Autor: Walsh, David

Buch: The Third Millenium

Titel: The Third Millenium

Stichwort: Seinsvergessenheit - Wissenschaften, Heidegger

Kurzinhalt: Forgetfulness Being; he (Heidegger) saw what most of contemporary science has yet to glimpse?that science itself would become impossible if an order of givenness is eliminated

Textausschnitt: 94a Forgetfulness of the boundary of Being is therefore a source of greater distortion in the human sciences than in the natural sciences. In the former, it deforms our capacity to view the reality before us; in the latter, it merely affects our background presuppositions. For it makes a substantive difference whether one conceives of the radical inexhaustibility of each human being or not. Without the constitution through the glance of transcendent openness, human history could become a finite realm in which progress can reach its culmination, evil be eradicated, and happiness achieved. Human beings could be rendered in terms of the aggregation of their attributes, influences, and contributions. Rights would be susceptible of limits, and a definitive order might be imposed as the guaranteed attainment of universal fulfillment. The logic of the social sciences as an analysis of phenomenal relationships between human beings might finally reach its conclusion in a science of the techniques of universal rational control. Only the questions "for what?" or "for whom?" cause a hesitation in this smooth unfolding. When man too has been subsumed into science, then we seem to be left without an ostensible beneficiary of such useful knowledge. (Fs)

95a The crisis of a manipulative social science draws us deeper into the problematic of a bounded science as such. This is a problem shared across the disciplines. Sciences that operate without reference to anything beyond themselves inevitably run into difficulties in defining the reality of their study. As sciences, they cannot do more than begin with the reality that is given, but then they cannot use their instruments of analysis to probe the givenness of what has been given. To do so, they would have to leap outside of their own area of competence, since they cannot utilize the principles derived from the given reality to elucidate what lies behind the givenness. Any empirical discipline develops its analysis in relation to what is there; it can never legitimately extend those analyses into the derivation of that order of reality from another. This is the whole set of problems that arise under the heading of reductionism. They run the gamut from the consciousness-physiology problems to the search for the secret of life and the origin of the universe. Strictly speaking, they are nonproblems because they are incapable of explication in terms of the sciences involved. But they are not nonproblems in terms of human curiosity. They are irresistible in that sense, because our minds are inevitably drawn toward what lies beyond the limits of any field of investigation. We can scarcely avoid peering over from one realm into another, nor assuming that methods proven successful in one area can fruitfully be extended elsewhere. (Fs)

95b But they cannot. Despite the liveliness of current controversies, successful scientists recognize that the rationality of their disciplines is dependent on the restraint of their ambitions to the modest purview of what is given. The illegitimate extrapolation beyond such boundaries-a temptation that is reinforced through the ubiquitous extension of technological control-is an abyss from which nothing returns. Not only is it impossible to penetrate beyond the givenness of a reality stratified from conceptual thought to subatomic particles, but the attempt to do so is tantamount to the destruction of science itself. Without a relatively stable realm of reality for investigation, there would be no science. If all is reduced to a promiscuous fluidity of levels and dimensions where chemicals can become alive and neutrons can bear thoughts and stars have feelings, then the lines of demarcation within which science can explore relationships would disappear. Analysis of phenomenal relationships and the identification of the laws of their regularity cannot proceed unless the levels of reality remain constant. At the very minimum, the phenomena themselves must be susceptible of an identification that does not prove to be evanescent. If all reality was to be explained in terms of the laws of physics, then our understanding would be poorer, not richer, and we might have good reason for suspecting that the physical constancies were themselves merely provisional for something else. The rationality of the sciences is crucially dependent on the recognition of the richly multilayered character of the reality within which they move. (Fs)

96a It is, of course, an inevitable side effect of the detachment of scientific objectivity and of the technological tools generated by it that we would be inclined to imagine a point at which we could stand outside of reality as a whole. If one can exercise partial detachment, why not total? The answer is that our partial detachment presupposes a whole within which it occurs. This is the response to the widespread suggestion that modern science ultimately undermines an order of nature, both conceptually and practically. This was the problem that so obsessed Heidegger and is at the heart of the modern world. He saw what most of contemporary science has yet to glimpse?that science itself would become impossible if an order of givenness is eliminated. Science explores the relations within the givenness of reality, but, if everything is now to be derived from the manipulations of scientific technology, then there is no longer a realm for investigation. All is open to construction. The postmodern understanding of meaning, where nothing refers and everything is constructed, would extend to the so-called hard sciences as well. We would live within a reality that is available for comprehensive reconstruction at our will. But we know that even our technology?the sphere in which this constructivist impulse is most advanced?cannot live up to its grandiose self-image. Rhetoric aside, we do not create life any more than we can engineer human beings. Our technology consists of manipulating what is there and crucially presupposes an order that is given and disclosed through the investigation of science. We may extrapolate toward the dispensability of nature, but we cannot reach it without eliminating the possibility of our extension of control. (Fs) (notabene)