympathy for the Nazi regime, but
also in Becker’s intention to emphasize the pro-scientific side of the newly elevated
state philosopher Nietzsche. I analyze Becker’s arguments against the backdrop of
Rey’s and Hausdorff’s considerations and argue that these severely limit the validity
of Becker’s conclusions. To discuss Nietzsche’s physical proof first, Becker argues
that assuming a finite space, a finite number of possible particle positions and energy
states, a finite number of atoms, and Laplacian determinism indeed yields a periodic
recurrence of all world states. Being aware of Rey’s discussion of Nietzschean
recurrence within the context of statistical mechanics, Becker concedes that by relaxing
determinism one might only be able to prove that nature cannot avoid recurring
to any given single state. And thus he passes the buck to the sciences. But as the
discussions ensuing Zermelo’s recurrence objections have shown, the ­statistical

M. Stöltzner (*)
Department of Philosophy, University of South Carolina,
901 Sumter, Columbia, SC 29208, USA
e-mail: stoeltzn@mailbox.sc.edu

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 113

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_8,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
114 M. Stöltzner

character of the second law requires a more radical departure from the established
Laplacean conception of world state. On this basis, Rey argued that recurrence
illustrates a more profound opposition between subject and object, in which the
second law becomes the measure of the subjective and eternal recurrence the mea-
sure of the objective. Becker’s mathematical argument takes its point of departure
by distinguishing, on the one hand, regressus in infinitum and progressus ex infinito
and, on the other hand, progressus in infinitum and progressus ex infinito. Thus the
inconsistency of a progressus in infinitum usque ad certam finem (resp. nunc) does
not fault the progressus ex infinito usque ad certam finem (resp. nunc) because the
world states could be periodically arranged, as Nietzsche has claimed. Becker’s
argument, for one, rests upon a constructivist stand in the foundations of mathe-
matics and the Heideggerian underpinning of it by the temporality of mathematical
thought that he had already given in his 1927 Mathematische Existenz. But Becker
also assumes that, for periodic motions, one can (in thought) reverse the order of
time. A look at Hausdorff’s book and a proto-set-theoretic argument presented there
shows, however, that such a reversal does not work without invoking what Hausdorff
calls transcendent reality.1

Nietzsches Verhältnis zu den Wissenschaften und seine Rolle für eine

­wissenschaftliche Philosophie sind bis heute umstritten. Da ist zum einen der
‘­positivistische’ frühe Nietzsche, der die Kantische Metaphysikkritik radikalisierte,
der eine überkommene Ethik zu zertrümmern sich anschickte und der die
Geschichtsteleologie des 19. Jahrhunderts verspottete. Dieser Nietzsche erfreute
sich sogar unter neopositivistischen Philosophen einer gewissen Wertschätzung,2
und zwar gerade dort, wo deren eigene Metaphysikkritik noch rhetorisch angefacht
werden sollte. Scheinbar auf der anderen Seite steht der Autor des Zarathustra und
insbesondere jener Manuskripte und Fragmente, die als Wille zur Macht kompiliert
für die Ideologie des Nationalsozialismus eingespannt werden sollten, und—man
denke an die Rede von Züchtung und Übermensch—es wohl auch konnten.
Es gibt gute philosophiehistorische Gründe, einer solchen Zweiteilung von
Nietzsches komplexem Denkweg zu widersprechen. Ich habe aber dennoch mit ihr
begonnen, weil sie die Brisanz jenes Versuchs aufzeigt, den Oskar Becker 1936
unternommen hat, nämlich “Nietzsches Beweise für seine Lehre von der ewigen
Wiederkunft”3 aus der Perspektive von Mathematik und Naturwissenschaft ernst
zu nehmen und sie mit den Mitteln einer wissenschaftlichen Philosophie zu
untersuchen. Denn die ewige Wiederkunft war, Nietzsches eigenen Äußerungen

1
 A shorter English version of this paper has appeared as Stöltzner 2012. The current, original
version was presented at the 2008 Beckertagung in Hagen (Germany). I am indebted to the
participants for their manifold comments and suggestions, especially to V. Peckhaus, D. Piecha
and A. Gethmann-Siefert.
2
 Vgl. insbes. von Mises (1939).
3
 Becker (1936), 368–387. Ich benutze den Wiederabdruck in Becker (1963), 41–66.
Die ewige Wiederkunft wissenschaftlich betrachtet… 115

zufolge, die “Grundconception”4 des Zarathustra und ganz allgemein der Angelpunkt
seines Spätwerks, ausersehen, den Nihilismus zu überwinden und die Umwertung
der Werte zu ermöglichen. Eine positivistische Grundstimmung ist dabei zunächst
nicht zu bemerken. Glaubt man jedoch der Biographie von Lou Andreas-Salomé, so
wollte Nietzsche nach der Auffindung des Gedankens 1881 in Sils-Maria sich zehn
Jahre in Wien oder Paris in die zeitgenössische Naturwissenschaft vertiefen, um
“eine wissenschaftlich unverrückbare Basis dafür zu gewinnen”.5 Doch sei Nietzsche
sehr bald klar geworden, “daß die wissenschaftliche Fundamenentierung der
Wiederkunftslehre auf Grund der atomistischen Theorie nicht durchführbar sei.”6
Daher habe er in der Folge ihre ethischen und religiösen Konsequenzen betont
und sie zunehmend als eine mystische Offenbarung begriffen. Auch Becker zitiert
­eingangs seines Aufsatzes “die bekannte biographische Tatsache”7 von Nietzsches
Studienabsichten, ohne allerdings zu erwähnen, dass Andrea-Salomés Lesart heftig
umstritten war, und die ewige Wiederkunft noch zu Nietzsches Lebzeiten ins Zentrum
der Konflikte um die Herausgabe seines Nachlasses geraten war. So ­bestand der
(später geschasste) erste Herausgeber Heinrich Köselitz auf der mechanistischen
Interpretation. Ebenso Rudolf Steiner, der wie Becker die Verbindung der ewigen
Wiederkunft zu Thesen aus Eugen Dührings Cursus der Philosophie8 ­betonte, jedoch
zusammen mit Andrea-Salomé annahm, dass sich Nietzsche selbst recht schnell von
der wissenschaftlichen Unhaltbarkeit des Wiederkunftgedankens überzeugt hatte.
Becker möchte dem Leser durch eine detaillierte, auf den Schriften und dem
seinerzeit publizierten Nachlass basierende Philologie vorführen, dass sich in
Nietzsches Werk zwei gültige Beweise für die ewige Wiederkunft des Gleichen fin-
den, ein physikalisch-kosmologischer und ein mathematisch-logischer. Diese sollen
im Zentrum meiner Ausführungen stehen und auf dem Hintergrund des damaligen
Wissensstandes kritisch gewürdigt werden. Auf die Frage, inwieweit Beckers
Rekonstruktion von Nietzsches Gedankengang auch tatsächlich den Intentionen des
Autors gerecht wird und ob alle verwendeten Quellen im Lichte der heutigen
Editionsmaßstäbe überhaupt zulässig sind, kann ich hingegen nicht eingehen.9
Becker war sich durchaus bewusst, dass sein Unterfangen nicht zum Mainstream
der Nietzscheforschung gehörte. Zu Beginn des Aufsatzes benennt er auch die
Gründe für das geringe Interesse an den wissenschaftlichen Grundlagen von
Nietzsches Wiederkunftsgedanken, ja die Ablehnung, die dieser erfahren habe,
nämlich die in Deutschland besonders ausgeprägte Trennung zwischen Natur- und
Geisteswissenschaften. Unter Nietzsches französischen Interpreten, insbesondere bei

4
 Vgl. Friedrich Nietzsche: Ecce homo. Nietzsche (1980), Band 6, 335. Für den historischen
Hintergrund des Wiederkunftsgedankens bei Nietzsche und seiner Rezeption stütze ich mich auf
die Darstellung von Werner Stegmaier (2004), insbes. 37–49.
5
 Lou Andreas-Salomé, zitiert nach Stegmaier (2004), 44.
6
 Ebd.
7
 Becker (1936), 41.
8
 Dühring (1875).
9
 Ich habe daher nur die im vorliegenden Aufsatz verwendeten Nietzschezitate weiter
nachgeprüft.
116 M. Stöltzner

Charles Andler10 und Abel Rey, bestehe hierfür weitaus mehr Interesse. Reys
umfängliche Studie Le retour éternel e la philosophie de la physique aus dem Jahre
1927 ist dabei für mich die wesentlichere.11 Nicht nur weil sie aus der Feder des wich-
tigsten Protagonisten der zweiten Garde der französischen Konventionalisten stammt.
Sondern vor allem auch, weil Rey über das philosophiehistorische Anliegen hinaus mit
Nietzsches Wiederkunftgedanken in wissenschaftsphilosophischer Hinsicht Ernst
machen wollte, ebenso wie Becker. Ich werde Le retour éternel daher als system-
atischen Kontrapunkt zum von Becker akzeptierten physikalisch-­ kosmologischen
Beweis heranziehen. Meine Schlussfolgerung wird sein, dass Becker im Gegensatz zu
Rey kaum die Konsequenzen aus der atomistischen bzw. statistischen Interpretation
des zweiten Hauptsatzes der Thermodynamik rezipiert hat, jene Fragen des
Atomismus, die Nietzsche, Andrea-Salomé zufolge, zehn Jahre lang hatte studieren
wollen. Im Vergleich zu Beckers detaillierter Textarbeit und der überzeugenden
Einordnung der Nietzscheschen Gedanken in die Philosophiegeschichte fällt Reys
Buch allerdings deutlich ab. Dem heutigen Leser werden die kosmologischen
Überlegungen, die sich bei Becker und Rey finden, als hochspekulativ und geradezu
unwissenschaftlich vorkommen. Doch ist hier Vorsicht geboten. Noch bis in die 1950er
Jahre wurde von verschiedenen Seiten bestritten, ob es eine physikalische Kosmologie
im streng wissenschaftlichen Sinne überhaupt geben könne bzw. ob die relativistische
Feldphysik dafür bereits eine geeignete Basis biete, selbst wenn seit den 1920er
Jahren explizite Vorschläge kosmologischer Modelle diskutiert worden waren.12
Als Kontrapunkt des zweiten von Becker akzeptierten Beweises der
Wiederkunftsthese—bzw. des dritten, den er bei Nietzsche findet—dient mir ein
anderer vorgängiger Interpretationsversuch, der ebenfalls mit Begriffen und
Methoden arbeitet, die den Ende des 19. und zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts auf-
gekommenen Untersuchungen über die Grundlagen der Mathematik, insbesondere
der Mengenlehre, entstammen. Diesen Versuch erwähnt Becker allerdings nicht,
obwohl er ihn meines Erachtens hätte kennen müssen. Schließlich war dessen Autor
sein Kollege an der Bonner Universität und der bedeutendste Mathematiker d­ aselbst.
Die Rede ist von Felix Hausdorff und seinen Jugendwerken Sant’ Ilario. Gedanken
aus der Landschaft Zarathustras und Das Chaos in kosmischer Auslese,13 die dieser
nach seiner Habilitation über ein Problem der mathematischen Astronomie unter
dem damals weitgehend bekannten Pseudonym Paul Mongré (1897, 1898) ­publiziert
hatte. Hausdorff/Mongré stand auch in enger Verbindung zum Nietzsche-­Archiv
und kommentierte in mehreren an prominenter Stelle erschienenen
Zeitschriftenartikeln kritisch den Editionsfortschritt. Während Sant’Ilario schon
rein äußerlich als eine von vielen zeitgenössischen Nachahmungen des Zarathustra
1936, mithin fast vierzig Jahre später, wenig Interesse erheischen mochte, war Das

10
 Andler (1920–1931).
11
 Rey (1927).
12
 Vgl. Kragh (1999), insbes. Kap. 5.2.
13
 Paul Mongré (1897); ders.: (1898). Beide wurden im bereits zitierten VII. Band der Gesammelten
Werke von Felix Hausdorff wieder abgedruckt und werden im Folgenden nach dieser Ausgabe
zitiert.
Die ewige Wiederkunft wissenschaftlich betrachtet… 117

Chaos eine umfangreiche philosophische Analyse über die Begriffe von Raum und
Zeit sowie allgemeiner eine Verteidigung eines ‘besonnenen Empirismus’—so
nennt Hausdorff seinen eigenen Standpunkt—gegen einen metaphysischen
Realismus, die z.B. auch bei Moritz Schlick positive Erwähnung fand, gerade
wegen ihrer Vorwegnahme der konventionalistischen Analyse des Raumproblems.14
Oskar Becker kannte Hausdorffs mathematische Arbeiten bereits zu Zeiten von
Mathematische Existenz, wo er dessen Grundzüge der Mengenlehre mehrmals
zitierte.15 Und dass in Bonner Professorenkreisen des stillen Kollegen Hausdorffs
frühes literarisches und philosophisches Schaffen gänzlich unerwähnt geblieben
sein sollte, erscheint mir unwahrscheinlich—wenn es auch nicht das erste Beispiel
eines derartigen akademischen Nebeneinanderherlebens wäre. Falls Becker Das
Chaos kannte, so liegt nahe, dass er Hausdorff nach dessen Emeritierung 1935 in
Folge der nationalsozialistischen Rassenpolitik nicht unbedingt zitieren wollte.
Hausdorff emigrierte übrigens nicht aus Deutschland, sondern lebte bis 1942 unter
zunehmenden Schwierigkeiten weiter in Bonn. Als man ihn zusammen mit seiner
Frau als einen der letzten noch in Bonn verbliebenen Juden nach Theresienstadt
deportieren wollte, begingen beide Selbstmord.16
Doch mir geht es hier nicht um ausgleichende Gerechtigkeit in Sachen Nietzsche.
Vielmehr zeigt der nicht geführte Bonner Dialog, dass Beckers Rekonstruktion von
Nietzsches mathematischem Beweis zu starke implizite Voraussetzungen enthält
und es andere mathematische Formulierungen des Wiederkunftgedankens gibt, die
diesen als unhaltbar erweisen, jedenfalls im von Becker intendierten immanenten
(d.i. nicht-transzendenten) Sinn. Eines von Hausdorffs Argumenten basiert zudem
auf informellen mengentheoretischen Überlegungen und ist der Beckerschen
Begründung von Nietzsches Beweis nicht unähnlich.
Indem meine Analyse für beide Beweise negativ ausfällt, und zwar auch auf
Basis des damaligen wissenschaftlichen Kenntnisstandes, wird deutlich, dass
Beckers Aufsatz im Kontext der zentralen Rolle zu verstehen ist, die er der ewigen
Wiederkunft an anderen Orten seines Werkes gibt, und der großen Bedeutung, die
er Nietzsche ganz allgemein zuweist. Und hier wird sehr wohl auch die sogenannte
ethische Lesart des Nietzscheschen Gedankens schlagend, seine Rolle für das
Verständnis des Historischen und der Zeitlichkeit, wie sie bereits 1927 in
Mathematische Existenz hervortritt. Aber auch die ideologische Ausbeutbarkeit von
Nietzsches Gedankengut wird in Beckers Kriegsvortrag von 1942 Gedanken
Friedrich Nietzsches über Rangordnung, Zucht und Züchtung deutlich. Auf
der Grundlage einer Kritik an Nietzsches lamarckistischem Verständnis des
Selektionsprinzips versucht Becker dort, den Gedanken der Züchtung im Sinne des

14
 Vgl. den Briefwechsel zwischen Hausdorff und Schlick aus den Jahren 1919/1920 sowie Epple
(2006), 263–289.
15
 Becker (1973) (erste Auflage 1927 in Jahrbuch für phänomenologische Forschung, Bd. VIII)
zitiert Hausdorff (1914), auf 175, 356 und 359. Auf 162 findet sich auch ein Verweis auf eine
frühere Arbeit von Hausdorff (1907), 84–159. Die Seitenangabe bei Becker (217) ist falsch, so
dass der Verweis hier nicht ohne weiteres präzisiert werden kann.
16
 Zur Biographie findet man Näheres in Brieskorn (1996).
118 M. Stöltzner

Nationalsozialismus weiterzuentwickeln, wobei sich gerade dasjenige Volk als das

überlegene erweist, das den Wiederkunftsgedanken mit all seinen Konsequenzen
erträgt.17 Man kann daher retrospektiv wohl mit einem gewissen Recht Beckers
beide Nietzscheaufsätze auch als eine publizistische Auseinandersetzung mit Alfred
Baeumlers Nietzschebild betrachten, in der Becker einen wissenschaftsfreundli-
cheren Nietzsche innerhalb des nationalsozialistischen Deutschlands hoffähig
machen wollte.18 Wenn dem tatsächlich so war, dann verbot sich jeder Verweis auf
Hausdorff, insbesondere in den Blättern für Deutsche Philosophie.

1  Die ewige Wiederkunft in Mathematische Existenz

Hauptthese von Beckers Mathematische Existenz war, dass die phänomenologische

Analyse den Streit um die Grundlagen der Mathematik zugunsten des Intuitionismus
entschied. Doch ging Beckers Grundlegungsprogramm über die reine
Rechtfertigung von Brouwers Konstruktivismus insoweit hinaus, als es die allge-
meine Rolle von Zeitlichkeit und Historizität in der Mathematik betonte. Im
Gegensatz zum Cantorschen transfiniten Progressus, den Becker unbegründet und
als in seiner Ganzheit, dem Kontinuum, für den Verstand nicht fasslich fand,
entsprach die Brouwersche Wahlfolge, z.B. die Augen fortgesetzter Würfe mit
einem Würfel, einem genuin zeitlichen Prozess, der wie ein historischer Prozess
zukunftsoffen war. Folgen, die durch ein explizites Bildungsgesetz konstruktiv
darstellbar waren, lebten zwar nicht außerhalb der Zeit, doch waren Aussagen über
sie unabhängig von jeweiligen Zeitpunkt im konkreten Fortschreiten der Folge
gültig. Indem Becker den Vollzug in den Mittelpunkt der mathematischen
Phänomene rückt,
ist das eigene (historische) menschliche Dasein als ausschlaggebend hingestellt. Die
Mathematik erhält damit eine ‘anthropologische’ Fundierung. Nicht ein ordnungsmäßig
gegliedertes, ‘objektives’, im traditionellen Sinn ‘an sich’ seiendes Universum …, sondern
das faktische Leben des Menschen, das jeweils eigene Leben des Einzelnen … ist das
ontische Fundament, auch für das Mathematische.19

War die mathematische Folge somit auf die historische Zeit bezogen und in
ihrem Fortschreiten unwiederholbar, so erwies sich die Naturzeit als die Domäne
der ewigen Wiederkunft, auch wenn diese nicht außerhalb der Zeitlichkeit stand,
sondern nur einem anderen Prinzip der Zeitigung folgte.
Das Kennzeichnende der Naturzeit gegenüber der historischen Zeit ist das Bestehen der
Möglichkeit der Wiederkehr des Gleichen, des Sich-Wiederholens des gleichen Ereignisses.
Dagegen kennt die historische Zeit die Wiederkehr nicht; man könnte zugespitzt sagen:
(echte) Zukunft schließt (echte) Wiederkunft aus. … Damit ist (in der historischen Zeit)

17
 Becker (1942).
18
 Für diesen Hinweis danke ich Detlev Piecha. Zu Baeumlers Nietzschebild, vgl.: Piecha (1998),
132–193.
19
 Becker (1973), 196.
Die ewige Wiederkunft wissenschaftlich betrachtet… 119

genau genommen auch die Kategorie des Gleichen ausgeschlossen, es gibt dort nur
Nämliches (Identisches im strengen Sinne). Die Zeit ist beide Male in ganz verschiedener
Weise principium individuationis. Naturzeit ermöglicht das Wiederauftreten des genau
Gleichen … “zu verschiedenen Zeiten.” … Die genaue Gleichheit ist empirisch … zwar
niemals verwirklicht, aber sie ist (ideal) möglich.20

Ich stelle den Unterschied zwischen historischer Zeit und Naturzeit an dieser Stelle
bewusst heraus, weil Becker neun Jahre später in seinem mathematischen Beweis für
Nietzsches Wiederkunftsgedanken das Problem aus dem anthropologischen Bereich
in die Natur selbst verschiebt, indem er Nietzsches These wissenschaftlich ernst
nimmt und sie nicht nur als theoretische Möglichkeit in ihrem (‘ethischen’ oder
phänomenologischen) Bezug auf den Menschen belässt. Diese Objektivierung der
Wiederkunft gilt natürlich erst recht für den physikalisch-­kosmologischen Beweis. In
Mathematische Existenz scheint Becker nicht so weit gehen zu wollen und unterst-
reicht: “‘Wiederkehr’ ist nicht gleichbedeutend mit echter ‘Wiederholung’, wie schon
das Phänomen der musikalischen ‘Reprise’ zeigt.”21 Beckers Versuch, mit Nietzsche
wissenschaftlich ernst zu machen, scheint mithin aus dem Bereich der Phänomenologie
hinauszuführen. Und so schreibt Antonello Giugliano in seiner kenntnisreichen
Studie über “Zahl und Zeit: Becker zwischen Nietzsche und Heidegger” schlicht:
“Die Annäherung Beckers an Nietzsche war sehr problematisch, wie gerade sein—
gegenüber Löwiths radikaler Thematisierung der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen—
‘unphilosophischer’ Aufsatz von 1936 … erweist.”22 Auch wenn ich im Folgenden
Beckers konkrete Lösungsansätze kritisch beurteilen werde, so möchte ich doch
dieser Einordnung widersprechen. Es ist gerade das Verdienst von Beckers
Nietzscheaufsatz, dass er die ewige Wiederkunft im Stile derjenigen Verbindung aus
Wissenschaftsphilosophie, Phänomenologie und Philosophiegeschichte angegangen
ist, die auch Mathematische Existenz charakterisiert hatte.

2  E
 in unvollständiger und ein gültiger
physikalisch-­kosmologischer Beweis

Becker identifiziert 1936 drei Beweise für die ewige Wiederkunft in Nietzsches Werk.
Doch erscheint ihm der erste, in der Nietzscheliteratur gelegentlich zitierte Beweisgang
zurecht als “zu unbestimmt, um sachlich gewürdigt zu werden.”23 Denn er beruht auf
der Alternative zwischen einer endlichen und konstanten Kraftmenge des Universums,
die bereits die ewige Wiederkunft impliziere, und dem w ­ illkürlichen Eingreifen
Gottes zur Veränderung der Kraftmenge, d.h. des Energieinhalts des Universums.24

20
 Becker (1973), 224f.
21
 Becker (1973), 318.
22
 Antonello Giugliano (2005), 47–58, Zitat auf 53. Gemeint ist Karl Löwith (1935).
23
 Becker (1936), 42.
24
 Mit ‘Kraft’ ist dabei im Sinne der auf Leibniz zurückgehenden und noch bei Helmholtz gängigen
Terminologie das gemeint, was zu Beckers Zeit ebenso wie heute als ‘Energie’ bezeichnet wird.
120 M. Stöltzner

Aber, so wendet Becker zurecht ein, schon die Dezimalbruchen-twicklungen für

­irrationale Zahlen gäben ein Beispiel für “ins Unendliche gehende nicht-periodische
Entwicklungen …, die nach einer bestimmten gesetzlichen Regel ablaufen, ohne
­göttlich schöpferische Willkür.”25
Allerdings könnte man Nietzsches Aphorismus “Wer nicht an einen Kreisprozeß
des Alls glaubt, muß an einen willkürlichen Gott glauben”26 auch physikalischer
und im Sinne der in den 1880er Jahren verbreiteten, vom Chemiker und Monisten
Wilhelm Ostwald propagierten Energetik so interpretieren, dass alle Prozesse in der
Welt Umwandlungen von Energiearten sind und das Universum als Ganzes ein
abgeschlossenes System darstellt. Nietzsche hätte dann schlicht nicht zwischen
den beiden Carnotschen Kreisprozessen—und den beiden Hauptsätzen der
Thermodynamik—unterschieden und vergessen, dass Arbeit irreversibel in Wärme
umgewandelt werden kann. In dieser Sichtweise würde der Beweisgang schlicht die
der Wiederkunft entgegengesetzte Alternative eines Wärmetodes des Universums
zudecken, was ihn zweifellos nicht besser macht.
Der zweite Beweis lautet in Beckers Rekonstruktion wie folgt:
Vorausgesetzt, der Weltraum sei [(i)] endlich, gestatte auch [(ii)] nur eine endliche Zahl von
Lagen (d.h. die möglichen Orte im Raum bildeten eine diskrete Mannigfaltigkeit), entspre-
chend gebe es nur [(iii)] eine endliche Zahl von “materiellen” Atomen, die als Kraftzentren
zu denken sind (nach Boscovich), und endlich vorausgesetzt, nur endlich viele Abstufungen
der Kraft (Energie) seien möglich [diese mithin (iv) von endlichem Betrage und (v) diskret] –
so ergibt sich eine bloß endliche Anzahl von möglichen Kombinationen dieser einen
bestimmten Weltzustand festlegenden Elemente, also nur eine endliche Zahl möglicher
Weltzustände. Nimmt man nun weiterhin [(vi)] an, ein bestimmter Weltzustand lege
eindeutig den nächsten fest (d.h. es bestehe eine exakte, nicht bloß eine statistische
Kausalverknüpfung), so ist ein streng periodischer Gang des Weltgeschehens unbedingt
notwendig. Denn nach Erschöpfung aller möglichen Weltzustände muß notwendig einer
von ihnen einmal wiederkehren. Da dieser nun einen eindeutig bestimmten Nachfolger hat
und dieser wiederum ebenso, so laufen die Weltzustände auch in der festgelegten
Reihenfolge so lange ab, bis sich der zuerst wiedergekehrte zum zweitenmal wiederholt
usw., in alle Ewigkeit.27

Becker bezeichnet diesen Beweis als tadelsfrei, sofern man noch zur Präzisierung
des Begriffs ‘Nachfolger’ die Zeit selbst als unstetig auffasst. Während Becker die
anderen Schritte durch Zitate aus Nietzsche belegen kann, findet sich diese These
nirgends auch nur angedeutet. Sie sei aber auch nicht zwingend notwendig, “denn
bei einer diskreten Raumbeschaffenheit sind ohnehin nur unstetige Bewegungen
denkbar.”28 Da Beckers Bemerkung ohnehin nur im Rahmen der klassischen
Mechanik Sinn macht—in der Relativitätstheorie wird die Zeit ja dem Raum im
Wesentlichen gleichgestellt—ist allerdings zu bedenken, dass ohne unabhängige

25
 Becker (1936), 42.
26
 Zitiert nach Becker (1936), 42. In Nietzsche (1980), Band 9, 561, lautet Aphorismus 11 [312]
jedoch: “Wer nicht an einen Kreisprozeß des Alls glaubt, muß an den [sic] willkürlichen Gott
glauben.” Und es findet sich auch ein Verweis auf die Behandlung des Themas bei Vogt (1878).
Auch Becker erwähnt an anderer Stelle den Einfluss Vogts auf Nietzsche.
27
 Becker (1936), 43.
28
 Becker (1936), 45.
Die ewige Wiederkunft wissenschaftlich betrachtet… 121

Diskretisierung der Zeit, die Bewegungen beliebig schnell ablaufen können.

In ­diesem Falle griffe Beckers Argumentation zu kurz.
Mit Bezug auf die anderen Bedingungen bleibt Becker betont vorsichtig.
“Es fragt sich aber, ob jene Annahmen in der wirklichen Welt zutreffen. Dies zu
entscheiden, ist Sache umfangreicher physikalischer Forschungen. Nietzsches
­
zweiter Beweisgang ist also ein bloßes Programm, der kühne Entwurf eines
­möglichen Beweises für seine Lehre.” In der Fußnote betont er jedoch die “direkte
phänomenologische (bzw. psychologische) Bedeutung”29 seiner Annahmen. Trotz
der formalen Defizite hält Becker Nietzsches Argumentation für hinreichend
plausibel, so dass er einige Erläuterungen gibt, die sich auf die Physik seiner Zeit
beziehen—jedoch nicht alle, die er hätte geben können und sollen.
Die diskrete Natur von Raum und Kraft entnahm Nietzsche, Becker zufolge, der
Atomenlehre von Boscovich und Dührings These, dass die vorhandene Zahl der
Weltkörper und ihrer Selbsttätigkeiten in jedem Zeitpunkt endlich sein müsse.30
Hinter Dührings These, so sei hinzugefügt, steckt jedoch auch eine radikaler
mathematischer Konstruktivismus, den dieser schon in seiner Kritischen Geschichte
der allgemeinen Principien der Mechanik propagiert hatte.31 So umstritten der
Atomismus in den 1880er und 1890er Jahren gewesen war, so war er doch 1936
vollständig akzeptiert. Mit der weitergehenden These über die “Unanwendbarkeit
der Geometrie im Kleinen,”32 d.h. der Diskretheit des physikalischen Raumes, war
der Physiker Erwin Schrödinger zwei Jahre zuvor allerdings weitgehend alleine
geblieben. Er hatte sie als eine mögliche Konsequenz aus den Interpretationsproblemen
der Quantenmechanik erwogen.
Als Nietzsches Quelle für die Endlichkeit des Raumes zitiert Becker den
Leipziger Astrophysiker Johann Carl Friedrich Zöller, in welchem er auch den
ersten erblickt, “der von Riemanns sphärischer Geometrie eine ernsthafte physika-
lische Anwendung machte, vielleicht die einzige bis zum ‘kosmologischen Glied’
der Einsteinschen Gravitationsgleichung!”33 Dabei geht es um die Möglichkeit
eines unbegrenzten aber nicht unendlichen Raumes konstanter positiver Krümmung,
in dem sich nach endlichen Zeitintervallen die endlich vielen Körper letztlich
einander wieder annähern. Allerdings bezieht sich die (pseudo-)Riemannsche
­
Struktur in der Einsteinschen Theorie auf die 3 + 1-dimensionale Raumzeit, so dass
die ewige Wiederkunft nicht in diesem Sinne begründet werden kann.34

29
 Ebd.
30
 Vgl. Becker (1936), 46.
31
 Dühring (1873/1877/1887). Während die erste Auflage betont sachlich war und ihrem Autor den
Benekepreis einbrachte, ergingen sich die zweite und dritte in wüsten Polemiken gegen die
Berliner Mathematiker, wodurch Dühring letztlich auch seine venia legendi verlor.
32
 Schrödinger (1934), 518–520.
33
 Becker (1936), 47. Vgl. Zöller (1872).
34
 Diese tritt letztlich nur in solchen Welten auf, die Reisen in die eigene Vergangenheit ­ermöglichen,
oder wenn ein Universum nach einem “big crunch” wieder über einen “big bang” sozusagen
neu entsteht.
122 M. Stöltzner

Zöllners eher bildhaft zu nehmendes Argument für die Endlichkeit von

Raum und Materie am Beispiel eines Gasballes von rein gravitativ wirkenden
Massekörpern bringt Becker zwar nicht zu Unrecht mit dem kosmologischen Glied
Einsteins in Verbindung. Doch in beiden Fällen handelt es sich zuallererst um ein
Stabilitätsproblem. Denn Einstein hatte das kosmologische Glied sozusagen von
Hand zur Stabilisierung seines stationären kosmologischen Modells in die
Feldgleichungen eingeführt und später wieder verabschiedet. Zu Beckers Zeit waren
bereits spekulative Modelle diskutiert worden, wie Materie etwa infolge radioakti-
ver Prozesse immer weiter entstehen könnte, so dass ein unendliches Universum
stabil bleibt und der gefürchtete Wärmetod vermieden werden kann.35

3  E
 ine probabilistische Modifikation des Beweises
und die Brücke zu Abel Rey

In Beckers zuvor skizzierter Rekonstruktion von Nietzsches Beweisgang spielt die

eindeutige Kausalverknüpfung zwischen den Weltzuständen eine zentrale Rolle. In
einer Modifikation des Beweises schwächt Becker diese Bedingung dahingehend
ab, dass die Natur lediglich die Wiederkehr eines herausgegriffenen Weltzustandes
A nicht ‘vermeiden’ dürfe, indem sie etwa durch ständige Vermehrung der Kraft die
Mittel gewänne, sich ‘davor zu hüten’. Der Weg der Wiederkunft von A nach
A müsse daher nicht immer über dieselben Zwischenzustände B,C,D, … gehen,
sondern könne über ganz beliebige Wege erfolgen.
Dann herrscht lediglich das Gesetz des Zufalls, d.h. dann findet das statt, was die
Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung voraussagt. Und diese sagt in der Tat, bei endlich vielen
möglichen Zuständen A,B,C … der Welt, das schließliche Wiederauftreten jedes von ihnen
voraus—wenn auch keineswegs den geregelten Kreislauf der Zustände, der sich immer in
identischen Zyklen wiederholt.36

In dieser Weise schließe man auch

an die sonst gelegentlich vorgetragene Lehre Nietzsches [an], daß nämlich die Wahrheit in
der Physik der Wahrscheinlichkeit Platz zu machen habe und das Unterworfensein unter
Natur-‘Gesetzen’ mit dem Willen zur Macht streite. … Aber diese Wahrscheinlichkeitsphysik
und Kraftmechanik widerspricht keineswegs der ewigen Wiederkunft, sondern erfordert
sie gerade!37

Im modifizierten Beweisgang finden wir die Vorstellungen der Boltzmannschen

statistischen Mechanik angedeutet: eine zufällige Bewegung einer großen Zahl
einzelner Atome, für deren jeweilige Bewegungen die Gesetze der Mechanik
­weiterhin gelten. Der Raum als solcher ist in der statistischen Mechanik nicht
diskretisiert, wiewohl der späte Boltzmann die Diskretisierung der Zeit

35
 Vgl. Nernst (1921).
36
 Becker (1936), 50.
37
 Becker (1936), 50–51.
Die ewige Wiederkunft wissenschaftlich betrachtet… 123

erwogen hatte.38 Auf atomistischer Basis konnte Boltzmann eine statistische

Herleitung des zweiten Hauptsatzes der Thermodynamik geben. Diese war jedoch
nicht ganz frei von Zusatzannahmen und Interpretationsproblemen, und Boltzmann
hat seine Argumentation auch nach und nach im Lichte zweier klassischer Einwände
präzisiert. Beide sind im Kontext der Wiederkunftsthese relevant. Boltzmanns
Wiener Kollege Josef Loschmidt hatte bestritten, dass die gegen Zeitumkehr invari-
ante Newtonsche Mechanik einen Satz abzuleiten gestatte, der die Gerichtetheit
allen Naturgeschehens behaupte. Man könne jedoch schlicht die Bewegungen aller
einzelnen Atome umkehren. Boltzmann entgegnete, dass die zur umgekehrten
Bewegungen gehörenden Anfangszustände zwar aufträten, jedoch viel seltener seien
als diejenigen, die eine im Sinne des zweiten Hauptsatzes ablaufende makroskopische
Entwicklung ergeben. Die Gläser in unserer Welt zerspringen; sie bilden sich nicht
spontan aus Scherben. Dennoch betonte Boltzmann stets, das derartige Ereignisse
nicht unmöglich, sondern nur extrem unwahrscheinlich seien.
Es ist jedoch vor allem der zweite Einwand, auf den Becker anspielt, das von
Ernst Zermelo gegen Boltzmann verwendete Poincarésche Wiederkeh­rtheorem.
In einem geschlossenen System von endlich vielen wechselwirkenden
Massepunkten kehrt ein bestimmter Zustand (d.i. ein Punkt im Phasenraum)
nach endlicher Zeit zwangsläufig wieder, oder präziser gesagt, er kommt dem
ursprünglichen Zustand eine vorgegebene beliebig kleine Distanz nahe. Die auch
heute noch gängige Antwort Boltzmanns bestand darin, auf die unglaublich
­langen Wiederkehrzeiten zu verweisen. Schon für Systeme weniger Massenpunkte
und nicht allzu hohe Genauigkeiten übersteigen diese das uns heute bekannte
Alter des Universums. Wenn man wie Becker annimmt, und er war zu seiner
Zeit hier nicht allein, dass das Universum ewig besteht, wandelt sich
Poincarés Wiederkehrtheorem scheinbar zu einem Beweis des Nietzscheschen
Wiederkun­ftgedankens. Doch die vom zweiten Hauptsatz der Thermodynamik
behauptete Einstellung des thermischen Gleichgewichts (im Mittel) liegt auf
einer ganz anderen, weitaus kürzeren Zeitskala als die Wiederkehr. Die
Wiederkehr bewahrt mithin nicht vor dem Wärmetod. Allerdings geschieht die
Annäherung an das Gleichgewicht nicht ohne Ausnahmen; Fluktuationen des
Zustandes bleiben stets bestehen.
Derartige Fluktuationen spielen auch eine wichtige Rolle in Boltzmanns
­hochspekulativer kosmologischer Lösung des Wärmetodproblems. Wir leben in
einem Teil des Universums, wo Ordnung, Galaxien und biologisches Leben,
deswegen entstehen konnte, weil diese lokale Entropieabnahme durch andere
­
Regionen des Universums kompensiert wurde. Da Boltzmann allerdings den mak-
roskopischen Zeitpfeil auf dem zweiten Hauptsatz gründete, folgt daraus die etwas
merkwürdige Tatsache, dass in diesen Regionen des Universums die Zeit umgekehrt
verläuft als in der unsrigen.39 Wenn diese Charakterisierung zuträfe, würde der
Wiederkunftsthese gleichsam der kosmologische Boden entzogen. Sie wäre dann
entweder eine lokale Eigenschaft gewisser Punktgebilde und käme kosmologisch

38
 Vgl. dazu Stöltzner (1999), 85–111.
39
 Vgl. Fasol-Boltzmann (1990), p. 292.
124 M. Stöltzner

gesehen lokalen Fluktuationen gleich, oder aber sie wäre eine Eigenschaft des
gesamten Universums, die sich auf einer Zeitskala abspielt, innerhalb derer
die lokale Eigenzeit ihre Kapriolen schlägt, so dass die Verbindung zwischen der
anthropologischen und der kosmologischen Ebene zerbräche.
Weitaus präsenter als bei Becker ist die eben skizzierte probabilistische
Perspektive bei Abel Rey, auf dessen “ausgezeichnete Erörterungen”40 Becker
­verweist. Nimmt man den Reyschen Gedankengang konsequent auf, so verweist er
Becker jedoch meines Erachtens wieder auf den in Mathematische Existenz
eingenommenen Standpunkt zurück, insofern die angestrebte Objektivierung bzw.
‘Naturalisierung’ der ewigen Wiederkunft nicht wirklich gelingt.
Rey seinerseits betrachtet die These von der ewigen Wiederkunft als die
notwendige Konsequenz aus der Krise der Physik in der 2. Hälfte des 19.
­
Jahrhunderts. Denn die Newton-Laplacesche Vorstellung, das Universum sei eine
große mechanische Maschine, wurde durch die Arbeiten von Carnot und Clausius
radikal gebrochen. Die These von der ewigen Wiederkunft bedeute daher gerade
eine Ausdehnung der Carnotschen Kreisprozesse, insbesondere des Wärme umset-
zenden zweiten, auf das gesamte Universum.41 Sie sei wie die Energieerhaltung
eine gigantische Extrapolation aus unserem empirischen Wissen.42 Rey nimmt die
ewige Wiederkunft nicht als einen Einwand gegen die statistische Ableitung des
zweiten Hauptsatzes der Thermodynamik, sondern als notwendiges Postulat der
kinetischen Theorie. “La théorie cinétique des gaz, la mécanique statistique, cette
application pure et simple de la théorie des probabilités, postulent nécssairement la
retour éternel.”43 Daran ändert auch nichts, dass sich im Prinzip auch das
Unwahrscheinlichste beliebig oft wiederholen kann. Innerhalb eines hinreichend
langen Zeitraums finden wir einen jeden Wiederkehrzyklus vor, habe dieser nun
eine hohe oder eine sehr 10
geringe Wahrscheinlichkeit. Selbst eine für uns unvor-
stellbare Zeit von 1010 Jahrhunderten sei nichts im Vergleich zur ewigen Dauer
des Universums. Andererseits geschehe ein Ereignis, das sich jedes Jahrhundert 10
wiederholt, also bestenfalls einmal pro Menschenleben, in derselben Zeit 1010
mal, mithin unvorstellbar oft.44
Dies illustriert, was Rey als die fundamentale philosophische Konsequenz des
Wiederkunftsgedankens betrachtet: die Präzisierung des Verhältnisses zwischen
Subjekt und Objekt. Dieses wird Rey zufolge zunächst von Gegensatzpaaren
beherrscht:
Inconscience-conscience; déterminisme-liberté; inertie-activité; réductible à la q­ uantité-
­irréducible à la quantité ou qualité pure; … hasard-finalité; déductible-intuitif: causalité
fonctionelle-causalité efficiente.45

40
 Becker (1936), 50, Fußnote.
41
 Vgl. Rey (1927), 272 bzw. 267, 278.
42
 Vgl. Rey (1927), 301.
43
 Rey (1927), 304.
44
 Vgl. Rey (1927), 306.
45
 Rey (1927), 285f.
Die ewige Wiederkunft wissenschaftlich betrachtet… 125

Zu diesen komme nun das Paar “retour éternel-vieillissement; réversibilité-­

irréversibilité”46 hinzu. Fasse man die ewige Wiederkehr jedoch im Sinne der
statistischen Mechanik auf, so verschwinde der radikale Gegensatz zwischen rein
mechanischen und (scheinbar) reversiblen Zyklen wie den Planetenbahnen und dem
fortschreitenden Bewusstseinsfluss im Sinne Bergsons. Infolge der unterschiedli-
chen Zeitskalen werde einerseits die ewige Wiederkunft zum Maß des Objektiven.
Hier gibt es keine Evolution, sondern nur Revolutionen im astronomischen Sinne;
nichts entsteht und nichts geht verloren.47 Die Unmöglichkeit der ewigen Wiederkehr
auf der menschlichen Skala, die erfahrungsmäßige Geltung des zweiten Hauptsatzes
begründe andererseits das Maß des Subjektiven. Die ewige Wiederkehr liege daher
an der Schnittstelle zweier differenter, jedoch einander nicht widersprechender
Welten: dem Subjektiven und dem Objektiven. Durch die Einsicht in die ewige
Wiederkunft werde auch Raum für die Spontaneität des Subjekts geschaffen, sie
erlaube eine optimistische Weltsicht, weil der Geist sich das höchste Gesetz vorstel-
len könne. Auch die objektive physikalische Zeit werde so mit der subjektiven Zeit
im Sinne von Bergsons Bewusstseinsfluss vereinbar.48
Reys Betonung der Differenz zwischen Subjekt und Objekt weist zurück auf die
Differenz zwischen historischer Zeit und Naturzeit, die Becker in Mathematische
Existenz noch wichtiger gewesen war als in seiner auf die objektive Wissenschaft
aufbauenden, fast ein Jahrzehnt später publizierten Rekonstruktion von Nietzsches
Beweisgang.

4  Beckers mathematischer Beweis

Becker ist sichtlich froh, noch einen weiteren Beweisgang zu haben, der “von den
mannigfachen schwer zu beweisenden Voraussetzungen des zweiten Arguments
unabhängig” ist. Er sei daher auch weniger ein bloßes Programm, sondern “in allen
entscheidenden Zügen vollkommen ausgebildet” und trage damit das “sachliche
Schwergewicht”49 der Begründung der Wiederkunftsthese. Unter den zitierten
Nietzsche-Aphorismen finden sich:
Man gehe einmal rückwärts. Hätte die Welt ein Ziel so müsste es erreicht sein: gäbe es für
sie einen (unbeabsichtigten) Endzustand, so müßte er ebenfalls erreicht sein. …
Wäre ein Gleichgewicht der Kraft irgendeinmal erreicht worden, so dauerte es
noch. Der augenblickliche Zustand widerspricht der Annahme … denn bis jetzt ist
schon eine Unendlichkeit verflossen. Wenn das Gleichgewicht möglich wäre, so müßte
es eingetreten sein.50

46
 Rey (1927), 286.
47
 Rey (1927), 307f.
48
 Vgl. Rey (1927), 310–312.
49
 Alle Becker (1927), 52.
50
 Zitiert nach Becker (1927), 51f. Vgl. Nietzsche (1980), Band 9, 553 für den ersten (dort ‘Ziel’
und ‘Endzustand’ gesperrt) und 534 für den zweiten Aphorismus.
126 M. Stöltzner

Auch in diesem Fall war Becker zufolge wieder Dührings Cursus der Philosophie
Nietzsches Hauptquelle. Beckers Rekonstruktion des Nietzscheschen Arguments
beruht auf zwei Unterscheidungen, die sowohl bei Dühring als auch bei Kant und
Schopenhauer nicht ausreichend gewürdigt worden seien.
1. Ein regressus in infinitum und ein progressus ex infinito sind nicht dasselbe.
Deshalb läßt sich nicht von der Möglichkeit des ersten auf die des zweiten
schließen.
2. Progressus in infinitum und progressus ex infinito sind verschieden; deshalb läßt
sich nicht aus der Widersinnigkeit eines progressus in infinitum usque ad certam
finem (resp. nunc) auf die Unmöglichkeit eines progressus ex infinito usque ad
certam finem (resp. nunc) schließen.51
In Bedingung 1. drückt sich die Gerichtetheit der Zeit aus, die für Becker eine
fundamentale Eigenschaft des Zeitbegriffs darstellt. Mit einer reinen Parameterzeit,
einer B-Zeit im Sinne von McTaggarts berühmter Klassifikation,52 wäre phänome-
nologisch auch wenig anzufangen, da die fundamentale Auszeichnung der
Gegenwärtigkeit wegfällt. Bedingung 2. unterscheidet Anfangs- und Endlosigkeit.
Becker stimmt dabei Schopenhauers Kritik an Kants Beweis der Thesis der Ersten
Antinomie, die Welt habe einen Anfang in der Zeit, zu. Denn das Argument beruhe
kurz gefasst darauf, dass eine Reihe ohne Anfang sich niemals vollenden lasse.
Doch es lasse sich sowohl das Ende einer anfangslosen Reihe als auch der Anfang
einer endlosen Reihe widerspruchslos denken. Auch Nietzsche verfehle wie sein
Vorbild Dühring die zweite Unterscheidung. Doch der Beweis lässt sich Becker
zufolge reparieren.
Es scheint zunächst so, als dürfe Becker Nietzsches Beweis eigentlich gar nicht
akzeptieren. Denn dass ein Gleichgewicht oder anderes Ziel schon erreicht sein
müsse, weil alles mögliche schon wirklich geworden, setzt ja voraus, dass die bis
jetzt verflossene Ewigkeit eine aktuale Unendlichkeit darstellt. Doch es gibt selbst
für den Konstruktivisten eine Möglichkeit, den eigentlich paradoxen, weil unvor-
stellbaren Begriff eines progressus ex infinito usque ad certam finem anzuerkennen,
“und zwar einzig und allein durch die Ansetzung des unendlichen Weltverlaufs als
eines streng periodischen. Denn ein streng periodischer Prozeß ist vorstellungsmäßig
umkehrbar. Er besteht ja aus endlichen Perioden (z.B. a b c), die, jede für sich,
umkehrbar sind (in c b a).”53 Dann und nur dann können wir den regressus in
­infinitum ‘cba, cba, cba, …,’ anschaulich dargestellt durch ‘ ← … abc, abc, abc.’ zu
einem progressus ex infinito usque ad finem ‘ → … abc, abc, abc.’ umkehren, indem
wir einfach die Ablaufrichtung in den einzelnen endlichen Wiederkehrperioden
umkehren, aus denen der unendliche Weltlauf zusammengesetzt ist. Die 1.
Unterscheidung zwischen regressus in infinitum und progressus ex infinito ist daher
überbrückbar.54 Indem nun der progressus ex infinito usque ad nunc denkbar sei,

51
 Becker (1927), 55.
52
 Vgl. McTaggart (1908), 457–474.
53
 Becker (1927), 57.
54
 Vgl. Becker (1927), 57.
Die ewige Wiederkunft wissenschaftlich betrachtet… 127

falle der Beweis von Kants Thesis und es treffe die Antithesis zu: das Universum hat
keinen Anfang.
Im periodischen Vorgang ist überhaupt kein Punkt ausgezeichnet, weder unter den
homologen Punkten der verschiedenen Perioden, … noch unter den Zeitpunkten innerhalb
derselben Periode. … Die leere Zeit selbst kann anschaulich gemacht werden als ein
Vorgang mit ‘unendlich kleiner’ oder minimaler Periode ‘…aaaaaaa…’, man denke etwa
an des Ticken einer Taschenuhr.55

Mir scheint es, dass Becker hier eigentlich zwei Dinge beweist. Nimmt man die
Unendlichkeit der Welt an, so folgt erstens die Nietzschesche Wiederkunft. Weil in
dieser Weise ein unendlicher Weltverlauf in für den Konstruktivisten akzeptabler
Weise gedacht werden kann, wird zweitens die Kantische Antinomie entschieden.
Für Kosmologien wie die heutige, in denen das Universum ein endliches Alter
besitzt, folgt in beiden Fällen nichts.56
Welchen Status hat nun Beckers Beweis der Wiederkunft? “Wollte hier jemand
einwenden, es sei nur von ‘gnoseologischen’ oder bestenfalls ‘phänomenolo-
gischen’, aber nicht von ‘ontologischen’ Sachverhalten die Rede, so sei ihm
erwidert, daß man die ‘ontische’ Struktur des periodischen Weltverlaufs nicht unter
dem Bild einer Schwingung (Sinuskurve), sondern eines Kreises zu fassen hat.
‘Die Zeit selber ist ein Kreis’, wie Nietzsche sagt.”57
Meines Erachtens scheint Becker die ontische Struktur hier durchaus mittels
eines transzendentalen Arguments zu begründen. Das Vergangenheitskontinuum
ist ­überhaupt nur vorstellbar, wenn es aus lauter Perioden besteht. Doch werden
hierfür eine ganze Reihe von Voraussetzungen gemacht. Zunächst ist hier natürlich
die Ablehnung des Cantorschen Kontinuums zu nennen, aber es finden sich
meines Erachtens auch zwei der nach Beckers Worten schwer zu beweisenden
physikalischen Voraussetzungendes zweiten Beweisganges wieder. Da ist zum
einen die Diskretheit der Weltzustände; denn ansonsten wäre ja auch durch die
Periodisierung das Kontinuum nicht entschärft. Zum anderen aber fällt Becker
hinter die Modifikation des zweiten Beweisgangs im Sinne der statistischen
Mechanik zurück und nimmt wieder eine e­ indeutig bestimmte Kausalverknüpfung
und Zustandsabfolge ‘abc usw.’ an. Würde lediglich der Zustand a nach einer
gewissen Zeit wieder erreicht, jedoch auf einem anderen Wege, gelänge die
Umkehrung nicht und es wäre sehr wohl der Zustand a ausgezeichnet, was Becker
ja bestreitet. Würde a im Sinne des Poincaréschen Wiederkehrtheorems nur bis
auf einen kleinen vorgegebenen Rest wieder erreicht, so könnte Becker das
Argument nicht ins Unendliche iterieren und die Differenz im Sinne der 1.

55
 Becker (1927), 59.
56
 Allerdings könnte Becker auf Schopenhauers Einsicht verweisen, dass in diesem Falle “die Zeit
selbst angefangen haben muß, was widersinnig ist” (zitiert nach Becker (1927), 55). Im Rahmen
der heutigen Urknallkosmologie ist dies zwar eine formale Konsequenz der Verschmelzung von
Raum und Zeit in der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie. Doch betrachten viele diese Konsequenz als
nicht annehmbar und verweisen darauf, dass die Kosmologie des frühen Universums eine
Quantenkosmologie sein muss. Zu den heutigen Debatten, vgl. Stadler, Stöltzner (Hg.) (2006).
57
 Becker (1927), 58; Die Passage aus dem Zarathustra findet sich in Nietzsche (1980), Band 4, 200.
128 M. Stöltzner

Unterscheidung (zwischen regressus in infinitum und progressus ex infinito)

­bliebe bestehen. Denkt man an Boltzmanns Argument über die Auszeichnung von
Anfangsbedingungen, wäre dies auch nicht überraschend. Würde man diesen Weg
gehen, so denke ich, ergäbe sich die Einsicht, dass es zwar Wiederkehrbahnen
gibt, diese jedoch sehr selten, mathematisch gesprochen ein verschwindendes
Maß besitzen. In diese Richtung weist nun gerade die Analyse von Felix Hausdorff
alias Paul Mongré.

5  Ein nicht geführter Dialog unter Bonner Kollegen

Bereits 1893 fiel dem gerade frisch promovierten Mathematiker Felix Hausdorff
auf, dass Nietzsches Argument, die endliche Zahl von möglichen Weltzuständen
könne nur dann durch die unendliche Zeit erfüllt werden, wenn das Weltgeschehen
periodisch sei, unhaltbar war. Der Literat und Nietzscheverehrer Paul Mongré teilte
dies auch brieflich dem Herausgeber Köselitz mit, nicht ohne zu verschweigen,
dass er Nietzsches Bemühungen um die Wissenschaft ebenso ernst nehme wie
Andreas-Salomé.58
Rein mechanistisch betrachtet ist der Gedanke einer Erschöpfbarkeit der Weltzustände
sogar falsch und beruht auf einer Amphibolie des Unendlichkeitsbegriffs. … Die Zeit ist
eine eindimensionale Mannigfaltigkeit, ein ∞1, die Gesamtheit aller Weltzustände
[der Phasenraum] eine unendlichdimensionale, ein ∞∞; jene kann also diese nur partiell
realisiren, keinesfalls erschöpfen. Bestünde die Welt aus der Bewegung eines einzigen
Punktdreiecks, so hätten wir ∞3 mögliche Weltzustände … und zu ihrer Unterbringung nur
∞1 Zeitaugenblicke; es würden also ∞2 Weltzustände unrealisirt bleiben, geschweige dass
Zeit zu Wiederholungen übrig wäre.59

Hausdorff-Mongré hat diesen Gedanken auch im Sant’Ilario60 breiter ausgeführt.

Und der entsprechende Aphorismus endet ganz im Sinne von Andreas-Salomé:
“Die ewige Wiederkunft ist eine gewaltige Conception, ein Mysterium, das schon
als Möglichkeit aufregt, erschüttert, ungeheure Folgerungen zulässt. Wir treten
diesem ‘abgründlichen Gedanken’ nicht zu nahe, wenn wir seinen oberflächlichen
Beweis verwerfen.”61
Auf den ersten Blick scheint Mongrés Dimensionsbetrachtung auch Beckers
physikalisch-kosmologischen Beweisgang zu Fall zu bringen, doch sie ist nicht
allgemein genug. Durch sein Studium der Cantorschen Mengenlehre erkannte
Hausdorff kurz darauf, dass Punktmengen unterschiedlicher Dimension dieselbe Stufe
der Unendlichkeit haben können, weil zwischen ihnen bijektive Abbildungen bestehen.

58
 Zu Hausdorff-Mongrés engen Beziehungen zum Nietzsche Archiv einschließlich der Tatsache,
dass er vorübergehend als Herausgeber von Nietzsches naturwissenschaftlichen Schriften im
Gespräch war, vgl. Stegmaier (2004), 66–70.
59
 Zitiert nach Stegmaier (2004), 46.
60
 Mongré: Sant’Ilario. In: Hausdorff (2004), 443–448. Aphorismus 406.
61
 Mongré (1897), 448.
Die ewige Wiederkunft wissenschaftlich betrachtet… 129

In Das Chaos finden sich daher mathematische Argumente anderen Typs, die
jedoch zum Teil auf eine ähnliche Intuition hinauslaufen. Bevor ich diese ­vorstelle,
möchte ich jedoch noch Hausdorff-Mongrés Überlegungen zum Verhältnis zwischen
Nietzsches Wiederkunftgedanken und dem Poincaréschen Wiederkehrtheorem
vortragen und zu Beckers physikalisch-kosmologischem Beweis in Beziehung setzen.
Mongrés Aufsatz “Nietzsches Lehre von der Wiederkunft des Gleichen,”
publiziert in der Zeit im Jahre 1900, beginnt wie folgt: “Warum schreibt nicht einer
unserer Philosophen die Geschichte der ‘sphäro-cyklischen Weltanschauung’?
Auf diesen neuen Namen sei es erlaubt eine uralte Sache zu taufen, nämlich alle
jene Versuche, mit dem Schlüssel irgend einer Kreis-Kugel-Ring-Symbolik das
Weltgeheimnis zu entziffern.”62 Dem Riemannschen sphärischen Raum mit
konstantem Krümmungsmaß stellt Mongré dabei die zyklische Zeit an die Seite.
Wohlgemerkt, ich glaube nicht, daß die ewige Wiederkunft in der üblichen Form sich halten
läßt; aber ich finde nicht, daß die moderne Philosophie darüber hinaus sei, solche
Speculationen nach Für und Wider gründlich durchzudenken. … Viel eher wäre die
Philosophie berechtigt, sich in diesem Falle unzuständig zu erklären und die Acten über die
ewige Wiederkunft an die Naturwissenschaft weiterzugeben.63

Die Naturwissenschaft entscheidet gegen die ewige Wiederkunft: “in einem sich
selbst überlassenen System sind vollkommene Kreisprocesse unmöglich. Der
Kosmos ‘altert’, vorausgesetzt, daß er ein sich selbst überlassenes System ist.”64
Während die Ostwaldsche Energetik überhaupt nur nichtumkehrbare Vorgänge
zulasse und die umkehrbaren lediglich als ideale Grenzfälle betrachte, könne sich
die immer noch dominante mechanische Weltanschauung mit der Wiederkehr noch
am besten befreunden.
Hier ist die … Wiederkehr eines gegebenen Zustandes principiell möglich, nur äußerst
unwahrscheinlich; … gewissermaßen ein statistisches und kein deductiv nothwendiges
Ergebnis. … Periodicität des Weltlaufs ist hier also immerhin möglich, angenäherte
Periodicität, nach einem Satze der neueren Mechanik, sogar gewiß, aber nur in einem
System von endlichen Dimensionen und Geschwindigkeiten, also Voraussetzungen, die für
das [mechanische] Universum nicht zutreffen dürften.65

Hier sprach jemand, der sich fünf Jahre zuvor über mathematische Probleme
der Astronomie habilitiert hatte und Poincarés Arbeiten zur Himmelsmechanik
genau kannte.
Im eben zitierten Aufsatz wird auch auf eine bereits anderenorts veröffentlichte
mathematische Analyse verwiesen. Diese findet sich im zwei Jahre zuvor publizierten
Buch Das Chaos in kosmischer Auslese (1898). Der Mathematik hatte Mongré bereits
in Sant’Ilario die Bestimmung einer “Selbstkritik der Wissenschaft”66 zugewiesen.

62
 Mongré: “Nietzsches Lehre von der Wiederkunft des Gleichen”. In: Hausdorff (2004),
Band VII, 897.
63
 Mongré Ebd., 897–898.
64
 Mongré Ebd., 900.
65
 Mongré Ebd., 900f.
66
 Mongré (1897), 436 (Aphorismus 401).
130 M. Stöltzner

In Das Chaos dient sie nun vor allem zur Kritik einer realistischen Metaphysik,
die eine Welt der ‘Dinge an sich’ unabhängig von unserem Bewusstsein postuliert.
Hier der vernichtende Schluss des Buches:
Die ganze wunderbare und reichgegliederte Structur unseres Kosmos [so wie wir ihn
erfahren] zerflatterte beim Übergang zum Transcendenten in lauter chaotische
Unbestimmtheit; beim Rückweg zum Empirischen versagt dementsprechend der Versuch,
die allereinfachsten Bewusstseinsformen als notwendige Incarnationen der Erscheinung
aufzustellen.67

Mithilfe mathematischer Kritik möchte Hausdorf den metaphysischen Realismus

ad absurdum führen. “Zu diesem Zwecke greifen wir irgend eine unserer
Bewusstseinswelt anhaftende Eigenschaft heraus, übertragen sie unverändert auf
das absolut Reale und suchen sie dann, bei vorgeschriebener und festgehaltener
empirischer Wirkung, möglichst stark umzuformen.”68 Ziel ist es insbesondere, die
maximale Vieldeutigkeit jener absolut realen bzw. transzendenten Welt bei unverän-
dertem empirischem Gehalt bzw. Bewusstseinsinhalt zu erweisen, in manchen
Fällen sogar im mathematisch verheerend präzisen Sinne einer unendlichen
Vieldeutigkeit.69 Dieses Chaos in den Dingen an sich wird durch die Existenz
unseres Bewusstseins auf den in ihm vorgefundenen Kosmos reduziert, was Mongré
im Sinne einer epistemischen Auslese durch eben dieses Bewusstsein versteht.
Auch der Wiederkunftsgedanke erweist sich als Möglichkeit in der transzen-
denten Welt. Mongrés für das vorzustellende Argument entscheidender Zeitbegriff
scheint auf den ersten Blick gar nicht so weit von Beckers phänomenologischem
erntfernt. Er unterscheidet den ‘Zeitinhalt’, die kontinuierliche Reihe von
Weltzuständen oder das materiale Substrat der Zeit, vom ‘Zeitablauf’ als desjenigen
“räthselhaften formalen Prozesses, durch den jener Weltzustand die
Verwandlungsfolge Zukunft, Gegenwart, Vergangenheit erfährt.”70 “Weltzustand ist
eine erfüllte Zeitstrecke von der Länge Null, sowie Augenblick eine leere Zeitstrecke
von der Länge Null ist.”71 Der Punkt entspricht einer Linie der Länge Null. “Was
eine erfüllte Zeitstrecke ist, darüber ist unmittelbar unser zeitlich erlebendes
Bewusstein zu ­befragen, das receptiv und productiv mit nichts anderem als mit der
Erfüllung der Zeitform beschäftigt ist.”72 Führt man wie in der Mechanik die realis-
tische Hilfsvorstellung einer absoluten Zeit ein, so ruht der Zeitinhalt und der
Zeitablauf spielt sich bewegungsartig ab. Der Gegenwartspunkt bewegt sich auf
einer Zeitlinie, deren Punkte die Weltzustände beschreiben. Doch aus transzen-
denter Sicht gesehen muss diese Bewegung keinesfalls konstant, ja nicht einmal
stetig sein. “Die transcendente Succession der Weltzustände ist willkürlich und fällt

67
 Mongré (1898), 803.
68
 Mongré (1898), 602.
69
 So etwa im Falle der Skaleninvarianz des gesamten Universums, vgl. Mongré (1898), 605.
70
 Mongré (1898), 605.
71
 Mongré (1898), 605f.
72
 Mongré Ebd., 606.
Die ewige Wiederkunft wissenschaftlich betrachtet… 131

nicht in unser Bewusstsein.”73 Der Zeitinhalt ist also indifferent gegenüber dem
Zeitablauf im ­ transzendenten Sinne. Der mit unserem Bewusstseinsinhalt
­übereinstimmende transzendente Weltverlauf ist singulär. “Weder der beharrende
einzelne Weltzustand noch eine beharrende Vielheit von Weltzuständen ist
Bewusstseinserscheinung, sondern allein jenes strömende oder gleitende Continuum
von Weltzuständen”,74 das Werden.
Mongré untersucht nun den Fall, dass wir eine Strecke AB der Zeitlinie in
umgekehrter Richtung BA durchschreiten.
Kann die Zeitstrecke BA aus AB durch irgendwelche Reversion der Bewusstseinsvorgänge,
also etwa durch physiologische, chemische und zuletzt mechanische Untersuchungen
hergeleitet werden…? Das wäre das erreichte Ziel des Materialismus, die vollendete
Übersetzungskunst, die Bewusstseinsvorgänge als Bewegungsgleichungen und diese wie-
der als jene verdolmetscht.75

Durch eine mathematische Kritik zeigt Mongré, dass dies nicht möglich ist.
Wenn wir AB in sehr kleine Teilstrecken zerlegen (1,2,3,…,n-1,n), so erhalten wir
durch einfache Umkehrung die Strecke (n,n-1,…,3,2,1). Im Limes n → ∞ erhalten
wir daraus in der Tat die Strecke BA, doch müssen wir dazu durch den Weltzustand
hindurch gehen, was eine Fülle kompliziertester Vorgänge involvierte. “Fragen wir
nun gar, wie es bei jener Reversion um die Erhaltung oder Veränderung von
Relationen höherer Gattung steht, ob beispielsweise der Complex räumlich und
materiell zusammengehöriger Einzelerscheinungen, der in positiver Richtung ein
organisirtes bewusstes Lebewesen bildet, nach der Umkehrung sich zu einer ähnli-
chen räthselhaften Function wieder vereinigt, so sinken wir tief unter die Schwelle
des Denkbaren und stossen auf Probleme,”76 die nur der ideale Materialismus im
Besitz einer Weltformel lösen könnte.
Aus demselben Material von Weltzuständen sind demnach zwei Welten herstellbar, die als
rein mechanische Erscheinungen aufgefasst sich nur im Vorzeichen ± unterscheiden würden,
die von aussen betrachtet durchaus identisch sind, und die trotzdem den in ihrem inneren
Connex eingesponnenen Wesen keine Communication über die Grenze herüber
­ermöglichen. … Wir sind als subjektive Träger der Zeit, unserer innersten Structur nach in
die Structur der positiv gerichteten Zeitlinie eingeflochten und von der negativen Richtung
ausgeschlossen.77

Hausdorff-Mongré beharrt mithin auf der ersten von Becker gemachten

Unterscheidung (zwischen regressus in infinitum und progressus ex infinito), und
die Umkehrbarkeit wird auch dadurch nicht erleichtert, dass es sich hier ja nur um
eine endliche Strecke AB und nicht um einen unendlichen progressus/regressus in
der Zeit handelt. Mir scheint insgesamt gesehen Mongrés Argumentationsgang eine
stichhaltige Kritik an Beckers mathematischem Beweis, die nicht davon abhängt,

73
 Mongré Ebd., 610, Hervorhebung im Original.
74
 Mongré Ebd., 616.
75
 Mongré Ebd., 620.
76
 Mongré Ebd., 621.
77
 Mongré: Ebd., 622.
132 M. Stöltzner

dass Mongré in Das Chaos eine Konzeption des Bewusstseins vertritt, die Beckers
Ablehnung des Cantoscher Kontinuums zuwiderläuft. So heißt es einige Seiten
zuvor: “Was in einem Augenblicke erhalten ist, ist niemals Vorstellung [im Sinne
Kants]; die einfachste Bewusstseinsaction setzt immer unendlich viele, stetig
aufeinander folgende Augenblicke, kürzer ein Continuum von Weltzuständen
voraus.”78
Aus der Sicht unseres Bewusstseins ist daher die Umkehrung unmöglich, aus
tranzendenter Sicht ist sie trivial. Der Weltbeobachter in der absoluten Zeit sieht
jenes “beharrende Substrat des Wandels und Wechsels, das die Möglichkeit einer
ewigen Wiederkunft des Gleichen in sich trägt, … das Reservoir des Daseins, dessen
Realitätsgehalt durch den Process des zeitlichen Ablaufs nicht vermindert und durch
millionenfache Wiederholung dieses Processes nicht erschöpft wird.”79 Die ewige
Wiederkunft verbildlicht die Zeitlosigkeit des materiellen Zeitsubstrats. Mongré
unterstreicht den Unterschied seines Arguments von demjenigen Nietzsches.
Mit der von Nietzsche neuerdings aufgestellten Formel der ewigen Wiederkunft, die eine
inhaltliche Periodicität innerhalb des Weltgeschehens behauptet, ist die unsrige nicht
identisch; Nietzsches Aussage bezieht sich auf die innere Structur der Zeitlinie (die er sich
geschlossen, in sich zurücklaufend vorstellt), unsere gilt, ohne Rücksicht auf den Inhalt,
von jeder Einzelstrecke. Nietzsches Hypothese … unterliegt schliesslich dem Richterspruch
der Erfahrung; unser Satz redet von der transcendenten Möglichkeit.80

Indem Mongrés mathematische Analyse des Wiederkunftgedankens, im

Gegensatz zu derjenigen Beckers, negativ ausfällt, wird die Frage wieder an die
Physik zurückverwiesen—wo sie weniger leicht zu widerlegen ist, als sich das
Mongré in seinem Brief an Köselitz vorgestellt hatte.
Mongré nutzt nun die Nietzschesche Hypothese zu einer Klassifikation metaphy-
sischer Entwürfe in ontologische und genealogische, ein Gedanke, der sich mit
anderer Terminologie auch in den historischen Betrachtungen am Ende von Beckers
Aufsatz findet. Am Ende des Kapitels “Gegen die Metaphysik” kritisiert Mongré
auch jegliche ‘Ethik der ewigen Widerkunft’ etwa in dem Sinne, “dass der diony-
sische Mensch nicht nur das Leben, sondern die unendliche Wiederkehr des Lebens
bejahe.”81 Aber die ewige Wiederkunft geht uns praktisch gar nichts an, da sich die
identische Wiederholung unserer Wahrnehmung entzöge. “Wenn von dieser
Wiederholung die leiseste Spur einer Empfindung oder Ahnung in die Zeitlinie
dränge, … so wäre das eben keine identische Wiederkehr.”82
Mongré zufolge erweist sich die ewige Wiederkunft als metaphysischer
Begriff, dessen epistemologischer Sinn darin besteht, dass er abgestreift werden
kann, nicht als üsinnloser Begriff im Sinne des Neopositivismus, sondern nach
erfolgter Selbstvergewisserung des Subjekts in seinem zeitlichen Bewusstsein.

78
 Mongré: Ebd., 607.
79
 Mongré: Ebd., 626.
80
 Mongré: Ebd., 632–633.
81
 Mongré (1898), 647.
82
 Ebd.
Die ewige Wiederkunft wissenschaftlich betrachtet… 133

Wir finden mithin wie bei Rey am Wiederkehrgedanken wieder eine Trennung
in objektive und subjektive Ebene, die dem Phänomenologen Becker nicht
behagen konnte.
Das Thema der ewigen Wiederkunft hat auch den Mathematiker Hausdorff später
nicht losgelassen. Moritz Epple83 zitiert ein Manuskript aus dem Jahre 1908 in dem
Hausdorff den Gedanken in das folgende Problem übersetzt. Gibt es Abbildungen
aus den reellen Zahlen ℝ, in die Menge {1,2}, die vollständig wiederkehrfrei sind
in dem Sinne, dass für keine Intervalle I,J ⊂ ℝ, für die f beide Werte unendlich oft
annimmt, f sich in I und J ‘gleich’ verhält, d.h., dass eine ordnungserhaltende
Abbildung existiert. Eine Lösung ist nicht überliefert.

6  Epilog

Paul Mongré hat in der Neuen Rundschau auch die Herausgabe des Willens zur
Macht kommentiert. Es sei beklagenswert, dass Nietzsche gerade in seinen
schwachen Punkten derzeit so populär sei, und nicht als der gütige, verstehende
Freigeist, der er auch gewesen.84
In Nietzsche glüht ein Fanatiker. Seine Moral der Züchtung, auf unserem heutigen
Fundamente biologischen und physiologischem Wissens errichtet: das könnte ein weltge-
schichtlicher Skandal werden, gegen den Inquisition und Hexenprozeß zu harmlosen
Verirrungen verblassen. “Das Leben selbst erkennt … kein gleiches Recht zwischen
gesunden und entarteten Theilen eines Organismus an: letztere muß man ausschneiden
…”. Ungefähr sagen das die päpstlichen Ketzerrichter auch … Sollen wir wieder einmal
erleben, wie man mit dem Hexenhammer philosophiert? … [D]erselbe Philosoph, der den
Moral-Castratismus der Guten und Gerechten verabscheut, befürwortet den eigentlichen
chirurgischen Castratismus im Dienste der Auslese. Um das zu würdigen, müssen wir
einmal, was schneller gethan als gesagt ist, unser heutiges Wissen von der Vererbung
zusammenzählen. Daß Trunkenbolde h­ äufig idiotische Kinder zeugen, daß
Geisteskrankheiten, Tuberkulose, Neurasthenie sich der Disposition nach manchmal
vererben, manchmal auch nicht. Auf diesen verblüffenden Reichthum an Kenntnissen hin
soll man der Biologie das gesegnete Messerchen in die Hand geben?85

Als Becker im Jahr 1942 seine Gedanken Friedrich Nietzsches über Rangordnung,
Zucht und Züchtung vortrug, hatte sich diese Befürchtung nur allzu sehr bewahrheitet.
Die Biologie war auch damals, nach Aussage der meisten nicht-deutschen Genetiker
und Eugeniker, keinesfalls ausreichend vorangekommen.86 Der ­wissenschaftlichen
Vorsicht wollte sich Becker nun aber offenbar nicht mehr anschließen.

83
 Vgl. Epple (2006).
84
 Mongré (1902), in Hausdorff (2004), 909.
85
 Mongré (1902), 907.
86
 Vgl. vor allem die Argumentation des Wieners Julius Bauer in Hofer (2007), 31–65.
134 M. Stöltzner

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Heidegger and Our Twenty-first Century
Experience of Ge-Stell

Theodore Kisiel

Abstract I propose an etymological translation of Ge-Stell, Heidegger’s word for

the essence of modern technology, from its Greek and Latin roots as “syn-thetic
com-posit[ion]ing,” which presciently portends our twenty-first century experience
of the internetted WorldWideWeb with its virtual infinity of websites in cyberspace,
Global Positioning Systems, interlocking air traffic control grids, world-embracing
weather maps, the 24-7 world news coverage of cable TV-networks like CNN, etc.,
etc.—all of which are structured by the complex programming based on the
computerized and ultimately simple Leibnizian binary-digital logic generating an
infinite number of combinations of the posit (1) and non-posit (0). The sharp
contrast between the global time-space technologically foreshortened into instan-
taneity and simultaneity and the radically local time-space of our situated historical
existence—in short, the temporal-spatial tension between Ge-Stell and Da-Sein—
is examined for ways and means of bringing them together in contemporaneous
compatibility.

Martin Heidegger got as far as the atomic-space-cybernetic age in his meditations

on technicity and modern technology. We ourselves have been able to experience
the marvels of the twenty-first century advance into the internet revolution and its
instantaneous global reaches, such that, for example, we and the entire world with
us were virtual witnesses of the recent events that transpired in Abbotabad, Pakistan,
almost immediately after they happened.1 We twenty-first century citizens of the
world take for granted the convenience of stratospheric transportation networks and

1
This talk, delivered on May 25, 2011 to the Heidegger Forschungsgruppe meeting in Messkirch,
Germany, took as its example of virtually instantaneous global communication the raid on the
compound of Osama bin Laden that took place in the early hours of May 2 East Asian time.
T. Kisiel (*)
Northern Illinois University, 27W761 Washington Av,
Winfield, IL 60190, USA
e-mail: tkisiel@wpo.cso.niu.edu

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 137

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_9,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
138 T. Kisiel

the satellitic transmission of instantaneous media events that enwrap the “global
village” at every hour of every day by CNN. But modern technology had advanced
sufficiently in Heidegger’s day for him to be struck by the same drastic foreshorten-
ing of time and space and its global reach brought on by the radio technology of his
time. Accordingly, what he had to say to us about the essence of modern technology
in the twentieth century appears to apply as well, with some minor adjustments in
terminology, to the more enhanced and advanced technological realities of the
twenty-first century.
Such adjustments can easily be made in the single hyphenated word by which
he defines the essence of modern technology, almost as ingenious as the single
hyphenated word that defines his entire way of thought, namely, Da-Sein. For
modern technicity, his one word is of course Ge-Stell. In the last three decades of
his life, Heidegger repeatedly tells us what Ge-Stell is, and repeatedly notes that
it is to be sharply distinguished from the ordinary everyday senses of Gestell, as
in Büchergestell (bookcase) and Brillengestell (frame for eyeglasses). It must
therefore be emphatically stated that Ge-Stell is simply NOT “frame, framework
or enframing,” the current English translations drawn directly from German-
English dictionaries. What then is Ge-Stell in its global essentiality? It is, in
Heidegger’s breakdown of this single word, “die versammelnde Einheit aller
Weisen des Stellens/the collective unity of all modes of setting in place, positioning,
positing.”2 “Im Ge- spricht die Versammlung, Vereinigung, das Zusammenbringen
aller Weisen des Stellens/The prefix Ge- speaks to the gathering, unification,
bringing-together of all kinds of placing and positioning.”3 “Das Ge-Stell ist die
Versammlung, die Gesamtheit aller Weisen des Stellens, die sich dem
Menschenwesen in dem Maße auferlegen, in dem es gegenwärtig ek-sistiert/
Ge-Stell is the gathering, the integration of all the modes of placing, positioning,
and positing that impose themselves upon the human being in the manner in
which the human being presently ex-sists.”4
Against the current English favorite of “enframing,” I therefore propose an
etymological translation of Ge-Stell from its Greek and Latin roots as “syn-thetic
com-posit[ion]ing,” where the Greek-rooted adjective ‘synthetic’ adds the note of
artifactuality and even artificiality to the system of positions and posits. For me,
Ge-Stell as “syn-thetic com-posit[ion]ing” presciently portends the twenty-first cen-
tury globalizations of the internetted WorldWideWeb with its virtual infinity of
websites in cyberspace, Global Positioning Systems (GPS), interlocking air traffic
control grids, world-embracing weather maps, the 24-7 world news coverage of
cable TV-networks like CNN, etc., etc., all of which are structured by the complex
programming based on the computerized and ultimately simple Leibnizian

2
Heidegger (1977b), 104. The citation is taken from the seminar at Le Thor in 1969.
3
Ibid., 129. Citation taken from the seminar at Zähringen, 1973.
4
Ibid., 126, Zähringen, 1973. The same point was already made in a rich note circa 1955, whose
first sentence reads: “Im Wort ‘Gestell’ spricht die Versammlung des Stellens, in der ‘Versammlung’
spricht das Echo zum Logos, im ‘Stellen’ spricht das Echo der Thesis (Poiesis).” Heidegger (2009),
320; see also 327 and 365. Hereafter cited as GA76.
Heidegger and Our Twenty-first Century Experience of Ge-Stell 139

binary-digital logic generating an infinite number of combinations of the posit (1)

and non-posit (0). The synthetic compositing of computer logic thus maps out the
grand artifact of the technological infrastructure that networks the entire globe of
our planet Earth.
The phenomenon of technological globalization was already apparent by the
time of the so-called “Great War” of 1914–1918, which was accordingly renamed
the World War. One of the heroes of this highly mechanized war, Ernst Jünger, in
his accounts of “totale Mobilmachung,” the total mobilization that occurred in
the last year of the war, began to attribute this phenomenon to planetarisches
Technik and its use in the struggle for planetarische Herrschaft. This becomes
Heidegger’s word for globalization in this period to phenomenologically describe
the human experience that results from the network of grids constructed by mod-
ern technology to guide and control the so-called “air waves” which harness the
natural electromagnetic radiation occurring across the surface of our planet Earth
for human use and consumption. Globalization is essentially a time-space term,
a dynamic term that spells out a quasi-infinite velocity in nanoseconds through
its virtual abolition of space into bi-locative simultaneity and its instantaneous
reduction of all time differences. By the early twentieth century, radio technol-
ogy had advanced sufficiently for Heidegger to be struck by the drastic foreshort-
ening of time and space and its global reach. In the famous ‘pincers’ passage of
SS 1935, Heidegger dramatically describes the global geopolitical as well as
philosophical situation of a postwar Germany being squeezed by two interna-
tional movements, both of them technological juggernauts, on the western front
by American capitalism and on the eastern front by Bolshevistic communism, in
the following words:
Russia and America, when viewed metaphysically, are both the same: the same hopeless
frenzy of unchained technology and of the groundless organization of the average man.
When the farthest corner of the globe [der Erdball, the terrestial globe versus Heidegger’s
beloved terra firma] has been technically conquered and can be economically exploited;
when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes acces-
sible as fast as you like; when you [by way of radio] can simultaneously “experience” an
assassination attempt against a [Yugoslavian] king in France and a symphony concert in
Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity, and time as his-
tory has vanished from the Dasein of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man
of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then,
there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question: what for?—where to?—
and what then? […in short, the question of be-ing in the twentieth century…]5

Clearly, Heidegger was suspicious of this instantaneity and simultaneity of the

time technologized by global communication primarily because it abolishes the
time of situated history, the time of Da-sein. In 1935, this time-space abolition
results from the medium of the radio along with the wire services of newspapers,
but it just as readily reflects with uncanny foresight the more advanced digital-
media systems of the twenty-first century. As Heidegger observes in 1949, by plane

5
Heidegger (1953), 28f. English translation by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (2000a), 40.
Emphasis added.
140 T. Kisiel

and by radio and soon by TV, “all distances in time and space are shrinking.”6 He
calls this the phenomenon of the distanceless [das Abstandslose]. Distant locales
and exotic places are shown on TV or film so realistically that you may even feel
that YOU ARE THERE [as we were, most recently, in Abbottabad, Pakistan] there
and there and everywhere in a technologically induced bi-locative simultaneity.
Heidegger asks: “What is happening here when, as a result of the abolition of great
distances, everything is equally far and equally near? What is this uniformity in
which everything is neither far nor near, is, as it were, without distance? Everything
gets lumped together into uniform distancelessness [Abstandslosigkeit]. How? Is
not this merging of all into the distanceless more unearthly than everything blowing
up [by way of the atomic bomb]?”7 What Heidegger misses in this all-too-familiar
modern experience is a genuine experience of nearness, the proximity of be-ing.
Because the experience of nearness fails to materialize with this abolition of all
distances, the phenomenon of the distanceless has come to dominate our lives in the
twenty-first century.8
Heidegger’s own examples of Ge-Stell begin in a farmer’s field about to be
exploited for its mineral deposits, be it for coal or uranium ore. Instead of being
cultivated, the land is now being challenged [sich gestellt] to yield energy, where
we set upon9 the land in order to extract coal or ore from it, then store this energy
resource in order to have it ready for use. The hydroelectric plant is set into the
river Rhine, thereby damming it up to build up water pressure which then sets the
turbines turning whose thrust in turn generates and sets the electric current going
into the network of long-distance cables, where the systematic transforming, stor-
ing, distributing and switching of electrical energy takes place.10 Be it coal or
hydroelectric power or atomic energy, in each case “Nature is positioned for its
energy,” nature is forced to yield its energy. Nature, thus held up to yield energy,
emerges henceforth as the “storage-place of energy,” like a global fuel depot or
gigantic gas station.
Storage of resources, be it energy or information, becomes a central feature of
the Ge-Stell, which Heidegger calls its fundamental unconcealment. “Everywhere,
everything is ordered to stand by [es wird bestellt, auf der Stelle zu stehen], to be
immediately in position for use, in fact to stand there to be on call for a further
ordering [Bestellen]. […] Whatever is ordered about in this way has its own stand-
ing. We call it the standing-reserve [Bestand].” And now comes the perhaps surpris-
ing denouement of Ge-Stell from the philosophical perspective: “Whatever stands

6
Heidegger (1994), 3, citing from the preface to the lecture, “Das Ding.” English translation by
Albert Hofstadter in Heidegger (1971b), 165.
7
Ibid., 4/166.
8
Ibid., 20/181.
9
Here, stellen is translated in various idioms of “to set.” The typical translations of stellen are “put,
place, set, stand,” with strong overlaps with the verbs setzen and legen.
10
Heidegger (1954b), 23–24, citing from the 1953 version of “Die Frage nach der Technik.”
English translation by William Lovitt in (1977a), 16.
Heidegger and Our Twenty-first Century Experience of Ge-Stell 141

by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as object.”11

“Thus when man, in investigating and observing, ensnares nature as an area of his
own conceiving, he has already been claimed by a way of revealing that challenges
him to approach nature as an object of research, until even the object disappears into
the objectlessness of standing-reserve.”12 Heidegger in a parallel essay also notes
that the most recent cyclotron experiments in nuclear physics likewise encounter
this phenomenon of the complete disappearance of the object, which hitherto had
been the very hallmark of modern science. But “that does not mean that the subject-
object relation vanishes, but rather the opposite: it now attains its most extreme
dominance, predetermined from out of Ge-Stell, syn-thetic com-positioning. It
becomes a standing-reserve [Bestand] to be commanded and placed on order.”13 The
subject-object relation now reaches, for the first time, its purely ‘relational’ character,
that is, its character of orderability [Bestellungscharakter], in which both the subject
and the object are claimed as standing-reserves [Bestände].
The more modern technology unfolds and develops, the more objectivity trans-
forms itself into disposability (into a making-itself-available). Gegenständlichkeit is
transformed into Beständlichkeit. Now there are no more objects (no more beings
standing over against a subject that takes them into view)—there are only Bestände,
to wit, reserve resources positioned for orderability: stock on hand, stored inventory,
warehoused supplies and provisions, capital holdings, assets, funds held in reserve
(in short, beings held ready for plan-directed use). Political economists in fact no
longer deal with objects but instead systematically order the space with an overall
plan toward maximizing the utility of resources. Beings as a whole are aligned and
ordered within a horizon of usefulness, domination or, better still, the disposability
[Beständlichkeit] of all that needs to be placed under control. The planners
themselves are no longer scientifically oriented toward a field of objects but now
emerge in their true gestalt as technicians and even technocrats, i.e., humans who
see beings a priori in the horizon of making-them-useful. It can no longer appear in
the objective neutrality of an over-against. There is nothing other than reserve
resources: warehoused stock, inventories of goods, stores of supplies, stockpiles of
uranium, reserves of provisions, energy reserves, capital reserves, federal reserve
funds,14 not to speak of the quasi-infinite store of information in the so-called mem-
ory banks of the internetted WorldWideWeb. “The ontological definition of reserve
stock is not the persistence of durable goods but their character of disposability, the
constant possibility of being offered and ordered, i.e., of enduring availability. Its
constancy is not that of objectness but that of the standing reserve, a constancy
defined in terms of syn-thetic com-positioning. In disposability, the being is posited
as being exclusively available from the ground up, available for use in the planning

11
Ibid., 24/17.
12
Ibid., 27/19.
13
Ibid., 61/173, citing from the essay “Wissenschaft und Besinnung.”
14
Heidegger (1977b), 105–6.
142 T. Kisiel

of the whole.”15 There are no longer any objects but only ‘production resources’ and
‘consumer goods’ at the disposal of everyone, who themselves are put into service
in the business of production and consumption. In universities (now called “knowl-
edge industries”) as well as in corporations, personnel departments are now called
departments of human resources. And since all resources are disposable, they are at
once replaceable. This is clearly manifest in the industry of consumer goods with its
abundance of substitutes and, in an era of mass production, leads to the tendency to
replace rather than repair used goods.16 But extending the same attitudes to human
resources is fraught with all manners of abuse, the extremes of which we have
witnessed under the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.
The recent disruption in the global flow of standing reserves caused by the
Japanese earthquake illustrates another phenomenon unique to modern technicity,
namely, that Heidegger’s broken hammer experience has gone global. The widely
adopted Toyota strategy of just-in-time inventories for its production lines led, as a
result of the earthquake, to drastic disruptions in the supply lines of numerous
automobile production lines around the world. Massive power outages and recent
identity thefts of mega-lists pirated on the internet are further examples of the bro-
ken hammer experience gone global. Recall the fears of massive attacks on the
Internet and WorldWideWeb by cyber-terrorists in the millennial year of Y2K.
Among other things, it conjures the image of the lightning-speed electronic circula-
tion of vast sums of currency whipping around the world’s financial markets in a
global cash flow whose reverberations sometimes verge on a cascading collapse.
Such a globally impelled crash, whether by impersonal market forces or computer
hackers, would make the worldwide depression of 1929, at least in its velocity of
impact, pale in insignificance.
To be sure, all of these examples of global disruption occur in the high-velocity
time-space of modern technicity, which is not at all comparable with the more
vitally measured time-space of the broken hammer experience. Recall that the
broken hammer experience retrospectively reminds us of the referential context and
its vital connections that the broken hammer interrupts, say, in the work world of the
carpenter. At one point, Heidegger asks what exactly is the “basic referential
context” (GA76, 302: Grundverweisungszusammenhang) of a “world” of machina-
tion and notes its radical difference from the referential world of handwork and
hand tools by pointing to the regulated and uninterrupted repeatability “in exactly
the same way” of the “mechanical” motions of the machine and the more calculative
referential relations necessary for its manufacture.17 The “machine is not an
‘imitation’ of handwork and natural processes but rather a self-standing organiza-
tion of all the processes of beings.”18 And this “organization of all the processes
of beings” in its deliberately calculated mechanical design is not even a world.

15
Ibid., 106.
16
Ibid., 107.
17
GA76, 307.
18
GA76, 308.
Heidegger and Our Twenty-first Century Experience of Ge-Stell 143

Heidegger thus speaks of an “unworlding and unearthing of beings” in the machinations

of Ge-Stell,19 where beings stand in a state of total abandonment by be-ing
[Seinsverlassenheit].20
We are accordingly moving from the epoch of objectivity [Gegenständlichkeit]
to the epoch of disposability [Beständlichkeit], the most extreme gestalt of the
history of the metaphysics of constant presence since the Greeks. “Because we no
longer encounter what is called Ge-Stell within the horizon of representation, the
view that allows us to think of the be-ing of beings as presence, Ge-Stell no longer
approaches us as something present and thus seems at first alien and strange.”21 As
the most extreme gestalt of the history of the metaphysics of constant presence,
and so the completion and fulfillment of this metaphysics, the Ge-Stell assumes a
strange constant absence which in effect serves to point it in another direction, to
serve as a passage from metaphysics to another thinking governed by the properizing
event, das Er-eignis. The Ge-Stell is “Janus-faced, it is essentially double-sided
[…] it is so to speak the photographic negative of the event, das Ereignis.”22
Accordingly, “an outstanding way to draw near to das Er-eignis, the properizing
event, would be to look deeply into the essence of Ge-Stell.”23 The Ge-Stell thus
prompts Be-sinnung, a meditation on its meaning. It is therefore not a matter of
regarding the emergence of technology as a negative event (and certainly even less
as a positive event, as if it were a paradise on earth). “That in and from which man
and be-ing approach and challenge each other in the technological world claims us
in the manner of Ge-Stell, syn-thetic com-positioning. In the reciprocal self-positing
[Sichstellen] of man and be-ing we discern the claim that defines the constellation
of our age.”24 With the Ge-Stell, it appears that we are on the verge of overcoming
the subject-object relation and entering into the mutual ownership of man and being
that the properizing event is.
The intimate be-longing together of man and be-ing in the manner of a mutual escalating
challenge brings us in startling fashion nearer to that and how man is delivered over to the
ownership of be-ing and be-ing is appropriated to the essence of man. Within Ge-Stell there
prevails a rare and exceptional ownership and appropriation. We must simply experience
this owning in which man and be-ing are proper for one another, i.e., we must enter into
what we call the event of enownment and properizing, das Ereignis … a singulare tantum
… unique … What we experience in Ge-Stell as the constellation of be-ing and man through
the modern world of technology is a prelude to what is called Er-eignis. For in the event
there resides the possibility that it may turn the sheer prevalence of Ge-Stell into a more
inceptive appropriating. Such a transformation of Ge-Stell into das Er-eignis would by
virtue of this event bring the appropriate recovery—appropriate, thus never to be made by

19
GA76, 307.
20
GA76, 297.
21
Heidegger (1957), 28. English translation by Joan Stambaugh (1969), 35f.
22
Heidegger (1977b), 104.
23
Ibid.
24
Heidegger (1957), 27f./35.
144 T. Kisiel

man alone—of the world of technology out of its domination to servitude in the realm by
which man reaches more properly into the properizing event.25
Presuming that we could wait in anticipation for the possibility that Ge-Stell, the
reciprocal challenge of man and be-ing in the calculation of the calculable, would address
itself to us as the appropriating event that first expropriates man and be-ing into their proper
[character]; then a path would be freed for man to experience beings in a more inceptive
way—the totality of the modern technological world, nature, and history, and above all their
be-ing.26

In Heidegger’s depiction, therefore, at the most extreme extremity of the history

of the metaphysics of constant presence, we find ourselves poised at the very
threshold of crossing over into an authentic experience of be-ing in the propriating
event, das Er-eignis. But despite the apparent and so tantalizing proximity of this
ex-perience, we are not given to expect a smooth gradual crossing over to it simply
because of the extremities at which we are poised: the machinations of technology
have resulted in the complete abandonment of beings by be-ing [Seinsverlassenheit]
and the human being is in peril of not only forgetting his essential be-ing but even
of having forgotten this forgetting of be-ing. “But in this extreme extremity of des-
tining peril the most intimate relationship [of man and be-ing] shows itself, but
shows itself only as a completely veiled hint.”27 It is necessary to push the ex-peri-
ence of the peril of technology to the extreme to glimpse the e-vent emerging in the
Ge-Stell. Accordingly, Heidegger recommends not attempting to arrest or to master
technology but to drive it to its extreme in order to ex-peri-ence it in its full peril to
the human being, and at the same time to meditate on the meaning of its destining
essence.28 To put this extreme experience in another way, technology in its essence
is the “most extreme neglect [Ver-wahr-losung] of the under-cut of difference
[Unter-schied, of be-ing and beings]…. Technology—the neglect of (nearness), yet
accordingly in this neglect [we find] the nearing of the turn of the forgottenness of
the under-cut of difference.”29 Finally, Heidegger, following Hölderlin, prompts the
“sons of the Alps” to make the perilous crossing “over the abyss on lightly built
bridges” by invoking these encouraging lines from Hölderlin’s Patmos: “Wo aber
Gefahr ist, wächst/Das Rettende auch//But where peril is also grows the saving.”
How the extreme peril of technology might allow us to glimpse “the growing light
of a saving [power]” is suggested by the hint that the Greek word techne is the com-
mon root of both technology and art, even the fine arts.30 By way of this hint,
Ge-Stell at its extreme of unworlding [Entweltung] and unearthing [Enterdung] may
well be transformable into the world and earth of das Geviert.
This crossing over from Ge-Stell to Geviert once again operates between
extremes that, in their very contrast, provide clues for the crossing. How? Consider,

25
Heidegger (1957), 28f./36f.
26
Ibid., 32f./40.
27
GA76, 327.
28
GA76, 255.
29
GA76, 370.
30
Heidegger (1954b)/(1977a), 36–43/28–35.
Heidegger and Our Twenty-first Century Experience of Ge-Stell 145

for example, the abolition of time and space that comes with modern technology,
where everything is equally far and equally near, inducing a uniformity in which
everything is neither far nor near, is, as it were, without distance, such that every-
thing gets lumped together into a uniform distancelessness [Abstandslosigkeit].
What is missing in this all-too-familiar modern experience of time and space is a
genuine experience of nearness, the proximity of be-ing. But that very experience
of missing the near opposed to the far in their authentic presential sense is the
beginning of meditative thinking—for which nearness can become conspicuous by
its very absence—and of the turn toward moving beyond the essence of modern
technology as Ge-Stell, which in its essence does not admit of any qualitative near-
ness or farness.31 Ge-Stell in its essence disallows nearness. And what nearness
[Nähe] truly nears is the intimacy of a world as a neighborhood [Nähe] in which
we can dwell meaningfully.32 “Ge-Stell as the completed destining of the forgotten-
ness of the essence of be-ing inconspicuously radiates a ray of the distant arrival of
world. The fact that world withholds its worlding here does not mean that nothing
happens with world: the withholding itself radiates the lofty nearness of the most
distant farness of world.”33
A crucial opposition is clearly emerging in our consideration of modern
technicity, namely, the contradistinction between the technical time-space of the
distanceless versus the time-space of historical Dasein. In SS 1928 Heidegger
characterized the historical world as a temporal playing field [Zeit-Spiel-Raum] that
grants Da-sein the freedom of movement within a finite world of distinct historical
possibilities. One is tempted nowadays to compare this basic contradistinction with
that between the cyberspace of virtual reality and the concrete space of historical
reality, by way of the many recent crossovers from virtual to historical reality in
organizing protest movements on line, be it environmental, economic, and most
recently, that of the “Arab spring.” The most recent twenty-first century technolo-
gies like the internet have by and large had a liberating effect as compared to the
twentieth century, which often employed technology as totalitarian tools of domina-
tion like the propaganda propagated by newspapers/radio/film and the leveling of
das Man to uniformity and conformity. Have ‘1984’ and ‘Big Brother’ become fig-
ments of the past now overcome, at least on the global scale in which they were
fictionally portrayed?
On other occasions, Heidegger describes this contradistinction in terms of
technical-functional relations versus vitally lived relations, or, a bit more deeply, as
the contradistinction between a technical world of functionality and a lived world of
meaningfulness, which are the topics of two radically different kinds of thinking,
calculative thinking and meditative thinking [be-sinnendes Denken], which
accordingly meditates on the meaning [Sinn] of be-ing. In the Spiegel Interview of
1966, for example, where Heidegger admits to being frightened [erschrocken] when
he first saw the pictures of the earth taken from the moon, he remarks: “We do not

31
Heidegger (1994), 45.
32
Ibid., 46.
33
Ibid., 53.
146 T. Kisiel

need atomic bombs at all [to uproot us]—the uprooting of man is already here. All
our relationships have become merely technical ones. It is no longer upon an earth
that man lives today.”34 He finds it uncanny to be living in a world in which every-
thing is pure function, and this functioning simply leads to more and more function-
ing, and this technicity increasingly dislodges man and uproots him from the earth
and native roots. This takes us to another formulation of our contradistinction, that
of the global versus the local, which came into currency with the generation that
lived through the PC (personal computer) revolution but is quite apt to the old
Heidegger’s concerns, as he meditates on the impact of technological giganticism
on local traditions and on the rhythms and ways of life of the “good old days.”

1 Autochthony in the Atomic Age

Heidegger assumes a less terrified and more meditative and placid [gelassene] tone
toward Ge-Stell in his 1955 talk in Messkirch memorializing the hometown com-
poser Conradin Kreuzer, published under the title Gelassenheit but whose original
title for the hometown crowd that first heard it was “Bodenständigkeit im
Atomzeitalter,” “Autochthony in the Atomic Age.”35 He notes here that it is not only
schwäbischer Boden—der Geniewinkel—that has produced great poets and think-
ers, but also the Boden of Middle Germany, East Prussia, Silesia as well as Bohemia
has inspired its great poets and thinkers.36 What is this ground that produces great
poets and thinkers? Nothing less than the native language in which one finds oneself
rooted, the earth of language in its dialects in their tonality, rhythms, and song, in
short, the down-to-earth language of original experience.37
To come to terms with the inexorable onslaught of modern technology on his
hometown and environs, Heidegger recommends that his Landsmenschen should

34
Heidegger (2000b), 669–670; translated by William Richardson as “‘Only a God Can Save Us’:
The Spiegel Interview (1966),” Heidegger (1981), 56.
35
The adjective bodenständig is typically translated as “indigenous, native” so that the more
abstract Bodenständigkeit etymologically suggests being native to a land or a nation and, even
more starkly (and mythologically), having one’s roots in native soil. Whence the clear possibility
of using this term for nationalistic and even for racist ends, as was the case in Nazi Blubo ( = Blut
und Boden) propaganda. And Heidegger here is speaking directly to a post-war native German
audience. But it should be noted that Heidegger first used the word often enough in the twenties in
a phenomenological and so non-nationalistic context to connote the re-duction “back to the ori-
gins, roots, native ground” of original experience. This is important to note when we try to redirect
his suggestions toward our own unique situation of being caught up in our twenty-first century
Ge-Stell.
36
Heidegger (1959), 16; translated by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund as Discourse on
Thinking Heidegger (1966), 47.
37
It might be noted here that Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who was born and raised not too far
from Messkirch, also developed his poetic sense of the Germany for which he was willing to fight
and die directly from schwäbischem Boden, inspired especially by the poetry of Hölderlin and
Stefan George.
Heidegger and Our Twenty-first Century Experience of Ge-Stell 147

strive to cultivate two basic comportments to meditatively confront the flood of

technical devices that were already working their way into the life and fabric of the
town and gradually making themselves more or less indispensable. The first com-
portment involves affirming the unavoidable use of technical devices but denying
them the right to dominate our lives, i.e., of letting technical things be what they
are but then of willing to let them go to avoid becoming slavishly dependent on
them. Heidegger identifies this yes-no comportment toward technical devices as
the releasement toward things [Gelassenheit zu den Dingen]. “Having this com-
portment we no longer view things merely in a technical way. … We notice that
while the production and use of machines demands of us another relation to things,
it is not a meaning-less [sinn-los] relation. Farming and agriculture, e.g., have now
become a motorized food industry. Thus here, evidently, as elsewhere, a profound
change is taking place in man’s relation to nature and to the world. But the mean-
ing [Sinn] that reigns in this change remains obscure.”38 The issue here, accord-
ingly, is to make sense of all this high tech infiltrating into our lives by way of
meditative [be-sinnendes] thinking. For example, what are we to make of the fact
that “Nature is becoming a gigantic gas station, an energy source for modern
technology and industry,”39 a storage-place for energy, thus a “natural resource”
subject to the calculations of those wishing to exploit it for profit or conquest?
There is then in all technical processes a meaning, not invented or made by us, which lays
claim to what we do and leave undone. We do not know the significance of the uncanny
increasing dominance of atomic technology. The meaning pervading technology hides
itself. But if we explicitly and continuously heed the fact that such hidden meaning touches
us everywhere in the world of technology we stand at once within the realm of that which
hides itself from us, and hides itself just in approaching us. That which shows itself and
at the same time withdraws is the essential trait of what we call the mystery. I call the
comportment that enables us to remain open to the meaning hidden in technology, openness
for the mystery [Offenheit für das Geheimnis].40

Releasement to and from technical things and openness for the mystery of the
meaning of modern technicity: These two comportments combined serve to pro-
mote meditative thinking and so to counter the threat of becoming so bedazzled by
the marvels of modern technology that calculative thinking comes to be accepted
as the only way of thinking. Humans would thereby deny and throw away their
essential nature of being meditative beings and no longer nurture their capacity for
meditative thinking.41 In our present situation, we are called upon to be open to the
mystery of the global domination of technology and to meditatively ponder the
profound changes that it is exacting upon our relations with nature and the world
in order that we might find meaningful ways for us to live in this new world. For
these two comportments “grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a
totally different way. They promise us a new ground and foundation [Boden] upon

38
Heidegger (1959), 25; (1966), 54f.
39
Ibid., 20/50.
40
Ibid., 25f/55.
41
Ibid., 27/56.
148 T. Kisiel

which we can stand and endure in the world of technology without being imperiled
by it. … They give us a vision of a new autochthony [Bodenständigkeit] that some-
day might even be fit to bring back the old and now rapidly disappearing autoch-
thony in a transformed gestalt.”42 “If releasement toward things and openness
toward the mystery awaken within us, we might arrive at a path that will lead to a
new ground and foundation [Boden]. In that Boden the creativity that produces
lasting works could strike new roots.”43
What would such “lasting works” created out of the new autochthony look like?
Would they involve some sort of fusion of technology and art, some sort of “tech
art,” as suggested by the Greek techne, which means both art and technology? At
one point, Heidegger does hint broadly that an autobahn bridge might be a candidate
for gathering the fourfold.44 But can a Boeing-787 taking off ever gather the four-
fold? We know that Heidegger developed an appreciation for Paul Klee and modern
art later on in life. Or would it involve an Eastern approach to art, like the Taoism
that comes into play in the jug that jugs? Then there is the feng shui approach to
architecture, which Heidegger spontaneously applied in his account of how a
Schwarzwald Bauernhof gathers the fourfold.45 Since the resolution to modern
technicity is bound to pass to some extent through art, it is worth concluding by
examining Heidegger’s sense of the artwork for clues to the possible transition from
Ge-Stell to das Er-eignis.

2 How the Artwork Works in a Historically Local Context

Heidegger’s early use of the hyphenated word Ge-stell in 1935 as it operates in the
gestalt of an artwork evokes a 1956 cautionary note from him to distance this more
focused “local” sense from the modern meaning of Ge-Stell operative on a global
scale in modern technicity. But it also opens the opportunity for us to examine the
different sort of gathering of modes of stellen, the different kinds of settings and
positioning that are operative in an artwork.
First of all, “To be a work means to set up [aufstellen] a world.”46 In setting up
the world, the work sets forth [her-stellt] the earth, accordingly with herstellen
being taken in the strict etymological sense of the word. The work sets itself back
[sich zurückstellt] and thereby puts the earth into the openness of a world.

42
Ibid., 26/55.
43
Ibid., 28/56f.
44
Heidegger (1954a), 153; translated by Alfred Hofstadter as “Building Dwelling Thinking” in
Heidegger (1971b), 152.
45
Ibid., 161/160.
46
Heidegger (1950), 33; translated by Alfred Hofstadter as “The Origin of the Work of Art” in
Heidegger (1971b), 44.
Heidegger and Our Twenty-first Century Experience of Ge-Stell 149

That into which the work sets itself back [zurückstellt] and which it lets come forth in this
setting back of itself we called the earth. … In setting up a world, the work sets forth the
earth. … To set forth the earth means to bring it into the open as the self-closing.47

“The setting up of a world and the setting forth of earth are two essential traits of
the work-being of the work. They belong together in the unity of work-being.”48
The world is the self-opening openness of the broad courses of the simple and essential
decisions in the destiny of a historical people. The earth is the spontaneous coming forth of
the continually self-closing and accordingly covering and sheltering. World and earth are
essentially different from one another and yet are never separated. The world grounds itself
upon the earth and the earth towers through the world.49

“The opposition of world and earth is a strife.”50 “Inasmuch as the work sets up
a world and sets forth the earth, it is an institution of this strife.” “The work-being
of the work consists in the strifing of the strife between world and earth.”51 The
strife here is between the self-opening openness of the world and the self-closing
closedness and so covering sheltering of the earth, in short, the strife between
unconcealing and concealing, the happening of truth. “Truth happens only by
establishing itself in [both] the strife and the playing space [Spielraum] that it
itself opens up.”52 “Truth establishes itself in the work. Truth comes to presence
[west] only as the strife of clearing and concealing in the opposition between
world and earth.”53
One final setting [Stellen] must be made for the work to do its work as a happening
of truth. Having set itself up [aufstellt] as world and set itself forth (her-stellt) as
earth by setting itself back [zurückstellen] into the earth, the work must now set and
fix in place [feststellen] the strife of truth in the gestalt. Put another way, the truth
must establish itself by being fixed in place in the gestalt of an artwork. “Art is the
setting and fixing in place of self-establishing truth in the gestalt.”54 The Greek
sense of morphe as gestalt or form is made clear by Ge-stell, understood as the
gathering together of the various settings of truth in the rift-design of the bounding
outline (peras) of the gestalt.
In the creating of the work, the strife as rift must be set back [zurückgestellt] into
the earth, and the earth itself must be set forth [hervorgestellt] and used as the self-
closing. Such use, however, does not use up or misuse the earth as matter, mere
stuff, but rather frees the earth to be just itself. This use of the earth is a working
with it that indeed looks like the employment of matter in handicraft. Hence the
appearance that artistic creation is also craft activity. It simply is NOT. But it is

47
Ibid., 35/46f.
48
Ibid., 36/48.
49
Ibid., 37/48f.
50
Ibid., 37/49.
51
Ibid., 38/49.
52
Ibid., 49/61.
53
Ibid., 51/62.
54
Ibid., 59/71. Emphasis added.
150 T. Kisiel

always a use of the earth in the setting and fixing in place of truth in the gestalt.
In contrast, the making of tools and equipment is never immediately the effecting of
the happening of truth. The production of equipment is finished when a material has
been sufficiently formed to have it ready for use. The equipment’s readiness for use
means that it is released beyond itself to disappear into usefulness.55
In the artwork, by contrast, its matter is not used up and does not disappear but is
rather set forth as earth into the openness of the world. Rather than using up words
in the manner of everyday discourse, the poet uses the word “such that the word
truly becomes a word and remains a word” in all its glory and brilliance. This is the
Bodenständigkeit or earth-rootedness of language so cherished by Heidegger.
“The poetizing project of truth, which sets itself (sich stellt) into the work as a
gestalt, is never enacted in an indeterminate void. Rather, the truth in the work is
projected to the coming preservers, i.e. to a historical humanity [and not a Volk!].”56
The preservers in their Dasein now take their place in the in-between and in the
middle of the strife of world and earth, unconcealment and concealment. With the
artwork we are in a historical world of a historical people in search of its destiny,
not in the uniform technological time-space of the distanceless, but rather in the
time-space of historical Dasein. It is the temporal playing field [Zeit-Spiel-Raum] of
history that grants us freedom of movement in and through a historical world of
distinct finite possibilities. And the artwork itself is just one of the forms of the
historical happening of truth, along with philosophical questioning, state-founding
deeds, and essential sacrifice, like the “people-saving death” of Albert Leo Schlageter.
“The world is the self-opening openness of the broad courses of the simple and
essential decisions in the destiny of a historical people.”57 Such a historical world
with its tradition of deeds and sacrifices and concepts offers a people an appointed
task [Aufgegebenes] which points them to their future world of possibilities. This
appointed task unique to a people at once discloses to them a native endowment
[Mitgegebenes] already given to them on the basis of what they have been. Clearly,
the appointed task of today’s historical humanity is to ponder the profound change
that is taking place by way of the essence of modern technology, Ge-Stell, and to
ready itself to cope with these changes in a way that remains true to our own unique
proper situation of be-ing, in which “das Leben selbst legt sich aus,” life itself lays
itself out, interprets itself, explicates itself. This domain of original meaningfulness
which precedes the subject-object relation is what must be repeatedly retrieved
and retained so that we may once again learn to live poetically on the earth in a
post-modern world of technology.

55
Ibid., 52/64. Emphasis added.
56
Ibid., 63/75.
57
Ibid., 37/49.
Heidegger and Our Twenty-first Century Experience of Ge-Stell 151

References

Heidegger, Martin. 1950. Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes. In Holzwege, ed. Martin Heidegger.
Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Heidegger, Martin. 1953. Einführung in die Metaphysik. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.
Heidegger, Martin. 1954a. Bauen Wohnen Denken. In Vorträge und Aufsätze. Pfullingen: Neske.
Heidegger, Martin. 1954b. Vorträge und Aufsätze. Pfullingen: Neske.
Heidegger, Martin. 1957. Identität und Differenz. Pfullingen: Neske.
Heidegger, Martin. 1959. Gelassenheit. Pfullingen: Neske.
Heidegger, Martin. 1966. Discourse on Thinking. Trans. John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund.
New York: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, Martin. 1969. Identity and Difference. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. New York: Harper &
Row.
Heidegger, Martin. 1971a. Building dwelling thinking. In Poetry, Language, Thought, ed.
Heidegger. Trans. Alfred Hofstadter. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, Martin. 1971b. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. San Francisco:
Harper & Row.
Heidegger, Martin. 1971c. The origin of the work of art. In Poetry, Language, Thought, ed.
Heidegger. Trans. Alfred Hofstadter. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, Martin. 1977a. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William
Lovitt. San Francisco: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, Martin. 1977b. Vier Seminare. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
Heidegger, Martin. 1981. ‘Only a god can save us’: The Spiegel interview (1966). In Heidegger:
The Man and the Thinker, ed. Thomas Sheehan, 56f. Trans. William Richardson. Chicago:
Precedent.
Heidegger, Martin. 1994. Das Ding; Das Ge-Stell; Die Gefahr. In Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge,
Gesamtausgabe, vol. 79, ed. Jaeger Petra. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, pp. 5–21, 24–45,
46–67.
Heidegger, Martin. 2000a. Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 2000b. Spiegel-Gespräch mit Martin Heidegger. In GA 16: Reden und andere
Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, 669–670. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Heidegger, Martin. 2009. Leitgedanken zur Entstehung der Metaphysik, der neuzeitlichen
Wissenschaft und der modernen Technik, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 76, ed. Strube Claudius.
Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s
Die Gefahr/The Danger

Babette Babich

Abstract Heidegger’s question concerning technology was originally posed in

lectures to the Club of Bremen. This essay considers the totalizing role of technol-
ogy in Heidegger’s day and our own, including a discussion of radio and calling for
a greater integration of Heidegger’s thinking and critical theory. Today’s media con-
text and the increasing ecological pressures of our time may provide a way to think,
once again, the related notions of event [Ereignis] and ownedness [Eigentlichkeit].

1 Constellating Technology

»Die Konstellation des Seyns spreche uns an.«

— Heidegger, Die Kehre

On December 1, 1949, Heidegger addressed the Club of Bremen under the title:
Insight Into That Which Is, featuring four sub-lectures, each one lengthy enough to
count as a lecture in its own right.1 A few months later, Heidegger reprised the
colloquium in Baden-Baden on two successive days on the 25th and 26th of March,
1950. A popular account of the Baden-Baden lectures in Der Spiegel invokes
Heidegger’s influence on Sartre and the French Existentialist movement,2 but
reflects that if it is the image of the philosopher in his Black Forest cabin that “makes

1
Martin Heidegger (1994). Cf. Heidegger (2012) and see for translations of “The Question
Concerning Technology” and “The Turn” as well as the additional essays, “The Age of World
Picture” and “Science and Reflection,” Heidegger (1977b).
2
“Heidegger. Rückfall ins Gestell,” Der Spiegel, 14: April 6, 1950.
B. Babich (*)
Department of Philosophy, Fordham University,
113 West 60th Street, New York, NY 10023, USA
e-mail: babich@fordham.edu

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 153

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_10,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
154 B. Babich

headlines,”3 the most newsworthy event would be the two day lecture series:
described as an “absolute exception,” and emphasizing that Heidegger was techni-
cally still banned from teaching. There is an obvious dispute about the dates of the
official ban4 yet what is not disputable is that Heidegger would not resume univer-
sity teaching at Freiburg until 1951.5 What is also not in dispute is that under the
Nazis, Heidegger was deemed insufficiently important (“scientifically” or as a
scholar) and he was relieved from service in university and re-assigned to service in
the Volksturm following the heavy bombing attack on Freiburg.
Towards the end of the war itself Heidegger managed to get permission to relocate
his papers to Messkirch and he also offered a conflict-laden reading of Hölderlin in a
lecture held in a castle above Beuron to which he and other university faculty retreated,
speaking there not on needfulness [Die Not] or desperate times [dürftiger Zeit] but
(and much rather), Die Armut, poverty.6 Still or in any case, the Spiegel’s assertion of
an ‘absolute exception’ seems less than accurate for two days of lectures reprising the
one day Bremen lectures held three months earlier.7 Indeed Heidegger tells us that he
would repeat the Bremen lectures on other occasions, the most well-known of which
being a presentation of these lectures in Munich at the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts
in Munich, on June 6, 1950, where he presented the first, second, and last lecture of
the series of four lectures presented in Bremen and repeated in Baden-Baden.
The first lecture was titled Das Ding [The Thing], the second Das Ge-Stell—which
may be variously translated, most popularly, as “The Enframing” or, more recently, as
“The Positionality” or even, with a Brooklyn (and I hope suitably gangster accent)
“The Set-Up,”—the third, Die Gefahr [The Danger], and the fourth, Die Kehre [The
Turn]. Five years later, in 1954, Heidegger featured the central themes from these
lectures in his Vorträge und Aufsätze, published in 1954, in which Die Frage nach der
Technik, “The Question Concerning Technology,” has pride of place as the first chapter,
followed by “Science and Reflection” and so on.8 Indeed, had Heidegger scholarship
been differently, hermeneutically minded, rather as Joe Kockelmans has been able to

3
Ibid.
4
The suspension of Heidegger’s right to teach was imposed 1945–1949 but Heidegger would not
resume teaching until 1951, as Heidegger’s own comment on Richardson’s “Appendix” to his
Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought indicates, Richardson (1993), 678–679. The rec-
ommendation of a period of 5 years appears in Jaspers’ Gutachten but as Günter Figal has noted,
among others like Rüdiger Safranski, the prohibition was indeed lifted as of 1949, although
Heidegger would not officially “resume teaching until after assuming emeritus status in 1951.” In:
Figal (2006), 38. See for an overview of relevant primary sources, Martin (1989).
5
There is some ambiguity as to what might be meant by a Berufsverbot or Lehrverbot and the
Spiegel article suggests that this refers to university as well as general or public lectures, such that
Heidegger’s commemorative lecture Wozu Dichter?, presented in 1946 in honor of Rilke would/
should also be counted as ‚lecturing.’
6
Heidegger’s June 27, 1945 Beuron lecture “Die Armut,” is apotheosized by Lacoue-Labarthe in
his introduction to Heidegger (2004).
7
Here too, if we are counting the ways Heidegger might be considered as ‘teaching,’ one may also
count a radio broadcast in 1951. Heidegger (1951); courtesy of Klett-Cotta und WDR.
8
See Heidegger’s (1978 [1954]a, b).
Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr/The Danger 155

read Heidegger, along with a few others like Ted Kisiel, like Hans Seigfried and
Patrick Heelan, all of whom read and foregrounded Heidegger’s thinking in the mid-
1960s through to the early 1980s on the topic of technology and modern science,
Heidegger’s collection of his Lectures and Essays (as yet untranslated as such) might
well have set the tone for the post-war Heidegger reception.
But as it happens the history of the reception of a thinker’s ideas is often the
history of the reception of the translation of those ideas. Thus Ralph Manheim’s
translation of Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, first translated in 1959 and
thus in advance of Macquarrie and Robinson’s translation of Being and Time in
1962 along with the 1971 translations of the studies of poetry, language, and above
all the essay on the origin of the work of art, would entail for Anglophone readers
that Heidegger’s reflections on science and technology were relegated to second tier
in Heidegger scholarship.9 Yet things are not all that different in France, though one
may note Dominique Janicaud as exception and Rainer Bast, Ewald Richter, and
Carl-Friedrich Gethman in Germany.10
Today, in English language studies we may have the preconditions for a change
in English language Heidegger scholarship with Andrew Mitchell’s new translation
of the Bremen and Freiburg lectures.11 But the comparison of French and German
studies tells us that we should expect to take some time to add the question of
Heidegger and science to the issue of technology, a compound concern that and
along with his thinking on art Heidegger always saw in terms of what I am here
seeking to articulate as a constellation.
It was this same constellation that was in view for Kockelmans himself who,
along with the already mentioned Hans Seigfried and Patrick Heelan, authored
important early studies of Heidegger and the sciences.12 Kockelmans also went on,
together with Ted Kisiel, to dedicate an important collection to framing this thought
constellation within continental philosophy of science, with the alas relatively
utterly unreceived but indispensable collection, Phenomenology and the Natural
Sciences,13 together with Kockelmans’ own single authored Heidegger and
Science,14 which Kockelmans was able to explore as a central theme of his own

9
Cf. Heidegger (1959, 1962) as well as Heidegger (1971).
10
See, in particular, Janicaud (1985), as well as (patently: in addition to others, both earlier and
since): Bast (1986), Richter (1992) and see too Gethman’s (1991) as well as Seigfried’s (1991),
respectively.
11
Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, as cited above.
12
Instructively, the American tendency to fail to mention German and French scholarship on the
topic of Heidegger’s philosophy of science and above all to exclude mention of work done by
Kockelmans or Heelan, see for a recent instance, Heelan (2012) or Richardson as well as Seigfried
in favor of voices supposed to be received (at the time the names mentioned in passing were Hesse,
Lakatos, and Feyerabend, although the article’s actual citations were limited to Kuhn) character-
izes Jack Caputo’s essay (1986). To be sure, Heidegger’s philosophy of science cannot be dis-
cussed apart from Heidegger’s engagement with Husserl and Kant and above all perhaps with
Nietzsche. See for this context, Babich (2010a).
13
Kockelmans and Kisiel (1970).
14
Kockelmans (1985a).
156 B. Babich

research while also publishing in the same year a wide ranging study in Nijhoff’s
influential Phaenomenologica series on Heidegger on Art and Art Works.15
The story of continental philosophy of science and Heidegger is a complicated
one, not able to be related here but at the same time unable to be dispensed with
as it very directly affects the reception of Heidegger in philosophy of science in
particular but also in philosophy in general.16 Thus the fortunes of continental
philosophy as such and in contest with analytic philosophy and the overarching
ressentiment of things French and especially in the post-war years of things
German make a difference as well. In addition, analytic philosophy (as I argue
elsewhere)17 has tended to be especially suspicious of Heidegger’s focus on ques-
tioning or critique. To this it should also be acknowledged that critique per se had
been associated ever since Immanuel Kant himself with the encroaching danger of
nihilism, thus Heidegger’s 1939 lecture courses on Nietzsche’s epistemology
(entitled “The Will to Power as Knowledge”) and 1940 course on “Nihilism”
hardly helped matters in this regard.18 But as with many things, there is much
more than a single influence or factor.19 That these factors continue to interweave
and play in current understanding is also something I hope to foreground in what
follows.
The Bremen lectures for their own part draw on formulations unpublished (the
Beiträge) as well as published as we recall Heidegger’s 1946 “Letter on Humanism,”20
a letter composed in reply to the Jean Beaufret’s question to him in the wake of the
devastation of World War II, prompted in part in response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s Paris
lecture in the same post-war year: Existentialism is a Humanism.21

15
Kockelmans (1985b).
16
See, again, in general, Babich, “Towards a Critical Philosophy of Science” and with specific
reference to Heidegger, see Babich (2012, 159–192 and 2013b). In addition to Trish Glazebrook’s
introductory overview: “Why Read Heidegger on Science?” in: Glazebrook, ed., Heidegger on
Science, 13–26, see too in the same collection Richter, “Heidegger’s Theses Concerning the
Question of the Foundations of the Sciences” (67–90) as well as important contributions by
Heelan, “Carnap and Heidegger: Parting Ways in the Philosophy of Science” (113–130) as well as
Ute Guzzoni “Gelassenheit: Beyond Technoscientific Thinking” (193–204) and Kiesel’s “A
Supratheoretical PreScientific Hermenutics of Scientific Discovery” (239–260).
On Heidegger and the disciplinary profession of philosophy as such, especially but not only in
Anglophone culture, see Babich (2003), 63–103.
17
See, for one example, a recent interview, Babich (2011), 37–71.
18
See for these courses: Heidegger (1991).
19
Kleinberg’s (2005) is, I think, a useful addition here, especially in the postwar context, but see
too for the pre-war context the now-standard reference on Heidegger-Carnap, Friedman
(2000)—cf. Heelan’s essay “Carnap and Heidegger” cited above—enhanced in depth by
Gordon’s (2012).
20
Heidegger (1954). Additional elements, were we tracing the history of the lectures themselves
can also be found in Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie and so on. Heidegger’s (1977c) and the
same translation is also included in the English edition of Heidegger’s Wegmarken by MacNeill
(1998).
21
Jean-Paul Sartre (1946, 2007).
Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr/The Danger 157

The Thing (the first of the lectures later reprised in Munich), is also included in
Vorträge und Aufsätze, together with Heidegger’s prefatory “Hinweis” or contex-
tualizing reference to the ‘shrinking’ of time and space through the same well-
known technological means that continue to shrink distances to this day. And as
already noted, eight years later, a little contribution based on the Bavarian lectures
also appears as the first in the Neske series Opuscula aus wissenschaft und dich-
tung, entitled Die Technik und die Kehre and duly citing the context of the original
lectures.22
As a consequence, by 1962 all but one of the original four lectures had been
published, in one variant or reprise or another. My theme here focusses on that
otherwise unpublished essay, “The Danger,” Die Gefahr, although and of course
parts of the text are assimilated into The Question Concerning Technology. As this
point of assimilation also makes clear, a discussion cannot but include reference to
all four, especially Das Ge-Stell.
The thoughts Heidegger gathers together in these lectures, given as we are told,
and let it be noted again, over the course of a single day, and hence in a single breath
(the German celebrates just this capacity, doubtless due to the length of their sen-
tences: der lange Atem being a term of approbation), go back to the Beiträge,
Heidegger’s supposed second major work, but a work scholars now largely disre-
gard (after the initial flurry of interest).23 These days and already for some time we
have tended to focus on what we take to be the early Heidegger—roughly the pre-
Being and Time Heidegger, this being the bailiwick of either the very pious, literally
so, Heideggerians, or else those who follow and trace the origins of Heidegger’s
original thinking in the spirit of Ted Kisiel’s genealogical, phenomeno-philological
brand of Heidegger-hermeneutics. Then there is the later Heidegger, corresponding
largely to the Heidegger discussed here, but many people, especially in literature
departments also take this to be the Heidegger of Poetry Language Thought and On
the Way to Language, and so on all the way to Time and Being and the Discourse on
Thinking as well as the later seminars.
And yet the division into early Heidegger and late Heidegger, corresponding to
Heidegger I and Heidegger II, is problematic. Heidegger himself politely points this
out by foregrounding entanglement, rather in the guise of his Being and Time
discussion of future temporalization (out of the past) in his “Letter to Father
Richardson,” telling us (not really very helpfully) that
only by way of what [Heidegger] I has thought does one gain access to what is to-be-thought
by [Heidegger] II. But the thought of [Heidegger] I becomes possible only if it is contained
in [Heidegger] II.24

22
Heidegger (1962).
23
Heidegger’s originally unpublished Beiträge: vom Ereignis was published in his collected works
in advance of the schedule Heidegger had envisaged. It is also available in English in different edi-
tions, under two species of translation.
24
Heidegger (2003), 8.
158 B. Babich

To take up Heidegger’s third lecture, Die Gefahr, it will be necessary to refer to

the lecture just preceding it on the technological frame or setup, Das Ge-Stell. Here,
I’d like to speak of the language thematic of both lectures (Ge-fahr, Ge-Stell) in a
way that is not made easier by the limitation of addressing the question in English,
as I am inevitably doing and just to the extent that the English translations cannot
but efface the prefixes in either case. The patent point is that these two words, as
different as they are, share the same prefix Ge- and that this is relevant as a word
form and substantively. Although it is not often done, it’s important to take note of
this because Heidegger’s mode of thinking through what he calls his Insight Into
That Which Is tacks a path through related notions (i.e., that which is). In this respect
he includes as the core of his lectures, two themes formed with a prefix, the “Ge-,”
a prefix, as we will all remember from Heidegger’s The Question Concerning
Technology, that he considers so very important that he talks about it there just as he
does in Das Ge-Stell, focusing on the painfully ungainly Ge-Stell, taking it apart,
literally by hyphenation and at what can appear to be surprising length. This gives
(or should give) a translator pause and William Lovitt, to his credit, thought about
the challenge it presented in his translation of The Question Concerning Technology25
and Andrew Mitchell, who has just published his translation of the original four
lectures with Indiana Press also gives his reasons for his rendering (though some
may have wished for more detail than the few lines he offers).26
The rendering of Gestell/Ge-Stell as “framework”/“positionality” may be due to
little more than the politics of re-translations, for and after all, a translator has to
change enough in order to justify the effort, and it can seem that where Lovitt has
“enframing,” Mitchell simply inserts, it can appear to have been a kind of cut and
paste, “positionality.” Thus Mitchell’s translation, which is a fluid one, has a dan-
gerous side of its own as it tends to favor a one-to-one style of translation of the
sort that today’s Cambridge University Press translations have made into a kind of
analytic gold or plastic standard, perhaps this begins with the Fichte and Hegel
translations, but it is also (with some considerable and disastrous consequences) in
evidence in the Cambridge Nietzsche editions. According to this standardizing
standard, one finds an equivalent and settles for it, and to this extent the glossary in
the Mitchell translation is more literal than say the listing to be found in Macquarrie
and Robinson, for example.27
Gestell, a kind of physical array or constellation, means framework or structural
outline or scaffold. The word is significant because Gestellung also means muster,
and one can be ordered to such a mustering, commandeered or called up to service.
As is familiar to those of us who know his concern with the fortunes of technology,
traditional and modern, what Heidegger wishes to do here, after he has set up his
initial tracing reflections on modern technology per se, is to tease out the

25
In addition to his note on the transforms affected by such prefixes in his introduction (p. xx), see
William Lovitt’s footnote 17 in his translation of “The Question Concerning Technology,” in:
Heidegger (1977a), 3–35, here p. 19. Cf. note 14, p. 13, as well as notes pp. 15–16, pp. 16–17.
26
Andrew Mitchell (2012), xi.
27
Mitchell, “English German Glossary,” in: Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 173–198.
Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr/The Danger 159

determining or destining set up that is part and parcel of modern technology as this
intricately ordered and dependent set up is opposed to the cognate fitted-togetherness
but individually separable configuring of old-fashioned equipmentality, as such.
Tools qua tools have always involved referentiality. This is what Heidegger calls
Bewandtnis and it is the subject of his memorable analysis of handiness—handhab-
barkeit—in Heidegger’s in Being and Time discussion of Zuhandenheit (BT 98/69),
namely readiness-to-hand and in turn and presuming such a readiness in its
modality as “unreadiness-to-hand,” the revelation of “being-just-present-at hand-
and-no-more” (BT 103/73) as these fit together precisely in such a work context.
Using a hammer for a given project, whether it involves the kind of complexity that
would have engaged Heidegger’s own father as a cooper or joiner (these are related
carpenterly professions, but the unions to this day keep them well distinct), or just
hanging a picture on the wall, one is referred to a nail or, if this is a metal-free
project, think of a trip to IKEA or more romantically, think of Eric Sloane’s America
where nails were expensive and using wood’s properties part of Yankee or New
England ingenuity (read thrift or cheapness), with the hammer will go the pegs or
cleats.28 The difference however is that the same claw hammer that nails nails,
removes nails (note that this does not apply to German hammers, they do not come
with a claw as one is meant to remove one’s nail with the proper tool) and the same
hammer, German or Sears Craftsman style can be used to break through a wall if
one wishes to remodel a kitchen or for other purposes of the sort and in my classes
on Heidegger’s Question Concerning Technology, I sometimes like to imagine
circus acts, cirque du soleil meets gas station mechanic, juggling with three and then
four hammers and so on—these have to be claw hammers for the sake of showman-
ship and counterpoise. Modern technology quite specifically does not work like
that. If you misplace the charger for a new cellphone, you will find that using one of
the chargers in your collected array of chargers from cellphones gone by will be an
exercise in futility. Connectivity is the point. Modern technology, Heidegger argues,
goes beyond the traditional in-order-to of particular kinds of equipmentalities, the
kind of practical ordering or for-the-sake-of-which that Aristotle lists for us with
reference to the bridler’s art in the very first section of the Nichomachean Ethics.
In Being and Time, Heidegger refers to the aforementioned workshop array of tools
but he also lists the items on his own desk as tools of a kind: paper, desk blotter,
fountain pen, ink and so on. So today we might add to all those desk items, a com-
puter, printer, internet connection, surely all this is the same—just update. Heidegger
thinks not and his four Bremen lectures, “Insight Into That Which Is,” try to explore
what is different in modern technology and that is to say to raise the question regard-
ing technology as a question, just as we might remember that he has been at pains
to point out just how hard it is to ask after anything at all beginning with Being and
Time, section two of which unpacks what it means to question.
Thus and just to offer a contrasting illustration of the romantic sort that we can
use to document modern progress, Heidegger used a handsaw of the kind that
requires two workers to cut wood for use as fuel in the cabin his wife had arranged

28
See for example, Sloane’s (2004 [1965]).
160 B. Babich

Fig. 1 Hans-Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger, Todtnauberg, 1923. Bildagentur dpa

to have built for him in 1922 and for which wood-cutting task he required the efforts
of one of his students, my own teacher Hans-Georg Gadamer.
Heidegger later sent a picture commemorating this moment to Gadamer as a
gift on his 75th birthday in 1975 and Gadamer thus includes it, with Heidegger’s
note, in his Philosophische Lehrjahre.29 The picture dates from 1923, that is: pre-
Being and Time, which would thus make this image, for those who like these
terms, a picture of Heidegger I (Fig. 1).
Let me note just because it matters in the current context that pants of the kind
worn by both Heidegger and Gadamer in this picture did not in fact testify to some
kind of back-to-the-land fascist movement but were standard for the time and there
are photos of my own father, who was born in New York City in 1935, wearing short
pants (i.e., not shorts) of a similar fashion, in pre-war NYC, circa 1940 or ‘41.
Details like these, ontic as they are, do not deter folk who have assumed that this
picture must date from at least a decade later, say circa 1933, or must even be a
postwar image, those who might claim that it provides iconic evidence for
Heidegger’s nostalgia for the past. For my part, I take the irony to be the labor itself
as, like Tom Sawyer, Heidegger commandeers Gadamer’s assistance to help him cut
some wood, ironic because of Gadamer’s later recollection that when he first met
Heidegger he took him for a manual-laborer—a Hausmeister—in NYC that would
be a super.
The thing about a two handed bow saw is that the ‘Gestell’ involved to support
the wood being sawed has as such no particular connection to the saw or the piece
of lumber. It is called a saw horse, technically, just as other Gestell types count as
clothes horses or racks, umbrella stands and the like, and you can buy these too at

29
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1995), 33.
Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr/The Danger 161

IKEA and a pair of them will help you cut plywood but can also serve to hold a din-
ner table perfect for a fashionable loft kitchen. The components can be used together
or not, they are severable with respect to use but also distance and thus they are
more rather than less self-contained. Heidegger was therefore using the support of
such frames to position wood to cut with a bowsaw, given Gadamer’s help, given his
wife’s gift to him of a house in the high hills of the black forest (they are not really
mountains), rural land that was then, as a lot of land still is, without convenient
access to electricity,30 for example, although there was, and that would be a sine qua
non, water afforded by the famous spring to which Celan would dedicate his poem
Arnica, Eyebright, Arnika, Augentrost.31
By contrast and this is the point Heidegger seeks to make throughout, modern
technology, modern tools, power tools are different and everything turns on power
and its dependencies: thus nature in the purview of modern technoscience becomes
on Heidegger’s analysis something that it never was until modernity: a giant gas
station, a source for the development of natural resources, meaning energy, mean-
ing electricity. In the case of a power tool you are tied to that referentiality by the
cord, even if you have a cordless drill, because as Hurricane Sandy reminded us in
New York City, you really need to charge cordless tools, including laptops and
iPads and cellphones. So whether it is an outlet (this becomes a kind of holy grail
for students looking to plug in their laptops or travelers looking to do the same), or
extension cord, they all point to the need for electricity, and all the stuff you will
have to think about if one gets a job at NYU (at NYU pay) and wishes to build a
cabin of one’s own upstate in New York’s Putnam county, say, you’ll need water,
cable, the works, and all that will be a pre-requisite before you can get to reflect
upon Heidegger’s observation that a mechanical tool “is nothing that separately
presences for itself.”32 In other words, that is to say that even in its components,
i.e., qua taken apart, as he also speaks about automobiles broken down for ship-
ment, modern technology requires far more than just completeness unto itself to be
able to be set in motion. Thus contrasting the modern technological apparatus with
a self-propelled wheel assembly, like the spinning wheel or else like the “bucket-
wheel in the rice fields of China” as he invokes these still in use in rural china,

30
By the time the cabin was built it likely had electricity. Germany had electric lighting since the
1880s and by 1913 a good many households as well as the university in Freiburg itself used elec-
tricity. See for instance, Chickering (2007).
31
Celan’s poem was written after his 1957 visit to Heidegger’s hut in the Black Forest and was
included in a collection of Celan’s poetry entitled Lichtzwang published shortly after the poet’s
death in 1970. The title of the poem, Todtnauberg, is a metonymic allusion to place and the rest of
the poem seems to do the same: Arnika, Augentrost, der/Trunk aus dem Brunnen mit dem/
Sternwurfel drauf,//in der/Hütte,/die in das Buch/—wessen Namen nahms auf/vor dem meinen?—,/
die in dies Buch/geschriebene Zeile von/einer Hoffnung, heute,/auf eines Denkenden/kommendes/
Wort/im Herzen,//Waldwasen, uneingeebnet,/Orchis and Orchis, einzeln,/Krudes, später, im
Fahren,/deutlich,/der uns fährt, der Mensch,/der‘s mit anhört,//die halb-/beschrittenen Knüppel-/
pfade im Hochmoor,//Feuchtes,/viel.“Paul Celan (1980), 240–241 and (2000), Vol. 2, 255–256.
See for one discussion, Lyon (2006). See too Herman Rapaport’s chapter “Forces of Gravity” in
his Is There Truth in Art? (1997), 110–143.
32
Heidegger (1994), 34.
162 B. Babich

modern technological machinery only “stands” or works as such “when it goes.”33

If the machine is out of order, if requisite parts are missing, it is worse than nothing
and now we are back to the sheerly present at hand (or the irremediably present at
hand in the case of those old power cords that connect to appliances or tools one no
longer has). Here Heidegger is concerned to attend to the ordering of both the
machine and the mechanical network into which it is set just in order that it might
be a mechanism of this or that kind. Thus as noted, he also gives the example of the
automobile, pointing out that the automobile is more than a tool made of separable
parts into which it can be broken down and out of which it can be assembled but
exemplifies modern technology to the extent that its use, and intriguingly this has
been the subject of several politically theoretic studies of technology, requires an
entire schema, a constellation or network, all of it sine qua non. This is not merely
a matter of fuel and and a network of fuel stations, of building a network of roads
for automotive use and redesigning entire downtown urban areas to include park-
ing garages and highways that pass over or pass through a city and so on. Thus
Langdon Winner and others talk about the concerted efforts in the early decades of
the last century to demolish street cars and established forms or networks of public
transport to shift consumers of public transportation, which cost whatever it cost
for a ticket, to consumers of private transportation which required a whole lot more
in the way of direct and indirect costs.34
Private vs. public transportation underlines Heidegger’s point. Hitler built the
Autobahn and his system of roads (still a fetish factor in Germany—Freie Fahrt für
freie Burger, where the emphasis is on free, meaning no speed-limit) was as benefi-
cial for the nation in peacetime as in wartime. Thus Heidegger can remind his
Bremen businessmen that unlike the jug that he uses to illustrate the thing in his first
lecture, the automobile does not “just” stand there even when it is parked. Instead it
is “at the ready,” precisely available for use in every potential or possible sense.
Hence the automobile, and by extension, the truck for industrial transportation “is
able to be challenged forth precisely for a further transport, which itself sets in place
the promotion”—and in good, Rotary Club, English we might prefer to say that this
potential to be challenged forth drives the wheels—“of commerce”35
Here Heidegger goes on to clarify the way in which we are today set up, as it
were, to be consumers of precisely the technological schema or framework or, to
use Jacques Ellul’s term for the very same thing, the technological system, because
the point concerning technology is that there is no having of it by halves. You cannot
opt out, you cannot take it or leave it—the later Heidegger—Heidegger III we could
say—suggests in his Discourse on Thinking that we might do a kind of zen thing
with technology, a kind of mindfulness he called Gelassenheit, but like zen and like

33
Ibid.
34
Langdon Winner offers a discussion of this point along with a number of references to classical
political studies of the shift from public to private transport on the eastern and western seaboards
in Winner (1986).
35
Heidegger (1994), 35.
Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr/The Danger 163

mindfulness (Heidegger called this thinking), Gelassenheit turns out to be more

elusive or harder than it sounds.
For Heidegger, “the forester who surveys the wood to be felled”—the line here
is reproduced in its entirety in “The Question Concerning Technology”—traces
and does not trace the path followed by his grandfather just to the extent that the
wood he cuts is ordered, set up for and into the lumber industry which is ordered
or fit into producing “cellulose stock” for the paper industry which in turn is set up
for delivery “to the newspapers and tabloids that impose themselves on the public
sphere in ordered to be devoured by it.”36 If the Frankfurt School were not disposed
to reject everything Heidegger notes (after all Horkheimer would still have all the
priority one might wish) there is a useful critical analysis in the next paragraph,
which does not indeed appear to the same extent in the later essay The Question
Concerning Technology. Thus Heidegger here touches upon themes echoing those
of Horkheimer and Adorno in their own 1944 Dialectic of Enlightenment—elements
of which grew out of Adorno’s work, begun in 1941 on Lazarsfeld’s Princeton
radio project37—along with Friedrich Georg Jünger as well as Herbert Marcuse, in
addition to Günther Anders (the stepchild of the Frankfurt School) as indeed
Rudolf Arnheim, points also approached from a different point of view by Edward
Bernays and Vance Packard.38
The point is media, and Heidegger goes on to talk about radio and film in order
to explain the very way that the human being him- or herself is disposed of, imposed
upon, precisely with respect to his or her disposition as such:
Radio and film belong to the standing reserve of this commandeering [of the human being]
through which the public sphere [Offentlichkeit] is set up, challenged forth, and thereby
installed in the first place.39

For Heidegger, this is not merely the work of the “radio broadcast advisory coun-
cil” but is already at hand in “the standing reserve called the radio, i.e., challenged
forth to the ordering of the broadcast industry.”40
My point is to call attention to a remark that Heidegger offers in a phrase uncan-
nily similar to Adorno’s physiognomic observation regarding the twirling of the

36
Heidegger (1994), 37.
37
See Adorno (1945). See for the results of the Princeton Radio Project, Adorno (2006) and see too
Thomas Y. Levin’s contextual discussion, which to be sure does not connect Adorno with either his
contemporary Anders much less, given the same contemporaneity, Heidegger: Thomas Y. Levin
with Michael von der Linn (1994), 316–324. See for further discussion and further references
Babich (2013a), Chap. 6.
38
Vance Packard’s (1957) is a popularized discussion of the then-well-established effects of
Edward Bernays’ (1928). Bernays’ work is better known under the rubric of Public Opinion
Research or Motivation Research, and is of course all about advertising or marketing but which
was originally developed (and is still used) for the political purpose of shaping public opinion—as
its original name indicates. For a discussion with respect to television, see Günter Anders cited
below as well as independently of Anders, the Canadian political theorist, Dallas Walker Smythe
(1954), 143–156.
39
Heidegger (1994), 37.
40
Ibid.
164 B. Babich

radio dial but also in a context akin to the “homeworker” analysis that would be
offered by Günther Anders in 1956, which piecework manufacturing in turn pro-
duces or generates the media consumer qua media consumer, a point to be taken up
by the Canadian media-political theorist Dallas Smythe, arguing and in the process
explaining why commercial broadcast access is of value to manufacturers, that, in
Heidegger’s words here
every radio listener who turns its dial is insulated as part of the component character
of the parts of the standing reserve, locked in as a piece of the standing reserve, in
which he remains confined even if he still thinks he is utterly free to turn the device on
and off.41

Paralleling his trademark tool example, Heidegger observes that even if one were
to turn off the radio, one would remain connected or bound to it. Indeed as I have
argued to be typical for Heidegger’s style of intensification, he emphasizes the point
with an iconically philosophical thought example: were a cosmic miracle suddenly
to silence all radio broadcasts, so Heidegger argues, the very same connection
would still persist.42 On this extreme supposition, even if:
suddenly everywhere on earth in everyplace, radio receivers were to disappear—who could
comprehend the cluelessness, the boredom, the emptiness that would at a blow assault the
human being and thoroughly unhinge their routine affairs.43

This is also, though that is a paper of its own, the reason for Heidegger’s extended
reflection on what is involved when a particular tract of land is challenged forth to
produce coal, which is in turn demanded by the electrical industry which itself
deploys a massive set up just to be able to convert coal into steam, into power for
industrial and private use. Heidegger uses this example because such industries
and their interconnections (especially all the details we tend not to think about)
were transparent to him as they were to every German, every Frenchman, etc., etc.,
after the war. Thus the competing desire to use land for mining (raw materials)
clashed with the need to use land for agriculture (foodstuffs), but the technization of
both handcrafts, only meant that the one application namely mining or as we call it
today: land use development, demanded vastly more land than ever before, and the
second application, farming, also took more land in its mechanized variety than had
been traditionally needed.
But the economics of competing land applications and how they might be parceled
out and to which interest groups concerned Heidegger less than the very compli-
cated array or constellation of modern scientific, technologized industry as such.

41
Ibid. Anders himself offers a sustained discussion of this counter-example in “Die Welt als
Phantom und Matrize. Philosophische Betrachtungen über Rundfunk und Fernsehen“in his 1956
book, Anders (1980), 97–214.
42
Heidegger’s thought example has been ‘real’ (or Baudrillardian ‘integratedly real’) for some time
and as newspaper reports of New York residents reported (and my own students attested) during
Hurricane Sandy, when they couldn’t charge cell-phones and usual avenues of internet access were
down—today that would be the wireless equivalent of what radio was in 1949—there was great
anxiety.
43
Heidegger (1994), 39.
Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr/The Danger 165

Thus in addition to his coal example, or airplane example (in the original lecture as
we have just cited it, he talks about automotive components packed for export as
items of so much standing reserve—present at hand we could say—and parking lots
and highways, as components of the automotive industry, all very patently ready to
hand). Likewise as also noted, Heidegger focusses on forestry, the woodsman today
as compared to his forebears and with that he is off with a discussion of forest man-
agement practices, which means harvesting, i.e., cutting down the trees for the sake
of and exactly as cued to the needs of other industries as we have just detailed these:
like the enormous need for paper after the war, be it for planning or for journalism,
which industry also catches Heidegger’s attention as it is this same industry (this is
the point he makes about radio) includes human beings who are themselves parts of
this same industry, ordered into it, set up into it, to the extent that both paper journal-
ism and radio are so many culture industries to use the language that Horkheimer
and Adorno and Anders also employ to speak of these media enterprises, as such
public industries, as Heidegger explains, are used to direct or set up the “public
sphere” so that it may be challenged forth and ordered, i.e., so that public or political
planning can proceed according to political design. Indeed as Heidegger certainly
knew—the political fate of Germany depended upon it—such public sphere plan-
ning was quite explicitly at issue. The question at hand was at the time: what kind
of government would rebuild the country? What direction would it take?44 If it can
be argued that in West Germany, excluding socialism would have to be politically
overdetermined, Marx himself had offered serious critiques of the kind of advantage
capitalism takes in the time of crisis and had already analysed that the only effi-
ciency served was that of profit. Heidegger makes this point in his own lectures, an
emphasis repeated in his “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,”45 which was of course all
about the urgent misery of the housing crisis, which was also at the time a food
crisis and his “Letter on Humanism” culminates with references, among other
things, to Marx, as we note by considering his contrast between thinking and doing,
contending that “thinking is a deed” and continuing by emphasizing such a deed
“also surpasses all praxis.”46 For Heidegger, however the thought in question, the
‘understanding’ of the world that Marx had famously attributed to all philosophy
heretofore in his Theses on Feuerbach, would not be marked by anything like “the
grandeur of its achievements” or indeed efficacy as such “but through the humble-
ness of its inconsequential accomplishment.”47 Here in the Letter on Humanism, and
presumably Heidegger would have known exactly what he was saying by writing
this, the conclusion points to the same constellation of philosophy as a project of
understanding the world or changing it, and Heidegger suggests that theory itself

44
The beautiful German coin, a 50 pfennig piece issued the same year and featuring a young
woman planting a small bush, offers an iconic illustration of this very concern.
45
Cf. Heidegger, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” in Heidegger (1971), 143–161.
46
Heidegger (1977c), 274. I note that Heidegger already is in dialogue with communism, and its
anticipated threat in his lecture Die Armut.
47
Ibid.
166 B. Babich

can use a bit of reflection on itself and what it is capable of: “It is time to break the
habit of overestimating philosophy.”48
The problem here is already one I have been framing out: that is the problem of
the Ge-Stell as this parallels the frames set up to re-build houses or indeed cathe-
drals in Freiburg as the cathedral there was damaged during the war49—if you visit
and climb to the top you can see that the Freiburg residents set a plaque to thank the
stones, as it were, for not falling. And to be sure, as those of us who live in the city
know all too well, once a scaffolding goes up around a building to repair it or what
have you, its durability seems guaranteed.50 The scaffolding, the framework, the set
up, is not only indispensable but all-pervasive.
Thus when we read the essay Das Ge-stell, the set up or the setting up, you can
also say the enframing (I have already noted that my concerns about ‘the positional-
ity,’ just to the extent that it can sound like a Kama Sutra move or some Deepak
Chopra trademarked approach to heated or Bikram yoga), or indeed when we read
Die Gefahr, we are confronted with Heidegger’s most notorious comments on the
technized transforms of industry and its consequences. Heidegger looks at what the
mechanization of anything and everything does, and points out that it does not fail
to affect us in the most basic way.
Thus Heidegger writes about the requisitioning and planning that characterized a
wartime and a postwar Nachkriegszeit Germany, and he would certainly know about
both as he himself (qua dispensable) had been set into, conscripted into service at
the end of the war. For in wartime everything was placed at the disposal of this kind
of ordering and everything came to be regarded, this is the effect of the transforma-
tion of this kind of ordering, as so much standing reserve. We even may remember,
it’s a postmodern meme, and certainly my grandparents would have remembered,
various wartime advertisements encouraging the average American to do his or her
“part” during the second world war. Now we already know from reading Marx’s
Capital if we did not know it from Adam Smith or others that just such a transfor-
mation of nature and human relations is the heart of economic ordering. All the war
shows, as if it had needed to be shown, is the calculation of the same order and the
details of dependencies. The things one tends not to notice (that the amount of wood
that will be needed to be managed in the Black Forest will be directly dependent
upon the proliferation of journalism and propaganda and information tracts—pick
your euphemism—so that, once again, rather than serving the lumber industry the
woodsman is more accurately or actually serving the pamphlet or leaflet industry)
and such superficially counter-intuitive relations were made more transparent in the
years during and especially after the war. This way of commandeering the resources

48
Ibid., 176. See on this Graeme Nicholson (1987), 171–187.
49
I adverted to this at the start and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe underscores this as well when he
recounts Heidegger’s dispensation from university responsibilities in order to relocate his manu-
scripts to a safe place (in Messkirch), following “the (heavy) bombardment of Freiburg by English
and American aerial forces.” Lacoue-Labarthe (2004), 9.
50
Many of us will have known, as I have known, urban scaffolds of the supposedly ‘temporary’
kind that have managed to endure for decades and decades…
Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr/The Danger 167

of the world for such further purposes “endures” and Jacques Ellul will take a leaf
from Heidegger (and Friedrich Georg Jünger) to insist on what he calls the “auton-
omy” of technology and technique, noting that once it is set in motion, today’s
modern technology cannot be arrested. It might perhaps, and however unlikely, be
diverted, but never simply stopped.
For Heidegger this setting up endures insofar as the set up is in turn imposed for
the sake of other purposes, to which it is ordered (raw materials are raw materials
for something, although and of course they can be stockpiled more generically
within that same framework). Deployment or utilization “sets everything up in
advance such that what is set up conduces to success ….But the resultant is arranged
as success beforehand.”51 And for Heidegger the resultant schema cannot but be
self-reinforcing, and what is defined as “success,” as he goes on to elaborate this, “is
that kind of resultant that is itself allied to the production of further results. We call
it ordering/requisitioning/com-portment [das Be-Stellen].”52
For Heidegger, and if this were another paper, I might go in another direction,
there is a difference between the kind of productivity of the village carpenter (we
began by noting that Heidegger’s father was one such) who might make or produce
a table or who might for another purpose, make a coffin, a Todtenbaum, which itself
would be destined, fitted not into the productive time and cares of the carpenter’s
industry but into another schema of another kind of temporality and care—here
Heidegger uses the language of the cares or concerns of Being and Time—and that
means into the constellation and intimate engagements of another world that is not
the world of the manufacturer’s workshop but the different world directionalities
and setting of the “peasant’s farm, the house and the land, the ones who dwell there,
their kin, and the neighborhood.”53
There is no connection with any of that today, and intriguingly, we can cross the
distance in time between Heidegger’s 1950 lecture and 2013 without needing to
change a thing. The “mechanized burial industry of the metropolis”54 as Heidegger
goes on to say by contrast does not lend itself to peasant rituals, themes or terminol-
ogy. And if you want to see a French take on some of that, I recommend the climax
of the wonderfully existentialist (not existential) 1986 film by Claude Berri, Jean de
Florette when Jean (Gérard Depardieu in perhaps his most sympathetic role) is
destroyed by his own techne (his dynamite) and his lack of techne (peasant experi-
ence) and above all by the failure of techne as what Aristotle named phronesis which
would be knowing the difference between the two (that said, the technological cri-
tique of Jean de Florette is more Jacques Ellul than Martin Heidegger).
Comparing in a swift analogy the peasant’s placing of his ox, positioning the ani-
mal in his traces just so, in order to advance the work he needs to get out of the ox,
Heidegger writes that “Men and women must report themselves to a work service
[Arbeitsdienst]. They are conscripted. They are met by a constellation [Stellen] that

51
Heidegger (1994), 26.
52
Ibid.
53
Ibid.
54
Ibid.
168 B. Babich

places them, i.e., commandeers them.”55 Heidegger thus goes into, as is his wont as
we recognize this strategy from Being and Time to the later work on language, the
meaning of the word, asking what das Ge-Stell means and and answering “to place,
to position, to set’” so as to experience what comes to pass in that requisitioning and
accountability through which a given stock arises and is thus a standing reserve.
Heidegger’s analysis concerns civilian conscription, during and after a war on
the most human level, whereby what is deployed are human beings as troops contra
human beings as troops and of course and most lamentably contra those civilians
who happen to be the enemy, and as part of that the requisitioning of whatever is at
hand for the purposes of war. Like those summoned to do their part during war,
Heidegger’s point is that the approach is a total one, and there are parallels with
Friedrich Georg Jünger, not unlike the parallels Walter Benjamin draws out in his
reflection on the world of art in the age of technological reproduction with regard
to the consequences of the first world war, when Benjamin cites the Futurist
Manifesto of the Italian artisti, Marinetti in his own reflections.56 As Benjamin then
goes on to explain the object contradiction that is the work of art as such:
the aesthetic of modern warfare appears as follows: if the natural use of productive forces
is impeded by the property system, then the increase in technological means, in speed, in
sources of energy will press toward an unnatural use. This is found in war, and the
destruction caused by war furnishes proof that society was not mature enough to make
technology its organ, that technology was not sufficiently developed to master the elemental
forces of society.57

Benjamin continues by invoking what appears to be the fascist aesthetic, the

aesthetics of pure politics: “Fiat ars—pereat mundus” and he explains this is as a
direct consequence of technology and points out, too flatly for the nuanced sensi-
bilities of a Horkheimer: “This is evidently the consummation of l’art pour l’art.”58
Invoking the cliché sublime converted here into the art-spectacular of a humanity
converted from divine object to a subject absorbed with “its own annihilation as a
supreme aesthetic pleasure,” we are still far from thinking through the caesura, the
space between the themes of his conclusion: “Such is the aestheticizing of politics,
as practiced by fascism. Communism replies by politicizing art.”59
To bring the point from a period after the first world war to Heidegger’s time
after the second world war (and still to this day, however we wish to understand 9/11
and the war on Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and so on, and however we wish to

55
Ibid.
56
See the conclusion of Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Technical Age of Reproducibility.” I
recommend the version (the second) of Benjamin’s essay that appears in Benjamin (2008) despite
the great advantages of Arendt’s (1968) contextualization of the version that appears in the Shocken
edition, because of the specific and useful secondary apparatus provided for this essay. Benjamin’s
discussion of photography including an allusion to war and to the origins of the technique, is var-
ied, albeit without reference to Benjamin, in Friedrich Georg Jünger (1946).
57
Benjamin (2008), 42.
58
Ibid.
59
Ibid.
Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr/The Danger 169

understand the Keystone Pipeline to the US coast or the relentlessly stupid use of
fracking), Heidegger points to these everyday circumstances and these everyday
ontic consequences when he observes that “a tract of land is coopted, namely for the
coal and ore that subsists in it.”60
This notion of cooption and it should be clear here that Heidegger is talking
about newly requisitioned tracts, newly requisitioned by the Nazis and then again
in the postwar era, rather than offering some merely nostalgic musings in praise
of the farmer’s traditional field. For us today and to be sure, all this is a matter of
‘development,’ one thereby sets up a coal or another mining industry (we can
add, if we like, that just such cooption sets up a fracking industry for extracting
natural gas, requiring the use of vast quantities of fresh water, yet further evi-
dence of the ‘perfection’ of technique in Jünger’s sense as the engineering sci-
ence of fracking requires pure rather than ‘recycled’ water, which is then an
industry, paralleling Heidegger’s awful agricultural example, that is/becomes an
industry for the production of contaminated aquifers along with the production
of contaminated soil and of course—because we are talking about gas—the pro-
duction of polluted and poisoned air). In this way or “through such requisitioning
[Bestellen] the land becomes a coal reserve, the soil a mineral deposit.”
Immediately contrasting this with the farmer’s practice with respect to the land
and to nature, as a kind of allowing, this is the meaning of Gelassenheit, “the
crops to grow as nature itself allows,”61 Heidegger thus seeks to raise the ques-
tion concerning the difference made by modern technology in this contrasting
opposition, and here we need the entire quote
In the meantime, however, even the tending of the fields [die Feldbestellung] has gone over
to the same re-quisitioning [Be-Stellen] that imposes upon the air for nitrogen, the soil for
coal and ore, the ore for uranium, the uranium for atomic energy, and the latter for destruc-
tion on command.62

The lineage traced is that of modern technology and the efficiency of a

technological world order. Everything is regarded, and we know this, we take this
for granted, for the purposes of development, by which we mean if we are doing
development studies: technological orderability or usability in the same schema or
setup. Everything fits into this frame and there is no outside. If Marx saw the
dynamic of the machine as reducing the needed labor of the worker to no more than
an appendage, a fitted extra, and thus the stupidification of the human as a necessary
part of capital and its mechanized deployment, as part of the complex relation of the
human being to nature within the sane very material dialectic, Nietzsche himself
points to a similarly coordinate structure when he argued that we humanize nature
and everything else by cutting it to our measure (these are the “bounds” of sense in
Nietzsche’s articulation of the critique of reason in the third book of The Gay

60
Heidegger (1994), 26–27.
61
Ibid., 27.
62
Ibid.
170 B. Babich

Science) but also as he goes on in On the Genealogy of Morals to highlight the

numbing of the mind that, as he teased, is called “the blessing of work.”63
Still it is one thing again to guess at the brutalizing direction of technology, and
Nietzsche’s language of the “God of machines and smelting pots,”64 seems to cap-
ture the high regard we have for the priests of the same god, the engineers and
technicians and indeed the scientists and theorists of all kinds. By contrast, and this
is where the practical level, the ontic matters of the ordinary come into play, it is
quite another thing again to live through the pains of such a transformation of the
world in the image of technology, as Heidegger lived through this transfiguration,
through two world wars, even if one could argue that we are today still, as we are,
and not that we give it a thought, living through wars all the same. For the work of
this transfiguring force is now largely consummate and we ignore, we do not live
through, the wars we have consistently been fighting. If Heidegger could ask if the
victims relegated to annihilation camps ‘died’ or if (and let us not forget that for
Heidegger the word and the meaning of the word in each case makes all the differ-
ence) they did not much rather and simply ‘perish’? The word he uses, the technical
term as historians also use it, is liquidation. And whatever fate that is, what it is not,
what does not have a chance to touch it (and those so condemned are bereft of
exactly this on Heidegger’s account) is death: a death, and above all, not one’s own
death: a death that one might take up, or and this is pure luxury, as we see, refuse to
appropriate, refuse to live. The inauthentic death is also what one does not die in
such camps.
For our part, we also ignore, as Baudrillard argued that we should not but that we
cannot but fail to see, the political realm, which “political” we take to be all about
what the journalism cum culture industry serves up to us.65 Baudrillard’s term was
‘integrated reality,’ which we ought today rename embedded reality, all the while
unaware of what really happened to close down the OWS movement (New York
City, after all, is where it began) and it is worth noting that I offered an earlier talk
scheduled during the events of the original Occupy Wall Street66 to the same group
at the New School that initially invited me to give the talk on which the current
essay is based. Here what matters with this detail and allusion to “real life” is that
we scholars and citizens, journalists and consumers barely notice today that Wall
Street is no longer “occupied,” and we do not bother to attend to such routine and

63
Nietzsche (1980), Vol. 5, 382. The full citation is useful: “Viel häufiger als eine solche hypnotis-
tische Gesammtdämpfung der Sensibilität, der Schmerzfähigkeit, welche schon seltnere Kräfte,
vor Allem Muth, Verachtung der Meinung, »intellektuellen Stoicismus« voraussetzt, wird gegen
Depressions-Zustände ein anderes training versucht, welches jedenfalls leichter ist: die machinale
Thätigkeit. Dass mit ihr ein leidendes Dasein in einem nicht unbeträchtlichen Grade erleichtert
wird, steht ausser allem Zweifel: man nennt heute diese Thatsache, etwas unehrlich, »den Segen
der Arbeit«.
64
Nietzsche (1980), Vol. 1, 114f. Nietzsche is here, in his first book, coordinating the allure of a
metaphysical comfort with the ideal of an “earthly consonance.”
65
See Baudrillard’s (2005a).
66
The earlier talk in question combined a lecture originally given in Dublin and a lecture entitled
“Requiem” given at Boston College. The first lecture is forthcoming: as Babich (2013a).
Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr/The Danger 171

such ontic details unless a Facebook post is sufficiently annoying to compel us to do

so, likewise we are oblivious to our torture of our prisoners as we still detain them
in Guantanamo, all that after electing a president on the explicit mandate that such
detention centers follow the rule of law (hasn’t happened and we elected that same
president again, anyway), and we certainly think nothing of the overkill (tanks in the
street, martial law, the complete shutdown of the town) required to catch two college
students in Boston (called terrorists), killing one and leaving another at least ini-
tially unable to speak (Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics goes on at length about the
fortune of that circumstantiality): we as a media populace followed the manhunt in
Boston with the avidity usually reserved for a contest on American Idol. Politics for
us, as Baudrillard wrote again and again, alas with Gallic impenetrability, is all
about the issues that are presented to us as news.67 History may well tell a different
story, but this is doubtful, and this too was also Baudrillard’s point, Kittler’s too
when he could turn his attention from his Greeks and other dissipations.68 After
everything is digitized which means to be sure, after every record can be infinitely
revised or changed at will—according to whoever’s whim, whatever, the point to be
remembered (no one will be able to make it) is that no one will be able to demon-
strate/prove/notice the effects or consequences of such limitless alterability (this is
the real meaning of the Leibnizian difference that makes no difference).
Yet one should be skeptical: we remain in need of a critical theory for our times
and the current practitioners of the same, be they in Frankfurt or New York or
Chicago, have fallen silent on anything that resembles critique. And these titulary
practitioners control all the journals (Critical Theory, Constellations, etc.) and they
control all the fellowships and they control all the books that are published in sup-
posedly respectable presses. And did I say professorial posts too? No, because I did
not have to: this goes without saying.
Repeated twice in these two core lectures, Das Ge-Stell and Die Gefahr,
which may now be taken as the locus of Heidegger’s abyssal politics, is (again)
his un-speakable, claim about death and technology and we have heard about this
and about its untenability all our intellectual lives. The most incendiary locus for
this twice-repeated provocation might be as expressed in Das Ge-Stell. This is
the locus that one scholar quoted out of context after gaining access to the then-
not-yet published text (this is the fun of plundering archives, not that there are all
that many chances for those doing archival work to do comparable things), after
promising not to quote it out of context. But by breaking a promise (and one
makes such promises in order to break them, as Kant tells us, namely as we seek
to gain an advantage and because we know or tell ourselves that without just that
false promise, breaking in our unsovereign mouths, as Nietzsche says calling us
windbags, even as we utter it [this is the point of the aphorism on the Nietzsche’s
‘sovereign individual at the start of the second part of On the Genealogy of

67
See Baudrillard (2005b) but see too one of his final essays available in English, Baudrillard
(2009).
68
This is not a matter of being for (or against) the media as it is also not a matter of being for or
against technology.
172 B. Babich

Morals]), that same advantage is denied us. The advantage won by Wolfgang
Schirmacher yielded the quote that generated a small book industry, large if you
count Wolin, huge if you count Tom Rockmore’s books, which is of course the
Heidegger scandal, beginning with Levinas, Lacoue-Labarthe, Derrida, Habermas
too.69 In fact Heidegger makes two similar declarations, but the first one is the
most notorious and it runs as follows
Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry in essence the same as the production of
corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and
starving of countries, the same as the production of hydrogen bombs.70

All of these things, for Heidegger, hence our horror, in essence: the same. For
Heidegger this sameness is so because it cannot but be so: everything is drawn into
the gyre, the “centre cannot hold” indeed we need the whole array of Yeats’ rebuke
of historicity and modern fatefulness or futurity because the essence of modern
technology in our world happens to remain as that which Heidegger saw it as being,
and to which insight into that which is, he sought to call our attention.
The setting upon of modern technology is critical, crucial, indispensable for
Heidegger and that is how he can utter such an offensive comparison: for him
modern technology is all about such equations, such calculations, such reductions.
Thus we noted with respect to a different kind of land-use, switching agrarian
land over, opening it up, literally so, to the coal industry, that Heidegger writes that
with that the coal itself (he has the Rilkean poem to the wealth of the kings slumber-
ing in the mountains in his mind), is ordered, set upon: “challenged forth for heat,
as the ground is challenged forth for coal.” Here the constellating point in question
will be that heat itself, today we would say energy,
is already set to set up steam, the pressure of which drives the turbines, which keep a factory
productive, which is itself ordered to set in place machines that produce tools by means of
which again, machines are set to work and maintained.71

The subsequent and for environmental studies indispensable reflective array to

which Heidegger then turns only offers an elaboration of this point:
The hydroelectric plant is placed in the river. It imposes upon it for water pressure,
which sets the turbines turning, the turning of which drives the machines, the gearing of
which imposes upon the electrical current through which the long-distance power centers
and their electrical grid are positioned for the conducting of electricity. The power
station in the Rhine river, the dam, the turbines, the generators, the switchboard, the
electrical grid—all this and more is there only insofar as it stands in place and at the ready,
not in order to be there (presence), but to be positioned, and indeed solely to impose
upon still others.72

69
There is no shortage of discussions of the same: I list this literature myself in several essays, as
do many, many, many others, but see, for a start, Babich (2009), 227–243 as well an earlier essay,
on Babich (1992), 83–106.
70
Heidegger (1994), 27
71
Ibid.
72
Ibid.
Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr/The Danger 173

Heidegger could not understand the engineering array or constellation any better,
maybe this what our culture industry means when it praises German engineering to
this day, usually in a Volkswagen ad or just an advertisement for a coffee machine.
Heidegger goes on to notice that this includes human being in deep ways and he
speaks of the machination, “mechanization of the human,”73 “the human being is
ordered by and for the requisitioning.”74
All this can seem to be taking us rather far afield, and as Das Ge-Stell serves as
prelude to Heidegger’s lecture on Die Gefahr, we turn to consider, as promised,
Heidegger’s reflection on the Ge.
We name the collection of mountains [die Versammlung der Berge] that are already gath-
ered together, united of themselves and never in retrospect, the mountain range [das
Gebirge]. We name the collection of ways according to which we are disposed to such and
such, and can feel ourselves so disposed, our frame of mind [das Gemut]. We now named
the self-gathered collection of placing, setting [das Stellens], wherein everything orderable
essences in the standing reserve, das Ge-Stell.75

Here for Heidegger everything is harrowed, harvested, arranged, disposed to

standing reserve and industry, and in this sense he can claim that “das Ge-Stell is the
essence of technology.”76

1.1 Die Gefahr/The Danger

As is typical for Heidegger, as we already know if we have learned to follow the

rhetorical didacticism that characterizes the strategic articulations of Being and
Time, Heidegger repeats the moves he introduces in Das Ge-Stell in the following
lecture Die Gefahr, and he does so in a thoroughly scholastic fashion. To be sure,
the reason that Jack Caputo and others can undertake to read Heidegger and Aquinas
together is because of Heidegger’s scholastic formation, not unlike Kant’s own for-
mation and indeed and to be sure as Heidegger admires Kant throughout his life.77
Here Heidegger closes his fourth lecture on the turn by invoking Kant on the ulti-
mate practical question, the ground of being qua being and as such: that would be
God even for the godless, as (the believing) Kant himself is usually blamed for
being the instigator of nihilism, at least according to Fichte and Jacobi.78 For his
part, Kant was already writing in a godless time, after Newton, after Laplace’s

73
Ibid., 28.
74
Ibid., 29.
75
Ibid., 32,
76
Ibid., 33.
77
See on Heidegger and Aquinas Jack Caputo’s often cited study (1982). See on Heidegger and
Kant, as an overview, Daniel Dahlstrom (2010). Willi Goetschl (1994) offers a useful background
for the (very differently) hermeneutically contextualizing framework to which I am adverting here.
78
This is complicated even beyond the constellations Freerick Beiser has tracked in his work. I
discuss this, citing Beiser and others, in some of my footnotes to Babich (2010b), 231–256.
174 B. Babich

Mécanique Céleste (finished in 1725, Kant would draw upon this for his own nebu-
lar hypothesis in 1755), and Heidegger’s schoolman’s (and hence classically didi-
catic strategy) is simply to tell us what he is doing and then to do so and then to
reprise what it is that he has done.79 In this sense “The Turn” inevitably has nothing
to do with the way typical Heideggerians seeking to divide their bit of Heidegger
into something manageable tend to speak of it, as if there might be a change in
Heidegger’s thinking (Heidegger as we know is famous for saying that a thinker
thinks only one thought), and we have already noted that where we might need to
locate such a change or turn we do not need to wait for these lectures for it is already
noted in Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism (and it is of course albeit in a secret, eso-
teric, or unpublished way already present in the Beiträge).80 In the Letter on
Humanism Heidegger declares that “everything is reversed,”81 or turned around, but
scholars will find such a translation or reflexive turning in his Introduction to
Metaphysics, or indeed in the 1935 lectures on The Origin of the Work of Art, which
are themselves, as they have to do with nothing other than the Greek notion or
meaning of techne, likewise indispensable for the four lectures on technology.
The focus on calculation with which Heidegger ends his lecture on Das Ge-Stell
is replaced with a reflection on worlding in terms that we recognize as the terms of
the fourfold, and which if we keep Heidegger’s reflections on the happening or
event of truth in his lecture on the artwork highlights “worlding” coming to
presence:
World is the fourfold of earth and sky, divinities and mortals. In the uniting whole of its
presence, the mirrorplay of the fourfold guards everything that thingingly presences and
absences between the four.82

As we also recognize from Being and Time, Heidegger gives nothing—he is not
a Hegelian, as it happens, for nothing—without simultaneously also taking it away.
Thus after indicating the importance of the safeguard, of sheltering (and we recall
that this is at the heart of his reflections on physis), Heidegger observes that “The
world still refuses itself as world. World still withdraws into the concealment proper
to it.”83 The difficulty for any discussion here as we recognize this immediately from
our familiarity with Being and Time but also from our rather persistent unfamiliarity
with Heidegger’s 1930 Essence of Truth, is that we are confounded by lighting and
concealing, showing hiding, aletheia/lethe.
The problem as Heidegger writes here, nicely concisely, is that “aletheia does
not properly guard itself in its own essence it lapses into concealment, lethe,

79
See on this: Babich (1993), 239–260.
80
See for an important and subtle discussion of this complex theme, Richard Polt (2006) and see
too in this context Babich (2010c), 397–415.
81
Heidegger (1977c). See for a discussion of this politicized political context along with further
references, see Babich (2013c).
82
Heidegger (1994), 48.
83
Ibid., 49.
Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr/The Danger 175

aletheia falls into forgetfulness.”84 By this means to be sure, Heidegger both

introduces the danger qua danger as well as recuperating his own reflection on the
sheer forgottenness of being which he has in the interim (as we know from the
Beiträge) begun to write as Seyn.
What Heidegger here calls the “refusal” of world, which he expresses as the Ereignis,
happening or event, also sometimes rendered as “appropriation” “ Diese Ereignis
besteht darin das Welt als die Wahrnis des Wesens des Seins sich verweigert.”85
World thus refuses itself as the preserver, guardian, harborer of the essence of
Being. Heidegger now offers us two references to temporality, one to the then-current
dispensation of world-affairs, as the “unfolding of planetary totality,” observing as
the defeated party to the previous contest for world-domination (i.e., the Germans
as the losers in the second world war) could not but be, however awkwardly,
perfectly placed to observe that “the modern battle for mastery of the earth is
concentrated upon the position of the two contemporary ‘world’ ‘powers.” (51)
This is complicated to the extent that Heidegger coordinates the refusal of world as
manifest as eventuated via or through the defenseless of the thing noting that in this
relation one to another they are “the same if to be sure not the identical.” (Ibid.) But
the distinction is not idle for Heidegger: “the same [das Selbe],” he will go on to
emphasize “is never the identical [das Gleiche].” (52) At this point what is at issue
for Heidegger is the refusal of world and the vulnerability of the thing in the prevail-
ing turn of the set up he has analysed as modern technology. Everything but every-
thing is presented as the ordered ‘items at hand’ or standing currency of standing
reserve. “Ge-Stell” he writes adumbrated in this play on standing reserve “is” this
disposition and is accordingly “the essence of modern technology.” (51) But this
conjunction is one of the moment, the present time, the insight is into that which is,
in its immediacy, thus Heidegger goes on to observe that this holds not ‘as such’ or
‘from all time’ but very literally ‘here,’ just to the extent that it is here and now that
we find that the “oblivion of the essence of being is consummate.” In the same way,
and now we see why so many commentators inevitably turn here to a reflection on
The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger also writes that “World and Ge-Stell are
the same.” (52)
Calculation, a concern for Heidegger from the start, both in his reflections on
truth in Being and Time as in the Essence of Truth, as in his reflections on “Science
and World Picture,” all originating from his original and enduring interest in
science and his interest, inevitable for anyone who works on Dilthey’s account of
history but also anyone in philosophy who is both a contemporary as Heidegger
was, roughly speaking here, as you are whether you like it or not as students a
contemporary of my ancient self just as I was when I was a 23 year old student
when I met first met William Richardson as well as being the contemporary of my
even more ancient teacher, the same Gadamer at 80, so similarly was Heidegger a
contemporary of Max Weber as well as from its outset to its flourishing with the
same Rudolf Carnap we already began by noticing, and beyond to its current

84
Ibid.
85
Ibid., 50–51.
176 B. Babich

world-dominion within philosophy proper in so-called analytic philosophy, logical

positivism, the issue of values was for Heidegger a matter of weighting and weigh-
ing the same. We cannot count the time of life with a clock, we cannot calculate it
at all. Thus Heidegger writes, playing on the banality of banality, the indifference
of the diffident—Alles gilt gleich—same old, same old, we might say. (52)
If a further discussion of calculation cannot here be considered, what is important
to note is that the same preface, the Ge- that remains at issue, is also to be consid-
ered in the danger, die Ge-fahr. Two coordinate and even nested claims make this
clear: “The essence of technology is the Ge-Stell. The essence of the Ge-Stell is the
danger.” (54) In effect, it is the Ge-Stell as such, the enframing, the set up that “sets
after the truth of the essence of being with forgetfulness.” (53) This harrying, har-
rowing is Heidegger’s “pur-suit’—here the word is not Gestellen, but Nachstellen.
For Heidegger, as he writes, in “Old High German, to pursue is called fara.” (53)
The Ge-Stell, the set-up, or the en-framing “gathered in itself as pursuit is the dan-
ger [Das in sich gesammelte Stellen als Nachstellen ist die Gefahr].” (53) What is
key here just as in the folded, referentiality or integral orderedness of the Ge- in
Ge-Stell, is the gathered in itself of the pursuit in question, as the danger. The
Hegelian move here brings us him to reflect “that Beyng (Being or Sein spelled with
a y, in an ancient mode, as Seyn) is the danger. Beyng is unqualifiedly in itself, from
itself, for itself” (can’t get more Hegelian than this) “the danger. As this pursuit,
which pursues its own essence with the forgetting of this essence”—here, again, we
recognize aletheia—“beyng as beyng is the danger.” (53)
Here Heidegger’s definition of the danger summarizes the lectures to this point:
The danger is the collected pursuit [sich in sich versammelte Stellen als Nachstellen] as
which en-framing/set up [als welches das Ge-Stell] in the guise of unguardedness of the
thing, pursues the self-refusal of world with the forgetting of its truth.” (54)

For Heidegger, and note that our reading through an English language lens
challenges us, we are left to reflect that we do not experience [Erfahren] the danger
as danger.” (55) It is in this context that Heidegger presents the currency of need and
desperation, that is: he lists a litany of death, as indeed of pain that is to say suffer-
ing, and also of poverty, all and each as what confronts us and at the same time
manages not to touch us, leaving us unmoved, unchanged, in a terrifying sense. The
phenomenon to which Heidegger refers here continues to this day as we well know,
all you have to do is read the paper, check Facebook and note how many awful
things and then note how little any of those things affect you really or at all: talk
about the oblivion of being as much as you like.
For Heidegger in the midst of extraordinary need and desperation, and from 1945
onward, certainly unabated by 1949 in Germany, that is then pretty much everywhere
in that defeated land, precisely to the extent that the businessmen and city fathers to
whom Heidegger spoke in Bremen, just to the degree that they did indeed address this
need and that need, as people organized to respond to devastations in this way and
that, remedying problems in this way and that, that precisely in the midst of “amelio-
rating pain and tending to neediness” (55–56) what remains critical for Heidegger is
that precisely while so engaged “one does not attend to the need.” (65) Heidegger has
Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr/The Danger 177

a name for this—which he explores already in Being and Time, errancy, die Irre.86 It
is our amazing ability not to be where we are, which (remember that we are for
Heidegger Dasein), only means that we are not who we are. In this sense, Heidegger
observes here, „Das Wesen der Irre beruht im Wesen des Seyns als der Gefahr.” [The
essence of errancy subsists in the essence of Seyn as the danger.] (56)
This same errancy plagues us when in the same paradoxical sense in which the
paradox of neediness prevails such that we all have needs, we all have our despera-
tions, but we do not in midst of our worries actually because we cannot begin to
attend to needfulness as such. In the context of this reflection on death, suffering or
pain and neediness or needfulness and all the heedlessness of the same in the midst
of an abundance of the same, we encounter the second version, or variant upon
Heidegger’s seeming insensitivity (which we now see to be an insensitivity in his
words on insensitivity as we hear him). This locus, situated in postwar needfulness,
is the most grim, and it is perhaps because of its time, harsher in tone than
Heidegger’s more popular (it was a radio) lecture “Building, Dwelling, Thinking,”
broadcast in 1951 with its own respective (and indeed more hopeful) reflections on
need and needfulness. Here in The Danger we read:
Hundreds of thousands die in masses. Do they die? They succumb. They are put down. Do
they die? They become inventory items of a standing reserve for the fabrication of corpses.
Do they die? They are unremarkably liquidated in annihilation camps. And even without
such—millions now in China, end pathetically in starvation. (56)

In this context, it can be argued that the Heidegger of Being and Time thereby
reclaims his own reflection on what he had offered for reflection on death, that is
being-towards-death, as this specifically characterizes human beings in their mor-
tality, as beings concerned with their being and aware of their vulnerability in being
in the mode (this is high Heidegger, esoteric Heidegger) of disattending, flight, for-
getfulness of being.
Death shelters [birgt] the essence of being. Death is the highest re-fuge [Gebirg] of the truth
of being itself, the refuge that in itself shelters [birgt] the concealment [Verborgenheit] of
the essence of being and gathers together the sheltering [bergung] of its essence.… To be
capable of death in its essence means to be able to die. (Ibid.)

But for Heidegger: “The human is not yet the mortal.” (56) Since much of
Heidegger’s project in Being and Time was all about explaining life in terms of liv-
ing and in terms of the vanity of mortal beings who take themselves to be immortal,
as we do, proximally and for the most part, what fascism took from its others was
what made them human, even in its constant, as it is pretty much always, default.
Here I want to emphasize as this essay moves toward its conclusion that the same
technique, the same modus, asks us to attend to Heidegger’s very overtly hermeneutic
phenomenology (he is not—despite the Spiegel’s sensationalist insistence on the
same, an insistence shared by numerous junior college professors—an ‘existentialist’)
with respect to our obliviousness, thoughtlessness. “Immeasurable suffering shifts

86
Die Irre, or errancy has been a lasting concern for William Richardson as one can read beginning
with his (1993). And see too the contributions to Babich (1995).
178 B. Babich

and surges across the earth. But the essence of pain conceals itself. …Everywhere we
are besieged with countless and boundless suffering. We however are not pained
[schmerzlos], we are not appropriated to the essence of pain.”(57)
We are not pained and today there is more of this un-moved, painlessness than
ever. Who bothers to watch animal rights videos, if one ever did, who is really con-
cerned about the plight or fate (pick any word you like) of the Palestinians, the
Syrians, the Nigerians, etc. and etc. and etc.?
Death, the mountains of Seyn, pain, the schema of Seyn, poverty, the liberation into the
ownership of Seyn, are features allowing the danger to be remarked, that needfulness is
excluded in the midst of the greatest neediness, that the danger is not as the danger allowing
the danger to be noted. (Ibid.)

We are unpained, we do not sense what is all around us, as Heidegger who will
turn in his last essay on the turn to language by which as he explains he means our
need to lay claim to it. And today, I would argue, we are no further advanced: we
still need to recall Hölderlin’s warning to us, whether as scholars of being or of
language as all those who have lost their tongues in foreign (and native) lands.
Here Heidegger seeks to differentiate his reading from those who contend that
“technology is the catastrophe of the modern world” (58) and so on. For Heidegger
it is already problematic to offer a critique of technology in a technological age, no
matter in what voice one seeks to do so. The point here is that whether one praises
or damns it, “at the same time one greedily scurries after the latest technological
advance, perhaps one cannot but run after it in this way.” (58) Yet to this same extent
“judgment and inclination with respect to technology contradict themselves and the
same contradiction is taken as objection.” (Ibid.)
Heidegger’s perhaps best known claim that the “essence of technology is itself
nothing technological” (60) remains, as he reprises it in the final lecture, The Turn,
almost in the same words, arguing that everything that is “merely technical” can
“never attain to the essence of technology” (Die Kehre, 76). We do not grasp and
hence cannot begin to articulate what he calls the “insight into that which is,” to the
extent that we do not even ask after the import of the times as they unfold around us.
“But,” for Heidegger, “we do not yet hear, we, under the dominion of technology,
whose hearing and seeing decay through radio and film.” (Die Kehre, 77) Here we
can and should add the internet (why on earth not?), but for Heidegger what we do
not yet hearken to or see is occluded not simply by way of our thuggishness or inat-
tention: “The constellation of beyng is the refusal of world as world.”
If earlier, Heidegger had responded to a question on humanism by recalling a
related request for a contribution to ethics by distinguishing between the modern
notion and the ancient Greek sense of the same, he also took care to be blunt about
the circumstances of such thought, as we have already referred to his earlier lecture
on poverty. For Heidegger as he goes on to note in his letter to a former enemy in
1946, philosophizing or thinking “about being shattered is separated by a chasm
from a thinking that is shattered.”87

87
Heidegger (1954/1977c), 223/340.
Constellating Technology: Heidegger’s Die Gefahr/The Danger 179

Maybe, and in the spirit of the small, the slight recommendation, we might begin,
after all this time, to take up Heidegger’s more complex question. That is his ques-
tion concerning the “world, worlding,” as this would be “the nearest of everything
that nears,” now heard as we perhaps should always have heard it as the question of
Ereignis, that is in terms of what Heidegger called Eigentlichkeit: appropriation
appropriated as it were, qua the “ownership of appropriation.” (Ibid.) For as we also
know, from the start, what Heidegger meant by Eigentlichkeit was never ‘authentic-
ity’ (and it is easy to remember that German has a term for authenticity, die
Authenticität) but owned ownedness, appropriated appropriation.88
Ereignis.

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209–244. Bonn: Bouvier.
Sloane, Eric. 2004. [1965]. A reverence for wood. New York: Dover Publications.
Smythe, Dallas Walker. 1954. Reality as presented by television. The Public Opinion Quarterly
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Winner, Langdon. 1986. The whale and the reactor. A search for limits in an age of high technology.
Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Heidegger and the Reversed Order
of Science and Technology

Lin Ma and Jaap van Brakel

Abstract Contrary to the common view that modern technology derives from
modern science, Heidegger presents a reverse picture in which science originated in
the essence of technology, wherein Being speaks. We argue that it is in this sense
that Heidegger speaks of the Same [das Selbe] of science and technology, both
being ultimately grounded in the history of Being. In the long span from 1938 to
1976, Heidegger has continuously delved into the relation of science and tech-
nology. In our research we also engage ourselves with various claims made by
philosophers of technoscience. We show that Heidegger has always kept himself
well-informed of traditional as well as new types of technology and science,
including quantum physics, atomic technology (as used in nuclear reactors), and
biophysics (including speculations about genetic manipulation in the 1950s).
Nevertheless, one cannot ascribe to Heidegger the view that these new develop-
ments originate a new Epoch of Being.

1 Introduction

Two weeks before Heidegger’s death on May 26, 1976, the tenth annual meeting of
the “Heidegger Conference” of the North American Heidegger Society was held at
DePaul University in Chicago. Heidegger’s letter of greetings to this conference has
been reported as the last philosophical text by his hand. In this letter, he requested
that the participants take up the following question as “stimulation” [Anregung] for
their discussion:
Is modern natural science the foundation [Grundlage] of modern technology — as assumed —
or is it, for its part, already the basic form [Grundform] of, the determining fore-conception

L. Ma (*) • J. van Brakel

Hoger Instituut voor Wijsbegeerte, Renmin University of China, Kardinaal Mercierplein 2,
3000 Leuven, Belgium
e-mail: lin.ma.2007@gmail.com; jaap.vanbrakel@hiw.kuleuven.be

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 183

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_11,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
184 L. Ma and J. van Brakel

[Vorgriff] and incessant incursion [Eingriff] of technological representation into the rea-
lized and arranged [ausführende und einrichtende] machinations of modern technology?
([1976], p. 747/3)

Here, carefully formulating in terms of a question, Heidegger made the crucial

point that, instead of the common-sense idea that science lays the foundation for
technology, the technological essence may well be that from which science is
derived and on behalf of which science functions.
What is perhaps most perplexing is the fact that Heidegger singled out this ques-
tion, from among many other questions, as an indispensable inquiry relative to “the
asking of the question of Being” (748/4) Toward the end of his 1976 letter, Heidegger
suggests that fruitful reflection upon the relation between science and technology
could help prepare a transformation of man’s dwelling in this world, which he
claims to be what the question of Being is “in truth” (748/4).
At the 11th “Heidegger Conference” in 1977 as well as the 35th “Heidegger
Conference” in 2001, the question of the being of science and technology was made
a central theme of the meeting. However, the contributions to these conferences
have hardly addressed Heidegger’s question directly.1 In this paper, we attempt to
shed light upon this enigmatic aspect of Heidegger’s thinking and its essential con-
nection with “the mystery of what is today in truth in the technologically deter-
mined world” (ÜTS 138). First, we trace the genesis of this question in Heidegger’s
thinking since about 1940 and expose relevant materials that disclose his major
concerns in ruminating upon this question (Sect. 2). In this section, quite a number
of substantial citations come from GA 76, Zur Metaphysik—Neuzeitlichen
Wissenschaft—Technik (henceforth MWT) published in 2009,2 where one finds
abundant preparatory notes for public lectures on the essence of science and/or tech-
nology. We argue that it is in the year 1938 that Heidegger developed some
Wegmarken for a response to this question, and his pondering on it did not come to
an end until his death.
Second, using a text from the Winter of 1945/1946 as an initiating clue, we lay
out a three-fold structure of the way in which Heidegger sets forward his question-
ing (Sect. 3), which leads to the crucial thesis that modern science and technology
are the “Same” [das Selbe].
When it comes to Heidegger’s thinking on modern science and technology, the
prejudice that Heidegger “deeply contested” science and technology remains preva-
lent (Ihde 2010, p. 110). We emphasize, in the very beginning of the present paper
that this is only one facet of the profile. It is true that Heidegger often express

1
[Most of the participants at the 2001 conference, organized 25 years after Heidegger’s initial 1976
question, did address Heidegger’s question, including Heidegger’s student, Ute Guzzoni in her
presentation. A German version of her essay appears in the proceedings and an English translation
of her presentation is included in Glazebrook 2012. Holger Schmid also takes up Heidegger’s
question. See Schmid’s chapter to follow in the present volume.—BB].
2
For other abbreviations of Heidegger’s works see the list of references included at the end of this
chapter. Page numbers of English translations if available follow the page numbers of the
original.
Heidegger and the Reversed Order of Science and Technology 185

worries about such things as “the possible self-destruction of the human being,” but
immediately adds: “it is not a matter of hostility toward science as such” (ZS
124/94). In many other places, Heidegger reiterates that “the sciences are in them-
selves something positively essential” (WhD 16/14), and stresses that our comport-
ment toward technology should be “yes” and “no” at the same time: “We can use
technical devices, and yet with proper use also keep ourselves free of them, that we
may let go of them any time” (G 526f/46).
In a discussion in 1955 about one of his favourite poets, J.P. Hebel, Heidegger
argues that science and technology can well co-exist with “simple naturalness”
(Hebel145/97). Referring to Hebel as a “friend to the house which the world is”
(139/93), Heidegger suggests that his poetry exemplifies the ideal of co-existence.
After citing Goethe’s review of Hebel’s Allemanic Poems in which he says that
Hebel “thoroughly countrifies the universe,” Heidegger adds that Hebel also shows
nature in its scientific calculability. The current problem, as Heidegger points out, is
precisely that “calculable nature” and “natural nature” have been separated into
“two alien realms,” the latter being degraded and the former being “offered as the
sole key to the mystery of the world” (146/98).
In recent literature, some scholars ascribe to Heidegger a prescience of what is
now called “technoscience,”3 while some others suggest that Heidegger’s work pro-
vides a clue leading to the thesis that the “non-locality” of quantum mechanics
points toward a non-totalizing science and an other Epoch in the history of being.
As to the first claim, Heidegger was prescient of what is now called technoscience,
and in this respect his writings are still relevant to current debates in Science &
Technology Studies, but this is a rather unimportant issue in the context of his think-
ing on the relation of science and technology (Sect. 3). We discuss the specific issue
of quantum physics and nuclear technology in Sect. 5.
Yet another piece of criticism coming from philosophers of technoscience, is that
Heidegger did not engage himself in concrete, empirical study of actual technolo-
gies (Ihde 2010, pp. 2–5).4 Therefore, his more conclusive statements about science
and technology lack a firm ground. This criticism seems to be far-fetched. It is true
that Heidegger has never carried out any prolonged “case study,” which is currently
a shared practice among philosophers of technoscience. However, one can see from

3
The term ‘technoscience’ is a term that is now widely used in “Science & Technology Studies.”
Most contemporary philosophers of technology (such as Feenberg, Ihde, Latour) subscribe to
the thesis that science and technology cannot (anymore) be separated and should be studied via
detailed case studies (i.e. philosophy of science and technology “after the empirical turn”).
They are critical of Heidegger because he is considered an essentialist, determinist, and pessi-
mist. Ihde’s Heidegger’s Technologies: Postphenomenological Perspectives is a systematic
discussion of important differences between Heidegger’s approach and his own “pragmato-
phenomenological account” (which “leaves in shambles the metaphysical Heideggerian tale”)
Ihde (2010), 113.
4
Latour paints Heidegger as a thorougly pessimistic technological determinist. For discussion see
Kochan (2010). According to Feenberg (1999), vii, 15–17, 29, Heidegger is an essentialist on three
counts: a-historical, substantivist, and one-dimensional. For discussion see Thomson (2000).
186 L. Ma and J. van Brakel

Heidegger’s working notes, conversations, and lectures that he has always kept
himself well-informed of traditional as well as new types of technology.5
After a discussion of Heidegger’s use of the words ‘epoch’ and ‘Epoch’ (Sects. 4
and 5) and the (alleged) essential difference between pre-modern and modern tech-
nology, we propose in Sect. 7 a slightly revised version of Heidegger’s view of the
relation of science and technology, concluding that his slogan “Science is applied
Technology” (FG 10/15) is better replaced by “Science and Technology are the
Same.”
In other writings, Heidegger has employed the expression “the Same” [das
Selbe] sometimes as a unique notion, sometimes in its more ordinary sense, and
sometimes as a pun that denotes both senses. As a unique notion, the Same speaks
of the “belonging-together” of being and thinking (ID 92/29). It is that which lets
Being and thinking relate and concern one another mutually. To think of the
belonging-together is not to assimilate the components into a unity, as a simplistic
understanding of the principle of identity [Gleichheit] would presume. What is at
issue is to experience the togetherness in terms of belonging. The Same is the matter
of thinking, the task of thinking, and the way of thinking. As he writes in “Moira,”
“What is silently concealed in the enigma-word τὸ αὐτό is the revealing bestowal
[entbergende Gewähren] of the belonging-together of the duality [of Being and
beings] and the thinking that comes forward into view within it” (M 251/95).
Heidegger also uses the notion of the Same [das Selbe] to explicate relations in
various areas, for example, the relation between poetic and philosophical thinking:
“Only poetry is of the same order [in derselben Ordnung] as philosophical thinking,
although thinking and poetry are not identical [gleich]” (IM 28/28). The bond
between poetry and thinking is a gathering, that is, the Same, that shelters and
grounds both of them. That here is such a bond is because both poetry and thinking
arise as a correspondence to the claim of being. As Heidegger states, “Essential
thinking must always say only the same, the old, the oldest, the beginning, and must
say it primordially.”6
In this light, Heidegger’s saying that science and technology are the Same (ÜTS
16/136), presumably, would entail that, in exploring their relation, one needs to
reflect upon their essence, and in reflecting upon their essence, one needs to think
back upon their belonging-together as a gathering from out of which both science
and technology come into being and sustains themselves. Heidegger defines the
primordial Same as the belonging-together of being and thinking; therefore, speaking
of the Same of science and technology inevitably directs our thinking back to their
essential connection with the history of Being.

5
See for example two pages of insightful notes on the steam engine (MWT 367–8), including “the
politics of artifact.” How the steam engine moved the working place of women and children from
home to the factory, from country side to town. Examples regarding more recent technologies are
given in Sects. 4 and 5.
6
GA 54, 114/77. On Heidegger’s use of the Same in regard to intellectual relations between phi-
losophers, see Ma (2008), 202.
Heidegger and the Reversed Order of Science and Technology 187

2 Reversing the Assumed Order of Modern Science

and Technology

On the basis of relevant materials, we suggest that it is in the year 1940 when the
question concerning the relation of science and technology emerged as one of the
essential questions that Heidegger continued to be seriously preoccupied with
until 1976.7
In a note taken after having delivered the lecture “Besinnung auf die Wissenschaft”
in Freiburg in June 1938, Heidegger writes,8 “Modern science as ‘technology’—
This step in the lecture of 1938 not yet completed although everything ready.”9 This
“step,” not yet taken in that lecture, was soon taken resolutely.
In his notes of 1940 with the heading ‹Philosophie› und ‹Wissenschaft›,10
Heidegger directly identified modern science with technology, and technology with
the completion of metaphysics: “What modern science is: ‘technology’. What
‘technology’ is—completion of metaphysics” (MWT 126).11 By way of clarification,
he adds such statements as: “Inserting modern science into the essence of modern
technology. The latter appears later, but from early on already rules in the essence
[im Wesen].” “Pure natural science is an essential completion [Wesensvollzug] of
technology.” “The unity of modern science as technology.”12

7
According to Ihde (2010), 93, Heidegger’s interest in science and technology is shown only in a
few brief periods, that is: the period of Being and Time, the mid 1930s, the mid 1950s, and, after
“a gap,” his last statement of 1976. This picture is unconvincing in view of Heidegger’s own writ-
ings, as the citations in this section show.
8
At GA 16, 349, one finds a summary of this lecture, the last sentence of which reads: “neuzeitliche
Wissenschaft [ist] eine Weise der Technik.” This is the same lecture, elsewhere referred to as “Die
Begründung des neuzeitlichen Weltbildes durch die Metaphysik” of 9 June 1938 (GA 16, 802),
which led to the published text of ZWB.
9
MWT 126: “Die neuzeitliche Wissenschaft als “Technik”—Dieser Schritt im Vortrag 1938 noch
nicht vollzogen, obzwar alles bereit.” The “step” was also prepared in Beitr. (1936/1938), but also
there not fully taken. For example, in § 76 Heidegger provides a list of propositions on science. In
proposition number 19 (155/107), he speaks of the “growing consolidation of the machinational-
technical essence of all science”, which can be considered as support for the claim that Heidegger
was prescient concerning technoscience. In the revised list of propositions on science in his notes
of 1940 he is more explicit (proposition 22, MWT 124–5): “Modern science is research because it
has its essential foundation (Wesensgrund) in technology.”
10
The editors of the Gesamtausgabe don’t give a date for this bundle of notes, except for indicating
that it is from the period of ÜM (1936/1946). The years given for various text on MWT 126f sug-
gest 1940 as the best guess.
11
“Was die neuzeitliche Wissenschaft ist: »Technik«. Was »Technik« ist—Vollendung der
Metaphysik.” For a discussion of the relation of technology and metaphysics see §1 in Ma and van
Brakel (2014).
12
“die Einfügung der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft in das Wesen der neuzeitlichen Technik, das
später als sie erscheint, aber früher im Wesen waltet” (MWT 127); “reine Naturwissenschaft [ist]
ein Wesensvollzug der Technik” (125). “Die Einheit der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft als
»Technik«” (128).
188 L. Ma and J. van Brakel

In various writings after 1940, Heidegger often mentions the technological

essence of science. For instance:
“The more plainly the sciences are carried along by their predetermined technological
essence. . . .” This comes from «Nietzsche’s Wort Gott ist tot» of 1943 (HW 211/159).
“[M]odern science stems from the essence of technology” (FG 179/116). This is cited
from “Der Lehrer trifft den Türmer an der Tür zum Turmaufgang” (Winter 1944/45).
“Modern science is application of the essence of technology.”13 This comes from the
Bremer Vorträge of 1949.
“Modern science is grounded in the nature of technology” (WhD 140/135); and “we still
seem to be afraid of facing the exciting fact that today’s sciences belong in the realm of the
essence of modern technology and nowhere else” (WhD 16/14). This claim is made in Was
heißt Denken of 1951.
“Today, that which modern science moves in its innermost essence, … we can only
incompletely characterize … by giving it the name ‘technology’.”14 This comes from a
marginal note to “Wissenschaft und Besinnung” of 1953.
“Modern technology is the supporting grounding feature [tragende Grundzug] of
modern natural science” (ÜTS 18/137). This is cited from the lecture „Technische und
Überlieferte Sprache“ of 1962.
“The fundamental character of [the] scientific attitude is its cybernetic, that is
technological character.“15 This comes from „Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe
des Denkens“ of 1966.
“The essence (das Eigene) of modern technology and in it the already grounding
sciences: die Gestellnis.“16 This is found among his numerous notes made in the early
1970s, published in Gedachtes (GA 81, 349).

We can see that the issue has been on his mind during the whole period of 1938–
1976. What is most prominent among these remarks is a reversal of the order of
science and technology. Since modernity, it has been an accepted view that technol-
ogy owes its birth to science. Modern technology emerged only when science let
itself avail in a certain area. Against this assumption, Heidegger suggests that we
consider science from its technological essence. In doing this, we would reverse
their order in seeing modern science as the application of the essence of technology.
In its essence, technology is more primordial, in that the Greek word τέχνε means
precisely “a bringing forth of beings . . . out of concealment specifically into the
unconcealment of its appearance” (ÜM 46/35; em. or.) The reason why technology
is more primordial is none other than that it denotes unconcealment of beings.

13
“Das Wesen der modernen Technik, das Ge-stell, begann mit dem wesensmäßigen Grundakt des
Bestellens, insofern es zuerst die Natur als den Grund-Bestand im vorhinein sicher stellte. Die
moderne Technik ist nicht angewandte Naturwissenschaft, vielmehr ist die neuzeitliche
Wissenschaft Anwendung des Wesens der Technik, …” (BV 43).
14
Marginal note to W&B only in GA 7, 62. “Das, was die moderne Wissenschaft in ihrem innersten
Wesen bewegt, das, wodurch sich der gezeigte unscheinbare Sachverhalt ereignet, können wir
heute nur erst ganz unzureichend und überdies leicht mißdeutbar kennzeichnen, wenn wir dafür
den Namen »Technik« nennen.”
15
EP 72/58. Cf. ZWB, 85/64: “From an inner compulsion, the researcher presses forward into the
sphere occupied by the figure of, in the essential sense, the technologist.”
16
“das Eigene der neuzeitlichen Technologie und der in ihm schon gründenden Wissenschaften:
die Gestellnis.” On Gestellnis see Ma and van Brakel (2014).
Heidegger and the Reversed Order of Science and Technology 189

Thus, we need to consider the relation between science and technology from the
vantage point of the history of Being.
Among sciences, Heidegger pays particular attention to (mathematical, theoreti-
cal) physics, because it is assumed to be the foundation and origin of all (natural)
sciences. In a letter to Takehiko Kojima of 18 August 1963, Heidegger states: “The
grounding feature of modern mathematical science is the technological, which
appears first in its new and essential Gestalt through modern physics.”17 That the
essence of science is the technological, Heidegger presumes, finds a first reflection in
physics. In “Die Frage nach der Technik” of 1953, Heidegger says: “Modern physics
is the herald of Enframement [Gestell], a herald whose origin is still unknown.”18 In
“A Triadic Conversation” (Winter 1944/45), Heidegger even claims: “Physics must
be technology, because theoretical physics is the proper, pure technology” [FG 8/5;
em. or.]. In the next section, we will see how Heidegger comes to this point.

3 Laying Out a Structure of Argument

Heidegger’s earliest and perhaps the most important presentation of a detailed

argument regarding the relation between science and technology can be found
in “A Triadic Conversation between a Guide, a Scientist, and a Scholar” from
the Country Path Conversations composed in the Winter of 1944/45, just before
the end of the Second World War. The argument can be summarized in terms of the
following steps.
First step: Experimental physics makes use of technology. The example
Heidegger gives is “the machine that splits the atom” (FG 6/3). Hence, experimental
physics in itself might be considered to be technology being applied, instead of
technology coming into being through the application of experimental physics. On
the basis of this observation (which is repeated in 1962—see below), one may
intend to describe Heidegger as prescient of technoscience.19 However, this is only
a preliminary remark, and Heidegger has yet much more to say.

17
“Die Natur wird daraufhin herausgefordert, d. h. gestellt, sich in einer berechenbaren
Gegenständlichkeit zu zeigen. … Dieses Her-Stellen, d. h. das Eigentümliche der Technik, voll-
zieht sich auf eine einzigartige Weise innerhalb der Geschichte des europäischen Abendlandes
durch die Entfaltung der neuzeitlichen mathematischen Naturwissenschaft. Deren Grundzug ist
das Technische, das zuerst durch die moderne Physik in seiner neuen und eigentlichen Gestalt zum
Vorschein kommt” Heidegger (1963), 156.
18
“Die neuzeitliche Physik ist der in seiner Herkunft noch unbekannte Vorbote des Ge-stells” (FT
23/303).
19
Heidegger being prescient concerning “technoscience” was already apparent in Beitr. “Natural
sciences will become a part of machine technology and its operations.” To this could be added
Heidegger’s early awareness of the “knowledge economy”: what counts is not anymore which
country has the richest natural resources (minerals etc.), but the country which is most successful
in technological innovation (Bedr 9).
190 L. Ma and J. van Brakel

Second step: Theoretical physics, which is “the foundation of ‘fundamental

research’ in all the natural sciences” (FG 8f/4), does not employ instruments or
machines. Hence, it is of course not applied technology in the sense in which exper-
imental physics is applied technology. However, theoretical physics is (applied)
technology in a different sense. Heidegger claims: “Physics must be technology,
because theoretical physics is the proper, pure technology” [8/5], “the technological
essence of physics lies precisely in that it is theoretical physics” (11/6). Why?
Third step: The technological and the theoretical are the selfsame (das Selbe)
(FG 11/6). Why?
Thinking [in theoretical physics and elsewhere in the sciences] sets nature toward itself as
the spatiotemporally-ordered manifold of moving points of mass. … natural processes are
re-presented [vor-gestellt]. In this fashion, nature is what is pro-duced [Hergestellt]…
[thus] nature is as that which stands over against the human. … [this] producing is the
basic trait of the objectification of nature … something objective for mathematical repre-
sentation (11/7).

Heidegger’s discussion of the essence of science in lectures and writings from

the period 1935–1938 can help illuminate the idea embodied in the third step,20 in
particular his discussion of the notion ta mathemata and the impact of Descartes’
metaphysics,21 which reverses the meaning of obiectum and subiectum (FD
106/280). According to Heidegger, in such statements as modern science is factual,
experimental, and measuring, we miss its fundamental characteristics, which con-
sists in two things. One is the way of working with the things, that is, setting things
on their proper foundation in advance by using axioms and by “precalculability.”22
The other is the metaphysical projection of the thingness of the things. This way of
projection, in opening up a domain in which only things of a certain kind can show
themselves, “sketches out in advance a blueprint of the structure of every natural
body as well as of its relation, to every other body” (Kockelmans 1985, p. 150).
Thus the task of science is to specify what can be accepted as scientific facts.23
As a consequence, those most commonly assumed features of science (experi-
ments & instruments, exactness & law, calculation & mathematics, and more

20
Kockelmans has given a still useful and insightful overview of Heidegger’s view of science draw-
ing on FD (1935/1936), ZWB (1938), WhD (1951/1952), W&B (1953), FT (1953), G (1955). See
in particular ch. 5 “Toward an Ontology of the Modern Natural Sciences.” Of course at the time of
writing Kockelmans did not have access to sources which have become available from the many
volumes of the Gesamtausgabe published up to now.
21
For Heidegger’s broad notion of “the mathematical” see FD 69-77/249-255, ZWB 78/58,
Kockelmans (1985), 142f, 150–1, and Dea (2009). Ta mathemata means for the Greeks that which
man knows in advance in observing entities and dealing with things. Carson (2010) characterizes
it as a view of mathematization as prescription that things make their appearance as objects pre-
dictable, calculable, and governable in a technological sense.
22
In “Wesen der Sprache” (WS 178/74) Heidegger ascribes to Nietzsche the insight that “method”
is more essential than “result.” Scientific method is not a mere instrument, “it has pressed science
into its own service.” To be contrasted with “thinking”, where there is “neither method nor theme.”
23
Galileo poses conditions in advance to which nature must answer in one way or another. With
Newton nature becomes the closed totality of the motions of the spatio-temporally related point-
masses. See for discussion Kockelmans (1985) and Dea (2009).
Heidegger and the Reversed Order of Science and Technology 191

recently: research enterprise, specialization, institionalisation) take on a broader

meaning.24 For example, calculation now means: taking something into account by
setting it up as an object of expectation.
Heidegger argues that modern science is completely different from medieval and
ancient (Western) science (FD), and that the experience of nature entailed therein is
also completely different. However, it makes no sense to say that modern science is
more exact or that Newton’s theory is true and Aristotle’s view false. What is essen-
tial of modern science is its method of precalculability and the metaphysical projec-
tion of the thingness of the things.
During one of the Zollikon seminars in 1965, again the essence of science is
described in similar terms as in the late 1930s: it is the “connection between mea-
surability and method” (ZS 134/103), where measurability is in fact the same as
calculability, which “means precalculability.” This is the method of science: secur-
ing the calculability of nature. The mind is reduced to a “technician of calculations”
(139/107).25
Coming back now to the Country Path Conversations, the Scientist summarizes
the argument thus far:
Then the name ‘technology’ strictly speaking, refers to a kind of representing, that is, a kind
of cognition, and hence to a kind of theoretical comportment. The essence and the domi-
nance of technology consists in the fact that, through it, nature has become an object.
Nature is set up by the human, halted by him, so that it may be accountable to him and to
his plans for it. Technology is the objectification of nature. (FG 12/7)

Since “the word itself … harbor[s] the significance [Deutung] of the matter
named by it” (FG 12/7), Heidegger, in the role of the Guide, explains how the word
‘technology’ in the modern sense is a particular kind of τέχνε: “Modern technology
is that letting-see and setting-toward in which nature comes to appear as a
mathematical object” (13/8f).26 Hence, Heidegger’s idiosyncratic statement that
“physics is applied technology” (15/10) does not necessarily contradict the common
assumption that “technology is applied physics.” This is because: “In each of the
two statements the words ‘physics,’ ‘technology,’ and ‘application’ signify some-
thing different. … Because physics is applied technology in the sense of τέχνε,
‘technology’ in the familiar sense can and must be applied physics (15/10).

24
Heidegger may also be said to be prescient concerning the current “research” phase of modern
science: research in groups, distinction of Geisteswissenschaften and Naturwissenschaften disap-
pearing, institutionalisation, intertwined with industry, becoming an enterprise. See ZWB and
Kockelmans (1985), 152–162.
25
And this is further interpreted in Ge-stell terms (135/105): “the point is control and domination
of the processes of nature” (em. or.). This is followed by a citation from the last part of Descartes’
Discourse on Method; “we render ourselves the master and possessors of nature” (136/105).
[Descartes, Philosophical Writings, 1: 119. “Nous render comme maîtres et possesseurs de la
nature.”].
26
Heidegger is well aware that, as expressed by the Scholar in the conversation (14/9): “I just can’t
rid myself of the suspicion that you are interpreting the Greek word τέχνε in terms of your own
dogmatically asserted definition of the essence of modern ‘technology’.”
192 L. Ma and J. van Brakel

In FT and ÜTS, Heidegger elaborated on the connection between his earlier

statements concerning the essence of science and the later claims regarding the
essence of technology in terms of the essence of the Ge-stell. They are of one and
the same essence. What unites the theoretical (that is, science) and the technological
is the metaphysical projection of things in setting them up as usable objects.
In 1953 Heidegger repeats twice, that according to chronological reckoning,
modern technology is later;27 nevertheless, from the point of view of the essence
holding sway within it, it is earlier historically speaking.28 At the same time, modern
physical theory of nature prepares the way for the essence of modern technology in
that the challenging gathering-together into ordering revealing holds sway in mod-
ern physics, although it does not at once come expressly to appearance. Similarly,
man‘s ordering attitude and behavior have already displayed themselves in the rise
of modern physics as an exact science.29
Heidegger further explains, as pure theory, modern science‘s way of representing
already sets nature up (pursues and entraps nature) to exhibit itself as a coherence of
forces calculable in advance. It orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of
asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way.30 Physics sets
up (orders) nature as what is pre-calculable.
In 1962 (ÜTS), Heidegger remarks that, among scientists and technologists, one
now hears the view that science and technology are in a relation of “mutual
support.” For example, in nuclear physics, the technical instruments co-determine
which phenomena will be observed, thus co-determining the process of knowing.
However, he points out, the further question concerning their common origin is not
raised. Such a mutual relation is only possible provided science and technology are
co-ordinated [gleichgeordnet]. What is the thing in which S&T correspond to one
another? Both share the comportment of challenging posing [herausfordernde
Stellen] toward things. The essence of science and technology does not consist, as
one might think, in a means-to-an-end structure, but in the fact that a demand
[Anspruch] is made (a non-human power), which orders humans to challenge nature
forth (19/137).31

27
FT 303-4/21-2. Also BV 43.
28
Kockelmans (1985), 177 interprets these passages by saying “although science is first ‘in execu-
tion’, technicity was first in a perhaps still unconscious intention.”
29
Given the typical Heideggerian view that “That which is primally early shows itself only ulti-
mately to men” (FT 23/327).
30
That revealing concerns nature, above all, as the chief storehouse of the standing energy reserve.
“For physics, nature is the standing reserve [Bestand] of energy and matter” (BV 42).
31
“Der Mensch selbst ist gestellt, ist daraufhin angesprochen, dem genannten Anspruch zu entspre-
chen” (ÜTS 20/138). Cf. FT 21/302: “It remains true, nonetheless, that man in the technological
age is, in a particularly striking way, challenged forth into revealing.”
Heidegger and the Reversed Order of Science and Technology 193

4 Epoch and Epochs

In the secondary literature Heidegger’s strict separation between premodern and

modern technology has been disputed (see Sect. 6). It has also been argued that
presently we don’t live anymore in Heidegger’s Epoch of the Ge-stell, because since
his death there have been revolutionary changes both in science and technology. For
example, Ihde claims that “today’s technologies evidence a quite different flavor
from what was prominent during Heidegger’s lifetime” (5) and suggests that we
have entered a new Epoch of Being (of technoscience and quantum physics).
Therefore, he argues, Heidegger’s position regarding technology is out-dated. This
judgment does not seem to be fair to Heidegger. Certainly, since the 1970s, new
types of technologies appear one after another, of which it had not been possible for
Heidegger to have any knowledge. However, Ihde has neglected some of Heidegger’s
writings that testify to a broad vision concerning the future of technology. Heidegger
has stressed many times that the “modern age” is in no way at an end (WhD 57/54).
Given the “predetermined essence of science,” we have to reckon with “a gigantic
progress of science in the future” (Beitr 156/108; G 524/45).
In addition, several of Ihde’s examples of technologies, about which he claims
that Heidegger knew nothing, or which he failed to present in the right way, are not
correct. In particular this is the case with respect to quantum physics (see next sec-
tion) and what Heidegger calls “biophysics.” In the seminar at Le Thor in 1969,
Heidegger makes such a remark (Sem 358/55): “This means that the human being
can be produced according to a definite plan just like any other technological
object.”32 Ihde (2010, p. 111) notices this statement and suggests that it is at most
reflective of the Nazi legacy of eugenetics. However, this abjucation is poor-
grounded. Heidegger draws on contemporary statements from scientists. In 1955
Heidegger cites Stanley, the American chemist who was the Noble Laureate in
Chemistry in 1946, who made the following prediction: “The hour is near when life
will be placed in the hands of the chemist who will be able to synthesize, split and
change living substance at will” (G 525/44). Stanley, as Heidegger notes, made this
statement at a meeting taking place a few months before Heidegger wrote the rele-
vant text. A decade later, in one of the Zollikon seminars held in March 1966,
Heidegger refers to “present research on the technique of genetic mutation in
humans” (ZS 177/135), referring to a book published 2 years before.33 It is obvious
that until late in his lifetime, Heidegger always kept himself well-informed about
cutting-edge advances in science and technology.
Misunderstandings may arise because Heidegger sometimes employs the
word ‘epoch’ for quite different purposes. This has caused confusions, such that
some scholars assume that there might be different epochs of modern science

32
Cf. WM 257/197: “Sometimes it seems as if modern humanity is rushing headlong toward this
goal of producing itself technologically” (em. or.).
33
The reference is to “[Friedrich] Wagner, Die Wissenschaften und die gefährdete Welt.[Eine
Wissenschaftssoziologie der Atomphysik, München, 1964] pp. 225 ff., 462 ff.”
194 L. Ma and J. van Brakel

(on Heidegger’s terms). According to our reading, we need to draw a line between
the presumably “ontological” Epoch and the “ontic”epochs. Modernity is a unique
Epoch in the history of being, whereas there are a plurality of “epochs” within the
Epoch of Modernity. Occasionally Heidegger also uses such words as ‘era’, or ‘rev-
olution’ as alternative phrasing of epochs in the ontic sense. These refer to particular
periods or phases within modern science or technology that is supposed to have a
unilateral history. One has to guard against the tendency of ascribing ontological
weight to such epochs. The Epoch of modernity is a much more encompassing
epoch that embraces possible breaks between classical and quantum physics, pre-
industrial, industrial, and postindustrial technology, early modern science and insti-
tutionalised research enterprises, and so on.
For example, within the history of modern technology, Heidegger distinguishes
such developmental stages as: power machinery, electrical technology, and atomic
technology (FT 23/303). In regard to atomic technology, Heidegger states: “If the
taming of atomic energy is successful, and [I know] it will be successful, then
a totally new era of technical development will begin” (Ibid.). Such a statement
should not be understood as atomic energy signifying the beginning of another
Epoch of Being. Similarly, in an undated note, probably from the early 1950s, he
speaks of the “second industrial revolution,” which amounts to “entering decision-
making into the machine,” and which will constitute “the era of automatisation after
World War III.”34 Again this should not be taken as a new ontological phase in the
history of technology/technoscience.
With respect to developments in science, Heidegger offers the epithet of “a revo-
lution that belongs to the greatest in human thought” to Newton’s first law of motion
(FD 89/257). This “revolution” is one of the contributions to the beginning of the
Epoch of Modernity.35 Within this Epoch, he further identifies several “lower-
level” revolutions and changes. In the Le Thor Seminar of 1969, he remarks that
today, there are no objects as there were for eighteenth/nineteenth century scien-
tists: “the further that modern technology unfolds, the more does objectivity
[Gegenständlichkeit] transform in standing-reservedness [Beständlichkeit]” (Sem
367/61). In the 1973 seminar in Zähringen he refers to it in these words: “man has
gone from an epoch of objectivity to an epoch of orderability [Bestellbarkeit]”
(388/74, em. ad.). This transition parallels the transformation of science into
“research.” According to Heidegger, since the 1930s, science has been under threat
(Bedrohung). This threat stems not only from science proceeding according to a
certain pre-given method, but from science becoming “research,” that is, becoming
an externally financed institution and an enterprise, like the industries with whom it

34
“Das automatische Zeitalter nach dem III. Weltkrieg” (MWT 368); “Die zweite industrielle
Revolution. Die Eingabe des Entscheidens in die Maschine” (MWT 376).
35
Heidegger has provided detailed accounts of the work of Galileo and Newton (FD 77-95/255-
271). Dea (2009), 54 interprets these accounts in Being and Time terms: “Before Newton, the
fore-understanding the scientist brought to his understanding of nature included an interest in
individual entities and, hence, a hermeneutical opennes to Being; after Newton, the scientists’
hermeneutical horizon is restricted by the fore-understanding that individual entities are the indif-
ferent manifestations of universal laws.”
Heidegger and the Reversed Order of Science and Technology 195

collaborates (Bedr, ZWB).36 We suggest the genesis and strengthening of the

institutional character of academic research since the second half of the twentieth
century and today has corroborated Heidegger’s insight. But his distinction of an
“epoch of objectivity” and an “epoch of orderability” should not be understood as
two successive Epochs in the history of Being.

5 Quantum Physics

It has often been suggested that the transition of classical to modern physics is so
fundamental that it would herald a new Epoch of Being, but this is not Heidegger’s
view.37 Kockelmans has rightly stressed this point. With quantum physics, “nature
must still set itself in place in advance for the objectifying and securing processes
which science, as the theory of what is actually real, accomplishes” (Kockelmans
1985, p. 169). Quantum physics still aims at writing the “one single fundamental
equation from which all the properties of all elementary particles, and therewith the
behavior of all material things, follow.”38 The comportment toward nature embraced
by quantum physics remains to be the same with that embraced by classical physics.
This is so, even though Heidegger speaks of “epochs in modern physics” (W&B
54/172). In a passage in square brackets in W&B Heidegger adds (55/173):
The subject-object-relation thus reaches, for the first time, its pure “relational”—, i.e.,
ordering, character, in which both the subject and the object are sucked up [aufgezogen]
as standing-reserves. That does not mean: the subject-object-relation vanishes, but the
opposite: it now attains to its most extreme dominance [Herrschaft], which is predeter-
mined from out of Enframing [das Gestell].

Werner Heisenberg, whom Heidegger first met in 1935 in Todtnauberg, provided

him with first-hand information about quantum physics. According to Carson
(2010), in Heidegger’s lectures in the fall of 1935, quantum physics was given a
partial exemption from his apparently derogatory view of science. But from 1936
onward, Heidegger presented all forms of Wissenschaften, including quantum phys-
ics and the humanities, as an extension of the technological will. Carson further
documents that, in the years 1949–1953, Heidegger had been looking for a public
confrontation with Heisenberg, which was finally taking place at the week-long
lecture series of 1953 on Die Künste im technischen Zeitalter. Heisenberg presented

36
He asks, without implying that “an other beginning” is occurring: “What understanding of beings
and what concept of truth is it that underlies the transformation of science into research?” (ZWB
86/65).
37
According to Ihde (2010), 109, it is by the mid-fifties that Heidegger came to recognize that
“quantum physics totally resituates the early modern subject-object distinction.” This is incorrect,
as we will see.
38
Heidegger citing Heisenberg in W&B 54/172.
196 L. Ma and J. van Brakel

“Das Naturbild der modernen Physik.”39 Heidegger, delivered, “Die Frage nach der
Technik.”40
Already in 1937, soon after the Einstein-Bohr debate concerning the interpreta-
tion of quantum mechanics, Heidegger writes several pages concerning what he
calls “statistical physics” and the uncertainty relation (MWT 175–181). “Can we say
with N. Bohr, ‘that here [referring to the uncertainty relation] the separation between
observed object and observing subject starts to disappear’? No!” This statement is
followed by a couple of reasons why Bohr is wrong (and Einstein is right?). For
Heidegger, it is completely mistaken to base a new epistemology on the uncertainty
relation (179). According to Heidegger “cause” and “rule” are presupposed in every
experiment, including quantum physics.
Again he thought about the issue at length when preparing for the “meeting with
Heisenberg.” In a letter to Medard Boss (October 28, 1953), Heidegger writes: “I
am kept very busy by the lecture in Münich [“Die Frage nach der Technik”] and
with an interrelated correspondence with Heisenberg. At the hut I wrote a wide-
reaching sketch and got deep into the question of causality.”41 The result of
Heidegger’s ponderings and exchange of ideas found its way in the printed text as
follows (FT 24/304).42
If modern physics must resign itself ever increasingly to the fact that its realm of representa-
tion remains inscrutable and incapable of being visualized, [it is still being] challenged
forth by the rule of Enframing, which demands that nature be orderable as standing-reserve.
Hence physics, in all its retreating from the representation turned only toward objects that
has alone been standard till recently, will never be able to renounce this one thing: that
nature reports itself in some way or other that is identifiable through calculation and that it
remains orderable as a system of information.

In addition, there is the technological side of atomic physics: atom bombs,

nuclear power stations, which he mentions in several places. In Gelassenheit of
1955 there is a critical discussion of several pages on nuclear science, from which
we already cited: “If the taming of atomic energy is successful, and it will be suc-
cessful, then a totally new era of technical development will begin.”
In a marginal note to “Wissenschaft und Besinnung” Heidegger comes close to
acknowledging the need of a “new epistemology” when he remarks that “through”
Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation the human is explicitly included in the artificiality

39
Cf. Heisenberg (1955).
40
Some time before the meeting, Heidegger had distributed a draft of the text that was later to be
published with the title “Wissenschaft und Besinnung” (W&B).
41
ZS 246f/310. From the letter a month earlier (dated September 30), it is apparent that Heidegger
had been working on the preparation of his lecture and public discussion with Heisenberg for a
considerable period of time. It would seem that his notes and drafts in this summer have not (all?/
yet?) been published (cf. GA 76).
42
Cf. BV 43: “Although atomic physics is differently disposed [geartet]—only statistical instead of
determinate [eindeutig] calculability–, it is still the same physics.” W&B (54/172): “atomic phys-
ics admits only of the guaranteeing of an objective coherence that has a statistical character.”
Heidegger and the Reversed Order of Science and Technology 197

of the instruments, becoming a part of it.43 However, even in the case of quantum
physics and nuclear technology, science and technology are still governed by “the
Same” (that is, calculability, orderability, predictability). During one of the Zollikon
Seminars in 1966 (ZS 177/134-5) Heidegger repeats his view that predictability is
not invalidated by the indeterminacy principle.44 He mentions the atomic bomb and
the notion of upper and lower limits: without predictability, technical construction
would be impossible. There is no a-causal world view (as Heisenberg advocated).45
Since Heidegger pondered about these matters, numerous publications on quan-
tum mechanics have appeared, leading to a range of quite different interpreta-
tions.46 Nevertheless, the foundational questions remain to be the same as those
raised in the Bohr-Einstein debate in the 1930s: how to understand “measurement”
of parameters in the quantum mechanical formalism. This is what is called “the
measurement problem.” However, until now there is no agreement about where to
begin in order to have a provisional formulation of the nature of the problem.
Hence, the question whether quantum mechanics would require a “new epistemol-
ogy” is still open and Heidegger’s rather “instrumentalistic” view (what counts is
predictability) is still an option.

6 Premodern and Modern Technology

One important aspect of Heidegger’s reflection upon technology (and hence upon
the essence of science and technology) is a strict distinction between pre-modern
and modern technology. Relevant scholars such as Zimmerman (1990) have
embraced such a distinction. For Heidegger, pre-modern means of production is a
“natural bringing-forth” that corresponds to poiesis. The work of a craftsman is not
so much different from the work of an artist in that both attempt to let things come
into unconcealment and reveal themselves, which is a matter of ἀλήθεια. With mod-
ern means of production, in contrast, things are challenged, controlled to reveal
themselves as standing-reserves; nature is a resource to be exploited.
In a recent article, Riis (2011) disputes Heidegger’s view. According to him,
there simply does not exist an unbridgeable gap between pre-modern technology

43
“Among all the objects he can only meet himself—but what is ‘himself’ in this case: the instru-
mentation!” GA 7, 57.
44
Comments on Heisenberg etc. were occasioned after the participants of the seminar had objected
to Heidegger using classical physics as a “general” characterization of science.
45
Heidegger acknowledges that quantum physics has changed the notion of causality “once again ….
It seems as though causality is shrinking into a reporting, ‘a reporting challenged forth’ of standing-
reserves that must be guaranteed either simultaneously or in sequence” (FT 24/304).
46
Including an empirically equivalent alternative to “standard” quantum mechanics, viz. Bohm
mechanics, which presupposes a deterministic world and, by present standards, leads to the same
predictions as “standard” quantum mechanics.
198 L. Ma and J. van Brakel

and modern technology.47 For sure, Heidegger should be aware that the Greeks
employed slaves to build temples and to work in silver mines, and the mode of con-
trolling embodied in these forms of producing does not have essential qualitative
difference from that embodied in modern technology.48 Hence Riis concludes that,
as Dasein, humans are essentially modern.49
We agree with Riis that a sharp distinction between pre-modern and modern
technology is far from self-evident.50 It is certainly not obvious that ancient ways of
production are completely exempted from forms of extracting resources such as
silver, as if resources are simply out there in nature ready for use. Similar ways of
subjecting nature to human force and control already exist in ancient times. Consider
the following passage from Heidegger’s 1962 lecture (ÜTS 18/137), where we
substitute the word ‘silver’ for the word ‘energy’:
The [silver] that is locked in nature is unlocked [when silver ore is mined], what is disclosed
is transformed [that is, with chemical means silver is extracted from the silver salts in the
ore], what is transformed is reinforced [i.e. concentrated, purified, refined], what is rein-
forced is stored, what is stored is distributed [to the silver smiths]. These ways, according
to which nature is secured, are controlled [e.g. (dying) slaves in the silvermines]. This
controlling, in its turn, must secure itself further.

The main idea of this passage remains unchanged with the substitution of the
word ‘silver’ for ‘energy.’ There is no silver as such in nature, but only silver ore.
Controlling nature as well as human beings exists in all periods of time and in all
regions of the globe.51 One can as well be referred to the construction of pyra-
mids and other “gigantic” architecture around the world, and the phenomenon of
deforestation that persistently occurs throughout the history of humanity and
across the globe.
For sure, certain ancient tools of production, such as a windmill to which
Heidegger refers, appear to be far less challenging [herausforderend] than other
tools, such as the power station “in” the Rhine to which Heidegger also refers.
However, we would argue that the contrast between controlling and non-controlling
modes of obtaining resources or of making products does not exactly correspond to
a certain timeline of pre-modern age and modern age. This contrast also exists in

47
Heidegger seems to be pointing to a similar direction when he writes (Beitr 132/92): “It is very
difficult to grasp historically the emergence of what is machinationally ownmost to beings, because
basically it has been effective in operation since the first beginning of Western thinking.”
48
Other “falsifying” examples (discussed by Ihde) could be clocks determining daily life in Europe
long before the rise of modern science or technology. Also: technology used in navigation on the
Atlantic for the past millennium (to be contrasted with “lifeform” navigation on the Pacific—
which in some sense was equally successful). Ihde (2010), 68: “through the use of technologies,
experience had already become prepared for the scientific experience of the world.”
49
“The rule of das Gestell has challenged humans as long as they have existed” Riis (2010), 116.
50
In a somewhat different context Claude Lefort has argued that there is a definite connection
between political discourse and modernity and that therefore the societies of ancient Rome and
Athens are modern societies.
51
What might be exceptions? Inuit, Aboriginals, Khoisan, Polynesians?
Heidegger and the Reversed Order of Science and Technology 199

ancient times. The following parable from the Zhuangzi, a famous Chinese Daoist
scripture, very well illustrates this point.
Zigong, a disciple of Kongzi (that is, Confucius), came across an old gardener,
who was carrying water to the fields. He used up a great deal of energy but pro-
duced very little result. Zigong asked the gardener whether he would like to use a
well sweep.52 The gardener flushed at his words with anger and said (Watson
1968, p. 134):
I have heard my teacher say, where there are machines, there are bound to be machine wor-
ries; where there are machine worries, there are bound to be machine hearts. With a machine
heart in your breast, you have spoiled what was pure and simple; and without the pure and
simple, the life of the spirit knows no rest. Where the life of the spirit knows no rest, the dao
will cease to buoy you up. It’s not that I don’t know about your machine—I would be
ashamed to use it!

A possible Confucian retort to the gardener might be that, all the same, the old
gardener has to use a sort of gadget such as a bucket in order to get water, and most
probably he was actually using one. However, a Daoist would reply that the use of
the latter forms of tool conform to the dao of nature insofar as it does not exert itself
upon water/nature but instead tries to integrate itself with nature in a calm and
peaceful way; whereas the use of a well sweep to get water violates the dao of
nature in exerting unnecessary force and attempting to subject water under its con-
trol. This parable from over 2,000 years ago vividly illustrates the contrast between
controlling and non-controlling modes of obtaining resources from nature.
Now if the distinction between premodern (“natural”) and modern (“calcula-
tive”) technology is undermined, would this bear any influence upon Heidegger’s
claim that modern science and modern technology are the Same (ÜTS 18/137)?

7 A Different Slogan: Science and Technology

Are the “Same”

Some scholars have presented Heidegger’s strict distinction between pre-modern

and modern technology as the ground on which his idea of a unique “Epoch of
Modernity” is established. However, Heidegger’s idea of a unique “Epoch of
Modernity” is set in a much broader vision of the history of Being, rather than
grounded on a more or less simplistic division between pre-modern and modern
technology. In this section we propose a slight revision of Heidegger’s story starting
with the “ontic” observation that the current globalised world (Heidegger would say
“planetarized”) is unique and is to be fundamentally distinguished from earlier
Epochs of Being, leaving open the possibility that there is more than one beginning
of the history of Being.53

52
“It’s a contraption made by shaping a piece of wood. The back end is heavy and the front end
light and it raises the water as though it were pouring it out, so fast that it seems to boil right over!”
53
See on the latter issue Ma (2008), 92–99.
200 L. Ma and J. van Brakel

The most essential feature of the globalised world lies in the spread and
domination of science and technology.54 Heidegger calls the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth century the “getting ready” of modernity, the nineteenth as getting breath,
and the twentieth as the more obvious beginning of an Epoch of being that is there
to stay for a long time (MWT 80). With the advantage of hindsight we can see that
the essence of science and technology which comes to full fruition in the twentieth
century (Ge-stell, “research enterprise”) was already “getting ready” in the time of
Galileo, Newton, and Descartes; while from the perspective (of Epochs) of the
history of being, Modernity has already been underway since the time of Plato:
“modern [science and] technology is completed metaphysics.”
What is the Same in which the essence of science and technology is retained and
united? That is, the application of a particular method of representation and precal-
culability of nature, and the challenging/controlling revealing of nature. The crucial
word is “re-presenting.”55 Heidegger discussed the notion of “representing” in
numerous places. Perhaps the following passage in ZWB (108/82) gives a condensed
but rather complete characterization:
To represent [Vorstellen] means here: of oneself, to set something before one and to make
what has been set in place [das Gestellte] secure as thus set in place. This placing-in-
securedness must be a calculating, since only calculation guarantees being certain, in
advance and always, of that which is to be presented. … The being is no longer that which
presences. Rather it is that which, in representation, is first set over and against [entgegen
Gestellte], with the character of an object [Gegen-ständige]. Representation, setting-before,
is a making everything stand over and against as object [Ver-gegen-ständlichung] which
masters and proceeds against. In this way, representation drives everything into the unity of
the thus-objectified.

This notion of representation “identifies” the Epoch of Modernity. Ontically it is

first present in the rise of modern science as Heidegger’s detailed discussions of the
work of Galileo, Newton and Descartes show. Its consequences only became fully
apparent in the rise of das Ge-stell, science as “research” and “planetarization.”
In the planetary imperialism of technologically organized man, the subjectivism of man
attains its acme, from which point it will descend to the level of organized uniformity and
there firmly establish itself. This uniformity becomes the surest instrument of total, i.e.,
technological, rule over the earth (ZWB 11/84).

Of the consequences of this unique form of re-presentation, which is shared by

modern science and technology, perhaps the three most important ones can be high-
lighted as follows (starting with a collation of passages already cited in Sect. 3):

54
Heidegger mentions five essential features of modernity, including science and machine technol-
ogy (ZWB 75f/57f). According to him the fundamental event of modernity is the conquest of the
world as picture (94/71).
55
It has been said that the burden of science and technology lies not in their calculative style but
rather in their insistent and aggressive spirit. Alderman (1978), 43. However, we agree with
Rojcewicz (2006), 114 that “science attacks nature with experiments is not what is impositional,
but the prime imposition is the representation of nature.”
Heidegger and the Reversed Order of Science and Technology 201

First, as to nature: natural processes are re-presented [vor-gestellt]. “Nature is what

is pro-duced [Hergestellt]… [thus] nature is as that which stands over against the
human. … [this] producing is the basic trait of the objectification of nature.
Nature is set up by the human, halted by him, so that it may be accountable to
him and to his plans for it” (FG 12/7).
Second, the metaphysical projection of the thingness of the things which opens up
a domain in which only things of a certain kind can henceforth show them-
selves; things are set on their proper foundation in advance and are set up as
usable objects.
Third, the control and domination of the processes of nature; man’s ordering attitude
and behavior, his comportment of challenging posing (herausfordernde Stellen)
toward things, the challenging gathering-together into ordering revealing, adding
later that it is man himself who is demanded to do this. This consequence includes
the “rule of das Gestell,” which demands that nature be orderable as
standing-reserve.
Hence, the “originary” bringing forth, in the context of the forgottenness of
being, develops into a pro-ducing and re-presenting of a standing-reserve to be
ordered and challenged. Instead of “Science is applied technology,” this line of
thinking may suggest that the answer to the question concerning the relation of
science and technology should be: “The essence of science and technology is
the Same.”
As a matter of fact, on a few occasions, Heidegger explicitly speaks of the Same
[das Selbe] of science and technology. We have already seen that, in the Feldweg
Gespräche of 1944/45, he suggests: “The technological and the theoretical are the
selfsame [das Selbe]” (11/6). In 1959, Heidegger begins “Aufzeichnungen aus der
Werkstatt” by saying that science is ‘identical’ [identisch] with the ruling [walten]
of modern technology.56 And finally, in his technology lecture of 1962: “Now, what
is that thing in which natural science and technology agree and thus is the Same? …
A reciprocal relation [Wechselverhältniss] between natural science and technology
can only subsist if both are co-ordinated [gleichgeordnet] ....” (ÜTS 16/136).

8 Questioning Is the Piety of Thought

Contrary to the common view that modern technology derives from modern science,
Heidegger presents a reverse picture in which science originated in the essence of
technology, wherein Being speaks. It is in this sense that Heidegger talks about the
Same of science and technology. As we have seen, on many occasions, it seems that
Heidegger has already provided a more or less explicit answer to the question

56
“Manche scheinen heute mit der Not zu ringen, für das Walten der modernen Technik und der mit
ihr identischen Wissenschaft eine Vorstellung von der Geschichte zu finden, in die sich der durch
jenes Walten bestimmte Weltzustand einordnen” GA 13, 151.
202 L. Ma and J. van Brakel

regarding the relationship of modern natural science to modern technology.

However, he keeps on raising this question again and again, to such an extent that
he singles it out for special attention in his letter of 1976. Why? Probably, it is
because the very act of questioning itself is more important than the answer, whereas
“we moderns” (WhD 140/135)57 can at best prepare an answer. As is reported in the
protocol of the Zähringen seminar of September 7, 1973, read and approved by
Heidegger (Sem 390/75):
The entry into this domain [i.e. “the ultimate decisions that this reality compels us to take
up”] is not produced by the thought undertaken by Heidegger. To believe thinking capable
of changing the place of man would still conceive of it on the model of production.
Therefore? Therefore, let us say cautiously that thinking begins to prepare the conditions of
such an entry.

In 1940 when first answering the question (see citations in Sect. 2), he expressed
the answer in a questioning way, as if merely suggesting the possibility.58
Technology. Is it merely application of natural science to …—to what then?—Or is modern
natural science the consequence of “technology”? But the latter (powered machines technol-
ogy) is chronologically later than modern natural science.—That does not exclude that the
metaphysical essence of this technology, is as a matter of fact [sachlich] essentially earlier.

Some reasons for Heidegger’s vacillation are intimated in “The Teacher Meets
the Tower Warden” from the Country Path Conversations:
Tower Warden: … technology possesses this power to alter actuality only because scientific
representations, whose actualization technology is said to achieve, already arise out of the
peculiar essence of technology.
Teacher: I find it difficult to follow your thoughts every time you present the relation of
science and technology in this manner.
TW: This is not only the case for you. It will still take a long time before the human
enters into an engagement with the insight that modern science stems from the essence of
modern technology.
T: Why do you place such weight on this insight?
TW: Because only it allows the experiences through which the human could achieve a
befitting relation to the technological world.
T: If this is the case — which, to be frank, I do not entirely perceive — then there is no
time to lose in the project of awakening the essential insight.
TW: Certainly not — but it is also the case that we cannot force this insight through
mere instruction and decree. (FG 179/116)

The essential origin of modern science and the essence of modern technology
need be traced out through questioning and this can never be a facile matter. This is
because, first of all: “A fog still surrounds the essence of modern science [and this
fog arises from the fact] that we are still not thinking” (WhD 16/14). A similar
remark concerning the essence of technology discloses Heidegger’s profound

57
We are citing the translator of Was heißt Denken? Heidegger himself wrote: “man heute.”
58
MWT 144: “‘Technik’ Ist sie nur die Anwendung der Naturwissenschaften auf …—worauf denn?
Oder ist die neuzeitlichte Naturwissenschaft die Folge der ‘Technik’? Aber diese (Kraftmas-
chinentechnik) zeitlich später als neuzeitliche Naturwissenschaft. Das schließt nicht aus, daß das
metaphysische Wesen dieser Technik das sachlich wesensmäßig frühere.”
Heidegger and the Reversed Order of Science and Technology 203

evasion: “Meanwhile the essence of modern technology is even darker than the
essence of science—so dark that probably we have not even once succeeded to
question modern technology properly [sachgerecht].”59 As late as 1969, in a letter to
Roger Meunier (Sem 416/88),60 Heidegger claims that “a sufficiently grounded
insight into the relation of the two [that is, the interlocking of modern technology
and modern science] has not yet been gained.” And presumably his letter of 1976
expresses the same idea.
Only through the insight that modern science stems from the essence of modern
technology could humans possibly obtain a befitting relation to the technological
world. However, there could be no rush in asserting this point.

References

Martin Heidegger

1935. Gesamtausgabe 40: Einführung in der Metaphysik. 1983. An introduction to metaphysics.

Trans. Gregory Fried, and Richard Polt. New Haven (Connecticut): Yale University Press
(2000). IM.
1935/1936. Die Frage nach dem Ding, 66–108. Translated as “Modern science, metaphysics, and
mathematics.” In: Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell 247–282. FD.
1936/1938. Gesamtausgabe 65: Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). Contributions to
Philosophy (From Enowning). Trans. Parvis Emad, and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press (1999). Beitr.
1936/1946. Überwindung der Metaphysik. In VA [2000], 67–98. Overcoming metaphysics. In The
Heidegger controversy, ed. Richard Wolin. 67–90. Cambridge MA: MIT Press (1993). ÜM.
1937/1938. Die Bedrohung der Wissenschaft. In Zur philosophischen Aktualität Heideggers, ed.
Dieter Papenfuss, and Otto Pöggeler. Band 1. Philosophie und Politik. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann (1991). Bedr.
1938. Die Zeit des Weltbildes. In HW [1969] 75-114/57-85. ZWB.
1942/1943. Gesamtausgabe 54: Parmenides. Parmenides. Trans. Andre Schuwer, and Richard
Rojcewicz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1992). GA 54.
1944/1945. Gesamtausgabe 77: Feldweg Gespräche (1982). Country Path Conversations. Trans.
B. W. Davis. Indiana University Press (2010). FG
1949. Einblick in das was ist. Bremer Vorträge. In GA 79: 3–78. BV
1951/1952. Was heisst Denken? Gesamtausgabe 8 (2002). What is Called Thinking? Trans. Fred
D. Wieck, and John Glenn Gray. New York: Harper & Row (1968). WhD.
1952. Moira (Parmenides, Fragment VIII: 34–41). In VA [2000], 235–262. Moira (Parmenides,
VIII, 34–41). In Early Greek Thinking. Trans. David F. Farrell, and Frank A. Capuzzi, 79–101.
New York: Harper & Row (1975). M.
1953. Die Frage nach der Technik. In VA, 5–36. “The question concerning technology.” In: Basic
Writings. Trans. William Lovitt, 311–341. London: Routledge (1993). FT.

59
W&B, marginal note only in GA 7, 62: “Das Wesen der modernen Technik ist indessen noch
dunkler als dasjenige der Wissenschaft—so dunkel, daß wir vermutlich noch nicht einmal dahin
gelangt sind, nach der modernen Technik sachgerecht zu fragen.”
60
Meunier is the translator of Heidegger’s inaugural lecture “Was ist Metaphysik?” into French.
204 L. Ma and J. van Brakel

1953. Wissenschaft und Besinnung. In VA [2000], 37–66. Science and reflection. In The Question
Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William Lovitt 155–182. New York: Harper
& Row (1977). W&B.
1955. Gelassenheit. In GA 16 [2006]: 517–529. Memorial address. In Discourse on Thinking.
Trans. John M. Anderson, and E. Hans Freund, 43–57. New York: Harper & Row (1966). G.
1955. Hebel—der Hausfreund. In GA 13 [2002]: 133–150. In English in Contemporary German
philosophy, Vol. 3, 89–101. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press (1983).
1955/1957. Identität und Differenz. Identity and Difference. Bilingual edition. Trans. Joan
Stambaugh. New York: Harper & Row (1969). ID.
1957/1958. Das Wesen der Sprache. In Unterwegs zur Sprache, 157–216. Stuttgart: Günther Neske
(1959). “The nature of language” In On the Way to Language. Trans. Peter D. Hertz, 57–110.
San Francisco: Harper and Row (1971). WS.
1962. Überlieferte Sprache und Technische Sprache, St. Gallen: Erker (1989). Traditional language
and technological language. Trans. Wanda Torres Gregory. Journal of Philosophical Research
23 (1998): 129–145. ÜTS.
1963. Brief an Takehiko Kojima. In GA 11 [2006]: 155–161.
1964. Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denkens. Zur Sache des Denkens, GA 14
[1951/52]: 67–90. “The end of philosophy and the task of thinking.” In On time and being,
55–73. Chicago University Press. EP.
1969. Gesamtausgabe 5: Holzwege. Off the Beaten Track. Edited and Trans. Julian Young, and
Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2002). HW.
1976. Neuzeitliche Naturwissenschaft und moderne Technik. In GA 16 [2006]: 747–748. “Modern
natural science and technology.” Research in Phenomenology 7 (1977): 1–4.
1993. Basic writings, ed. D. F. Krell. London: Routledge.
2000. Gesamtausgabe 7: Vorträge und Aufsätze. VA.
2002. Gesamtausgabe 13: Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens 1910–1976. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann. GA 13.
2004. Gesamtausgabe 9: Wegmarken. Pathmarks. Trans. William McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press (1998). WM.
2005. Gesamtausgabe 79: Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. GA
79.
2005. Gesamtausgabe 15: Seminare in Le Thor. Four Seminars. Le Thor 1966, 1968, 1969,
Zähringen 1973. Trans. Andrew Mitchell, and François Raffoul. Bloomington & Indianapolis:
Indiana University Press (2003). Sem.
2006. Gesamtausgabe 11: Identität und Differenz. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. GA 11.
2006. Gesamtausgabe 16: Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges 1910–1976. Frankfurt
am Main: Klostermann. GA 16.
2006. Gesamtausgabe 89: Zollikoner Seminare, Protokolle—Gespräche—Briefe. Herausgegeben
von Medard Boss. Zollikon Seminars. Protocolls—Conversations—Letters. Trans. Franz Mayr,
and Richard Askay. Evanston: Northwestern University Press (2001). ZS.
2007. Gesamtausgabe 81: Gedachtes. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. GA 81.

Others

Alderman, Harold. 1978. Heidegger’s critique of science and technology. In Heidegger and
modern philosophy, ed. Michael Murray. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Carson, Cathryn. 2010. Science as instrumental reason: Heidegger, Habermas, Heisenberg.
Continental Philosophical Review 42: 483–509.
Dea, Shannon. 2009. Heidegger and Galileo’s slippery slope. Dialogue 48: 59–76.
Feenberg, Andrew. 1999. Questioning technology. London: Routledge.
Heidegger and the Reversed Order of Science and Technology 205

Guzzoni, Ute. 2012. Gelassenheit: Beyond technoscientific thinking. In Heidegger on science, ed.
Trish Glazebrook, 193–204. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Heisenberg, Werner. 1955. Das Naturbild der heutigen Physik. Hamburg: Rowohlt.
Ihde, Don. 2010. Heidegger‘s technologies. Postphenomenological perspectives. New York:
Fordham University Press.
Kochan, Jeff. 2010. Latour’s Heidegger. Social Studies of Science 40: 579–598.
Kockelmans, Joseph J. 1985. Heidegger and science. Washington, DC: Center for Advanced
Research in Phenomenology & University Press of America.
Ma, Lin. 2008. Heidegger on East–west dialogue: Anticipating the event. New York: Routledge.
Ma, Lin, and Jaap van Brakel. 2014. Out of the Gestell? The role of the East in Heidegger’s das
andere Denken. Philosophy East & West 64. Forthcoming.
Riis, Søren. 2011. Towards the origin of modern technology: Reconfiguring Martin Heidegger’s
thinking. Continental Philosophical Review 44: 103–117.
Rojcewicz, Richard. 2006. The Gods and technology. A reading of Heidegger. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
Thomson, Ian. 2000. What’s wrong with being a technological essentialist? A response to Feenberg.
Inquiry 43: 429–444.
Watson, Burton. 1968. The complete works of Chuang Tzu. New York: Columbia University Press.
Zimmerman, Michael E. 1990. Heidegger’s confrontation with modernity. Technology, politics,
art. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Logos and the Essence of Technology

Holger Schmid

Abstract The present study takes up Martin Heidegger’s claim that today’s
technoscientific reality cannot be properly understood unless seen as the issue of a
2,300 year “incubation.” Against long-lived clichés of romanticizing archaism—
the “nostalgia for Greece” for example—this claim here appears in light of a
consistently Pauline-Johannine futurism.
Accordingly, modern technology, that is “metaphysics” itself, is to be envisioned
from a vantage point where, above all, world and language are known to arise from
one and the same constitution, as implied in the key terms of logos and poiesis.
Hence there must once again be talk of “the Greeks”: respecting Heidegger’s Sache
as well as meditating upon his methods.

As technology today comes to be ever more identical with reality in general, we face
a condition of “reality” which is patently indebted to the world-constitutive
function of scientific knowledge (with its emphasis on the species of natural—or
“physical”—science, to the extent that this mode of scientific thought has consequently
all but absorbed its former antagonist, the “moral,” i.e., the human sciences). The
self-dissolution or melting into one, as it were, of these traditional antitheses seems
inescapably to mark the ultimate peak of modernity. What used to appears to be
nature turns out now to be a social construction of simulacra—or technologically
generated “fictions.” Nature, we are assured, does not exist. All of this, we believe,
could not have been foreseen during the first half of the twentieth century, when,
during and subsequent to World War I, Heidegger and many others encountered
technology as a “planetary” problem. It is this coincidence of nature and technology
that surely constitutes the most revolutionary aspect of the world-change we are
currently undergoing. And yet, we are at the same time reminded of a passage in Plato,

H. Schmid (*)
Université de Lille 3, 24, rue de Thionville, F-59000 Lille, France
e-mail: holger.schmid@univ-lille3.fr

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 207

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_12,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
208 H. Schmid

one which is precisely adduced by Heidegger in the course of his own enquiring
after technology: “Everything that is responsible [aitia] for creating something out
of nothing is a kind of poetry.” (Symp. 205b)1 Faced with such a coincidence
between physis and poiesis, (which Heidegger will praise as “Greek”), we might
well surmise that our most recent technological revolutions are but the perfection of
Platonist metaphysics: nature finally recognized as illusion, as simulacrum. To that
extent, Heidegger’s question as a task of thinking the nexus between science qua
“modern natural science” (reason-giving: logos) and technology does not involve us
in the old cliché of Romanticism: of immediacy lost and regained. Much rather
could one claim, perhaps with a touch of exaggeration, that Heidegger remains ever
indifferent to the past as such, a Pauline futurist or eschatologist throughout—a
disposition that seems in paradoxical contrast to his insistent recourse to the
Ancients, to “the Greeks.” To explore this apparent paradox with respect to the
“essence” of technology is the goal of what follows.

1 Modes of Incubation

It is surely not difficult to concede that in the last 250 years of Western history (i.e.,
since the First Industrial Revolution) there has been a crucial link between modern
science and technology: since the beginning of the world of machines, that is, the
beginning of “modern technology.”2 But Heidegger’s more specific point is that the
principle of sufficient reason, as embodied in Leibniz’ thought, is to be recognized
as that which transpires today (having only today become visible in its unfolding),
constituting as it were the metaphysical ground of our still (and especially) “meta-
physically” informed present. Heidegger’s anti-historicist question thus intends to
be an anamnesis of the present and its aetiology. It is precisely in the reason-giving
principle that Leibniz refers us back to Plato’s Socrates and to his paradigm of the
only life worth living: one that is perpetually examined and controlled by logon
didonai (Apol. 38A). Thus the relevant time lag would actually intensify—and it
will increase further. And yet the whole idea of a chronological sequence might
seem misconceived, for the very point of Heidegger’s anamnesis is that technology
is not at all an independent entity to be set over against metaphysics or theory.
Technology, such is the thesis, is to be found qua “practice” precisely at the core,
and as the core, of metaphysics itself. Hence, part of Heidegger’s anamnesis will be
to ascribe to the principle of sufficient reason-giving what he calls an “incubation
period” of no less than 2,300 years.3 What breaks out like a disease (or like the
brooding of an egg) has thus been prepared over the course of a very long era.
“Older” than technology, in any event, is the “essence” of technics, which holds
sway not only in modern science, but in European science as such. Thus we may

1
See Heidegger (1977a), 10.
2
See, e.g., Kockelmans (1985), 173.
3
Heidegger (1996), first section.
Logos and the Essence of Technology 209

say that this essence as it reigns today—to the extent precisely that it is itself
nothing technological—is what began to rise 2,300 years ago: that is, in Heidegger’s
sense, metaphysics.
Is the principle of reason then to be qualified as a disease? Once again, we are
reminded of Socrates who famously professes, a moment before his death, to owe a
rooster to the healing god Asclepius. Is then Socrates’ ever-examined life of logon
didonai that very disease? What has this to do with Socrates’ kind of open-ended
questioning that might well be called the piety of his thought? Is logon didonai a
condition, a factor, or the heart of the disease? Is the history of thinking or meta-
physics the history of nihilism? In such anamnesis, would there not be, once again,
a normative implication of nostalgia for a painless, pre-nihilistic state of “health”?
But we should in any case be careful with our metaphors—and with the Pavlovian
reflexes they are liable to provoke. A few things seem initially plausible—even
before we begin to reflect on those 2,300 years:
1. What does it profit a physician nostalgically to wish away a “disease” that
awaits diagnosis? 2. In Heidegger’s incubation time the Pre-Socratics are conspicu-
ously included: 2,300 years counted backwards from Leibniz’ 1700 AD necessarily
lead to 600 B.C.; hence not even the Seven Sages would be able to escape the
verdict. 3. The notion of “disease” itself is historically conditioned, depending upon
how an age or culture defines health. To Heidegger’s mind, this is perfectly clear,
bringing him closer to Ludwik Fleck than to Sigmund Freud: perhaps not a useless
remark here, as mention will presently be made of King Oedipus. On the other hand,
it is Husserl who envisages the genealogy of modernity as pathogenesis, culminating,
as we know, in a “crisis” not of science alone but of modern life (or “European
humanity”) in general.4 What distinguishes Heidegger, then, is his mode of recourse
to antiquity. The Greek questioning experience and the essence of technology—
how then are they to be conceived to hang together? And how are we to understand
the “plague,” the disease that haunts Thebes at the beginning of Sophocles’ most
famous tragedy?
Heidegger’s questioning is guided by an observation which he shares, incidentally,
with a number of other thinkers on metaphysics. The concept of philosophy—
traditionally metaphysics—is itself preconditioned, at least since Plato and
Aristotle, by an idea of “knowing” (or scientia) which is in turn shaped by a model
of production, as typically embodied in Socrates’ frequent references to artisans
while inquiring after techne: thus production as “manufacture” (Handwerk is
Heidegger’s German term) and further, in Roman and Christian metamorphosis, as
“creation” (with reference here to a creator).5 The Greek term for this is poiesis.
Its correlate is techne as the knowledge which is liable to become synonymous
with all episteme in Plato: cognition or knowing in general, i.e., the noetic

4
On this, see Müller (1976), 22f.,with further references. The concept of “lifeworld,” in its
therapeutic intention emphasized there, is shown in its provenance from Heidegger’s early lecture
courses by Schmitz (1996), 19f.
5
Cf., e.g., Heidegger (1977b), 48.
210 H. Schmid

relationship to entities as such.6 But as “knowing,” it is the very sphere constituted

by traditional rationality, “reason” stemming from the Latin ratio or, in Greek,
logos. In its sphere, then, the traditional plurality of those knowing modes (the
technai) comes to be subsumed under the one heading of techne. It further ensues,
according to Heidegger, that above all it is in what seems to be its very opposite,
namely contemplation or theoria, that the model of knowing as fabrication (poiesis)
achieves its sovereignty.
What thus emerges is the question specific to the later Heidegger, intertwined
with the problems of die Kehre, the “turning” in the 1930s, with reference to poetry,
to the critical battle around and against Nietzsche7 (very much including Jüngerian
recrudescences, the Will to Power having transformed itself, through the Gestalt of
the worker, into the Will to Will). And arising in the midst of all this is the idea of
“planetary technology” where Heidegger reinforces and/or abandons the philosoph-
ical project of restituting or restoring the sciences—that is, the university—to a lost
or obscured “essential ground,” and thereby first completing metaphysics. As this is
also the context of Heidegger’s political disaster, it is clear that there is room for a
number of serious questions, which would center on the issue of Heidegger’s insight
concerning National Socialism as opponent or embodiment of planetary technol-
ogy, before and after 1938. This would be the insight, philosophically speaking,
regarding “metaphysics” which represents itself as the problem, not the solution.
And that is how technology comes to appear as the basic trait or structure of meta-
physics itself. It is therefore a strikingly contemporary interest that inspires
Heidegger to turn to a renewed anamnesis “of the Greeks” in order to lay bare the
core of technology.
This of course involves the further issue of the form and fashion of our own
Heidegger exegesis. It is clear that were we pledged, consciously or not, to a research
model of the philosophy of technology (qua assembling expert knowledge and
information data concerning technology), a Heidegger would have little to teach us:
and least of all by distinguishing technology from its “essence.” Not only has he no
ethics, even worse, he has no logic—and no physics either. Thus, in particular, our
perspective would not be disturbed by self-critical afflictions and suspicions, sug-
gesting, e.g., that in so thinking we might simply re-iterate what Heidegger, it is to
be hoped with an eye to his own Machtrausch, calls “busy-ness” [Betrieb]. In that
case, we would not reflect upon but merely exemplify the expert’s hysteron proteron
of confusing the problem with the solution, just as it happened to the problem-
solving hero Oedipus, who had to mistake the Theban plague as an outside “thing”
or research object to be investigated. Yet what remains most interesting therein may
be the fact that Heidegger, while still endeavoring to teach “metaphysics” in 1935,
describes this very Oedipus, crushed between the assault of appearance and the
advent of truth in his furious search for identity, as the exemplary “Greek” Dasein:
“we must see him as the embodiment of Greek being-there, who most radically
and wildly asserts its fundamental passion, the passion for disclosure of being, i.e.

6
See, for example, Heidegger (1984), 179.
7
On this see Babich (1993), 239–260.
Logos and the Essence of Technology 211

the struggle for Being itself.”8 Here indeed the connection between the “Greek” and
the catastrophic procedure of Oedipus’ expert questioning techne seems immedi-
ately to point to the non-apparent “challenge” which Heidegger will attempt to think
as the essence of technology.

2 Poiesis and the Un-poetic

The crucial aspect of the Heideggerian inquiry will turn out to be that the state of the
world and the state of language are one and the same; and this is precisely what is
expressed by the problem of logos. In principle, therefore, the question as to the
essence of technology becomes ever more identical with the problem of an origi-
nary creation or production, as a constitutively “Greek” poiesis in contrast with, and
obstructed by, the traditional metaphysical model of production (the same constel-
lation likewise explains Heidegger’s ongoing preoccupation with the poets, further
extending well into the 1980s in the shape of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s belated self-
critical musings on poetry). The essence of technology according to Heidegger thus
expresses a lack of, or a retreat from, or a refusal of a world. In that sense, if the task
of thinking be to conceive this refusal “as such” (in terms of the knowing, techne, as
essentially related to poiesis), the state of the world then appears by definition as
“unpoetic.” Now the term Heidegger introduces for this world-state is, of course, the
notoriously provocative term: Ge-stell, usually rendered as “enframing” or else as
“setting-upon” with connotations of trapping or entrapping. It may accordingly be
assumed that as the name for technology’s essence, Ge-stell must also be the formula
for the question of how to distinguish technology from this essence, to the extent
that, as a definition of this essence, it is contrasted with poiesis in the originary or
Greek sense. In Heideggerian terms, then, there is implied a reciprocity or coinci-
dence of an experience of language and of Being, proximally corresponding to the
Greek versus the modern era (as explanans vs. explanandum). Less obvious and in
the background, as it were, there is also in Stellen a crucial reference to the ancient
Greek thesis, the counterpart of physis, and thus to the nature-culture dyad, famous
since the Sophists and Aristotle, and recalling, via the “thetic” activity of techne in
bringing things to stand (i.e., to be), the distinction between the “positive” and the
“natural” in the Western tradition.9 To capture this proximity, which will presently
be recognized to imply the Ge-stell as the self-desisting Fourfold, it would
seem tempting to render Ge-stell by the term “Sistence.”10 More remarkably,
however, Ge-stell would seem to possess a polemic edge against Ernst Jünger’s

8
Heidegger (1959), 107.
9
See here Heidegger (1994), 62ff.
10
Stellen corresponds to the verb “to sist,” taken in its old, broad sense: “to cause to stand, to order
one before a court, to place or posit, etc.” OED. One may add that versions such as ‘positionality’
are utterly misleading, all the more so because the term pertains to Helmuth Plessner’s anthropo-
logical definition of human specificity as eccentric positionality.
212 H. Schmid

Gestalt of the worker,11 signalizing the same epochal signature or state of

affairs—namely, the “total mobilization” or Will to Will in a contrasting light.12
This should serve as a rough characterization of Heidegger’s point of departure
for his inquiry concerning technology. Here, one might still have the impression that
much of this talk about “world” and world-refusal looks frighteningly familiar: the
good, poetic, ancients versus the bad, world-deprived, technological moderns,
exactly as romantic cliché would paint its nostalgia for Greece. It is all the more
striking, however, if, as documented by one of Heidegger’s seminars held at Le Thor
as late as 1969, we should then find the thinker still emphasizing what he terms the
“fundamentally un-poetic nature of the interpretation of language by the Greeks”—
an assertion that appears to border on the paradoxical (the Greeks being, of course,
the poetic nation par excellence) as long as we do not raise the question: what—or
better: whom—does Heidegger mean by the Greeks? What does “poetic” mean
here? (What does the Greek interpretation of language have to do with the Greek
experience of Being?) What would a more “poetic” interpretation look like? All
these aspects will turn out to have to do with Heidegger’s treatment of logos.

3 Logos, the Constitution of World and Language

A first step towards characterizing the paradox would seem to reside in the assump-
tion that what is meant is the Greeks’ philosophy, qua philosophy, that carries and
embodies this “un-poetic” interpretation (whereupon Aristotle, for example, could
only be seen as the one who rehabilitated the poets banished by Plato): philosophy
as such would be at stake—to the extent that it adopted in its entirety the epistemic
model of production or manufacture as described earlier. Entities as physis, com-
posed of form and matter, are thereby reduced to thesis (that is, to a product of
work), negating the genuinely natural, physical character of standing and growing
in itself. Aristotle, to be sure, does distinguish between the two kinds of “move-
ment,” the natural and the cultural. But as the ontological conception of the thing as
ensemble of matter and form (or possibility and actuality) is retained, this continues
to serve to reaffirm the demiurgic or poietic model of thinking and knowing

11
On the Heidegger-Jünger relationship in general, see Franco Volpi (1990), 9–45. Here, 32 for
Jünger’s reaction to Gestell.
12
Such use of the term Gestell would then be datable as subsequent to “The Origin of the Work of
Art” (1936), where it had simply designated the “thetic” stance of the artwork in the strife of world
and earth. Thus 1938, as the the time of Heidegger’s renewed (and by then decidedly critical) reflec-
tion upon Jünger’s “worker” seems to suggest itself. Precision of insight into Heidegger’s inner
history during and after the Hitler empire seems occasionally hampered by negligence of Friedrich
Georg Jünger’s pivotal role therein, especially with regard to the book Die Perfektion der Technik
(2010 [1939]) and its significance for Heidegger’s changing view of technology: F. G. Jünger’s
name is absent from, e.g., Zimmerman (1990); Milchman and Rosenberg (1996); Rockmore (1992);
Rockmore and Margolis (1992); Macann (1996); Pöggeler (1994); Jamme and Harries (1992);
Seubold (2000), 119–132.
Logos and the Essence of Technology 213

(and it is against Aristotle’s dichotomy of entities that Heidegger had evoked the
unitary Platonic thought of physis as itself the highest poiesis!).
Hence the paradox persists: Greek philosophy would thus be unpoetic precisely
owing to its manufacturing or poietic paradigm. At any rate, this “manufacturing of
knowledge” is both technological and ancient, i.e., “Greek.” The consequence
becomes obvious in the problem of language and its Greek interpretation, which is
the problem of logos. As Heidegger explains in 1969, it is the reduction of aletheia
to the field of legein (in the sense of speech, as verbum dicendi) which characterizes
the Greek inception from its beginning, “always already, in advance,” i.e., ever since
Homer’s epic language: this is what constitutes the “unpoetic” interpretation of
language, in view precisely of the fact that there is, according to Heidegger’s
conviction, no higher-ranking poetic practice than that of the Greeks.13 Thus it is
indeed in the legein itself that the unpoetic comes to be founded. At Le Thor, for
once directly criticizing Aristotle’s Poetics, Heidegger still adds (or perhaps has a
participant add) a quotation of an apophthegm once uttered in conversation by
Stéphane Mallarmé: “poetry has entirely lost its course since the great Homeric
aberration.” A gloss he leaves unexplained, advising the reader to meditate upon its
implications. But it is clear that, at this point in Heidegger’s reasoning, logos itself,
in order to be freed from its metaphysical reduction to the apophantic and semantic,
must be envisaged in terms of a more originary, “more Greek” and hence more
“poetic” meaning of legein, and that the obvious locus of such an attempt must be
the exemplary thinking of logos, in Heraclitus.
Thus in the Western tradition, “reason” and “language” are brought to hang
together in logos, and that is why logos must be at the core of Heidegger’s sustained
reflection on the essence of technology: that is: Ge-Stell or “Sistence,” as this
essence, determined by its contrast with the “world” that it refuses or of which it
constitutes the self-desisting event. Its counterpart will then be Heidegger’s vision
of that world in describing which he regresses, according to some commentators,
into archaicizing mythology: the famous Geviert, the Fourfold, as the structure of
the world formed by the interdependent, inseparable, resonating tetrad of “regions”:
divinities and mortals, sky and earth. The essence of the entity or the thing, as oblit-
erated and left unthought by Plato as well as Aristotle (both spell-bound by the
pattern of production) and thereby a priori annihilated by science, is now conceived
as that which hosts or assembles the Fourfold, reminiscent of “thing” in Old High
German, meaning “assembly” (around a ‘cause’ or ‘matter’ of dispute, in ‘council’).
In such apparent mythologizing, the suspicion of escapism and irrationalism is
naturally bound to arise; and we seem to be back precisely to that romantic and
nostalgic picture of a lost unity of the world. Are we then dealing with a new phi-
losophy of Ur-Gemütlichkeit, as a sharp tongue commented regarding one of
Heidegger’s lectures? Yet it is also true that such a perfectly sober mind as that of
the Prussian statesman, designer of the very notion of the liberal arts and theorist of
language, Wilhelm von Humboldt, will find, a century earlier, surprisingly
Heideggerian terms for describing the “assembling” bent of the Greek mind: “when

13
Heidegger (1977a), 73f.; see also Heidegger (1967), 271.
214 H. Schmid

choosing an object,” he writes, “they always take together [compare legei], as much
as possible, the terminal points of all spiritual existence, heaven and earth, gods and
humans, vaulting them in the idea of fate [Schicksal] as keystone.” One could surely
surmise a common, probably Platonic, source for this coincidence between von
Humboldt and Heidegger, which may in fact come somewhat unexpectedly.14 Hence
in all of this there may be rather less irrational mysticism than much more structural
thinking. But how are we to go about expounding and clarifying the problem of the
refused “world” in what looks like a welter of paradox and contradictions, where
Heidegger in addition attempts to think much more rigorously and radically than
Humboldt, the enlightened humanist? Together, Enframing and the Fourfold signify
the unity of language and world—the “assembling” which is the more originary
meaning of logos (to be dis-covered). The relevant and problematic aspect thereof
(which is precisely that of production or poiesis as the “un-poetic”) would now
seem to contain the problem of Enframing as the essence of technology, accessible
by means of elucidating “the Greeks,” that is, the Greek experience of language
alone. More precisely still, the “unpoetic” (derivative, semantic logos) is the spe-
cific character which distinguishes the “world” (Fourfold) in its own, self-obstruct-
ing essence, as Enframing or Sistence. With this in mind, let us return to Heidegger’s
essays “The Question Concerning Technology” itself, the scene of which was a
meeting of the Bavarian Academy of the Fine Arts in 1953, where Heidegger’s lec-
ture followed on the heels of an address by Werner Heisenberg.

4 Causality Displacing the Fourfold

Crucial to Heidegger’s Munich lecture is its point of departure in the thesis described
above, according to which the essence of technology is nothing technological,
which he proceeds to explicate by examining the “instrumental,” that is, analyzing
the means/end relation defıning the instrumental comportment—of homo faber, as
Hannah Arendt would later call it—and by ranging it within causality. In modern
science, as we know, what is constitutive is thought to be the very opposite: i.e., the
presumptive elimination of all teleological elements. Heidegger, for his part, claims
that the whole sphere of causality remains obscure precisely in that the instrumental
(especially as regards technology’s finality) is defined in modern terms by “efficient
causality” alone as the sole admissible model of causality. Heidegger first refers to
the traditional system of four causes (out of which structure modern thought subse-
quently isolates a single effective cause), raising questions such as: Whence the four
causes? And how do they belong together? But then, taking a further step, he even

14
Humboldt (1961), 30. The import of Heidegger’s references to Humboldt, particularly in light of
the closing pages of his On the Way to Language, has frequently been underestimated. Cf. the
author’s study, Schmid (1999), 92–98.
Logos and the Essence of Technology 215

declares that ancient thought is ignorant of efficient causality, given that there is not
even a Greek word for it (either in Aristotle or elsewhere).15
Greek production does not effect an object through subjectivity; as an example,
Heidegger demonstrates this Greek character by analyzing the making of a silver
chalice, a sacrificial vessel, as it turns out, by a silversmith. (This silversmith may
also be read as a critical—if not self-critical—echo to the famous hammer-using
artisan of Being and Time’s analytic of Dasein.) With regard to Heidegger’s exam-
ple, we may recall that naturally the silver (as hyle) and the “aspect” (eidos) of
“chaliceness” represent material and formal causes. There remains a third that
above all is “responsible” (aition) for the sacrificial vessel by circumscribing the
chalice as belonging within the realm of consecration: the end, telos, or final cause,
which completes the entity by assigning it the bounds of its sphere—not its pur-
pose. The silversmith, the fourth participant in the responsibility for the finished
vessel, is what he is not as efficient cause: “the Aristotelian doctrine,” says
Heidegger, “neither knows the cause that is named by this term nor uses a Greek
word that would correspond to it.” What the silversmith does is to deliberate [über-
legen] and to gather [versammeln] the three causes previously mentioned.
Deliberation, Überlegen, says Heidegger, is in Greek legein, logos: It is due to this
logos of the silversmith that and how those first three modes of aition come into
appearance and into play.
Three points may strike us in this account of the making of the chalice. First, the
denial of an efficient cause (even of a Greek equivalent term), which would, if
unconditionally accepted, facilitate a sharp distinction between Greek—namely, in
this case, Aristotelian—and modern. However, the texts yield a different impres-
sion: for not only does Aristotle know of such a cause, the name that he has for it is
exactly “the efficient,” understood as the poietic: to poietikon.16 Second, the artisan’s
doing—poiein—is, so to speak, absorbed in the assembling, legein; thus it seems
that, for Heidegger, sheer “deliberation” brings about the accomplished vessel. In
other words, logos (the deliberation exhibiting the artisan’s techne) and poiesis
become here identical in that logos is stripped of its usual meaning “to say” or “to tell,”
in favor of assembling or “laying,” which will turn out to be the more originary
sense of logos—and poiesis as well—that Heidegger had sought. (It could also be
observed that logos and poiesis further coincide with physis, nature, with the help
of the quotation from Plato directed by Heidegger against the conventional
distinction, going back to the Sophists and Aristotle, between natural and cultural or
“positive” beings).
Third, the correlate of this latter fusion of logos/poiesis is our main interest for
the present consideration of “world” (language and Being) in the later Heidegger:

15
This and what follows: Heidegger (1977a), 6ff.
16
Compare, e.g., Met. I, 2, 1013a 31 with De gen. et corr. I, 7, 324 b 13 and De anima III, 5, 430a
12. Occasionally, as at Met. VIII, 6, 1045a 30f., Aristotle unhesitatingly drops all talk of finality to
name the efficient cause as solely responsible for any transition from the possible to the actual in
the shaping of matter (thereby approaching, once again, the Platonic identification of physis with
poiesis from Symp. 205b).
216 H. Schmid

the example of the silversmith’s production shows on closer inspection that the play
of the four causes is in fact derived as stemming from, and as being a concretization
of, the Fourfold. Conversely, the Fourfold constitutes an elaboration of the doctrine of
the four causes in the way Heidegger is known to rethink (in terms of the “unthought”)
loci of ancient tradition in a “more Greek” way. To put this in other terms:
Heidegger’s idea of the Fourfold is not derived from Hölderlin, as, for example,
Reiner Schürmann and others have assumed,17 but rather from Aristotle. As sky and
earth stand for and deepen matter and form, silver and chaliceness, as the telos
of sacrificial libation leads to the divinities, the region of the mortals then must be
the specific site of the poietikon, the poetic: in their very act of “assembling,” by
deliberation: logos.18 So conceived, the fourfold structure becomes concinnous with
the equally Aristotelian key thought of the essay, namely the truth-character of
technology as aletheuein, in using which Heidegger reaches back to his reception
of the Nicomachean Ethics 30 years earlier.
As the Fourfold constitutes the structure or harmony of the world precisely as
refused and silenced by Enframing or Sistence, i.e., by the essence of technology, it
is what Heidegger's anamnesis of the Greek inception aims at. In such a retrieval of
“the Greeks”—that is: of Aristotle—the un-poetic nature of the essence of technol-
ogy now accurately echoes the poietic structure of the Aristotelian Fourfold. The
poietic doing of the mortals in assembling “things,” their legein, clearly shows the
parallel: just as Enframing is nothing else than self-desisting Fourfold, so techne, by
now amounting to “Greek” knowing in its entirety (in light of Plato), is essentially
obliterated and likewise manifested by the poietic-unpoetic mode of disclosing that
is technology’s truth.

5 Back to the Pre-Socratics?

There yet remains the riddle of the unpoetic interpretation of language which we seem
now in a position to pose more adequately. The further turn to logos in Heidegger’s
reflection not as signifying “speech” but something more primordial, leads us one step
further back (or ahead) to the pre-Platonic Greeks. It is especially in his essay “Logos
(Heraclitus, Fragment B 50)” that Heidegger expounds the allegedly original meaning
of legein and logos as presupposed in the silversmith parable: “laying,” or laying-
before as letting-lie: this very turn from speech to laying constitutes the locus where,
according to Heidegger, there flashes up the “unthought” essence of language (and
“world” alike; that is, the “middle” of the Fourfold as Sage). Correspondingly, he
comments on what is for us to envision as the unthought in the Greek inception:

17
See, e.g., Schürmann (1987), 224: “Unfortunately for conceptual clarity, this is where Heidegger’s
language follows Hölderlin’s most closely.”
18
It may be observed that the silver chalice is Aristotle’s own example when characterizing the
material cause: see Met. V, 2, 1013a 25 f. The fact that deliberation, which would expected to be
phronesis, is shifted to logos seems due to the meaning assigned to Parmenides’ fr. 7,5 DK.
Logos and the Essence of Technology 217

had this beginning not safeguarded what has been, i.e., the gathering of what still endures,
the Being of beings would not now govern from out of the essence of modern technology.
Through technology the entire globe is now embraced and held fast in a kind of Being
experienced in Western fashion and represented on the epistemological models of European
metaphysics and science.19

Metaphysics and science are declared to be based upon the resulting conception
of language as tool or organ (glossa, “tongue”) and as “signifying voice,” phone
semantike (from semainein, to mean). By contrast, this flashing up of the primordial
unthought essence of language took place in Heraclitus’s use of the word logos. But
this flash was extinguished abruptly so as to obliterate logos in the sense of primor-
dial “laying.” And hence Heidegger’s point is that this “laying” is to be recognized
as the originary experience of language: “saying,”Sage, which must therefore be
thought as the middle of the Fourfold (where it also appears as Fate or Destining,
Geschick, with an echo of moira in Parmenides).
Of the vast field of questions here, we shall only be concerned to address that
aspect of logos as it relates to Aristotle in transcending him. With the extinction of
the flash, logos is set on its way to become ratio; it will proceed to become, in an
ever-renewed application of the form-matter scheme, the human faculty of autono-
mous reasoning or “logic” as opposed to (“positive”) revelation. Meanwhile, it
becomes proposition, then concept, ultimately it becomes the word, verbum. Thus
Heidegger would seem to maintain that logos, to the very extent that it took on the
meaning of “speech”, obscures the more original meaning of laying-out (lesende
Lege: something like “col-lective layout”). This would be precisely the genesis of
the now familiar “unpoetic” interpretation of language, while—with the advent of
the “semantic voice”—the unity of World and language in originary poiesis falls
into oblivion and refusal. Henceforth, in Enframing or Sistence the world speaks
only in its concealment. It is important to note that it is this meaning of laying that
Heidegger has in mind when he renders logos by Sage, saying, as the contrary of
speech further to be elaborated as the “ringing of silence.” (Another aspect of the
saying-laying relation will be mentioned in a moment.) Conversely, Sage is not by
any means “myth” as some commentators have believed.20
In order to measure the enduring presence of Aristotle in all this, while trying at
the same time to elucidate the advent of the “semantic voice” as the incisive moment
in the history of logos, it may be useful briefly to recall Heraclitus’s famous
fragment 93 (DK21) regarding the diction of Apolline prophesying. It is familiar to
all of us, e.g., in Marcovich’s translation: “The Lord whose is the oracle in Delphi
neither speaks (legei) nor conceals, but gives a sign (semainei).” Heidegger quotes
it repeatedly, since the wording beautifully confirms his main point since Being and
Time: apophantic “disclosing” (or, “de-claring,” with an allusion to Charles Kahn’s
rendering) as here the sense of legein is made evident in opposition to cryptic

19
Heidegger (1975), 76.
20
See, e.g., Lacoue-Labarthe (1987), 87; Großmann (1996), 198.
21
Diels and Kranz (1951).
218 H. Schmid

“concealment.”22 But what about the opposition itself, and what about the semainein?
Even without intending an overall analysis in our present context, two problems
may yet be observed to cohere in this received interpretation (which dates as far
back as Plutarch23; and, as we recall, Plutarch was himself a Delphic priest): the
meaning of semainein, on the one hand, together with the meaning of the “neither—
nor” opposition on the other, both seeming to center upon the problem of “signify-
ing” (hinting) as the presumptive activity of the oracle. It is to be understood that for
commentators from Antiquity, Heraclitus is usually taken to be referring to his own
philosophic discourse (logos), either metaphorically or by comparing it more or less
favorably with the oracle. Thus in the usual understanding of the Delphic way of
giving a sign (itself famously ambiguous) is implied something like a scale of trans-
parency between the extremes of total lucidity and total opacity, where logos, taken
as revealing opposed to concealment, would find its place on the side of lucidity, so
that the sign itself comes to stand in the middle: that is, in a chiaroscuro midpoint as
a fragile measure between those two extremes.24 In other words, what we find is
Aristotle’s conception of the mean (meson).
Now, if it were to be accepted that this idea of a moderated mean or middle,
between the extremes of concealing and revealing, constitutes but a retrojection of
an Aristotelian schema onto the fragment (hereby implying a kind of semantically
ambiguous twilight as essential to Pythian sayings), the question would still remain
with regard to an earlier meaning of semainei. This is not the place to attempt an
alternate reading of the fragment according to which the “neither—nor” would refer
not to a scale of degrees or valeurs of light and darkness but to a qualitative antith-
esis, in keeping with other occurrences of the neither/nor in Heraclitus. It may be
thought, however, that, if anywhere, it is in this Heraclitean saying that something
like the “Greek interpretation of language” is to be found and examined as to its
poetic or non-poetic character. The crucial point of such a reading would be to
emphasize that the lord of Delphi does not declare or “lay open” in the mode of
legein at all (not even halfway)—not implying as necessary that twilight ambiguity
which is a trait of only some of his sayings (for a counter-example here we may
recall, in Aeschylus’s Oresteia, the exactly unambiguous Delphic command that
Orestes kill his own mother).25 With regard to the meaning of semainein, “to indicate,”
it could be argued that its meaning is closer to “instruction” by imperative, giving
orders, for instance, indicating where to go for a departing colony.26 In addition, as

22
See, for example, Heidegger (1959), 170. Held (1970), 162–206, while emphasizing
Heidegger’s philological merit in elucidating “the original meaning of the word ‘logos’” (204), does
not mention fr. 93. Similarly, Bröcker (1965). See Kahn (1979), 43.
23
See De Pythiae oraculis, 21, Mor. 404 HD.
24
Cf. Marcovich’s discussion: “The saying seems to be an image (metaphor); its implication might
be the following: ‘As Apollo neither speaks out all (100 %) nor conceals all (0 %), but shows forth
a part of the truth (50 %), so also Logos inside things is neither inaccessible to human knowledge
(0 %) nor self-evident (100 %), but requires an intellectual effort from men,’” etc. Marcovich
(1967), 5l.
25
See also Delcourt (1955), 97.
26
Cf. Detienne (1994), 165ff.; see further Nagy (1996).
Logos and the Essence of Technology 219

semainein is a technical term of mantic and prophetic terminology, to say that the
lord of the oracle indicates, semainei, would hardly seem for Heraclitus to be a
surprising claim but to amount much rather to a tautology. The otherwise inevitable
lack of equilibrium (semainei must balance anax) would point to the previous part
of the sentence, i.e., once more to the problematic neither/nor and to the “does not
lay open” (oute legei). Thus we might be led to improvise a rendering such as,
“The ruler who possesses the oracle-chasm at Delphi neither lays open nor conceals
but gives orders.” If, on principle, the oracle does not “tell” in the way of logos, then
surely this would encourage enquiring into the Greek interpretation of language
beyond logos (or, more precisely, beyond the Aristotelian fixations of both logos
and semainein)—all the more so if we recall that the oracles were delivered in verse:
in hexameters, like Homer’s (unless, with Mallarmé in mind, this were to be put
inversely), that is, poetically. It is from this pivotal point of the Greek interpretation
of language (i.e., the experience of language and of Being) that the question of logos
in Greek philosophy in Parmenides and Heraclitus could be reopened. We might
expect that it is precisely to the “question concerning technology,”with its identity
of Fourfold and Enframing, that such renewed analysis of the limits of logos would
return: and this would then seem to form a new chapter in the history of the oddly
timeless influence of Heraclitus on Hölderlin and Hegel, on Nietzsche and
Heidegger. Heraclitus, in his vehement opposition to Homer: after having spoken of
the “great Homeric aberration,” in a sequel not mentioned by Heidegger, Mallarmé
replies to the interlocutor’s question, “Before Homer, what?”: “Orpheus.”

6 Ephesus and the Essence of Technology

In that sense, there is shed more light on the decisive instant when, according to
Heidegger, the flashlike appearance of logos as saying—i.e., as laying—in Heraclitus
was immediately obliterated and obscured so as to set metaphysics on its way: the
instant when, through the shift from laying to speech in logos, precisely the unpo-
etic interpretation of language arises, while primordial techne and poiesis are seen
retreating into the unthought, in favor of the incubation of modern technology. That
is, exactly when logos came to designate the experience of language to the very
extent that it became the occidental ratio or calculative reason. This instant is in
Aristotle, or as we can further narrow it: in the very opening phrases of De interpre-
tatione.27 What makes the interpretation of language ultimately unpoetic would be
the idea of symbols of mental experience as sensual articulation of sentence mean-
ing, in the “semantic voice” (phone semantike), where semainein first appears as
we know it, as signifying. By the same token, logos becomes well-ordered, calculative
“telling”—it becomes concept, proposition, and at the same time “reason,” the
thinking faculty of the rational animal, a shift that allegedly dates back to Parmenides
(fr. 7,5 DK). At last, on the other hand, logos then appears as the Word, once again,

27
See Heidegger (1971), 97.
220 H. Schmid

after 600 years, in Heraclitus’s town of Ephesus on the coast of Asia Minor, in the
writings of the fourth Evangelist. All the while, the self-obstruction of the“world”
prepares itself, toward its manifestation as Ge-stell after 2,300 years.
All of this may then be duly regarded as an exposition of Heidegger’s claim in
the Heraclitus essay as already cited: “Had this beginning not safeguarded what has
been [das Gewesene] i.e., the gathering of what still endures, the Being of beings
would not now govern from out of the essence of modern technology.” Here, the
essence of modern technology, the enframing mode of “sisting” and entrapping
entities, precisely in its unpoetic character (reduced to causa efficiens), is nothing
other than the world, the Fourfold, showing itself only in its concealment or refusal,
sub specie contraria, as Enframing. Or, citing Heidegger once again, it is this
essence of modern technology, through which “the entire globe is today transformed
and destined into a being which is occidentally conceived and is entrapped within
the truth-form of European metaphysics and science.” The insight resulting
from this anamnesis is not only, first, that the essence of technology is indeed
nothing technological but also, second, that it is visible only as seemingly remote in
time. It therefore defies any historicist perspective but is emphatically historic,
geschichtlich, as Heidegger correctly claims. It remains outside the jurisdiction
of expert historiography, on pain of confusing the problem with the solution. There
is no other way of grasping that direct connection between the height of the techno-
logical age and the beginning of metaphysics, i.e., the “Greeks,” than what Heidegger
calls “thinking.” And this will all the more be true to the extent that in light of
Heraclitus, as opposed to Aristotle, the Greek experience of language would seem
less manifest in Oedipus’ struggle for self-determination than in the wisdom of his
adversary, Tiresias.
Meanwhile, there is still a corollary to be appended. As we have seen, it is in the
totality of aspects concerning the Fourfold no less than the related problem of logos’
primordial creativity (transcending the “unpoetic” Platonic model of craftsmanship
or manufacture)—i.e., in the name of what Heidegger envisioned as originary
techne-poiesis—that Heidegger turns away from Leibniz and towards Aristotle. He
turns to Aristotle in order to depart from him towards the thought of a more
primordial, “more Greek” conception of the unity of the four causes in the Fourfold
conceived as the “Saying,” die Sage. Heidegger re-encounters that same Platonism
as the innermost character of modernity, if not the essence of technology itself: as
anyone can see in today’s mediatic reality. It is this constitutive Platonism that
Heidegger found embodied, at quite another level, in Heisenberg: symbolically
speaking, at the point where Heisenberg himself took up the thought of the four
causes, along with other Aristotelian concepts, to articulate the Zusammenhänge
which he had elaborated 30 years earlier.28
On the other hand, an attempt at an even more pointed reflection on language and
the “unpoetic,” at a greater distance from Aristotle rather than extrapolating what is

28
See Liesenfeld (1992), 199, n.l10, et passim. Subsequent divergences, precisely with regard to
Platonism, are mentioned in Pöggeler (1994), 400f.
Logos and the Essence of Technology 221

“more Greek” in rewriting him, would continue the meditation on Greek “basic words,”
Grundworte, by acknowledging above all that they appear, “more primordially,” in
contexts of poetic composition: which is the case precisely of logos, aletheia,
semainein.29 This would include, and be nourished by, a critical debate, e.g., with
the recent book on Pindar by Michael Theunissen, who, coming from a rather
un-Heideggerian orientation but nevertheless sharing the historic but non-historicist
motivation of presenting a cost-benefit analysis or critical theory to Western
rationality, turns to archaic Greek lyric poetry precisely to step out of the tradition
pre-given as the discipline of “philosophy” (susceptible of anachronism), in order to
grasp, philosophically, the problematic of the experience of time, which would
seem to have much in common with the essence of technology.30

7 Being and Writing

This would elucidate (such is my concluding observation) further surprising aspects

of this Heideggerian Aristotelianism: one of them to be found exactly in the place of
the unpoetic interpretation of language, i.e., of Being, where things begin to look
somewhat like an everyday evolutionist perspective. In the case of language, logos,
and of art, poiesis, alike, the “Greeks,” says Heidegger, dwell in their world without
attaining to sufficient concomitant thinking on either.31 This looks just a bit like
conventional thinking about unreflective “primitives” in their histoire froide—
regarded from modern European perspectives. What is perhaps more crucial is the
fact that it also looks like the Husserlian “naive” givenness or “natural” attitude; and
we may surmise that this is still an unexpected reflex of the first book of Aristotle’s
Metaphysics. This concerns once again logos in what Heidegger claims to be its
primordial meaning as “collective laying-out,” lesende Lege, just as such “laying” as
letting-lie represents a remarkable avatar of the Greek hypokeimenon, as that which
is let, or allowed to, present itself “before”: the “underlying” Substance, that is, no
less than the metaphysical category par excellence since Aristotle. Could that be a
coincidence? Concerning the second term, Lese (collection, of what lies before), it
is hard to escape seeing that it simultaneously refers to the ordinary sense of lesen,
or legere, i.e., reading, in that Heidegger names correlatively, in 1935, the written
letters, grammata, as the paradigm for the Greek “experience”—not here of language,
but of Being.32 What could this supposed paradigm have to do with the “unpoetic”?
We find therein a final hint at the unity of world and language as revealed by the
recourse to the Greeks in the thought of the Fourfold or saying as speaking in its
very concealment as Enframing. That is, the essence of technology takes on a

29
Cf. Boeder (1959); Böhme (1986).
30
Theunissen (2000).
31
See, e.g., Heidegger (1975), 77.
32
See Heidegger (1959), 64.
222 H. Schmid

surprising proximity to the problem of the connection between writing and

metaphysics. This would lead to further questions addressed to Heidegger and to
the Greeks as well.33

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Aristotle. De interpretatione
Aristotle. Degeneration et corruptione
Aristotle. Metaphysica
Aristotle. Ethica Nicomachea
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Böhme, Robert. 1986. Die verkannte Muse. Dichtersprache und geistige Tradition des Parnıenides.
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Bröcker, Walter. 1965. Die Geschichte der Philosophie vor Sokrates. Frankfurt am Main:
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Delcourt, Marie. 1955. L’oracle de Delphes. Paris: Payot.
Detienne, Marcel. 1994. Manières grecques de commencer. In Transcrire les mythologies, ed.
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Diels, Hermann, and Walther Kranz. 1951. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker griechisch und
deutsch. Sixth Edition. Dublin/Zurich: Weidmannsche.
Großmann, Andreas. 1996. Spur zum Heiligen. Kunst und Geschichte im Widerstreit zwischen
Hegel und Heidegger (Hegel-Studien Beiheft 3). Bonn: Bouvier.
Heidegger, Martin. 1959. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1967. Hegel und die Griechen. In Wegmarken. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Heidegger, Martin. 1971. On the Way to Language. Trans. P.D. Hertz. New York: Harper & Row.
Heidegger, Martin. 1975. Early greek thınking. Trans. D.F. Krell and F.A. Capuzzi. New York:
Harper and Row.
Heidegger, Martin. 1977a. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. William
Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row.
Heidegger, Martin. 1977b. Vier seminare. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
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Gesamtausgabe (GA) 45, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Heidegger, Martin. 1994. Bremer und Freiburger Vorträge (gA79), ed. Petra Jaeger. Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann.
Heidegger, Martin. 1996. The Principle of Reason. Trans. Reginald Lilly. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Held, Klaus. 1970. Der Logos-Gedanke des Heraklit. In Durchblicke. Martin Heidegger zum 80.
Geburtstag, 162–206. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Humboldt, Wichelm von. 1967. Latium und Hellas. In Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. II, ed. A. Flitner
and K. Giel. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Jamme, Christoph, and Karsten Harries (eds.). 1992. Martin Heidegger: Kunst, Politik, Technik.
Munich: Fink.

33
This essay was originally presented at the 2001 meeting of the Heidegger Circle convened by
Babette Babich, Fordham University in New York City, on the 25th anniversary of the question
Heidegger offered on April 11th 1976 to the meeting of the Heidegger Circle in Chicago.
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Jünger, Friedrich Georg. 2010 [1939]. Die Perfektion der Technik, 8th ed. Klostermann: Frankfurt
am Main.
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fragments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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America.
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Studie zu Max Planck und Werner Heisenberg. Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann.
Macann, Christopher (ed.). 1996. Critical Heidegger. London: Routledge.
Marcovich, M. (ed.). 1967. Heraclitus (Editio maior). Venezuela: Los Andes University Press.
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Highlands: Humanities Press.
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Press.
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Theunissen, Michael. 2000. Pindar: Menschenlos und Wende der Zeit. Munich: Beck.
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art. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
 Part III
Philosophical Truth
and Hermeneutic Aesthetics
On the Manifold Meaning of Truth in Aristotle

Graeme Nicholson

Abstract When Aristotle treats true and false statements in his logical treatises, he
shows that truth and falsity are the pre-supposed, non-discursive grounding for
statements themselves. His ethical treatises show that intellectual virtues are consti-
tuted by truth. The Metaphysics shows that truth in thinking is sustained by the truth
of being. All these diverse studies can be connected to one another by way of the
Greek term for truth, aletheia, as Heidegger has treated it.

It was Heidegger’s practice over the years to single out certain words of ancient
Greek and assign to them striking and memorable interpretations—we think of his
treatment of physis and logos in the Introduction to Metaphysics,1 where the former
is rendered as “emergence” and the latter as “gathering.” Equally memorable are his
frequent references to ousia as “presence” and alētheia as “unconcealedness.”
Sometimes these interpretations were accompanied by etymologizing. But there
was always another basis for them as well, a Greek philosophical text whose argu-
ment seemed to undergird what Heidegger was saying. So the reading of a particular
text was guided in part by etymology, yet, running in the other direction, the reading
of the text would add credibility to the etymology, a hermeneutical circle that
appeared again and again in Heidegger’s many essays on Greek philosophy.
The Introduction to Metaphysics had a strong focus on Pre-Socratic thinkers,
and earlier in the 1930s Heidegger had devoted courses to Plato. All these writings
have been widely studied and interpreted. But in the 1920s, up to 1930, Heidegger
devoted many studies to Aristotle that I think have received less attention in the
secondary literature. Joseph Kockelmans is one commentator who has devoted
attention to this part of Heidegger’s work, notably the essay “Being-True as the

1
Heidegger (1983, 2000). See especially Chapter IV, Sect. 3.
G. Nicholson (*)
University of Toronto, 350 St. David St. S, Fergus, ON N1M 2L8, Canada
e-mail: graemenicholson@gmail.com

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 227

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_13,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
228 G. Nicholson

Basic Determination of Being,” which he presented at the Heidegger Conference

in 1983 and later published in a book he edited.2 Kockelmans also calls attention
to Heidegger’s Aristotle-work frequently in his full-scale interpretation of
Heidegger’s philosophy.3
The topic of truth, or alētheia, looms large in Heidegger’s Aristotle-commentaries.
This is one of the cases that exhibit a circular relationship between textual reading and
the investigation of words and etymology. So we are able to put a twofold question to
Heidegger’s work: does the textual study as such grant support to the etymologizing?
And does the study of the word alētheia contribute to the philosophical understanding
of Aristotle’s thought about truth? In particular, there is a question whether Aristotle
ever presented a unitary account of truth or whether his scattered comments remain
unconnected, an issue that has taxed the minds of many scholars. He has a lot to say
about truth in several of the logical writings, especially de Interpretatione; he has many
comments in different books of the Metaphysics; he treats truth in the Nicomachean
Ethics and in the third book of de Anima. When we recognize that these inquiries
have different aims, it is hard to avoid the impression that the different treatments
invoke quite different ideas of truth. There could be a logical idea of truth, and then
a metaphysical idea, an ethical idea and a psychological idea (not to mention even
more recondite possibilities). That is why I have adopted the title “On the Manifold
Meaning of Truth in Aristotle.” I want to explore some of the different references in his
text where truth seems to play quite distinct roles; but I am guided by the hypotheses
(a) that Heidegger’s interpretation of alētheia can help us understand each of the
distinct contexts, and (b) that it may form a unitary point of reference for them all.
I shall follow the chronology of Heidegger’s work in the 1920s, rather than the
usual order in which Aristotle’s own writings have been arranged.

1 From the Lectures on Ethics: The Many Avenues to Truth

The earliest writings that we have from Heidegger on the topic of truth stem from
1922 when he was working out an interpretation of Aristotle. His research was
focussed on the many avenues by which the soul establishes what is true, but of
course this must be closely interwoven with an interpretation of what truth itself is.
In the late summer of 1922, having just completed a lecture-course on Aristotle
offered to students at Freiburg University,4 Heidegger worked up a prospectus for a
book on Aristotle that he sent to several influential philosophy professors.5 Heidegger
indicates what parts of Aristotle’s text he proposes to treat, Nicomachean Ethics

2
Joseph J. Kockelmans (1986), 145–160.
3
Kockelmans (1984).
4
Heidegger (2005a). Not to be confused with other lecture courses on Aristotle, in GA 61, 18 and
22, that will not concern us here.
5
Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristotle (Anzeige der hermeneutischen
Situation), now published as an Appendix to GA 62, pp. 343–399.
On the Manifold Meaning of Truth in Aristotle 229

[N. E.], Book VI, Metaphysics, Book I, Physics, Books I–V, and Metaphysics,
Books VII–IX. Later on, this prospectus formed the basis for a much lengthier
treatment of those same Aristotle texts in a lecture course that Heidegger gave to
the students of Marburg University in 1924–1925 on Plato’s Sophist,6 and I shall
draw particularly on its treatment of N. E., VI.
In the prospectus, Heidegger is particularly insistent on human finitude. Its first
30 pages highlight such themes as death, care, facticity and fallenness, themes that
certainly motivate the question whether we are at all capable of transcendence, of
achieving truth. The question is, “What kind of being is being-human such that it is
capable of understanding life and being?” (372) Heidegger’s question is how truth
manifests itself in the midst of such a human life and practice.
It is an ethical and existential inquiry, then, not an inquiry into logic, that moti-
vates Heidegger’s original discussion of Aristotle on truth. That already prompts his
dissent from a traditional reading, that Aristotle located truth primarily in the judg-
ment, logos, and defined it as an agreement or correspondence with its object (GA
62, p. 377). The most recent book in English on this topic, by Crivelli,7 often reaches
conclusions similar to Heidegger’s, but coming by an utterly different route, from
logical studies. The most basic difference is that Crivelli leaves the N. E. passages
entirely out of the discussion, for they were not based on logic (p. 40). This illus-
trates the problem that I introduced at the beginning of this paper—the question of
a unity to be found among Aristotle’s distinct inquiries into truth.
N. E., Book VI, opens with Aristotle’s articulation of the human soul. Books II to
V dealt with virtues of character, but Book VI treats a topic that is partly foundational
for the virtues of character and partly of independent importance: the virtues of
thought. On the one hand, virtues of character depend on certain norms of “correct
reason,” orthos logos, and so Aristotle must now examine what qualities of thought
are required to define those norms. On the other hand, our power of thought is in some
ways a higher function of the soul than moral practice, so that the virtues of thought
are valuable in their own right. Practical thinking and decisions aim at what is good
for us, but in the thinking that is not enlisted for practice and for decisions “the good
and the bad state consists [simply] in being true and false” (1139a 28). The virtues of
thought enable the soul to attain this truth (and, as well, of course, the truth that defines
the correct norms for moral practice). If we read Book VI in the context of the whole
treatise, especially Books I and X, it is clear that truth is an end or telos of the soul,
one component in the happiness, eudaimonia, that constitutes the end of human life,
in particular that end which the soul achieves in so far as it is qualified by one of the
virtues of thought. And since thought, dianoia, has many forms and applications, we
shall find several virtues of thought, that is to say, several pathways to truth.
The intellectual virtues (aretai tēs dianoias) are five in number: craft, science,
practical wisdom, theoretical wisdom and intelligence (technē, epistēmē, phronēsis,
sophia, nous). Throughout the treatments of them, Aristotle repeatedly shows their
links to alētheia, truth. The issue of principle that has to be kept in the forefront is

6
Heidegger (1992, 1997).
7
Paolo Crivelli (2004).
230 G. Nicholson

that science (or knowledge), epistēmē, is only one avenue to truth and in no way
pre-eminent. Each of the virtues is differentiated according to the things it treats of.
But Heidegger takes this further—he aims to show that in each virtue there is a dif-
ferentiated role for alētheia: both in 1922 and 1924, the virtues are divided in view
of the truth that constitutes them. Now we come to the core idea. Alētheia is referred
to in a number of different grammatical forms. There is not only the abstract noun
alētheia (e.g., 1139a 18, 1139b 12); there is the adjective alēthēs, “true” (e.g. 1139a
24, 1140a 10, a 21, b 5, b 21) and, of special interest here, the verb alētheuō (1139b
13, b 15, 1141a 3, a 18), which stands at the centre of Heidegger’s exposition. The
verb certainly signifies an achievement of truth, an access to truth, but it is a chal-
lenge to understand and translate the verb. At the opening of Chapter 3 (1139b 15),
Aristotle characterizes the group of intellectual virtues as a whole: it is by way of
them that the soul alētheuei through affirming or denying. Heidegger renders this
verb as erschließen, “disclose.” He translates: “ways in which das menschliche
Dasein als Zu- und Absprechen das Seiende erschließt (Soph., p. 21): “…how
human Dasein through affirming or denying discloses that which is.” On his interpre-
tation of alētheuein, then, there is the disclosing accomplished by us, and then that-
which-is that becomes disclosed. Therefore Heidegger says, “Truth [alētheia] is a
character of what is, insofar as it is encountered, but in the proper sense it is a deter-
mination of the being of human Dasein itself” (Soph., p. 23).
And this same understanding of the verb is then carried through in the accounts
of all the five virtues. We shall try to follow first how Heidegger treats the various
modes of alēthēs, alētheia and alētheuein in each of the five virtues, then turn to the
question of the general meaning of the term.
Chapter 3 gives Aristotle’s account of epistēmē, science, differentiated primarily
by the domain for which it is competent. As Heidegger reads the text, science is able
to disclose that which does not change, which must necessarily be as it is; and so we
could reckon geometry and theology as epistēmai by virtue of their characteristic
objects. The translation erschließen, “disclose,” treats alētheuein as an active and
transitive verb. What Heidegger stresses is that such disclosing must range over all
times, its object being reliable and constant; it brings to light that which does not
change. Epistēmē reveals what is absent just as much as what is present, because its
insights are valid for all times and places: its object, once disclosed, is never con-
cealed from it (p. 32). In the second place, epistēmē is that disposition of the soul that
is demonstrative [hexis apodeiktikē], showing out of the first and highest grounds
what must be the case: and this makes possible a disclosing of the object to others.
Still, though science may be taught, the practice of research is also a discovering or
revealing—the logos of science need not be uttered aloud.
The status that Aristotle assigns to epistēmē remains of interest even in a modern
or post-modern age: we can cite Kockelmans’s important paper “On the Problem
of Truth in the Sciences.”8 He is able definitely to vindicate truth in the sciences,

8
Presidential Address delivered before the Eighty-Third Annual Eastern Division Meeting of the
American Philosophical Association in Boston, Massachusetts, December 29, 1986.
On the Manifold Meaning of Truth in Aristotle 231

but this is truth that can be identified only with empirical adequacy. Science
cannot claim to embody an absolute, metaphysical idea of truth that would commit
us to an ontology of realism. There are of course differences between this view
and Aristotle’s, but the parallel is that in Aristotle’s Ethics we see that epistēmē
and its mode of truth fall short of the achievements of nous and sophia—to be
discussed below.
Technē, craft, is a disposition that functions in the domain of making [poiētikē].
But this too is a disclosing. The temporal character of craft is different from that of
science, for it works on something that is yet to be. But it is a trained excellence in
making, with a logos of its own and a logos alēthēs at that (1140a 10, a 20).
Heidegger’s particular emphasis in these pages, 40–47, is to interpret the logos that
is proper to craft as the grasp of that Idea or Form, eidos, that guides the technician
e.g., a house-builder, in the process of making. This eidos is what technē discloses,
both projectively, in advance of the work, and in the finished work as well. He refers
to a parallel passage in the Metaphysics, 1032a 26-b 12:
…from craft proceed the things of which the form is in the soul of the craftsman…health is
the definition in the doctor’s soul, i.e., the craft of medicine…the process towards health is
called a ‘making.’ Therefore it follows that in a sense health comes from health, and house
from house: that with matter from that without matter; for the medical craft and the building
craft are the form of health and of the house…

Practical wisdom, phronēsis, is a disposition that is truthful, i.e., revelatory

[hexis alēthē—1140b 5, b 20–21]. One who acts with reason, logos, in all matters
central to human life, in what is good and bad, is the guide to all who aspire to
moral virtue. What this disposition discloses is not houses and knives, but human
life itself (Heidegger, das Dasein), life in its central possibilities, especially
though deliberation. We tend in everyday life to conceal from ourselves this good
and bad through being too much swayed by pleasure and pain—thereby we
become opaque to ourselves (Heidegger, 50–52). Phronēsis brings transparency
to our lives.
We conclude by treating nous and sophia together (N. E. VI, Chapters 6, 7;
Heidegger, pp. 57–64). It is by nous, says Aristotle, that we alētheuomen those
highest grounds that science was unable to secure for itself. What is characteristic
of it is that it employs no logos—it is what Heidegger calls a pure Vernehmen,
apprehension, but Heidegger thinks Aristotle reserves this properly speaking
to God, a point on which one might challenge Heidegger. What is available
to some human beings is sophia, which reveals to them, alētheuein, both what
follows from fundamental principles as well as the principles themselves. Here
Aristotle is preparing for a difficult theme—to what extent the highest wisdom
really is open to human beings. Heidegger will spend a long chapter, pp. 132–188,
on that question and the related question whether phronēsis or sophia can claim
the status of the highest wisdom. The topics of nous and sophia will return in
the Metaphysics: Books Alpha (I) and Lamda (XII) treat philosophical wisdom,
and we have a lengthier study of the role of nous in Book Theta (IX) which
of course in its fullest extent incorporates epistēmē so as to constitute sophia.
See below.
232 G. Nicholson

2 The Word Alētheuein: A Common Concept?

If we start from the verb, as it seems Aristotle did, it is hard to imagine any translation
of alētheuein except “disclose, reveal.” As for the general statement that we cited
from the opening of Chapter 3 (1139b 15), the typical renderings of this line into
English use the noun “truth,” and then supply a verb to anchor it: e.g., “…the soul
grasps the truth…”9 It seems that for an English translator, the verbal term is always
secondary to the substantive term “truth;” we are hard pressed to find a verb from
which the substantive term could then be an offshoot. But “reveal, disclose” does
fill that role. Crivelli maintains that no English verb phrase renders the verb
adequately.10 Some writers are forced to invent words for this translation.11 But this
verb is found in a number of other treatises of Aristotle too, e.g., Metaphysics,
1011b 28, 1012a 3, a 4, a 6–7, 1051b 15; de Interpretatione 17a 3; these texts treat
our speaking or saying what is true, in contrast with saying what is false. And since
most of the virtues of thought employ logos, it might be thought on that basis that
our verb does mean “express truth” or “discover truth” where logos is the operative
agent. But the context of speech is not necessarily involved in the texts we have
cited from the N. E.—it is the domain of dianoia, thought. And in the Posterior
Analytics 100 b 6, the context is similar to that of the N. E., for it concerns, not
speech but the mental powers or thinking states (dianoian hexeōn) by which we can
engage in alētheuein. Even in the N. E., moreover, nous does not employ logos but
engages most pre-eminently in alētheuein.
Heidegger treated this word in the Introduction to the Sophist lectures.
Section 3 gives his etymological rendering of a-lētheia as “un-concealment” or
“un-coveredness” [nicht-mehr-verborgen-sein, aufgedecktsein], p. 16. Thereby,
what-is is initially concealed and needs an active intervention to uncover it, which,
Heidegger explains, the Greeks thought was generally accomplished through speech,
logos, p. 17. Alētheia, then, is the goal accomplished by an act of alētheuein.
Heidegger says in the Introduction that he will not translate the verb, but he offers
“uncoveringness” [aufdeckendsein] as a paraphrase. He summarizes (pp. 17–19):
by denying or affirming, we make manifest what-is [dēloun] or we let it be seen
[apophansis] and this achievement of our logos is alētheuein. But logos does not
need to be uttered through the tongue; it informs various types of action too, many
modes of our life and practice, detailed in N. E. VI.
Now, to analyze this further: (a) Heidegger treats alētheia as a composite
word, a negative word, an alpha-privative added to a root -lēthē; (b) it appears as
adjective, noun and verb; (c) the roots -lēthē, -lath- and lanthanomai signify “be
hidden,” “concealment,” and “forgetting”; (d) the composite word signified “uncon-
cealment,” rendered by a number of different German words, and therefore English

9
Terence Irwin, Hackett Books. Some other versions: “…the soul possesses truth…” (W. D. Ross,
Oxford translation); “…the soul expresses truth…” (Martin Ostwald, Library of Liberal Arts).
10
Op. cit, p. 51, note 24.
11
E.g., Theodore Kisiel (1993), 250, writes “the soul trues,” but that violates English too much.
On the Manifold Meaning of Truth in Aristotle 233

ones as well, varying from “revealedness” to “unveiling” to “disclosing;” (e) this

affords the concept of truth in the Greek language and Greek philosophy; and in
conclusion (f) when alēthēs is attributed to the soul, to one of the intellectual virtues
or to a statement, it means “true,” but when attributed to the object it means “uncon-
cealed.” So truth arises through tearing off a veil; truth was always preceded by a
concealment enshrouding the subject. And most centrally, unconcealment always
preserves some relationship to concealment; it does not abolish it utterly; there is
some sort of continuity between them, and, in consequence, some continuity
between truth and untruth. This is no antiquarian point—Greek philosophy with its
concept of truth is to be exemplary for us and our philosophy.
In his phenomenological works, especially Being and Time, Heidegger could-
show that there are philosophical grounds for understanding truth as disclosure
or uncovering or revealing. The phenomenology can be appraised as it stands
independently of Greek scholarship: Heidegger’s view is not generated entirely out
of his exegesis of the Greek words. But we must still ask whether he is right on the
points we itemized above, from (a) to (f). In addition, of course,—and that is the
point of this paper—we need to ask what role his understanding of the Greek words
plays in his textual exegesis and in his philosophical argument. His work has not
stood unchallenged. On (a), Friedländer, in the second edition of his book on
Plato12 said that there was no clear evidence that this was an alpha-privative word;
it is likely that “alēthēs has nothing to do with -lēthē, -lath-, lanth” (p. 222). Thus
we could hardly find “a passage in which the object of the verb could be (let alone
must be) the ‘unhidden’” (p. 223). Thus Friedländer disposes of points (d), (e) and
(f) as well.
But his analysis was refuted by a paper by Heitsch, a Göttingen classicist, that
appeared in 1962.13 In a matter such as this, as he explains, the objective history of
word-formation, what is usually called etymology, is not as important as the under-
standing which the ancient authors (whose texts we possess) had of the relationship
of the words they used, how, for example they treated the relationship of alētheia to
lēthē, -lath-, lanth, etc. And from non-philosophers from Homer on down through
the tragedians, historians and rhetoricians he assembles about 20 passages showing
that alētheia is an alpha-privative word: the word-relations in the texts show that
the authors placed it in strong contrast to lēthē and its cognates. He then adds about
a dozen quotations from Plato showing the same thing, e.g. Apology 17a “…they
almost made me forget who I was [epelathomēn]…and yet they hardly uttered a
word of truth [alēthes].” The grammarians of later antiquity who codified this
relationship were only reflecting the word-use that had prevailed for centuries
(Heitsch, p. 26); moreover, this interpretation of alētheia has been standard in
classical scholarship since Johannes Classen in the 1850s (p.24). Other papers, too,
have appeared14 that establish that alētheia does mean truth and that it is a privative

12
Paul Friedländer (1954, 1958), 222–3.
13
Ernst Heitsch (1962), 24–33.
14
For instance, Heribert Boeder (1959), 82–112.
234 G. Nicholson

construction. When Friedländer came to issue a third edition of his book,15 he

acknowledged (pp. 234–7, 386–7) that Heitsch had established his case; the
reproaches against Heidegger were unjustified.

3 The Truth of Statements

One year after the Sophist lectures, 1925–1926, Heidegger offered a lecture course,
Logic: The Question of Truth.16 In these lectures, Heidegger makes it plain that he is
not concerned with syllogistic logic or symbolic logic but rather a set of questions
that he calls “philosophical logic,” a discipline that would coincide with what Kant
and Husserl called “transcendental logic,” dealing with fundamental questions
concerning the grounds of knowledge, intentionality and of course truth (GA 21,
pp. 7–9). In earlier studies,17 he had dealt with the so-called theory of judgment
(Urteilstheorie) but in the main section of this course he uses the terminology of the
statement (Aussage), in addressing the question of truth. How can a statement be
true, or also false? He bases his account (pp. 127–195) on Aristotle’s explanations of
truth in de Interpretatione, especially Chapters 1–4 and Metaphysics, especially
Gamma 7, Epsilon 4, and Theta, 10. The interests of the Ethics seem at first to be
very far away. Yet we shall see that his interpretations of the Greek words and the
Aristotle texts bring the inquiries closer together.
Logic is the study of the logos; if we call this provisionally a sentence, we soon
see that the particular kind of logos that makes a declaration, the logos apophan-
tikos, is Aristotle’s theme in the treatise: this is the Aussage, the statement (de Int.
17a 1–4). It has a crucial but intricate relationship to the True and the False. The
treatise began by clarifying that a single verb or noun could not be true or false, but
only a combination or separation of those two; a mere noun (“goat-stag”) may sig-
nify something, but is capable of truth or falsity only where a verb is added, and that
could be just the verb for “being,” e.g., “is” or “is not.” Chapter 4 narrows the discus-
sion down further to the statement, employing the criterion of being possibly true or
possibly false. A request, an order, may be expressed in a sentence (logos) but is
not a statement (apophantikos) because there is no alētheuein or pseudesthai in
it (as Heidegger makes plain, p. 130, many other kinds of utterance too fall away by

15
Friedländer (1964). Not yet translated.
16
Heidegger (1976, in English 2010). Joseph Kockelmans takes his start from this lecture course
in his book On the Truth of Being; he also treats it in the paper we mentioned that he published
in 1986.
17
Heidegger’s researches on logic began with his doctoral dissertation of 1913 on the psychologis-
tic current of the nineteenth century, continued with his habilitation thesis of 1916 on Medieval
logic, with the closest engagement with Neo-Kantian and phenomenological logics and episte-
mologies coming in the years before and during his teaching activity in Freiburg and Marburg. In
the years after 1926, we have many treatments in logic in GA 24, GA 26, GA 38 and GA 45. An
excellent orientation can be found in Mohanty 1988.
On the Manifold Meaning of Truth in Aristotle 235

this criterion: questions, wishes, and so on). In pp. 127–135, Heidegger derives
from Aristotle’s text two implications that are of the greatest consequence for logical
theory. First of all, it is the double possibility, being true or being false, that counts
for this view of the statement; it is not sufficient to observe that a statement is what
is true. Since bivalence (T or F?) is the essential mark of a statement, it follows that,
in logic, truth and falsehood belong under the head of possibility (p. 129). That point
is also noted by Crivelli (p. 85). The second implication brings a corrective to the
common assumption in logical theory that the statement is the home, or location
(Ort), of truth (and falsehood), i.e., that “True” or “False” are to be predicated of
statements, or that the statement is a truth-bearer. Aristotle has shown, on the con-
trary, that (possible) truth and (possible) falsehood are the home, or location, of the
statement: Satz ist nicht der Ort der Wahrheit, sondern Wahrheit der Ort des Satzes
(p. 135). This emerges from the precise words that Aristotle uses at 17a 2–3,18 which
Heidegger understands (p. 129) to mean that it is truth that defines the statement, not
vice-versa.19 Logical theory errs by considering the statement to be a truth-bearer;
rather we need to recognize that the true and the false are statement-bearers.
This relationship can be comprehended by virtue of the special senses of the Greek
words in the text. The verb alētheuein means “uncovering, removing the con-
cealment of something” and its contrary pseudesthai means “deceiving, covering up”
(pp. 131–2). And, moreover, the operative term for the statement, apophantikos,
apophansis, means “letting something be seen” (aufweisen, sehen-lassen). We are
then able to say that only the discourse that uncovers or covers up achieves a
letting-be-seen.20 We grasp what is apophantic out of the double possibility: true or
false, revealing or concealing. Though Crivelli recognizes the point about possibility,
he remains with the logical theory that sees statements—or sentences, in his
terminology—as truth-bearers (p. 87; not the only truth-bearers, to be sure, for he
includes objects, pragmata). Heidegger goes further (as he will do in SZ, Sec. 33)
in deriving from the apophantic character of the statement its further functions as
predicating and communicating.
A result of this reading of de Int. is that Aristotle has left truth itself (and falsehood)
undefined in this treatise. We must look at the texts where he seems to define them,
in the Metaphysics.
Met. Gamma 7 has always been taken as locus classicus on this point. In the
Oxford translation, it reads
To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that
it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true; so that he who says of anything that it is, or that
it is not, will say what is true or what is false (alētheusei ē pseusetai)—1011b 26–8.

18
Apophantikos ou pas, all’ en hō to alētheuein ē pseudesthai hyparchei.
19
“Der Satz ist definiert mit Rücksicht auf Wahrheit und nicht umgekehrt,Wahrheit kommt vom
Satz her.”
20
“Aufweisend sehen lassen (Aussage) ist nur das Reden, darin das Entdecken oder Verdecken
vorkommt” 132. Several variants of this point appear 133–5.
236 G. Nicholson

Heidegger treats this text on pp. 162–170. There are several critical points he
emphasizes. First, that we must reject any relation of copying or picturing [Abbild]
between the statement and that which is. In part, this is based on his understanding
of legein (to say) as the apophantic letting-be-seen, the view that already guided
his reading of de Int. He is particularly intent on warding off any theory that puts
an intermediate picture in between the statement and that which is: the statement
is directly engaged with the thing, no matter how far away it might be. A causal
relation such as picturing is out of the question. He claims that the Abbild
idea arose through a faulty application of de Int., Chapter 1; that chapter dealt
causally with perception, vocalic sounds and writing, but it did not seek to explain
truth thereby.
Secondly, and this point is connected, he denies that we can assign a “correspon-
dence theory of truth” to this passage of Aristotle. Certainly the statement stands in
relation to what-is, but its relation is the active one of entdecken or verdecken—it
reaches out to the thing itself, either to unveil it or to veil it. Here the character
of truth and falsity as possibility shows its effect; the statement may be true or
false. The searchlight can reveal an airplane in the sky, though it doesn’t resemble
it; the searchlight can also reveal the absence of airplanes. Those two possibilities
can appear as prototypes for positive and negative assertions. The searchlight
cuts through, and overcomes, the darkness that has concealed airplanes, or, as it
may be, that has concealed the absence of airplanes. But the searchlight can miss a
plane that is already there shrouded in the darkness, and this is a prototype for false
assertion. The action of uncovering cannot be a copying or correspondence because
it incorporates as its permanent starting point the cover, the veil; it has in that way a
necessary connection to possible untruth.
In the same section, p. 164, Heidegger treats another locus classicus from Met.
Epsilon 4:
The true judgment affirms where the subject and predicate really are combined, and denies
where they are separated, while the false judgment has the opposite of this allocation
(1027b 20–22).

The grammatical terms “subject” and “predicate” are not in the Greek text,
which speaks of “that which is combined” and “that which lies separated,”
referring to the state of the things, not of the words. Heidegger calls attention to
the circumstance that combination-or-separation (synthesis and diairesis) are
found not only in the logos but also in the things (en tois pragmasin—b 26), so
that the truth or falsity of the logos (with its combination of terms) is grounded
in the state of the things. But the chapter also adds a difficult modification, hard
to reconcile:
…for falsity and truth are not in things but in thought…the combination and the separation
are in thought and not…in the things… (1027b 25–31)

This idea has also prompted great controversy regarding the last chapter of Book
Theta and so we shall take the point up in that context. Since Chapter 10 of Theta
introduces another dimension of truth altogether, we shall discuss the Epsilon text
along with it. Heidegger devotes 12 pages here to Met. Theta 10, but 5 years later, in
On the Manifold Meaning of Truth in Aristotle 237

a 1930 summer semester course called The Essence of Human Freedom: An

Introduction to Philosophy,21 he gave a much fuller treatment (40 pages), guided by the
same questions, so we shall cite the later text.22

4 Being as Truth

Sec. 44 of Being and Time was devoted to truth, and it began by documenting the
ancient connection between the question of being and the theme of truth, so that at
certain points in Aristotle the two virtually coincide. Heidegger quotes from the
Metaphysics, Book Alpha, 983b 2 to show that while the “science that we are seeking”
is concerned above all with being, (see also Gamma, 1003a 21), it can also be said
in the very next line that it is the study of truth, alētheia—983b 3 (see also 993b 17;
984b 10; 993b 17 and 20—all cited in the first paragraph of Sec.44, quotations from
the first two books of the Metaphysics). Some of Aristotle’s remarks are applied to
his predecessors who were investigating the causal powers of fire and earth, for
instance (984b 10), or generally what causes and principles operate in the world
(988a 18). He repeatedly refers to these as inquiries into alētheia. But such inquiries
were not focussed on epistemological questions—what the early philosophers
sought was not a theory of judgment, as Heidegger underlines (p. 213). Alētheia is
interchangeable with being or nature in Books Alpha and Alpha Elattōn, and indeed
W. D. Ross regularly renders it “reality” in his Oxford translation of these books.
The first two books of the Metaphysics speak of wisdom, sophia or philosophy, as
something sought or aimed for, and the same holds for what this wisdom would
attain—the truth is what philosophers have always been seeking. This provides a
reason for inquiring into that text of the Metaphysics that explores the convergence
of being and truth most thoroughly—Theta, Chapter 10.
Although Crivelli does not follow Heidegger in understanding truth as uncon-
cealedness, he does recognize that, for Aristotle, truth holds not only for statements
and thought, but also for what is (pp. 46–62); as we proceed, we’ll review some of
what he has to say about the truth of that which is.
The opening of Book Gamma and of Epsilon pointed us towards a discussion of
being, to on, and a good part of that inquiry has been accomplished in Books Zeta,
Eta and Theta. They showed how being is realized principally as substance, ousia,
in relation to the subordinate categories; and then they showed how being is realized
supremely as actuality, energeia, in relation to potentiality. But then, to the surprise
of many commentators, the end of Theta, Chapter 10 proposes to discuss being “in
the pre-eminent sense as the true and the false,” to de kuriōtata on alēthes ē pseudos,
11051b 1–2. Unlike some commentators,23 Heidegger accepts the traditional text

21
Heidegger (1982, 2002).
22
This is also the main source for the Kockelmans essay, mentioned above, of 1986.
23
Heidegger himself refers to Jaeger (1948), treats Theta 10 on pp. 204–5, though in earlier works
he treated it even more critically; Ross (1924), 2 volumes, commentary ad loc; and a number of
older German scholars. I’ll add a remark later on about Crivelli.
238 G. Nicholson

(see pp. 82–87). We’ll treat some of the controversy about it after an overview of
Heidegger’s understanding of the whole chapter.
The lines we quoted just above from Epsilon 4 (1027b 20–22) are closely echoed
here in 1051b 3–5:
Whoever holds that which is divided to be divided, and that which is combined to be
combined, says the truth, and what is false is to reverse this relation that is in the things.

But Epsilon 4 seemed to infer from this point that the topic of truth did not pertain
to a discussion of being. The present chapter, however, takes a different view: not
only does the topic of truth pertain to being—it is the pre-eminent sense thereof.
Commentators have sometimes found great difficulty in this juxtaposition. But
Heidegger undertakes a fundamental distinction (pp. 90–1, 105–6):
(i) What is under discussion in Epsilon 4 is the truth of the statement, or truth in
thinking, en dianoiai.
(ii) But Theta 10 is treating being as truth, as was proclaimed in the opening lines
of Chapter 10 b 1–2. Thus there is truth and falsehood in the things, epi tōn
pragmatōn, b 2.
Heidegger is putting to use his double understanding of alētheia, as set out in
pp. 87–9. A statement or a thought may engage in alētheuein, entdecken, disclosing,
revealing (Epsilon 4). But there is also an Entdecktheit, Unverborgenheit,
unconcealedness, that is proper to things or beings—ein Charakter des Seienden
selbst, p. 88 (Theta 10). Therefore this chapter brings Book Theta to an appropriate
conclusion: the theme of actuality that occupies Aristotle in this Book reaches its
culmination in the insight that the pre-eminent realization of actuality is in the
unconcealedness of what-is. Though Crivelli does not explore the meanings of the
word alētheia, he is able to reconcile Epsilon 4 with Theta 10 in a way that is very
much like Heidegger’s (pp. 62–66).
At 1051b 6–9, Aristotle says:
You are not pale because we truly think you are, but because you are pale we who say this
are telling the truth.

There is a combining of Pale with Face in the human being that deserves to count
as truth, one expression of alēthes on; this is the grounding for the statement that
alētheuei (Heidegger, p. 91). The question that Aristotle, according to Heidegger,
p. 92, is posing at b 5–6 is: How is it that some being or thing should be true?
And Aristotle’s answer is that this will depend upon the character of the being of
these things.
Aristotle sums up (b 9–15) different kinds of circumstance: some things are
always combined (triangle’s angles = two right angles), some things never (the diag-
onal is never commensurable), some things vary in that respect (face may be pale or
sunburned). In the first class is being; in the second, not-being; in the third is the
accidental. But the main line of Heidegger’s interpretation becomes clear from p. 99
onwards: he sees a steady mounting-up in this chapter. Merely accidental things are
almost untrue, almost equivalent to not-being (on p. 95, Heidegger quotes a text
On the Manifold Meaning of Truth in Aristotle 239

from Epsilon 2 to that effect—1026b 21). The things that are necessarily connected,
that cannot be other than they are, are more true than they. The uniting power at
work in yielding the nondivision in such a thing is the presence, the parousia, of one
feature with another. What bestows the power, what is unitive, is the being of beings.
So we read, p. 92, that an entity acquires this truth owing to its very being, so that
being-true is a character of the being, einai, of beings, ta onta. And then, at the head
of this series stand the things that are incomposite, asyntheta b 17–35; they are even
more indivisible than the things that exhibit necessary connections. They are utterly
simple. This group of things is identified by Heidegger with the principles and
grounds of all things [archai kai aitiai], citing a few texts from other books of the
Metaphysics and de Anima (pp. 99–104).24 (He does not connect them, as commen-
tators generally do, with the intelligences that move the heavenly spheres.) Still, the
point of this mounting series, ascending to subjects that are utterly simple, is an
increasing gain in truth, and equivalently an increasing gain in being. The simplicity
of the principle is such that it can only be apprehended simply, what Aristotle
here and elsewhere calls a touch, thigein, not by a judgment of dianoia (in other
texts, e.g., N. E. VI, Aristotle attributes this grasp to nous). The simple has the
highest form of truth in that it is not vulnerable to mistakes: you see it or you
don’t. Correspondingly, such subjects have the highest form of being: pure
actuality, energeia, without any potentiality (Heidegger maintains, p. 100, that
Aristotle infers these subjects’ perfection of being from their perfection of truth, not
the other way around).
It is apparent that Heidegger’s way of reading Theta 10 depends on his reading
the word alēthes at b 23 and b 33 in an ontological rather than logical sense, i.e.,
attributing it to these subjects as their unconcealedness and not to our alētheuein
through nous (see pp. 104–9). Only that permits him to endorse the statement that
stood at the head of the chapter, that being qua truth is the pre-eminent sense of
being. On his reading, this unconcealedness is the highest exemplification of the
being of beings that Theta has taught us to understand as energeia, actuality. Ross,25
on the other hand, reads the text at b 23 as referring to our apprehending of the
incomposite things through nous, while reading b 33, in accord with Heidegger, as
referring to the truth of the being of those things. Kockelmans follows Heidegger in
both readings (pp. 153–156). To conclude: it might be possible to construe both
these occurrences of alēthes non-dichotomously, as comprehending both the truth
of our nous and the unconcealedness of the things. For there is a suggestion that the
simplicity and actuality of the things bring about the mode of simple apprehension
practiced by nous. It seems that Crivelli too (pp. 64–66) is able to assign truth in
these passages both to thoughts and to things.
All along, Heidegger has been resisting the readings of Ross and Jaeger, the
former excising the word kuriōtata from the text, the latter emasculating it so as to
mean popular or common. Crivelli (pp. 234–7), following an alternative suggestion

24
Met.Kappa, 1059b 35; α, 993 b 28 f.; de An. 430a 26, b 6.
25
Op. cit., II, pp. 276–7.
240 G. Nicholson

of Ross and others, wants to connect the kuriōtata not with to on but with alēthes.
Thereby, Aristotle would be saying not that truth constitutes the pre-eminent sense
of being, but rather that the pre-eminent sense of truth is identified with being. But
I believe that this is not the natural, grammatical way to read the line in question.
Moreover, little is gained by such a shift. If we have understood that the actuality of
a being is expressed in its unconcealedness, it does not matter very much whether a
high rank is assigned to the one or to the other.

5 The Aristotelian Equivocals

A pervasive feature of Aristotle’s philosophizing is his attention to things which,

while they differ in certain ways, have the same name and not by mere accident but
because of some common feature—to identify which is a worthwhile undertaking
for the philosopher. They are called “things said in different ways” [pollachōs lego-
mena], and “equivocals” [homōnyma]. The whole of Metaphysics Delta is devoted
to 30 of them. The most famous of them is being, to on, treated in Delta 7 in its four
senses. As for the character of this equivocity itself, the most famous explanation is
in Gamma 2:
Everything which is healthy is related to health, one thing in the sense that it preserves
health, another in the sense that it produces it, another in the sense that it is a symptom of
health, another because it is capable of it. And that which is medical is relative to the medi-
cal art, one thing being called medical because it possesses it, another because it is naturally
adapted to it, another because it is a function of the medical art (1003a 34-b 4).

It has emerged that there are different kinds of equivocity, the largest and most
important branch being generally known today as “equivocity pros hen,” or focal
meaning, where medicines, foods, exercises and bodies can all be called healthy
because each has its peculiar relation to one thing, the state of the organism that is
their common focus.26 Aristotle’s doctrine bore very important fruit in the twentieth
century owing to the mediation of Franz Brentano’s book On the Several Senses of
Being in Aristotle.27 It came into the hands of the young Heidegger around 1907,
starting him on his way. Brentano was alert to Aristotle’s intention to establish
substance, ousia, as the focal meaning of “being,” but Heidegger’s later testimonies
make it abundantly clear that it was the question posed by the many senses of
“being” that mattered to him more than the answer.
Aristotle did treat “the false” (to pseudos) as such an equivocal in Delta 29, a text
earlier than Theta. He shows three kinds of subjects that can be false: false things,
pragmata, false accounts, logoi, and false persons, anthrōpoi. It would not seem
that the criteria are exactly the same for the three cases, and we would not expect
them to be so if this is an equivocal; nevertheless, it is clear that in all three cases the

26
See Joseph Owens (1963), Chapter 3.
27
Brentano (1862, 1975).
On the Manifold Meaning of Truth in Aristotle 241

contrary is the True. The terms treating the false things resemble some lines of
Theta 10; some aspects of the false logoi recall de Int; and there is even a faint
echo of the N. E. in the section on false persons. So it does seem that there could
be a mirror image of this text: Truth as an Aristotelian equivocal. Though such a
treatment does not exist, the argument of this paper is that such a treatment could be
organized around alētheia as the focal meaning for logical, ethical, metaphysical
and psychological truth.

References

Aristotle. 1941a. Metaphysics. Trans. W. D. Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Aristotle. 1941b. de Anima. Trans. J. A. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Aristotle. 1925. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. W. D. Ross. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Aristotle. 1962. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Martin Ostwald. New York: Library of Liberal Arts.
Aristotle. 1999. Nicomachean Ethics. 2nd ed. Trans. Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Boeder, Heribert. 1959. Der frühgriechische Wortgebrauch von Logos und Alētheia. Archiv für
Begriffsgeschichte 4: 82–112.
Brentano, Franz. 1862. Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles. Freiburg
i. Br: Herder.
Brentano, Franz. 1975. On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle. Trans. R. George. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Crivelli, Paolo. 2004. Aristotle on truth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Friedländer, Paul. 1954. Platon, vol. I. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Friedländer, Paul. 1958. Plato. Trans. H. Meyerhoff. New York: Harper.
Friedländer, Paul. 1964. Platon. Dritte Auflage, Vol. 1. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Heidegger, Martin. 1976. Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, GA 21, ed. Walter Biemel. Frankfurt
am Main: Klostermann.
Heidegger, Martin. 1982. Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit. Einleitung in die Philosophie. GA
31, ed. H. Tietjen. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Heidegger, Martin. 1983. Einführung in die Metaphysik, Gesamtausgabe [GA], Vol. 40, ed.
P. Jaeger. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Heidegger, Martin. 1992. Platon: Sophistes, GA 19, ed. Ingeborg Schüssler. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann.
Heidegger, Martin. 1997. Plato’s Sophist. Trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schuwer. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 2000. Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. G. Fried and R. Polt. New Haven:
Yale University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 2002. The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy. Trans.
Ted Sadler. London: Continuum.
Heidegger, Martin. 2005a. Phänomenologische Interpretationen Ausgewählter Abhandlungen des
Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik, GA 62, ed. Günther Neumann. Frankfurt am Main:
Klostermann.
Heidegger, Martin. 2005b. Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristotle (Anzeige der her-
meneutischen Situation). In Phänomenologische Interpretationen Ausgewählter Abhandlungen
des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik, ed. Heidegger, 343–399.
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University Press.
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Jaeger, Werner. 1948. Aristotle: Fundamentals of the history of his development. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
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Kisiel, Theodore. 1993. The genesis of Heidegger’s Being and time. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
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of the American Philosophy Association. Supplement to Volume 61.1. 5–26.
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Oxford: Clarendon Press.
The Twofold Character of Truth: Heidegger,
Davidson, Tugendhat

Jeff Malpas

In what circle are we moving here? It is the eukukleos alētheiē,

the well-rounded non-concealment itself, thought as the clearing

— Joseph Kockelmans, On the Truth of Being, 281

Abstract The concept of truth as aletheia, or ‘unconcealment,’ is one of the founding

concepts in Heidegger’s thinking. Yet it also appears to be a concept that is as prob-
lematic as it is central. Ernst Tugendhat, in particular, famously criticized Heidegger’s
identification of truth with aletheia in a way that seems to have led Heidegger eventu-
ally to abandon that identification. Beginning with Kockelman’s own account of the
idea of truth as unconcealment, I want to re-examine the questions at issue here, look-
ing particularly at Tugendhat’s criticisms, but also drawing on the account of truth to
be found in the work of Donald Davidson. My intention will be to show why it remains
the case that aletheia has to be understood as indeed a mode of truth; that understand-
ing this involves understanding a certain transcendental-topological structure as
pertaining to aletheia, thereby understanding truth as standing in an essential relation
to place or topos; and that the fundamental role played by truth as aletheia does not
curtail, but itself constitutes the ground for, genuine questioning or critique.

The concept of truth as aletheia, translated by Kockelmans as non-concealment, or

as I shall call it unconcealment, is one of the founding concepts in Heidegger’s
thinking. It is a concept present in his early thought as well as in his later. Kockelmans

J. Malpas (*)
Distinguished Professor, University of Tasmania, Sandy Bay Campus,
Geography-Geology Bldg, Rm 328, Private Bag 78, Hobart, TAS 7001, Australia
e-mail: jeff.malpas@utas.edu.au

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 243

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_14,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
244 J. Malpas

himself refers to Walter Biemel’s claim that taken as a whole Heidegger’s thinking
has a double focus: being and aletheia,1 and the claim is clearly one with which
Kockelmans himself is largely in agreement. It is, however, the same idea of truth
that appears here that was famously criticised by Ernst Tugendhat2 in a way that
seems eventually to have led Heidegger to abandon the use of ‘truth’ to refer to
aletheia.3 The idea of truth as unconcealment is thus central, but also apparently,
problematic. Indeed, in Tugendhat’s analysis, it is not merely that Heidegger’s
characterization of aletheia as a mode of truth is without foundation, but that
Heidegger’s very deployment of the concept is indicative of the limitation that
Heidegger’s thinking places on the possibility for genuinely critical engagement.
Beginning with Kockelman’s own account of the idea of truth as unconcealment, I
want to re-examine the questions at issue here, looking particularly to the way
Tugendhat’s criticisms have played been taken up in contemporary discussion, but
also drawing, as I have elsewhere,4 on the account of truth to be found in the work
of Donald Davidson. My intention will be to show why it remains the case that
aletheia has to be understood as indeed a mode of truth; that understanding this
involves understanding a certain transcendental-topological structure as pertaining
to aletheia, thereby understanding truth as standing in an essential relation to place
or topos5; and that the fundamental role played by truth as aletheia does not curtail,
but itself constitutes the ground for, genuine questioning or critique.

In his ‘Introduction’ to On the Truth of Being, Kockelmans sets out an account of

Heidegger’s thinking of truth as this is developed in both Being and Time, from
1927, and in the essay “On the Essence of Truth,” from 1930. While these two
works both belong to the period of Heidegger’s early thinking (“On the Essence of
Truth” usually being taken to mark the beginning of the turn to the later work),

1
Kockelmans (1984), 1. My own claim is that the focus on being and truth are together encom-
passed by the focus on place.
2
See Tugendhat (1994), 83–97.
3
See Heidegger (1972), 69—the original essay is in Zur Sachen des Denkens (Heidegger, 1969).
Although there has been some controversy as to the extent to which Tugendhat’s critique was
recognized by Heidegger himself (a controversy briefly discussed by Lafont (2000), 116–117), it
seems clear that Heidegger was indeed aware of, and responsive to, the issues Tugendhat raises (as
indicated by the 1964 letter from Heidegger to Tugendhat cited by Wrathall (2010), 37–38).
4
See especially Malpas (1991). Unfortunately, I do not discuss the Tugendhat criticism explicitly
here, just as Kockelmans does not discuss it explicitly in On the Truth of Being. Although, in hind-
sight, it would have been useful to have taken up the Tugendhat discussion directly in this earlier
work, my failure to do so was partly a function of the fact that those criticisms simply do not have
the same salience from a Davidsonian perspective as they may appear to have from the
Heideggerian—see my discussion in Sect. 5 below.
5
See Malpas (2006), esp. Chapter Four.
The Twofold Character of Truth: Heidegger, Davidson, Tugendhat 245

Kockelmans’ presentation indicates how they nevertheless provide the basis for the
understanding of truth even as it continues into the later thinking. Heidegger’s
thinking of truth in these earlier works provides, in fact, the essential preliminary to
Kockelmans’ reflections on the later thinking.
The view of truth that appears in Heidegger, and which Kockelmans delineates
with some care, is a view of truth as essentially twofold: truth names both truth as
correctness—the ‘adequation’ of sentence to thing or of sentence to world—and it
names truth as unconcealment. The underlying argument here can be put quite sim-
ply, and in a way that need not depend exclusively on the language of either Being
and Time or “On the Essence of Truth.” Truth is conventionally understood as cor-
rectness. Yet in order for a sentence to stand in the right relation to that which it is
about such that the sentence can be said to be ‘correct,’ not only must the sentence
already have picked out something as that about which it speaks, letting it appear as
something in relation to which the sentence can be true or false, but both sentence
and thing must already stand in a relation of accessibility to one another. Inasmuch
as the sentence allows the thing to appear, so a certain capacity for unconcealment
is already given in the nature of the sentence—language, one might say, is already
disclosive—but the capacity of the sentence to uncover in this way also depends on
that mode of unconcealment that allows the uncovering of both sentence and thing.
Truth thus names the correctness of the sentence, and it names the original uncon-
cealment that makes such correctness a possibility.
Although much of Tugendhat’s presentation of the Heideggerian account mirrors
the position just set out, Tugendhat’s critique tends to overlook Heidegger’s insis-
tence on truth as indeed encompassing both correctness and unconcealment.
Consequently, one of the responses that can be and has been made to Tugendhat
consists in drawing attention to the twofold character of truth that is at issue here.6
Yet Cristina Lafont and William H. Smith have argued that not only does Heidegger
himself not offer any adequate refutation of Tugendhat’s critique, but neither has
anyone else, and the reason for this, so they claim, lies in a failure to appreciate the
nature of Tugendhat’s argument—an argument that is not rebutted merely by an
assertion of the twofold character of truth. Thus Smith writes that: “no one has
yet formulated a successful reply to Tugendhat because the force of his critique is
continually misplaced, and therefore the full-force of his objections remains
unaddressed.”7 As Lafont and Smith view matters, the real question at issue, a ques-
tion that remains even if we accept the distinction between correctness and uncon-
cealment, is why unconcealment should itself be understood as a form of truth?
Why, for instance, should we not rather treat the concept of truth as just a matter of
correctness, and if we are to take unconcealment as the ground for the possibility
of truth, treat unconcealment as something other than truth? Thus with regard to
unconcealment as it stands in contrast to correctness, Cristina Lafont asks “what
justification and what significance does it have that Heidegger chooses ‘truth’ of all

6
See for instance, Wrathall (2010), 35.
7
Smith (2007), 157.
246 J. Malpas

words, to designate this other phenomenon?”8 The questions put by Lafont and by
Smith may be thought to take on a special significance in the light of Heidegger’s
own apparent change of position on this matter: to what extent, one might ask, does
this change of position arise from an inability to provide the justification after which
Lafont asks?9
The objection that Lafont and Smith restate in Tugendhat’s name depends on the
idea that unconcealment lacks a feature that is characteristically associated with
truth in its normal usage: its normativity. In its ordinary usage, truth is contrasted
with falsity, and any claim to truth is always open to critical assessment, and so to
being judged as true or false. Even if we use truth to refer to the way in the appear-
ance of something correlates with the nature of the thing (as when one speaks of a
‘true’ friend as someone who not only presents themselves as a friend, but who
actually is one—truth as genuine-ness), still even this usage seems to operate within
a framework in which something can fail to be truthful only in virtue of appearing
in a way other than it is, and so in a way that depends upon some notion of ‘authen-
tic’ and inauthentic’ appearance that can be normatively construed.10 Yet no possible
failure of truthfulness, and so no possibility of critical assessment, seems to operate with
regard to the truth of unconcealment. In fact, this is already indicated by the simple
fact that unconcealment is not a form of ‘claiming’ or asserting (not even in the
derivative sense in which an appearance might be seen to carry some sort of asser-
toric content), but rather provides the ground on which claims or assertions can be
made and be assessed.11

8
LaFont (2000), 116. Lafont’s query echoes the Tugendhat’s questioning concerning: “With what
right and with what meaning Heidegger chooses the word ‘truth’ to characterize his metatranscen-
dental reference back [to unconcealment],” (Tugendhat, 1994, 84).
9
According to Wrathall, not at all—instead, given the way Heidegger’s usage deliberately went
against conventional ways of thinking, his apparent change of position was “nothing more than a
pragmatic response to the refusal to pay attention to his warnings” (Wrathall, 2010, 37). My own
reading largely agrees with Wrathall on this point, although, as will be evident below, I see it as a
more problematic response than does Wrathall. Having said this, however, it remains the case that
he posing of the original question concerning justification is a useful starting point for inquiring
into the matters at issue.
10
Consequently, one cannot adequately respond to Tugendhat by arguing that the notion of truth as
correctness represents only one of a range of possible meanings—although truth may be said to
have an application outside of the linguistic according to which truth is understood as ‘faithfulness’,
such a sense of truth can itself be construed in terms of the correlation of word with deed, of prom-
ise with fulfilment, of semblance with reality, in a way that also lends itself to being understood in
terms of something like correctness (especially as connected with correspondence).
11
In this respect, it seems to me mistaken to attempt to respond to Tugendhat by arguing that there
is a properly normative dimension that operates in relation to unconcealment—something that
seems to be attempted by Smith, (2007), 174–177, and also, to some extent (although in a very
different way), by Daniel Dahlstrom—see Dahlstrom (2001), 419–423. This is an issue to which I
shall return, however, in Sect. 5 below, since although unconcealment cannot itself carry any nor-
mative element (since it is what makes normativity possible), this does not mean that the idea of
truth as unconcealment is beyond normative assessment (essentially the point Dahlstrom contests)
nor that we cannot critically engage with particular modes of unconcealment (the point Smith
takes up).
The Twofold Character of Truth: Heidegger, Davidson, Tugendhat 247

Given that unconcealment is not normatively or critically constrained in this way,

the question then arises, not merely how it can be understood as a form of truth, but
why it should be so considered in the first place. Moreover, at this point, the argu-
ment can be seen to have an added bite. Unconcealment seems to function in a way
that limits critical engagement—the particular mode of unconcealment that is the
ground for any specific practice of assertion cannot itself be subjected to critical
questioning. As Tugendhat comments: “If truth means unconcealment…then this
means that an understanding of world in general is opened up but not that it is put to
the test.”12 In this light, Heidegger’s position seems to depend, not on a taking of
questioning to the most fundamental level, but rather on a radical limiting of ques-
tioning: unconcealment appears as a mode of not questioning—a dimension into
which questioning does not even enter.

The problem presented by Tugendhat appears, according to Lafont and Smith, to be

clear and straightforward, and yet, in the literature, so they claim, it remains almost
entirely unaddressed or even acknowledged. That such an obvious problem could be
so completely overlooked or misunderstood ought to prompt some further query,
however, and there is, indeed, more to the situation than is apparent in LaFont’s, and
especially Smith’s, presentation. While both are right to point to Tugendhat as ask-
ing after that on which Heidegger’s identification of unconcealment with truth is
based, and right also to point to the way in which what concerns Tugendhat is the
lack of any normative dimension in the idea of unconcealment, they go too far in
claiming that this has gone entirely unappreciated in earlier discussions or that
attempts have not been made to respond to the justificatory demand at issue here. In
the case of Kockelmans, in particular, it seems that there is an awareness of the
nature of Tugendhat’s basic point, as well as an attempt to respond to it.
Kockelmans does not refer to Tugendhat directly, yet not only does he reiterate
the twofold character of truth in Heidegger, thereby reiterating the commitment to a
notion of truth as correctness (and so to truth as having a normative dimension), but
he also argues explicitly that Heidegger’s claim that unconcealment is a mode of
truth is not an arbitrary claim.13 Kockelmans thus attempts to provide consider-
ations as to why unconcealment should indeed be understood as a mode of truth.
Consequently, if one is to reject Kockelmans’ account, it cannot be on the grounds
that Kockelmans ignores the sorts of objections found in Tugendhat, but must
instead depend on viewing Kockelmans’ responses to those objections as inade-
quate or unconvincing. How one assesses Kockelmans’ position will obviously
depend on how one thinks about the concept of truth that is at issue here. It is all too
easy, in fact, for the discussion of this matter to slip into a simple confrontation

12
Tugendhat (1984), 95.
13
See Kockelmans (1994), 4.
248 J. Malpas

between opposing accounts of truth, rather than taking the form of a genuine
engagement regarding the questions at issue. The underlying question here is thus
not simply whether unconcealment is a mode of truth, but given a prima facie
understanding of truth as correctness, whether this is sufficient as a complete
account of truth, and whether what Donald Davidson calls ‘the structure and content
of truth’ is exhausted by an approach that focuses on the normativity of truth as this
operates in conjunction with the notion of correctness.
On Kockelmans account, there is no question that truth carries an important nor-
mative component that operates at the level of particular sentences and is captured
in the notion of truth as correctness. Yet the fact that truth carries such normativity
with it opens up the further issue as to the ground on which the normative assess-
ment of particular sentences is itself possible. Moreover, if there are reasons for
taking the ground for normativity as itself a mode of truth, then that will mean that
there is a mode of truth that is not open to normative assessment in the same way as
is the mode of truth associated with truth as correctness. Kockelmans claims that
there are such reasons, and thus takes truth to refer both to correctness and to that
which is the ground for the possibility of correctness, namely, unconcealment.
Kockelmans rehearses the Heideggerian argument for aletheia as that which
underlies truth as correctness: the correctness of statements is only possible on the
basis of a prior comportment towards beings that allows beings to come forth into
the open such that things can be stated of them, which statements may then be true
or false (the beings themselves providing the measure of such truth or falsity), and
this prior comportment is itself based in truth as aletheia—as unconcealment. In
addition, however, Kockelmans also makes explicit one further claim, concluding
that: “if the correctness (truth) of the statement becomes possible only through the
openness of the comportment, then that which makes the correctness first possible
must also, and with more original right, be taken as the essence of truth.”14 It is this
claim that requires further elucidation.
A key element in the argument for the identification of truth with unconcealment,
as Kockelmans understands it, is undoubtedly the idea that the inquiry into essence
is identical with the inquiry into that which makes possible. Independently of how
we view this idea, it certainly has a lengthy and respectable philosophical prove-
nance. Aristotle’s inquiries, paradigmatically set out in the Metaphysics, into the
first principles that underpin the being of things—the inquiry into what is first sub-
stance (prote ousia)—clearly depend on the idea that what determines the being of
a thing (which might be interpreted, in the language Kockelmans employs, as that
which makes it possible) is its essence, and there is a sense (although there remains
an ambiguity here also) in which the essence of the thing can bear the same name as
the thing whose essence it is. Moreover, that the essence of a thing should indeed be
called by the same name that belongs to the thing is certainly not an arbitrary sug-
gestion, but one that derives from the idea that the essence of a thing is what that

14
Ibid., 8.
The Twofold Character of Truth: Heidegger, Davidson, Tugendhat 249

thing most properly is—so the name may be said to designate, first, the essence,
and, secondarily, the thing to which the essence belongs. Truth may thus name cor-
rectness, but in its primary sense it names that which is the ground for correctness,
and it is this that is unconcealment or aletheia.
The mere fact that this argument can be reconstructed, and is indeed a type of
argument that seems to be assumed, and briefly alluded to, in Kockelmans account
shows, at the very least, that it cannot be correct to claim that there is no basis, in the
existing literature, for the claim that unconcealment is to be identified with truth.
Perhaps the argument at issue is too readily assumed, or presented in too schematic
a form, but what is surely at issue is not so much whether there is some basis for the
claim at issue, so much as whether it is an adequate basis. What more can be said,
then, to defend the adequacy of the position that Kockelmans advances? In the end,
what must be done is to show more clearly the way in which the twofold character
of truth does indeed follow even from the idea of truth as correctness. It is here that
the account of truth found in Davidson proves particularly useful, providing a per-
spective that, although very different from that to be found in Heidegger (or in
Kockelmans), nevertheless moves towards much the same conclusion. Moreover,
although there has been discussion of the apparent convergence between the
Davidsonian and Heideggerian accounts of truth,15 the possible relevance of the
Davidsonian account to Tugendhat’s objection has been largely unexplored. Before
we come to Davidson, however, there is still more to be done in order properly to
bring to light what is at issue in the twofold structure that truth presents in
Heidegger—this is especially so in relation to an aspect of that structure that is
clearly present in Heidegger’s early thinking, and that is also recognised by
Tugendhat, namely, its transcendental character.

The twofold structure that appears in Heidegger’s account of truth is not peculiar
only to his treatment of truth alone. It is, in fact, a recurrent structure in his thinking.
One can, for instance, discern a very similar structure in Heidegger’s discussion of
the concept of phenomena in the Introduction to Being and Time. There Heidegger
distinguishes between two senses of ‘phenomenon’ writing that:
…what is designated in the first signification of φαινόμενον (‘phenomenon’ as that which
shows itself) and what is designated in the second (‘phenomenon’ as semblance) are struc-
turally interconnected. Only when the meaning of something is such that it makes a preten-
sion of showing itself — that is, of being a phenomenon — can it show itself as something
which it is not, only then can it “merely look like so-and-so.” When φαινόμενον signifies

15
In addition to my own work, see especially Nulty (2006); Wrathall (2010), 40–56; and also
Okrent (2011).
250 J. Malpas

“semblance,” the primordial signification (the phenomenon as the manifest) is already

included as that upon which the second signification is founded.16

A similar structure is apparent in a much later discussion of the nature of

language. In “The Way to Language,” the title of which itself indicates a movement
that is at the centre of the essay, Heidegger attempts to find a way to language that
nevertheless already finds itself within language. As he writes:
We are here undertaking something very unusual, which we might paraphrase as follows:
we try to speak about speech qua speech. That sounds like a formula. It is intended to serve
us as a guideline on our way to language. The words: “speak, speech” are used three times
in the formula, saying something different each time and yet the Same. It is this underlying
Same which, in terms of the oneness that is the distinctive property of language, holds
together what is kept separate in the formula. To begin with, though, the formula points to
a web of relations in which we ourselves are included. The undertaking of a way to speech
is woven into a kind of speaking which intends to uncover speech itself in order to present
its as speech and to put it into words in the presentation — which is also evidence that
language itself has woven us into the speaking.17

The way to language at issue here moves between different senses of speech and
speaking, and so different senses of language, that are nevertheless essentially
bound together. In uncovering a way to language, which occurs only in and through
language, language is illuminated in all of these senses, but the uncovering of that
way is an uncovering of the originary phenomenon of language to which we
already belong—a phenomenon that Heidegger designates as Saying: “All human
language is appropriated in Saying and as such is in the strict sense of the word true
language…”.18 In each of these cases—the inquiry into the concept of the phenom-
enon, the investigation of the way to language, and also the uncovering of the
nature of truth—we find a mode of thinking that begins with what is immediately
presented (‘semblance,’ ‘speech,’ ‘correctness’) and that looks to elucidate its
nature (the conditions of its possibility) by uncovering its essential relatedness
within a larger structure (‘that which shows itself,’ ‘Saying,’ ‘unconcealment’). It
is a mode of thinking that can be understood as essentially hermeneutical in that it
does not rest content with the immediate presentation, but instead looks to uncover
the framework of significance (essentially a structure of relatedness) within which
that presentation is necessarily situated. There is an essential circularity at work
here, since it is only through the immediacy of the presentation that the larger
framework becomes at all evident (for the most part it remains withdrawn) at the
same time as the presentation is itself dependent on that larger framework—a cir-
cularity that, in traditional hermeneutics, is understood in terms of the mutual
dependence of whole and part.
The hermeneutical character of the thinking that is evident here is not merely
something repeated at different points in Heidegger’s thought, but is rather an ubiq-
uitous, one might even say a characteristic, feature of Heidegger’s thinking as a

16
Heidegger (1962), 30.
17
Heidegger (1971), 112.
18
Ibid., 133.
The Twofold Character of Truth: Heidegger, Davidson, Tugendhat 251

whole. Thus, even after Heidegger moves away from any explicit reference to
hermeneutics in his work,19 still the same essentially hermeneutical structure
remains.20 Part of what is so revolutionary about Heidegger’s thinking is, indeed, the
way in which he brings about a hermeneutic transformation of philosophical inquiry
(a transformation that, in its turn, also transforms hermeneutics). Construed as an
inquiry into that which is essential—into that which is originary, as well as that
which safeguards or preserves—ontological inquiry, in particular, can now be seen
to take the form of the uncovering of a twofold structure that encompasses both that
which is the initial focus of questioning and that which is brought forth as its proper
origin and ground. Moreover, the uncovering of what is essential here is not a matter
of the uncovering of some determinate character or entity—not a matter of identify-
ing an eidos or ousia—but is indeed the uncovering of a structure of relatedness that
unifies otherwise multiple, or at least dual, elements, and does so in a way that also
preserves their differentiation.
If the structure at issue here is hermeneutical, then it is also transcendental. In
his discussion of Heidegger’s idea of truth, Tugendhat refers to the structure of
Heidegger’s thinking as it moves from the conventional understanding of truth to
the idea of truth as unconcealment as involving a “transformed transcendental ‘ref-
erence back’.”21 The ‘transformation’ to which Tugendhat refers here is a shift in the
idea of the transcendental from Husserl to Heidegger, and although Tugendhat does
not himself make this explicit, it is a transformation partly brought about by
Heidegger’s alignment of the transcendental with the hermeneutical.22 The fact that
the transcendental and hermeneutical might indeed stand in an essential relation to
one another is suggested by the presence of an analogous circularity within the
transcendental to that which is evident in the hermeneutical—Tugendhat’s own talk

19
See Heidegger (1971), 28–32. The idea of the hermeneutical that emerges here is developed
in direct relation to an idea of the twofold, understood in terms of the twofold of presence and
what is present, that is also a “simple oneness” (30). What this discussion indicates is indeed the
fundamental role of the idea of the twofold in Heidegger’s thinking—it does not refer only to the
structure of truth nor does the question of truth stand apart from the question of being. The onto-
logical difference is itself one form in which the twofold appears, although to think the ontological
difference in terms of the twofold is to think the difference in terms of its essential unity.
20
The shift away from the hermeneutical, like the shift away from the transcendental that I discuss
briefly below, is actually a shift towards the topological. Yet inasmuch as the topological is already
at work in the very idea of the hermeneutical as well as in the idea of the transcendental, then,
regardless of Heidegger’s own terminological preferences, the shift here must be seen as actually
a realization of the topological character that belongs to the hermeneutical and the transcendental
as such—and also, therefore, as a continuation of the transcendental and the hermeneutical in
topological form, which is to say, in the form essential to them.
21
Tugendhat (1994), 84. Tugendhat also refers to this movement of ‘metatranscendental’ (see
the passage quoted from ‘Heidegger’s Idea of Truth’, 84, in n7 above) as another means to distin-
guish it from the transcendental as it appears in Husserl. Part of what distinguishes the Heideggerian
from the Husserlian notion of the transcendental, although Tugendhat does not make any real use
of this idea, is precisely Heidegger’s alignment of the transcendental with the hermeneutical.
22
Heidegger also names the structure at issue here as phenomenological, implying an even more
significant shift in the conception of phenomenology—something that is evident in Tugendhat’s
discussion.
252 J. Malpas

of a transcendental ‘reference back’ might be seen to hint in just this direction (and
is perhaps the same circularity that Kockelmans identifies as belonging to truth as
unconcealment).23 The circularity at issue here is itself indicative, however, of the
way in which both the transcendental and the hermeneutical already belong, in spite
of the various, and often contending, readings and misreadings attached to these
notions, within the domain of philosophical topology or topography.
The topological character of the hermeneutical is perhaps easier to appreciate
than is the topological character of the transcendental. The hermeneutical already
brings with it, especially in its Heideggerian employment, but also in the
Gadamerian, explicit concepts of situatedness and location—even in its mundane
forms, hermeneutic inquiry always proceeds on the basis of the concrete engage-
ment of the interpretation with some subject matter as it stands within a larger
frame.24 In comparison with the hermeneutical, the transcendental may appear a
more abstract notion, based, not in factical situatedness, but in the relation of
condition and conditioned. Moreover, there is an additional difficulty that arises
both in the assimilation of the transcendental to the topological and in the use of
the transcendental as applying to Heidegger’s twofold account of truth in its gen-
erality: although Heidegger draws explicitly on the notion of the transcendental
in his early work, he explicitly abandons the concept in his later thinking, and
this shift is itself associated with a shift towards a more explicitly topological
orientation (the transcendental, it appears, gives way to the topological, rather
than being an instantiation of it). Since Tugendhat focuses on Heidegger’s
account of truth primarily as developed in Being and Time, in which the transcen-
dental is not put in question, this is not an issue that he is forced to address, but
it is a prima facie problem for any account—like that developed here—that takes
up Heidegger’s thinking more broadly. There are thus two issues that need to be
further explored: first, what is the idea of the transcendental that Heidegger
rejects (and to what extent is it the same idea as is at issue in the hermeneutical
structure already delineated above); second, to what extent is the transcendental
indeed topological in character (and so to what extent does Heidegegr’s topologi-
cal thinking constitute a continuation, rather than abandonment, of the transcen-
dental as such)? In fact, both these question come down to a question concerning
how the transcendental is to be understood—and addressing that question will
require that we do not assume too determinate a conception of the transcendental
in advance.
No matter what else we say about the idea of the transcendental, the very heart
of the concept is a certain way of thinking about the problem of ground—it is a
grounding that is also a unifying25—and it is this that is captured in the commonplace
talk of the transcendental as concerned with ‘conditions of possibility.’ What the

23
The circularity evident here, both as a feature of the transcendental and the hermeneutical, is
explored in Malpas (1997), 1–20.
24
See Malpas (2010a).
25
See Malpas (2012b).
The Twofold Character of Truth: Heidegger, Davidson, Tugendhat 253

transcendental makes possible, on Heidegger’s account, however, is specifically

transcendence—where transcendence is the capacity of Dasein to open up a world
in a way that goes beyond any particular thing that may appear within that world.26
In this respect, transcendence can be understood as equivalent to Dasein’s own
capacity for disclosedness, and the transcendental as that which grounds such
disclosedness. Already this indicates just how closely the structure of the transcen-
dental, at least in Heidegger, is tied to the structure of truth as unconcealment. Yet
since it is the relation to transcendence that Heidegger takes to be primary in the
idea of the transcendental, so, as his thought develops, and he moves away from
the focus on transcendence, he also moves away from the language of the transcen-
dental. The movement away from transcendence, and so away from the transcendental,
is also a move away from a focus on human Dasein as the primary locus of truth
towards a more direct concentration on the happening of truth as that in relation to
which even the human is disclosed.27
There is reason to think, however, that Heidegger’s particular appropriation of
the transcendental as tied to transcendence in this way is mistaken, or, at least, con-
stitutes too narrow an understanding of what is at issue in the concept.28 On this
basis, one might well argue that the idea of the transcendental continues to operate
in Heidegger’s thinking even after Heidegger has abandoned that particular version
of the transcendental that is tied to transcendence. Taken more broadly, and in a way
that is also attentive to Kant’s, rather than Heidegger’s, use of the notion, the tran-
scendental should be understood in terms that connect it with Kant’s own geograph-
ical or topographic conception of the critical enterprise. Kant’s problem is essentially
how one can provide a grounding for knowledge or experience that does not appeal
to what goes beyond knowledge or experience. Kant’s solution, in general terms, is
to look to the ground of knowledge or experience in the unity that is given within it
and without which it would not be possible29 (such a way of putting matters clearly
echoes the hermeneutic characterisation I set out above). The term ‘transcendental’
can be used to refer to the ground that is thereby exhibited, to the grounding struc-
ture, and to the mode of inquiry by which such a ground is exhibited. In the terms
Kant employs, the way such a transcendental grounding proceeds can be taken to be
analogous to certain aspects of geometrical or topographic practice: the geometer,
for instance, from the measure of a small part of its surface, is able to determine the
full extent of the surface of a sphere; the topographical surveyor, by a process of
repeated triangulation and traverse, is able to map the entire territory in which she
or he is located.30 The transcendental is indeed a term that describes the inquiry into

26
See, for instance: Heidegger (1962), 366 and Heidegger (1984), 160–166; see also the discus-
sion in Malpas (2006), 162–171.
27
See Malpas (2006), Chapter Four, esp. 175–201.
28
This is an issue taken up at number of places in Malpas (2012b).
29
See Malpas (1997); see also Malpas (2012b).
30
See Malpas and Thiel (2011).
254 J. Malpas

a certain place or topos, as well as the place thus exhibited, that is our own place,
and that proceeds from within that very place.
Understood in this way, one can see a twofold structure already built into the
very character of the transcendental as set out here. The transcendental begins with
our being already given over to things; it asks after the ground for that givenness.
Since it may be taken to be asking after its own grounds, the twofold character of
what is at issue exhibits something of the circularity that is characteristic of the
transcendental as well as the hermeneutical.31 Yet in asking after the ground of our
own being-given-over to things in this way, the transcendental does not abandon
the givenness at issue, does not attempt to surpass it, but instead remains with it.
Invoking the topological character of Kant’s own understanding of the transcen-
dental, we can say that the transcendental begins with our being already ‘here/
there’, and what it seeks to uncover is the very place of that here/there, the very
place in which we already find ourselves. The twofold is thus evident in the way
being here/there is a mode of being-in-place that goes beyond the here/there of our
own location—to be here/there is precisely to be opened to a place, and for that
place itself to open up.32 The twofold at issue can thus be said to be identical with
the twofold character of place. That twofold character is one explored early on by
Aristotle himself, not in the Metaphysics, but in his analysis of topos in the Physics,
and also, although in very different terms, in Plato’s account of chora in the
Timaeus.33 In each case, what appears is a structure that combines a movement
inwards and outwards (an infolding as well as outfolding), an opening that is also
a closing, a relating that is a distinguishing, a limiting that is a freeing up, a with-
drawing that is also a coming forth.
In its most basic sense, a sense that underlies any other interpretation of the idea,
the transcendental refers us to the inquiry, and the twofold structure, that is named
by place or topos—an inquiry that, in keeping with the rest of the discussion here,
is also hermeneutical (or perhaps one should say that the hermeneutical is essen-
tially topological). Understood in this way, the transcendental can be seen to be
closely aligned with that mode of thinking that takes place as the primary focus for
philosophy—as closely aligned, that is, with a form of philosophical topography or
topology. Such a topology turns out to be present in Heidegger’s thought almost
from beginning to end (it is what Heidegger calls the ‘topology of being’34), and is
given a particularly clear exemplification in his thinking of truth. Indeed, what
Kockelmans refers to as “the eukukleos alētheiē, the well-rounded non-concealment
itself” is identical with the place, the topos, that is the focus of such a topology or

31
See Malpas (1997).
32
To some extent one might argue that this idea is itself an echo of what is at issue in the idea of
transcendence, but it also eschews certain key aspects of transcendence, namely, the move from
one element in the direction of another. Here rather than a move across or beyond, the movement
is an opening-up accomplished at the same time as a turning-in.
33
See my discussion of in Malpas (2012a).
34
Heidegger (2004), 41.
The Twofold Character of Truth: Heidegger, Davidson, Tugendhat 255

topography. Even the language Tugendhat employs in his inquiry into Heidegger’s
idea of truth carries traces of the topological structure at work here—thus Tugendhat
speaks of a “depth dimension” as involved in the Heideggerian account as well as
talking of what occurs in terms of a “pointing beyond” or a “reference back.”35 The
topological character of Heidegger’s of thinking is especially evident in his use of
the idea of Lichtung or ‘clearing’ to refer to truth as unconcealment. This is no mere
‘metaphor,’ but a very specific way of referring to the character of place or topos as
that opening into appearance, into presence, that occurs in the midst of the with-
drawal into concealment (a withdrawal that is, of course, never complete). Indeed,
the very idea of unconcealment itself captures the twofold character of the event that
is the clearing: unconcealment is no mere standing in the open (it is not pure trans-
parency), but is instead a dynamic interplay of concealing/revealing. This is itself
evident in the characterisation of truth as, indeed, a-letheia, un-concealment—the
twofold is evident in the privative.
Heidegger’s own worries about the idea of the transcendental, and what
underlies his eventual rejection of it, are not connected with its topological charac-
ter, but almost the very opposite—they relate to his particular reading of the
transcendental as necessarily implicated with the notion of transcendence. To begin
with, transcendence carries with it a problematic tendency towards subjectivism—
since transcendence seems to find its ground in human Dasein. In addition, how-
ever, transcendence also presupposes a certain separation of Dasein from world—a
separation itself enshrined in the very idea of Dasein as that in which transcen-
dence finds its ground and world as that towards which transcendence moves. In
this latter respect, transcendence can be seen to threaten the very unity that must
also be presupposed here (a unity given particularly salient articulation in the topo-
logical unity of place). Yet this problematic reading of the transcendental is by no
means forced upon us by anything in the notion of the transcendental itself—and
Kant’s own topographic employment of the idea suggests a very different interpre-
tation, one that is the basis for the discussion above.36 On this reading, the structure
of the transcendental is not to be found in the inquiry into that which underlies
transcendence (understood as the move of Dasein in the direction of world), but
rather in the inquiry into place or topos. Moreover, that inquiry is oriented towards

35
See especially Tugendhat (1994), 91. Such topological elements are never taken up by Tugendhat,
however, and are neither made explicit nor are their implications drawn out. This partly reflects the
limitations in Tugendhat’s own appreciation in what is at work here, although it is also a function
of the fact that Tugendhat’s discussion remains so much focussed on the earlier thinking, espe-
cially Being and Time, in which the topological character of Heidegger’s thinking is not yet fully
realised. By contrast, if one looks at the account of unconcealment as set out, for instance, in “The
Origin of the Work of Art” (or in almost any of the later writings, including Heidegger (1972)—see
esp. 65–70), the topological framework of Heidegger’s thinking is to the fore: here aletheia is
clearly understood in terms of a certain happening of place.
36
Which is not to say that Heidegger’s reading of the transcendental as tied to transcendence is
entirely without foundation, but rather that it is mistaken to see transcendence, in the way Heidegger
understands it, as the underlying and determining idea in the structure of the transcendental.
256 J. Malpas

the understanding of a twofold structure that, as twofold, is also therefore essen-

tially unitary; it is a structure that rather than overcome a separation, is the unfold-
ing of an essential relatedness, an originary belonging-together. The twofold
character of place is thus quite distinct from the potentially dichotomous separation
of Dasein and world that is implied in the idea of transcendence, and that requires
a surpassing of one in the direction of the other.37
It is precisely because of the transcendental-topological (and also hermeneutic)
structure that is at work in Heidegger’s twofold account of truth that one cannot
prise off truth as correctness from truth as unconcealment. The latter must always
be implicated in the former, even though the latter itself tends to withdraw in the
face of our concern with truth as correctness. In this respect, Tugendhat’s claim that
Heidegger’s turn towards truth as unconcealment results in the loss of truth as cor-
rectness, and so also in the loss of any genuine critical sense,38 gets things exactly
the wrong way round: only by keeping hold of truth as unconcealment, and the
twofold structure that it brings with it, can we hold on to truth as correctness. It is
for just this reason that Heidegger’s later acceptance of Tugendhat’s claim that ale-
theia is not the same as truth has to be viewed as problematic, since it threatens to
obscure the very twofold unity that is so important here. Although Heidegger clearly
did not see this admission as indicating his abandonment of the concept of aletheia,
but rather as an acceptance of the difficulty that the ordinary understanding of truth
as correctness presents for any attempt to think truth differently,39 still the severing
of unconcealment from truth in this way threatens the very structure that is at issue
in the idea of aletheia itself. Aletheia, unconcealment, does not stand apart from
truth as correctness, but is, one might say, its ‘other side’; there are, in an important
sense, not two separated concepts here, but two aspects of a single structure—
although a structure that constantly turns a part of itself away from us. This is what
it means, in fact, to talk of the twofold character of truth: truth as unconcealment is
the essence, that is the origin and ground, of truth as correctness.

If Lafont and Smith can claim that the nature of Tugendhat’s objection to Heidegger’s
account of truth has been misunderstood and overlooked, then one might equally
claim that the real nature of the twofold conception of truth in Heidegger has also been
misunderstood and sometimes ignored. Certainly Tugendhat himself seems to have no
real sense of the topological dimension in which Heidegger’s twofold understanding
of truth moves. Indeed, one might view Tugendhat’s objection, and the reiteration of

37
The idea of transcendence can itself be seen as based in a misapprehension of what is at issue in
the phenomenon of place—but as such, it can also be seen as an attempt to engage, even if mistak-
enly, with the topology that is at issue here.
38
See Tugendhat (1994), 94–95.
39
See Wrathall (2010), 37–38.
The Twofold Character of Truth: Heidegger, Davidson, Tugendhat 257

that objection, at least in terms of the insistence on the normativity of truth by writers
such as Lafont and Smith, as itself constituting a refusal of the very possibility that the
inquiry into truth might move in such a direction—a refusal of any transcendental-
topological dimension to truth. Although this could well be taken as the real core of
Tugendhat’s position, one might also take it as the basis for a restatement of
Tugendhat’s objection: Why should we look to any ‘transcendental-topological’ struc-
ture as necessary at all here? Why should we look to anything beyond truth as correct-
ness? Why should we look for anything as the ground for correctness? One response
to such a restated version of Tugendhat’s critique would be to rehearse once again
exactly the sorts of arguments just considered. Yet there is another, and perhaps more
useful, response, that is also available—one that need not draw, at least not initially,
on ideas of the hermeneutical, the transcendental or the topological. The source for
this response is the work of Donald Davidson. There one finds, as in Heidegger, a
conception of truth as also twofold in character: truth belongs to individual sentences,
but, on the Davidsonian account, it also inheres in the larger framework within which
those sentences are located. What is important about this account from the perspective
of Tugendhat’s objection, is that it shows the necessity of understanding truth in a way
that is not restricted to truth in its normative sense alone—a conclusion arrived at by
means of some fairly straightforward considerations concerning the way truth itself
operates and the other concepts with which it is implicated. In the larger context of
Davidson’s thinking as a whole, there is a sense of truth at work that turns out to oper-
ate within the same transcendental-topological dimension as can also be discerned in
Heidegger, but this is a dimension that is arrived at in the course of Davidson’s think-
ing, rather than one that is assumed from the start.
At first sight, however, far from providing a parallel to the Heideggerian
account, the Davidsonian position might be thought to exemplify what Heidegger
takes to be the conventional understanding of truth as correctness. A key feature
in Davidson’s account of truth is that truth is indeed a property of individual
sentences, and as it belongs to sentences, so it carries the normative dimension
emphasised by Tugendhat.40 Yet although Davidson does indeed take truth to
belong, in its standard usage, to individual sentences, truth also figures, as I
noted above, as part of the ‘background’ against which individual sentences can
be true or false, and in this respect, truth not only goes beyond what is given in
the individual sentence but it also exceeds what is captured by any notion of cor-
rectness. The way in which truth functions here is evident both in Davidson’s
inquiries into the concept of truth, and in his account of the nature of linguistic
understanding and communication.41
As developed in the idea of radical interpretation, the possibility of understanding
speakers—of interpreting their utterances and actions, and identifying their atti-
tudes—depends on the application of the Davidsonian ‘principle of charity’. Charity

40
Although Davidson does not understand this sense of truth as entailing any substantive notion of
truth as correspondence—see n.52 below.
41
For a brief overall summary of the Davidsonian position see Malpas (2010b); see also Malpas
(1991), esp. Chap. 2.
258 J. Malpas

requires that, in interpreting a speaker, one must take their beliefs and utterances to
be, for the most part, true (and so as also in agreement with one’s own beliefs and
utterances). The assumption of overall truth is an assumption that is not only prior
to any particular interpretive encounter, but it is not defeasible in the face of any
such encounter: that utterances and beliefs are generally true is a requirement if
utterances and beliefs are to have content, that is, if they are to be meaningful.42 In
the associated idea of triangulation, a notion that appears in Davidson’s more devel-
oped thinking, meaning (or, more broadly, content), including the meaning of utter-
ances as well as the content of states of mind, is seen to be dependent on the situation
of the speaker within a tripartite structure encompassing self, others, and world.43 It
is not only that we come to understand another speaker’s utterances, attitudes and
actions through being able to relate aspects of the other’s behaviour to our own, as
well as to features of the larger environmental situation in which we are jointly
located, but that it is only through the relatedness between ourselves, others, and
features of the world that utterances, attitudes, and actions take on the meaning (or
content) that, in large part, identifies and individuates them.44 In this sense, it is on
the basis of their relatedness within the tripartite structure of self, others, and world,
that utterances, attitudes, and actions are constituted as utterances, attitudes and
actions, and so too, since speakers are in turn constituted as speakers by the mean-
ings (the contents) that make up their mental lives, are speakers constituted as
speakers on the basis of the mutual relatedness that is worked out within the struc-
ture of triangulation.45
The possibility of truth as a property of sentences, or of individual utterances,
arises only on the basis of the conditions that make such sentences and utterances
meaningful—that constitute them as sentences or utterances. The conditions that
make for the possibility of meaning, and so for the possibility of truth as attaching
to individuals sentences, and so as being either truth or false, are the conditions that
are identical with the obtaining of the mutual relatedness between self, other, and
world within the structure of triangulation. The obtaining of that structure is not a
matter of the being true of any particular sentence or sentences, but it is a matter of
the being true (and not just being held true46) of the body of sentences, as a whole
and for the most part, and this is because it cannot be the case that the relatedness at
issue might fail without an accompanying failure of meaning, which also means a
failure in the possibility of individual sentences being true or false—without, in

42
See, for instance, Davidson (2001a), 153.
43
See Davidson (2001f), 205–220.
44
Utterances, attitudes and actions are, on a Davidsonian account, also identified and individuated
through their causes and causal effects, but this is not independent of the ‘rational’ (that is mean-
ingful or contentful) connections that are also at work—see Malpas (1999), 1–30.
45
See the discussion of this in Malpas (2013).
46
This is because the distinction between being true and being held true is itself a distinction that,
inasmuch as it is a meaningful or contentful distinction, can only be given meaning in respect of
individual sentences—the distinction itself depends on a larger context within which it is
embedded.
The Twofold Character of Truth: Heidegger, Davidson, Tugendhat 259

other words, a failure in normativity. Indeed, without the relatedness that is articu-
lated in triangulation there can be no speakers, no utterances, no attitudes, no
actions. When understood specifically in relation to belief and utterance, the obtain-
ing of the relatedness that is worked out within the structure of triangulation is the
obtaining of the overall truth of belief and utterance in a way exactly analogous to
the requirement that is at issue elsewhere in Davidson in the principle of charity. It
is thus that Davidson can write that it “cannot be the case that our general picture of
the world and our place in it is mistaken, for it is this picture which informs the rest
of our beliefs and makes them intelligible, whether they be true or false.”47
One way of capturing the point at stake here is by saying that the very possibility
of any individual sentence having a truth value (that is being true or false) depends
on many other sentences being true (but in a way that does not allow any identifica-
tion of just which sentences must be true). The symmetry that operates in respect of
truth and falsity at the level of individual sentences—a symmetry reflected in the
principle of bivalence—does not hold with respect to the larger body of sentences
within which individual sentences are always nested. The position described here
could be viewed as equivalent to a form of coherentism, since it is similar to the idea
according to which any single belief requires connection within a larger system of
belief, or as akin to the thesis of linguistic holism, according to which a sentence is
only meaningful in the context of a system of sentences, namely, a language.48 The
difference, however, is that neither coherentism nor linguistic holism make explicit
the way in which it is indeed truth that is implicated here. Meaning does not arise
on the basis merely of the interconnection of sentences or beliefs, and so cannot be
construed on the basis of some purely ‘internal’ system of connections, and in a way
that stands apart from speakers’ engagement in the world (if such a possibility is
even conceivable). For there to be meaning is already for meaning to be implicated
with the world, and so for it to be also already tied to truth. In this way the possibil-
ity of the meaning of any individual sentence or belief mirrors the conditions on
which the possibility of the truth or falsity of any individual sentence also rests.
Sentences and beliefs are meaningful (have content), and so can be true or false,
only inasmuch as they are nested within a larger body of sentences and beliefs that
are, for the most part, true—that are already connected with the world.
One might respond to this position by insisting that the truth that is supposed to
belong to the larger body of sentences can only be a truth that attaches to sentences
individually. So to say that truth inheres in the body of sentences implies that most of
the individual sentences that make up that body of sentences must be true. Yet this
would be to deny that truth does indeed attach to the body of sentences taken together

47
Davidson (2001f), 214.
48
To some extent, Davidson himself accepts both such positions, but only to the extent that they are
viewed as not concerned only with meaning, but as also encompassing truth—that is, both have to
be construed in ‘externalist’ rather than ‘internalist’ terms. Yet the characterization of Davidson’s
position as ‘coherentist’ misleads more than it illuminates —which is why Davidson later took
back his own characterization of his position as a ‘coherence theory’. See his ‘Afterthoughts
(1987)’, appended to ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, in Davidson (2001e),
154–155.
260 J. Malpas

(the truth of the body of sentences would directly reduce to the truth of a number of
individuals sentences),49 and would be to reassert a sense of truth that, because it does
indeed attach to each sentence individually, and so also entails that each individual
sentence might be true or false, opens up the very possibility that has to be ruled out,
namely, that the entire body of sentences could, for the most part, be false (if any
individual sentence can be false, and if the truth of the entire body of sentences is just
a matter of the truth of individual sentences, then the entire body of sentences could
be, for the most part, false). The possibility of meaning, and the possibility, therefore,
of individual truth or falsity, depends on a sense of truth that is not reducible to the
truth of individual sentences, and that is also not normatively constrained. Here, by
following through a Davidsonian line of argument, we come up against the real limit
of Tugendhat’s position, but also to the beginning of Heidegger’s.50
Although it can be seen to emerge from Davidson’s account of the conditions
that underpins the possibility of meaning and understanding, the idea that truth can-
not be understood in terms of correctness or correspondence tends to be implicit in
that account rather than a central theme. Elsewhere, however, Davidson takes up the
matter quite directly. This is not surprising, since one of Davidson’s distinctive con-
tributions to twentieth-century analytic thought has been the idea that one can take
truth as the basic concept in the understanding of meaning.51 Davidson thus appro-
priates the formal mechanism of Alfred Tarksi’s theory of truth as the template for a
formal theory of meaning. Already this should indicate the potential danger in mak-
ing too radical a distinction between truth and meaning: the concepts are distinct,
but as Davidson shows (and as is evident from the discussion above), they are also
closely related. Tarski viewed his own truth definition as entailing a correspondence
conception of truth. Davidson argues, however, that the Tarskian approach, while it
may appear to make use of notions that might be viewed as analogous to correspon-
dence (the idea of ‘satisfaction,’ as well as the notion of translational equivalence),52

49
A possibility that is ruled out here, since there is no single set of sentences that must be true in
order for the body of sentences to be (mostly) true—neither is it the case that the body of sentences
makes up a determinate set of sentences nor is it the case that the set of individual sentences that
must be true if the body of sentences is to be true is determinate either.
50
There is also an obvious connection to Wittgenstein here (especially the Wittgenstein [1969]),
although on some readings Wittgenstein stands in a closer relation to coherentism than would
Davidson or Heidegger.
51
An idea first set out in Davidson (2001c), 17–42.
52
In ‘True to the Facts’, Davidson defends a reading of the Tarskian account as a species of
correspondence account, thereby also defending the idea that correspondence captures something
important about truth—see Davidson (2001d), 37–54; see also Davidson (2001e), 139–140. The
basis for Davidson’s original acceptance of correspondence as a core element in the idea of truth is
that truth involves “the relation between a statement and something else” (Davidson, 2001d, 38)—a
relation, one might say, between words and objects (Davidson, 2001e, 139). This is an admission
Davidson later retracts – see especially Davidson (2001a), 154–155. Davidson’s retraction is not
based, however, on a change of mind about the nature of truth, but rather about whether ‘corre-
spondence’ is a helpful notion here. Even in “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” he
acknowledges that his use of the idea of correspondence is neither “straightforward” nor is it
“nonmisleading” (Davidson, 2001e, p. 139). In his later comments, he says of the nature of the
The Twofold Character of Truth: Heidegger, Davidson, Tugendhat 261

does not commit one to an identification of truth with correspondence.53 Indeed,

Davidson devotes considerable attention to showing that correspondence cannot be
adequate as an elucidation of truth.54 One reason Davidson gives for this is that there
simply is nothing to which true sentences correspond in any interesting or relevant
fashion.55 But one can also say, more generally, that any notion of correspondence
must, in any case, always presuppose truth, and so cannot elucidate it. This is
because only the right sort of correspondence makes for truth, but saying what
counts as the right sort here requires that we be able to specify what truth is in a way
that itself constrains the notion of correspondence (in the right way), and this
requires a notion of truth that is other than truth as correspondence.56 The same
point applies to any other concept we may use as a means of explaining truth or as
a surrogate for it. The fact is that truth is always presupposed in our attempt to
explain or give an account of truth.57 Even a Tarskian truth definition already
presupposes that we have a grasp of the way the concept of truth works independently
of the Tarskian definition itself, since the Tarskian account depends on the idea of
translation into an already understood language (and so a language in which we
already have a grasp of truth).58 Here, once again, truth appears as a concept that

mistake that it is “in a way only a misnomer, but terminological infelicities have a way of breeding
conceptual confusion…Correspondence theories have always been conceived as providing an
explanation or analysis of truth, and this a Tarski-style of truth certainly does not do,” Davidson
(2001a), 154–155.
53
See Davidson (2005), 37–42 & 155–156.
54
There is a sense of correspondence that can be seen to be at work in the notion of correctness—a
procedure is correct, for instance, if it matches the rules that govern such a procedure, and a claim
is correct if what it claims fits that which the claim is about—but the notion of correspondence at
work here is not such as to enable it to be generalised in any useful way, and it certainly cannot
serve to provide a genuine explanation or elucidation of the sense of correctness that is a work in
relation to truth (see n.52 above). Thus, while there are two senses of truth to be found in Davidson,
they are just the sense of truth associated with the truth or falsity of sentences (‘correctness’)—
which is not to be identified with any substantive notion of correspondence any more than it is to
be identified with, for instance, coherence, warranted assertibility, or pragmatic udefulness—and
the sense of truth that inheres in the larger body of sentences (or better, in the overall involvement
in the world as that is expressed in terms of triangulation) against which the truth or falsity of
individual sentences is possible.
55
See Davidson (2005), 41. This is the decisive consideration against correspondence theories and
undermines any substantive sense in which truth can be understood as correspondence. It is, how-
ever, less relevant to the issues concerning the twofold character of truth.
56
See Davidson (2001g), 193–194. One might argue that this does not demonstrate that truth can-
not be a matter of correspondence, but only that there is no way to elucidate the form of correspon-
dence that belongs to truth. My use of the argument here, however, can be taken as directed only
against that weaker claim—the stronger claim is undermined by the Davidsonian point noted
above to the effect that there is nothing significant to which true sentences can correspond.
57
This holds in relation to correctness also: since correctness applies more broadly than just to truth
alone, so knowing what sense of correctness is at issue in talk of truth depends on already having
a prior sense of truth. Correctness is thus not an elucidation of truth, but merely functions, in the
appropriate context, as another way of referring to truth (or to one sense of truth).
58
Davidson (2001g), 194–195.
262 J. Malpas

constrains discourse, in a way that is additional to the constraint associated with the
normative operation of truth in respect of individual sentences, but can never be
fully elucidated within such discourse, since it constrains even the normative
concept of truth that it operates with respect to individual sentences.
In Davidson, as in Heidegger, truth carries a twofold sense: as ‘correctness’ and
as that on which the possibility of correctness is based. This possibility is understood
in Heidegger in terms of the idea of unconcealment, understood, in one form, as the
clearing. Correctness thus finds its ground in the prior opening up of the world that
first allows for the possibility of action or of assertion. Davidson does not use the same
language as Heidegger, and yet the structure that he delineates through the idea of
triangulation is also essentially a form of clearing, or opening up. It is fundamentally
a structure of relatedness that depends on a certain mode of spatiality in which the
realisation of meaning, of presence, occurs through the becoming proximate of
human beings to themselves, to one another, to other creatures and other things,
within the framework of a single world, as that occurs in and through specific places
and spaces. While differences in language, sources, and style cannot be ignored, one
also cannot afford to allow oneself to be distracted from the points of conver-
gence that may lie beneath. Those points of convergence are especially important in
the thinking of truth that is at work in Heidegger and Davidson, since each provides
resources to assist in the illumination of the other, and to allow a better understanding
of the topology that they both endeavour to explore.

The twofold character of truth as it appears in Davidson mirrors the twofold

appearance of truth in Heidegger. One might argue that Davidson’s account lacks
the properly ontological element that is present in Heidegger’s, except that the very
idea of the twofold that is at work in the concept of truth at issue here brings with it
a transformed conception of what ontology might be—a conception that moves the
ontological in the direction of the topological, and so in the direction of a structure
that does indeed seem to be at work, if through different modes of expression, in
both thinkers. A proper understanding of the twofold character of truth as it appears
in Davidson and in Heidegger depends on understanding both the transcendental-
topological (and also hermeneutical) structure that underpins Heidegger’s argument
for unconcealment as the proper origin and ground of correctness, and the formal-
analytic structure evident in Davidson that reveals the truth of individual assertions
as always dependent on truth as it inheres in the larger background to assertion
(a sense of truth that stands in the background even of attempts to inquire into or to
define truth itself). These two aspects to the twofold conception of truth can both be
seen to point towards the character of truth as pertaining both that which is spoken
or asserted, and, more fundamentally, to the prior involvement with the world on the
basis of which such speaking or asserting is possible.
The Twofold Character of Truth: Heidegger, Davidson, Tugendhat 263

The idea of truth as other than correctness remains somewhat obscure, but this
is because the fact of our being already given over to the world—our being ‘in’ the
world, which is to say, our being always ‘placed’—is itself obscure, and must
always remain so. Even the attempt to thematize that very ‘being-given-over-to,’
that very ‘being-in,’ that very ‘placedness,’ is to presuppose it. It also remains the
case that the idea of truth at issue here cannot be subjected to normative assessment
in any direct way—it is not a sense of truth that operates with respect to the idea of
a bivalent ‘truth value’. Indeed, what Davidson’s argument shows, in particular, is
that the idea of bivalent truth—normative truth—already implies the idea of a truth
that is not bivalent. There is thus a symmetry that operates with respect to truth and
falsity at the level of individual assertion, but which does not operate at the level,
one might say, of assertion as a practice, since the practice of assertion presup-
poses that assertion is mostly true—and this follows from the close reciprocity that
obtains between truth and meaning (a reciprocity that does not hold between truth
and falsity).59 As truth operates within the practice of assertion, so it also operates
in the same way as part of the practice of criticism: criticism depends on the same
twofold character of truth that distinguishes between that which is the focus of
critical assessment and that which enables such critical assessment to proceed.
There is thus no failure of critical capacity in being unable to assess as true or false
one’s original being-placed in relation to things—there is, indeed, no sense to
attach to the idea of critical assessment or engagement that could be applied here.
Critical assessment, like assertion, is always tied to particular claims or statements,
but as soon as we move to attend to such claims or statements, we are no longer
dealing with anything that properly belongs to the structure of what Heidegger
calls unconcealment. The fact that unconcealment cannot be taken as a direct focus
for critical judgment—one cannot say of unconcealment either that it is false (as
opposed to true) or that it is not unconcealing (which does not mean that it does not
also conceal)—does not mean, however, that the idea of truth as unconcealment
stands entirely apart from any critical practice.
The idea of truth as unconcealment is not an idea arrived at merely by some sort
of unquestioned revelation, but arises out of an original questioning of the possibil-
ity of truth as correctness. Indeed, the preceding pages have been concerned with
nothing if not the attempt to argue for and to elucidate the idea of truth that is at
issue here—they thus operate within a framework of criticism, rather than outside of
it—and so also within a certain normative practice. One must be clear, however, that
this is not a normative practice directed at unconcealment as such, but is rather part
of the philosophical inquiry within which that idea is taken up. One might add here
that the idea of truth as unconcealment itself supports and sustains the possibility of
any form of critical engagement, and not only in the sense noted above in which it
provides the necessary ‘background’ against which specific criticisms operate.
Genuine criticism, genuine questioning, depends on there being a space for thinking

59
Which reinforces the idea that there are two sense of truth at work here: one in which truth is
defined in relation to falsity, and the other in which it is defined as that which makes possible the
disjunctive possibly of the true and the false.
264 J. Malpas

in which different possibilities and alternatives can be envisaged, in which connec-

tions and disconnections can become evident. It requires something like the very
place that is at issue in Heidegger’s notion of the clearing—the opening up of truth
in the unconcealment of the clearing is thus itself the opening up of the possibility
of questioning and of critique.
Aletheia, unconcealment, is one of the terms that Heidegger gives to the original
dynamic opening-up of the world—this ‘event of truth’ is the Ereignis that it is also
the happening of the Fourfold that is the worlding of world.60 Aletheia does not
occur as some strange ethereal event occurring outside of or beyond the concrete
world in which we find ourselves—it occurs both in the temporalized-spatialized
unfolding of ordinary life and activity, and in the character of the ordinary as part of
a larger happening of history as that occurs in and through certain encompassing
forms. Heidegger gives a name to that which determines the contemporary happen-
ing of truth: Gestell, meaning, in English, something like ‘framework’ or
‘enframing’.61 Gestell, he says, is the essence of the technological mode in which
the contemporary world unfolds itself.62 If this is so, however, then Heidegger’s own
analysis of Gestell, his critique of technological modernity, provides a striking
exemplification of the way his twofold conception of truth not only allows for a
mode of critical engagement, rather than closing it off, but is centrally oriented
towards just such critique—and to a more encompassing and radical mode of
critique than is perhaps envisaged in the normativity of truth as captured in the idea
of truth as merely “correctness.”
It is through the distinction between truth as correctness and truth as unconceal-
ment that we are opened up to the possibility of a form of critique that, even though
always expressed in terms of particular claims, can nevertheless engage with and
draw attention to the larger framework within which our modes of thinking, and
indeed, our very lives, are shaped and oriented. Moreover, part of Heidegger’s own
argument here, even if not entirely explicit, is surely that the refusal to acknowledge
the twofold character of truth—the refusal to allow that there is a larger
transcendental-topological determination to thinking, the refusal to recognise the
placed happening of truth as such—is itself characteristic of the contemporary
mode of unconcealment that is Gestell. It is thus that Heidegger can say of the world
in which we now find ourselves that it is a world that no longer thinks; that no longer
holds open a space for genuine questioning; that, one might say, no longer allows
for the possibility of critical engagement of a fundamental kind. Kockelmans’ draw
together some of the various lines of argument at issue here when he writers:

60
I use Ereignis here to refer to the event of truth, but Ereignis is a difficult term that can also refer
to a more fundamental event—a radical turning of and turning back to the originary event of
unconcealment. It might be said that Ereignis properly means the latter. There is, however, an
essential equivocity at work here that cannot and should not be eliminated, and that is common to
almost all of Heidegger’s key terms (see Malpas, 2006, 12). On the idea that Gestell might itself be
thought of as a form of Ereignis, see Malpas (2006), 288–289.
61
See Malpas (2006), 280.
62
See the discussion of this matter in ibid, 288–289.
The Twofold Character of Truth: Heidegger, Davidson, Tugendhat 265

When truth became reduced to correctness, man himself became the center and focal point
of all beings. And when man began to circle about himself in search of certainty and secu-
rity, thinking gradually became a pro-posing, positing presentation, and the Being of beings
changed into sheer objectivity. All of that prepared the way for the modern era of technicity,
concerning which man, thus, has completely lost the truth.63

The Heideggerian critique of technology, so central to Heidegger’s later thinking,

is thus itself closely tied to his twofold idea of truth.
If the idea of truth as unconcealment can in any way be said to set a limit to
critical inquiry, a limit to questioning, it is only in the sense that it functions as its
proper ground64: in understanding the twofold character of truth, we understand
how questioning arises only on the basis of our prior being-given over to the world,
and so on the basis of a singular opening-up of world in its concreteness, but we also
understand how the most fundamental questioning of all must be directed at the
very opening into possibility, and so into an inexhaustible multiplicity, that occurs
in any and every such opening—even that which belongs to technological moder-
nity, even that which would orient itself only to “correctness.”

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17–42. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Davidson, Donald. 2001d. True to the facts. In Inquiries into truth and interpretation, 2nd ed.,
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objective, 2nd ed., 139–140. Oxford: Clarendon Press
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tion to Being to show that the origin of technology is a truth-event”—Schuurman (1980), 89.
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in a number of places – see Malpas (2012b).
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What Can Philosophy of Science Learn
from Hermeneutics: and What Can
Hermeneutics Learn from Philosophy
of Science? With an Excursus on Botticelli

Jan Faye

Abstract For a long time hermeneutics and phenomenology were the dominant
positions in the philosophy of the humanities. Consequently objects of interpreta-
tion and understanding were denied an objective standing. Hence the validity of
these constitutive acts of meaning depended on the historical situation of the inter-
preter and of the object of interpretation. In this paper I deny that this needs to be
so. I do agree with the hermeneutic-phenomenological tradition that interpretation
plays as significant a role in understanding objects of science as it does in under-
standing cultural objects. I propose a view of interpretation and understanding that
rests on the idea that human cognition is a natural phenomenon. I therefore hold
that the science of the humanities is not that different from other empirical sciences
as long as we include human intentions as the core object of understanding. Based
on these suggestions I conclude that there exists objective understanding in the
humanities in the sense that the validity of an interpretation, no more than an expla-
nation in the sciences, needs to depend on the interpreter’s historical situation or
personal affairs. At the end I use the interpretation of Botticelli’s The Mystical
Nativity as an example.

1 What Is Understanding?

Traditionally hermeneutics and philosophy of science have had a rather antagonistic

view of each other. In the hermeneutic tradition going back to Wilhelm Dilthey, it
is part of a general account of science and humanities that the notions of explanation
and understanding are kept strictly apart. Science, Dilthey famously said, explains

J. Faye (*)
Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication, Section for Philosophy,
University of Copenhagen, Karen Blixensvej 4, DK-2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark
e-mail: faye@hum.ku.dk

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 267

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_15,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
268 J. Faye

the natural world, whereas humanities understand human life.1 This demarcation
may also add to the account of why philosophy of science has spilled so much ink
on the concept of explanation, but only little on interpretation and understanding.
Carl Hempel and his successors regarded understanding in connection with expla-
nation as a psychological notion. It might be specified as a form of subjective
expectation.
In recent years, however, philosophers have begun to be interested in questions
concerning scientific interpretation and understanding which means that mutual
interests between philosophy of science and hermeneutics become apparent.
Scientists understand as much as they explain because explanation itself expresses
understanding. Some authors, for instance, have argued that scientific understand-
ing can be considered as a skill. If we go back to Michael Polanyi we see that pos-
sessing a skill is to have ‘tacit knowledge.’2 Such a suggestion seems reasonable but
is not without problems. A skill cannot be ascribed a predicate like true or false, it
is a practice that does not necessarily reflect a rule-following procedure. Skills seem
always to be functional. A person must have the capacity to do something particular
in order for that person to have a certain skill. A person must be able to realize some
specific goal. But understanding need not be functional in the sense that it has a
practical purpose or leads to a goal. A person may understand a verbal order even
though that person is unable to carry it out. A person may understand a joke or a
paradox without having other skills than the ability of repeating it. A person may
understand something, say, by reading the instructions of a manual but that person
may still not know how to carry out the instructions in any practical way. I think that
understanding may give rise to skills and that skills are based on understanding.
Thus the concept of understanding is just as fundamental as that of skills.
What is ‘understanding’ then, if it is not a skill? In short, I take understanding to
be the organization of beliefs or bodily stored information. It is because of this
organization that we have skills. Usually we understand what we believe because a
particular belief is connected to other beliefs. It is only when we do not have under-
standing that we look for an interpretation or an explanation because they may help
us to connect a particular belief about some unintelligible phenomenon with other
well-established beliefs about other intelligible phenomena.
However, philosophy of science can learn from hermeneutic-phenomenological
tradition (as it is presented by Merleau-Ponty) that much of our common experi-
ence is acquired as embodied cognition. We may consider embodied cognition in
contrast to reflective cognition. Being a naturalist, I take this to imply that the
capacity of embodied cognition is grounded in the human evolution and that a
person’s embodied knowledge is non-linguistically learned, whereas reflective
cognition, of which the sciences and the humanities are parts, is linguistically
attained as part of the education of scholars and scientists. So I want to distinguish
between two fundamental sorts of understanding. First we have embodied under-
standing of being in the world and practicing a science, and second, based on this

1
Dilthey (1894), 144.
2
See, for instance, Polanyi (1966), Chap. 1.
What Can Philosophy of Science Learn from Hermeneutics… 269

concrete understanding, we have reflective understanding that builds on an abstract

distinction between subjects and objects, between description and the described, or
between representation and the represented.
Thus, embodied understanding is concrete and is a result of non-intentional
action and perception, while reflective understanding is abstract and is the result
of a purely intentional capacity of thoughts. Embodied understanding is non-
interpretive and non-representative experience, whereas reflective understanding
is representational thoughts and may be due to an interpretive act of reasoning.
In science we meet manifestations of these two kinds of understanding. Often they
are intermingled in the actual research processes, and abstract thoughts may sooner
or later become concrete experience.
As part of their scientific practice scholars and scientists have concrete, embod-
ied understanding which does not rest on interpretation but which interpretation
presupposes or from which it departures. Scholars and scientists’ concrete under-
standing results from their existence in the world (as Heidegger claimed) and from
their scientific socialization into the practice of a certain science. This kind of
understanding consists of the scientists’ lifelong experiences. It does not emerge
from a distinction between representations and the represented. In fact it is not pos-
sible to uphold such a distinction if one only focuses on embodied understanding.
But scholars and scientists also seek to form new theories or new models in order
to explain new phenomena. Before they can get there scholars and scientists have to
set up theoretical representations by virtue of interpretation. Here we can separate
the abstract representation from what is represented. This is due to the fact that the
representation goes behind our immediate perceptual and experimental experience.
This abstract form of understanding is neither embodied nor directly based on tacit
knowledge. It can be explicitly expressed. Often we arrive at reflective understand-
ing by an appeal to analogous thinking in order to bring in well-known features and
structures. What yields reflective understanding is either a fruitful conceptualization
of a certain unknown phenomenon in order to bring it within the scope of a concep-
tual framework or a successful explanation of a phenomenon in terms of already
well-understood phenomena. Reflective understanding consists in grasping how
pieces of information relate to one another, seeing how they can be connected so
they hang together coherently.
I propose that reflective understanding has intrinsic conditions for success,
whereas embodied understanding, even viewed internally, involves extrinsic condition
for success. In addition, abstract understanding has not only internally accessible
criteria but also these are transparent in the sense that it is impossible to understand
without understanding that one understands. In contrast to the usual internalist
assumption, I hold that it may be possible to possess embodied understanding
without knowing that one understands.
Much more can and should be said about the distinction between embodied and
reflective cognition. But let me emphasize two things. The scientific practice builds
not only on reflective thinking but just as well on tacit understanding in the form of
embodied cognition. Moreover, the practice of the sciences or the practice of the
humanities is carried out based on already well-established conceptual systems,
270 J. Faye

but if any of these is challenged or developed it involves procedure of interpretations.

Scientific discoveries do not necessarily build on interpretation, and the aim of
science is not merely prediction and explanation but also the attainment of scientific
understanding.
Explanation and interpretation help scholars or scientists to gain reflective
understanding, but scholars or scientists rely first and foremost in their daily
practice on a reflective understanding, which neither comes from explanation nor
interpretation. It consists of what they have already learned and came with education
and adopting tradition. Nevertheless, it is also the case that both interpretation and
explanation provide scholars and scientists with an abstract and a theoretical form
of understanding.

2 The Hermeneutic View of Interpretation

In the hermeneutic tradition it is part of the general understanding of science and

humanities that the notions of explanation and interpretation are kept strictly
apart. Dilthey basically thought that nature is alienated. It is external to us and
given to us only piece by piece via sense experience, while the spiritual life is
internal to us and is given in its full continuity. The spiritual lies open to us and
can therefore be understood in its particularity. In contrast, science must postulate
structures behind observable phenomena together with observable phenomena to
be able to bring the latter into a necessary connectedness. Also Dilthey believed
that we can only know of other people through a comparison with ourselves.
He argued that all understanding in the humanities consists in a reconstruction of
another person’s mental life based on a perceptible particular like an action, a
document, an artwork, or a literary text. The method, by which this is done,
Dilthey held, is hermeneutics in Schleiermacher’s tradition. So classical hermeneutics
associated understanding with meaning and saw interpretation as the method to
acquire such an understanding.
In opposition to Schleiermacher and Dilthey, we find Gadamer arguing that
understanding does not consist in a reconstruction of the other mind through
empathy. The fundamental principle is that we and the other mind, we and the text,
always share a horizon of understanding, i.e., a common amount of beliefs, and
that any understanding consists in overcoming those divergences that do not imme-
diately fit by virtue of bringing the horizons together.3 Gadamer believed that
understanding and interpretation were impossible to separate because a separation
would presuppose setting up two distinct horizons of understanding, the artist/
author’s and the interpreter’s, in opposition to one another. It is, however, impos-
sible to make such a separation since we cannot abandon our own horizon, much
less enter another horizon distinct from our own. Our horizon of understanding is
always situated in history and therefore becomes historically dependent. Each era

3
See Gadamer (1960/1993), especially 302–307.
What Can Philosophy of Science Learn from Hermeneutics… 271

brings its own expectations to the text or the artwork, puts its own questions, and
comes up with different answers. There is no objective interpretation of texts or
artworks. A text, which is interpreted again and again through centuries, gives rise
to different interpretations and validations. I find this view very problematic, but
shall refrain from elaborating on this here.4 Instead, in opposition to Gadamer, I
want to emphasize that (1) interpretation should be separated from understanding;
(2) many interpretations are explanations of meaning; and (3) that explanations of
meaning are objective in the sense that all texts or artworks are produced according
to certain intentions of the artist or the author and the object of the interpreter’s act
of interpretation is the manifestation of these intentions as expressed in the work.
The first of these points was addressed in the section above; the other two points
will be dealt with in the following sections.

3 Explanation as a Pragmatic-Rhetorical Practise

To begin, let me recall briefly what I take explanation to be.5 I view explanation as
part of a communicative discourse in which the explainer expresses his/her under-
standing as a response to an explanation-seeking question. In contrast to Hempel’s
covering law model of explanation, this pragmatic approach denies that the
concept of explanation can be characterized solely in semantic or syntactic terms.
And contrary to the ontological approach, it denies that explanation is only concerned
with ontological categories like causation. The pragmatic approach first and
foremost regards explanation to be an appropriate answer to an explanation-seeking
question in relation to a particular context. A question is being raised in a situation
where the questioner has a cognitive problem because he or she lacks knowledge
of some form and now hopes to be informed by an explanatory answer. Therefore,
the pragmatic view regards the context of the explanatory discourse, including the
explainer’s cognitive interest and background beliefs, as what determines the
appropriate answer. Pragmatists think that the acceptability of the explanatory
product is partly a result of the circumstances under which the explanation is
produced. Also, they take scientific explanations to be basically similar to explana-
tions in everyday life. The similarity between different kinds of explanations is
found in the discourse of questions and answers that takes place in a context
consisting of both factual and cognitive elements. The claim is that we do not
understand what an explanation is unless we also take more pragmatic aspects
around a communicative situation into consideration. The pragmatic view regards
explanation as an agent of change in belief systems.
Thus, the pragmatic-rhetorical approach holds that a response to an explanation-
seeking question in science need not follow valid deduction from a set of premises,
nor does it need to appeal to a causal mechanism; hence, the acceptance of a

4
In Faye (2012) Chap. 5, I discuss Gadamer’s view in greater detail.
5
For a further presentation, see Faye (2002), Chap. 3, and (2007).
272 J. Faye

response as an explanation includes lots of contextual elements. It does not pretend

to give us more than a descriptive account of what the audience will accept as an
explanation. Whether an explanation is good or bad, true or false, is not the issue as
long as it fits into the general pattern of scientific inquiry. So the insight that can be
associated with this pragmatic view of explanation is that scientific inquiry, and thus
scientific explanation, is goal-oriented and context-bounded. It is always performed
relative to some set of interests and a set of epistemic norms and standards that are
context-dependent. Moreover, those norms and standards often vary with change of
context without being explicitly acknowledged; thereby leading to controversies
about what is an acceptable explanation.
A common objection against any pragmatic theory is that it cannot cope with
the widespread wisdom that the understanding one gets from scientific explana-
tions must be objective and invariable. To the extent that this intuition is correct
I believe the pragmatic approach can account for it. The pragmatist does not
have to deny that scientific explanations are concerned with a mind-independent
world against which scientific explanations therefore are measured to find out
whether they are true or not. She may be a realist of sorts. But in my opinion the
common wisdom has limited value. It is based on a flawed metaphysics that
there is always one, and only one, correct way of describing the mind-independent
world. Our description of the world is dressed in conceptual and theoretical
clothing, but the conceptual garb may be renewed from time to time, and norms
and standards for evaluating one’s beliefs change with respect to the problem
in need of an explanation. Such a change of explanation comes not only with
historical development over time but also with the context of the problem. The
fact is, I believe, that scientific theories may be empirically underdetermined
by evidence, which means that the theory one accepts is determined by factors
other than mere observations. These other factors are, however, not equally
objective, nor do they have an objective ranking. Here personal or shared interests
play an important part.
In my opinion, explanation should be understood in the general context of
interpersonal communication. Explanation is closely connected with under-
standing. When we explain things and events to each other, we pass on informa-
tion about an immense range of different topics. These may cover such things as
the structure of the natural world, social tensions, historical events, reasons for
our actions, the meaning of words, symbols, literature and art works, or instruc-
tions on how to operate a certain piece of machinery. Explaining things and
events is thus an appropriate linguistic reaction to what is considered to be an
explanation-seeking question by which we distribute information of all kinds to
one another.
Faced with the notions of the explanatory act and the explanatory product we
must ask ourselves which of them is conceptually prior to the other, or whether they
really can be characterised independently of each other. If one is conceptually prior,
does it then mean that the secondary sense has to be understood in terms of the pri-
mary? A quick glance at the debate shows that most philosophers who defend one
of the other approaches, focus entirely on explanation as a propositional outcome.
What Can Philosophy of Science Learn from Hermeneutics… 273

They never tell us in details how theories, facts, or events possess a capacity of
explaining independent of human intentions. Indeed, what they want is to separate
objective and subjective features of explanation. They assume that explanation can
be completely characterized in terms of formal or ontological categories by abstract-
ing explanation from the pragmatic context in which it takes place. In the right
context sentences such as ‘The fact that chlorophyll is green explains why plants are
green,’ ‘The decline in interests rates explains the increase in investments,’ and
‘Maxwell’s theory explains that light is electromagnetic radiation’ are indeed
completely meaningful. But, I surmise, the use of the term ‘explanation’ is parasitic
on the notion of a linguistic discourse that is responsible for binding explanans and
explanandum together. The pragmatic theory presupposes that practise is prior to
logical status.
Neither facts, nor causes, nor laws explain anything by themselves. There
exists no explanatory relationship in nature. Explanation is not an extensional
concept, but an intensional one due to the fact that it is meant to confer under-
standing to the inquirer. Therefore, every explanation is sensitive to our way of
describing the facts we seek to explain. The explanatory relation is between utter-
ances or statements. However, this does not mean that the explanatory product is
objective in another sense. One might think that theories, propositions, or logical
arguments exist as abstract structures that make them publicly accessible. But as
such they only have virtual existence. The explanatory product is produced with
the intention of bringing forth understanding, and therefore its acceptance depends
on the explanatory act of fulfilling this intention. Furthermore, we may say that
the ontology of explanation is such that the explanatory product has a concrete and
temporal existence as part of a communicative activity. Only as part of a discourse
can a response to an explanation-seeking question become accessible for evaluation
to other people.
Indeed, we do talk about facts explaining facts; however, this is really an ellip-
tical way of expressing that explanations are concerned with facts, and that
we want explanations to be true. We should not blur the distinction between the
particular act of explanation and the explanatory force of this action. Nevertheless,
what counts as an explanation is not just a question of facts but as much a ques-
tion of pragmatic communicative strategies. It is fully acceptable to say that facts
explain facts as long as we also recognize that in one discursive context, a certain
kind of fact is required to provide the requisite understanding, whereas in a dif-
ferent context, a different kind of fact is called for. In many cases it makes good
sense to pay attention to the product of the explaining activity whenever we focus
on the different kinds of explanation. But if we want to understand explanation
as such, we must acknowledge that the meaning of the explanatory product is
partly determined by the context of the explaining act. It is no surprise that the
form and content of explanation offered by different empirical sciences vary
according to subject matter. But subject matter only partly determines the
manner in which people explain things; other factors include the context of the
audience, and the explainer’s and the explainee’s background knowledge and
cognitive interests.
274 J. Faye

4 Interpretation

Medieval scholars made a distinction between subtilitasintelligendi and subtilita-

sexplicandi. These two notions are equally important for understanding the
practice of science. Today, however, the modern use of the word “interpretation”
seems to cover both senses and thereby blurs an important insight. I shall therefore
suggest a distinction between two notions of interpretation: one concerns construction
of meaning, another relates to explanation of meaning. In general, however, I take
any interpretation to be a response to a representational question that involves a
hypothesis about the connection between the representer and the represented.
Originally our representational understanding began as a constructive response and
and, later, may be used in an explanatory response.
We ask for an explanation with the hope of gaining understanding, and we
make interpretations for similar reasons. It is a common view that interpretation
is associated with the understanding of meaning. The objects of interpretation are
considered to be intentional objects or objects having intentional properties.
Therefore, interpretation is seen as a process that leads us to an understanding of
persons, actions, or products of these actions, such as linguistic expressions, texts,
painting, sculpture, music, film, dance, plays and social institutions. What we
understand is the meaning being expressed by these products and an interpretation
is what shows the way to this meaning by means of a hypothesis. So an interpreta-
tion is viewed as a response to a question like “What does X mean?” This view is
in my opinion too simplistic.
First of all, X need not be of human origin. Any natural phenomenon can become
cognitively meaningful in the right circumstances. Causally produced effects
become meaningful if they are designed as data or are considered as evidence of
their causes. In addition to being physical phenomena they have gained a cognitive
status by being conceived as ‘data’ or ‘evidence.’ We convey thereby a certain mean-
ing to them in the sense that we take these phenomena to be capable of informing us
about something they are determined to represent. So data and evidence can be
objects of interpretation in case someone doesn’t understand what they inform us
about or are determined to represent.
There is, as already mentioned, a general ambiguity in the way we think of inter-
pretation which seems to have gone unnoticed. Sometimes the object of an interpre-
tation is what is considered to represent something such as data, signs, symbols, and
symptoms. The interpretive question is then what these phenomena are evidence of,
what they stand for, refer to, or what caused them. But at other times the object of
interpretation is types of phenomena which lack an appropriate classification or
conceptual representation. Such phenomena may be kinds of entities, relations,
sortal properties, etc. No phenomenon by itself points to anything beyond itself.
It does not reveal how it must be conceptually understood. In this case the interpretative
question is concerned with how they can be made the subject of representation.
Finally, there are times where the interpretation question is about whether a particular
phenomenon belongs to this or that category.
What Can Philosophy of Science Learn from Hermeneutics… 275

So what we call “interpretations” are explanations of cognitive meaning if the

interpreter addresses questions like “What does X stand for?,” “What does X
represent?,” “What is X evidence of?,” etc., and the interpreter intends to answer
these interpretation-seeking questions by proposing an appropriate response in
form of a hypothesis. I shall therefore suggest that interpretation of this kind, like
other types of explanations, can be considered as the interpreter’s response to a
question which expresses the questioner’s lack of understanding.6 Both question
and answer rely on the discursive presupposition that the phenomenon X can be
understood as intended by somebody to represent something or can be seen as
evidence of something which X represents. This form of interpretation may also
be called determinative interpretation since the interpreter determines by explana-
tion the cognitive meaning which a culture, or an individual person in a culture,
associates with the phenomenon under consideration. Explanation of meaning is
indeed possible only if the interpreted phenomenon already carries a meaning
independently of the interpreter’s act of interpretation because it has already been
constructed to have such a cognitive meaning.
However, other acts of interpretation are cases where the interpreter gives mean-
ing to the phenomenon in question. In these cases the focus is on a phenomenon Y
which the interpreter does not find intelligible as it appears and therefore does not
know how to grasp. These situations give rise to questions like “How can Y be
understood?”and “How is Y to be represented?” The interpreter’s responses to such
questions might be called investigative interpretations. What is characteristic of an
investigative interpretation is that the act of interpretation makes the phenomenon Y
intelligible by assigning a certain representational understanding to it. This happens
by proposing a new form of classification, conceptualization, or schematization,
and then by bringing the resulting beliefs into a coherent connection with the
interpreter’s belief system. In this case the understanding of Y depends on the
interpreter’s own invention.
I think we need a much broader perspective on ‘interpretation’ in which it is seen
to offer both explanation and conceptual understanding in the humanities and the
sciences. As mentioned above, ‘interpretation’ can be characterized as a means of
gaining explanatory understanding of the ‘meaning’ of a representation. An inter-
pretation in its determinative sense suggests a deliberately formulated hypothesis
addressing a representational issue concerning what a representation really repre-
sents. The relation between explanation and interpretation is here that the latter is a
form of explanation by which one explains the representational role of some repre-
sentation. An explanation of meaning arises in contexts where a phenomenon is
considered to represent something else, but where someone has doubts about what
the phenomenon really stands for; it may be in connection with the consideration of

6
Note that the interpreter and the questioner may be one and the same person but may also be two
different persons. In the first situation the interpreter eventually answers his own interpretation-
seeking question by expressing his own understanding, in the second situation the questioner
raise an interpretation seeking question to another person in the hope of being informed by this
person’s answer.
276 J. Faye

effects, data, evidence, signs, symbols, texts, pictures, films, statements or actions.
Moreover, ‘interpretation’ in a second non-explanatory form can be seen as a
proposal of classification, conceptual representation, or theory formation. Under
those circumstances we respond intentionally with an interpreting act only when we
do not possess enough information to grasp the puzzling phenomenon in question.
Elsewhere I have argued for a pragmatic notion of interpretation in which
interpretation in its determinative form is a context-dependent response to a
meaning-seeking question and for applying a pragmatic and rhetorical theory of
explanation to interpretation as well.7 According to this unified theory of explanation
and interpretation, the form of interpretation under consideration is a deliberately
produced answer to a meaning-seeking question. The result of the interpretive
process is certain statements concerning a representational issue, whereas the process
is the communicative action that leads to these statements. The way the result turns
out depends somehow on the context and therefore, among other things, on the aim
and interest of those who do the interpretive work.
My suggestion is that the type of interpretation is determined partly by the
interpreter and partly by the object of the interpretation. Indeed, the object plays an
important role in the interpreter’s selection of the relevant type of interpretation.
The interpreter constrains her interpretation in accordance with her grasp of the
object by choosing the type of interpretation accordingly. For example, experimen-
tal data will give rise to another type of interpretation than a text or a painting.
But the interpreter’s knowledge of the situation, her goals and interests are also
elements in determining the form of interpretation. Thus, the person’s background
assumptions, beliefs and knowledge of the object influence the hypothesis he
generates. This applies not only to the form of hypothesis, but to the content as
well. The content of an interpretation is as much context-dependent as its form.
But, again, the object of interpretation imposes some constraints on any possible
understanding of the content.
A short characterization of the two notions of interpretation I present here would
then be that the determinative interpretation signifies a situation in which the
interpreter explains the meaning of a certain representational phenomenon, usually
an action, an expression, a sign, a symbol, or something similar, by a hypothesis
concerning what is represented by this phenomenon. The investigative interpreta-
tion, on the other hand, signifies a situation where the interpreter constructs a
hypothesis which provides meaning to the phenomenon he wants to have represented
in case he does not already grasp the meaning of this phenomenon. I shall also hold,
however, that an investigative interpretation may change status and become part of
a determinative interpretation whenever the scientific community reaches a common
agreement that the conceptual construction of an investigative interpretation should
form our general understanding of the phenomenon in question.
Strangely enough, philosophers of science who have been occupied with
explanation have shown little interest in characterizing interpretation in spite of the
fact that they themselves speak of interpretation. This lack of interest is partly due

7
See Faye (2010, 2011, 2012).
What Can Philosophy of Science Learn from Hermeneutics… 277

to the fact, I think, that they intuitively assume that these two concepts belong to
each side of Reichenbach’s famous distinction between the context of discovery
and the context of justification. Thus, interpretation has to do with the context of
discovery, whereas explanation belongs to the context of justification. This led
philosophers like Karl Popper and Carl Hempel to develop the deductive-nomological
model of explanation. They simply ignored interpretation as being too much of a
psychological notion with its close ties to meaning and understanding; they tacitly
seem to have accepted the hermeneutic division between explanation and under-
standing as important for a characterization of the difference between the natural
sciences and the humanities [Geisteswissenschaften]. In contrast, hermeneutic
philosophers have dealt with understanding and interpretation, but paid no attention
to explanation. An important consequence is that rigorousness of the various
accounts of explanation is missing with respect to the accounts of interpretation.
Explanation was the object of a logical analysis, interpretation involved a subjective
synthesis. But if we consider explanation to be an act of intentional communication,
there is no reason to uphold the traditional dichotomy between explanation and
what I call determinative interpretation. In both cases the explainer or the interpreter
supplies some information which is needed for understanding the topic of the
explanation/interpretation-seeking question.
Now the challenge we still have to meet is this: scientists often produce causal
explanations, and these explanations are taken to be objective because their topics
are mind-independent. Causal relationships, which are object of causal explana-
tions, exist regardless of the explainer. But when we turn to the interpretation of art
or texts, any explanation of meaning seems not to be controlled (even partially) by
similar objective facts. Rather each time a scholar is confronted with an artwork or
a text he or she seems to construct the meaning instead of establishing the meaning.
However, I shall attempt to prove that scholars working on empirical and scientific
grounds both possess and use objective criteria to determine what kind of informa-
tion is relevant and what isn’t in the process of creating a particular interpretation.
These criteria are not of the scholars own making but stem from features which the
community of scholars believes are controlled by the artist or the author and there-
fore are considered as meaningful expressions of the artist’s or author’s intentions.

5 Botticelli’s the Mystic Nativity

Among the oeuvre of the famous renaissance painter, Sandro Botticelli, there is one
work which for many years has escaped a satisfactory scientific interpretation. Its
iconography does not fit the traditional way of depicting similar motifs. The paint-
ing is called The Mystical Nativity and owned by the National Gallery in London. It
shows, as the name suggest, the birth of Jesus Christ. At the center of the painting
the Holy family is situated under the roof of a shelter that covers the entrance of a
cave where an ox and a donkey appear in the opening. The Virgin Mary, infant
Jesus, as well as Joseph, who has fallen asleep, are larger than other figures and their
278 J. Faye

surroundings – as the medieval convention prescribes. A group of men, including

wise men, shepherds and a couple of angels, kneel behind the Virgin and Joseph.
At the top of the roof sit three angels, the one in the middle holding an open book
(the Bible?) and the two others each holding an olive branch. They are dressed in a
red, a white, and a green gown signaling faith, hope, and charity. Above them in the
sky twelve angels circle under a golden dome, each dressed in similar colors, and
each one holding an olive branch and a white ribbon. At the bottom of the painting
three more angels embracing three men meet one’s eye and around them fivesmitten
and self-destructive demons are trying to flee to the underworld. The men hold
scrolls proclaiming in Latin: “Peace on Earth to men of goodwill.”
The most remarkable feature is the instruction to the viewer which Botticelli
has placed at the top of his painting. The Greek inscription translates as: “This
picture, at the end of the year 1500, in the troubles of Italy, I, Alessandro, painted
in the half time after the time; at the time of the fulfillment of the eleventh of St
John, in the Second Woe of the Apocalypse; in the loosing of the devil for three
and a half years; then he shall be chained according to the twelfth, and we shall
see him [here a word or two is missing] as in this picture.”8 The reference is to
Saint John’s Book of Revelation where Chap. 11 speaks of the second woe and
mentions three-and-a-half years. In Chap. 10, which Botticelli’s text does not
explicitly mention, it is told that an angel descends from Heaven holding a book
in her hand and a voice from Heaven commands Saint John to take it. The central
angel sitting on the roof of the stable holding a book supported by two other
angels may very well allude to this passage.
Not everything about this painting involves interpretation in order to be
understood. Although parts of it are not immediately meaningful for an art histo-
rian, there are many other features which are directly understandable even for ordi-
nary people. We can see it as a painting; we see angels, persons, an ox and a donkey
without being engaged in any form of interpretation. Everybody speaking a lan-
guage has the conceptual resources to be aware of these depictions right away.
People raised within a Christian culture also immediately recognize the birth of
Jesus based on their knowledge of the Gospels’ narrative of the birth of Jesus and
thousands of other representations of the same story. But ordinary people’s
pre-existing understanding ends here. The art historians’ immediate understanding
reaches a bit further. They know already the meaning of the various colors of the
various dresses, the iconographic meaning of the olive branches, and the meaning
of the enlargement of the Holy Family. By knowing the renaissance context in
which The Mystic Nativity is painted, art historians can rely on their professional
understanding of the iconographic use of colors and symbols at that time. None of
these items give rise to any question of meaning, and as long as they do not give
rise to such questions, nothing is open for interpretation. It is only if somebody
seriously challenges, say, the meaning of the colors that the community may
engage interpretive questions.

8
This translation is due to Hatfield (1995), 98.
What Can Philosophy of Science Learn from Hermeneutics… 279

But Botticelli’s painting is still full of symbols which are not easily understood
even by scholars of renaissance art and which provoke them to ask interpretation-
seeking questions such as why the painting depicts twelve angels dancing in the
sky under a golden dome, why it depicts three angels embracing three olive
garlanded men, and why it depicts five demons attempting to escape. What is the
meaning of these symbols? Understanding their meaning is not within the scope of
well-documented iconography. At this point scholars must formulate certain
interpretive hypotheses about their meaning which can be used as a scientific
response to that type of questions. Symbols are ambiguous by nature. They are
only well-defined in context and the aim of interpretation is to identify this context
to determine the meaning.
However, interpretive hypotheses have to be relevant, and the criterion by which
scholars can judge that a certain hypothesis is relevant is if the painter can possibly
have had this meaning in mind. Besides being relevant interpretive hypotheses must
be supported by empirical evidence which comes from historical, cultural and
biographical information. The key to the interpretation of this painting seems to be
the Greek inscription where Botticelli gives us certain contextual clues. He mentions
that Italy faces troubles and two chapters of the Saint John’s Revelation. The
inscription states that the painting is executed at the time of the fulfillment of
the second woe of the Apocalypse after which Satan will be chained as we see in the
picture. So any good interpretation must explain this unusual collocation of the birth
of Jesus Christ (in the past) and the vision of a world to come (in the future).
The 12th chapter introduces the apocalyptic woman “clothed with the sun, with
the moon under her feet, and on her head a garland of twelve stars.” She is in labor
with a male child. A fiery red seven-headed dragon waits for the birth of the child.
However, when born, it is taken up to God’s throne while the woman flees into the
wilderness for one thousand two hundred and sixty days (the same as three and a
half years). Exegetic writings often identify the apocalyptic women with Virgin
Mary, and she is interpreted as a symbol of the Church. The dragon is taken to be
the Devil. This theme also seems to be the object of Botticelli’s painting. The second
woe will be followed by the realization of the prophecy as Saint John presents in the
12th chapter: Virgin Mary, now having 12 angels circling above her head instead
of a wreath of 12 stars, symbolizes the Church, and the Savior’s rebirth announces
the rebirth of the Church. It is the beginning of a new day that can be seen from the
dawn in the background of the picture. The devil will be expelled from the Earth
(the five demons beneath) and eternal peace will last forever.
Hatfield mentions three possible interpretations of which this one seems to be the
most probable given textual as well as contextual circumstances.9 But what is the
evidence in support of this interpretation? At the end of the fifteenth century an
increasing fear accumulated because it was foreshadowed that the end of the world
was approaching. The Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola spoke about it in his
stirring speeches, and he urged the people of Florence to give up their luxurious
lifestyle, do penance, and show remorse over their undignified and profane life.

9
Hatfield (1995), 112 ff.
280 J. Faye

He found many supporters and many of their luxury goods were committed to the
flames in a huge bonfire. However, Savonarola was politically too radical, he got
many enemies, the pope excommunicated him, and finally he was prosecuted and
condemned to death as a heretic and a schismatic, and he was executed together
with two of his lieutenants. The execution took place May 28, 1498. There is no
doubt that Botticelli was deeply touched by these events.
In his Compendio di revelatione, first published in 1495, Savonarola sets forth a
vision that had come to him in which he saw an extraordinary heavenly crown.
At its base were 12 hearts with 12 banderoles surmounting them and written on these
in Latin were the unique mystical qualities or privileges of the Virgin Mary – she is
“Mother of her father,” “Daughter of her son,” “Bride of God,” etc.10 Though much
of the writing on the ribbons held by the dancing angels is now invisible to the
naked eye, infra-red reflectography has shown that the original words on the angels’
ribbons correspond exactly to Savonarola’s 12 privileges of the Virgin. In his sermon,
preached on Assumption Day 1496, Savonarola went on to explore the 11th and
12th chapters of the Book of Revelation – the precise chapters mentioned in the
painting’s inscription. He connected the glory of Mary with the imminent coming of
the power of Christ on Earth.11 This theme is exactly the one which Botticelli seems
to render by his own constructive interpretation. Thus, it seems very likely that the
three men embraced by angels are Savonarola and his two lieutenants who are
brought to life again with the rebirth of Jesus Christ.

6 Conclusion

The example illustrates how art history works as an empirical science. Interpretations
are subjected to empirical scrutiny and may be rejected as mere speculations if they
cannot account for the evidence.
The result is not in accordance with postmodern thinking. There is an ‘objective’
meaning in the form of the artist’s intention and with this in mind it directs scholars
in their search for possible interpretive hypotheses. But it may also offend certain
hermeneutists. Dilthey was right in so far as the artist’s intention is important for a
scientific understanding of the work, but he was wrong when he thought that the
method to reach such an understanding is empathy into the mind of the artist. It is
the artist’s intentions as they are expressed in the work which is the object of inter-
pretation, not the artist’s psychological moods or motives. Also Gadamer was right
to the extent that he denied, in opposition to Dilthey, that the human sciences have
their own methods.12 But in my opinion he was mistaken when he claimed that all
understanding is interpretation and when he argued against the objectivity of inter-
pretation. For him, ideas, texts, and works of art are historically bounded and each

10
Ibid, 94.
11
Ibid., 96–98.
12
Gadamer (1960/1993), 7–8.
What Can Philosophy of Science Learn from Hermeneutics… 281

interpreter is by necessity situated in his or her own time. The historical situation of
the interpreter will always influence and become a part of his or her interpretation,
and since the historical situation changes over the years, different interpreters
standing in different historical situations cannot reach a common ahistorical,
hence ‘objective’, interpretation. I think, however, that the above interpretation of
Botticelli’s The Mystic Nativity proves Gadamer wrong. The most likely interpretation
today, of which there is growing consensus among art historians, is probably the
interpretation which Botticelli himself would have agreed with, and which contem-
porary viewers would have recognized seeing the painting. Therefore I don’t expect
we will see a satisfactory but radically different interpretation in the future.

References

Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1894. Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 5. Leipzig and Berlin, 1914–1936.
Faye, Jan. 2002. Rethinking science. An introduction to the unity of science. Aldershort: Ashgate.
An enlarged version of Athenes kammer. En introduktion til videnskabernes enhed (2000).
Copenhagen: Høst & Søn.
Faye, Jan. 2007. The pragmatic-rhetorical view on explanation. In Rethinking explanation, Boston
studies in the philosophy of science, vol. 252, ed. J. Persson and P. Ylikoski, 43–68. Dordrecht:
Springer.
Faye, Jan. 2010. Interpretation in the natural sciences. In ESPA epistemology and methodology of
science, ed. M. Suárez, M. Dorato, and M. Rédei, 107–117. Dordrecht: Springer.
Faye, Jan. 2011. Explanation and interpretation in the sciences of man. In Explanation, prediction
and confirmation, ed. Dennis Dieks, 269–280. Dordrecht: Springer.
Faye, Jan. 2012. After postmodernism: A naturalistic reconstruction of the humanities. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Gardamer, Hans-Georg. 1960/1993. Wahrheit und Methode. English edition: Truth and Method,
2 edn. New York: Continuum.
Hatfield, Rab. 1995. Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity, Savonarola, and the Millennium. Journal of the
Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 58: 88–114.
Polanyi, Michael. 1966. The tacit dimension. London: Routledge.
The Classical Notion of Person
and Its Criticism by Modern Philosophy

Enrico Berti

Abstract The paper illustrates the classical notion of person, i. e. the definition of
person given by Boethius (fifth to sixth century A.D.) as “an individual substance
of a rational nature”, showing the derivation of its elements from the philosophy of
Aristotle. Afterwards the paper exposes the criticism to this notion formulated by
modern and contemporary philosophers (David Hume, Joseph Butler, Alfred
Ayer, Derek Parfit). Finally the text shows the reaction to this criticism and the
rediscovery of the classical notion of person, or of its Aristotelian elements, by Saul
Kripke, David Wiggins, Paul Ricoeur and Martha C. Nussbaum.

1 The Classical Notion of Person

By classical notion we mean the definition of “person” formulated by Boethius

(fifth to sixth century A.D.), that is, “an individual substance of a rational nature”
[rationalis naturae individua substantia, cf. Contra Eutychen III 1–6]. This
definition possesses the unique characteristic of being theological in origin and of
using at the same time purely philosophical categories. The origin of the definition
is theological because Boethius introduces it polemically in opposition to the
monophysitic heresy of Eutyches, which attributed to Jesus Christ a single nature,
the divine one, and against the dualistic heresy of Nestorius, which attributed to
him, as well as two natures, also two persons, one divine and one human. Against
these positions Boethius defends the Christological dogma of the Council of
Chalcedon (451 A.D.), which affirms the “hypostatic union,” in a single person
[the Greek term hypostasis is rendered in Latin as person], of two natures, one

E. Berti (*)
c/o Dipartimento di Filosofia, University of Padova,
piazza Capitaniato 3, I-35139 Padova, Italy
e-mail: enrico.berti@unipd.it

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 283

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_16,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
284 E. Berti

divine and one human. However, in order to formulate his definition of person,
Boethius uses two concepts derived from Aristotle’s Categories, of which he was
the first Latin translator and commentator (together with all of Aristotle’s writings
on logic, i.e. the collection called Organon, which Boethius made known to the
Medieval Latin world).
Indeed, the concept of “individual substance” corresponds to what Aristotle in
the Categories calls “primary substance” [ousia prôtê], that is, “what is neither the
predicate of a substrate nor inherent in a substrate,” because it is itself a substrate.
“Substrate” translates the Greek hypokeimenon, which literally means “that which
lies underneath,” which underlies becoming, change, inasmuch as it is its subject, that
is, the thing that becomes, the thing that changes and which, in changing, persists
during the entire process of change. It might also be translated as “subject” (subjectum
in Latin is equivalent to the Greek hypokeimenon), but modern philosophy has
agreed to use this term only for the human subject, while the substrate as intended
by Aristotle indicates any subject of becoming, both living and non living. For
Aristotle, substrate is that of which universal concepts are predicates, such as
species, e.g. “man,” and genus, e.g. “animal,” and which accidental properties inhere
in, e.g. “white” or “grammatical” (i.e., capable of reading and writing). Therefore,
as the substrate is not predicated of anything else and is not inherent in anything
else, it is “in itself”. Since, in order to exist, both the universal and the accidental
properties suppose the existence of a substrate on which they may be predicated or
in which to inhere, this is termed not only ousia (literally “being” in a strong sense,
that is, permanent, lasting), which in Latin is translated as substantia (literally “what is
underneath,” like the Greek hypostasis), but also “primary” ousia, that is, preceding
all others. On the contrary, species and genus, which do not exist “in themselves,”
but only in the substrate, and nevertheless constitute its essence (that is, tell “what it
is”), are termed “secondary” ousia.
As an example of “primary substance” Aristotle indicates “a certain man,” that is
Socrates, or Callias, and, more in general “a certain ‘this’” [tode ti], that is, a deter-
minate individual. Therefore Boethius rightly interprets the Aristotelian concept of
“primary substance” as “individual substance.” In this case, “individual” does not
mean “indivisible” [atomos in Greek] but “particular,” not universal, because species
and genus, that is “secondary substances”, are universal. Thus it is not indivisibility
which is essential to the Aristotelian concept of primary substance, but individuality,
i.e. particularity, the non universality, because the universal, that is the species and
genus, is always “in something other,” while the primary substance is always “in
itself.” Individuality, however, is not sufficient to build a primary substance, because
there can also be particular or individual properties, for example Socrates’ particular
whiteness. Thus a primary substance must first and foremost be a substrate, or
subject, and must also be individual. This is why Boethius, wanting to say that the
person is first of all a primary substance, says that it is an “individual substance.”
Even the concept of “nature,” used by Boethius to characterise the type of
primary substance which the person consists in, derives from Aristotle, where it is
expressed by the term physis, which alludes to “birth” [the Greek verb phuô, in its
intransitive meaning, corresponds to the Latin nascor, whose participle is natum],
The Classical Notion of Person and Its Criticism by Modern Philosophy 285

that is, what a thing is “by birth”: e.g. a man is a man because he is born of human
parents. In Aristotle “nature,” in this sense, is synonymous with “essence,” a
concept also expressed by the term ousia, but with the meaning of “what something
is by its own nature,” which corresponds to the question “what is it by its own
nature?”. E.g., if I ask, “what is Socrates?,” meaning what is he by nature, that is, by
birth, the answer is: “man”.
Finally, the term “rational,” which Boethius uses to clarify the nature of the person,
translates the Greek logon ekhon, that is “possessing logos.” The term logos, as is
well-known, in Greek certainly means “reason” (Latin ratio), but it first and foremost
means “word” (Latin verbum) and “discourse” (Latin sermo, oratio). Therefore,
Boethius’ expression “of a rational nature,” contained in the definition of “person,”
indicates an individual substance that, by its nature, that is, by its essence, possesses
logos, i.e. speech, language. According to Aristotle, this is what distinguishes man
from other animals, what constitutes the specific difference of the species “man”
within the genus “animal.” Since Boethius’ definition applies first of all to divine per-
sons, or to the person of Jesus Christ, the determination of “rational” cannot simply
allude to the capability to reason, but must allude more in general to the capability to
communicate, to enter into a mutual relationship. Indeed, according to the Trinitarian
dogma, formulated by the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.), the three persons of the Holy
Trinity possess the same nature, that is, divine nature, and are distinguished only by
the relationship they entertain mutually, that is, because the Son “is generated” by the
Father and the Holy Spirit “proceeds” from the Father and from the Son. Already in
the Gospel of John, the Son is called Logos, that is “word” [verbum].
Returning once again to speak of the human person, to whom Boethius’
definition is applied by analogy with the divine one, we must remark that “sub-
stance possessing logos by its nature” does not necessarily mean “substance which
currently exercises logos,” but rather also substance that, by nature, possesses the
capability of exercising logos even when it does not exercise it. Indeed, nature is
what Aristotle would call a “primary act,” that is the current possession of a body
of capabilities, the exercise of which should be called “secondary act” or “activity.”
Therefore, on the basis of Boethius’ definition, a new-born is also a person, even
thought he is as yet unable to speak, and so is a human individual affected by
aphasia, since he is born of human parents and therefore possesses a rational nature
(leaving aside the problem of the human embryo, which would lead to a whole
other series of problems, although, in my opinion, what has been said about the new-
born can be applied).

2 Criticism of Modern and Contemporary Philosophy

Boethius’ definition of person can be considered “classical” because it has remained

at the basis of global culture, not only Christian but also Jewish and Muslim, both
ancient, medieval and modern, that is of the entire culture which Aristotelian tradi-
tion has influenced: indeed, we find it with irrelevant variations in Augustine, John
286 E. Berti

Damascene, Richard of St Victor, Thomas Aquinas, G. W. Leibniz, Antonio

Rosmini, Jacques Maritain and several other thinkers I do not need to mention.1
However, starting from the seventeenth century the classical notion of person has
been jeopardised, not so much because it has been criticised directly, but because
the notions on which it is founded, i.e. “substance,” “nature” and, more recently,
“individual,” have been criticised. First of all, the notion of “substance” has been, so
to say, over-determined by Descartes and Spinoza, who defined it as “what does not
need anything else to exist” or “that which exists by itself,” which strictly can only
be applied to a divine substance. As a reaction, the notion of substance was criti-
cised by John Locke (1632/1704), who considered it “a complex idea,” that is, borne
not of direct experience (sensation and reflection), like “simple ideas,” but of a
combination of several simple ideas, that is, as a construction of the intellect, which
does not correspond to any experience. The object of such an idea, that is, the sub-
stance strictly speaking, remains for Locke a substratum obscurum, that is, some-
thing that, so to say, is “underneath” or “behind” the primary or secondary qualities,
that can be seen and therefore cannot be seen, cannot be touched, cannot be per-
ceived in any way. With this doctrine we are very far from the Aristotelian notion for
which substance is the single individual of whom one has a direct experience, e.g.
Socrates. The notion of substance then underwent a further transformation on behalf
of George Berkeley (1685/1753), for whom material substances do not exist, inas-
much as existence consists in being perceived (esse est percipi), thus the same quali-
ties are nothing but perceptions and the only really existing substance is the
percipient subject, that is, the human spirit (besides the divine Spirit).
These transformations led to the explicit criticism of the concept of substance on
behalf of David Hume (1711/1776), according to which we do not have a direct
experience either of material substances or of spiritual substances (that is, of our-
selves as substance), therefore the idea of substance (as indeed also that of cause,
which is the object of another memorable criticism by Hume) is only a belief of ours
generated by habit, to which we cannot say any independent reality corresponds.
For Hume we do not even have experience of ourselves, thus we are not a substance
that persists, equipped with its own identity, but only a bundle of impressions that
follow one another over time. Personal identity itself, which for Locke was guaran-
teed at least by memory, that is by conscience, for Hume is not guaranteed by any
experience, although this is a problem for him, because in the Appendix to his
Treatise of Human Nature he declares himself unsatisfied with the doctrine he
himself had expounded and admits he has not been able to find a solution.
The Anglican bishop Joseph Butler (1692/1752) and the Scottish philosopher
Thomas Reid (1710/1796) reacted to the criticism respectively of Locke and
Hume. They referred to the classical notion of substance as the only thing capable
of guaranteeing individual identity. But the somewhat narrow notion of experi-
ence as formed by individual sensations, or impressions, proper of empiricism,
prevented the Aristotelian doctrine from being fully recovered, according to
which the true object of experience is the primary substance itself, that is, the

1
Cf. Berti (1992, 1995).
The Classical Notion of Person and Its Criticism by Modern Philosophy 287

individual substance perceived in its entirety, with all its properties, including
identity and persistence in change.
Even the attempt, made by Immanuel Kant (1724/1804), to give back objective
value to the idea of substance (and to that of cause, on which the entire Newtonian
mechanics is founded), considering it as an a priori concept, that is, a category of
reason, universal and necessary, has not led to an actual recovery of the classical
notion, because even Kant continued to admit that we do not have any experience of
substance and the perception that we have of ourselves—the “transcendental apper-
ception,” or “I think”—is not the experience of a substance but is only the condition
of each of our experiences. The idea of “soul” for Kant is an idea of reason, that is,
the rational need to unify the psychic phenomena that we know of, which in any
case is destined not to be able to be translated into authentic knowledge, for the very
lack of an authentic experience of the soul. However, from the practical point of
view, Kant has recovered the concept of person as a subject bearing the moral law
and thus possessing his own “dignity,” i.e., not exchangeability, which distinguishes
him from things that are exchangeable and thus only have a “price,” and makes him
worthy of “respect,” worthy of being considered always, in the person proper and in
the others, not only as a medium but also as an end.
The concept of “nature,” on the contrary, which is still present in Hume, who
writes a Treatise of Human Nature trying to build a science of this analogous to the
one build by Newton for non human nature, is also undermined in the nineteenth
century, first by idealist and historicist philosophy and then by evolutionistic anthro-
pology. Fichte, Schelling and Hegel’s idealistic philosophy denies the existence of
unchangeable essences and, resolving reality in thought, which is a continuous
process, dissolves substances, essences and the bodies themselves in moments of a
single major process, which is the becoming of the Spirit. However, it is worth not-
ing that Hegel’s most important critics, that is, Feuerbach, Marx and Kierkegaard,
objected that it is not possible to have a process without a substrate, and conceived
this substrate as the individual human subject, just as Aristotle did, explicitly recall-
ing the latter (Marx even went as far as using the Aristotelic term of hypokeimenon).2
Evolutionistic anthropology, as is well-known, denies the fixed nature of the spe-
cies and thus the interpretation that has been given of it by positivistic philosophy
has gone as far as denying the existence of an unchangeable human nature, which is
the same at all stages of evolution and in all the earth’s peoples. The concept of
“human nature” is thus replaced by the concept of “culture,” intended as a differen-
tiated, dynamic reality. However, also for this very reason, we must report a misun-
derstanding that took place at the beginning of the modern age, when “nature,” in
particular “human nature,” was intended as an unchangeable essence, belonging to
a hypothetical “state of nature,” that is, to a primitive, pre-political condition of
man. This notion, belonging to the so-called “jus-naturalism” (Hobbes, Locke,
Rousseau), led to the opposition between “nature” and “culture” or between “nature”
and “history,” exposing the concept of nature to the criticism of evolutionism and
historicism, which have shown that such a “nature” never existed and that the true

2
Cf. Berti (2004).
288 E. Berti

nature of man is culture itself, that is, what man makes of himself. But, if we apply
such criticisms to the Aristotelian and then to the classical concept of nature, they
completely miss the mark, because for Aristotle, as we have seen, the true nature of
man is logos, that is, speech, therefore political life, “culture.” Indeed, man is for
Aristotle “an animal who is political by his nature,” precisely because of language,
and the pre-political condition can belong only to beasts or gods. Besides, Aristotle
explicitly states that the true nature of man is the end (telos), the achievement, the
total fulfilment of human capabilities. Even from the point of view of the modern
evolutionistic anthropology I do not think it can be denied that there is a marked
difference between the human species and the other animal species, thanks to
evolution, and this difference consists precisely in language and culture.
Finally, even the concept of individual, and the connected notion of “personal
identity,” has been the object of criticism on behalf of contemporary philosophy of
empiricist and neopositivist inspiration. Alfred J. Ayer, the greatest representative of
neo-positivism in Great Britain, has gone as far as denying the experience that we
have of our very thought, declaring that one can never affirm “I think,” but can only
say “it is thought” or “there is a thought.”3 Derek Parfit, echoing Hume, maintained
that the person is nothing but a series of subsequent “selfs” equipped with a collective
identity, comparable to what is proper, for example, of a nation, in which individuals
change continuously and what persists is only their common quality, that is, the fact
of all belonging to the same nation.4

3 Reaction to Criticism and the Rediscovery of the Classical

Concept of Person

In the Anglo-American philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century,

characterised by analytic-linguistic inspiration, that is, by the notion of philosophy as
language analysis—not only of scientific language, as was the case in neo-positivism
(Russell, the early Wittgenstein, Carnap), but also of ordinary language—we see a
progressive rediscovery of the classical notion of person, as an answer to the
criticisms of modern and contemporary philosophy of Humean inspiration to the
concept of substance and personal identity. To this end we must recall first of all
the position of Peter F. Strawson, the continuer of the Oxford and Cambridge School
inspired by the late Wittgenstein (Austin, Ryle), who, in the work Individuals
(1959), tried to describe how the world must be able to explain the way in which we
speak of it in ordinary language. By means of this description, which he called
“descriptive metaphysics,” Strawson showed that the ultimate reference of our
language is always made up of particular objects, which are identifiable by means
of space-time coordinates and reidentifiable through “sortal” designators (a term

3
Ayer (1963).
4
Parfit (1984). For the reaction to criticism and the rediscovery of the classical concept of person,
see my article Berti (2006).
The Classical Notion of Person and Its Criticism by Modern Philosophy 289

derived from Locke to indicate “what sort of” an object it is), that is, of a universal
type. Among these particular objects, Strawson remarked, there are some that serve
as a reference for the identification of others, which are called by him “basic par-
ticulars” or “individuals”: they correspond exactly to what Aristotle called “primary
substances” and which he indicated as the logical subjects of propositions. Among
individuals, Strawson continued, there are some that play an even more basic iden-
tificatory role and correspond to original and not further analysable units of physical
and psychic facts, which are persons. Persons are thus basic particulars, or individu-
als, that is “primary substances,” with indissolubly united physical and psychic
properties.5 The affinity between this notion and the classical one is evident.
Simultaneously, in the United States he who today is perhaps considered the
greatest American philosopher of the twentieth century, that is Willard v. O. Quine,
in his work Word and Object (1960), maintained that the possibility of referring
language to objects, that is, to give meaning to language, requires as a necessary
condition the fact of being able to identify objects: indeed, there is no entity without
identity.6 This way, he reproposed the problem of personal identity, denied by Hume
and by his most recent continuers. This has given rise to a debate the first document
of which was constituted by the seminar on Identity and Individuation, which took
place at the Institute of Philosophy of New York University during the academic
year 1969–70, the proceedings of which were published in a book by the same title
edited by Milton K. Munitz.7 The problem is how it is possible to identify an
individual, that is, to distinguish him from others coexisting in space and recognising
he has a certain persistence, or identity, over time.
This problem in turn contains various issues, for example what authorises us to
affirm the identity of a thing or a person when these change over time? Then there
is the issue raised by Leibniz with the so-called “principle of the identity of the
indiscernibles”: is it true that two individuals who have exactly the same properties,
that is, that are indiscernible, are also identical, i.e., are the same individual? Finally,
there is a third issue, called forth by the famous essay by G. Frege, Über Sinn und
Bedeutung, of 1892: how is identity possible between realities that are the object of
different descriptions, for instance “morning star” and “evening star?”
A famous solution to this problem was suggested by Saul Kripke in Naming and
Necessity (1980), according to whom there is identity when two “rigid designators,”
that is, two signs, that indicate essential properties, have the same referent in all
possible worlds. But this supposes, exactly, that there are essences, the object of nec-
essary truths, that is, of necessarily true although not analytic judgements (distinction
introduced by Quine), which are first and foremost natural species but can also be
classes of artificial objects.8 The reference to essences naturally calls to mind Aristotle,
but this is not essential to Kripke’s thesis, which, although criticised and contested,

5
Strawson (1959).
6
Quine (1960).
7
Munitz (ed.) (1971).
8
Kripke (1980).
290 E. Berti

is certainly considered an important reference point within the framework of analytic

philosophy and thus makes enough sense to be able to be discussed.
David Wiggins is also moving in the same direction as Kripke, but with more
explicit references to Aristotle, and in Sameness and Substance (1980) he explicitly
advocates that, to establish an absolute identity, as is the case in a single individual,
it is necessary to resort to the Aristotelian concept of substance. Also for Wiggins
natural species are substances and are each characterised by an “activity,” that is,
life, therefore they are not plain nominal essences in Locke’s sense. The same
character is possessed, although to a lesser degree, by artificial objects, for which
functioning is analogous to activity. Thus, to identify something, it is necessary to
say what it is, that is, to subsume it under a predicate that offers for it a principle of
continuity or of individuation: this is what predicates indicating a principle of
activity or functioning—i.e. the concepts of natural or artificial substances—do.9
The debate on identity was finally summarised in the treatise by D. W. Hamlyn
on Metaphysics (1984), where the author showed that, in order to identity any
object, first of all the reference to its space-time coordinates is necessary, then to
its “space-time history” and, finally, to the species it belongs to.10 This can lead to
a form of essentialism, which, however—as Putnam noted in The Meaning of
Meaning (1975)—is indispensable, especially for natural substances, such as
water, which has as its essence the fact of being H2O, whether we know it or not,
in all possible worlds.11
Within the framework of the problem of the identity of substances, the problem
of personal identity was recently taken up again, always in the framework of Anglo-
American analytic philosophy. Wiggins suggested an original solution to this
problem, indicating as the condition of personal identity not conscience, like Locke,
but the continuity of life. Parfit objected to this that the important continuity for the
person is not the biological one but the psychological one, which may fail during
character mutations,12 and Williams observed that this notion makes of the human
person a simple natural species (it is the accusation of “biologism”).13 These objec-
tions of a spiritualistic nature do not take into account the fact that the higher func-
tions of man are strongly conditioned by the biological ones, and that thought itself
is a form of life, as proved today by the fact that the Mind-Body Problem is no
longer addressed by the cognitive sciences by means of information technology or
computer science, but especially by recourse to the neurosciences. This emerges
clearly from the most recent formulation of “functionalism” by H. Putnam in the
book Words and Life, where the author goes as far as speaking of a “return to
Aristotle after Wittgenstein.”14

9
Wiggins (1980).
10
Hamlyn (1984).
11
Putnam (1975).
12
Parfit (1973).
13
Williams (1986).
14
Putnam (1994).
The Classical Notion of Person and Its Criticism by Modern Philosophy 291

However, together with the notion of person, analytic philosophy has also
recovered the Aristotelian notion of substance. For example, in the Blackwell
Companion to Metaphysics, the author of the entry “Substance,” Peter Simons,
illustrated a whole range of possible meanings of this term, affirming the need for a
metaphysical perspective in which a single notion of substance can play its role
consistently. Indeed, substance can mean: A) being independent, as for Husserl; B)
ultimate subject, as for the nominalists Quinton, Price, Quine, Bambrough and
Stout, or for the realists Armstrong, Ryle and van Cleve; C) individuating element,
as for Strawson and Wiggins; D) what underlies change, as for Mellor, Q. Smith,
McMullin, White, Furth and Anscombe; E) fundamental underlying object of refer-
ence, as for Campbell, Kim, Loux and Rosenkrantz (I omit further mention of
names, although they are present in the text).15
Another eloquent example of the topicality of the debate on the substance of
analytic philosophy is the article Substance by the aforementioned D. Wiggins in
the volume Philosophy. A Guide through the Subject, edited by A. C. Grayling
(1995), of which it constitutes, together with Causation, Time, Universals the
Metaphysics section. Wiggins rightly refers to Aristotle as to the first who focal-
ised the concept of substance and first of all takes into examination the criticisms
that Hume addressed to the concept of substance, demonstrating that they start
from a prejudicially hostile definition, which oscillates between the “something
unknown and invisible” (Treatise, I, IV, 4) of Lockian origin, and “that which can
exist by itself” (Treatise, I, IV, 5) of Cartesian origin.16 In any case, it has nothing
to do with the famous definition of “primary substance” given by Aristotle in the
Categories, that is, “that which is neither in a subject nor is the predicate of a
subject,” a definition that can be applied to all those particular concrete realities
which can be qualified by other things but do not in themselves qualify other
things. Primary substances, which are the basic constituents of the world, are also
what survives certain types of change, that is—as Wiggins says with an expression
taken from his aforementioned book Sameness and Substance (Oxford 1980)—
the continuants, characterised by a certain function or activity. In Metaphysics—as
is well-known—Aristotle further develops the issue, identifying the cause of
substantiality in form, intended as principle of activity, of which the latter in
living beings fundamentally is life.
The Lockian idea of substance as “a certain je ne sais quoi,” that is, something
hidden, invisible and thus absurd—observes Wiggins—is the product of the
separation of the subject from all of its properties, which has nothing to do with the
subject (hypokeimeon) which Aristotle speaks of, a perfectly visible reality, which
is palpable and possesses quality. The same can be said—I may add—of the
Cartesian and Spinozian idea of substance as something that exists in itself, which
has nothing to do with the sensible substance that Aristotle speaks of. But Wiggins
also criticises some recent misunderstandings of the concept of substance, for
example the one that is proper of the constructionalism of David Lewis, while he

15
Simons (1995).
16
Wiggins (1995).
292 E. Berti

observes that the Aristotelian idea of substance has been recovered by Strawson and
Quine. On the basis of this notion, concludes Wiggins, concrete realities such as
animals, human beings and other similar continuants are substances, about which
one can rather pose the problem of how we can identify them or how they conserve
their own identity.
Finally, the thesis inspired by Hume and supported by Parfit, who—echoing
Hume—interprets the life of the person as a series of subsequent experiences, com-
parable to the history of nations, where there is an evident lack of a substantial
subject that remains identical at different times, has also been subject to criticism.
In particular, Bernard Williams, another exponent of the Oxford School who
recently passed away, observed that there must be some kind of link between
subsequent “selfs,” which should be engendered by change, as proved by the fact
that they all fail in the case of the physical death of their “progenitor”.17
A return to the classical notion of person is not only present in Anglo-American
philosophy of analytic inspiration, but also in “continental” philosophy of herme-
neutic inspiration. Paul Ricoeur’s position is exemplary in this regard. In the article
“Meurt le personnalisme, revient la personne,” which came out for the first time in
the journal that had been the instrument of “personalism,” that is, Esprit, in 1983,
the French philosopher, who had been close to Emmanuel Mounier, founder of this
current in the years 1947–1950, and had collaborated with his journal, declares that
personalism as a philosophical current is dead because “it was not competitive
enough to win the battle of concept,” while person returns because “it had been the
best candidate to sustain legal, political, economic and social battles” in defence of
human rights.18 I believe that both parts of this diagnosis must be shared, and that
for this reason a philosophical foundation of person, more robust than the one previ-
ously offered by personalism, must be sought. Besides, Mounier did not consider
himself a philosopher and was seeking a philosopher of personalism, after Nazi
persecution had parted him from Paul Landsberg, who was the most appropriate to
play this role in the Esprit group.
The “battle of concept” lost by personalism, although Ricoeur does not say it
explicitly, is in my opinion the criticism of the notion of person made by Anglo-
American analytic philosophy, which Ricoeur too found himself up against and was
able to deal with in his most recent writings. Indeed, we must recognise that not
only French personalism but the entire philosophy of Christian inspiration devel-
oped in the European continent in the second half of the twentieth century almost
completely neglected the comparison with the analytic philosophy tradition, in the
conviction that it was too logical, too abstract to say something interesting on the
person and on the person’s life. Thus not only were the extremist criticisms of a
neo-positivist such as Alfred Ayer ignored, so were the much more traditional ones
of Derek Parfit.
Ricoeur himself, in his most recent writings, precisely in order to reply to Parfit’s
objections, tried to solve the problem of personal identity distinguishing identity as

17
Williams (1981).
18
Ricoeur (1992).
The Classical Notion of Person and Its Criticism by Modern Philosophy 293

“sameness” (mêmeté), on the basis of which each is simply “the same” (idem, same,
gleich), from identity as “selfhood” (ipséité), on the basis of which on the contrary
someone is “himself” (ipse, self, selbst). The former, in his opinion, supposes the
existence of a substance, but it is not important, because it belongs to the sphere, in
Heideggerian language, of Vor-handen and of Zu-handen. The latter is the important
one, belonging to the sphere of Dasein, that is, of authentic existence. But the latter
identity, that is, selfhood, according to Ricoeur is only a “narrative identity,” result-
ing from the effective unity of an entire life, and is ensured by “character,” intended
as a certain constancy in dispositions, but above all by that loyalty to oneself that
one gives proof of by keeping promises. This “loyalty to oneself” (le maintien de
soi) is, for Ricoeur, the authentic personal identity.19
The latter solution may seem insufficient, because it offers a purely ethical, not
ontological foundation of the person, which is applicable only to those who are
responsible for their own actions, that is, who possess a moral “character,” the capa-
bility of remaining loyal to themselves, a reliability from the point of view of the
others. How could a similar concept of personal identity be valid for someone who
is irresponsible, for instance a child, or for someone who is seriously ill, or for a
dissociated person? Yet even in these cases there exist rights, such as for example
the right to inherit, or the right to property, which suppose a personal identity. If it
is true, as Ricoeur himself affirmed, that the person remains the best candidate to
sustain the battles in defence of human rights, it is necessary to recur to a concept of
person capable of playing this role. Besides, Ricoeur, in the above-mentioned
article, had mentioned a similar concept, defining the person as “the support of an
attitude,” which means the substrate, the substantial subject of the various activities,
irreducible to the latter ones. And in his most recent book he points out that the
Aristotelian doctrine of potency and of the act does not apply only to human praxis,
but indicates “a ground of being, at once potentiality and actuality,” which seems to
allude to the presence of a substrate as the foundation of acting, equipped with those
capabilities that Aristotle indicated with the expression “primary act”.20
The fact that the person remains, as Ricoeur maintains, the best candidate to
sustain the battles in defence of human rights is demonstrated, in my opinion, by the
philosophical implications that the formulation of the latter entails. For instance, the
right to equality, that is, the right of each to be treated by law in the same way as
everyone else, presupposes something that makes all human beings the same, inde-
pendently of their differences in origin, nationality, social class and culture. Well,
this is what the classical notion of person expresses by means of the concept of
“nature.” Let us then take the right to freedom, freedom of thought, of speech, of
press, of religion, of association: it supposes that man, although strongly condi-
tioned by a series of material factors (physical constitution, economic condition,
subconscious, education received, etc.) conserves a margin of freedom, that is, of
self-determination, of capability of escaping material conditionings, that corre-
sponds to what Boethius called “rational nature.” Finally, the right to property, on

19
Ricoeur (1990).
20
Ibidem, p. 357.
294 E. Berti

the basis of which the owner of a good conserves its property despite any changes
in his life, that is, irregardless of whether he changes civil status, citizenship,
religion, etc., presupposes that the owner of said right always remains the same
person, that is, is a subject that persists in becoming, which is the same as admitting
that he is an individual substance in the sense meant by Boethius.
It is true that not all philosophers recognise human rights as founded, or
foundable, on incontrovertible reasons, in fact some believe that they cannot even
have an ultimate foundation. However, there is no doubt that they correspond to
the way of thinking of the majority of people, i.e. they express “public opinion,”
as proved by the fact that they have been solemnly proclaimed in universal
declarations undersigned by most States, that they are present in many constitutions
of democratic States and that even those governments that in actual fact do not
respect them are not willing to admit it officially, because they know this would
make them unpopular.
Besides, the notion of person that underlies the declarations of human rights has
been adopted by some of the philosophers most committed, for instance, to the
defence of the rights of women or of people belonging to different cultures than the
Western one. I am thinking especially of the case of Martha C. Nussbaum, who,
referring to the theory of economist Amartya K. Sen, according to which the most
equitable distribution of wealth is the one based on the people’s capability of using
it, has drawn up an actual list of human capabilities, which outlines an anthropology
that is not very distant from the classical notion of person. Besides, M. Nussbaum
explicitly echoes the Aristotelian notion of happiness as the full realization of all
human capabilities, although she criticises Aristotle for his discrimination of
women, slaves and barbarians.21 All in all, we can say that today, despite the criticisms
it has been subjected to by a part of modern philosophy, the classical notion of
person proves to be still topical both in the contemporary philosophical debate and
in the people’s way of thinking.

References

Ayer, A.J. 1963. The concept of person and other essays. Oxford: Clarendon.
Berti, E. 1992. Il concetto di persona nella storia del pensiero filosofico. In AA. VV. Persona e
personalismo, 43–74. Padova, Gregoriana.
Berti, E. 1995. Individuo e persona: la concezione classica. Studium 91: 515–528.
Berti, E. 2004. Aristote dans les premières critiques adressées à Hegel par Feuerbach, Marx et
Kierkegaard. In Aristote au XIXe siècle, ed. D. Thouard, 23–35. Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses
Universitaires du Septentrion.
Berti, E. 2006. How I see philosophy of the 21st century. International Academy for Philosophy,
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Hamlyn, D.W. 1984. Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kripke, Saul. 1980. Naming and necessity. Oxford: Blackwell.
Munitz, Milton K. (ed.). 1971. Identity and individuation. New York: New York University Press.

21
M. C. Nussbaum (2000).
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Nussbaum, Martha C. 2000. Women and human development. The capabilities approach.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Parfit, Derek. 1973. Later selves and moral principles. In Philosophy and personal relations, ed.
Alan Montefiore, 149–150. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and persons. Oxford: Clarendon.
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Williams, Bernard. 1986. Hylomorphism. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 4: 188–199.
 Part IV
Hermeneutic Science and First
Philosophy, Theology and the Universe
Philosophie des sciences et philosophie
première

Pierre Kerszberg

Abstract Depuis son institution à l’époque de Galilée, la science mathématique de

la nature a voulu s’affranchir des apparences trompeuses de l’expérience familière.
Pourtant la référence à l’expérience familière demeure une exigence de sens que les
théories contemporaines ne peuvent pas éviter, même si elles transforment pro-
fondément la nature et la portée de cette expérience. Finalement la précom-
préhension de ce qui est effectivement compris dans les sciences est l’énigme du
sens oblitérée par et grâce à leur pouvoir opératoire. Cette énigme impose la tâche
philosophique de reprendre l’ancien projet de philosophie première à l’aune de
l’horizon d’une mathesis universalis. Cet article explore les possibilités d’une épis-
témologie qui se débarrasse à la fois du fantasme d’une maîtrise absolue de ce qui
est et du scepticisme qui suit immanquablement la frustration de ce fantasme. Dans
le sillage de Kant, la phénoménologie transcendantale ouvre la voie vers une telle
épistémologie. Du fantasme inachevé et inachevable d’une évidence apriorique à
propos de ce qui existe effectivement, héritage de la mathesis universalis, une telle
épistémologie retient des efforts de la science moderne et contemporaine qu’elle
commence par inventer des évidences en jouant d’une manière inhabituelle avec les
gestes du corps traduits dans les espaces de la pensée.

Les pionniers de la révolution scientifique du dix-septième siècle parlent

certainement d’une seule voix lorsqu’ils exigent que la compréhension de la nature
doit passer par sa mathématisation. Le contact avec la nature au premier jour n’est
pas une source de connaissance fiable, au contraire il est entaché d’erreur et
d’illusion par suite de l’intrusion intempestive d’appréciations purement
subjectives, et il incombe à une pensée sûre de son chemin, comme peut l’être la

P. Kerszberg (*)
Department of Philosophy, Université de Toulouse, Toulouse, France
e-mail: kerszber@univ-tlse2.fr

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 299

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_17,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
300 P. Kerszberg

mathématique, de corriger ces travers. Mais cette voix unanime devient discor-
dante lorsque, au-delà des nouvelles connaissances, il s’agit de justifier la démarche
proprement dite.
Il suffit pour s’en rendre compte de considérer deux des auteurs qui ont contribué
d’une manière significative à façonner notre image scientifique du monde : Descartes
et Newton. On a pu opposer Descartes à Newton comme le monde de l’explication
à celui du calcul : l’un fait appel à des atomes accrochés les uns aux autres et
entraînés dans des tourbillons qui expliquent les phénomènes suivant les normes de
l’étendue géométrique, mais il ne calcule rien ; l’autre se fie au calcul grâce aux-
quels les phénomènes sont déduits, sans que cette déduction puisse remonter jusqu’à
leurs causes ultimes.1 Pourtant, indépendamment de leurs opinions si éloignées
l’une de l’autre, Descartes et Newton s’accordent au moins pour penser qu’au
moyen de leurs principes ils font droit à l’expérience commune. Cette fidélité est
même décisive quant à la validité de leurs théories – donc rétrospectivement quant
à la supériorité d’une théorie sur l’autre. Descartes distingue le mouvement pris
selon l’usage commun du mouvement selon la vérité mathématique : le premier est
l’action par laquelle un corps se déplace d’un lieu en un autre, mais comme il est
impossible de savoir si le lieu est lui-même fixe ou mobile, il faut dépasser cet usage
courant et rappeler que là où il y a un lieu, il y a aussi un corps ; par conséquent le
déplacement d’un lieu à un autre selon la vérité implique un changement dans la
relation du corps en mouvement à d’autres corps qui sont immédiatement en contact
avec lui. Newton dit au contraire que le mouvement considéré en relation à son
environnement sensible est la notion familière : pour se débarrasser de cette
préconception il faut distinguer entre mouvement apparent et mouvement vrai, le
mouvement vrai étant justement la translation d’un lieu absolument fixe à un
autre. Mais cette distinction opère à partir des termes de temps, d’espace, de lieu et
de mouvement dont Newton pense qu’ils sont bien connus de tout le monde, et qu’il
ne faut donc pas définir. Faire droit à l’expérience commune (familière) suppose au
moins une compréhension commune (partagée) de cette expérience, or les théories
physiques de Descartes et de Newton divergent dans la mesure même où ils ne
s’entendent pas sur le sens de l’expérience commune.
Il est tentant de conclure que cette dispute est d’un autre âge, et n’a plus raison
d’être. Les succès de la physique newtonienne n’ont-ils pas effacé les scrupules sur
le sens d’une expérience qui de toute façon n’intervient plus dans la construction
théorique ? Ces succès reposent sur des possibilités d’action sur les phénomènes,
sur l’efficacité de prédictions qui intéressent principalement le praticien de la
science armé de ses instruments de mesure. Lorsque la physique quantique a sup-
planté la physique newtonienne, la preuve aurait été faite que les physiciens peuvent
concevoir et raisonner sans se tromper tout en laissant de côté une référence directe
à l’image sensible ou l’intuition physique empruntée à la vie quotidienne. Pour
élaborer la mécanique quantique, ils sont partis de caractéristiques pensées au début
comme simplement formelles, élaborées à l’aide de mathématiques très abstraites
(opérateurs, fonctions d’état, espaces de Hilbert, etc.). Ce faisant, ils les ont

1
Thom (1983), 12.
Philosophie des sciences et philosophie première 301

transformées en éléments de pensée pleinement conceptuels et théoriques, et ils les

ont chargées de contenu physique, par la mise en relation effective et adéquate avec
les phénomènes produits dans les expérimentations, et formant par leur moyen leur
propre pensée physique de ces phénomènes.
Cela n’empêche pas qu’il reste dans cette théorie des concepts (comme la
fonction d’onde) à propos desquels il est impossible de voir à quoi ils correspondent
dans la réalité physique. Heisenberg fait valoir que si l’on demande une description
de ce qui se passe réellement dans les expériences sur les atomes, les mots « descrip-
tion », « réel », « se passe » ne peuvent justement concerner que les concepts de la
vie quotidienne ou de la physique classique. Si le physicien abandonnait cette base,
il perdrait le moyen de s’exprimer sans ambiguïté et ne pourrait poursuivre sa
recherche scientifique. Comme il ne l’abandonne pas, il décide que la mécanique
quantique est inintelligible en dehors de son formalisme mathématique, et que
« toute déclaration sur ce qui s’est ‘réellement passé’ est une déclaration en termes
de concepts classiques … incomplète en soi quant au détail des phénomènes atom-
iques impliqués ».2 Incomplète, et sans doute incohérente. On aurait des « moments
classiques » (aux points d’observation) entrecoupés de « moments quantiques »
(entre deux observations), et seuls les premiers seraient détenteurs du sens de la
« réalité ». Les deux descriptions ne seraient-elles pas complémentaires l’une de
l’autre dans un système complet de la réalité, comme Bohr l’a suggéré ? Fondée sur
la perturbation incontrôlable occasionnée par les appareils macroscopiques de
mesure sur les objets microphysiques, l’idée de complémentarité n’est pas très
convaincante, car pour la vérifier il faudrait disposer d’un moyen d’accéder aux
propriétés non perturbées, ce qui est impossible si justement la perturbation est
déclarée incontrôlable. D’après le célèbre argument connu sous le nom de paradoxe
d’Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen, Einstein répond qu’une condition certes non nécessaire
mais néanmoins suffisante pour toute théorie physique (classique ou quantique) est
justement que la non-perturbation d’un système est le seul indice du réel : « Si, sans
perturber d’aucune manière un système, nous pouvons prédire avec certitude la
valeur d’une grandeur physique, alors il existe un élément de la réalité physique
correspondant à cette grandeur ». La mise en œuvre expérimentale de cette condi-
tion a certes donné tort à Einstein. Mais par son étonnant mélange de réalisme et
d’instrumentalisme, c’est la nature même de l’argument qui interpelle. Il se réfère à
la réalité physique tout en se limitant à considérer des prédictions quantitatives,
c’est-à-dire une représentation des phénomènes conforme aux instruments mis en
œuvre pour les observer, et si elle est prise au sens strict cette représentation ne
saurait préjuger en rien de l’être qui se tient au cœur des phénomènes. Cherchant à
faire la part des choses, Heisenberg dit par ailleurs que « l’emploi des concepts
classiques est en définitive une conséquence de la manière générale de penser de
l’humanité ».3 Cela signifie deux choses : d’une part, les concepts classiques seraient
devenus les représentants du sens commun, comme si l’effort d’arrachement au sens
commun entrepris par les pionniers de la science moderne n’avait servi qu’à le

2
Heisenberg (1961), 187–188.
3
Ibid., 52.
302 P. Kerszberg

redéfinir ; d’autre part, la mécanique quantique doit se contenter d’une demi-mesure

dans l’arrachement à ces concepts, puisque l’exigence de description entraîne une
contradiction intermittente avec l’exigence d’intelligibilité.
L’identification des concepts de la physique classique avec l’ancien sens
commun témoigne de la force persistante de l’expérience familière, force d’autant
plus insistante qu’elle n’est plus interrogée pour son propre compte. Cela signifie-
t-il que la théorie quantique se débarrasse à la fois des concepts classiques et du
sens commun ? Dans cette théorie, l’accord entre la théorie et l’expérience va très
loin, beaucoup plus loin que les limites de l’expérience ordinaire, puisqu’il atteint
parfois jusqu’à plus de dix chiffres significatifs. Mais un tel accord n’a justement
plus aucun sens pour l’expérience familière. Les phénomènes microphysiques ne
désignent en soi aucune propriété intrinsèque pour les corps auxquels ces
phénomènes sont rattachés. Néanmoins, chaque résultat de mesure sur des phé-
nomènes microphysiques succède à un passage dans un appareillage qui impose
les contraintes de la familiarité macroscopique sur tout le protocole théorético-
expérimental. Il est une occurrence singulière, déterminée par l’irréversibilité des
processus qui y trouvent leur aboutissement, et indissolublement rattachée à une
histoire expérimentale. Les retrouvailles avec l’ancienne familiarité d’un monde de
choses bien définies deviennent ainsi une exigence logique de la théorie, sous la
forme particulière d’une histoire. On se demande à quelles conditions et dans
quelles circonstances particulières on peut rattacher les symboles abstraits de la
théorie à l’univers précompris des choses selon un certain déroulement temporel.
L’univers du précompris est retrouvé à la fin d’une série d’opérations hautement
abstraites, sans se poser la question de savoir ce que le précompris signifie pour
commencer et comme s’il allait toujours de soi ! Le fait remarquable est que, à
proportion des progrès de la connaissance scientifique depuis l’époque glorieuse
de la première révolution scientifique, la mésentente explicite sur l’expérience
familière s’est convertie insidieusement en une entente tacite.
En réaction au monde de plus en plus abstrait de la science, la philosophie a
développé, depuis le tournant du vingtième siècle, une attention croissante au sens
de l’expérience familière. Husserl nous demande d’admettre que le monde abstrait
reste malgré tout enraciné dans l’expérience familière considérée pour son propre
compte, à savoir dans sa forme systématique qu’est le monde de la vie, même si
la connexion entre les deux a été aliénée au point qu’elle est à peine reconnaissable.
Heidegger trouve que l’aliénation est devenue désespérément radicale, puisque
les sciences élaborent leur propre autofondation sans se soucier d’une fondation
encore plus profonde, réservée à la philosophie, seule à même de révéler la
compréhension préontologique de l’être dans le domaine régional de l’étant dont
s’occupe la science.
À écouter un certain discours épistémologique depuis l’avènement d’une théorie
physique aussi extraordinaire que la mécanique quantique, le besoin de compren-
dre ce qui est précompris ne devrait finalement pas échapper à la théorie elle-même.
C’est ainsi que Schrödinger se fait le porte-parole de la mécanique quantique lorsqu’il
annonce qu’un premier contact nous lie au monde depuis toujours, un contact que
la physique serait en train de retrouver après une longue éclipse. L’éclipse
Philosophie des sciences et philosophie première 303

commence avec la révolution scientifique du dix-septième siècle, sans laquelle la

nouvelle science n’aurait pourtant jamais vu le jour. Aidée du langage mathématique,
la découverte progressive du gigantesque système qui tient et soutient la complexité
de la nature ne pouvait avancer qu’au prix de placer le sujet qui effectue cette
découverte à distance de ce qu’il découvre. Pour dénouer les fils de cette complex-
ité, le sujet se mettait à son service en se considérant comme un étranger dans le
monde qu’il construit – une pure substance pensante face à la substance matérielle et
étendue. Schrödinger constate alors avec amertume qu’il est difficile se résoudre à
accepter qu’à la suite de la mathématisation de la nature notre conscience soit
devenue un point symbolique, une sorte d’assistant pour ce but pratique qu’est la
maîtrise de la nature. Pure substance pensante, le sujet vivant s’exclut de la nature
dont il est pourtant manifeste qu’il en fait partie, et il en résulte dit-il une « horrible
antinomie ».4 La conscience n’a pas d’espace pour s’étendre et vivre dans un monde qui
est pourtant sa création. En réaction à cette horreur, il faut mettre un terme à ce ban-
nissement volontaire et décider que la maléfique discrimination entre le sujet et
l’objet a fait son temps. La physique quantique aurait justement accompli un premier
pas pour détendre la frontière artificielle qui sépare l’opérateur connaissant de tout
ce qu’il y a à connaître. Les moyens dont nous disposons pour observer un
objet interfèrent d’une manière irréductible avec cet objet ; entre le sujet et l’objet,
l’antinomie qui paraissait si tranchante s’affaiblit pour devenir une discrimination
arbitraire. C’est ainsi que la physique quantique entreprend le chemin vers la recon-
naissance d’un fait archaïque qui n’aurait jamais dû être oublié : sujet et objet dans
la totalité de leurs déterminations respectives ne font qu’un, le monde est donné une
seule fois et il n’est pas divisé en monde existant en soi, d’une part, monde perçu et
construit par un sujet, d’autre part.
Dans l’interprétation de Schrödinger, tout se passe comme si l’opération qui a
réduit le sujet à un point symbolique n’était rien d’autre qu’un moyen simplifica-
teur et temporaire : peut-être nécessaire pour commencer, mais finalement inutile
au regard de la tâche à accomplir. Or, même s’il ne s’agit que d’une parenthèse, il
est permis de s’interroger sur la raison d’être et la finalité de l’antinomie créée de
toutes pièces par Descartes, Newton et leurs successeurs. La cible est facilement
identifiable : qui parle d’antinomie évoque la philosophie critique de Kant. Kant
n’a-t-il pas expressément désigné par antinomie une configuration de la raison qui
se contredit elle-même lorsque, confrontée aux limites de l’expérience possible,
elle est obligée de renoncer à son unité ? De tous les philosophes de l’époque mod-
erne, Kant est à la fois le plus proche de cette aspiration à l’unité qui est la marque
distinctive de la raison scientifique et le dernier représentant de l’antinomie sujet/
objet poussée jusque dans ses derniers retranchements.5 Le monde existant serait
constitué de choses en soi à propos desquelles nous n’aurons cependant jamais
aucune connaissance ; mais la théorie quantique est fondée sur les relations
d’incertitude, suivant lesquelles les limites de la raison ne sont qu’une traduction des
limites constitutives de la nature dans le déploiement total de sa phénoménalité.

4
Schrödinger (1967), 131.
5
Ibid., 136–137.
304 P. Kerszberg

Si l’antinomie est peut-être une nécessité pratique pour la vie, dit Schrödinger, elle
n’a plus d’intérêt philosophique pour la science. Kant aurait dû se contenter de sa
célèbre équation, selon laquelle les conditions de possibilité de l’expérience sont
les mêmes que les conditions de possibilité des objets de l’expérience, et abandon-
ner le chemin qui rend ces objets redevables par surcroît de mystérieuses choses en
soi. À travers l’exemplarité de Kant, la lecture de Schrödinger condamne la science
et la philosophie modernes à une sorte de perversité dans la séparation entre nous
et le monde, perversité dont la seule excuse serait qu’elles n’en n’ont pas eu pleine-
ment conscience.
Or, si la physique contemporaine a prétendu venir à bout des différentes figures
reconnaissables du conflit de la raison avec elle-même, comme les dimensions
finies ou infinies de l’espace-temps, la création ou l’éternité du monde, elle s’est
rendue purement et simplement indifférente à une antinomie fondatrice de
l’expérience familière du monde. La réalité est si difficile à saisir et semble toujours
échapper, parce que tout compte fait, comme Nietzsche l’a signalé avec une perti-
nence inégalée, personne n’a jamais parlé de réalité en connaissance de cause et
personne n’en parlera jamais. Dans la mesure où elles apparaissent comme ceci ou
comme cela, les choses sont prêtes depuis toujours à signifier n’importe quoi, sauf
ce qu’il en est de leur « réalité ». Aucun savoir n’échappe à la fatalité de ce que
Nietzsche appelle « l’apparence au début », qui « finit toujours par devenir essence
et agit en tant qu’essence ».6 Ce qui apparaît pour la première fois est tout aussi bien
et immédiatement un faux-semblant (Schein) de la chose qui est censée apparaître
selon sa nature, et malgré tous nos efforts ce faux-semblant collera toujours à la
chose. En effet, au lieu de refléter une réalité, l’apparence trahit la manière dont le
regard s’est immiscé dans la chose pour la désigner, et cette manière est irréduct-
iblement multiple. Elle habille la chose et l’affuble de toutes sortes de normes : non
seulement le nom et l’apparence que le nom donne de désigner la chose même, mais
aussi la réputation, la valeur, le poids, la mesure. D’emblée les choses ont été lestées
d’un vêtement étranger qui a entaché leur essence d’erreur et d’arbitraire, les faisant
apparaître selon une essence qui ne pouvait pas être la leur mais qui était cependant
censée être la leur. En raison de cette mise aux normes, la « soi-disant » réalité ne
pourra plus jamais être annulée au profit de « la » réalité. Pourtant l’apparence con-
tinue d’évoquer une « réalité », et elle compte comme étant justement sa seule
marque de reconnaissance. D’où finalement le désir de trouver un moyen de
supprimer ce qui ne fait que passer pour essentiel au profit de la pure essence. Désir
qui fait preuve de délire : pour saisir ce que l’étranger aurait d’étranger vis-à-vis du
réel, il faudrait pouvoir le comparer avec ce réel dans sa nudité totale, ce qui est
impossible car un monde mis à nu est un monde où personne ne vit. Pour que les
choses se livrent dans leur absolue réalité, il faudrait paradoxalement qu’elles
n’apparaissent pas du tout. Einstein est tombé dans ce piège : dans son effort pour
préserver contre Bohr la séparation classique entre l’instrument de mesure et les
résultats d’une mesure, il s’appuie sur un critère indépendant de la réalité, qu’il
énonce de la façon suivante : « tout élément de la réalité physique doit avoir sa

6
Nietzsche (1982), 96.
Philosophie des sciences et philosophie première 305

contrepartie dans la réalité physique ». Même s’il admet qu’il ne s’agit que d’une
condition suffisante de la réalité, et non une condition nécessaire, Einstein se place
pour ainsi dire dans la réalité sans médiation, pour voir ensuite si la médiation
introduite par la théorie lui est fidèle.
Nietzsche insiste : comme personne ne peut se satisfaire de penser les choses en
les désignant, l’impact du nom sur la chose prend du temps. C’est seulement à la
longue, comme fruit d’une tradition, que le nom finit par passer pour le corps de la
chose. La motivation de la science moderne a été de rompre avec les habitudes
héritées depuis la nuit des temps, pour corriger et surmonter une fois pour toutes
une longue suite d’erreurs à propos du choix des normes. Parmi toutes les normes
identifiables et les significations possibles des choses, il a semblé que leur
représentation mathématique allait soulager l’apparence au début des charges qui
s’étaient indûment accumulées sur elle. Connaître, c’est se trouver en terrain de
connaissance, donc reconnaître qu’il y avait quelque chose de connaissable en plus
de ce qui passait inaperçu à force d’aller de soi : évaluer les normes les unes par
rapport aux autres, et les mettre en ordre. Or, comme le souligne Nietzsche, la
mathématique se prête parfaitement à ce jeu précisément parce que ses règles
s’utilisent si facilement comme des recettes qui dévoilent la raison de ce qui semble
aller de soi. Par exemple reconnaître notre table de multiplication dans le
comportement des choses. Les charges résiduelles de l’apparence au début s’en
trouvent si allégées que l’opération semble donner raison au vieil adage de Galilée :
parce qu’elle est écrite en langage mathématique, la nature est mathématique au
plus profond de son être. À la persistance d’un savoir qui va de soi dans tout savoir,
aussi neuf soit-il, la science depuis la révolution scientifique du dix-septième siècle
répond en accordant à un certain type de savoir un privilège qui ne pose pas prob-
lème. C’est ainsi que, malgré l’abîme fantastique creusé par le chemin semé de
ruptures qui les sépare, l’arithmétique la plus élémentaire a fini par léguer aux
algorithmes de la mécanique quantique l’impression de fouiller le même terrain de
connaissance qui a été ouvert pour la première fois.
Délestée de tout ce qui ne concerne pas directement l’être supposé, l’apparence
au début dans la pleine richesse du premier contact avec la nature n’est plus un objet
pour la science ; elle est tout au plus une sorte d’aspiration nostalgique dans un
rêve éveillé, comme en témoignent les spéculations d’un Schrödinger. Mais si
l’apparence au début agit toujours comme essence, pour ainsi dire en sous-main,
qu’est-ce que cela signifie pour la pensée scientifique de ne plus s’en préoccuper, ne
pas même se donner les moyens de s’en préoccuper, sinon en retenant son aspect
mathématique ? Qu’est-ce qu’une première connaissance, à propos de laquelle il est
impossible de s’entendre avec les moyens de la connaissance qui dépendent pour-
tant d’elle ?
La pensée de la première connaissance renvoie à une discipline éminente que
toutes les disciplines scientifiques supposent alors qu’elle ne les implique pas. Une
discipline éminente de ce genre a été identifiée bien avant la naissance de la science
moderne : depuis Aristote elle est la philosophie première. Ce qui ressort de la
nature au premier contact dans toute sa plénitude, que la physique recueille sans
pouvoir en rendre compte, Aristote l’appelle : l’être ; certes la physique aussi,
306 P. Kerszberg

écrit-il, est une sagesse, mais elle n’est pas première, car la nature est seulement un
genre déterminé de l’être.7 Contre les sciences qui en font un amalgame, la philoso-
phie première distingue la nature de l’être. Aristote attaque ses prédécesseurs immé-
diats, les physiologues ioniens, qui au contraire faisaient comme nous le faisons
nous-mêmes aujourd’hui depuis la révolution scientifique du dix-septième siècle, à
savoir qu’ils identifiaient la nature et l’être dans le monde unique et total qu’est
l’univers. Dans la conception naturaliste de la nature, tout élément de la nature
s’explique pour les Anciens comme pour nous par un autre élément de la nature qui
en est la cause ou l’effet ; les Modernes que nous sommes ont seulement ajouté un
outil privilégié pour réaliser cette opération : l’outil mathématique. La sagesse des
premiers physiciens, objecte Aristote, est pourtant seconde si la nature n’est elle-
même qu’un genre de l’être. Depuis l’avènement de la science moderne la sagesse
naturaliste est redevenue première, et Aristote nous paraît donc à bien des égards
complètement dépassé, ne fût-ce que parce qu’il justifie la sagesse au sens le plus
large comme simple désir de savoir, en réponse à l’expérience du plaisir que nous
éprouvons dans nos sensations, non par le souci qui est désormais le nôtre d’une
maîtrise de la nature. Toute science selon Aristote ne sera qu’un grand déballage de
tout ce que comporte la sensation pour commencer. Un déploiement qui s’effectue
au moyen d’idées, sans que des Idées s’en détachent pour constituer un monde
propre de la science au détriment de la sensation – comme le monde des Idées
mathématiques dans le platonisme mathématique de la science moderne.
La philosophie première selon Aristote n’est plus la physique, mais elle n’en est
pas moins une science. En effet, comme la nature, l’être est lui aussi une totalité, ce
qui ne s’aperçoit que lorsqu’il est considéré strictement en tant qu’être. Cet Etre est
ce qui est commun à toutes les choses, de sorte que l’être en tant qu’être se dit de
tous les êtres en tant qu’êtres. L’ensemble de tous les êtres comporte aussi bien des
êtres de pensée que des êtres naturels : le nombre, la ligne, le feu. Toutes les choses
qui participent de l’Etre, le philosophe doit les connaître dans leur essence et dans
leurs attributs, ce qui n’est possible que parce que l’être en tant qu’être possède lui
aussi des attributs propres. Mais comme son objet est ce qui est premier, la science
de l’être en tant qu’être est une science d’un genre particulier.8 De ce qui est premier
tout le reste dépend pour ainsi dire à sens unique, puisque les autres connaissances
supposent la connaissance de ce qui est premier alors que celle-ci ne les implique
pas. Pourquoi au juste appeler science la philosophie première, puisque l’être dont
elle s’occupe va au-delà du savoir de type démonstratif qu’est la science ? La
réponse est une échappatoire grandiose : la philosophie première est la science que
l’on cherche, celle qui est toujours recherchée en toute science alors même que
toute science cherche pour trouver. Cette recherche incessante ne l’épuisera jamais.
Or, il suffit que cette science soit recherchée pour qu’en elle s’affirme une puissance
causale supérieure à la physique : la première découverte qui affleure à même le
mouvement de recherche vers ce qui est premier, c’est la cause formelle, qui n’a
plus rien à voir avec une cause de type matériel (physique).

7
Aristote, Métaphysique, 1005b.
8
Ibid., 1003b.
Philosophie des sciences et philosophie première 307

Ce qu’Aristote vient de formuler est à la fois décisif et insatisfaisant, en attente

d’une nouvelle décision que la science moderne viendra justifier rétrospectivement.
Décisif, en ce sens que l’explication de ce qui est sollicite la forme, ou essence, qui
est cause de l’être matériel dont s’occupe la physique ; la forme répond à la question
de savoir quelles sont les causes les plus hautes de la nature, qui sont aussi plus
hautes que la nature. Insatisfaisant, parce que cette décision ne va pas de soi : elle
implique à la fois un saut au-delà de la nature et un retour vers la nature. Par exem-
ple, la forme est une substance immobile, et pourtant en tant que premier moteur
elle est la cause des substances en mouvement dont s’occupe la physique. Aristote
rassemble en un seul mot cette double notion de la cause la plus haute qui s’abaisse
pourtant dans la source d’où elle a jailli : la cause est aussi principe. D’une part les
multiples sciences connues et pratiquées s’organisent suivant les genres d’être dont
elles s’occupent en particulier, et chaque science constitue le genre qui pose son
propre principe dont l’existence est impossible à démontrer ; par suite, chaque
science doit observer une règle d’incommunicabilité des genres, qui interdit dans la
démonstration de passer d’un genre à l’autre (par exemple l’arithmétique pose
l’unité comme son principe, et la géométrie la grandeur). D’autre part, la philoso-
phie première est universelle parce que comme science elle n’a pas son propre genre
; mais elle ne devient science qu’au prix d’un saut au-delà de la sensation, dont
on est en droit de se demander s’il conserve le « ce qu’est » d’où il provient. Il
aura suffi à la science moderne de nier ce pouvoir exorbitant de la sensation pour
restituer au monde des Idées une place qui lui revient en priorité dans l’ordre du
savoir.
Or, ce refus plane déjà comme une potentialité plus ou moins cachée dans la
conception aristotélicienne de la science. La cause formelle, Aristote la voit d’abord
à l’œuvre en mathématique où le nombre est forme parce qu’il est agencement d’un
et de multiple. Dès le début, la philosophie première est ainsi empreinte de la forme
mathématique comme accès privilégié à la pensée de ce qui est premier. Aristote
voit un rapprochement possible entre la philosophie première et une mathématique
générale, dont l’idée est empruntée à la théorie générale des proportions d’Eudoxe.
La science moderne a tiré parti de cette indication pour démocratiser la forme, et
rapprocher la nature de l’être. Si tout dépend de la forme, cela n’est concevable
désormais selon la tendance démocratique que si en retour elle implique ce qui
dépend d’elle. La géométrie analytique de Descartes est au cœur d’une mathéma-
tique générale où un genre supérieur est posé, tel qu’il enveloppe les diverses
branches de cette science sous un même principe. Descartes appelle mathesis uni-
versalis la science « qui explique tout ce qu’il est possible de rechercher touchant
l’ordre et la mesure, sans assignation à quelque matière particulière que ce soit ».9
En suivant jusqu’au bout la voie mathématique pour déchiffrer l’essence de ce qui
est premier, la science universelle permet de fonder les divers genres de sciences sur
un même principe général. Dans la philosophie première ainsi élevée au rang de
science universelle, ce qui est recherché n’est plus astreint à basculer dans la forme
au détriment de la matière, au contraire l’explication de qui est recherché porte sur

9
Descartes (1963), 98.
308 P. Kerszberg

la matière en général qui est la forme de n’importe quelle matière particulière. Cette
forme se décline dans la mathématique pure des formes spatio-temporelles
applicables aux corps matériels par le procédé de la mesure. Par exemple,
l’immobilité n’est plus la cause/principe du mouvement des corps : repos et mouve-
ment sont plutôt deux états de la matière en général que la mesure distingue, sans
que l’un soit ontologiquement plus éminent que l’autre.
Par suite de ce recouvrement de la mathématique générale avec la matière en
général, la philosophie première devient la science mathématique de la nature maté-
rielle. Ce qui est recherché en toute science se confond-il alors avec ce que la science
recherche effectivement ? Les sciences mathématiques de la nature héritent de
l’ancienne philosophie première le souci d’une forme universelle qui, sans dépasser
la nature pour basculer dans l’être, dépasse néanmoins la nature en tant qu’elle est
spécifiable en choses naturelles déterminées. C’est ainsi que Kant distingue le con-
cept d’une nature en général de toute théorie particulière des corps physiques. Il se
place d’abord sur le terrain de la science en affirmant que « dans toute théorie par-
ticulière de la nature, on ne peut trouver de science à proprement parler (eigentlich)
que dans l’exacte mesure où il peut s’y trouver de la mathématique ».10 La mathé-
matique fournit le fondement de la partie empirique dans la science de la nature, et
cela seul doit suffire à faire de cette science une science authentique, c’est-à-dire autre
chose qu’un art systématique ou une théorie purement expérimentale comme
pouvaient l’être (au temps de Kant) la chimie ou la psychologie. Mais une science
fondée sur une partie d’elle-même est-elle fondée authentiquement ? Prenant le
relais de la science, la philosophie pure recherche ce qui constitue le concept
d’une nature dans toute son universalité. Or, ajoute Kant, si ce concept universel
est pensable, il est possible qu’il le soit sans mathématiques. Le sens universel de
nature ne sera jamais fixé par les mathématiques, et pourtant il sera toujours
recherché dans la science qui théorise la nature au moyen des mathématiques. Un
espace de pure pensée reste ainsi ouvert au cœur même de l’activité théorique qui
porte la pensée vers le réel concret en le construisant selon les normes
mathématiques.
Lorsque la mathesis universalis forme le projet de réunir la mathématique et le
réel concret dans un espace abstrait, elle imagine que la pure pensée est épuisée
dans cette forme abstraite. Selon une tendance qui n’a fait que s’accentuer depuis
l’époque de la première fondation et des succès de la science mathématique de la
nature, elle n’aperçoit pas qu’elle confond ainsi la nature en général avec toutes ses
manifestations dans des choses déterminées. Une loi de la nature est du domaine
de la pure pensée, et pourtant elle n’a de sens que vis-à-vis de phénomènes détermi-
nés : comment cela est-il possible ? Considérons un physicien placé devant un
phénomène quelconque. Ce phénomène est par lui-même privé de signification :
cette signification devra donc être inventée. Particulièrement significatif est
l’exemple de la loi de Torricelli qui relie l’élévation de l’eau dans les corps de
pompe et la pression atmosphérique. Il est connu depuis l’Antiquité que l’eau
s’élève dans les corps de pompe jusqu’à une hauteur déterminée. Mais le sens de

10
Kant (1980), 367.
Philosophie des sciences et philosophie première 309

ce fait ne réside pas du tout dans le fait même. Torricelli n’a pas rapproché cette
expérience de celle de la pression atmosphérique : au contraire il a supposé la pres-
sion atmosphérique parce qu’elle était nécessaire à l’explication ; l’existence d’un
phénomène correspondant au concept n’a été prouvée que plus tard par Pascal.
Donc Torricelli n’a pas découvert sa loi, il l’a inventée dans un exercice de pure
pensée face au sens que doit avoir la nature en général. L’expression contenue dans
la loi de la nature n’est pas moins inventée que l’expression « la nature a horreur
du vide » si la relation à l’expérience est différente. Comme l’a remarqué Husserl
en digne successeur de Kant, quand bien même la mathématique est applicable au
réel concret dans certaines limites, « nous ne possédons pas l’ombre d’une évi-
dence apriorique à l’égard de ce qui existe effectivement dans la nature ».11 Tout ce
que nous pouvons en connaître exige une induction à partir des faits d’expérience
; même une induction conforme aux opérations logiques ne donnera jamais qu’une
évidence rétrospective, et elle se heurte par principe au mur d’un fait nouveau sus-
ceptible de révoquer complètement des conclusions provisoires. La mathématique
pure des formes spatio-temporelles appliquées au réel concret est fondée sur une
évidence apriorique, qui à la fois court-circuite le progrès de l’expérience et dicte
la forme que doit épouser ce progrès. Elle s’adresse à la nature concrète de tel ou
tel phénomène comme si une nature en général transparaissait en lui, et elle est
donc une manière de glaner une connaissance absolue de tout ce qui existe effec-
tivement dans et pour un entendement divin. Pour nous, êtres finis et mortels, la
seule différence avec Dieu est que la connaissance de toutes les formes dans une
Forme absolument universelle de l’Espace-Temps-Matière prend du temps, elle
exige un effort intellectuel pour les déployer selon un déroulement systématique ;
nous pensons que la systématicité de l’effort est précisément garante de la validité
rétrospective de certaines évidences qui en ressortent comme des évidences
ultimes, de sorte que l’évidence apriorique pour commencer se trouve finalement
justifiée par son usage. D’où l’idée que science et système s’impliquent l’un l’autre
d’une manière si intime qu’il n’y a de connaissance propre que systématique.
Depuis Descartes et Galilée tout progrès dans la connaissance scientifique consiste
à unifier sous l’égide de la Forme des domaines du savoir a priori disparates. Mais
comme en témoigne le progrès effectif des sciences jusqu’à aujourd’hui, l’illusion
rétrospective de l’évidence ultime se répercute dans l’irréductibilité de certains
faits systématiquement réfractaires à l’unification. Ceux-ci ne sont derechef que
des stimuli pour avancer systématiquement vers l’unification soi-disant finale.
Quand des résultats expérimentaux se montrent rebelles à une interprétation
évidente dans les termes d’une théorie existante, cette résistance est considérée
comme un indice de la manifestation de la nature « en soi », qui appelle une
nouvelle théorie.
Peut-on envisager une épistémologie qui se débarrasse à la fois du fantasme
d’une maîtrise absolue de ce qui est et du scepticisme qui suit immanquablement la
frustration de ce fantasme ? La phénoménologie ouvre la voie vers une telle épisté-
mologie. Du fantasme inachevé et inachevable d’une évidence apriorique à propos

11
Husserl (1976), 64.
310 P. Kerszberg

de ce qui existe effectivement, héritage de la mathesis universalis, une telle

épistémologie retient des efforts de la science moderne qu’elle commence par
inventer des évidences en jouant avec les sensations d’une manière inhabituelle. Les
sensations, dont Aristote disait qu’elles sont le commencement de la science, s’y
épanouissent en gestes.
Galilée nous demande de nous enfermer dans la cabine d’un bateau, avec tout un
attirail incongru de choses qui n’y ont pas leur place « naturelle » : des papillons et
des mouches, des poissons dans un aquarium. Tant que le bateau vogue paisible-
ment sur une mer calme, la vie à l’intérieur de ce milieu très artificiel est tout aussi
naturelle que si les papillons volaient libres dans l’air, et si les poissons nageaient
tranquillement dans la mer. Par rapport au rivage le mouvement est quelque chose,
par rapport aux parois de la cabine il n’est rien. Donc un mouvement partagé par des
corps dans les limites bien définies d’un système de référence est sans effet, et en
bonne orthodoxie aristotélicienne ce qui n’a pas d’effet n’a pas non plus de cause.
En son essence le mouvement est « comme nul ». Les sensations éprouvées par
procuration dans l’étrange cabine viennent de produire le principe de relativité. Il
reste alors à formuler mathématiquement les lois du mouvement des corps en par-
tant de cette situation où les lois ne sont pas affectées par des circonstances adven-
tices, tout comme le voyageur dans la cabine du bateau n’était pas affecté par le
mouvement du bateau.
Le tout jeune Einstein a jeté les bases de la théorie de la relativité restreinte
lorsqu’il s’est imaginé à la poursuite d’un rayon lumineux : si j’ai la même vitesse
que lui, il n’y a plus rien à voir (un champ électromagnétique stationnaire n’est plus
un champ électromagnétique) ni à penser (les équations de Maxwell ne sont plus
valables). Ce mouvement ne se laisse pas annuler. Pour continuer à voir et à penser,
il faut redonner à l’observateur la capacité de faire l’expérience de ses propres mou-
vements, c’est-à-dire ses sensations propres de mouvement, ce qui se traduit dans la
théorie par l’abandon du temps absolu.12 Le vertige de la sensation dans l’expérience
en pensée réactive d’une manière étonnante le plaisir que nous éprouvons dans la
sensation, en constatant que notre désir de savoir est tiré dans une direction inhabi-
tuelle. Il instaure une pratique symbolique en amont du formalisme pour produire
des idéalités : celles-ci ne sont ni abstraites des sensations ordinaires ni posées dans
un monde séparé. Elles flottent pour ainsi dire dans la seule conscience du physicien,
et ne valent que pour cette conscience.13
Au-delà du rôle paradigmatique joué par ces gestes fondateurs dans la science
depuis Galilée, la philosophie phénoménologique de la connaissance scientifique
considère que le vide ouvert par la désorientation dans le monde concret est la car-
actéristique essentielle de toute science qui construit des idéalités représentatives de
ce monde. Quel est le sens de ce vide avant qu’il ne soit recouvert par l’évidence

12
Einstein (1949), 53.
13
Voir Châtelet (1993), 33–36. L’histoire des sciences apprend à voir les gestes fondateurs dans
deux registres de la pensée : non seulement l’expérience en pensée, mais aussi le diagramme. Il est
essentiel au diagramme qu’il soit parcouru de pointillés tels que seule la libre imagination puisse
les intuitionner.
Philosophie des sciences et philosophie première 311

toute prête qui se révélera rétrospectivement ? À la conscience vide du physicien

répond la prise de conscience radicale du phénoménologue, qui invite à considérer
la conscience vide comme un cas particulier d’une légalité universelle.14
On la voit fort bien à l’œuvre dans la mathesis universalis élaborée par Descartes,
où la science est délibérément restreinte aux idées claires et distinctes dont la trans-
parence pour l’esprit est comparable à une sorte de figuration du vide. Les figures
géométriques incarnent ces idées, de telle sorte que l’essence du réel est elle-même
géométrique. Le moment inventif des idéalités se dédouble en deux phases qui dif-
férencient nettement l’idéal du réel : une phase conventionnelle et arbitraire, suivie
d’un ajustement à la réalité.15 D’abord l’invention d’un schème conventionnel. Ainsi
la couleur, dans les termes de Descartes, est tout ce qu’on voudra, précisément parce
qu’on ne sait pas pour commencer ce qu’elle est. Néanmoins il est impossible de
nier qu’elle est étendue, donc qu’elle a une figure. Descartes veut faire droit à ce fait
sans préjuger à la légère de l’essence de la couleur, et c’est pourquoi il met de
l’ordre dans la diversité des couleurs en leur attribuant ce qui a seulement la nature
d’une figure, par exemple des lignes parallèles pour le blanc, des carreaux pour le
bleu, etc. Toutes les différences de nuances dans les choses sensibles colorées peu-
vent en principe être mises en correspondance avec ces symboles, car a priori il y a
une diversité infinie de figures prêtes à représenter des nuances aussi fines que pos-
sible. Reste à savoir comment l’espace représentant arbitraire de la réalité de la
couleur en est aussi un représentant adéquat. La solution de ce problème passe par
l’invention d’une idéalité dont l’essence spatiale a la particularité de s’effacer au
moment de passer dans la représentation spatiale d’une réalité tout autre. Cette idé-
alité est la dimension.16 Notion spatiale, la dimension signifie longueur. Cette notion
permet de reconstituer la réalité spatiale, par composition de trois dimensions. Mais
elle se prête aussi à la reconstitution des autres réalités, comme la pesanteur ou la
vitesse. Pour y arriver il suffit de voir que la dimension n’est pas seulement la lon-
gueur mais tout élément analogue à la longueur. Le mode de composition des
dimensions n’est alors qu’un aspect du mode général de composition des grandeurs.
Des phénomènes comme la pesanteur ou la vitesse sont des dimensions des choses
pesées ou des choses en mouvement, c’est-à-dire des représentations spatiales de
ces phénomènes qui ne dépendent plus de l’essence spatiale de la dimension.
Dans tout ce raisonnement, le souci de Descartes est de ne rien ajouter arbitrai-
rement aux choses et de cantonner les idéalités au travail du seul esprit aux prises
avec lui-même. En identifiant pour commencer une couleur avec une étendue
figurée, Descartes raisonne au moyen d’une hypothèse qui n’a pas d’autre préten-
tion que d’être commode. Il trouve ensuite un moyen pour étendre cette représen-
tation commode à toutes les réalités possibles. La chose réelle se fond dans la
méthode de représentation pour se confondre finalement avec elle. Autrement dit,

14
Husserl, Logique formelle et logique transcendantale, §16a.
15
Descartes, op.cit., 137.
16
Ibid., 177–178.
312 P. Kerszberg

la clarté de l’outil de pensée qu’est la figure constitue une préfiguration de sens

déjà organisée à l’avance, et le réel se tient prêt à remplir cette préfiguration avec
sa matérialité propre.
Mais quand bien même elle fonctionne en recouvrant l’objet par la méthode de
sa construction symbolique, dans cette science véritable faite d’idées claires et
distinctes Descartes ne calcule rien. Considérant le calcul en tant que tel, Leibniz
revendique au contraire les droits de la connaissance symbolique comme une con-
naissance aveugle. Les opérations sur les symboles nécessitent de longues chaînes
de raisonnement, si longues que la signification soi-disant claire et distincte des
symboles et combinaisons de symboles peut et doit être mise en parenthèses. En
effet, en utilisant des signes, en algèbre « et même presque en toutes choses », il
nous faut omettre « de préciser dans notre conscience leur conception explicite,
sachant, ou croyant que nous l’avons en notre pouvoir ».17 Selon une tendance qui
n’a fait que s’accentuer depuis lors dans tous les compartiments de la science
mathématique de la nature, l’aveuglement au sens des outils de pensée est devenue
la condition de leur efficacité.
Fruit d’un oubli volontaire, l’aveuglement de la méthode mathématique convoque
pour ainsi dire malgré lui des questions ontologiques auxquelles la science ne
pourra jamais répondre. Elle y reste pourtant sensible, comme si elle ne pouvait pas
éviter de se rendre conforme à un appel qui la dépasse.
Aucun domaine de la physique contemporaine n’échappe à ce qui a été pensé en
elle pour la première fois, implicitement ou explicitement, au tournant du vingtième
siècle. Dans les notes autobiographiques qu’il a rédigées vers la fin de sa vie,
Einstein a accordé à Minkowski le mérite d’avoir réalisé le plus profond bouleverse-
ment dans les relations entre la physique et la mathématique pour répondre à cette
attente. D’après Minkowski, une nouvelle notion de « monde » émerge de la théorie
de la relativité restreinte, dans la mesure où, comme il l’écrivait en conclusion de sa
célèbre conférence de 1908 sur l’espace et le temps, « l’espace par lui-même et le
temps par lui-même sont condamnés à ne devenir que des ombres, et seule une sorte
d’union des deux sera préservée comme réalité indépendante ». Espace et temps
étaient justement les deux concepts fondamentaux séparés dans une loi comme la
loi de la chute des corps de Galilée. À cette réalité répond ce que Minkowski appelle
un « postulat de monde » corrélatif de la substitution de la notion de causalité par
celle de symétrie. Ainsi, Lorentz a d’abord découvert et formulé dans sa théorie des
électrons le premier principe de symétrie important ; il s’agissait d’une propriété
mathématique des équations de Maxwell qui elles-mêmes étaient fondées sur les
lois expérimentales de l’électromagnétisme. Mais alors que chez Lorentz la symét-
rie était une découverte pour ainsi dire secondaire, Minkowski part de l’invariance
mathématique au sens de Lorentz et pose l’exigence que les équations du champ
aient une forme particulière (connue sous le nom de covariance) en rapport avec
cette invariance.
En raison de la priorité de la représentation mathématique formelle, l’image de
la nature dans la physique contemporaine n’est-elle pas une manière élégante

17
Leibniz (1972), 152.
Philosophie des sciences et philosophie première 313

d’évacuer toute la problématique de l’être de l’horizon de la science ? C’est une

conséquence à laquelle Einstein aura tenté de résister jusqu’au bout. En 1950, vers
le terme de sa vie, ne nous demandait-il pas de réfléchir en profondeur à cet énoncé
apparemment trivial : « Les équations de Maxwell impliquent le groupe de Lorentz,
mais le groupe de Lorentz n’implique pas les équations de Maxwell ».18
Forts de cette conclusion banale mais fondamentale, revenons une dernière fois
à la théorie de la relativité restreinte. Héritiers d’un mode de penser classique, les
tenants de la conception électromagnétique du monde pensaient qu’il existe une
classe privilégiée de systèmes d’inertie, les systèmes au repos dans l’éther ; ils pen-
saient aussi que les phénomènes relativistes, tels que la contraction des longueurs,
exigent une explication détaillée en termes de forces électromagnétiques, en tout
cas une explication dynamique. La théorie de la relativité restreinte fut le premier
geste qui dit au contraire que ces forces sont des artefacts de l’état de mouvement
relatif des systèmes de référence utilisés pour la représentation. Autrement dit, elle
« explique » les phénomènes relativistes en se dispensant de les expliquer autrement
que comme des conséquences simples de la géométrie de l’espace-temps. Cela revi-
ent à tourner la flèche de l’explication à l’envers. Que les lois de la nature pour les
phénomènes physiques non gravitationnels soient invariantes par rapport au groupe
de Lorentz, cela serait une sorte de fait brut qui ne demande pas d’explication – on
en tiendra pour preuve que l’espace-temps de Minkowski est justement le cadre
propre à représenter ces phénomènes. En substituant l’espace-temps à l’espace et au
temps, il s’agit de reculer le moment où la nature commence à se manifester telle
qu’elle est en soi, pour ne pas s’en laisser conter et l’affronter de face à armes
égales. Il se pourrait donc que le principe de l’invariance de Lorentz ne nécessite
aucune explication, mais la question reste entière de savoir si la géométrie de
Minkowski ne l’explique pas malgré tout. L’explication devrait en appeler à
l’espace-temps conçu comme une entité existant indépendamment de tout le reste,
de sorte que la structure métrique de l’espace-temps contraint les lois de la nature à
revêtir une certaine forme.19 Cette « explication » ne fait qu’exaspérer le renverse-
ment de la flèche de l’explication au lieu de la retourner dans le bon sens : comment
des barres rigides et des horloges censées fonctionner « normalement » pourraient-
elles jamais savoir dans quel espace-temps ils sont plongés ? Le mystère des forces
est reporté sur une mystérieuse intention de la nature qui s’exprimerait dans la
forme de ses lois.
Depuis le début Einstein cherchait pour sa part une « théorie fondamentale » qui
servirait de canevas pour l’intelligibilité future de la nature. Comment les mathéma-
tiques pures viendraient-elles à la rencontre du monde concret dont s’occupe la
physique ? D’un côté, il s’agit d’introduire une dose d’a priori dans la nature, en
transformant un fait comme l’invariance de la vitesse de la lumière en loi ; d’un
autre côté, si des propositions logiques comme celles de la géométrie sont vides
vis-à-vis du réel, il s’agit de leur fournir une dose d’empiricité en reconduisant le
système des axiomes à une science des relations mutuelles entre des corps

18
Einstein (1950), 15.
19
Voir Brown (2005), 143.
314 P. Kerszberg

considérés comme pratiquement rigides. Mais les échecs répétés pour réaliser une
théorie fondamentale de ce genre, tout comme les échecs essuyés par d’autres tenta-
tives en vue d’un tel but, démontrent finalement que la physique n’a pas les moyens
d’expliquer l’explication comme tendance réductrice à l’unification. Une vision
totalement unifiée du monde échappe à une justification interne à la physique, qui
pour sa part pourra et devra toujours se contenter d’aménager tant bien que mal ses
reconstructions fragmentées du réel.
La décision de Leibniz d’utiliser les mathématiques pour les rendre aveugles au
sens est la décision capitale sur laquelle repose aujourd’hui l’intelligibilité du
monde naturel. Husserl a justement désigné par « crise » l’état de chose qui découle
de cette décision, et il a tenté de lui substituer un remède sous la forme d’une autre
décision, qui consiste à élaborer l’ontologie d’un monde de la vie sous-jacent à
toute prise de position théorique. Ce monde de la vie contiendrait toutes les possi-
bilités de penser sans lesquelles aucun sens ne pourrait advenir, y compris le sens
des formations de pensée oubliées dans l’aventure du sens. Heidegger en a tiré
toutes les conséquences. Le monde naturel qui se déploie depuis Galilée, rappelle-
t-il, obéit à une position fondamentale de l’être : la position mathématique. Cette
position est un mode de l’apprendre : l’apprendre mathématique est un apprendre à
connaître ce que l’on a déjà, « un prendre suprêmement remarquable, un prendre
dans lequel celui qui prend ne prend que ce qu’au fond il a déjà »,20 de sorte que ce
qu’il a déjà d’une manière indéterminée se prête à l’effort d’un marquage par des
déterminations possibles. Sollicité par les choses, le prendre mathématique n’a pas
d’égard pour elles, contrairement au prendre ordinaire qui veut et obtient une
connaissance totale de la chose qui l’intéresse.21 Le prendre mathématique fait
retour sur le fonds indéterminé d’où la connaissance s’extrait et s’élève à partir
d’elle-même. Certes, lorsqu’il entre au contact des choses dont nous faisons
l’expérience, le prendre mathématique devient mathématique au sens déterminé de
nombre ou de figure. Mais en tant que mise en œuvre de l’apprentissage au sens le
plus général, Heidegger voit dans le prendre mathématique dont le sens a été déter-
miné en discipline mathématique depuis Galilée la marque d’une précompréhen-
sion de l’être qui n’arrive jamais à son terme. La position mathématique fondamentale
ne persiste à nous renseigner sur les propriétés de la nature que pour autant que le
fonds indéterminé de la mathesis galiléenne peut et doit rester indéterminé. C’est
dire que la science n’est pas une connaissance authentique tournée vers l’essence
des choses, peut-être n’est-elle même pas une connaissance du tout, mais une
pratique tournée vers l’exploitation sans relâche d’un indéterminé qui, du fait de son
retrait, se prête à toutes les déterminations imaginables.
Toutefois, la liberté inouïe de l’imagination scientifique se prête à son tour à une
reprise critique de la question de savoir ce que signifie habiter un monde avant de le
comprendre. Tandis que Descartes considérait qu’il appartient au physicien de
décider parmi les essences librement inventées celles qui ont un fondement réel,
Husserl considère que « toutes les sciences concevables conformes au réel et au

20
Heidegger (1971), 85.
21
Ortega y Gasset (1970), 223.
Philosophie des sciences et philosophie première 315

possible sont des formes transcendantales qui se dessinent (vorgezeichnet)

conformément à l’essence et qui se dessinent comme devant être réalisées dans une
libre activité ».22 C’est pourquoi il a pu emboîter le pas au projet de la mathesis
universalis et soutenir que la phénoménologie est tout de même une science, et
même la philosophie première par excellence pour notre époque, dans la mesure où
les formes transcendantales qu’elle met en œuvre donnent vie à une manière
d’habiter l’espace du monde, constituer des environnements vivables à partir de
configurations qui caractérisent schématiquement une situation environnementale.
L’environnement peut désigner tout aussi bien le milieu où nous vivons naturelle-
ment que le milieu manipulé pour en faire un pôle d’intérêt purement théorique. En
tant que schèmes, les premiers gestes de la pensée rejoignent ainsi la condition de
toute vie, ce qui rapproche l’homme de l’animal tout autant qu’il l’en éloigne radi-
calement.23 Alors que l’animal est capté dans les schèmes de son comportement, et
que le sens des schèmes est tout entier contenu en eux sans aller aussi loin que la
saisie de la forme complexe de l’objet naturel, les schèmes proprement humains se
libèrent de la capture pour s’enchaîner dans d’authentiques perceptions, où ils trou-
vent un sens que les schèmes primaires n’ont pas du tout. Il s’agit pourtant dans les
deux cas des mêmes schèmes.

References

Aristotle. 1974. La Métaphysique. Trad. J.Tricot. Paris: J.Vrin.

Brown, Harvey. 2005. Physical relativity: Space-time structure from a dynamical perspective.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Châtelet, Gilles. 1993. Les Enjeux du mobile : Mathématiques, physique, philosophie. Paris:
Le Seuil.
Descartes, René. 1963. Règles pour la direction de l’esprit. F. Alquié (éd.) Œuvres philosophiques.
I. Paris: Garnier.
Einstein, Albert. 1949. Autobiographical notes. In Albert Einstein: Philosopher-scientist, ed.
P.A. Schilpp. La Salle: Open Court.
Einstein, Albert. 1950. On the generalized theory of gravitation. Scientific American 182(4):
13–17.
Heidegger, Martin. 1971. Qu’est-ce qu’une chose? J. Taminiaux et J. Reboul (trad.). Paris:
Gallimard.
Heisenberg, Werner. 1961. Physique et philosophie. J. Hadamard (trad.). Paris: Albin Michel.
Husserl, Edmund. 1957. Logique Formelle et Logique Transcendentale. S. Bachelard (trad.). Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France.
Husserl, Edmund. 1976. La Crise des sciences européennes et la phénoménologie transcendantale.
G. Granel (trad.). Paris: Gallimard.
Kant, Emmanuel. 1980. Premiers principes métaphysiques de la science de la nature. F. de Gandt.
(trad.) Œuvres philosophiques. I. Paris: Gallimard.
Leibniz, G.W. 1972. Méditations sur la connaissance, la vérité et les idées. In Œuvres, ed. Prenant, L.
Paris: Aubier-Montaigne.

22
Husserl (1957), 362.
23
Voir Lorenz, Les fondements de l’éthologie (1984), 190.
316 P. Kerszberg

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1982. Le Gai savoir. Pierre Klossowski (trad.). Paris: Gallimard.
Ortega y Gasset, José. 1970. L’évolution de la théorie déductive. J.P. Borel (trad.). Paris: Gallimard.
Schrödinger, Erwin. 1967. Mind and matter. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Thom, René. 1983. Paraboles et catastrophes. Paris: Flammarion.
A Re-Reading of Heidegger’s “Phenomenology
and Theology”

Adriaan T. Peperzak

Abstract This close reading of Heidegger’s “Phenomenology and Theology” is

motivated by critical questions concerning his basic statements about the presence
and absence of certain relations between faith and philosophy.

Shortly after the publication of Being and Time in 1927, Martin Heidegger presented
a paper on the task of theology and its relations with philosophy in Tübingen (on
March 9, 1927) and in Marburg (on February 14, 1928). The title of his paper was
programmatic: Phenomenology and Theology, but the text was not published until
1969. In a short preface to its long delayed publication, Heidegger suggests that his
early paper might still be useful for rethinking not only the questionability
[Fragwürdigkeit] of the Christian character [Christlichkeit] of Christianity and its
theology, but also the questionability of philosophy.1 During his life, Heidegger did
not publish any other extensive discussion on the relations between philosophy and
theology; but at the occasion of a theological conversation on “the problem of a non-
objectifying thinking and speaking in today’s theology,” held in April 1964 at Drew
University in Madison (USA), Heidegger sent the participants a letter, dated March
11, 1964, with remarks or hints [Hinweise] about the topic of that conference, and
this letter was added to the 1969 publication of his 1927 text.2 As far as I know, most
or all of his other observations on theology, as published before his death, are in the

1
Heidegger (1969), 45–78.
2
In 1969 the German text, accompanied by a French translation, was published in the Archives de
Philosophie 32 (1969), 356ff, and the letter of 1964 has there received the title «Some hints
concerning the main perspectives for the theological conversation about “The problem of a
non-objectifying thinking and speaking in contemporary theology”». Both texts are reprinted in
Wegmarken, GA 9, 47–67 and 68–77. To the latter version Heidegger added a short preface
A.T. Peperzak (*)
Arthur J. Schmitt Chair of Philosophy, Loyola University Chicago,
Lake Shore Campus, 1032 W. Sheridan Rd., Chicago 60626, IL, USA
e-mail: apeperz@luc.edu

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 317

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_18,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
318 A.T. Peperzak

form of brief passages, most often in a polemical context. Many, but not all of them,
fit into the framework of his early essay, which I would like to reread and annotate
here in memory of my dear friend Joe Kockelmans, for whom Heidegger’s strug-
gling with his Catholic past has been a profoundly significant drama.3 I doubt
whether Heidegger ever published a direct or indirect retractatio of the basic
thoughts expressed in his essay of 1927, although Hans-Georg Gadamer has assured
me that the letter he added in 1964 to it, ought to be read as such. Toward the end of
the present rereading I will come back to the question of whether that letter indeed
can be read as a correction or partial withdrawal, and if so, what this then would
mean for the validity of Phenomenology and Theology.
Heidegger’s own preface (45–46) to its later publication situates his early paper
in a tradition of writings that reaches from Overbeck’s pamphlet Über die
Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie [On the Christianness of Today’s
Theology, 1873],4 which opposes Christian faith to all forms of Bildung and
Wissenschaft, and the fierce attack on David Strauß’s “philistine” theology found in
Nietzsche’s first of his Untimely Meditations (1873), all the way to Heidegger’s own
courses of the 1930s on “Nietzsche and European nihilism” and his essay on
“Nietzsche’s word ‘God is dead’,” published in Holzwege (1950).

1 Heidegger on Theology and Philosophy

In Phenomenology and Theology, Heidegger defends the thesis that philosophy

does not need theology, whereas theology can use, but does not need philosophy,
except for some of theology’s formal aspects, insofar as it claims to be a Wissenschaft
or “science.”5 Christian faith [Glaube] however, on which a Christian is totally
dependent, is and remains “the mortal enemy [Todfeind] of philosophy” (66),
because the existenzielle roots of faith and philosophy are radically different. To
appreciate this—for many, and especially for Catholic, readers shocking or exag-
gerated—statement, we must understand that Heidegger’s essay does not present
faith as an ensemble of theoretical beliefs, but instead as a most radical and funda-
mental “form” or “mode of existence” (an Existenzform or Existenzweise), i.e., as a
characteristic existenzielle possibility of performing one’s Dasein (and not as an

(45–46) and an “Appendix” (78). I will quote from this edition. An English translation of the text
is available (1976), 5–21.
3
Cf. Kockelmans (1973), 85–108, on Heidegger’s “Phenomenology and Theology,” to which the
present essay is my belated response, too late—alas!—for further discussions with Joe.
4
The second edition (1903) of Franz Overbeck’s Über die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie
was enlarged by an Introduction and an Epilogue. I used the photographic reprint of this second
edition, as published by the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (1989).
5
Heidegger (1969), 61 (Further citations are given parenthetically in the text itself). As we will see,
the latter statement must be qualified. Is it really possible to isolate the formal elements of theology
from all its claims about its content?
A Re-Reading of Heidegger’s “Phenomenology and Theology” 319

existenziale structure of Dasein as such). Intellectuals who try to combine a

faith-ruled way of life with a serious commitment to the philosophical mode (or
form) of existence, so different from a faith-inspired basic stance, lead a contradic-
tory and false existence. If they position themselves as philosophers, while already
being truly committed to Christian faith, they hide or ignore their own most radical
commitment, because this does not allow for the radical and all-risking kind of
“free” and “purely rational” [rein rationale, 63] questioning that is proper to
philosophy. Their “philosophy” would in fact be no more than a game (“as if” one
were a real philosopher), or else their faith would be a lie. The contradiction between
a faith-bound existence and philosophy’s free and total responsibility for the way an
engaged philosopher performs his own Dasein excludes any synthesis between the
two. Christian philosophy is a “wooden iron” (66); and theology can neither be a
form of phenomenology, if “phenomenology,” as Heidegger thinks, is synonymous
with philosophy (67), nor can a theologian at the same time be member of any
particular brand or school of philosophy (66).
Heidegger begins his paper with a very succinct summary of what he calls “the
vulgar conception of the relation between theology and philosophy” (47). According
to this widespread conception, philosophy and theology are two competing world-
visions [Weltanschauungen] regarding one and the same reality: human life in the
world. Whereas theology appeals to faith in revelation for announcing its interpreta-
tion of the human world, philosophy, being “the faith-free interpretation of world
and life” (47), turns to reason [Vernunft] alone. Instead of either immediately dis-
cussing this vulgar view or proposing a phenomenologically more accurate contrast
between theology and philosophy, Heidegger states that he will treat their relation
as a relation between two sciences [Wissenschaften].6 He further restricts his scope
by discarding any inductive or empiricist definition of philosophy’s or theology’s
“scientific” character that would be based on their factual performances. Instead he
presents “an ideal construction of the ideas of both sciences” (47, my emphasis),
i.e., a meta-scientific outline of the different types of scientificity that should
characterize philosophy and theology, if they indeed do realize the essence or the
“idea” of science as such. Only thus, Heidegger insists, a fundamental [grundsätzlich]
insight in their relation can be won (47).
Noticing that such a “construction” presupposes a clear concept of “science,”
Heidegger presents us with a formal definition: Wissenschaft is “the founding
[begründende] disclosure, exposure, or unveiling [Enthüllung] of an in-itself-enclosed
[in sichgeschlossen] domain of beings [das Seiende] or being [das Sein] for the sake
of [its or their] unveiledness or disclosedness” (48). After reminding the reader of
the distinction between beings (entities) and the kind of being [Sein] that characterizes
them as belonging to different groups according to each group’s specific mode of

6
The meaning of the word Wissenschaft, which Heidegger uses constantly in this essay, is closer to
the medieval scientia and the ancient epistēmē than to the modern Anglo-Saxon meaning of “sci-
ence.” Among the academic disciplines, theology and philosophy are here still called Wissenschaften
by Heidegger, but later, like in his letter of 1964 (74), he opposes their formal character quite
strongly to that of the natural sciences and mathematics.
320 A.T. Peperzak

being [Seinsart], Heidegger states that each particular science has its own mode of
approach and knowledge according to the specific mode of being that determines
the domain to which those beings belong (48). Then, focusing on philosophy and
theology as two sciences that have their own objects, problems, and characteristics,
he rehearses the distinction between the ontic and the ontological perspective, as it
was set out in the first sections of Being and Time. As the investigation of “being
itself,” philosophy is the only “ontological” science, whereas all the positive
sciences presuppose a “positum” of their own, i.e., a specific type of beings [onta]
that distinguishes them from other beings and thus makes it possible to gather and
thematize them as the collective Gegenstand [or object] of a particular science.
As non-ontological—and thus non-philosophical—thematizations of beings that have
a particular character, the latter sciences are ontic sciences. Their themes or “objects”
[Gegenstände] have already become familiar and to a certain extent manifest—
though not yet in a scientific way—before they are investigated scientifically, but
they still need a rigorous conceptualization and an examination of their relations to
the ontological findings of philosophy. Not only for philosophy and theology but
also for all other sciences, this means that their objects are known in a provisional—
perhaps even hardly self-conscious—way before they are studied explicitly.
Against the theoretical background sketched above, Heidegger repeats his
disagreement with the vulgar conception of the difference between philosophy and
theology: as an ontic science, theology is closer to chemistry or mathematics than
to philosophy, because theology does not have any insight into the truth of being
itself , a topic that—as we already have heard—is reserved for philosophy. 7
He concludes then by stating the following thesis about the scientific status of
theology: “Theology is a positive science and as such it is therefore absolutely
different from philosophy” (p. 49).
How does Heidegger delineate the positum, the specific being that is studied and
the mode of existence that is invested in theology? Warning us that he will not focus
on any other theology than the Christian one (49)—in fact, he also abstains from
saying anything about other forms of religious or irreligious faiths, including all
Greek, Roman, Asian, or Germanic ones—Heidegger answers that the positum of
(Christian) theology lies in “Christlichkeit” as such. Through an expression that
figures in the title of Overbeck’s book of 1873, to which Heidegger refers (see
above), he thus affirms that the object [Gegenstand] of theology is “Christianness”
(52). But what makes (Christian) theology—and all that is attached to it, such
as Christian beliefs, opinions, behavior, morality, prayer, and contemplation—
characteristically Christian? The answer lies in the particular form or mode of (human)

7
The statement that theology is not concerned with “ontological” questions implies that it cannot
compete with philosophy, because it does not and cannot have any competence for pursuing
questions with regard to Heidegger’s main philosophical concern, called “being” [Sein]: “being as
such” or “being itself.” Below I will suggest that Heidegger’s discarding of 2000 years of ontology
from philosophical and biblical theology is quite dogmatic and unjustified, especially if it is not
preceded by a thorough discussion of late Greek and medieval theology of creation and
providence, which cannot be simply dismissed as containing nothing else than “metaphysical
speculation.”
A Re-Reading of Heidegger’s “Phenomenology and Theology” 321

existing that is expressed in them or, in other words, in the “ontic” and existenzielle
reality that can be summarized by the word faith [Glaube].
Heidegger’s description of faith’s distinctive character is not very eloquent, but
he does give some hints. As appropriate response to the reality (the Gegenstand,
object, or theme) in which Christians believe, faith cannot be a product or effect
of Dasein’s own free initiative.8 Instead, it is presented by faith as the believed
(−in): das Geglaubte, of which the believer believes that it has been or is being
revealed (52).
Before we follow Heidegger’s description of the object [Gegenstand] of Christian
faith, it is necessary that we have a preliminary, although not yet scientifically justi-
fied, idea of that object [das Geglaubte]. What Christians believe in, the “object” of
their faith, is neither a list of articles, statements, or dogmas, nor even a coherent
ensemble of propositions that compose one whole. Faith is much more fundamental
than a creed, because it is the decisive mode of existence [the Existenzform or
Existenzweise] that expresses itself in all the theoretical and practical tenets and
facets that constitute the Christianness of a Christian life. Faith does not coincide
with believing that certain statements or doctrines or convictions are true (e.g., I
state as an objective truth that God exists, that Christ has revealed God’s compas-
sion, etc.). “Believing-in” is closer to the total self-delivery and self-abandonment
through which true believers entrust themselves to the revealed reality in which they
put their faith. Heidegger repeatedly emphasizes the radicality of the faithful’s
devotion to which an authentically Christian existence through its faith, confession,
dedication, and activities testify. Faith (or believing-in) is the fundamental and
encompassing position that turns a Christian into a wholly different direction than,
for example, the mode of existence that orients a non-believing philosopher.9
“Faith” is the name for a basic and unifying existenzielle turn and orientation, and
only secondarily a question of convictions that can be spelled out in catechisms,
sermons, or theology (52–56).
After Heidegger’s general remarks about our prescientific acquaintance with cer-
tain beings that a positive science then can investigate as its positum, the attentive
reader hopes that Heidegger first will describe the prescientific familiarity of
Christians with their faith and its object, in order to thereafter give some clarifica-
tions about the way in which theology, as a science, can transform that naïve form
of understanding into a scientifically ascertained interpretation and a conceptually10
accurate knowledge. It is not easy, however, to follow the articulation of his text on
this point—not only because of its selective character but also (1) because it empha-
sizes some aspects of the Christian creed while silencing others, which are at least

8
Cf., 52: “not generated by Dasein and not developed (or brought to maturity) through it in
complete liberty” [“nicht aus dem Dasein und nicht durch es aus freien Stücken gezeitigt”).
9
Faith implies “a turnaround [or conversion, Umgestelltwerden] of someone’s existence in and
through God’s faithfully assumed mercy” (53).
10
Throughout “Phänomenologie und Theologie” Heidegger frequently uses the words “Begreifen,”
“Begriffe,” and “begrifflich” to indicate scientific knowledge as distinct from the prescientific
acquaintance with phenomena. See, for example, 50, 54, 56, 57, 60, 63, and 65.
322 A.T. Peperzak

as central and fundamental if not more fundamental than the ones he mentions, and
(2) because Heidegger’s description itself already privileges certain theologies over
others. Many commentators have pointed to the influence of Luther, Karl Barth, and
Rudolf Bultmann on Heidegger’s quite un-Catholic presentation of theology in his
1927 essay, but his silence about (or suppression of?) certain theologoumena that
are essential of the entire Christian tradition from its very beginnings demands an
explanation of its own. Whatever the truth about Heidegger’s changes of mind
around 1920 may be, his essay of 1927 answers only the question of what he, in
1927–1928 deems central for the core of Christian faith—and consequently also for
a theology that is inspired by this faith.
Implicitly appealing to Luther’s plea for theology as a theologia crucis, Heidegger
summarizes the Christian message through the formula “Christ, the crucified God”
(52), but he does not offer much help for a faithful understanding of this ambiguous
expression, which hardly makes sense if it is isolated from the Christian faith in
God’s incarnation.11 What individual Christians and their community [Gemeinde] in
faith embrace, the object of their faith, is, according to Heidegger, not primarily
God, but instead the crucifixion of Christ, which, as understood by faith, has the
character of a sacrifice [Opfer, 52]. Faith and theology thus focus on a unique fact
of history (51–54) whose revelatory meaning only faith can recognize. For the faith-
ful this fact is a liberating occurrence or event [Geschehen or Geschehnis] that, as
revelation, cannot be “known” as such and adhered to except through faith alone.
Since this event has also a very special mode of historicity, we cannot be informed
about it by world historical or local reports. Only faith itself is open to “revelatory
history” [Offenbarungsgeschehen, 52–54]. Revelation is neither a news update
about the past nor a piece of scientific research about the historical evolution of
humankind, but it challenges the believers and makes them participate in the sacri-
ficial crucifixion of Christ, which reveals at the same time the sin [Sünde] of their
own forgetfulness about God and their having been forgiven by God’s mercy
(52–53). To live coram Deo as a sinner who has become crucified with Christ and
thus reconciled with God, changes the believer’s destiny [Geschick]. The history
[das Geschehen] into which faith grants the Christians participation, is not an
episode of the general history [Geschichte], but instead a “specific form of enabling”
or aptitude [Geschicklichkeit] that changes their destiny (53–54). For faith in Christ
is a revolution [Umgestelltwerden der Existenz]. It converts the basic position
[die Existenzweise] of the faithless into a form of participatory living with and “in”
Christ before God. Notwithstanding the very special character of Christian historic-
ity, Heidegger calls theology a historical science; but since faith causes a radical
conversion [Umstellung] of the sinner’s position [Einstellung] thanks to his being
crucified with Christ (53), Heidegger stresses that Christians belong to an eschato-
logical history by being born again. Through faith, one is reborn as a “new creation”

11
The German phrases on 52: “der gekreuzigt Gott,” “das so durch Christus bestimmte Verhältnis
des Glaubens zum Kreuz” (the relation to the cross that thus is determined by Christ), and “die
Kreuzigung” (the crucifixion) do not by themselves clarify whether the one who is crucified is God
or only a kind of god or pseudogod in the line of Zeus, Prometheus, Apollo or Ares.
A Re-Reading of Heidegger’s “Phenomenology and Theology” 323

[Neue Schöpfung, 63]. “Faith = rebirth” [Glaube = Wiedergeburt, 53]. Instead of

being dominated by sin, the Christian has become “a servant [Knecht] of God” (53, 62).
Through God’s mercy the entirety of his Dasein can no longer be separated from the
cross of Christ (53–63).
It is clear that Heidegger’s résumé of Christian faith does not pretend to offer a
complete summary of its main tenets but instead prioritizes its existenzielle specific-
ity: faith is a mode of existing, an Existenzform, in which sin and rebirth are central
concerns. It is almost as if Heidegger wants to show us the quintessence of Christian
faith by showing the reader a crucifix, surrounded by a couple of symbolic words
(such as sin, cross, sacrifice, pardon, conversion, service, and new creation) which
would remind expert theologians of their biblical roots and 1,900 years of discus-
sion among Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Calvinian, and other commentators.
Because Heidegger himself does not even try to justify his selection of credita and
their roots, the reader remains puzzled by the very partial outline of the “positum”
that, according to Heidegger’s view, distinguishes a pre-theological but already
believing acquaintance with Christian faith from any other “ontic” basis for depar-
ture in theology. That Heidegger, after his early conservative-Catholic period, has
become a fervent reader of Luther, might explain his emphasis on sin, sacrifice,
cross, forgiving, and new creation, but it does not explain his quite blatant silence
about creation, incarnation, trinity, resurrection, eternal life, prayer, agapē and—
above all—Godself as not being one of many beings and incomparable to any
“other” being. All his emphases remain enigmatic if they are not explained in their
coherence with the other—at least equally fundamental but silenced—tenets of
Christian faith. For example, what does the sacrificial character of the Cross mean,
if, in a profoundly anti-Paulinian way, Christ’s resurrection is not even mentioned
at all? How should we understand the very ambiguous, perhaps even improper,
expression of “the crucified God” (or “god”), if it is not accompanied by a reminder
of the equally silenced (or perhaps repressed?) incarnation of God’s “Word” or
“Son” (52)? And what about a Christianness in which prayer and agapē are not even
mentioned as primarily and most radically constitutive of a faithful Christian
existence? Is agapē between God and humanity, between humans mutually, and from
singular humans to God not the one and all-encompassing “new command,” through
which the “new creation” (63) is distinct from a God-forgotten life in sin?
A particularly surprising aspect of Heidegger’s hints regarding the object of
theology lies in his often repeated emphasis on faith as concentrated on itself, in
contrast with the parsimony of his indications about the ways in which God—and
not (wo)man—constitutes the primary, fundamental, central, absolute, ultimate and
originary source and meaning of the believer’s existence.
Heidegger defends his position by pointing out that the philosophical study and
all positive but non-theological studies of religion approach Christianity from a per-
spective that is neither rooted in nor guided by faith, while Heidegger’s distinction
between theology and other “positive” sciences, such as, for example, zoology (59),
can be justified by the infinite difference between the Seinsart of their objects, and
the Seinsart of God. Apparently he presupposes that God’s being is a particular kind
of being instead of “being” beyond all species or varieties of being. But why does
324 A.T. Peperzak

Heidegger restrict the “object” of theology to human faith—a faith in the crucified
Christ, whom he interprets as a historical occurrence—without any attempt to, at
least somewhat, clarify the relation (or coincidence) of this “fact” with the omni-
presence of the Absolute and Incomparable Origin or “Father,” who, according to
Christian faith, is not only responsible for all kinds of being in all their created
meanings, but, as God, also one with the man Jesus.
It remains unclear to me how Heidegger could combine his almost exclusive
concentration on human faith without any serious attempt at a phenomenological
description of the characteristically Christian attitudes, practices and motivations
that immediately refer to God. Christian faith cannot be restricted to a central
conviction (“I believe that…”), because it conditions and orients all the dimensions
of the true believers’ individual and common12 existence (54). All the expressions
Heidegger uses in these pages focus on human sin and rebirth, but no echo is heard
of the overwhelming presence of God in the biblical and postbiblical liturgical,
devotional, or mystical documentation about three millennia of sacred history and
the abundant literature about piety as seeking of and walking with God, described
in many styles by holy and not so holy, learned and hardly learned but faithful men
and women, some of whom (also) used a considerable amount of philosophical and
theological expertise to illuminate their wealth of religious experience.
To what extent it is possible to write a phenomenological evocation of God’s
hidden presence (more hidden than that of “being as such” or “being itself”) is of
course a thorny question, but Heidegger, who taught us how to adjust our descrip-
tions to the characteristic phenomenality of characteristic experiences, could have
helped us, if he had taken Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Eckhart, or Juan de la Cruz
and many others as seriously as Parmenides, Heraclitus, or Hölderlin. However, his
choice for philosophy—which, according to his own words, excludes him from
faith—does not seem to have prepared him well for a phenomenology of the
Christian experience. As far as biblical exegesis is concerned, he does not even try
to hint at it and his exclusion of the first testament from the Bible does not forbode
a faithful understanding of the “New Testament.”13
Toward the end of his explanation of theology’s positum, Heidegger quotes, by
way of summary, a word of Luther: “Faith is self-imprisonment [das Sichge-
fangengeben] in things we do not see,”14 and once more he emphasizes that faith is
not just a special kind of knowledge about a salvific history, but instead a particular
way of participating in the occurrence of a very special kind of history, of which
theology itself is a part. Theology is oriented, guided, motivated, and encompassed

12
Heidegger mentions the Christian Gemeinde [religious community] a few times, for instance on
52 and 56, but he silences all questions regarding the universality and internal diversity of the
Church.
13
On 57, Heidegger restricts the Bible, out of which all Christian theology thinks, to the New
Testament alone. The first part of the Bible and the meaning of Israel are not even mentioned
(Does he ever refer to them?).
14
The passive moment of Sichgefangengeben (53) can be strengthened by translating the
expression as: “to allow (or let) oneself (to) be imprisoned.”
A Re-Reading of Heidegger’s “Phenomenology and Theology” 325

by or “imprisoned” in the ongoing history of being crucified with Christ (53–54).

To what extent this “prison” of faith and theology has consequences for the scientific
character of theology has to be seen; but in any case Heidegger’s framing of theology
(if it is a science) emphasizes its radical difference from all other sciences.
Regarding the ontological monopoly of philosophy, Heidegger’s position is
clear: do not turn to theology for questions or answers about being and its why, its
meaning, or its distinction from beings (including the “highest”ones) and all that
cannot be called a being because it lacks or surpasses all beings. Whether
Heidegger’s expression “speculative knowledge of God” (60) is pointing at a
honorable part of philosophy is not clearly affirmed or denied, but in any case
theologians should not expect any contribution to their science (if it is one) from
that side. Insofar as theology is seen as a “science of God’s action [das Handeln
Gottes] with regard to human’s faithful action” (58–59), it focuses on God’s creative,
providential, redeeming, and re-creating activity.15 It should then not remain
enclosed within the borders of the basic and all-encompassing (but in Heidegger’s
view ontologically completely irrelevant) faith from which it emerges. If theology
indeed is a science, it should borrow from philosophy, because only philosophy
possesses the highest authority about the conditions of scientificity. Heidegger’s
statements according to which theology, despite its special character, is subordinate
to philosophy (27), because all ontic sciences are rooted in ontology, are not easy
to combine with his sharp distinction between theology and philosophy; but he
is very explicit (27, 31), at least about the formal demands that philosophy, as a
meta-scientific methodology, imposes on theology, if this discipline indeed must
be understood as a science.
Right from the beginning of his essay, Heidegger separates theology not only
from philosophy, but also from all other positive sciences, despite the ontic charac-
ter it shares with them. The reason lies in its Christian character, which determines
theology as an “ingredient of faith” (54), whereas all other sciences, like philoso-
phy, operate in a “free” [freie] and purely rational [rein rational, 65–66] way. As a
faith-obeying interpretation of faith at the service of faith itself, theology does not
coincide with a special part or specialty within some faith-free and merely rational
or “profane” (58) science that seems open to all possible kinds of faith or religion.
Consequently, theology must not only avoid any mixture with philosophy of
religion (59–60), but also refrain from confiding in or borrowing from other
kinds of religious study, such as the history or the psychology of religions, and
even from a general world history with particular attention to the Christian religion
(51–52, 59–60). Because all non-theological sciences, according to Heidegger’s
“ideal construction of their idea” (47, 53), discard faith from their essential
presuppositions, just as philosophy does, theologians are completely on their own,
i.e., they are left alone to their faith (and not to any form of universal evidence or
shared but faith-free convictions).

15
These activities of God are presupposed in a “new creation” [neue Schöpfung, 63], if this expres-
sion is meant seriously, but neither creation nor the entire pre-Christian history are mentioned.
326 A.T. Peperzak

By sharply distinguishing Christian theology not only from philosophy and all
other sciences, including profane history and religious studies insofar as these are
not entirely dominated by Christian faith, Heidegger avoids a host of difficult
questions regarding both theology and philosophy. For example, the following:
(1) Do the faiths of other religions express themselves in theologies of their own,
which have a similar scientific status and relation to philosophy? Could being and
ontology unite humanity by showing that a “free and purely rational” but faith-
free understanding of Dasein precedes or accompanies (or contradicts) all faiths?
(2) To what extent is it reasonable to defend that faith—or, at least, some kind of
radical and pre-rational commitment, which analogically might be called a
“fundamental trust” or a “profound affinity”—not only belongs to the existenzielle,
but also to the existenziale, conditions of any mode of human existence? (3) Does
not each epochal—e.g., modern or postmodern—meta-scientific idea of science
imply an un-provable, but hardly escapable, trust or commitment or “faith” that
precedes and orients all human existence before it can appeal to boast about a
“free” form of “pure rationality”?
These questions can be multiplied, but Heidegger—perhaps wisely or
strategically—confines his discussion to the relations between (1) a particular
(rather Lutheran than phenomenological) interpretation of Christianness, (2) his own
rather early version of philosophy, and (3) a meta-scientific definition of science as
such. Within a horizon of 2,000 years of faithful writing and reflection (of which
he disregards the first 1,400 years that separate Paul from Luther), he confines
theology to a faith-bound commentary on some fragments of the fundamental
documentation about one century: some selected texts of the New Testament (57).
The question of whether the first (or—according to a Christian tradition—“old”)
Testament and the very long tradition of its Christian explanations can, should, or
ought to play a role in theological assimilations of the Christian kerygma, he leaves
to those who are disappointed about his casual mention of their biblical basis (57).
Heidegger’s delineation of (Christian) theology isolates its domain not only from
any invasion of “profane” (58), pagan, “free,” “purely-rational,” faith-less, or
philosophical questions and curiosities, but also from its Jewish past about which he
shows neither interest nor acquaintance.
If all ontological questions are reserved for the “free” and exclusively “rational”
realm of philosophy, however, how then exactly does a theological understanding of
creation and providence, historicity, incarnation, resurrection, and the all-
encompasing bond between God and humanity relate to philosophical questions
about the amazing givenness of the world and humanity? The question of whether
one and the same person can at the same time be a Christian and a philosopher—i.e.,
how one can live and practice a union of two existenzielle modi—remains very
unclear. Heidegger seems to deny the possibility of such a union, but how then can
he write so confidently about faith versus rational freedom, philosophy as the only
superscience, and theology as an unfree, and especially philosophy-free (perhaps
also non-rational?), discipline?
To liberate theology from profane or pagan interference might be seen as the
creation of a refuge for believers and theologians, but also as a quarantine or exile.
A Re-Reading of Heidegger’s “Phenomenology and Theology” 327

By relegating theology to the “prison” of its faith, the philosopher liberates himself
to think freely without being directed, oriented, or limited, and reminded of his sins
by theology or faith. Is not this the illusion of a completely autarkic existence many
philosophers longed for since the beginning of modernity? Or has Heidegger his
own, but perhaps no longer Christian, faith?
Heidegger’s sketch of faith and its content is part of an introduction to his thesis
about the radical difference and existenzielle incompatibility between philosophy,
on the one hand, and theology as the science of, from, and for faith, on the other.
Before reacting to Heidegger’s view of the relation that keeps theology and
philosophy apart, however, we must acquire a better understanding of how he
determines the scientific character of philosophy. In contrast to all other sciences,
philosophy is not focused on a specific kind or cluster of beings, as specified by
their particular modes of being [Seinsart], but instead on (the being of) being as
such and in itself. In the phase of his development reached in 1927, Heidegger
identifies philosophy as the one and only ontological science whose task concerns
not only the exploration of “being” as such, but also the ways in which being itself
conditions and connects the various modes of being that are proper to the various
dimensions studied by the “positive” or “ontic” sciences (62–63). The title of
Phenomenology and Theology limits that task by confining it to an examination of
the relation between philosophy and theology.16 To what extent does ontology then
still concern theology? If theology is completely dependent on, surrounded by, and
immersed in faith, what could still remain for any collaboration with or dependence
on philosophy and vice-versa?
Heidegger’s conception of philosophy is somewhat clearer than his characteriza-
tion of theology. As produced on the basis of a free, non-Christian experience
[Erfahrung, 63 and 67] that uses “purely rational” means [rein rationale] of knowing,
philosophy emerges from a peculiar mode of existence, which is called “free” and
“posited on its own” [rein auf sichgestellt, 63–66]. As completely independent of
any kind of doxa or faith, philosophy is rooted in a mode of existence that has
nothing to do with Christianity. Being a free form of questioning [freies Fragen, 65]
in search for a “transcendental ontology” (67), philosophy emerges from a non-
Christian but “free self-appropriation of one’s entire Dasein” (66). It is supported by
its own free experience, which gives access to the existenziale mode and structure
of being. With regard to all positive sciences, philosophy thus has the direction of
their ultimate, purely ontological, foundation (65–66).
Heidegger wants to state without ambiguity that philosophy does not need to pay
attention to (Christian) faith and that the existenzielle attitude of faith, as servitude
to God and sacrificial participation in Christ’s crucifixion, is narrow and too differ-
ent from the “free self-appropriation” of the philosopher’s own “Dasein in its
entirety” to justify any cooperation between philosophy and faith in a theology that
would constitute some kind of mediation [Vermittlung, 66] or synthesis. The core of
faith (its particular mode of existence) remains the deadly enemy [Todfeind, 66] of

16
That Heidegger sees “phenomenology” as another name of philosophy is clear not only from the
title, but also for example, from 67.
328 A.T. Peperzak

any truly philosophical existence. However, Heidegger also maintains that the
fundamental opposition [Gegensatz] between philosophy and theology, insofar as
both are sciences, does not exclude the possibility that theologians borrow from
philosophy. A “Christian philosophy” is a “wooden iron” (66), but insofar as theol-
ogy claims to be an authentic science, it must follow the formal and existenziale
findings of philosophy, whereas philosophy, as a non-Christian ontology free from
faith, cannot borrow anything from faith or theology.
The definition of philosophy as an entirely self-directed mode of thought that
emerges from the philosopher’s “free self-appropriation of his own entire Dasein”
is surprising; but who would dare to accuse the writer of Being and Time that he
naively repeats the modern slogans about philosophy’s autonomy or to even suggest
that a thinker could claim full responsibility for his own being born in a particular
epoch of the European history and his entire education in a particular language by
German parents and schools in the aftermath of a neo-Kantian and post-Hegelian
epoch of philosophy? Would Heidegger in 1927–1928 really think that anyone’s
thinking can be entirely self-directed, free from all those unchosen influences that
no one can either prove or re-create after the fact? His own essay is an eloquent
example of being inspired by a particular trend in theology (and a revolt against his
own Catholic past), and his later work is incomprehensible without awareness of his
glaring dependence on Aristotle, Kant, Nietzsche, Hölderlin, and some others.
What exactly does Heidegger mean, when he writes that “all the fundamental
concepts of theology “have (…) in themselves an (…) ontologically determining
pre-Christian, and consequently a purely rationally understandable content”
[my emphasis] and that they necessarily imply [bergen] in themselves “that under-
standing of being [Seinsverständnis], which human Dasein as such and out of
itself [von sich aus] has, insofar as it exists überhaupt” [and thus not yet insofar as it
follows an existentially specified mode]? (63) Does he want to evoke here the
traditional distinction between the abstract dimension of a “natural” or generally
human philosophy, on the one hand, and its historical concretizations, on the other?
Does he presuppose that a philosophy is only then authentically “free,” “merely
rational,” and fully responsible, if it gets rid of all historical forms of trust or faith in
particular doxai, mores, literary, theoretical and affective traditions? Could he really
suggest that the modern bible of human Reason and Freedom should be written by
philosophers without any faith? Hegel called the main condition for such a philosophy
“faith in Reason” [Glaube an die Vernunft]. But already Sein und Zeit—and
certainly Heidegger’s later work—point into a different direction. Could any
postmodern thinker really be so naïve as to deem a profoundly presuppositionless
philosophy possible at all?
Heidegger’s characterization of philosophical freedom as “free self-appropriation
of the entire Dasein” (66) places us before a puzzle. If it is not naïve, it seems to
imply a rather shocking arrogance. Several modern philosophers have accustomed
us to the posture of an ideal thinker who, as a kind of miniature god, offers us from
an Archimedean nowhere his interpretation of the universe; but we are reluctant to
rank Heidegger among them, because we are grateful for his lessons in phenome-
nology and especially for his later focusing on the receptive and “listening” aspects
A Re-Reading of Heidegger’s “Phenomenology and Theology” 329

of thinking [Denken] as thanking [Danken] and appropriate responding

[Entsprechen]. Should we read his early text on Phenomenology and Theology as
already implying—or at least as not denying—that a free and responsible manner
of thinking may include and integrate the historical person who, thanks to an
epochal and personal destiny, has become a well-educated and well-read thinker?
But if that is a more accurate sense of freedom—a certain form of Gelassenheit
perhaps?—the question of philosophy’s presuppositions and the measure of its
freedom and rationality are still not quite answered. With regard to the relation
between Christian theology and philosophy, the main problem we would then like
to see resolved is whether any philosophy is possible that not only emerges from
pre-philosophical, pre-scientific, and insufficiently tested conceptions of the most
important phenomena, but also is rooted in a pervasive and profound form of trust
or faith concerning more superficial, but not irrelevant, questions, guesses, suspi-
cions, and procedures. In 1927–1928, Heidegger’s procedure avoids not only all
confrontations with explicitly—and implicitly—religious kinds of non-Christian
faith, which avoidance permits him to ignore the hypothesis according to which no
real philosophy is completely faithless. But if no philosophy can avoid at least
some connections with some basic faith or trust (or superstition), the postulates
supporting Heidegger’s essay must be revised.
Much of Heidegger’s later work might be diagnosed as based on a specific kind
of non-Christian faith (a faith in “the truth of Being” as “opening”and “granting” a
certain belief in a kind of “space” where finite gods and human mortals meet). If he
agreed that philosophy, in its own way, emerges from a fiducial mode of existence
in search for understanding, a comparison of philosophy with theology and of
their—perhaps different—roots, as he understood them, would be easier than a
comparison between a “wooden iron” (66) and a work of illusory “free” rationality
or “rational” autarchy.17
The last page (67) of Heidegger’s essay can perhaps be read as an indirect hint
about softening the sharp opposition between philosophy and theology that was
formulated in the preceding pages. Without mentioning theology, the text focuses
on the general problem of a researcher in one of the positive sciences who examines
the basic concepts and connections of his own science. When such an examination
is so thorough that the researcher must reconsider the traditional conception of his
central positum or theme, including its characteristic mode of being, in order to
replace it with a better understanding of its ontological foundation, then this
researcher needs also to be a philosopher or to consult with one in order to readjust
the basic concepts of his science through interdisciplinary cooperation. Heidegger
concedes that there are no “fixed rules” for such coordination, but he points at the

17
Heidegger does not refer to the traditional formula of “fides quaerens intellectum.” Probably he
would hear it as a justification of the (neo-)scholastic mode of mobilizing reason for the conquest
of insights into (parts of) the patrimonium of Christian faith. With regard to a metaphilosophical
interpretation of philosophy as search for understanding of an explicitly or implicitly religious
faith or trust, see Peperzak, (2013), Chaps. 7 and 8.
330 A.T. Peperzak

importance of an “instinct for the topic at stake” and of “scientific tact.”18 He does
not return once more to the special status of theology as a unique science founded
on faith, but instead refers theologians to philosophy’s pre- and non-Christian analyses
of Dasein’s existential structures, insofar as these are presupposed in theological
commentaries on the Christian faith. Insofar as theology confides in itself or borrows
from philosophical analyses, theologians must remain attentive to philosophy and
accept the needed corrections from that side (64–65). And here Heidegger comes
much closer to the great tradition from Origen and the Capadoceans to Cusanus,
Malebranche, Blondel and some other twentieth century philosophy than he suggested
before. He uses even the word “aufgehoben” in the sense of “hinaufgehoben”
(63, 67) when he writes that faith can take certain outcomes of philosophical
analysis under its wings [“in Verfügung nehmen”] in order to “lift them up” to the
level of theological interpretation and faith-based praxis (63, 67).
Heidegger also gives a particular example of cooperation between philosophy
and theology by confronting faith’s disclosure and reflective awareness of sin
[Sünde] with his own philosophical analysis of debt [Schuld], given in Being and
Time §§ 54–60. While suggesting that an authentic theology of sin cannot be
satisfied with a merely philosophical phenomenology of debt, he underlines that no
theology should contradict correct philosophical analyses of debt. Without discussing
or accepting either Heidegger’s presuppositions expressed in his own analyses of
debt and deficiency as an existenzial moment of Dasein as such, or his opinion that
“sin” is an exclusively Christian concept or phenomenon, I would like to ask instead
what exactly the difference might be between a theological integration of good
analyses and acceptance of corrections that are offered by a free, rational, and
phenomenologically accurate ontology, on the one hand, and theology as a “faith in
search of self-understanding” that integrates philosophically adequate analyses,
like, e.g., those offered by Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, or the Stoics, or, for that matter,
by Heidegger himself.
Heidegger might be right in stating that the fundamental stance and motivation
of non-believing philosophers is radically different from that of a faith-inspired
existence (although the evidence is not immediately obvious), but what seems
highly incredible to me—and difficult to combine with Heidegger’s experience of
the historical and epochal determination of all philosophies—is his claim that
theology is a special kind of exclusively ontic and, more specifically, historical
(or historial, or rather “destinal,” geschickliche) science, while philosophy is a
wholly “free” thinking that is not at all oriented, turned, motivated, inspired, or
biased by any specific—Christian, Jewish, or otherwise religious, pre-Christian,
anti-Christian, post-Christian, quasi-Christian, Nietzschean, Aristotelian,
Parmenidean, polytheically Hölderlinian, or other, but in any case pre- or beyond-
“philosophical”—trust or faith. As a philosopher, I find it very difficult to believe that

18
Ibid., 67. Giancarlo Tarantino, whom I want to thank here for his assistance in producing this
chapter, reminded me of a possible link between these expressions and Heidegger’s explanation of
Aristotle’s analysis of phronēsis in book VI of his Nicomachean Ethics. See Heidegger’s course on
Plato’s Sophist, GA 19, 48–57 and 138–165.
A Re-Reading of Heidegger’s “Phenomenology and Theology” 331

the relatively young Heidegger of 1927, just as most neo-Thomists of a 100 years
ago, believed in the possibility of clearly separating the reality of a generally-
human, merely “natural,” completely unbiased, unhistorical and un-epochal
intellect, together with its “merely rational” and entirely “free” insights, on the one
hand, from the factual doxa and ethos that define the established convictions and
mores in which even the leading thinkers of a certain period feel at home, on the
other. I rather believe that a basic trust or faith is unavoidable and effective in all
who dare to think “on their own.” And let’s not forget that philosophers too have
their own adherence to variations of das (elitarian) Man.
In tandem with his strong opposition between theology and philosophy,
Heidegger emphasizes the thematic (faith-given) independence, but not the “free-
dom” of theology. Since theology, according to Heidegger’s analysis, is and “has
meaning and right only as” an “ingredient” of faith (53), the question of its scientific
character, including the character of its conceptuality, remains problematic (60).
This problematic character is stressed when Heidegger declares and partially
italicizes without commentary that “theology itself is primarily [not entirely?] based
on [begründet durch] faith, even if its statements and argumentations originate from
formally free operations of reason” (61).
One cannot conclude that the relations between theology and philosophy have
been satisfactorily solved by Heidegger’s recourse to the old—and controversial—
distinctions between form and content and between dependence on faith and ratio-
nal independence from any trust or other authority. On the one hand, theology
borrows from philosophy, when it accepts philosophical corrections, whereas, on
the other hand, philosophy declares that theology is not able to think freely and
must accept corrections of its analyses where philosophy deems these necessary.
In order to be a science, theology must follow philosophy’s indications about
scientificity and the status of ontic research, while leaving the truly radical and
most fundamental—ontological—questions concerning being and its ultimate
meaning to philosophy.
If Heidegger is right, good philosophers cannot be theologians—they cannot
even be interested in theology—and good theologians cannot be authentic phi-
losophers. Consequently he cannot recognize Augustine, Anselm, Bonaventura,
Aquinas, Scotus, Cusanus, and innumerable others as theologians who were also
philosophers. According to his criteria, however, even Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and
Proclus were inauthentic philosophers, because they were very much involved in
speculative study of God [speculative Gotteslehre, 59–60], just as Descartes,
Leibniz, Spinoza, Fichte, Kant, Hegel, and Schelling were. Heidegger avoids evok-
ing any of the post-Socratic Greek or pre-modern European philosophers in order to
discuss with them the relations between philosophy and theology, but he cannot, of
course, deny that at least some of them are still revered by many of his colleagues
who consider them to be outstanding theologians and philosophers at the same time.
As for his own past or present colleagues in theology, such as Augustine, Thomas,
Scotus, Cusanus, Newman, Barth, and Bultmann, Heidegger cannot recognize them
as also relevant for philosophical studies. Some of them have indeed been able to
reflect so thoroughly on the foundation of their own (“positive”) science that they
332 A.T. Peperzak

have become capable of discussing philosophical questions with professors of

philosophy. They might even have learned some parts of the philosophical tradition,
but if they mix it with their theology, they betray their own discipline and bastardize
philosophy. A certain, purely formal, cooperation of philosophers with theologians
seems however possible, as we have seen, even for Heidegger. Though far from
being well-informed about post-Platonic and medieval authors, Heidegger still knew
more double-sided thinkers than many of his colleagues in philosophy. If he had
been more interested in a benevolent or simply accurate and less-selective reading
of, e.g., Plato, Plotinus, Bonaventura, Aquinas, Scotus, or Cusanus, he would prob-
ably have been more nuanced and convincing about their handling of the relations
between faith and reason, theology, ontology and phenomenology, revelation and
philosophy. Perhaps, he would then also have refrained from dogmatically declaring
that philosophy must exclude any idea of God. Such theologians, whose philosophical
or “speculative” sophistication was clearly not inferior to that of Hegel’s logic,
might have impressed him, if he had participated in their discussions about the pos-
sibility of approaching God through the stammering language of human discussions
about such (quasi-)concepts like—for example—esse ipsum, being itself, or infinity.
Indeed, some of those starling philosophers who were also theologians have shown
that divine infinity has very little or nothing in common with either a highest being
or the being that is common to all, and that, consequently, all gods who claim to be
God, are idols, whereas only the infinity of God makes free.

2 The Letter of 1964

In his letter of 1964, which he added to the publication of Phenomenology and

Theology in 1969, Heidegger maintains that the task of theology lies in a clarifica-
tion [Erörterung] of the Christian faith, including its meaning and its claims; but he
refrains again from sketching a theological methodology. Instead, he focuses on a
question that was implied in the topic of the Madison conference to which he was
invited in 1964. From that topic, “the problem of a non-objectifying thinking and
speaking in today’s theology,” Heidegger isolates the question of whether objectifi-
cation is essential and unavoidable in science as such (and not only in, for example,
the natural sciences). As we might expect, his answer is a clear “No,” and this might
be seen as part of the retractatio that Gadamer mentioned.
In the paper of 1927 the word “Vergegenständlichung” [objectification] was
used rather often in order to indicate the transition from the prescientific acquain-
tance with some kind of being to its scientific positing, which makes it the
Gegenstand (that which confronts it) of a specific science. In the letter of 1964,
however, Heidegger not only states that Objektivierung and Vergegenständlichung19

19
In the original essay, “Phänomenologie und Theologie,” Heidegger uses Gegenstand and
Vergegenständlichung instead of the words Objekt and Objektivierung. I neglect his distinction
here, because it is not immediately relevant for the present discussion.
A Re-Reading of Heidegger’s “Phenomenology and Theology” 333

are not essential for thinking or speaking; he also gives a few hints about his new
understanding of thinking and speaking as forms of intuitive acceptance
[Erblicken and Hinnehmen] and responsive obedience to what, in its own way of
being, comes forward to a receptive “listener.” Both thinking and speaking are
now forms of appropriate responding [Entsprechen, 72–73]; they allow the
phenomena to show and tell in their own way what the thinker should think and
say about them (74).
At the end of his letter (77), Heidegger has only one advice for theologians:
Discover, in your concentration on the essence of Christian faith, “what theology
should think and how it should speak.” One of the questions that are implicitly
answered in this advice is whether theology still can be a science at all. And
Heidegger already suggests an answer in adding that theology “presumably is not
allowed to [darf nicht] be a science.” If this suspicion is true, then Gadamer’s
remark about Heidegger’s own rejection of his early view on theology is certainly
justified. However, if theology is not a science, then much of what the text of 1927
said about theology and its relation to other sciences, including philosophy (if this
is a science), must be forgotten or denied. What was said about the special charac-
ter of theology as confined to faith alone might still be valid, but nothing new is
forwarded about the difference between faith and theology (which is no longer
considered a science) or about the meaning of theology for the faithful, the university,
or the general culture.
While arguing, in the beginning of his letter, against the identification of
speaking as a form of objectification, Heidegger offers the examples of “Trost
zusprechen” [to console] and “ansprechen” [to address, call, speak to] as modes
of speaking that certainly cannot be described or understood as objectifying
activities. What the later Heidegger has written about speaking as responding
[Entsprechen] is here also present in the background, but the most current form
of everyday speaking to and with other speakers as interlocutory event is hardly
ever thematized by Heidegger. Where has he offered a phenomenology that high-
lights the addressing of one speaker by another, the mutual exchange in a conver-
sation or dialogue, the interplay between teachers and students, the reactions
evoked by a prophetic address, or a simple prayer to God? Regrettably, Heidegger
has shown little interest in the fact that all forms of speaking are directed to
someone, either as response or as provocation, or rather as both at the same time.
Like many other philosophers, he seems to have been more interested in poems
and soliloquia by authors who did not wait for human responses before they
wrote their next poetic or noetic work.
In his later essays Heidegger has shown how a master of phenomenology tries
hard to approach various phenomena not in an objectifying but each time in a care-
fully appropriate way—for example, by describing a thing, a goblet, a landscape, a
bridge, a space, or an event. We owe him thanks for those lessons in phenomeno-
logical observation and accuracy. What neither he nor most of his philosophical
predecessors have often shown, however, is how persons stand, walk, look, speak,
think, gesticulate, dance, fight, enjoy life, invite, serve, love, discuss, or sadly feel
alone. What he, insofar as I know, has hardly ever done—alas!—is to retrieve
334 A.T. Peperzak

phenomenologically the very abundant literature of first hand testimonies about

human encounters with the one and only God, who, despite the densest hiddenness,
is experienced by the adoring faithful as being present around and beyond but also
within them.
Both addressing and responding—conversation with other humans and encoun-
ters in prayer with God—are constitutive of Christian faith and theology, if it is
true that the one and only “new” and all-encompassing “commandment” identifies
agapē as loving God while at the same time loving every and all human persons.
Consequently, an adequate understanding of theology does not seem possible
without a phenomenologically correct analysis of faith as being drawn by and
moving up (i.e., as praying) to the lovable God, in whose love one participates by
loving one’s neighbors. Faith is not primarily a believing that… or a belief in
dogmas but rather a believing in and a reaching out of the whole person toward
the hidden Love that moves the universe. This truth cannot be unveiled from the
standard perspective of traditional philosophy, because this presupposes the
standpoint of a solitary thinker (ego, I), who, as a supreme mental being, domi-
nates the all of all beings thanks to the panoramic view that such a position at the
top allows for. That our mind from such a point of view cannot discover God is
inevitable, however, because God is neither a being that can appear as one among
or above other beings within the all-encompassing (or “metaphysical”) horizon of
all beings together, because such a horizon makes all gathered beings finite, nor
as the beingness that is proper to all beings. Even “Being itself” seems incapable
of granting us a contact with God, as long as we understand “Being” as the abso-
lute and ultimate condition, Lichtung, “space,” or horizon of an all-encompassing
vision. Plato has tried to think and name the unique non-being humanity is driven
to, by referring to it as “beyond-being” because it is radically incomparable to all
essences [ousiai, Wesen, Seiendes]; and later (Greek, Latin, and Germanic) thinkers
have introduced the word “infinite” to point at its ungraspable (and therefore
utterly dark) unicity.
Are both ruptures with the panoramic overview—interlocution as well as infin-
ity—necessary for philosophy, at least in the form of experimental hypo-theses?
Must philosophy overcome its obsessive fascination with being and “metaphysics”
by reaching beyond them to point at the ultimate condition(s) of all being and
“Being itself”? Or can we continue our philosophical search for truth, like Hegel
and many of his predecessors, in the direction of a highest or most originary X that
explains the coherence and the gathering of ta panta as the full unfolding of the One
[to Hen] that is also to Pan (the universe)? Must philosophers begin by apriori
excluding both the God of the Biblical tradition and the philosophical Infinite of
“speculative” philosophy from their own domain, where only finite gods and other
idols would have the right to dwell? Or should philosophers, like Plato and his
offspring, discover that only faith or trust in a beyond supports their own daring
to live and think and speak responsibly? Would it perhaps even become again
possible to experience a kind of affinity between the best of theology and the best
of philosophy? Only, of course, if truly reasonable freedom and non-superstitious
faith are no longer perceived as contrary.
A Re-Reading of Heidegger’s “Phenomenology and Theology” 335

3 Looking Back

Throughout his entire essay of 1927, Heidegger has treated theology as a science.
On its first page he even declares that one of the main differences between his own
approach of the relation between philosophy and theology and the “vulgar,” non-
scientific but weltanschauliche, approach lies in the fact that he will treat both as
sciences, and that their difference therefore must be determined through “scientific
argumentation”—not only by way of persuasion and conviction (47). A few pages
later (49) however, a doubt emerges: immediately after declaring that theology is a
positive science, Heidegger asks, rather unexpectedly, “whether theology is a
science at all” (49). He recognizes that this question “is the most central question,”
but adds that an answer to it must be delayed because the “idea” of theology must
first be determined more thoroughly. The following pages explain the concept of a
“positive science” (50–51) and then give a description of theology according to its
idea. Theology emerges from faith, but, as a science, it must make transparent
[durchsichtig] what faith is, believes, and does, and how it profoundly marks the
believer’s existence. Theology is motivated by faith and its purpose is the concrete
development and strengthening of that faith (51–54).
Then Heidegger confronts this idea of theology with the definition of a science
in general. If science is “a freely performed, conceptually disclosing objectification
[Vergegenständlichung]” of its specific topic, its application to theology, as a sci-
ence so utterly determined by faith, implies an answer to the following consider-
ation. “If faith essentially [von Hause aus] would resist a conceptual explanation
[eine begriffliche Auslegung], then theology would be a quite inadequate way of
understanding [Erfassen] its object [faith]. It would then miss an essential moment,
without which it from the outset never could become a science” (54).
Without giving the reader an answer, the text passes on to other aspects of the
central question (see p. 49); but a warning has been given. During the entire essay
the task of theology is seen in the “conceptual explanation” of faith as guided by
faith itself. In the just quoted passage, the expression is presented as constitutive of
authentic science. Does it reinforce the doubt that was hinted at on p. 49? Or does
Heidegger take here “conceptual” [begrifflich], together with Begriffe and Begreifen
in a more rigorous sense than in the many sentences where he usesthese words
in a somewhat loose way, more or less similar to “understandable,” “rational,”
“reasonable,” or “clear”? (e.g., 60)
On page 60, Heidegger points to the “peculiar [eigentümliche] conceptuality” of
theology, which he illustrates by underlining its characteristic mode of access to its
“object” (faith) and the specific evidence by which theological theses are supported.
But, without further elucidation, he only concludes from that peculiarity that
theology should neither borrow from other (positive) sciences, nor allow them to
interfere in its own mode(s) of demonstration and conceptual rigor. “Theology’s
own conceptuality can only grow out of itself” (60).
Maintaining that (1) “theology itself is founded primarily in faith,” Heidegger
also maintains that (2) its statements [Aussagen] and demonstrative procedures
336 A.T. Peperzak

[Beweisgänge] are generated by formally free actions of reason [Vernunft, 61].

Despite the peculiarity of theology’s object, character, motivation, purpose, evidence,
conceptuality, and methodical procedures, and despite its “imprisonment” within
the circle of faith-in-faith, of which it is an ingredient (54), theology is a science—
not quite similar to other sciences, but still respectable because of the extent
of freedom and rationality it nevertheless shares with all other sciences, including
even philosophy.20
Heidegger’s letter of 1964, written almost 40 years later, disagrees with his
early text by cautiously suggesting that theology “probably cannot (or is not
allowed to) be a science at all” (77). In a much earlier letter, however, written on
August 8, 1928, half a year after presenting Phenomenology and Theology in
Marburg, he confides to Elisabeth Blochmann: “I am personally convinced that
theology is not a science—but today I am not yet capable to really show this”21 And
after indicating that the relation between philosophy and theology would demand
a more fundamental approach of both than he could offer in his talk of 1928, he
adds: “My work in Marburg was also always consciously double-sided—helpful
and quite disquieting—and I freed more than one person from theology…”22
The word “freed” [befreit] or “liberated” in the second quote is particularly
interesting; it rhymes with the conviction, shared by Heidegger in 1927–1928, that
theology is characterized by the servitude of faith, whereas science, including
philosophy, is a “free” and “purely rational” manner of taking full responsibility
for one’s own thought.
However, if, already before August 1928, Heidegger gave up the postulates on
which his replacement of the “vulgar” conception of theology in relation to philoso-
phy was based, then the entire argumentation of his 1927 essay crumbles. If theol-
ogy is neither a Weltanschauung nor a science, what is it then? Just a faith imprisoned
in a horizon that isolates it from philosophy and the ontic sciences, but also forbids
it to interfere in them or compete with them? Perhaps Heidegger would answer that,
in any case, theology has other roots, and therefore also a radically other style of
intelligibility than philosophy.

20
Heidegger does not explain the implicit distinction between the form (formale structures and
procedures) and the content [Gegenstand] which are united in each science, nor does he analyze
the peculiar way in which they (as formally free and rational action regarding a neither free nor
rational faith) constitute one scientific and at the same time faithful, but not schizoid and still
intelligent mode of existence.
21
Cf. Martin Heidegger and Elisabeth Blochmann (1990), 25.
22
Cf. 26. The same letter of August 8, 1928 clearly shows that Phenomenology and Theology rep-
resents only a phase of Heidegger’s struggle with the problem on which it focuses. Especially the
following statements would prompt a further development (or even a radical overhaul, especially
with regard to philosophy) of the printed essay: “It belongs to the essence of human Dasein that it,
insofar as it exists, philosophizes. To be human already means to philosophize […]” (25). And
“Religion is a fundamental possibility [eine Grundmöglichkeit] of human existence, although of a
completely other kind than philosophy. This [philosophy], in turn, has its [own] faith [Glauben]
[my emphasis, A.P.]—which is the freedom [Freiheit] of Dasein itself, which, of course [ja],
becomes existent only in being free [im Freisein]” (25).
A Re-Reading of Heidegger’s “Phenomenology and Theology” 337

But what about the opposition between faith and reason [Vernunft], in which the
vulgar view takes refuge for an explication of the formal features of theology and
philosophy? Doesn’t Heidegger’s contrast between the faithful “conceptuality” of
theology on the one hand, and the “purely rational,” faithless, “free” and “self-
directed” operations of philosophy, on the other, come close to the “vulgar” (though
typically modern) contrast between faith and reason? Like Hegel, Heidegger seems
to agree with the modern (and, to a certain extent, also postmodern) conviction that
the freedom of reason is the “deadly enemy” of a faith that tries to understand itself.
And what about the exile of theology, as an ontic discipline, from the domain of
ontology? The answer to this question depends on the way in which one responds to
the long history of Western thought, in which creation has been thought as indivisibly
related to the most amazing of all wonders: that all beings are and that the “fact” of
this “are” is the most striking of all wonderful “facts” for those who are in awe of it.
Especially the question of God—but not as an entity (which cannot be God)—is
then a criterium for depth in thinking, but that question has already been exiled by
too many (true or false?) thinkers from genuine philosophy.

References

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics.

Heidegger, Martin. 1969. Phänomenologie und Theologie. In Wegmarken, GA 9, ed. Friedrich
Wilhelm von Hermann, 45–78. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Heidegger, Martin. 1976. Phenomenology and Theology. In The Piety of Thinking. Trans. James
Hart, and John Maraldo, 5–21. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1992. Platon: Sophistes. GA 19, ed. Ingeborg Schußler. Frankfurt am Main:
Vittorio Klostermann.
Heidegger, Martin. 2003. Plato’s Sophist. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, Martin and Elisabeth, Blochmann. 1990. Briefwechsel 1918–1969, 2nd ed, ed. Joachim
W. Storck. Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft.
Kockelmans, Joseph. 1973. Heidegger and theology. The Southern Journal of Philosophy 4(3):
85–108.
Overbeck, Franz. 1903. Über die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie. Leipzig: Naumann.
Overbeck, Franz. 1989. Über die Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie. Darmstadt: Wissens-
chaftliche Buchgesellschaft.
Peperzak, Adriaan T. 2013. Trust. Who or what might support us? New York: Fordham University
Press.
The Remainders of Faith: On Karl Löwith’s
Conception of Secularization

Rodolphe Gasché

Abstract The essay explores Karl Löwith’s notion of secularization arguing that
this notion presupposes a conception of faith found only in the religions of the
Book. In addition, it is shown that his analyses of history whether eschatological or
progressive are carried out against the background of the Greek experience of the
physical cosmos characterized by cyclical time.

In its most compressed form, Karl Löwith’s thesis in his landmark investigation of
the theological underpinnings of modern historical consciousness asserts that the
problem of history has a “supramundane origin,” to use Dieter Henrich’s incisive
expression.1 This thesis, according to which the modern conception of history as an
open-ended process of progress is a worldly reflection of the Christian history of
salvation, has been the subject of many controversies and fierce criticism. In
particular, Löwith’s use of the category of secularization in order to conceptualize
the transition from the Christian view on history—with its idea of providence and
eschatological endtime—to worldly history has been contested. Indeed, notwith-
standing all the caveats and qualifications that Löwith broaches in the “Conclusion”
to his study—particularly the distinction “between a historical source and its
possible consequences,” which serves him to explain how Christianity itself could

This essay was originally published in Divinatio. Studia Culturologica Series, Sofia: MSHS.
Vol. 28 (2008): 27–50.
1
Henrich (1967), 459.
R. Gasché (*)
SUNY Distinguished Professor & Eugenio Donato Professor of Comparative Literature
Department of Comparative Literature, State University of New York (SUNY),
639 Clemens Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260, USA
e-mail: gasche@buffalo.edu

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 339

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_19,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
340 R. Gasché

produce an anti-Christian “illegitimate child”2—the general thesis of Meaning in

History states that modern historical consciousness, with its conception of history
as progressive, originates in Hebrew and Christian thought, and is but a secularized
version of the Judeo-Christian “eschatological outlook toward a future fulfilment”
(196). As Hans Blumenberg has convincingly shown, the historical notion of secu-
larization as a category of illegitimacy only accomplishes this task of accounting for
the discontinuity between the world of Christianity and the modern world by pre-
supposing an identity of substance between both. Construed as a secularization of
sacred history, the worldly conception of history characteristic of the modern world,
despite its seemingly radical alienation from the Christian history of salvation,
entertains an intimate relation of continuity with theological history. Secularization,
Blumenberg holds, is a category of continuity. Yet, in his 1934 book on Nietzsches
Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen, where the first rudiments of his
later theory of secularization are worked out, Löwith argues, in a discussion of
Nietzsche’s conception of nihilism, that what remains after the decay of Christian
faith is also much more than just a remainder of faith. He writes that “this seeming
remainder is in fact [im Grunde] the kernel” of Christian faith.3 In other words, the
replacement of Christianity by the secular view of world-history as a history of
progress does not only fully remain within the framework set by Christianity, but is
even the actualization, if not the highest potentiation of its very kernel—the kernel
of its constituting faith. And indeed, on more than one occasion in Meaning in
History, Löwith speaks of the faith in progress and of the religion of progress. The
category of secularization is thus not only a category of continuity as Blumenberg
has shown, and as such unable to account for discontinuities in history, in short,
structurally incapable of recognizing autonomous developments, novelties, and
innovations. Rather, it is above all, I will hold hereafter, a category demonstrating
that it itself has raised the kernel of Christian faith to its ultimate potentiality.4 As a
consequence, Blumenberg’s argument that as a category of continuity, the category
of secularization remains a Christian conception—a conception intent on extending
and salvaging theological history itself—and thus essentially is ‘the ultimate
theologumenon,” would be even more compelling.5 But if, at the same time, secu-
larization also represents a potentiation of the very essence of Christian faith, then
what follows from this for the very conception of this category?
The history sketched out in Meaning in History, that of how modern historical
consciousness derives from the Christian salvation story, not only shows that this
history has its unifying substance in a prime concern with the future, but also that it
is a history which does not evidence any true epochal breaks. Thus, the passage
from sacred history to secular history is only a seeming discontinuity, and what

2
Löwith (1949). All citations in the text refer to this edition. Whereas the English original of
Meaning in History refers to a “natural child” (112), the translation into German speaks more
appropriately of an “illegitimate child.” Löwith (2004), 123.
3
Löwith (1956b), 53.
4
Blumenberg (1983).
5
Blumenberg (1964), 265.
The Remainders of Faith: On Karl Löwith’s Conception of Secularization 341

distinguishes modern historical consciousness from the Christian eschatological

view of history is ultimately only a question of degree. If, as Löwith contends at the
very beginning of his work, the “philosophy of history is […] entirely dependent on
theology of history, in particular on the theological concept of history as a history of
fulfilment and salvation” (1; emphasis mine), then it is clear from the start that the
modern consciousness of history does not represent a radical rupture with a previ-
ous epoch. By contrast, this profoundly continuous, that is, linear, history predi-
cated on a concern with the future stands in a sharp contrast to the Greek
understanding of history and the world. It is not only in Löwith’s work posterior to
Meaning in History, as Blumenberg contends, that one can see that his concept of
secularization becomes really intelligible only when thought from, or against, the
backdrop of the divide between the pagan world with its cyclical view of nature and
history on the one hand and the Jewish-Christian futuristic understanding of history
on the other. That the divide between the Christian and the modern secular world is
only secondary at best when compared to the epochal break between paganism and
Jewish-Christian faith is obvious already from Löwith’s 1949 work. Undoubtedly,
in his later writings this point is made in a much blunter fashion as when, for exam-
ple, he writes that “the transition from Greek culture to Christianity is a decisive and
deciding break compared to the development from the Christian tradition to the
modern attitude of consciousness which is only a secularization of the Christian
saeculum.”6 Indeed, all that occurs in secularization is a rendering worldly of the
world that Christianity had rendered un-wordly [Verweltlichung der entweltlichten
Welt] through having tied it to the salvation plan, thus establishing, paradoxically,
the world’s mere worldliness in the first place. Löwith remarks: “Secularization
remains one of the Christian saeculum.”7 Blumenberg, no doubt, echoes Löwith’s
statement about the relative significance of the divide between the Christian and the
modern world when he observes: “The secularization of Christianity that produces
modernity becomes for Löwith a comparatively unimportant differentiation as soon
as he turns his attention to the unique and epochal break that in one stroke decided
in favor of both the Middle Ages and the modern age: the turning away from the
pagan cosmos of antiquity, with its cyclical structure of security, to the one-time
temporal action of the biblical/Christian type.”8 The break with pagan cosmology is
the only epochal break that truly counts. This one break puts all other breaks into
perspective. In light of this unique break all the other breaks, in particular the secu-
lar break away from Christianity and hence also modern self-affirmation carried
with it, are only of relative significance. If Löwith can so easily dismiss modernity’s
novelty, i.e., its claim to independence from Christianity, and depict secularization
as entirely dependent on what it seeks to overcome, it is because of the significance
he attributes to the one fateful break, that of Judeo-Christianity with the pagan
world. Accordingly, this explicit valorization of the pagan natural world and its
cyclical history for understanding the notion of secularization in Löwith will interest

6
Löwith (1960), 254.
7
Ibid., 237.
8
Blumenberg (1983), 28.
342 R. Gasché

us in the following. Löwith’s whole analysis of secularization and its concomitant

maxim of history as progress as an exclusively Christian conception, and, by exten-
sion, his analysis of modernity’s attempts at self-emancipation and self-affirmation
as still indebted to Christianity, is predicated on this valorization.
In my view, Blumenberg’s criticism of Löwith’s conception of secularization is
irrefutable: this conception does not do justice to modernity’s accomplishments. At
the same time, by establishing the intra-Christian credentials of the conception of
secularization, and, therein, its restricted nature as a historical category, another
facet of his concept of secularization comes into view, one which, by highlighting
the continuity between Christianity and modern secularization, puts the assumption
that history is continuous into its place. Furthermore, by following up on the prob-
lematic of the difference between the pagan and the Christian world, a difference
that also includes the modern world, I also hope to bring to light an aspect of
Löwith’s understanding of secularization that to my knowledge has received little
attention, one that significantly restricts the concept’s interpretive power to those
cultures and civilizations founded on the religious movements that broke away from
the pagan world of the Greeks, that is, the religions of the Book.
First, however, an additional issue needs to be addressed, one that inevitably poses
itself when reading Meaning in History. This is the question of whether, by resorting
to the category of secularization, Löwith can escape subscribing to the kind of under-
standing of history that he sets out to criticize, namely that of a future-oriented con-
ception of historical time. By locating the origin of the modern understanding of
history as an open-ended progress in the secularization of the biblical conception of
an end-time—a conception that itself thus comes to an end in modernity, which in
turn, according to Löwith’s diagnosis, faces its own end in the present in which all
faith in progress has vanished—the temporal pattern associated with the category of
secularization seems also to subtend Löwith’s own historical presentation of this
development. Helmut Kuhn—one of the first to critically respond to Löwith’s
work—noted already in his 1949 book review of Meaning in History that the author
“seems to embrace the very type of theory which he combats. He, too, constructs a
philosophical history directed towards an eschaton. In a peculiarly inverted manner
he is among the believers in progress–the goal being the undoing of the things done.”9
Kuhn refers here in particular to Löwith’s “inversion of the customary way of historical
presentation” in Meaning in History through “developing the historical succession of
the interpretations of history regressively, starting from modern times and going back
to their beginning” (2). Indeed, in his book, which opens with a chapter on Jacob
Burckhardt’s view of history, a view that refrains from any theological or metaphysi-
cal frame of reference, Löwith traces the theological implications of the philosophy
of history backwards from Burckhardt through Marx and Hegel, Voltaire and Vico,
Joachim and Augustine, to name a few, and concludes his study with a chapter on
the Bible. This approach is justified “on three grounds: didactic, methodical, and
substantial” (2). But, before briefly discussing these three reasons, a word about the
addressee of Löwith’s book is warranted. It is the modern reader, more precisely the

9
Kuhn (1949), 825.
The Remainders of Faith: On Karl Löwith’s Conception of Secularization 343

post World War II generation, which, having witnessed the atrocities committed in
Europe, “is just awakening from the secular dream of progress which replaced the
faith in providence but which has not yet reached Burckhardt’s resolute renuncia-
tion” (2). In other words, it is a reader who, similar to Löwith, finds himself “more or
less at the end of the rope,” at the end, that is, of the secular belief in progress and, in
the same breadth, of the belief in Christian providence, of which this philosophy
of history is but an antireligious perversion [Verkehrung] (3, 192). However, the
addressee of Löwith’s work, although disillusioned with the modern faith in prog-
ress, is not aware of its theological foundation. By choosing to invert his historical
presentation of the origination of modern historical consciousness, Löwith thus
works toward awakening the present generation not only from the dream of a history
of progress which has reaped nothing but disaster, but from that of the history of
salvation as well. Although vaguely reminiscent of the Husserlian conception of
Abbau as the dismantling of the historical sedimentations that cover over the originary
evidences of the life-world, and of Heidegger’s notion of Destruktion of the history
of metaphysics in order to reach back to its covered up unthought so as to be able to
begin anew, Löwith’s regress from the present understanding of history to its origin
in the biblical view of history does not aim at bringing the hidden religious presup-
positions of the conception of history to light in order to reactivate these covered up
presuppositions in some more originary way, but, on the contrary, to awaken his
addressee from the dream of history altogether. This is the first didactic reason that
Löwith offers to justify his inverted historical presentation of the supposedly linear
sequence that is the origination and development of the philosophy of history from
the secularization of the eschatological conception of Jewish and Christian faith in a
fulfillment of time—a linear progress that has come already to a provisional end in
the suspension of both conceptions of history in the work of Burckhardt. It is more
expedient, Löwith argues, to start with what is familiar to the modern mind, namely
that conception of history as progress from which the new generation is just awaken-
ing, before turning to “the unfamiliar thought of former generations” to which this
conception is indebted. He writes: “It is easier to understand the former belief
in providence through a critical analysis of the theological implications of the still
existing belief in secular progress than it would be to understand belief in progress
through an analysis of providence” (2).
The methodical ground for inverting the sequence of his historical presentation
is the following: since “history is moving forward, leaving behind the historical
foundations of the more recent and contemporary elaborations […] historical con-
sciousness cannot but start with itself, though its aim is to know the thought of other
times and of other men, different from our times and ourselves” (2). However one
goes about interpreting history, one is always only “reading the book of history
backward from the last to the first page” (2). The second reason for his inverted
presentation is, thus, merely a formalization of what actually happens, consciously
or not, even in the customary way of historical presentation. It is a reason based on
the claim that “history is moving forward,” and that it leaves behind the historical
foundation of the present. Yet if history is held to move forward, then it is essentially
oriented toward the future whether or not this future is thought in terms of the
344 R. Gasché

eschaton of religious and theological history or of the open-ended progress that

secular historicism advocates. By justifying his approach to history through invok-
ing what factually obtains in historical consciousness, and by holding that history
“moves forward,” this second rationale for presenting history in an inverted way
fully subscribes, it would seem, to that kind of history that, in going back to its
beginning in theological history, Löwith seeks to undo.
So what about the substantial [sachliche] reflection that demands the inverted
sequence of the presentation in question? Löwith explains: “The methodical regress
from the modern secular interpretations of history to their ancient religious pattern
is, last but not least, substantially justified by the realization that we find ourselves
more or less at the end of the modern rope” (3). In the subsequent German publica-
tion of the book, the reason for proceeding this way rests on the diagnosis that cur-
rently we find ourselves at “the end of modern historical thought,” that is, at the end
of a conception of history predicated on open-ended progress.10 This substantial
diagnosis that today modern historical consciousness has (more or less) come to an
end subtends, in fact, the two previous reasons for proceeding to write history back-
wards. It explains the existence of a new generation for which modern historical
consciousness has lost all credibility, but one which also needs to be awakened to
the rootedness of the secular dream of progress in the theological foundation of faith
in providence so that it may resolutely renounce the Judeo-Christian conception of
history as well. The conclusion that we find ourselves “at the end of the modern
rope” calls as well for the formalization of what occurs in all turns to the past. When
an end has been reached and history no longer moves forward, then it is necessary
to revert backwards to the stages of the development of historical consciousness, to
its foundation in Judeo-Christian faith in order to be able to sanction this end and
make it irreversible. Only by returning back to the beginning of the modern com-
pound in the “ancient religious pattern” through a step-by-step “analytical reduc-
tion” can the full meaning of that beginning that led to the whole process be grasped
and a definite deathblow be dealt to what already has come to an end. Furthermore,
this is the condition as well for overcoming the uncertainty and “suspense” that
characterizes the contemporary world.
In his above mentioned review article of Meaning in History, Kuhn devotes a
number of insightful remarks to the reversed temporal sequence of Löwith’s histori-
cal presentation and points out that, indeed, this reversal, “far from being a mere
expository device, is vividly expressive of the writer’s thesis,” namely that modern
philosophy of history is a secularization of the history of salvation.11 But, I think
that Löwith’s decision to present the history of this development in a reverse fashion
accomplishes something more. As Kuhn rightly points out, “everything in history
cries out against a regressive report” because it puts into question the elemental and
“minimal faith—faith in the directed continuity of the forward move of events in
time.” By inverting the sequence of history, Löwith not only keeps the reader “from
chapter through chapter […] in expectation of the past to come,” but he undermines,

10
Löwith (2004), 13.
11
Kuhn (1949), 823.
The Remainders of Faith: On Karl Löwith’s Conception of Secularization 345

I would hold, the very elemental faith in question.12 This is the faith, or expectation,
that history moves forward. As we have seen, the assumption that history moves
forward allows Löwith to justify his regressive approach to history insofar as,
through this forward movement, the present’s antecedents become covered over, but
this same approach also appeared to underwrite the very concept of history that he
sought to undo. Now, however, it becomes clear that this very method also under-
mines the faith in history’s movement to begin with. If the modern conception of
historical progress is a secularization of eschatological history, if, furthermore,
every reflection on history within this process needs to be retraced to a previous
position, then not only is there no progress, but on the contrary, history stagnates.
Although future-oriented, secularization implies that nothing (new) happens. In
addition to being a category of continuity, secularization may thus also be a cate-
gory that, from within history, keeps history from moving forward. It is a category
that draws one’s attention to a past that inhibits the present from being something
new, a category, that is, of the inner inertia of a conception of time that is essentially
geared toward the future. If modernity is understood in terms of secularization, then
it is from the start an aborted project.
However, before following through with this line of thought, let me first ask what,
according to Löwith, is at stake in history and historical consciousness. The question
is all the more warranted since modern historical consciousness, which itself is the
secular offshoot of theological history, has given rise to what Löwith describes as
“the modern overemphasis on secular history as the scene of man’s destiny” (192).
Compared to the Christian conception of secular history which considers the whole
of worldly history as merely an interim or detour within the scheme of providence
which is scheduled to be ultimately overturned at the end of times, modern historical
consciousness overrates, overestimates worldly history. Löwith writes:
The modern overemphasis on secular history as the scene of man’s destiny is a product of
our alienation from the natural theology of antiquity and from the supernatural theology of
Christianity. It is foreign to wisdom and faith. Classical antiquity believed that human
nature and history imitate the nature of the cosmos; the Old Testament teaches that man is
created in the image of God; and the Christian teaching is focused on the imitation of
Christ. According to the New Testament view, the advent of Christ is not a particular,
though outstanding, fact within the continuity of secular history but the unique event that
shattered once and for all the whole frame of history by breaking into its natural course,
which is a course of sin and death. The importance of secular history decreases in direct
proportion to the intensity of man’s concern with God and himself. (192–93)

Even though modern historical consciousness has its roots in Christianity,

Christian sacred history does not valorize worldly history and, in this, its view
resembles that of antiquity. In light of the eternal laws of the cosmos, history for the
ancients, is in some way of as little importance as is worldly history from a Christian
perspective, a history that is interrupted and transcended by the one single event—
the advent of Jesus Christ. However, this is also where the similarities between the
historical views of classical cosmology and Christian theology end. Even though
Christianity makes worldly history into a mere interim in the plan of salvation, it is

12
Kuhn (1949), 822–23.
346 R. Gasché

not therefore less important. On the contrary, as Löwith remarks: “This ‘interim,’
i.e., the whole of history, is neither an empty period in which nothing happens nor a
busy period in which everything may happen, but the decisive time of probation and
final discrimination between the wheat and the tares” (184). In characterizing
worldly history as an interim, that is, in linking it to the promise of redemption and
salvation, history is rendered intelligible and made meaningful in itself. Accordingly,
Löwith reports that “man’s sin and God’s saving purpose—they alone require and
justify history as such, and historical time. Without original sin and final redemption
the historical interim would be unnecessary and unintelligible” (183–84). In the
same way, to suggest that, with the second coming of Christ, worldly history would
come to an end, is to make history highly significant in the first place. In short, in
Christianity, worldly history, always experienced as a mere interim or necessary
detour within the history of salvation and hence as limited in a way similar to classical
cosmology’s view of history which “restrained the experience of history and prevented
its growing into indefinite dimensions [dass sie masslos wurde],” has nonetheless
endowed history itself with a specific meaning (193). Although limited and restrained,
this very meaningfulness of worldly history serves as the ground for explaining
how modern historical consciousness can be construed as the secularization of the
history of salvation to begin with and how within modernity history, could assume
a disproportionate, if not measureless or even hubristic, importance.
By making worldly history meaningful even in such a limited fashion, Christianity
brought about the fateful break with classical cosmology, from which modern his-
torical consciousness is thus doubly alienated. This quest for meaning—of the
meaning of worldly history and existence—which according to Löwith, arises in
Judaism, also sets Christianity and its later secularized forms radically apart from
the classical world. Beginning with his early work on Nietzsches Philosophie der
ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen, in which Nietzsche is described as the philoso-
pher who attempted to recover the lost world of the Greek cosmos, Löwith has
consistently linked the question of the meaning of history (and the problem of the
value of existence) to the Christian interpretation of existence. Nietzsche, he con-
tends in Wissen, Glaube und Skepsis, is “the sole modern philosopher, who radically
sought to overcome the question of […] meaning and purpose,” and can in this
sense be said to be Greek.13 Compared to the visible order of the cosmos, history
does not show any order of its own. Historical or political events do not have the
power to interrupt the cyclical movement of the cosmos that itself regulates the
order of human affairs. The ancients did not ask what the meaning or purpose of
history was as such; they did not endow it with a meaning separate and independent
from that of the natural order of things. Furthermore, in comparison with the cosmo-
logical order, human history was seen to be rather insignificant. As the realm of the
contingent, history was understood as political history and thus as an object not
worth the attention of the philosopher whose eyes were turned to the necessary,
immutable, and eternal laws of the visible cosmos, but only of statesmen and histo-
rians concerned with retelling and learning from past events. Löwith writes:

13
Löwith (1956a), 80.
The Remainders of Faith: On Karl Löwith’s Conception of Secularization 347

The Greeks were deeply impressed by the everlasting order and beauty of the visible world,
but it never occurred to any Greek thinker to connect in his mind this well-ordered eternal
cosmos to the transitory pragmata of human history into a ‘world-history’ […] The classical
philosophers did not make history their subject matter and they did not inquire into the
meaning of history because, as philosophers, they dwelt on the one and all which has its
existence from nature and is for ever and so they left the continuously changing fate of
history to the political historians.14

So, what triggers the emergence of the question of the meaning and purpose of
history? At the beginning of Meaning in History Löwith notes that “the basic expe-
rience of evil and suffering” that comes with historical action is “the outstanding
element […] out of which an interpretation of history could arise at all” (3).15 He
adds: “The interpretation of history is, in the last analysis, an attempt to understand
the meaning of history as the meaning of suffering by historical action. The Christian
meaning of history, in particular, consists in the most paradoxical fact that the cross,
this sign of deepest ignominy, could conquer the world of conquerors by opposing
it. In our times crosses have been borne silently by millions of people; and if any-
thing warrants the thought that the meaning of history has to be understood in a
Christian sense, it is such boundless suffering” (3). As Löwith’s analysis of the
Prometheus myth in “Das Verhängnis des Fortschritts” demonstrates, for the Greeks
evil and suffering are indeed intrinsically tied to historical action, but only as the
inevitable dark side of all historical accomplishments.16 There is no historical great
deed that does not also have evil consequences. What, then, must have happened for
suffering and evil to become such an issue in biblical and post-Christian thinking?
Why does the evil and suffering that accompanies historical action demand an inter-
pretation of history and set off a quest for its meaning? Is it not because, with
Christianity, history is experienced as oriented toward the future, and, therefore,
expectations are necessarily bound up with history? According to Löwith, “there are
only deceptions, where there are expectations.” 17 Only because history is no longer,
as in the pagan world, only concerned with what occurred in the past for the sake of
political edification, but now is thought to move forward and toward something,
does the evil and pain associated with it become an issue and the question of its
meaning, as a question of what is in it for the human being, becomes pertinent. For
evil and suffering to become an issue at all, is it not, first, because history as such
has become a concern and becomes endowed with the sense of a promise?
Understood as holding something in wait for the human being, all of the evil and
suffering associated with history lets itself be interpreted as the price to be paid for

14
Löwith (1969), 47–48.
15
See also Löwith (2004), 13.
16
Löwith writes: “It is true that Prometheus frees the human being thanks to the gift stolen from the
gods, but he does not redeem them; on the contrary, he is chained and punished by Zeus … The
Greeks have atoned in the cult of Prometheus for the theft of the fire of the heavens by way of
the myth of the chained Prometheus, because they profoundly sensed that this theft provided the
human being with a power that needed the most powerful chains so as not to bring about the
ruin of man.” Löwith (1964).
17
Löwith, Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen, p. 14.
348 R. Gasché

an ultimate delivery from history, either in the outer-worldly Kingdom of God or in

an enlightened secular world of infinite progress. Only because history, beginning
with Judaism and Christianity, is conceived as a directed process, can there also be
the “modern illusion” of history “as a progressive evolution which solves the prob-
lem of evil by way of elimination” (3).
But the inquiry into the meaning of history from biblical times to the post-
Christian philosophy of history has another side still to be accounted for. For history
to become a topical issue, it must first be experienced as being meaningless in light
of the promise of redemption from everything worldly. But such experience is pos-
sible only in view of, and with respect to, a meaning that, since it is not manifest in
history itself, must be of the order of the hidden. Only with an idea of a meaning of
history in place, but one that is not revealed by history itself because it is nothing
historical, can history appear as the realm of the meaningless and thus set off the
quest for its hidden meaning. According to Löwith, “there would be no search for
the meaning of history if its meaning were manifest in historical events. It is the
very absence of meaning in the events themselves that motivates the quest.
Conversely, it is only within a pre-established horizon of ultimate meaning, how-
ever hidden it may be, that actual history seems to be meaningless. The horizon has
been established by history, for it is Hebrew and Christian thinking that brought this
colossal question [masslose Frage] into existence. To ask earnestly the question of
the ultimate meaning of history takes one’s breath away; it transports us into a vac-
uum which only hope and faith can fill” (4). Compared to the ancients’ much more
modest speculations, the question of the ultimate meaning of the contingent realm
of history is a “colossal question,” more precisely, an immoderate question, one that
does not know its limits. From a Greek perspective it would be a hubristic question
that transgresses the limits of the knowable. No cognitive answer to this question is
conceivable. As a consequence, this question “transports us into a vacuum which
only hope and faith can fill.”18 In other words, only hope and faith could possibly
provide a response to the question regarding the ultimate meaning of history as a
whole that arises with Judeo-Christian thought. It is a question that can only be
asked if faith in a history of salvation and hope for redemption have already turned
worldly history into the saeculum and have made history worldly to begin with.
As Löwith pointed out:
the ancients were more moderate in their speculations. They did not presume to make sense
of the world or to discover its ultimate meaning. They were impressed by the visible order
and beauty of the cosmos, and the cosmic laws of growth and decay was also a pattern for
their understanding of history. According to the Greek view of life and the world, every-
thing moves in recurrences, like the eternal recurrence of sunrise and sunset, of summer and
winter, of generation and corruption. This view was satisfactory to them because it is a
rational and natural understanding of the universe, combining a recognition of temporal
changes with periodic regularity, constancy, and immutability. The immutable, as visible in
the fixed order of the heavenly bodies, had a higher interest and value to them than any
progressive and radical change. (4)

18
Löwith (2004), 14.
The Remainders of Faith: On Karl Löwith’s Conception of Secularization 349

Unlike the Hebrews and the Christians, the ancients were not so presumptuous as
to claim a right to fathom what cannot be known because it is not manifest in the
course of history itself, that is, the ultimate meaning of history. They focused on the
order of the visible—the cyclical order of the visible manifest in the rational
organization of the movements of the heavenly bodies, the cyclical changes of the
seasons, and life and death. No other order distinguished the world of human affairs.
Limiting themselves to what they could see, the ancients rather than speculating
about what cannot be known, also held history to be circular, a cyclical recurrence
of growth and decay, rather than moving toward an eschaton. Löwith concludes: “In
this intellectual climate dominated by the rationality of the natural cosmos, there
was no room for the universal [weltgeschichtliche] significance of a unique, incom-
parable historic event [such as the advent of Christ] […] They were primarily con-
cerned with the logos of the cosmos, not with the Lord and the meaning of history”
(4).19 In any case, what should be clear at this point is that it is this quest for the
ultimate meaning of history, and, in particular, the question of faith (as opposed to
knowledge) implied therein, that distinguishes the epoch-making advent of
Christianity, which is epoch-making in that it breaks with the wisdom of the
ancients. By implication, it should also be clear that modern historical conscious-
ness, as a secularized eschatological history, must rest on a secularized conception
of faith, namely faith in history. But if this is so, does one then not have to consider
the possibility that the concept of secularization is intrinsically tied to faith and thus
that secularization is conceivable only where it is preceded by faith? In the follow-
ing I wish to argue that, for Löwith, secularization not only presupposes faith, and
in particular Christian faith, but also that one can only meaningfully speak of secu-
larization where there is a faith in the strict sense that can be rendered worldly in the
first place. Despite Löwith’s own failure to consistently clearly distinguish between
faith and belief in Meaning in History, these two concepts are entirely distinct.20

19
Since by juxtaposing the ancients’ exclusive concern with the immutable and rational order of the
cosmos to the Christian and post-Christian concern with history which is a function of an article of
faith, namely the singular advent of Jesus Christ, Löwith intends to dismiss history as an infatua-
tion, it should be kept in mind that the singularity of the interrupting advent of the first coming of
Christ, although unique in that it is also the only event worth its name known by Christianity, has
set the stage for the thinking of the event and singularity.
20
In the 1949 English original, Löwith speaks somewhat indiscriminately of “Christian faith,”
“revelation and faith,” “faith in providence,”but also of “the belief in providence,” “the belief in
salvation,” “the belief in reason and progress,” and so forth (1–2). It is therefore not unimportant to
recall that in German only one word—Glaube—covers the religious and epistemic meanings
expressed by the English terms faith and belief respectively. It is not clear whether Löwith has been
aware of the semantic difference between the two words—between an adherence to a religious
dogma based on a credo, and an adherence to a judgment of existential import which although
impeccable (because it does not contain any internal contradiction) does nevertheless not allow for
proof. In any case as the examples given seem to suggest, Löwith did not rigorously distinguish
between the two English terms. Furthermore, the German translation by Hermann Kesting, revised
by Löwith himself, blurs whatever distinction there may have been in the English original between
faith and belief, by translating both by Glaube, or Glauben. For the distinction in German between
Glaube and Glauben, see the entry by Büttgen (2004).
350 R. Gasché

Belief is based on a logically flawless judgment, even if the latter cannot be scien-
tifically proved. Faith [Glaube, foi], by contrast, is an unconditional confidence or
trust in someone or something. It is not the merely pragmatic confidence in the
reliability of this or that thing, even if it cannot be rationally supported. Faith is,
rather, a steadfast trust in something despite the absence of any evidence for it. In
the context of Löwith’s work, faith refers primarily, if not exclusively to Christian
faith. But, all differences aside, the way faith is determined here makes it not the
sole property of Christianity, but extends it to the other two religions of the Book.
Nonetheless, Löwith highlights the fact that for the Christian believer faith is not
“the unquestionable possession of a constantly available certainty of faith.” In
Wissen, Glaube und Skepsis he writes: “Faith, as it is expressed in Hiob and Paulus,
as well as in Augustine, Luther, Pascal and Kierkegaard, is an unconditional confi-
dence that it has been difficult to achieve and that can also easily be lost again.”21
However, it is not enough to say that the concept of faith which is presupposed by
all talk about secularization is primarily Christian faith. Rather, it must be noted that
faith is a function of Christianity insofar as it is a form of monotheism. As will
become clear, faith is intimately tied to a monotheistic conception of God, and it is
only in the context of monotheism that it makes sense to speak of secularization.
This is, then, also the reason why the concept of secularization can, in principle, be
extended to the other two religions of the Book, but only to them. Within the context
of non-monotheistic religions all talk of secularization is meaningless.
Anyway, in the crucial chapter in Meaning in History devoted to Voltaire, who
was the first to have coined the expression of a “philosophy of history,” Löwith
argues that the modern conception of a universal history [Weltgeschichte] “directed
toward one single end and unifying, at least potentially, the whole course of events
was not created by Voltaire,” whose conception of worldly history still lacks a cen-
tral meaning that imparts a uniform orientation to all histories. Rather, this directed
universal history first arises through “Jewish messianism and Christian eschatology,
on the basis of an exclusive monotheism” (111). In the German translation of the
1949 book, Löwith adds that “it is only the One biblical God who universally ori-
ents and centers history.”22 The faith in One God, then, is the presupposition for
being able to conceive of history as the conflict between the will of God and that of
men, a history whose impact is the salvation of God’s sinful creature. “One single
theme: “God’s call and man’s response to it” allows for a transformation of the
whole of history into an interim, that is, a time of probation, by which worldly
history becomes intelligible and justified as such, while at the same time being pro-
gramed to come to an end at the end of time (183–84). In the “Conclusion” to
Meaning in History, Löwith remarks that “the problem of history as a whole is
unanswerable within its own perspective. Historical processes as such do not bear
the least evidence of a comprehensive and ultimate meaning. History as such has no
outcome. There has never been and never will be an immanent solution of the prob-
lem of history, for man’s historical experience is one of steady failure” (191).

21
Löwith (1956a), 26.
22
Löwith (2004), 122.
The Remainders of Faith: On Karl Löwith’s Conception of Secularization 351

Needless to say, history is experienced as a steady failure only if it is measured

against expectations, anticipations, and hopes in the first place. When Löwith holds
that “Christianity, too, as a historical world religion, is a complete failure,”Christian
faith remains the standard in relation to which the immanent meaninglessness of
history is asserted. But what Löwith also suggests here is that, since no immanent
meaning can be discovered in the actual course of history, any meaning to be attrib-
uted to it must come to history from the outside. And, it his here that faith comes in,
as it offers at last an answer to such a demand for an ultimate meaning that unifies
all historical events and directs them toward one definite outcome. Within
Christianity, the answer to this demand is the second coming of Christ at the end of
times which will confirm the belief that all worldly history will only have been a
detour in the history of salvation.
If history is to be meaningful as an interim in the promised salvation, then such
meaning cannot simply have its source outside of history. Rather, this source must
be something that, from the perspective of historical experience, is impossible,
namely, in the very words of the Scriptures, a scandalon, “an offence,” i.e., an
occasion of disbelief. As Joachim Gnilka notes, in the New Testament, the scandalon
is above all one that God imposes on human beings, in that His ways of salvation
occur in a manner that does not correspond to human expectations and representa-
tions. Faith is based on, and defined by, this very offence that the incarnation and the
resurrection of Christ represent to the human mind.23 Broadly speaking, the scand-
alon on which the Christian act of rendering history intelligible as a history of
salvation rests is the advent of Christ. Löwith writes:
The Christian claim that the whole and only meaning of history before and after Christ rests
on the historical appearance of Jesus Christ is a claim so strange, stupendous, and radical
that it could not and cannot but contradict and upset the normal historical consciousness of
ancient and modern times […] The possibility of a Christian interpretation of history rests
neither on the recognition of spiritual values nor on that of Jesus as a world-historical indi-
vidual; for many such individuals have had a world-wide effect and more than one claimed
to be a savior. The Christian interpretation of history stands or falls with the acceptance of
Jesus as Christ, i.e., with the doctrine of Incarnation. (184)

If, for a classical mind such as the second century Platonic philosopher Celsus,
“the Christian claim is ridiculously pretentious,” it is “because it endows an insig-
nificant group of Jews and Christians with cosmic relevance. To a modern mind like
Voltaire it is equally ridiculous because it exempts a particular history of salvation
and revelation from the profane and general history of civilization. Both Celsus and
Voltaire realize the scandalon of a history of salvation” (184). More precisely, the
scandalon consists in believing that one supposedly historical event can, by inter-
rupting history, render history as a whole intelligible and meaningful, even if real-
izing this amounts to positing that worldly history is meaningless. The faith that

23
From the offences that God imposes on the faithful, one must distinguish “the offences
[that, according to Mattheus 18, 6] will come.” These are offences to the faithful by the
incredulous, admonitions that is to Christ’s followers to remain steadfast in the faith. Gnilka
(1973), Vol. I, 111–115.
352 R. Gasché

subtends theological history is “the faith in an actual event which has come to pass,”
that is, “the faith in an accomplished fact,” namely, the faith that the advent of Jesus
Christ is the advent of fulfilled time which only needs to be completed and that, with
the second coming of Christ, history can be done away with once and for all (188,
189). For the pagans, the beginning of history is “a decisive political event (e.g., the
foundation of Rome or a new revolutionary beginning) as the lasting foundation of
the following happenings” (182). Therefore, for the pagan, the biblical view of his-
tory in light of which all mundane history is ultimately meaningless, even though it
also originates in a beginning—the creation of the world—and unfolds in view of an
eschaton, that is, the still outstanding central event at the end of time as the coming
of the Messia, must appear as incredulous. Even more so, Christian time-reckoning,
which begins with a central and decisive event that has already occurred—the per-
fectum praesens of the advent of Jesus Christ who, by having died for humankind,
has already begun the process of salvation—and from which “the years of the his-
tory B.C. continuously decrease while the years A.D. increase toward an end-time,”
must, of needs, be judged aberrant (182). And, indeed, for the pagan mind, the
Christian hope for and expectation of the accomplished fact of Jesus Christ which is
required to make sense of history is simply not an option.
As Löwith emphasizes, faith is the unconditional credo in a central event such
as the creation of the world or, especially, the advent of Jesus Christ, through which
time is reckoned forward as well as backward. Thus, “the New Testament concept
of faith did not exist in Greek thought.”24 Nor did the ancients know the distinction
between intra-worldly knowledge and trans-worldly faith, a distinction which,
according to Löwith, is, strictly speaking, “an inner-Christian affair” in that it pre-
supposes a beforehand relation of philosophical knowledge to faith, a relation
which is simply not present in ancient thought.25 By contrast, the Greeks distin-
guished between two forms of knowledge—true knowledge [episteme] and opin-
ion [doxa]. Although doxa can be translated as belief, and in German even as
Glauben, it is done so simply in the sense of believing something to be the case.
Löwith writes: “Held against the standard of episteme as true knowledge doxa is
not faith in the New Testament sense of pistis, but belief in the sense of merely
holding something to be true.”26 Pistis, rather than meaning genuine faith, is, for
the ancient Greeks, only a “subordinate form of doxa.”27 Does it not follow from
this that the only fundamental epochal break which Löwith recognizes, the one
between the world of the ancients and the Judeo-Christian world, is predicated on

24
Löwith (1956a), 14.
25
Ibid., 11. In a passing remark in the Critique of Practical Reason, Kant observes that the Greeks
thought that the principle of the good was sufficient to establish the principle of morals, and that it
seemed to them that they did not need the postulate of the existence of God as a further condition
of its possibility. It follows from this that faith, and even “pure rational belief [Vernuftglaube]” has
no place in the world of the ancients (Kant 1996, 241). The question whether they believed in their
gods, is a wrong question. Rather they knew of their existence.
26
Löwith (1956a), 13.
27
Ibid., 14.
The Remainders of Faith: On Karl Löwith’s Conception of Secularization 353

the difference between knowledge in all of its forms on the one hand, and faith in
something which like a fact can be held to be true on the other? From his remarks
in Wissen, Glauben und Skepsis regarding the relation of philosophical knowledge
to faith and, in particular, from his elaborations on theolology and philosophical
thought in St. Augustine, for whom faith holds precedence over all cognitive
insight, it is clear that, for Löwith, philosophy must already have accepted the
priority of faith over knowledge to even be able to broach the question regarding
the relation of faith to knowledge in the first place.28
Now, as we have seen, for Löwith, modern philosophy of history with “its faith
in the absolute relevance of what is the most relative, namely history,” is the result
of “a philosophical secularization of Christian faith,” of faith in providence and the
coming of the Kingdom of God.29 According to Löwith, “true, modern historical
consciousness has discarded the Christian faith in a central event of absolute rele-
vance, yet it maintains its logical antecedents and consequences, viz., the past as
preparation and the future as consummation, thus reducing the history of salvation
to the impersonal teleology of a progressive evolution in which every present stage
is the fulfilment of past preparations. Transformed into a secular theory of progress,
the scheme of the history of salvation could seem to be natural and demonstrable”
(186). Undoubtedly, modern historical consciousness has abandoned the faith in
history that is predicated on one unique event—the “single once-for-all which hap-
pened once-upon-a-time” (186). If Christian faith rests on, and is defined by, the
assumption of such a unique event of fulfilled time in which past and future con-
verge, it would seem that the philosophy of history has indeed transcended faith
altogether. However, as Löwith argues, modern historical consciousness may well
have broken with faith as a faith in a history of salvation, but only insofar as it
replaces—or, “reduces”—biblical and Christian futurism to the impersonal teleol-
ogy of a progressive evolution. For, fundamentally, the notion of history that
modern historical consciousness opposes to that of faith does not break with faith’s
formal structure. This formal structure of the history of salvation that survives in
modern time-consciousness is not limited to “the articulation of all historical time
into past, present, and future,” but is above all the formal scheme involved in
Christianity’s valorization of one unique now—the advent of Jesus Christ—which
constitutes the core of faith, the scheme most properly taken up in what Löwith
terms “the secularization [Verweltlichung] of Christian faith.”30 For the modern
experience of qualitative historical time there is no now-point that would be neutral,
insignificant, or indifferent. In fact, by viewing each present now as the opening of
the horizon of a past and a future fulfilment, modern historical consciousness has
not only generalized the Christian kairos, it has indeed fully realized the very kernel
of faith. Secular historical consciousness, rather than being a radical break with
Christian faith, is thus not only in full continuity with the latter, it is, for Löwith,
the very realization or accomplishment of it, more precisely, the completion of the

28
Ibid., 18–21.
29
Löwith (1960), 170, 174.
30
Ibid., 169.
354 R. Gasché

essence of faith itself. It is therefore that Löwith can, with Benedetto Croce, qualify
the modern faith in history as a faith in progress and as the last and ultimate reli-
gion.31 In a historical consciousness that is a secularization of Christian faith, the
formal schema characteristic of the unique historical advent of Jesus Christ has been
extended to all present nows. The modern faith in history is therefore the last, and
ultimate, religion.
However, if what remains of Christianity in modern historical consciousness is
the very kernel of Christian faith itself, and if secularization consists above all in
universalizing faith’s formal schemes, then the implication is twofold: first, that
faith in history is, indeed, the last religion—that is, a religion understood as consti-
tuted by faith in the sense we have seen, and, second, that not only does faith here
achieve its completion, but also comes to its end. Recall the new generation which,
according to Löwith, has become disenchanted with the modern faith in progress
and to whom he dedicates his analyses of the biblical and Christian underpinnings
of the philosophy of history in a effort to consolidate the defeat of the eschatological
and teleological tradition. In order to glean what, according to Löwith, may come
after the failure of both Christianity and modernity, it is necessary to return one
more time to the epoch-making break between antiquity and Christianity, that is, to
the break between knowledge and faith. Löwith writes: “Faith in history is the result
of our alienation from the natural cosmo-theology of the ancient world and from the
supra-natural theology of Christianity both of which provide a frame for history as
well as a non-historical horizon of experience and understanding.” If it is true,
indeed, that faith in history could arise only as a result of the dissolution of these
two pre-modern conceptions and also, then, with historical existence’s loss of “a
determinate place in the whole of nature [des von Natur aus Seienden],” that is, in
therefore having “become completely independent and confined within its own tem-
porality,” then it is true as well that the “abstraction” from “the whole natural world,
from the physical cosmos” which is presupposed by the modern assumption that
“history is the dimension of human existence,” characterizes already the break of
Christianity with the pagan world.32 No doubt, if “the experience of history was still
bound, ordered, and limited cosmologically by Greek thought through the order and
the logos of the physical cosmos, and theologically by Christian faith through the
order of creation and God’s will,” then the biblical history of creation and the theo-
logical limitation of worldly history could only give rise to what Löwith qualifies as
“the illusion of modern historical consciousness” because it had already dismissed
the natural world to begin with.33 Only an “essential incongruity [prinzipielles
Missverhältnis] of the individual to the world in general” can explain “the singular
incongruity to the historical world” characteristic of modernity, an incongruity that
originates already in Christianity’s transformation of the human historical world
into an interim in God’s salvation plan. A “no man’s land,” as it were, the “wholly
other, natural, and physical world, which precedes all world- and human history,”

31
Ibid., 160.
32
Ibid., 160.
33
Ibid., 159, 155.
The Remainders of Faith: On Karl Löwith’s Conception of Secularization 355

that is, all religious, public, and political being-together, is the world that had to
become denaturalized for a history of salvation, and, subsequently, a secularized
conception of history, to become possible.34 Löwith remarks that the biblical faith in
creation implies “that the whole visible world, the totality of what is, the human
being included, is not by nature [von Natur aus] there. The critical function of the
doctrine of creation consists in denaturalizing physis and the cosmos, and to render
absurd the discovery of nature in its naturalness […] A physis arising from itself as
well as a cosmos that originates in itself, or has been formed from chaos—this first
and final theme of all natural philosophy—becomes annulled right away by the
belief in a creation.”35
Löwith’s concern with the living physical cosmos goes at least as far back as his
1935 study on Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen, where
this issue is addressed for the first time.36 It has been pointed out that the physical
cosmos, as it has been sketched out by Löwith, “remains, in spite of frequent
invocations of originary experience and sensible immediacy,” strangely empty.37
Yet, were one to take into account that Löwith’s natural world is a form of life-world,
albeit distinct from Husserl’s total horizon of the world and of Heidegger’s
world-project, it would be possible to construe this notion in a much more substan-
tial manner, even though Löwith himself acknowledges that, while the natural world
is the greatest and the richest, it is at the same time “as empty as a frame without a
picture.”38 As he submits, “the word cosmos corresponds to the peculiar Greek
experience of the world, but who could just like that claim that we do not live any-
more in a cosmos.”39 If cosmos means the “wonderfully organized and surprisingly
reasonable natural world,”—Löwith points to the discoveries of modern biology to
support his claim—or “the omnipresent physical world within which world-history
is something minute,” in short, “a cosmos that exists by nature [von Natur aus] and
is organized in a lively fashion,” then it is difficult to hold that we no longer live in
the cosmos.40 To characterize the visible world in which we live, and which, as such,
encloses all of human history, as a cosmos does not exclude the expansion of the
immediately visible order of this form of life-world by means of, say, prosthetic
devices. But to qualify the omnipresent natural world as cosmos is also to evoke
the law of its temporality as distinct from the eschatological time-conception of
the bible and Christian theology, as well as from the open-ended future-oriented
conception of progress of secular modernity. To determine the all-present physical
world as cosmos is to suggest that the law of the world is, as the ancients held it, a
cyclical law, or, in Nietzschean terms, the law of eternal recurrence of the same.

34
Löwith (1956a), 60.
35
Ibid., 68.
36
See also Hosoya (1967), 163.
37
Hosoya (1967), 168.
38
See in particular, Löwith (1960), 228, 239.
39
Löwith (1956a), 76.
40
Ibid.; Löwith (1956b), 109; Löwith (1960), 240.
356 R. Gasché

To conclude, I would like to return to the question left in abeyance that of whether
or not Löwith in fact embraces the kind of futuristic history, whether eschatological
or progressive, which he combats in his work. It has been argued that, although
Meaning in History calls “for a renewal of the model of cyclical time characteristic
of ancient Greek thought patterned on natural phenomena,” this idea has been
advanced “more as a portent than as a definite philosophical program,” and that it,
therefore, also “remained quite vague.”41 Furthermore, Löwith’s critique of
Nietzsche’s “questionable,” because ambiguous and contradictory, doctrine of the
eternal return in his 1935 study on Nietzsche could be mentioned as further proof that
the idea of a return to a cyclical time conception is not of any real concern to Löwith.
And, does he not even declare in Meaning in History that “a return to such views as
had satisfied the ancients,” that is, “to the goalless, cyclical conception of the Greeks
regarding the course of history,” is no longer possible (111)?42 But, that statement is
made in the context of a discussion of the weight of the Christian belief in a universal
history directed toward one single end and unifying, at least potentially, the whole
course of events, a belief that weighs in on all the Enlightenment attempts to break
away from it. However, as we have seen, times have changed! Not only has the new
generation for whom Löwith is writing become disenchanted with the idea of progress,
but, by seeking to reveal the theological underpinnings of this secular conception
of history, Löwith aims at the same time at dismantling the formal structures charac-
teristic of the eschatological futurism of Judaism and Christianity. For Löwith, it is
no longer a question of replacing [ersetzen] the major theological tenets regarding
the Jewish and Christian view of history by a secular one because the religious views
on history are no longer “the established horizon” (111). Let me also note that
Löwith’s intransigent critique of Nietzsche’s conception of the eternal return of the
same in his early study takes place after all in the name of the originary Greek con-
ception of cyclical time. Nietzsche’s interpretation of the eternal return of the same
is termed “un-Greek,” and is said to amount to a fateful modernization—because
indebted to the Jewish-Christian tradition—of the idea of the eternal recurrence of
the same.43 Furthermore, the opposition between cyclical history and eschatological
and teleological history, including modern history as an open-ended progress, is cru-
cial to Meaning in History. Take, for example, the following statement: “It is not by
chance that the religion of progress did not emerge and develop in antiquity, with its
veneration for the past and the ever present. It is Jewish-Christian futurism which
opened the future as the dynamic horizon of all modern striving and thinking. Within
a cyclic Weltanschauung and order of the universe, where every movement of
advance is, at the same time, a movement of return, there is no place for progress […]
The whole significance of progress depends on ‘looking forward,’” that is, on the
assumption that the future brings something new (111). It is in light of this cyclical
time conception of the ancients that Löwith consistently evaluates both the Jewish
and Christian infatuation with an end of time, as well as that of the moderns with

41
Barash (1998), 75.
42
Löwith (2004), 122.
43
Löwith (1956b), 125–26.
The Remainders of Faith: On Karl Löwith’s Conception of Secularization 357

unrelenting progress. As Löwith’s qualification of this faith in progress as immodest

and inordinate demonstrates unambiguously, it is the Greek conception of time that
guides his analyses from the start. But the cyclical conception of time is operative in
Meaning in History in still another way. Indeed, as should have become obvious,
Löwith’s diagnosis that currently the secular conception of history is coming to an
end, though not in order to make place for a revival of its Jewish-Christian underpin-
nings, but, rather, to end both the Jewish and Christian’s ways of understanding
history (given that the secular understanding of history represents, in fact, the full
realization of the essence of both conceptions of history), is not an indication of a
subscription to a linear end-time-oriented history. Instead, it is already a cyclical
conception of time that animates Löwith’s inverted account of the development of
the genesis of modern historical consciousness. Rather than indicative of a linear and
continuous conception of history, the category of secularization in Löwith is subser-
vient to a cyclical time conception. Furthermore, such a conception of cyclical time
is, it seems, even necessary to be able to account for the continuous history from
biblical and Christian conceptions of history to those of modernity. One more time,
Löwith’s profound dedication to Greek thought is demonstrated when, echoing
Aristotle’s suggestion in Physics IV that a punctual now as both a beginning and an
end is required for time to be a continuous succession, while, at the same time, also
transforming such synthesis of time to imply the circularity of time, he writes: “To be
theoretically consequent […], the trust in continuity would have to come back to the
classical theory of circular movement; for only on the basis of a circular, endless
movement, without beginning and end, is continuity really demonstrable. But how
can one imagine history as a continuous process within a linear progression, without
presupposing a discontinuing terminus a quo and ad quem, i.e., a beginning and an
end?” (207).44 By recounting the continuous history of the historicized consciousness
from its origin in Jewish-Christian eschatological conceptions to its secularization in
modernity in an inverse way, Löwith has forcefully made a case for history’s steady
failure. He has demonstrated, in a gesture that is Stoic indeed, that “the world is still
as it was in the time of Alaric,” that “only our means of oppression and destruction
(as well as of reconstruction) are considerably improved and are adorned with
hypocrisy” (191).

References

Aristotle. 1985. In The complete works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Barash, Jeffrey Andrew. 1998. The sense of history: On the political implications of Karl Löwith’s
concept of secularization. History and Theory 37(1): 69–82.
Blumenberg, Hans. 1964. ‘Säkularisation’. Kritik einer Kategorie historischer Illegitimität. In Die
Philosophie und die Frage nach dem Fortschritt, ed. H. Kuhn and F. Wiedmann. 240–265.
Munich: Anton Pustet.

44
Aristotle, Physics, Book IV (218a-222a), in (1985), Vol. 1, 370–376.
358 R. Gasché

Blumenberg, Hans. 1983. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Trans. R. M. Wallace. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Büttgen, Philippe. 2004. Glaube. In Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, ed. B. Cassin, 507–
508. Paris: Seuil.
Gnilka, Joachim. 1973. Aergernis. In Handbuch theologischer Grundbegriffe. Munich: Deutscher
Taschenbuch Verlag.
Henrich, Dieter. 1967. Sceptico sereno. In Natur und Geschichte. Karl Löwith zum 70. Geburtstag,
ed. H. Braun and M. Riedel. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer.
Hosoya, Sadao.1967. Zwischen Natur und Geschichte. Eine unzulängliche Bemerkung zu K.
Löwith. In Natur und Geschichte. Karl Löwith zum 70. Geburtstag, ed. Braun, H. and
M. Riedel. Suttgart: Kohlhammer.
Kant, Immanuel. 1996. In Practical philosophy, ed. M.J. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Kuhn, Helmut. 1949. Book review of Meaning in history. The theological implications of the
philosophy of history. The Journal of Philosophy 46(25) (Dec 8): 825.
Löwith, Karl. 1949. Meaning in history. The theological implications of the philosophy of history.
Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Löwith, Karl. 1956a. Wissen, Glaube und Skepsis. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Löwith, Karl. 1956b. Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen. Frankfurt am
Main: Kohlhammer.
Löwith, Karl. 1960. Gesammelte Abhandlungen. Zur Kritik der geschichtlichen Existenz. Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer.
Löwith, Karl. 1964. Das Verhängnis des Fortschritts. In Die Philosophie und die Frage nach dem
Fortschritt, ed. H. Kuhn and F. Wiedmann, 27–28. Munich: Anton Pustet.
Löwith, Karl. 1969. Permanence and change. Lectures on the philosophy of history. Capetown:
Haum.
Löwith, Karl. 2004. Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen. Die theologischen Voraussetzungen der
Geschichtsphilosophie. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler.
The Hermeneutics of God, the Universe,
and Everything

Simon Glynn

Abstract Hermeneutic interpretation entered modern thought as a means of

clarifying and resolving apparent incoherencies and contradictions within the
scriptures, its potential for determining the meanings of legal, classical, and other
texts being soon recognized, and even extended to the discernment of the meanings
of plays, paintings, and other artistic and cultural artifacts and performances.
And while some argued such meanings were to be ascertained by interpreting them
within the contexts in which they appeared, others maintaining that artists’ or
authors’ intentions were ultimately authoritative, were forced to concede that these
too could only be interpretively derived, often in similar manner. Moreover conflicting
interpretations suggest that the concepts which shape our “perceptions” of such
matters are relative, while Gestalt psychologists and Ames and his school empirically
demonstrated that even our most basic empirical perceptions are interpretations
shaped by our pre-conceptions; an insight which clearly undermines the objectivistic
pretensions of the natural sciences. The paper concludes, along with Heidegger, that
hermeneutic interpretation is central to all epistemological understanding, as indeed
it is to our very existence or being as humans.

1 Epistemological Hermeneutics: A Brief Outline

Hermeneutics, like Hermes, the winged messenger of the gods for whom it is
arguably named,1 is concerned with the interpretive derivation of meaning and
correct understanding. Heidegger traces hermeneutic practice back, via Plato, to

1
The term has its roots in the Greek term hermeneuein meaning to interpret.
S. Glynn (*)
Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton, FL 33431, USA
e-mail: glynn@fau.edu

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 359

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5_20,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
360 S. Glynn

Parmenides and Heraclitus,2 but it is with the Reformation that the widespread
practice of hermeneutics is more generally associated. And while certain Protestants
claimed that the intended, and therefore supposedly absolutely authoritative, mean-
ings of the scriptures, which they took to be the “inerrant word of God,” had been
divinely revealed to them, those souls who felt themselves to be less well connected
generally proceed in the opposite direction, attempting to approach an understand
of what God meant through an understanding of the scriptures. And against the
Fundamentalist claim that a supposedly literal meaning was immediately evident,
and thus needed no interpretation, many, made wary of such claims by the apparent
incoherences, not to say contradictions, exhibited by and between certain scriptures,
argued that it was only by interpreting particular scriptures, and the individual
passages constitutive of them, in relation to the whole, that they could be properly
understood. Catholics on the other hand, generally anxious to maintain the authority
of the church, not to mention the power accruing to its role as an indispensable
intermediary between the laity and the Deity, argued against interpreting the
scriptures solely in terms of other scriptures, insisting that a proper understanding
of them could only be derived from the extrinsic context or perspective offered by
ecclesiastical tradition.
Now it was clearly only a short step from employing hermeneutic interpretation for
the purposes of understanding scriptural texts, to its deployment for the purposes of
understanding texts, such as works of classical antiquity, more generally, with disputes
similar to those just outlined between the would-be fundamentalists and hermeneuti-
cists regarding scriptural exegesis besetting attempts to understand legal texts, and to
implement the law. And while it fell to Schleiermacher to articulate general hermeneu-
tic principles which hopefully could be applied to all attempts to understand the full
range of these various, scriptural, legal or classical texts, it was predictably suggested
that such general principles of interpretation might also be extended to attempts to
understand the meaning or significance of literary works more generally, as well as
cultural artifacts and performances, such as paintings, plays and the like.
Thus the Romantics, who—in eliding the distinction between divine creation ex
nihilo, and human creativity, which in contrast simply consists in the structuring or
restructuring of form, whether material or immaterial—regarded the artist or author
as god like, consequently insisted that so far from the meaning of a work being
derivable entirely intrinsically, which is to say wholly upon the basis of relations
between elements entirely internal to it, the artist’s or author’s intentions were
definitive. However unlike those divines who claimed direct revelation as the source
of their insight into The Creator’s intentions, cultural critics could not always, or
arguably ever, claim direct access to authorial and artistic intentions, which could
perhaps best be understood in terms of the context from which they arose, and from
which, accordingly, they were to be hermeneutically or interpretively derived.
Enter Dilthey who, opposing those (Positivists and neo-Positivists etc.) who suggested
that the human and social sciences adopt the supposedly objective epistemologies,

2
See for instance Heidegger (1971, 1975, 1976a, Sect. 44, 256–273).
The Hermeneutics of God, the Universe, and Everything 361

quantitative methodologies and causal explanations that had seemingly served

the natural science so well, argued that such an approach, developed for the study
of physical objects and their properties, relations and interactions, was singularly
inappropriate for the study of those of human subjects, which should be understood
hermeneutically. Thus insisting that while “Nature we explain; man (on the other
hand) we understand,”3 Dilthey held that, so far from being causally explicable,
as were the behavior and interactions of material objects, human behavior etc. was
the result of free choices which could be understood in terms of the interpretively
derived meaning or significance of the situations from which they arose. And if
human behavior and relations could be understood hermeneutically, so too,
Dilthey suggested, could socio-cultural systems and institutions. As he therefore
further insisted:
A rigorous hermeneutic of social organizations is needed in addition to single textual
works…. Hermeneutics is possible here because between a people and a state, between
believers and a church, between scientific life and a university there stands a relation in
which a general outlook and unitary form of life find a structural coherence in which they
express themselves. There is here the relation of parts to the whole, in which the parts
receive meaning from the whole, and the whole receives sense from the parts; these categories
of interpretation have their correlate in the structural coherence of the organization, by
which it realizes its goal teleologically.4

Thus just as when we look up a word in a dictionary its meaning is determined

by its relation to others, which are determined in turn by their relations to still others,
and eventually by their relation to the original individual (this being the famous
hermeneutic circle, or at least its epistemological aspect),5 and just as Saussure has
shown that the meaning of an individual linguistic utterance (parole) is similarly
dependent upon its relation to the whole of the language in which it is uttered
(le langue)6 which such utterances collectively constitute, Dilthey here suggests
that the meaning or significance of particular human and/or socio-cultural, relations
and institutions, may similarly be understood on the basis of their relations to the
socio-cultural whole which they collectively constitute. Like linguistic, artistic and
other forms of human expression then, human actions, cultural systems and social
organizations also have meaning or significance which hermeneutics can help
us understand.7

3
Dilthey (1957), 144 as quoted by Schrag (1980), 101. My addition in parentheses.
4
Dilthey, quoted in Polkinghorne (1983), 221, quoting Earmarth (1978), 303.
5
As we shall see later, Heidegger argues that epistemological hermeneutics, concerned with mean-
ings of the sort with which we are here concerned, is merely an aspect of an ontological hermeneutics
which is concerned to understand the significance of being, of what it means to be, which is in its
turn to be differentiated from a hermeneutic ontology, for which, irrespective of the (epistemological)
recognition thereof, the pursuit of meaning or significance is itself a mode of being.
6
de Saussure (1959), 114.
7
For a more detailed discussion and references concerning the aforementioned development of
Hermeneutics see Polkinghorne (1983), 215ff.
362 S. Glynn

However while Kant argued that human understanding, and indeed experiences
also, were mediated by universal categorial structures, conflicting interpretations of
the scriptures, as well as of legal and literary texts and works of art suggest that it is
historical, and indeed socio-culturally etc. relative conceptions and/or preconcep-
tions, rather than universal or transcendental categories, that have the last word in
this regard.8
Furthermore any understanding an inquiring scientist may have, of the meaning
or significance the actor attaches to his/her own behavior, is of course a (second
order) understanding of an understanding, or Double Hermeneutic as it has been
called, as so too is the scientist’s understanding of the actor’s understanding of
his/her intentions or motives, and experiences etc. While focusing for a moment
upon experience, it would seem to follow from the neo-Kantian insight above that,
as the cognitive experiments of the Gestalt psychologists and of Ames and his
school empirically demonstrate, the sensible is inextricably intertwined with the
intelligible, and that consequently even our most basic empirical perceptions or
observations are relative to our conceptions and/or preconceptions. In which case
insofar as the natural sciences claim to be grounded upon just such empirical
perceptions and observations, they too would seem to be substantially hermeneutic
as Heidegger suggests.9
Having thus briefly delineated the range of, and some of the debates surrounding,
hermeneutic epistemology, let us now examine some of the more important issues
and possibilities arising therefrom.

2 Scripture

Returning firstly then to the question of scriptural exegesis, fundamentalists claim

that the intentions of the authors are revealed in the very texts they are subsequently
taken to illuminate. However, reflecting upon their understanding of “Thou Shalt
Not Kill” for example, which many currently take as prohibiting abortion, but as
entirely consistent with the death penalty and a couple of wars, it is evident that all
that is in fact reveled are the presuppositions or assumptions, not to say prejudices,
of the interpreter. As Heidegger confirms: “If one is engaged in—textual
Interpretation, one likes to appeal [Bruft] to what “stands there,” than one finds
that what “stands there” in the first instance is nothing other than the obvious
undiscussed assumptions [Vormeinung] (i.e. theories or pre-conceptions) of the
person who does the interpreting.”10

8
See Bauman (1978), 9.
9
On this issue, see for example, Heidegger (1976b) and Martin Heidegger (1962, Sect. 32,
188–195).
10
Martin Heidegger (1962), 192. My addition in provided parentheses.
The Hermeneutics of God, the Universe, and Everything 363

Clearly then, rooted in his or her socio-historical-cultural etc. context (let us call
it “B”) the interpreter can neither truly step into that of the authors of antiquity in an
attempt to interpret them on their own ground (let us call it “A”) nor can s/he step
outside his/her context and establish a transcendent perspective from which to
evaluate the degree of correspondence between the initial, authorial, intention in
context “A,” and his/her (the interpreter’s) subsequent interpretation in context “B.”
Rather s/he can only attempt to understand the intentions of the author in socio-
historical-cultural context “A” as they appeared through the text as perceived in
socio-historical-cultural context “B.” Moreover, insofar as the authors of the
scriptures are dead, the only clues as to the supposed correspondence of the
interpreter’s interpretation to the author’s original intention are the intrinsic
coherence of the interpretation, and its extrinsic coherence with other related texts, or
the whole of the available scriptures (always assuming their coherence of course),11
perhaps along with the interpretation’s coherence with what is more generally
thought to be understood of the socio-cultural etc. context of the text’s initial
production. Not forgetting of course that whether the interpreter attempts to understand
related texts and contexts directly, or understands them as interpreted, and thus
mediated to him/her by others in the scholarly community, the interpreter’s under-
standing of all of this is, in the final analysis, mediated by his/her own conceptions
and preconceptions, often drawn in larger part from his/her socio-historico-cultural
circumstances, which such understanding therefore reflects.
Thus, Gadamer informs us that:
Every age has to understand a transmitted text in its own way, for the text is part of the
whole of the tradition in which the age takes an objective interest and in which it seeks to
understand itself. The real meaning of a text as it speaks to the interpreter does not depend
upon the contingencies of the author and whom he originally wrote for… it is always partly
determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter and hence by the totality of the
objective course of history.12

Hence “…understanding …in the human sciences is essentially historical…in

that a text is understood only if it is understood in a different way every time.”13
However what is perhaps not widely recognized is that while some, in what we
may loosely refer to as the Hellenistic or Greek tradition (dominated by the notion of
Logos as absolute foundation or basis for a teleological pursuit of a definitive or literal
truth) regard the concomitant demise of a rigid absolutism as lamentable, others, in
what we may loosely refer to as the Hebraic or Jewish tradition (which while insisting
that Talmudic interpretation be constrained by its need to be intrinsically and contex-
tually coherent, nevertheless embrace its interpretation and reinterpretation) regard

11
An enormous assumption that many would argue is clearly unwarranted. Thus while, to give but
one of many examples, the Old Testament insists “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” the
New Testament of course councils that we “Turn the other cheek” while the attempt to overcome
this apparent contradiction by limiting each to its own Testament provides no solution to a religion
whose “holy book” The Bible, consists of both!
12
Gadamer (1975), 263.
13
Gadamer (1975), 275–276.
364 S. Glynn

the fact that such contextually delineated relativism facilitates an understanding that
changes with the historically changing circumstances as laudable, facilitating as it
does the propriety of the text relative to the ever changing situation, in or to which
it is often to be applied.14 Yet no matter which of these attitudes individuals may
adopt, the fact remains that, absent a transcendental (or quasi-divine) perspective or
insight, we cannot know what the author’s intentions were.

3 Law

And as with the scriptures, so too, of course, with regard to the law. Thus taking the
US Constitution as an example, the authors are long since deceased, and so here
again, even the aspiration, much less the claim, to have divined the “original intent”
of the authors of this document, is problematic for the same reasons as was the
claim to have divined the original intent of the authors of the scriptures.
Nor does the fact that the authors of the Constitution left other documents behind,
and that, in comparison to the authors of the scriptures, we have a much more
extensive and recent record of the doings of the Constitutional authors, make any
essential difference. For the reading of the Constitution within the context of other
documents and historical circumstances is essentially not terribly different from
reading parts of the scriptures within the context of the whole. What we are doing in
all such cases is looking for provisionally coherent interpretations, and seeking to
hone them in such a manner as to avoid conflict with the progressively revealed
context, while eliminating those interpretations that recalcitrantly remain incoherent.
Thus so far from changing the essential features of the hermeneutic process, other
texts and an historical record simply act as filters which, in restricting interpretive
latitude or indeterminacy, merely increase its degree of rigor; the coherence of an
interpretation, no matter how constrained, while arguably necessary, nevertheless
always remaining insufficient, to definitively establish its correspondence to the
animating intention underlying the text, which could only be ascertained by an
illusive transcendental reflection.
Moreover as with scriptural interpretation, while those would-be absolutists
who, unlike “strict constructionists,” do not simply deny the intranscendable relativ-
ism of legal interpretation, regard it as a lamentable fact, non-absolutists, usually of
a less authoritarian or more liberal disposition, regard the fact that the meaning of
the (therefore “living”) Constitution or legal code is dependent upon its being
interpreted from the perspective of the historical situation to which it is to be applied
as insuring its continuing propriety.

14
On this distinction see, for instance, Mathew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, as quoted by Derrida
(1978), 79.
The Hermeneutics of God, the Universe, and Everything 365

4 The Arts

And just as scriptures and legal texts are subject to hermeneutic interpretation, so
too of course are works of the literary imagination, not to mention painting, sculp-
ture and the performing arts etc. And although limited space precludes a detailed
examination of each, a paradigmatic example of an artistic work, viz. the much
analyzed Mona Lisa, will prove most instructive and helpful in enabling us to
identify hermeneutic principles which may often be applied, mutatis mutandis,
to the arts in general, and not infrequently beyond.
Now many have interpreted the Mona Lisa’s supposedly “enigmatic” smile as
indicative of Leonardo’s, possibly unconscious, intention to evoke the lost love of
his mother; an intention which—as with those scriptural and legal hermeneuticists
who claim to have derived this “animating spirit” of the scripture or law from the
very text or letter whose interpretation it is to inform—some simply claim to have
derived from the very picture whose meaning they take this intention to inform.
Moreover even where access to Leonardo’s family history etc. may provide evi-
dence of his early separation from his mother, only if this was interpreted or seen as
being significant enough to the older Leonardo as to inform his intention, conscious
or otherwise, would it provide significant support for the initial interpretation.
Furthermore, the very seeing of the smile as enigmatic, not of course to mention the
seeing an oil paint on a two dimensional canvas as being a picture at all, much less
a picture of a three dimensional young woman, and one who is smiling at that,
may all be understood as grounded upon interpretive acts.
Additionally, even if we assume for the moment that Leonardo indeed intended,
consciously or otherwise, to evoke his mother’s lost love, which intention we
assume to have been unambiguous, this might still fail to illuminate the full range of
meanings or significance that the work had even for or to Leonardo himself, who
may have had multiple intentions. Moreover, just as the context of his family history
may inform an, or perhaps even the, understanding of Leonardo’s intentions, there
seems to be no a priori reason why other contexts, such as that within which the
work was received, should not equally, or perhaps we should say more fully,
inform the work’s meaning or significance; and this regardless of whether or not
Leonardo could even have been aware of such contexts, much less intended such
meanings or significance.
That is to say that while, as Gadamer claims “…the discovery of the true mean-
ing of a text or a work of art is never finished; it is in fact an infinite process”15 this
is not merely because there may be many intentions underlying the work, which
could be understood from within the constantly changing context or contexts of the
interpreter or interpreters, but also because, moving beyond a concern with inten-
tions, there seems to be absolutely no good reason why, entirely independent of
authorial intentions (and as with the meanings of scriptural and legal texts) the
constantly changing historical, (not to mention social, economic or political etc.)

15
Gadamer (1975), 265.
366 S. Glynn

context(s) which the work exists in and may therefore contribute to, and within
which it is received, should not also inform its meaning or significance.
For instance, the status of the Mona Lisa as the emblematic icon of the
Renaissance can be seen as central to the work’s significance, irrespective of the fact
that even had Leonardo been aware of participating in a renaissance of some sort,
he is extremely unlikely to have anticipated, much less intended the works iconic
status. And even if he did both, given that the Renaissance had, at the time of
Leonardo’s execution of the painting, yet to run its full course, and he did not know
how long this would take, he still could not have entirely understood the signifi-
cance of such emblematic status anyhow; the more so in light of the fact that the
way in which the Renaissance itself is understood varies between cultures and
epochs etc. Nor indeed could he have known that several centuries later Marcel
Duchamps would draw a moustache and goatee on a reproduction and retitle it
L.H.O.O.Q., which is a pun in that when these letters are pronounced in French they
sound like “Elle a chaud au cul,” or, in translation, “She has a hot ass.” Nor could he
have anticipated that in consequence Duchamp would later be able to refer to a
subsequent reproduction of the standard Mona Lisa, sans moustache and goatee, in
somewhat risqué fashion, as “L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved.” Neither could Leonardo have
envisioned the iconic significance of his work as embodied in Andy Warhol’s silk
screened re-colored acrylic multiple of the same image, which he re-titled “Mona,”
thereby ambiguously both invoking the title of a blues song, and providing a
homonym for a term signifying someone given to vocalizing sexual pleasure, to
which the song title may or may not have been intended to apply.
Regardless of authorial intentions then, the full meaning or significance of a text
or artifact, and indeed, as we shall see, human and social experiences and actions
also, is dependent, at least in part, upon the context of origin, its/their accumulating
history, and the changing contexts of reception. Clearly then, as Gadamer has duly
noted “….not occasionally only but always, the text goes beyond its author. That is
why understanding is not merely a reproductive but a productive attitude as well.”16
Bauman, affirming this last point, insists that “All meaning results from interpre-
tation; it is something to be constructed, not discovered.”17 In which case it should
not surprise us to learn that it is not only history, family or otherwise, that is capable
of providing the context in terms of which works and actions are to be interpreted.
Leonardo’s historical separation from his mother may, for instance, be ontoge-
netically generalized, and the Mona Lisa interpreted, in psychoanalytic terms, as
the product of an Oedipus Complex, while even more generally, a Freudian may
interpret all artistic production as having its origin in the sublimation of repressed
libido, whereas a Marxist might understand the Italian Renaissance in general, and
portraiture of this type in particular, from an economic perspective, in the context of
maritime trade which resulted in the rise of bourgeois patrons who commissioned
non-religious works.

16
Gadamer (1975), 264. See also 263.
17
Bauman (1978), 181.
The Hermeneutics of God, the Universe, and Everything 367

5 History

Moreover not only does the interpretation of the arts, or indeed the scriptures, or the
law, not necessarily have to be in historical terms (Marx famously interpreted
the law as “the mystification of class conflict” for example) but neither does the
interpretation of history itself.
For instance, Marx’s understanding of history in terms of the movement from
“Eden” (characterized by no private ownership) through Slavery (where Labor was
privately owned) Feudalism (where Land was privately owned) Capitalism (where
Capital was privately owned) to Socialism (where there was public ownership of
the means of production) and finally to Communism (where, to come full circle,
there was again to be no ownership) is of course the concomitant of an economic-
interpretation. Indeed for a “vulgar,” or reductive, Marxist, all history may be
understood and explained in economic terms. Thus the rise of Fascism may be
understood as the result of large war reparations extracted from Germany at the end
of WWI, which while plausibly interpretable as being intended to insure peace by
blocking the reconstruction of a powerful, militaristic, German State, escaped the
“authors” (of these reparations) intentions in that, by handicapping economic
recovery these reparations served to delegitimize the ruling Junker elite. This in
turn made them ever more reliant upon the lower middle class dominated National
Socialists and their policing to maintain power and order, thereby facilitated the
rise of the Nazis, and German militarism. While, moving from an economic to a
psychological interpretation, the rise of the Nazis and Hitler’s power may be under-
stood as deriving from a population which felt that its insecurity and self-doubt—
resulting from their defeat in WWI and exacerbated by the economic collapse of
the late 1920s and after—could be assuaged by embracing an authoritarian father
figure or Fuhrer who, in return for unquestioning acceptance of his authority,
would insure order, security and empowerment to his “family,” which is to say to
Arian members of the “Fatherland.” From a vulgar Freudian perspective, all wars
may be interpreted in terms of Thanatos, or the death instinct, or perhaps, in terms
of Eros; the old men sending the younger men off to war so that they would have
unobstructed access to those young women left behind, and, if victorious, access to
those of the defeated nation also.

6 Human and Social Sciences

Now it will be noted that such interpretations of history, in this case from economic
and psychological perspectives, also subsumed social and political elements or
dimensions within their prevue, and just as shifts in political power (the rise of
Nazism) may be interpreted, and thus understood, in economic terms (large war
reparations) or indeed in psychological terms (insecurity) psychological insecurity
for example may in its turn be interpreted, and thus understood, in economic
368 S. Glynn

(debt burden and the concomitant lack of economic empowerment) or even political
(the loss of a war) terms etc.
Furthermore not only may psychological states be thus understandable in the
sense of their origination being explainable, in economic and/or political terms,
but psychological terms may be understood in the sense of their significance of
meanings being explicateable, and concomitantly their deployment being explainable,
in similar terms.
Take the term “Psychosis,” for instance. Observing a friend talking to her/him
self, who I initially take to be “thinking out loud” as we might normally say, I notice,
upon drawing closed, that what s/he is in fact saying, together with the patterns of
speech and pauses, are more consistent with the act of conversing with an interlocutor,
which, despite the fact that I can see none present, s/he claims to be doing.
Worried about my friend’s psychological state I call another friend, who upon
arrival confirms my observation as to the absence of our friend’s supposed inter-
locutor. A psychiatrist is called, and upon being told by our friend that the interlocu-
tor, who s/he claims is standing in plain sight, is male, about 5 ft 10 in. tall, and has
long, light brown hair, comes to the conclusion that our friend has lost contact with
reality, and as such is psychotic!
Asked further about the supposed interlocutor, our friend volunteers that usually
s/he converses with him about once a week, when s/he comes to visit him—in what
happens to be a church—and that his name is Jesus! Moreover I, my other friend
and the psychiatrist observe that we are in the midst of an evangelical congregation,
all of whom claim to be literally in the presence of Christ. And while we will
perhaps interpret, and thus understand, their experiences, and even the congregants
themselves, as psychotic, they may interpret our failure to see Christ as indicative of
our being heretical. Clearly then, as Schütz has put it: “When I become aware of the
segment of your lived experience, I arrange what I see within my own meaning
context. But meanwhile you have arranged it in yours. Thus I am always interpreting
your lived experience from my own standpoint.”18
Yet there is another, or further, hermeneutic dimension to this situation. For,
perhaps, by virtue of the fact that the congregants are in their own Church, to which,
unlike some “cults,” they might readily grant public access, and therefore are
perceived neither as a threat to society, nor even as disruptive, and perhaps because
such behavior is not uncommon within the broader society, and perhaps even, in
part, because they may be economically affluent and politically well connected, we
might refrain from calling or even thinking them psychotic, as we might if none of
this were so! The significance of the collective or social, not to say economic and
political, context within which the meanings and deployment of psychological
terms or concepts are negotiated could not be more evident.
And as with the understanding and deployment of psychological terms or
concepts, so too of course with that of political, economic, cultural, and indeed all,
terms or concepts, as can readily be demonstrated by a couple of examples drawn
from US politics. For instance, having refused to allow the Vietnamese elections

18
Schütz (1972), 106.
The Hermeneutics of God, the Universe, and Everything 369

(scheduled for 1956) to go ahead because Eisenhower had been advised that the
“Communists” or Vietnamese Nationalists, under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh
would win, the US government actually claimed that in the war it subsequently
waged against Ho’s Viet Minh it was fighting for democracy which, despite that
term normally referring to particular system or form of political governance, was
redefined in contradistinction to communism, which is normally understood either
as a system or form of economy characterized by the absence of private ownership,
or as a system or form of equalitarian socio-cultural relations. And in similar vein
many neo-liberal economists and their neoconservative allies continue to insist that
a “free market”—unregulated even by those democratically elected governments
which might wish to insure their constituents’ freedom from exploitation, starvation
and pollution etc., by enacting minimum wage and environmental legislation—is a
necessary, and even a sufficient, condition of a liberal democracy. Or again, former
US President George W. Bush’s insistence that “we do not torture” which has, in
light of the facts, something of an Alice in Wonderland quality. And although
Humpty Dumpty’s claim that “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to
mean…” this only holds, of course, if one is not necessarily concerned to commu-
nicate with, and be understood by, others. Otherwise the definition or delineation
and deployment of words and the (signified) concepts associated with them—in
terms of which we interpret and come to “understand” human experiences, personal
behavior, and socio-cultural and political etc. interactions and institutions etc.—are
subject to the linguistic community’s “understanding” of their meanings; negotiated
meanings which inevitably reflects the political, economic, social and cultural
interests and power dynamics at play within that community.
And just as, like linguistic contexts as narrowly understood, economic, political,
social and cultural contexts also define and delineate the meaning or significance of
linguistic terms and concepts within linguistic communities, so too the very mean-
ings or significance of the experiences, behavior, interactions and institutions which
these concepts and terms help us understand and communicate, are also dependent
upon all kinds of contexts.
Beginning then with experience, let us examine the case of Marnie (from the
Alfred Hitchcock film of the same name) who experiences extreme anxiety when
perceiving the color red. Psychoanalytic regression reveals that Marnie’s mother, a
prostitute, had worn red shoes and a red dress when going out to attract clients
whom she brought back home with her. One night, when 6 years old, Marnie had
observed her mother struggling with a man she had brought back to their apartment,
whom she killed by bloodily splitting his skull with a blow to the head with a fire
iron. Marnie’s experience of anxiety when perceiving the color red was then inter-
preted, and thus understood and explained, in terms of the context of the repressed
memory of a painful event, which it threatened to revive via association. Thus
affirming Schütz and Luckmann’s claim, that “Living experiences first become
meaningful when they are explicated…in respect to their position in a reference
schema,”19 we can see how access to a wider context, provided by her repressed

19
Schütz and Luckmann (1974), 16.
370 S. Glynn

past, of which Marnie was not consciously aware, (not to mention an understanding
of psychoanalytic theory) provided a “reference schema” which enabled the inquirer
to understand the meaning or significance of her experience better than she had
understood it herself. While in contrast to the case of Leonardo’s understanding of
the Mona Lisa then, it is not the inaccessibility of future contexts, but rather the
inaccessibility of past contexts which is in play here.
And like experiences, and works of art, etc. etc., human actions also derive their
meaning or significance, at least in part, from the contexts within which they play
out or are received, their meaning or significance consequently evolving to the point
were they too may escape their “author’s” intentions.
Take, for example, a foreign invasion. Perhaps it was initially intended to
protect a nation against terrorism, either by preempting an attack, or by setting an
example of the retribution that might follow an attack, and/or by destroying or
otherwise incapacitating any future potential threat etc. However let us imagine
that this invasion in fact demonstrates the relative impotency of the invader,
refutes previously widely held beliefs regarding the invader’s moral rectitude,
economically impoverishes and therefore diminishes the invader’s real power, and
causes widespread civilian casualties, which fuel anti-invader sentiment and
recruitment to the resistance, thereby increasing the invader’s vulnerability to
terrorist attacks. In such a case then (isomorphically with Leonardo’s painting)
the significance of the act clearly transcends the actor’s intentions, even perhaps
to the point that its consequences could not even have been imagined, much less
fully comprehended, by the actor.
Nevertheless actor’s intentions remain important, for irrespective of any light
they may throw upon the meanings of actions, an understanding of the intentions or
reasons motivating human and social actions may facilitate the prediction of future
acts. For instance, while an invasion may be interpreted as motivated by a desire for
security, it might also be interpreted in terms of the desire to topple a despot, to
spread democracy, or as a prelude to a resource grab, while an understanding of
which intentions or group of intentions were primary motivators would clearly be
useful in attempting to predict the future behavior of the invader.20
Now although, unlike the case with the scriptures and the US Constitution, the
perpetrators of the acts in question may well be available to the inquirer, and
therefore apparently able to confirm or refute the inquirer’s interpretation and
concomitant understanding of the actors’ intention, this is far from unproblematic,
for several reasons. To begin with (i) actors may not remember their intentions at all
or fully or (ii) actors’ intentions may nevertheless have been to some degree ambiguous
even to the actors themselves, and may in any event (iii) (as in the previously alluded
to case of a war motivated by desire of those older males instigating the war to

20
This is not, of course, to imply that the motivating intention, and the sort of actions following
from it, would necessarily remain the same over time, and regardless of circumstance. Indeed were
the motive a resource grab, sufficient success, and/or the diminishing importance of the resource,
brought about by technological change for instance, might well lead to the prediction that the
hitherto belligerent invader will cease being so.
The Hermeneutics of God, the Universe, and Everything 371

remove those young males who mostly participate in it, in order to have
unobstructed access to the young women they leave behind) be unconscious.
Moreover, (iv) actors may seek to mislead the inquirer as to their intentions, while
even when this is not the case (v) actors’ communications of their understanding of
the intentions underlying their acts may be unintentionally cryptic, ambiguous or
misleading, while (vi) even if it is not, if this communication is to be understood by
the inquirer, it will be no less in need of interpretation than the act or behavior it is
supposed to illuminate.
Thus even when the inquirer or social scientist turns to actors to verify his/her
interpretation and concomitant understanding of the actors’ intentions, as Schütz
has observed: “…the concepts formed by the social scientist are constructs of the
constructs formed in the commonsense thinking by actors on the social scene…
constructs formed at the second level.”21
So far from obviating the need for interpretation, or providing assurance as to its
veridicality then, the inquirer’s direct access to or communication with actors
involves a second order or Double Hermeneutic, by which, if the inquirer is to
attempt to understand the actors’ intentions s/he must attempt to interpret the actors’
interpretations and concomitant understanding of their own intentions.
Clearly then, as Bauman has observed: “There is no essential difference …
between the sense actors make of their actions and the meaning assigned to this
action by an…external observer for that matter; all of them are equally in a basically
similar process of meaning-construction-through-interpretation.”22
Thus even actors’ immediate accounts of their intentions at best provide contex-
tualization which is not necessarily any more transparent and less in need of inter-
pretation than the subsidiary writings and histories of the long dead Constitutional
authors for example. While in any event, the coherence of the inquirer’s interpreta-
tion of actors’ or an actor’s intentions with the available evidence, although perhaps
necessary to insure its correspondence to the actors’ or actor’s actual intentions, is
in no way sufficient to guarantee it.
Moreover, in view of the previously mentioned difficulties actors may have,
even when not intentionally misleading the inquirer, in remembering, disambigu-
ating (even to themselves), and/or being fully conscious of their intentions, it
should be apparent that (as with the attempt to understand a subject’s experiences
better than s/he does him/herself) it may be possible, by adopting a broader or
different context or perspective, as Ricoeur would have it, to “…understand an
author/actor” and thus her/his intentions and actions etc. “better than s/he under-
stood (them) her/himself.”23
And as with human experiences and actions, so too with cultures. That is to say
that while an anthropologist who belongs to a culture will tend to shares the concep-
tions, preconceptions and presuppositions prevalent therein, and will consequently
understand that culture as it understands itself, if on the other hand s/he is an

21
Schütz (1962), 246. See also 243.
22
Bauman (1978), 181.
23
Quoted by Ricoeur (1981), 151. My addition in parentheses.
372 S. Glynn

outsider, this implies a critical distance, which, by enabling her/him to escape certain
of the preconceptions and presuppositions endemic to it, may facilitate his/her
understand it from a different, and in some cases a better, or more illuminating,
perspective or context, than it understands itself.
Take for example the story told about the two space probes, sent by the Martians
and the Venusians respectively to earth. The first, arriving on a Los Angeles freeway,
proceeds to send imagery to Mission Control Mars, where the Martians conclude
that earthlings are 3 or 4 ft high, 10 or 11 ft long, go around at about 50–70 miles
per hour, and at night their eyes light up! The second, arriving in a Hollywood
cemetery, proceeds to probe the earth, and observing that a number of the otherwise
biodegrading corpses still have well preserved breast implants the Venusians con-
clude that these are the corpses of deceased members of a fertility cult! And although
our initial reaction might be to dismiss both interpretations as equally incoherent
with our understanding of things, further consideration may lead us to conclude that
while the first is evidently so, the second may have something to it, perhaps offering
an insight into our own culture which has hitherto eluded us, and thereby effecting
our cultural self-understanding!
Clearly then, in the first case, participation in a culture enables us to reject what
obviously appear to be spurious interpretations, while in the second, it is precisely
the Venusians’ detachment from the culture that facilitates what we may come to
regard as genuine insight. Synthesizing these apparently contradictory require-
ments, that in order to facilitate our hermeneutic understanding we should both
become familiar with, yet retain critical distance from, the “object” of our study,
Plessner has pointed out, “Understanding is not the identification of the self with
others, so that distance is illuminated; it is becoming familiar at a distance.”24
On this view then, while the inquirer, be s/he an anthropologist, psychologist,
sociologist or cultural critic etc., should attempt to engage with, and adopt the per-
spective of, those whose cultures, experiences, acts and/or artifacts, etc., s/he wishes
to study, nevertheless s/he should also attempt to remain or become something of
an estranged outsider, thus enabling her/him to retain or adopt an alternative,
maybe broader, hopefully more complete perspective, and consequently an even
more compelling and perhaps better, understanding than that of those who are more
directly involved. It is after all surely precisely to the degree to which, upon return-
ing from genuinely25 foreign travel for instance, we feel ourselves to have become
estranged from our own culture, and thus to have become (albeit temporarily)
strangers in our own land, that we regard ourselves as having gained a better under-
standing than previously of our own culture and everyday existence.

24
Helmuth Plessner (1978), p. 39.
25
I use his qualification to distinguish “Travelers” from Tourists, who sojourning in Europe, South
America, Africa or Asia, typically journey by air or with coach touring parties, from one Holiday
Inn, Hilton or Ritz Carlton resort to another, and, like visitors to Disney’s Epcot “World Showcase,”
make occasional forays from these hotels into “alien” cultures.
The Hermeneutics of God, the Universe, and Everything 373

Not that it is always necessary to be, or come from, outside a culture in order to
gain such a perspective; a certain reflective detachment may be sufficient as suggested
by an example Plessner draws from another sphere:
…the estranged vision of the artist fulfils an indispensible condition of all genuine under-
standing. It lifts what is invisible in human relations because it is familiar, the counterfoil
which puts the familiar into perspective as foreground and background and makes it
comprehensible…26

Similarly then with the entry into a culture by Simmel’s “Stranger”27 for instance,
which results in those in the culture attempting to adopt what they imagine to be the
perspective of the Other in order to see the culture as they imagine the stranger must
see it; an act of reflection which provides a sufficiently different perspective upon
the culture to enhance the participants’ understanding of it.28 While like foreign
travel, or the presence of strangers, so too the study of foreign cultures may also
promote the adoption of alternative conceptions, preconceptions and presuppositions,
thereby similarly affording an alternative, reflectively critical, perspective upon our
own, to the point where Ricoeur is driven to conclude that:
It is … the growth of his [sic] own understanding of himself that he pursues through his
understanding of the other. Every hermeneutics is thus, explicitly or implicitly, self under-
standing by means of understanding others.29

Nor should this surprise us, for it is, of course, the implicit proto-structuralist rule
of the hermeneutic circle that, as with the meanings of words in a dictionary, each
individual, as well as each shared world-view, human intention, action, experience
or artifact etc. is to be understood in terms of their/its relations to the others, to
which in turn—and here we come full hermeneutic circle—the same applies.

7 Critical Reflection and the Conflict of Interpretations

Now we have seen that regardless of whether one claims to understand others’
writings, artistic works, experiences, intentions or behavior etc., better than the
author/creator/actor etc. does her/himself, or whether it is a revision and/or enhance-
ment of one’s own understanding that is claimed, all such claims are predicated
upon the capacity to gain critical distance from, or to reflect critically upon, the
relevant phenomena and/or context, as well as upon whatever preconceptions,
presumptions and prejudices may have mediated the understanding of them. This then
has lead critics of hermeneutics and champions of neo-positivistic epistemologies
to suggest that the adoption of a critical perspective can enable one to escape

26
Plessner (1978), 31.
27
See Simmel (1970).
28
See for example Koepping (1981).
29
Ricoeur (1981), 17.
374 S. Glynn

preconceptions, presuppositions and prejudices etc. altogether, and concomitantly

to attain an absolutely objective or transcendental perspective.
However it should be noted that from all that we have seen so far it seems evident
that, as the example of the Martian misunderstanding of their experiences as being
of Earthlings suggests, so far from critical distance or, as we shall see, critical reflec-
tion, facilitating such a transcendental perspective or “View from Nowhere,” it
merely offers an alternative perspective or point of view, which although it
transcends the particular pre-reflective or uncritical view which it may call into
question, comes replete with its own preconceptions and presuppositions, which
may or may not be superior, in the sense of offering a more coherent and/or
extensive understanding.
Take for example an individual who is firmly convinced that everyone is out to
get him/her. This individual may well see even others’ apparently innocent behavior
as evidence of their attempt to disguise this fact, to the point of regarding others’
attempts to reassure him/her as a ploy to put him/her off guard. A psychoanalyst on
the other hand, having some critical distance from the person’s experience, may
interpret and thus see her/his reports and behavior as paranoid, and her/his denial of
this as evidence of repression (and the denial of repression as further evidence of it).
However, as William Burrows famously insisted “Just because you are “paranoid”
doesn’t necessarily mean that they are not all out to get you!” Perhaps supposed
“paranoiacs” are the only people who really know what is going on. Similarly,
absent a truly transcendental perspective, how are we to adjudicate the method-
ological dispute between, say, a vulgar Marxist, who may understand and explain
the form of all socio-cultural behavior and institutions, and the fact of all political
change, in terms of deterministic economic or material factors, and a Neo-Hegelian
who perceives everywhere in the same phenomena evidence of spirit or ideas and
free choice, and who therefore regards the Marxist, as s/he will in turn be regarded
by the Marxist, as a victim of “false consciousness.”30 And how are we to settle the
dispute between Freud and Marx regarding the significance of religion? For unlike
Freud who saw religious belief as an “illusion” or quasi-psychotic fantasy primarily
aimed at overcoming the fear of death, Marx on the other hand saw it as “the opium
of the (oppressed) masses” intended to ameliorate the suffering of life resulting from
economic exploitation and political inequality (for instance by the Christian
promise that “the meek will inherit the earth,” and “the first will be last and the last
will be first”).
Gadamer’s assertion made apropos coherent historical perspectives that “It is by
no means settled (and never can be settled) that any particular perspective …is the
right one”31 would seem to hold in all these examples, thus suggesting that it might
indeed apply to the full range of the human and social sciences.

30
See my note 10. While I am aware that Marxists normally apply this term to those who, they
claim, do not understand what is in their best interests economically, there is no reason why it
should not be more widely understood as indicative of delusions of many sorts.
31
Gadamer (1975), 484. Gadamer’s parentheses.
The Hermeneutics of God, the Universe, and Everything 375

Although forced to acknowledge that none of the examples we have examined

so far immediately evidence a presuppositionless or objective perspective, the
Positivists will surely object that this in no way implies that there is none, before
going on to insist that it is most certainly possible to adjudicate between such intrin-
sically coherent yet extrinsically conflicting interpretations as those outlined above
by appealing to the facts. That, to take the last cited example for instance, if the
ending of oppressive exploitation and gross inequality results in the demise of
religion, then Marx is correct, while if it does not then Freud would seem to be.
However although the Marxist may regard the contrast between the virulence of
fundamentalist religions and religious beliefs amongst the poor with the compara-
tive secularity of much of affluent Western Europe as confirming her/his view, a
Freudian might respond by noting that in the US, which is generally more affluent
still, religion continues to be much more significant than in Western Europe. To this
a Marxist might reply by pointing out that it was the Puritans and other religious
zealots followed by the “poor huddled masses” who initially founded and predomi-
nantly populated the US, and then insisting upon the “birth marks” interpretation of
history (according to which every society will inevitably bear the birth marks of the
society from which it emerges) thereby interpreting the continuing significance of
religion in the US as a vestigial consequence of past economic hardship soon to fall
victim to economic affluence.
What the Positivists appeal to the facts fail to appreciate then is that access to the
facts is always mediated by the very preconceptions and presuppositions that they
are supposed to verity,32 and that consequently each individual or group will tend to
conceive of the “facts” in such a manner as to have them fit their own preconcep-
tions, presuppositions, or theories as we might call them. And when confronted with
“facts” which prove absolutely recalcitrance to being perceived/conceived in a man-
ner coherent with our theoretical preconceptions, we are often as likely (as we shall
presently detail) to ignore them as to abandon our preconceptions, presuppositions
or prejudices as we might then call them. While even if we indeed abandon our
theories or preconceptions etc. in face of apparently recalcitrant facts, it should be
noted that there may remain any number of alternative conceptual frameworks or
theories in terms of which they may be coherently interpreted. Therefore while
such coherence may be necessary to insure the veridicality of our perceptions and
understanding, it nevertheless remains insufficient.
And while if and insofar as such intrinsically coherent alternative interpretations
do not conflict, or are not extrinsically incoherent with each other, they may possibly
be seen as complementing or as supplementing each other (each offering a different
perspective upon, or nuance or aspect to our understanding of, the phenomenon
in question) if they are conflicting, which is to say mutually exclusive of each other,
Gadamer’s previous assertion seems to be correct, there being no way, as things
stand, of determining which particular perspective is the right one.
Thus although it may, for instance, be possible to see the previously outlined
Marxist and Psychoanalytic interpretations of the rise of Nazism as complementing

32
See my note 10 above.
376 S. Glynn

each other (in the sense that each can be seen as elucidating the phenomena from a
different perspective) and it may be possible to see Marx’s and Freud’s different
interpretations of religion as supplementing each other, (in the sense that religion
may perform the function of alleviating anxiety in relation both to economic
hardship and death) the same cannot be said of the just mentioned vulgar Marxist
and neo-Hegelian interpretation of social change, or the psychoanalyst’s and the
“paranoiac’s” interpretation of the latter’s experiences. And it is by no means clear,
given that the perception, by each, of the “facts” is mediated by their own theoretical
preconceptions, how we might adjudicate between them, save on the basis of our
own preconceptions or prejudices, or perhaps normatively upon, or at least upon our
understanding of, those of most others.
In recognition of the efficacy of such arguments even that neo-Kantian champion
of the Enlightenment—and thus of the Hellenistic side of the Hebraic/Hellenistic
debate—Jurgen Habermas, is forced to concede that “…it is always illusory to
suppose an autonomy, free of presuppositions, in which knowing first grasps reality
theoretically…” Nevertheless, Habermas continues “…the mind can always reflect
back upon the interest structure … this is reserved to self-reflection.” And “If the latter
cannot cancel out interest it can to a certain extent make up for it.” 33 That is to say
that, recognizing that, as a contingent matter of fact, as these and any number of other
examples demonstrate, we are certainly often unable to free ourselves of the precon-
ceptions and presuppositions which therefore continue to mediate our perceptions
and understanding, Habermas none the less remains unwilling to concede that this is
always and entirely so, and thus to abandon the Enlightenment pretension altogether.
To this Gadamer’s emphatic response is that “The customary enlightenment
formula according to which the process of demagnification of the world leads
necessarily from mythos to logos seems to me to be a modern prejudice,”34 or myth
as we might perhaps say. Indeed the concept of “en-light-enment” itself may be
understood as a metaphorical notion derived from the Platonic myth of escape from
the cave of “dark” prejudices and presuppositions characteristic of mythos, and
emergence into the clear “light” of logos. While its substantive application, marked
by an attempt to rid oneself of, or escape from, presuppositions and prejudices, is
itself based upon a presupposition or prejudice; viz that an unprejudiced view,
even if possible, is superior to a perspective which embodies presuppositions and
prejudices; a presupposition or prejudice which, as such, negates what is supposedly
affirmed and thereby undermines itself! As Gadamer’s succinctly formulates this
self-contradiction at the heart of the Enlightenment the “…one prejudice of the
enlightenment that is essential to it: the fundamental prejudice of the enlightenment
is the prejudice against prejudice itself…”.35
Nor should this critique surprise us unduly, for as Godel formally demonstrated,
no system can be self-axiomatizing or justifying; any attempt to be so always neces-
sarily ending either in circularity or infinite regress. Thus not even reason—the

33
Habermas (1978), 313–314. See also 315.
34
Gadamer (1976), 51.
35
Gadamer (1975), 239–240.
The Hermeneutics of God, the Universe, and Everything 377

logos which is the Enlightenment’s defining ethos—can save us,36 all such justifications
therefore being, as the “Habermas/Gadamer debate” demonstrated37 and as the
Postmodernists insist, ultimately non-rational.38
In “light,” or perhaps we might better say in view?, of all this it should then be
“clear” that, as Gadamer insists “Prejudices are the biases of our openness to
the world.”39 While the absence of unprejudiced or unmediated access to the facts
thereby asserted would seem to present a direct challenge to the supposed objectivity
of the natural, no less than of the human and social sciences!

8 The Natural Sciences: The Hermeneutics of Empiricism

Having had their attempted assault upon the human and social sciences decisively
repelled the die hard Positivists now then find themselves in the unenviable position
of attempting to retrench around and defend the natural sciences against the
onslaught of a counter attack. Forced to acknowledge the role, if not indeed the
prevalence, of non-rational prejudices and presuppositions, and subjective interpre-
tations, at least in the human and social sciences and the wider field of inquiry onto
which they open, the Positivists nevertheless continue to maintain that the natural
sciences at any rate are based upon presuppositionless observation of the empirically
given facts, and that they thereby achieve a disinterested or value-free objectivity
which they are forced to concede may be absent elsewhere.
However in the first place, as Max Scheler has observed, “To conceive of the
world as value-free is a task which men (sic) set themselves on account of a value:
the vital value of mastery and power over things.”40 So far from being disinterest-
edly objective, enlightenment science was, from its inception, animated and
guided by human interests. Indeed as that “founding father” Bacon, recognized,
“…human knowledge and human power meet in one …truth and utility are here
the very same thing,”41 our conception of knowledge being then, as it still is, pragmatic.
Nietzsche explains:
The compulsion to form concepts, genera, forms, ends, and laws (“one world of identical
causes”) should not be understood as though we were capable through them of ascertaining
the true world, but rather the compulsion to adapt to ourselves a world in which existence
is made possible. Thereby we create a world that is calculable, simplified, understandable,
etc., for us.42

36
See Barnes (1974), 5. For a fuller discussion of the Postmodern critique of reason see Glynn (1991).
37
See How (1980).
38
See Gadamer (1975), 245, and (1976), 51, and Jacques Derrida (1974), 11. For a fuller discussion
see Glynn (2005), 59–76. Note that so far from being synonymous with the irrational, and thus
simply the logical negation of rational, the “non-rational” is nether.
39
Gadamer (1976), 9.
40
Scheler (1960), 122, FN 2, as quoted by Leiss in (1974), 109.
41
Bacon as quoted in Rozack (1973), 149.
42
For but one example see Nietzsche (1970) 3:526.
378 S. Glynn

And as with knowledge, so too with reason also. Thus Nietzsche sees “…logic
and the categories of reason as means to the adaption of the world to ends of utility
(that is ‘in principle,’ for a useful falsification).”43
And as with this reflective conception of the epistemology of natural science, so
too with the perception of the “empirical facts,” upon which such science is suppos-
edly based. That is to say that, so far from being disinterestedly objective, the empir-
ical perceptions or experiences of the supposed empirical “facts” of the natural
sciences reflect the often pragmatic preconceptions and presumptions, not to say
prejudices, of the observing subject no less than we have seen do those of the human
and social sciences. As Heidegger, building upon the Kantian insight that the
sensible is inextricably intertwined with the intelligible—which implies that while
perception and conception may be analytically distinguishable they nevertheless
remain ontologically inseparable–affirms:
The greatness and superiority of the natural sciences during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries rests in the fact that all the scientists were philosophers. They understood that
there are no mere facts but that a fact is only what it is in the light of the fundamental
conception… 44

Beginning with experience itself then, so far from experiencing what William
James notably characterized as a “…blooming, buzzing, confusion” of incoherent
impressions, rather, as Husserl noted, in everyday experience “I do not see color
sensations, but colored things, I do not hear sensations of sound, but the song a
women is singing etc.,”45 that “…in immediate givenness, one finds anything but
color data, tone data, other “sense” data …. instead …. I see a tree which is green;
I hear the rustling of its leaves, I smell its blossoms etc.”46 Maurice Merleau-Ponty
affirms, “Pure sensation … corresponds to nothing in our experience…,” “…there
is no experience of sensation…”47
However although many take this, in and of itself, as evidence of the conceptual
mediation of our experiences, if and insofar as all of our perceptions really were
conceptually mediated interpretations, then it seems that we could not know, in the
sense of be certain of, this. For insofar as we experience what we take to be objects
and events rather than undifferentiated sensations, then while these experiences
might be taken to imply the mediation of pure sensations by conceptions, equally
they could be taken as unmediated reflections, and therefore evidence of the existence,
of just such objects and events.
But although our everyday experiences of objects and events provide insufficient
grounds for concluding that these perceptions are the product of interpretation,
there are other grounds for doing so. Thus drawing upon Gestalt experiments in

43
Friedrich Nietzsche (1970) 3:726, as quoted by Habermas (1978), 297. Nietzsche’s addition in
parentheses.
44
Heidegger (1976b), 247–248.
45
Husserl (1913), 374 quoted by Lubbe (1978), 108.
46
Husserl (1970), 233.
47
Merleau-Ponty (1962), 3 & 7.
The Hermeneutics of God, the Universe, and Everything 379

cognition, Thomas Kuhn notes that “The duck-rabbit shows that two men (sic) with
the same retinal impressions can see different things; the inverting lenses show that
two men with different retinal impressions can see the same thing.”48 While if some-
one who only perceives, say, the “rabbit,” to begin with, is told that the picture may
also be seen as a “duck,” s/he will then often be able to see the “duck.” Furthermore
“Ames and his school have shown that when a ball set against a featureless
background is silently and rapidly inflated (by an air hose obscured from the
observer by the ball itself) it is seen as if it retains its size and was coming nearer,”
for the reason, as Polanyi explains, that on the basis of most of our past experiences
we “…construct() a universal interpretive framework that assumes the ubiquitous
existence of objects, retaining their size and shape…”49 However the experimenter
then demonstrates to the observer that what s/he previously interpreted as an apparent
increase in size due to the ball’s approaching, was in fact a real increase in size due
to its inflation. Consequently, when the now fully inflated ball (suspended by thin,
and therefore invisible, wires) is slowly propelled, at uniform speed and with a
linear trajectory, directly towards the observer, who has adopted the inflation
“framework” or conception, s/he interprets the now apparent increase in size of the
ball due to its approaching, as a real increase in size due to its continued inflation!
We can then see that certain conflicts in even our most basic experiences or
perceptions reveal them to be mediated by our conceptions or preconceptions
regardless of whether or not there is in fact an objective reality existing beyond the
realm of experiences or appearances. Thus while Kant, who also denies the exis-
tence of (catagorially) unmediated experiences, nevertheless insisted that there was
a noumenal realm of objects or “Things-In-Themselves,” existing independently of
the empirically given, or phenomenal, realm of experiences, clearly there can, by
definition, be no direct empirical evidence of such an objective, experience or
appearance transcending, reality. As Husserl affirms, while: “The empiricist talk of
the natural scientists often, if not for the most part, gives the impression that the
natural sciences are based on the experience of objective nature … The objective is
precisely never experienceable as itself.”50
Indeed: “The contrast between the subjectivity of the life-world and the
“objective,” the “true” world, lies in the fact that the latter is a theoretical-logical
substruction, the substruction of something that is in principle not perceivable, in
principle not experienceable…”51
That is to say that, as Hume noted, so far from observing objects or
“things-in-themselves” we actually experience bundles of constantly changing,
interrupted and different perceptions. It being precisely the intrinsic continuities,
resemblances and similarities exhibited by or between them that lead us to interpret
these changing, interrupted and different perceptions as appearances of relatively
unchanging, or self-identical and continuously existing “things-in-themselves”;

48
Kuhn (1970), 126–127.
49
Polanyi (1958), 96.
50
Husserl (1970), 128–129.
51
Husserl (1970), 127.
380 S. Glynn

objects which, with breathtaking (hermeneutic) circularity, we take to explain or be

the cause of, the very experiences of the continuities, resemblances and similarities,
from which we infer their existence.52 Clearly then such empirically unverifiable
“things-in-themselves” or objects are nothing more nor less than interpretively
derived theoretical constructs or theories, which, regardless of their ontological
status, enable us to explain, and make law like predictions regarding the future
nature or properties of, our perception. For instance Einstein informs us that:
…the formation of the word, and hence the concept “ball,” is a kind of thought economy
enabling the child to combine very complicated sense impressions in a simple way…. Mach
also thinks … the formulation of scientific theories …takes place in a similar way. We try
to order the phenomena to reduce them to simple form, until we can describe (and explain
and predict we might add) what may be a large number of them with the aid of a few
simple concepts.53

That is to say that, as with supposed objects, whose hypothetically conceived

existence we interpretively infer from the properties and relations displayed by and
between the very conceptually mediated perceptions and conceptions they are
subsequently taken to explain, so too mutatis mutandis, our scientific theories are
interpretively inferred from the very properties of and relations displayed by and
between such “objects” which we subsequently take them to explain and predict.
An interpretation of an interpretation, or Double Hermeneutic; not, as per the human
and social sciences, of an observer’s understanding of an actor’s understanding of
his/her intentions or experiences etc., but an explicit (scientific) theoretical inter-
pretation and consequent understanding of the properties of and relations between
“objects,” our experiences of which have already been implicitly mediated by or
interpreted in terms of the pre-conceptions informing even our most basic percep-
tions. A theoretical interpretation, or understanding, of the “facts” arising from the
interpretive preconceptions informs our perceptions supposedly thereof.
Thus turning to the derivation of such scientific theories, observing, for instance
that an unsupported ink stand, apple, musket ball and cannon ball all fall down
(or close with the earth) I explain this in terms of the theory of gravity, which like
the “objects” supposedly influenced thereby, is inexperienceable in and of itself,
being derived from the very phenomena which it is, again with breathtaking
(hermeneutic) circularity, taken to explain. As C.S. Pierce has so succinctly put it,
“…the force of gravity is the cause of the ink stand and other objects falling-
although the force of gravity will consist merely in the fact that the ink stand and
other objects will fall.”54 And not unlike supposed objects or “things-in-themselves,”
which enable us to explain and predict our experiences and the relations between
them, the theory of gravity enables us to both explain and predict the behavior and
relations displayed by and between such objects; viz that under similar circumstances
all objects will fall.

52
See Hume (1967), 204–208, 211–212 & 215.
53
Albert Einstein quoted in Heisenberg (1971), 64–65. My additions in brackets.
54
Pierce (1931–5), Vol. VII, 344.
The Hermeneutics of God, the Universe, and Everything 381

But some will surely object that so far from being an inexperienceable “occult
force”55 (as members of the Royal Society disparagingly dubbed it) gravity can be
and in fact is directly experienced, in aching outstretched arms for instance. However
this merely demonstrates the degree to which our theoretical assumptions or
preconceptions pervade our perceptions or experiences themselves, for just as
Newtonians will interpret, and thus come to understand, such experiences as being
experiences of gravity, Aristotelians—believing that, by their very nature, entities
removed from their “natural” place on earth strive to return there—will interpret the
same experiences, as well as the motions of unsupported objects, as earthly bodies
striving to reach their earthly homes. As Michael Polanyi tells us “…within two
different conceptual frameworks the same range of experiences takes the shape of
different facts and different evidence.”56
And as with gravity, or indeed gravitons also, so too with anti-matter, curved
space, or even such mundane “entities” as electrons, atoms and molecules, which,
as never having been experienced “in themselves” are therefore clearly reified
hypotheses, which similarly owe their supposed existence to the conceptions and
preconceptions or theoretical assumptions underlying our interpretation of the very
phenomena—such as the behavior of material bodies, tracks across cloud or bubble
chambers, lines across photographic emulsions, etc.—which we derive them from,
and which, again, to come full hermeneutic circle, we take them to explain.
Given such dependence of our “perception” or “understanding” of the putative
“facts” upon such implicit preconceptions etc. it is perhaps unsurprising that, faced
with a conflict between the explicit theoretical hypotheses characteristic of science
and “empirical observations” of “facts” which appear to refute them, so far from
abandoning or adjusting the theories so that they fit the facts, on the contrary,
scientists often reinterpret the “facts” so as to make them fit their theories, while
facts that prove recalcitrant are often simply ignored.
For instance, having formed the hypothesis or theoretical preconception that all
heavenly bodies move in circular orbit, Galileo, upon looking through his telescope,
observed that comets and asteroids, not to mention planets, moved in elliptical
orbits. So far from this leading him to abandon his theory he simply interpreted his
observations as illusions resulting from imperfections in the telescope’s lenses.
Or take the famous experiment by which Galileo supposedly proved the theory
of uniform acceleration. If the musket ball and cannonball had been dropped
simultaneously from Pisa’s leaning tower, differences in the air resistance they
would have encountered would have meant that the musket ball, being smaller,
would have hit the ground first. Nevertheless as Einstein, in accord with all we
saw previously regarding our most basic perceptions, affirms “In reality it is the
theory that decides what we can observe,”57 in which case, either Galileo, already
committed to the theory of uniform acceleration, would have observed them as

55
See Rozack (1973), 362ff.
56
Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, 167.
57
Albert Einstein quoted in Heisenberg (1971), 63.
382 S. Glynn

hitting the ground together, or, if he did not, he would not have “observed” this fact
in the sense of considering it noteworthy, and would simply have ignored it.
Furthermore, so far from us understanding this incident as a refutation of his
theory by the facts, in light of what we have seen we can now re-interpret it as
a clash between his explicit scientific theory (of uniform acceleration) and
whatever other theoretical preconception was mediating his perception. In other
words, if, as Popper, in accordance with what we have seen previously, affirms,
“…observations …are always interpretations …in the light of theories, ”58
then quite clearly, as Imre Lakatos insists “…clashes between theories and factual
propositions are not “falsifications” but merely inconsistencies”59 between the
explicitly deployed theoretical hypotheses of the sciences, and the often implicitly
employed interpretive preconceptions informing our supposedly immediate
perceptions of the “facts;” clashes between the two aspects of the Double
Hermeneutic of the natural sciences.
In light of this we can now see that, so far from the consistency or coherence of
the empirically observed “facts” and our scientific theories being a consequence
of the theoretical conceptions of science being brought into line with the facts, it
is, on the contrary, often the result of our “perceptions” of the “facts,” being brought
into line with the theoretical conceptions of science. Furthermore, while inconsis-
tencies or incoherences between the scientific theories and the “fact” may indicate
that one or the other must be rejected or revised, on the other hand their consistency
or coherence is never sufficient to insure their veridicality, and can do no more than
provide a degree of verisimilitude. Moreover the complete consistency of Popper’s
notion of falsification 60 with this ramification of a hermeneutic understanding of the
natural sciences serves as yet further evidence, if such evidence were needed, that in
addition to its already well established applications, hermeneutic interpretation is
central to the natural sciences also.

9 Ontological Hermeneutics

Now if not only the scriptures, but the classics, and the arts and the humanities in
general, not to mention the human, and social sciences, and, as we now see, even
the natural sciences also are all hermeneutic, then one might further speculate,
as Heidegger goes on to claim, that all human inquiry and understanding is
hermeneutic. Indeed arguing that all inquiry, including that into existence itself, is
grounded upon reflective human consciousness, Heidegger insists that “…man (sic)
should be understood, within the question of being (which is to say from an

58
Popper (1959), 107, Fn. 3. My addition in brackets.
59
Lakatos (1970), 99.
60
That Universal theories can never be definetively verified but gain greater credability with the
failure of diverse observations to falsify them.
The Hermeneutics of God, the Universe, and Everything 383

ontological perspective) as the site which being requires in order to disclose itself.
Man is the site of the Openness of the there”61; the (reflective or human) being or
entity which Being or existence in general, requires in order to reflect upon, and thus
understand, itself. Further, Heidegger continues “…to work out the question of
Being” or understand what it means to Be “… is an entity’s mode of Being… this
entity we shall denote by the term “Dasein”.”62 “Understanding of Being is a defining
characteristic of Dasein’s Being.”63
It is then ultimately within or upon this most general of all, or ontological,
hermeneutics, the quest to understand the meaning of existence or Being, that
epistemological hermeneutics, the quest to understand the totality of particular
entities or modes of being, is subsumed or grounded. As Heidegger affirms:
Philosophy is Universal Phenomenological Ontology and takes its departure from the
hermeneutics of Dasein, which as an analytic of existence, has made fast the guiding line
for all philosophical inquiry at the point where it arises and to which it returns.64

In which case finally, as Ricoeur concludes:

…the properly epistemological concerns of Hermeneutics…are subordinated to ontological
preconceptions…understanding ceases to appear as a simple mode of knowing in order to
become a way of being.65

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Notes on Contributors

Babette Babich is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University in New York.

She is author of seven books, including The Hallelujah Effect: Philosophical
Reflections on Music, Performance Practice and Technology (2013), La fin de la
pensée? Philosophie analytique contre philosophie continentale (2012), and
Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science (German 2010; Italian 1996, English 1994). Her
work has been translated into Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish,
and Slovenian. Editor or co-editor of eight book collections, she is founding (1994)
and Executive Editor of New Nietzsche Studies. Her interests include continental
philosophy of science and technology, musical aesthetics, animal rights/ethics,
ancient Greek bronzes, the academic politics of the analytic-continental divide, and
distinguishing science from scientism.
Enrico Berti (born in Valeggio sul Mincio, Italy, 1935) is emeritus professor of the
University of Padua and Doctor honoris causa of the National and Capodistrian
University of Athens. He was professor of philosophy in the universities of Perugia,
Padua, Geneva, Bruxelles and Lugano. He is member of the Accademia Nazionale
dei Lincei (Rome), of the International Academy for Philosophy (Yerevan, Armenia)
and of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences (Vatican City), and president of the
International Institute of Philosophy (Paris). His scientific interests are directed to
ancient and contemporary philosophy, especially Aristotle’s thought and its survival
today, so in logic as in metaphysics, anthropology, ethics and politics. He is author
of many publications (books and articles), some of which have been translated in
English, French, Polish, Spanish and Portuguese.
Robert P. Crease is a philosopher and historian of science. He writes a monthly
column, “Critical Point,” for the international physics magazine Physics World.
He is Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University, where
he has taught since 1987. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and the
Institute of Physics. He has written, co-written, translated, or edited over a dozen
books. His most recent books include World in the Balance: The Historic Quest for
a Universal System of Measurement (2011), The Great Equations: Breakthroughs in

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 387

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
388 Notes on Contributors

Science from Pythagoras to Heisenberg (2009); J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life, by

Abraham Pais, with Robert P. Crease (2006); and The Prism and the Pendulum:
The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments in Science (2003).
Jan Faye, Section for Philosophy, University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He has
written extensively on the philosophy of the natural sciences and the humanities in
both English and Danish. Among the English books published are TheReality of the
Future (1989), Niels Bohr: His Heritage and Legacy (1991), Rethinking Science
(2002), and After Postmodernism (2012).
Robert Frodeman holds a doctorate in philosophy and a master of science in
geology and is Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Texas, where he
specializes in environmental philosophy, the philosophy of science and technology
policy, and the philosophy of interdisciplinarity. He served as a consultant for the
US Geological Survey for 8 years and was the 2001–2002 Hennebach Professor of
the Humanities at the Colorado School of Mines, and ESRC Fellow at Lancaster
University in England (2005). In addition to more than 80 published articles,
Frodeman is author/editor of nine books, including Geo-Logic: Breaking Ground
between Philosophy and the Earth Sciences (2003), Encyclopedia of Environmental
Ethics and Philosophy (2008), Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (2010) and
Sustainable Knowledge (2013).
Rodolphe Gasché is SUNY Distinguished Professor & Eugenio Donato Professor
of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. His books
include Die hybrideWissenschaft (1973); System und Metaphorik in der Philosophie
von Georges Bataille (1978); The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of
Reflection (1986); Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Harvard, 1994);
The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man (1998); Of Minimal Things: Studies on
the Notion of Relation (1999); The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetic
(2003); Views and Interviews. On “Deconstruction” in America (2006); The Honor
of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy (2007); Europe, or The Infinite Task. A
Study of a Philosophical Concept (2009); Un Arte Muy Fragile. Sobre la Retorica
de Aristoteles (2010; The Stelliferous Fold. Toward a Virtual Law of Literature’s
Self-Formation (2011); Georges Bataille: Phenomenology and Phantasmatology
(2012). He has just finished another booklength study entitled: Geophilosophy:
On Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s What is Philosophy?
Dimitri Ginev is founder and editor-in-chief of the journal Studia Culturologica.
Among his books are: Entre Anthroplogie et Hermeneutique (2003), Das herme-
neutische Projekt Georg Mischs (2011), and Practices and Possibilities (2013). His
main research interest is the history of modern hermeneutics.
Simon Glynn received his Ph.D. from The University of Manchester in England
and is Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University. His research interests
are in Contemporary Continental Epistemology (from Phenomenology and
Hermeneutics, to Structuralism, and Post-structural Deconstruction) and its application
to the natural, human and social sciences, and cultural analysis and interpretation,
Notes on Contributors 389

as well as in philosophy of technology. In addition to numerous articles and chapters

in journals and books, he is contributing editor of book collections including Sartre:
An Investigation of Some Major Themes (1987); European Philosophy and the
Human and Social Sciences (1987) and contributing co-editor of Continental and
Postmodern Perspectives in the Philosophy of Science (1995). He is currently
working on a book applying Contemporary Continental Epistemology to the
methodology of the sciences.
Patrick Aidan Heelan is William A. Gaston Professsor of Philosophy emeritus at
Georgetown University and a Jesuit priest. He has a doctorate in theoretical physics
specializing in geophysics and high energy physics, having studied with Erwin
Schrödinger (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies) and Eugene Wigner (post-doc
Princeton) and a doctorate in philosophy (at the University of Louvain in Belgium)
specializing in the study of Heisenberg’s physical physical from the perspective of
Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger and in active dialogue with Heisenberg
himself which may be found in his books Quantum mechanics and Objectivity
(1965), Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science (2nd edition: 1989), and
The Observable (2013). In addition to his interest in questions relating to science
and religion, Heelan has published extensively on the philosophy of the quantum
theory, contextual logic, the hermeneutics of theory and experiment, and the
task-dependent geometry structure of human spatial vision in everyday life and in
pictorial art and architecture.
Pierre Kerszberg is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toulouse since
2000. He was previously Researcher at the National Foundation for Scientific
Research (Belgium), Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney (Australia), and
Professor at the Pennsylvania State University (USA). His main interests lie in the
history of physics and cosmology, Kant, and phenomenology. His book publica-
tions include The Invented Universe (1989), Critique and Totality (1997), Kant et la
Nature (1999), L’Ombre de la Nature (2009), La Science dans le Monde de la Vie
(2012). Future research projects include the philosophy of music.
Theodore Kisiel is Distinguished Research Professor emeritus of philosophy at
Northern Illinois University, is translator of Heidegger’s Summer 1925 course,
History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (1992) as well as author of The
Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1995), Heidegger’s Way of Thought:
Critical and Interpretive Signposts (2002), in addition to co-editing, with Joseph
J. Kockelmans, Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences: Essays and Translations
(1970). He is also author of numerous articles on Heidegger and hermeneutic
phenomenology.
Giovanni Leghissa is Research Professor of Epistemology of the Humanities at the
Department of Philosophy, University of Torino, Italy. He was Visiting Professor at
the Institut für Philosophie at the University of Vienna, Austria, and at the
Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, Germany. His work focuses on phenom-
enology, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, gender and cultural studies, com-
parative philosophy. He has authored five books: L’evidenza impossibile. Saggio
390 Notes on Contributors

sull’ immaginazione in Husserl (1999); Il dio mortale. I potesi sulla religiosità

moderna (2004); Il gioco dell’ identità. Differenza, alterità, rappresentazione (2005),
Incorporare l’antico. Filologia classica e invenzione della modernità (2007).
Neoliberalismo. Un’ introduzione critica (2012). He has edited six collective
volumes and special issues of journals as well as Italian editions of Husserl, Derrida,
Blumenberg, Hall, de Certeau, Overbeck, Tempels. He is member of the editorial
board of the journal of philosophy aut aut.
Lin Ma is associate professor of philosophy at Renmin University of China
(Beijing). She is the author of Heidegger on East–west Dialogue: Anticipating the
Event (2008), and has published essays on comparative studies of Levinas and
Daoism. Currently she is co-organizing a special issue “Re-Discovering Heidegger
and Chinese Philosophy” for the Journal of Chinese Philosophy.
Jeff Malpas is Distinguished Professor at the University of Tasmania and Visiting
Distinguished Professor at Latrobe University. He is the author or editor of 21
books, and has published over 100 scholarly articles on topics in philosophy, art,
architecture, and geography. His work is grounded in post-Kantian thought,
especially the hermeneutical and phenomenological traditions, as well as in analytic
philosophy of language and mind, and draws on the thinking of a diverse range of
thinkers including, most notably, Albert Camus, Donald Davidson, Martin
Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer. He is currently working on topics including
the ethics of place, the failing character of governance, the materiality of memory,
the topological character of hermeneutics, the place of art, and the relation between
place, boundary, and surface.
Graeme Nicholson, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Toronto,
has been an active member of the Heidegger Circle and Society for Phenomenology
and Existential Philosopophy; co-editor of the series Contemporary Studies in
Philosophy and the Human Sciences at Humanities (later Humanity) Press; author
of some books in that series and, more recently, of Plato’s Phaedrus: The
Philosophy of Love (1999); and Justifying Our Existence: An Essay in Applied
Phenomenology (2009).
Adriaan T. Peperzak is Arthur J. Schmitt Professor of Loyola University in
Chicago. His research in the history of philosophy has focused on Hegel—in six
books and numerous articles—as well as Emmanuel Levinas—two books and three
edited collections. In particular, he is author, most recently, of Modern Freedom
(2001), Thinking (2006) and Trust (2013). He has also published extensively on
Plato, Aristotle, Bonaventura, Descartes, Heidegger, and Ricoeur, and on thematic
questions in ethics, social and political philosophy, metaphilosophy, and philosophy
of religion.
Nicholas Rescher (Ph.D., Princeton, 1951) is Distinguished University Professor
of Philosophy at be University of Pittsburgh where he has also served as Chairman
of the Philosophy Department and a Director (and currently Chairman) of the Center
for Philosophy of Science. In a productive research career extending over six
Notes on Contributors 391

decades he has more than 100 books to this credit. Thirteen books about Rescher’s
philosophy have been published in five languages. He has served as a President of
the American Philosophical Association, of the American Catholic Philosophy
Association, of the American G. W. Leibniz Society, of the C. S. Peirce Society, and
of the American Metaphysical Society as well as Secretary General of the
International Union of History and Philosophy of Sciences. Rescher has been
elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academia
Europea, the Royal Society of Canada, and the Royal Asiatic Society of Great
Britain. He has been awarded the Alexander von Humboldt prize for Humanistic
Scholarship in 1984, the Belgian Prix Mercier in 2005, and the Aquinas Medal of
the American Catholic Philosophical Association in 2007. In 2011 he was awarded
the premier cross of the Order of Merit (Bundesdienstkreuz Erster Klasse) of the
Federal Republic of Germany.
Gregor Schiemann is Professor for History and Philosophy of science at the
Department of Philosophy at the Bergische Universität in Wuppertal. He holds a
diploma in physics and a PhD in Philosophy. His areas of specialization are: history
and philosophy of physics, and the concept of nature. He is coeditor of the Journal
for General Philosophy of Science. Recent publications among other things are:
Hermann von Helmholtz’s Mechanism: The Loss of Certainty (2008); Werner
Heisenberg (2008); and, as editor (with Michael Heidelberger) The Significance of
the Hypothetical in the Natural Sciences (2009) (with Alfred Nordmann and Hans
Radder) Science Transformed? Debating Claims of an Epochal Break (2011).
Holger Schmid teaches philosophy at the University of Lille III, France. He has
published Nietzsches Gedanke der tragischen Erkenntnis (1984) and Kunst des
Hörens: Orte und Grenzen philosophischer Spracherfahrung (1999) as well as
articles published in German, French, and English bearing on subjects ancient and
modern, with special attention to problems of language and art.
Michael Stöltzner is associate professor of philosophy at the University of South
Carolina. He has studied physics and philosophy at Tübingen, Trieste, Vienna, and
Bielefeld and held positions at the Universities of Salzburg, Bielefeld and Wuppertal.
His main areas of research are philosophy and history of physics and applied
mathematics, core principles of mathematical physics; history of logical empiricism;
the development of formal teleology; and the philosophy of applied science, in
particular the role of models and ceteris paribus laws.
Jaap van Brakel is professor emeritus at the Higher Institute of Philosophy of the
University of Leuven. His current research interest concerns the necessary precon-
ditions of comparative and intercultural philosophy.
Index

A Barnes, Barry, 377

Abel, Günter, xix Barth, Karl, 331
Adorno, Theodor W., 163, 165 Bast, Rainer, 155
Aeschylus, 218 Baudrillard, Jean, 164, 170, 171
Ager, Derek V., 72 Bauer, Julius, 133
Alderman, Harold, 200 Bauman, Zygmunt, xxii, 362, 366, 371
Allchin, Douglas, 13, 14, 18, 24, 25 Beaufret, Jean, 156
Ames, Adelbert, 359f, 379 Becker, Oskar, xxvii, 113–133
Anders, Günther, 164, 165 Beiser, Frederick, 173
Andler, Charles, 116 Beller, Mara, 105
Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 115, 128 Benjamin, Walter, 168
Anselm, 331 Benne, Christian, xv
Apel, Karl-Otto, xix Bennett, Maxwell R., xviii
Apollo, 217 Bergson, Henri, 125
Aquinas, Thomas, 173, 286, 331, 332 Berkeley, George, 286
Arendt, Hannah, 168, 214 Bernays, Edward, 163
Aristotle, xxix, 3, 69, 167, 171, 191, 211–213, Bernstein, Richard, xxii
215–221, 227–241, 283–285, 306, 328, Berri, Claude, 167
331, 357 Berti, Enrico, xxix, 286–288
Arnheim, Rudolf, 96, 163 Biemel, Walter, 244
Arnold, Mathew, 364 bin Laden, Osama, 137
Asclepius, 209 Blochmann, Elisabeth, 336
Augustine, 285, 324, 331, 342, 350, 353 Bloor, David, 55
Austin, John, 288 Blumenberg, Hans, xxvii, 45, 55, 59, 60,
Avenarius, Richard, xxv 340–342
Ayer, Alfred, 283, 288, 292 Boeckh, August, xv, 66
Boeder, Heribert, 233
Boethius, xxix, 283–285, 293, 294
B Bohm, David, 197
Babich, Babette, xvi, 71, 156, 164, 170, 172, Bohr, Niels, 105, 106, 196, 197, 301, 304
184, 210 Bollnow, Otto Friedrich, xv
Bachelard, Gaston, xix Boltzmann, Ludwig, 123, 128
Bacon, Francis, 377 Bontekoe, Ronald, xv
Baeumler, Alfred, 118 Boss, Medard, 196
Barash, Jeffrey, 356 Botticelli, Sandro, 277–280
Barbarič, Daniel, xvi Bourdieu, Pierre, 55, 58

B. Babich and D. Ginev (eds.), The Multidimensionality of Hermeneutic Phenomenology, 393

Contributions to Phenomenology 70, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-01707-5,
© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014
394 Index

Bracken, Anthony, 103 Detienne, Marcel, 218

Brentano, Franz, 240 Dilthey, Wilhem, xv, xvii–xviii, 50. 175, 267,
Brieskorn, Egbert, 117 270, 280, 360, 361
Bröcker, Walter, 218 Dirac, Paul, 91, 97, 103, 105–107
Brouwer, Luitzen, 118 Dodd, James, 52, 57
Bultmann, Rudolf, 8, 322, 331 Donald, Merlin, 94
Burckhardt, Jacob, 342, 343 Drummond, John, 53
Butler, Joseph, 283, 286 Duchamp, Marcel, 366
Büttgen, Philippe, 349 Duesberg, Peter, xviii
Byrnes, Heidi, 91 Dühring, Eugen, 115, 121, 126

C E
Cambridge University Press, 158 Eger, Martin, xix
Cantor, Georg, 128, 132 Einstein, Martin, 8, 91–93, 196, 198, 200, 301,
Caputo, John, 155, 173 304, 310, 313, 380, 381
Carnap, Rudolf, 156, 175, 288 Ellul, Jacques, xix, 167
Carnot, Nicolas, 120 Epple, Moritz, 117, 133
Carr, David, 50 Euclid, 95–97
Carson, Catherine, 190, 195 Eutyches, 283
Cartwright, Nancy, xix, 75
Cassirer, Ernst, viii, 8, 99
Cavaillès, Jean, 64 F
Caws, Peter, xix Fasol-Boltzmann, Ilse, 123
Celan, Paul, 161 Faye, Jan, xxix, 271
Châtelet, Gilles, 310 Féhér, Istvan, xv
Chickering, Roger, 161 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 287
Chopra, Deepak, 166 Feyerabend, Paul, xix, 7, 155
Christ, Jesus, 277–280, 283, 285, 317f, Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 158, 173, 287, 331
321–325, 345, 346 Figal, Günter, xv, 154
Churchland, Patricia or Paul, xviii Fink, Eugen, 62
Claesges, Ulrich, 61 Flachar, Helmut, xv
Classen, Johannes, 233 Fleck, Ludwik, 44, 58, 105, 209
Confucius, 199 Føllesdal, Dagfinn, xix
Corbier, Christoph, xvi Foucault, Michel, 64
Crease, Robert, xix, xxvii, 81 Frege, Gottlob, 289
Crivelli, Paolo, 229, 232, 237, 239 Freud, Sigmund, 209, 366, 367, 374–376
Croce, Benedetto, 354 Freundlieb, Dieter, xix
Crowell, Stephen, 84 Fried, Gregory, 139
Cusanus, 330–332 Friedlander, Paul, 233–234
Friedman, Michael, 156
Frodeman, Robert, xviii, xxvii, 71
D Fuller, Steve, xix
Da Vinci, Leonardo, 83, 365, 366, 370
Dahlstrom, Daniel, 173
Damascene, John, 285–286 G
David, Paul, 75 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, xv–xvi, xviii, xx, xxii,
Davidson, Donald, xxix, 243–265 160, 161, 175, 211, 270, 271, 280, 281,
Dea, Shannon, 190 318, 332, 333, 363, 365, 374, 377
Del Negro, Walter, xix Galileo, 96, 190, 194, 200, 299, 305, 309, 310,
Delcourt, Marie, 218 314, 381
Depardieu, Gérard, 167 Gander, Hans-Helmuth, xv
Derrida, Jacques, 62, 172, 364, 377 Garvey, James, xviii
Descartes, René, 191, 200, 286, 300, 303, 307, Gasché, Rodolphe, xvii, xxx
309, 314, 331 Gasset, Ortegay, 314
Index 395

Geertz, Clifford, 104 Hempel, Carl, 268, 271, 277

Georg, Stefan, 146 Henrich, Dieter, 339
Gethman, Carl F., xix, 155 Heraclitus, 97, 213, 217–220, 324, 360
Gibson, James J., 95–97 Hermes, 359
Giere, Ronald, xix, 71 Hesse, Mary, vii, 155
Gilbert, G. Nigel, 14 Hilbert, David, xxvi, 105–109, 300
Ginev, Dimitri, xviii, xix, xxi, xxvi Hirsch, E.D., xv
Giuhliano, Antonello, 119 Hitchcock, Alfred, 369
Glazebrook, Patricia, xix, 156, 184 Hitler, Adolf, 212, 367
Glynn, Simon, xxii, xxx, 377 Hobbes, Thomas, 287
Gnilka, Joachim, 351 Hofer, Veronika, 133
Gödel, Kurt, xx, 376 Hofstadter, Albert, 140, 148
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 185 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 62, 85, 146, 178, 216,
Goetschl, Willi, 173 219, 324, 328
Goodman, Nelson, 71 Homer, 213, 219
Gordon, Peter, 156 Horkheimer, Max, 163, 168
Gould, Stephen Jay, 72, 84 Horstmann, Axel E.A., xv
Granier, Jean, xix Hosoya, Sadao, 355
Grathoff, Richard, 54 How, Alan, 377
Grayling, A.C., 291 Hübner, Kurt, xix, 7
Gregory of Nyssa, 324 Hull, David, 76
Grondin, Jean, xx Hume, David, xxix, 283, 286, 288, 289, 383
Gross, Allan G., xxii Husserl, Edmund, xv–xvi, xx, xxiii, xxvi–
Großmann, Andreas, 217 xxvii, 32–41, 49–67, 91–95, 155, 209,
Gründer, Karlfried, xv 221, 302, 311, 314, 379
Guzzoni, Ute, 156, 184

I
H IBM (Big Blue), 94
Habermas, Jürgen, 172, 376–378 Ihde, Don, 185, 187, 193, 195, 198
Hacker, P.M.S. xviii IKEA, 159
Hacking, Ian, xix, 58 Inkpen, Robert J., 71
Haeckel, Ernst, xviii Irwin, Terence, 232
Hardy, Lee, xix
Harré, Rom, xviii, 71
Hartmann, Nicolai, v J
Hassemer, Winfried, xv Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 173
Haugeland, John, 8 Jaeger, Werner, 237, 239
Hausdorff, Felix, xxvii, 113, 114, 116–118 James, William, 378
Hawking, Stephen, xviii Janicaud, Dominque, 155
Hebel, Johann Peter, 185 Janich, Peter, xix
Heelan, Patrick Aidan, xvii, xix, xx–xxiii, Jaspers, Karl, xvii, 154
xxvii, 92, 95, 96, 155, 156 John, Saint, 278, 279
Hegel, Georg W.F., xvii, xxvii, 158, 219, 287, Jünger, Ernst, 139, 211
328, 331, 334, 337, 342, 343 Jünger, Friedrich Georg, xxviii, 167–169, 212
Heidegger, Martin, v, xv–xviii, xxv–xxviii, 8,
9, 11, 73–75, 81, 82, 85, 93, 96, 97,
114, 137–150, 153–179, 183–203, K
207–222, 227–241, 244–265, 269, 293, Kahn, Charles, 217
314, 317–337, 355, 359–362 Kant, Immanuel, xx, xxvi, xxvii, xxx, 4, 91,
Heidelberg, Michael, 44 106, 126, 127, 155–156, 173, 174,
Heisenberg, Werner, 91–93, 195–197, 214, 253–255, 287, 304, 308, 309, 328, 331,
220, 301, 380, 381 352, 362, 379
Heitsch, Ernst, 233, 234 Kaulbach, Friedrich, xix
Held, Klaus, 56, 58, 218 Keith, William M., xxii
396 Index

Kerszberg, Pierre, xix, xxix–xxx M

Kierkegaard, Søren, 287 Ma, Lin, xxviii, 186, 199
Kisiel, Theodor, xix, xxiii, xxv, xxvii–xxviii, Macann, Christopher, 212
57, 93, 95, 99, 155–156 Mach, Ernst, xxv
Kittler, Friedrich, 171 MacNeill, William, 156
Kitts, David B., 71 Macquarrie, John, 155, 158
Kleinberg, Ethan, 156 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 213
Knorr-Cetina, Karen, 75 Malpas, Jeff, xxix, 244, 252–254, 258, 264
Kochan, Jeff, 185 Manheim, Ralph, 155
Kockelmans, Joseph, v–xi, xv–xvii, 7–9, 91–93, Mantzavinos, Chrysostomos, xxii
99, 101, 154–156, 190–192, 227, 228, Marcovich, Miroslav, 217, 218
237, 239, 243–245, 265, 318 Margulis, Lynn, xviii
Koepping, Klaus-Peter, 373 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 168
Kojima, Takehiko, 189 Maritain, Jacques, 286
Köselitz, Heinrich, 115, 128, 132 Markus, György, xxi–xxii
Kreuzer, Conradin, 146 Martin, Bernd, 154
Kripke, Saul, xxix, 283, 289, 290 Marx, Karl, 165–166, 169, 287, 342, 366,
Kuhn, Thomas, 45, 155, 342, 344 367, 375
Kula, Witold, 82 Massey, Doreen, 72
Maxwell, James Clerk, 310, 312, 313
Mayer, Robert Julius, xix
L McLuhan, Marshall, 96
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 166, 172, 217 McPhee, John, 71
Lafont, Christina, 244–247 McTaggart, John M.E., 126
Lakatos, Imre, 155, 382 Mensch, James, 53
Landgrebe, Ludwig, 49 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, xix, xx, 73, 94–95,
Landsberg, Paul, 292 97, 100, 102, 268, 378
Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 124, 174 Meunier, Roger, 203
Latour, Bruno, xix, 185 Minkowski, Hermann, 312, 313
Laudan, Rachel, 71 Mitchell, Andrew, 158
Lazarsfeld, Paul, 163 Mitchell, Peter, 13–23
Lefort, Claude, 198 Mittasch, Alwin, xix
Leghissa, Giovanni, xv, xxvi, 66 Moewus, Franz, xviii
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, xxviii, 171, 208, Mohanty, Jitendra Nath, 57, 234
209, 220, 286, 289, 312, 331 Mongré, Paul (see also Hausdorff, Felix),
Leiter, Brian, 72 xxvii, 113, 116, 128
Lenk, Hans, xix Moules, Nancy J., xxii
Levin, Thomas Y., 163 Mounier, Emmanuel, 292
Levinas, Emmanuel, 172 Mulkay, Michael, 14
Lewis, David, 291 Müller, Sabine, xvii
Liesenfeld, Cornelia, 220 Müller, Severin, 209
Locke, John, 286, 287 Müller-Lauter, Wolfgang, xvii
Lonergan, Bernard, 95, 97 Munitz, Milton K., 289
Lorentz, Hendrik, 312, 313
Loschmidt, Joseph, 123
Lovitt, William, 140, 158 N
Löw, Reinhardt, xix Nagy, Gregory, 218
Löwith, Karl, xvii, xxx, 119, 339–357 Nernst, Walter, 122
Lucchitta, Ivo, 76 Neske, 157
Luckmann, Thomas, xxvi, 31, 33–35, Nestorius, 283
40–43, 369 Newman, John Cardinal, 331
Luhmann, Niklaus, 55 Newton, Isaac, 3, 8, 191, 194, 200,
Luther, Martin, 322–324, 326 300, 303
Lyon, James K., 161 Nicholson, Graeme, xxix, 166
Index 397

Nietzsche, Friedrich, xv–xix, xxv, xxvii, R

113–118, 158, 169–171, 190, 210, 219, Radder, Hans, 44
304, 305, 318, 328, 346, 355, 356, 377 Radnitzky, Gerard, xix
Nijhoff, 156 Rapaport, Herman, 161
Nordmann, Alfred, xix, xxii Reichenbach, Hans, 277
Nulty, Timothy J., 249 Reid, Thomas, 286
Nussbaum, Martha, xxix, 283, 294 Reinhardt, Karl, xvii
Rescher, Nicholas, xx, xxvi
Rey, Abel, xxvii, 113, 114, 116, 124, 125
O Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg, 12, 23, 102
Oedipus, 209–211, 220, 366 Richard of St. Victor, 286
Okrent, Mark, 249 Richardson, William J., 146, 154, 155,
Oreskes, Naiomi, 71, 77 175, 177
Origen, 330 Richter, Ewald, 155
Orpheus, 219 Ricoeur, Paul, xxix, 49, 77, 283, 292, 293,
Ostwald, Martin, 232 371, 373, 383
Ostwald, Wilhelm, 120, 129 Riemann, Bernhard, 95, 121, 129
Overbeck, Franz, xxx, 318, 320 Riis, Søren, 197, 198
Owens, Joseph, 240 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 172
Robinson, Edward, 155, 158
Rockmore, Tom, 172, 212
P Rojcewicz, Richard, 200
Packard, Vance, 163 Rorty, Richard, xviii, xxiv
Parfit, Derek, xxix, 283, 288, 290, 292 Rosmini, Antonio, 286
Parmenides, 216, 217, 324, 330, 360 Ross, W.D., 232, 237, 239–240
Paul, St., 207, 208, 323, 326 Rouse, Joseph, xix
Pauling, Linus, 15 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 287
Peperzak, Adriaan, xvi, xxx, 329 Rudwick, Martin J.S., 73
Pickering, Andrew, 75 Russell, Bertrand, 288
Piecha, Detlev, 118 Ryckman, Thomas, 101
Pierce, C.S., 380 Ryle, Gilbert, 288
Pindar, 221
Plato, 70, 106, 200, 208, 212, 213, 227, 233,
330, 332, 334, 359 S
Plessner, Helmuth, 211, 372, 373 Safranski, Rüdiger, 154
Plotinus, 330–332 Salanskis, Jean-Michel, xx
Plutarch, 218 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 156
Pöggeler, Otto, xxiv, 212, 220 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 361
Poincaré, Henri, 129 Savonarola, Girolamo, 279, 280
Polanyi, Michael, 268, 379, 381 Sawyer, Tom, 160
Polkinghorne, 361 Scerri, Eric, xviii
Polt, Richard, 139, 174 Scheler, Max, 377
Popper, Karl, 277, 382 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph,
Poschl, Viktor, xv 287, 331
Prebble, John, 17, 18, 22 Schiemann, Gregor, xxvi, 46
Pribram, Karl, 96, 99 Schirmacher, Wolfgang, 172
Proclus, 331 Schlageter, Albert Leo, 150
Prometheus, 347 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, xv, xxvii, 91, 270
Putnam, Hilary, 290 Schlick, Moritz, 117
Schmid, Holger, xxviii–xxix, 184, 214
Schmitz, Hermann, 46, 209
Q Schopenhauer, Arthur, 126, 127
Quine, Willard van Orman, 289, Schrag, Calvin, 361
291, 292 Schrödinger, Erwin, 92, 97, 106, 121, 302–305
398 Index

Schumm, Stanley, 72 V
Schürmann, Reiner, 216 Vaihinger, Hans, xix
Schütz, Alfred, xxvi, 31–37, 40–43, 368, 369 van Brakel, Jaap, xviii, xxviii
Schuurman, Egbert, 265 van Fraassen, Bas, vii, xix, xxiv
Schwemmer, Oswald, 36 van Gogh, Vincent, 95
Scotus, Duns, 331 van Tongeren, Paul, xvii
Seebohm, Thomas, xv–xvi, xix Vattimo, Paul, xix
Seigfried, Hans, 155 Vogt, Johann Gustav, 120
Sen, Amartya, 294 Volpi, Franco, 212
Seneca, xvi Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 342, 350, 351
Serres, Michel, xix Von der Linn, Michael, 163
Seubold, Günter, 212 von Helmholtz, Hermann, xx, 95, 119
Sheldrake, Rupert, xviii von Humboldt, Wilhelm, vx, xviii, 213, 214
Simmel, Georg, 373 von Mises, Ludwig, 114
Simons, Peter, 291 von Neumann, John, 91, 103, 106
Sloane, Eric, 159 von Stauffenberg, Claus, 146
Smith, Adam, 166 von Weizsäcker, Carl Friedrich, xix
Smith, William H., 245–247 von Wright, Georg Henrik, xvii
Smythe, Dallas Walker, 163–164
Socrates, 208, 209
Spinoza, Baruch, 286, 331 W
Stadler, Friedrich, 127 Warman, Matt, xviii
Stambaugh, Joan, 143 Weber, Marcel, 13–15
Stanley, Wendell, 193 Weber, Max, 175
Stapleton, Timothy, xxiv Welton, Donn, 95
Stegmaier, Werner, 51, 115, 128 White, Hayden, 76
Steiner, Rudolf, 115 Whitman, James Q., xv
Steinle, Frierich, 44 Wiggins, David, xxix, 283, 290–292
Stengers, Isabel, xix Wigner, Eugene, 91, 92, 97, 103, 105–107
Stölzner, Michael, xxvii, 127 Willard, Dallas, 57
Strauß, David, 318 Williams, Bernard, 104, 290, 292
Strawson, Peter F., 288, 289, 291 Winch, Peter, 55
Ströker, Elisabeth, 50, 57, 64 Winner, Langdon, 162
Synge, John, 92 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 260, 288
Szanton, Andrew, 94 Wolf, Friedrich August, 66
Szilasi, Wilhelm, xxi Wolin, Richard, 172
Wrathal, Mark, 244–246, 256

T
Tarantino, Giancarlo, 330 Y
Tarski, Alfred, 261 Yeats, William Butler, 172
Taylor, Charles, 43
Theunissen, Michael, 221
Thiel, Karsten, 253 Z
Thomson, Ian, 185 Zahavi, Dan, 51
Tieszen, Richard, xx, xxiii Zermelo, Ernst, 113, 123
Tomasello, Michael, 99 Zigong, 199
Torricelli, Evangelista, 308, 309 Ziman, John, xix
Toyota, 142 Zimmerman, Michael, 197, 212
Tugendhat, Ernst, 243–247 Zöller, Johann Carl Friedrich, 121, 122