Trish Glazebrook-Heidegger's Philosophy of Science (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy) (2000)

Heidegger's Philosophy of Science

TRISH GLAZEBROOK

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Fordham University Press New York

2000

Copyright 2000 by Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means-electronic,

mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other-except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Perspectives in Continental Philosophy No. 12 ISSN 1089-3938

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Glazebrook, Trish. Heidegger's philosophy of science I Trish Glazebrook.-1st ed.

p. cm.-(Perspectives in continental philosophy; no. 12) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8232-2037-0 (hc)-ISBN 0-8232-2038-9 (pbk.)

1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976-{:ontributions in philosophy of science. 2. Science-Philosophy-History-20th century. l. Title. II. Series. B3279.H49 G57 2000 193-

For Geoffrey and Norma

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix

Abbreviations xi

Introduction 1

1. Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Science 14 Husser!: Philosophy As Rigorous Science 20 Kant and Metaphysics: Grounding Science 25 Synthetic A Priori Judgments 36 The Thing and Copernican Revolution 41 The A Priori 47 Mathematical Projection: Galileo and Newton 51 Metaphysics and the Mathematical 60 Conclusion 63

2. Experiment and Representation Crucial Experiments 73 Experiment and Experience 84 Violence 96 Setting Up the Real: Exact Science 104 Representation 112 Conclusion 117

3. Science in the Institution The Nothing 124 Destiny as Nihilism 131 Self-Assertion: Knowing versus Amassing

lnformation 139 The Threat of Science 148 Valuative Thinking and Disillusionment 156 Conclusion 159

65

119

viii CONTENTS

4. Ancient Science uoU; As Truth 165 Aristotle's Analogy of Being 179 Theoretical versus Productive Knowledge 184 uvaflEL ov 191 uoU; and lEXVI') 199 Conclusion 205

5. Science and Technology Epoch and Essence 209 "Science Does Not Think" 214 Thinking As Thanking: Being and Being

Represented 224 The Theory of the Real 232 Ge-stell 240 Quantum Theory 247 Conclusion 251

Bibliography

Index

Index of Greek Expressions

163

207

255

267

277

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are many people to thank for their support and assistance during the time I have been working on this book. Research was funded by the University of Toronto, the government of Ontario, and the German government, and further supported by the Department of Philosophy at Auckland University. I could not have done without the productive commentary, advice, and discussion on the entire manuscript that I got from Graeme Nicholson, Rebecca Comay, Will McNeill, and Dan Dahlstrom. Their close readings and prompt responses were indispensable to the development of this book. I am further indebted to Will McNeill for his enthusiastic and precise suggestions on translation. I am grateful to Father Joseph Owens for teaching me to love Aristotle. Jim Brown's support at the University of Toronto was supererogatory, and lowe Ian Hacking a great deal for his contribution to my understanding of the philosophy of science, despite his dislike of both Heidegger and this project. Jim Wetzel and Marilyn Thie read and commented helpfully on individual chapters. I wish I knew the names of those who asked questions on the chapter on experimentation at the Ontario Philosophical Association meeting at Waterloo University in 1993. Their comments were useful. Likewise my critique of Heidegger's reading of Aristotle was all the better for rigorous scrutiny at the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in New Orleans in 1993 (on

x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1991. In particular, I wish to thank Jack Caputo, whose ongoing support of this work has been crucial to its completion.

On a more personal note, thanks to Brian Hackeson for keeping my computer running, to George Hendry for all those lunches, to Louise Signal for spunk and chocolate biscuits, to Ann Saddlemeyer and the residents of Massey College, to Jacques Bismuth for backgammon, and to Rachel Boyington, who kept things in perspective by sharing the first weeks of her life with me as I completed the original draft.

My deepest debts of love and life are to Geoff and Norma Rotenberg, and it is to their memory that I dedicate this book.

AM An Post AWP BC BCP

BdW BPP BT BW CPR EGT EM EN ET FCM FD FT G GM GP H HCT IM K KM KPM MAL Met MFL MNST

ABBREVIATIONS

Aristoteles, Metaphysik IX. 1-3 Posterior Analytics "The Age of the World Picture," in QCT Basic Concepts (G) "On the Being and Conception of

xii

MSMM

N NI NIl PA PGZ Phys PRS QCT SA SR SU

SZ VA W WCT WHD WM WMp ww ZG

ABBREVIATIONS

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

Heidegger's Philosophy of Science

INTRODUCTION

"ON THE LONGEST DAY he ever Jived," said Father Richardson, "Heidegger could never be called a philosopher of science" (1968:511). W hat exactly does it mean, to be a philosopher of science? The label received widespread adoption only in the late 1950s, and one of the few things philosophers of science agree upon is that the discipline is not clearly demarcated. The breadth and diversity of philosophy of science is due in large part to the fact that the term " science" itself covers a wide range of practices and modes of thought. Social science, for example, may be no more scientific than the sociology of science is philosophical, or just as scientific as the latter is philosophicaL One thing is clear: the task of the philosopher of science is, at least in part, to ask what constitutes science.

Heidegger is certainly a philosopher of science in this respect. Over several decades he explores the thesis that science is the mathematical projection of nature. From its incipience in "Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft," to its full formulation in Being and Time, to the analysis of representation in "The Age of the World Picture," to the entanglement with technology in What Is Called Thinking?, to the setting up of the real in "Science and Reflection," the idea that science is the mathematical projection of nature runs throughout Heidegger's work as a background against which his critique of modernity unfolds. This conception of science binds together his thinking of the question of science over sixty years.

The several analyses of science that Heidegger undertakes during his life have been remarked on and described, but never interpreted as a coherent movement throughout his thought. John Caputo has argued that there are two essences of science in Heidegger's work: a hermeneutic one and a deconstructive one. The former he uncovers in Being and Time and suggests is an "existential genealogy" (1986:44), inseparably bound to an alleg-

2 INTRODUCTION

edly pure logic of science, that explores the genesis of science in the historical life of the scientist. This essence is subsequently suppressed in Heidegger's thought, Caputo argues, by the deconstructive sense, "which signifies an entire understanding of man and world, of being and truth" (1986:44). Caputo intends to correct a misunderstanding in which Heidegger is taken as hostile to science by showing instead that Heidegger sought to critique and delimit science in its deconstructive sense.

My reading of Heidegger's philosophy of science is sympathetic to Caputo's account. Heidegger was not well versed in science, as Patrick Heelan has underscored (1995:579). Yet I resist apologism. Heidegger's continual rethinking of the question of science is not a naive non-scientist's condemnation, for which greater technical expertise would be necessary to achieve validity. Rather, his contribution to philosophy of science is his insight into the extent to which science underwrites modernity. By laying out a sustained analysis of Heidegger's philosophy of science, I extend Caputo's reading even further. I expose the hermeneutic and deconstructive essences of science in Heidegger's early and late work, respectively, and furthermore suggest a transitional period in Heidegger's thinking in order to trace how it develops from the former to the latter.

Theodore Kisiel has also uncovered several-three, in factessences of science in Heidegger's work. The earliest he calls a logical conception, and I find it in a 1916 text, "Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft." He describes two further essences of science from Being and Time: an existential one, which is much like Caputo's hermeneutic; and a metaphysical or epochal conception, which he locates in the unpublished Part Two of the book and claims is later elaborated under the rubric "overcoming metaphysics" (Kisiel 1977:163). Heidegger's later analysis of modem science is a critique of the nihilistic metaphysics of subjectivity that he holds is essential to modem science. He holds that science informs modernity, and hence his critique is ultimately, as Kisiel suggests, an attempt to expose, and therefore to overcome, the metaphysics of the modem epoch.

These different but not discordant accounts of the various essences of science in Heidegger's work uncover the complexity of his thinking on the question of science. His thesis that the es-

INTRODUCfION 3

sence of science is the mathematical projection of nature does not fail so much as it calls for reformulation when he realizes that the relation between thinking and science is not what he had previously taken it to be. That relation was expressed by the thesis that philosophy is itself a science. This claim is not as simple as it may seem.

Naturwissenschajt is natural or physical science, for which physics is paradigmatic. But Wissenschajt also sounds of Geisteswissenschajt, the arts or humanities. For the early Heidegger, struggling against the yoke of transcendental idealism, these two conceptions are entangled in his attempt to ground the sciences in metaphysics and his thesis that philosophy is itself a science. When the attempt fails, Heidegger leaves behind that thesis. What remains is a specific, if not always precise and never entirely static, topic: the question of the nature of science. At issue here is Naturwissenschajt-specifically, the mathematical physics of modernity that begins with Galileo, flourishes under Newton, and has its quintessential expression in quantum theory.

Yet philosophy of science is more than a battle to draw the borders of science. It is also an inquiry into several sets of questions: the logic of discovery, proof, and method; the metaphysical and epistemological suppositions of scientific knowledge; the historical genesis and development of the experiment; the political consequences of institutionalized science; and the nature and limits of theory. Not only can each of these constellations of inquiry be traced throughout Heidegger's work, but also that work can be bridged to the analytic tradition of philosophy of science. How are Kuhn's "paradigms" different from Heidegger's "basic concepts," and from Ge-stell? What conclusions does Heidegger take from his insight, shared with Hacking, that experiments both represent and intervene? Where does Heidegger stand in the realist debate? on the existence of crucial experiments? on the role of mathematics in modem physical science? These are questions that can be answered out of Heidegger's philosophy of science.

It would be ludicrous and tedious, however, to suggest that Heidegger has a view on every issue taken up by the analytics. He says almost nothing explicitly, for example, about the prob-

4 INTRODUCTION

lem of induction, the relation between the philosophy and the history of science, the nature of probability, the logical foundations of statistical inference, and the function of explanation. Yet neither does, nor even could, each analytic philosopher of science treat every issue that falls under the rubric of philosophy of science. Certainly Heidegger has enough to say on a broad range of topics pertaining to science that I can defend the claim that he has a philosophy of science on the superficial basis of the number and variety of way he addresses the issue. I will, however, argue more deeply for Heidegger's philosophy of science by mapping its content, and by locating his thinking in the analytic discourse.

Accordingly, I share none of Father Richardson's reluctance to call Heidegger a philosopher of science. The infamous distinction Father Richardson drew between Heidegger I and Heidegger II was a useful and insightful tool for seeing changes and transitions, breaks, and abandonments in Heidegger's ongoing work. Yet now, some twenty-odd years after Heidegger's death, when Father Richardson himself (1997:18) has grown uncomfortable with the division, I emphasize rather the continuity in Heidegger's work: the question of natural science is a constant and continuous support against which Heidegger's thinking develops and grows.

Certainly, as Karlfried Grunder has claimed, the "problem of the essence, possibility, and limitations of science pervades all his writings published to date" (1963:18). The earliest entry in the Gesamtausgabe uses the "dazzling results [gliinzenden Erfolgen]" ("Realitatsproblem" 3) of scientific practice to press the problem of realism. In reportedly the last thing Heidegger wrote before his death, he questioned the relation between science and technology (MNST 1-2). In the sixty-four years between these two texts, natural science is ubiquitously peripheral and regularly central to his thought.

Yet an analysis of the significance of the question of natural science to Heidegger's thought, though overdue, has not been worked out. Indeed, whereas treatments of Heidegger's critique of technology abound, his lifelong entanglement with issues concerning the natural sciences has remained largely neglected. There is a growing body of papers on the topic, but a systematic,

INTRODUCTION 5

sustained account of the development of Heidegger's treatment of science is missing. This book is aimed precisely at addressing that gap by demonstrating both the significance of science to Heidegger's thought and the contribution of that thought to philosophy of science. I show not only that Heidegger works extensively and systematically on questions concerning science, but also that his ongoing consideration of science guides and informs his work on other issues, especially his critique of technology. Further, I show that issues crucial to Heidegger's analysis are central in the analytic tradition of philosophy of science, and I bring his contribution to bear on that tradition. In a word, then, I intend to interpret Heidegger in a radically novel way: according to his philosophy of science.

The years in which Heidegger wrote can be divided into three distinct phases as philosophy of science: the early view, extending into the 1930s, in which he held that philosophy is itself scientific; a transitional phase, in which he turns to questions of scientific practice and away from problems of philosophy, that is, from metaphysics to physics; and a later phase, from the 1950s onward, in which he locates the essence of science in the essence of technology. What binds these three periods together, such that they are one path of thinking rather than simply three different inquiries, is the notion that science is projective. In the early years, Heidegger understands such projection as the establishing of regional ontologies by means of basic concepts. During the transitional phase, he struggles to work out the projective nature of science by looking to the writings of Galileo and Newton. He talks not of basic concepts, but of the mathematical, which has been compared to the Kantian a priori (Kisiel 1973), but which Heidegger reformulates away from Kant's idealism. In the later years, Heidegger names what is projective in technology "Ge-stell," and argues that the essence of science is to be found in this essence of technology. Hence the three stages of Heidegger's critical inquiry into science have a unity insofar as each is a different formulation of its projective nature.

Heidegger's early inquiries into the projection at work in science are made against a Husserlian background. Philosophy is rigorous science for Heidegger, as it was for Husserl, rather than Weltanschauung philosophy. By using phenomenology as a sci-

6 INTRODUCTION

entific method for doing ontology, however, Heidegger rejects the bracketing of metaphysical issues for which Husserl's phenomenology called. He accepts Husserl's conception of regional ontology, in which the sciences define some realm of beings as their object by projecting a basic concept. But Heidegger further argues that metaphysics, in contrast to the sciences, takes being as its object. At the root of regional ontologies lies, then, fundamental ontology. Hence Heidegger calls scientific philosophy a pleonasm: ontology, as the exploration of the ground of the sciences, is already inherently scientific.

Yet this relation of grounding proves problematic to Heidegger as he attempts to understand it more deeply. The ground of science may be the projection of a realm of being, but Heidegger resists that the final word on science is idealism. The projective nature of modem science lies in the fact that the scientist proceeds on the basis of an idea, a hypothesis, rather than with the object. That is to say, a science that begins with a regional ontology is idealistic in that it is founded on an a priori conception of its object rather than on experience. Yet Heidegger no longer holds that such an a priori conception is necessary to all and every science. Rather, it is characteristic for him of modern science. He looks to uncover other possibilities for the essence of science: to answer how the essence of science can be projective without simply collapsing into idealism.

In the 1930s, Heidegger describes the essence of science as research. He argues that the transition from the ancient experience of nature to that of Galileo and Newton is the move from a realism in which qJ'lJOL, nature, is a priori-that is, prior to thought-to an idealism in which the a priori formulation of a hypothesis precedes the investigation of nature. His particular interest is the Cartesian establishing of certainty on the cogito that is paradigmatic of representational thinking, such that knowledge in modernity has its foundation in the thinking subject rather than in the thing known. This thesis is particularly significant as a critique of modem science, since the claim to certainty on the part of scientists surn as Newton and Bacon takes much of its force from the empirical nature of experimental science. The analysis of the essence of science as research leads Heidegger to argue that the experimental method is a set-

INTRODUCTION 7

ting up of nature on the basis of an a priori conception from which the appeal to the empirical is derivative. During this transitional phase, his developing insight into the essence of science as projective is that the projection at work in science sets up not only the realm of beings to be investigated, but also the epistemic criteria that determine what counts as knowledge in science.

In his later writings, Heidegger argues that the essence of science lies in the essence of technology. In a nutshell, he holds that the tripartite division of the history of Western thought so pervasive in his work-that is, the division into ancient, medieval, and modem epochs--culminates in modernity as the epoch of science and technology. He argues that technology is essentially a reformulation of the essence of science. Since Being and Time, Heidegger has argued that modem science projects an understanding onto nature. In that understanding, nature consists in spatiotemporally extended bodies subject to efficient causes. In 1940 he teaches that Aristotle held rather that nature is teleological. Final, much more so than efficient, causes are crucial to understanding nature in Aristotle's Physics. Only once nature has been rendered devoid of final causes-that is, devoid of end and purpose-by the modem scientific confinement to efficient causes, is nature available ideologically for appropriation to human ends and purposes in technology. Accordingly, the revealing of nature as a standing-reserve at the disposal of human being that is the essence of technology, is made possible by modem science.

Heidegger's ongoing critique of science is accordingly an account of the resolution of modernity into technology. It is a novel expression of what it might mean to be postrnodern which goes beyond a metaphysics of subjectivity to other possibilities for thinking and being. Heidegger recognizes that modem science is the historical, Western expression of the human desire to know. But he escapes the problem of cultural relativism that haunts post-Kuhnian philosophy of science by thinking it more deeply than the notion of worldview permits. He holds that modem science is a destiny; that is, it is definitive of a historical epoch in which being and human being unfold together in a metaphysics of subjectivity. There are other possibilities for knowledge in Heidegger's view. For example, the ancient inter-

8 INTRODUCTION

pretation of being as qJ1JOL reveals new beginnings latent in the epoch of science and technology, since that epoch can trace its origin to the ancient Greek world. Beyond representation lie thinking (Denken) and reflection (Besinnung).

By dividing Heidegger's analysis of the essence of science into an early, a transitional, and a late period, I will show not that there are several-and especially not two--Heideggers, but rather precisely that his work is an ongoing development. For indeed, these three periods in his thinking are bound together as an analysis of modem science and an uncovering of other possibilities for understanding nature. The role of representation in modem science-that is, the question of how scientific projection determines its object-is the decisive factor that underlies each account. I will trace the development of his thinking about science in five chapters. The remainder of this introduction first outlines the movement that binds these five chapters together and then summarizes the internal logic of each chapter.

In the first chapter, I explore the relation between metaphysics, mathematics, and science. I show how Heidegger rejects Kant's idealism as the basis on which to understand science. The next chapter lays out his argument that modem science is bound by the experimental method to a subjective metaphysics of representation. The third chapter explores his disillusionment with the university as the housing of the sciences and his questioning of the value of knowledge. The fourth chapter reads Heidegger on ancient science. I argue that the loss Heidegger sees in Plato and Aristotle of a pre-Socratic insight into q)'UOL, nature, provides him with a place for rethinking the essence of science in terms of possibilities that lie outside modem science. The final chapter analyzes Heidegger's account of the relation between science and technology in order to interpret his claim that the essence of science lies in the essence of technology. I conclude with a brief comment on quantum theory in which I make sense of Heidegger's denial that quantum physics is essentially different from Newtonian physics.

The first of the following chapters is an explication of Heidegger's early analysis of modem science, by which I mean his thinking in the years from 1916 to the mid-1930s. During these years Heidegger maintains, on the one hand (e.g., in Being and

INTRODUCTION 9

Time), that the essence of science is the mathematical projection of nature, and on the other hand (e.g., in Basic Problems of Phenomenology), that metaphysics is the science of being. The latter thesis becomes for Heidegger problematic as he attempts to ground the sciences in metaphysics in Kantian style. His account of metaphysics is very much tied up in his reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Having looked at this text several times already, he asks in 1935 in Die Frage nach dem Ding why it was both possible and necessary for Kant to write such a critique. At precisely the point in the course where he raises this question explicitly, he turns from Kant to Galileo and Newton. Kant's text is directed exactly at securing the certainty of Newton's physics through the synthetic a priori nature of Euclidean geometry. Yet Heidegger's analysis of the mathematical in modem science cuts more deeply than the claim that Newton's physics is mathematical insofar as it uses Euclidean geometry to describe nature. Rather, Heidegger finds in the mathematical the a priori projection of certainty. He concludes that science entails a binding together of a metaphysics and an epistemology; that is, he shows that modem science entails an a priori stance toward what can be known. He explores this stance by looking to the scientific method itself. Hence he turns from a consideration of metaphysics as a science to the sciences themselves.

The pivot by means of which Heidegger makes this tum is the experiment. Accordingly, the next chapter looks to the logic of scientific development and methodology. I read Heidegger as arguing that the empirical is not the experiential as qtltELQla was for Aristotle, and that the experimental method is a mathematical idealism. I raise three specific issues surrounding the experiment and locate Heidegger's treatment of these issues in the analytic debate. First, crucial experiments: is a single experimental result enough to prove or overturn a theory? Heidegger answers that it is. Second, the theory-Ioadedness of observation: does the informing of fact by theory preclude realism? Heidegger holds that it does not, but he displaces the debate. And third, representation in modem science: how does science represent its objects? Heidegger argues that it does so mathematically, but he radically revises that term. These issues lay a basis for Heidegger's later critique of technology in their treatment of represen-

10 INTRODUCTION

tation. Furthermore, they serve to explicate his claim that the essence of science is research, and to show that his central concerns are thematic in contemporary analytic philosophy of science.

The chapter on science in the institution investigates the Betriebscharakter of science. It is an account of Heidegger's view of the role of the sciences in the university, and of his analysis of the university as the housing of the sciences. His vision is that the German university, grounded in the essence of science, can serve to guide the historical destiny of human being. Since Heidegger holds that human being is definitively constituted as inquirer, and he takes modem human being to inquire first and foremost as scientist, he envisions the university as the institution in which human being realizes itself in the modem epoch. His disillusionment with that vision comes with the realization that, whereas he calls for a renewal of science for the sake of the sciences themselves in their service of human being and the history of being, the Nazi call for a renewal of the sciences is toward their own political ends in shaping the destiny of the German people. What little I have to say about Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism is found in this chapter.

The next chapter treats Heidegger's view of ancient science. I focus first on Heidegger's uncovering of being as

INTRODUCTION 11

on the basis of an internal drive. An artifact, however, requires something outside itself to bring it to fulfillment: an artist. This distinction echoes, Heidegger argues, the pre-Socratic understanding of being as q)1JOL, since it is as nature that being first and foremost comes to presence. Aristotle's understanding of nature as form and matter, however, despite the priority he assigns to form, opens up the possibility of understanding nature by analogy to artifact. As the human artisan imposes form onto matter in the creative act, so nature can be understood as having a creator. Things in nature can be experienced as artifacts of divine origin. This possibility of understanding nature is for Heidegger decisive to the subsequent history of the West. He reads Aristotle's Physics to rethink nature as more than an analogue of the artifact.

In the final chapter I turn to the question of the relation between modem science and technology and substantiate my argument that the ancient distinction between q)1JOL and 'tEXV1] is not sustained in the modem epoch. In 1966, in a letter to Professor Schrynemakers, Heidegger suggests three sets of questions to the participants of a symposium on the influence of his thinking. The first is the question posed in Being and Time of the meaning of being, whether that question has been taken up, if it is possible to do so, and how it characterizes his relation to the Western tradition of thinking. The second is the question of the limits of Being and Time, what an account of the epochs of being accomplishes as an interpretation of the age of technology. The third raises the issue of the relation of being to modem science. Heidegger hopes the symposium will work out one of these questions. I suggest that these three questions are different formulations of the same issue that cannot be worked out separately. Being, science, and technology are bound together in a critique of modernity.

Ten years later, in 1976, Heidegger formulates the question of science and technology as one question: "Is modem natural science the foundation of modem technology-as is supposed-or is it, for its part, already the basic form of technological thinking, the determining fore-conception and incessant incursion of technological representation into the realized and organized machinations of modem technology?" (MNST 3). In

12 INTRODUCTION

Heidegger's analysis, modem science is not simply the foundation of technology, but rather the basic form of technological thinking. His insight is that what was originally for the Greeks a difference so radical as to preclude identity through analogy is in modernity an unsustainable distinction. Hence Heidegger's claim that the essence of science lies in the essence of technology. I trace his account of the relation between the two and show how he understands the essence of technology to have arisen out of the essence of modem science. For modem science moves much like ancient "tEXVT]: the scientist begins with an idea which is then imposed onto nature.

I close with a short comment on Heidegger's view of quantum theory in which I argue that he recognizes no significant distinction between Newtonian physics and quantum mechanics. Although Heidegger understands the difference between the mathematics of each, he holds that definitive of Newtonian physics is its projection of nature as a coherence of forces calculable in advance. Quantum physics shares this projection in Heidegger's account. I use Bell's inequalities to assess Heidegger's analysis of quantum physics in order to ask whether his view holds beyond the science of his day into more recent developments in quantum theory.

It is impossible to pursue Heidegger's philosophy of science without encountering the questions of metaphysics, technology, and representational thinking. This is not because Heidegger's account of science is derivative upon these other issues, but rather because his developing views on science underlie these issues that are so Significant to his thought. Although a substantial body of literature has developed in recent years on the question of Heidegger's analysis of science, no text to date has systematically explored its place in his thinking. Griinder's claim that the problem of science pervades Heidegger's writings continues to hold true beyond 1956 when Griinder made it. I show that the question of science is foundationally informative of Heidegger's work and is basic to a novel and coherent, systematic account of his thinking, as well as a contribution to philosophy of science.

This reading of Heidegger is radical. It cuts to the root of his thinking, for I argue that what are taken to be Heidegger's many

INTRODUCTION 13

and significant contributions to philosophy-that is, his overcoming of metaphysics, his rereading of the ancients, his critique of technology and representational thinking, his vision and revision of language, truth and thinking-have at their core an inquiry into science that drove his thinking for sixty years. I am not arguing for a new reading of a few texts, or for adjustments and refinements of existing readings of Heidegger. Rather, I am bringing to light a new basis on which to interpret his work as a whole. I am not suggesting that there do not exist already insightful and important interpretations of his work. Heidegger may be right that "Every thinker thinks one only thought" (WeT 50/WHD 58), but the richness of the history of philosophy speaks to the multiple possibilities for envisioning such a thought. I read Heidegger's thought as a philosophy of science.

1

Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Science

HEIDEGGER'S ACCOUNT of science can be concisely expressed by the thesis that modem natural science consists in the mathematical projection of nature. This view is evident as early as 1916 in "Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft," where he distinguishes history from natural science on the basis of the projection of the time concept in each. It is explicit in 69 of Being and Time, where his analysis of the theoretical attitude echoes the account he gives of Galileo in 1916 and takes up again in 1935. The end of Heidegger's early view of science is evident in that 1935 text, Die Frage nach dem Ding, as well as in Introduction to Metaphysics. In Die Frage nach dem Ding, Heidegger does not relinquish the idea that science is the mathematical projection of nature, but he has untangled that thesis from a second thesis central to his early view: that metaphysics is itself a science.

Heidegger's philosophy of science from 1916 to the mid-1930s cannot be understood apart from his account of metaphysics as science. Explication of this early view entails laying out his account of the relation between metaphysics and natural science. Heidegger begins by taking metaphysics to ground the sciences. He does not remain satisfied with this view, but rather eventually determines the relation between metaphysics and science as the mathematical. For Heidegger, the mathematical is that which is known beforehand and brought to experience by the understanding. In Being and Time and in Basic Problems of Phenomenology, he begins his inquiry into the question of being with the ontic fact that any understanding of beings entails a prior projection of being. In Basic Problems of Phenomenology, the object of fundamental ontology as Heidegger envisions it is being, and the task is the investigation of being in order to secure the sciences in their regional ontology.

METAPHYSICS, MATHEMATICS, AND SCIENCE 15

Regional ontology is the condition for the possibility of any science. Heidegger argues in Basic Problems of Phenomenology that all non-philosophical sciences, that is, the positive sciences, "have as their theme some being or beings, and indeed in such a way that they are in every case antecedently given as beings to those sciences. They are posited by them in advance" (BPP 13/ GP 17). Sciences are positive in the sense that they posit their realm of objects in a regional ontology. Regional ontology is the determination of the subject area of a science by projection of what Heidegger calls, in Being and Time, "basic concepts" (BT 29/529). By projecting a basic concept, the scientist establishes a realm of possible objects of inquiry, a "world" in Heidegger's second of the four senses of that term in Being and Time (BT 93/ 52 64-65). Heidegger suggests that the movement of the sciences happens when their basic concepts "undergo more or less radical revision" (BT 29/529), much as Thomas Kuhn argues that sciences move through paradigm shifts during crises. In The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics in 1929-30, Heidegger describes such a situation with respect to the life sciences. Biology, he argues, confronts the task of developing "an entirely new projection of the objects of its enquiry" (FCM 188/GM 278).

In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that the basic concepts of a science are transparent to it, as Kuhn holds in his historical analysis that paradigms shifts come from within the sciences themselves. In the 1929-30 lectures, however, the situation is not quite so simple. Heidegger describes a circular interrelatedness between metaphysicS and science. The proposition that expresses the presupposition essential to, in Heidegger's example, zoology, does not come from zoology, yet it cannot be "elucidated independently of zoology either" (FCM 187/GM 276). What is this interrelatedness? Heidegger argues that ordinary understanding finds such circularity objectionable, and he insists that the movement is not dialectic. Later, throughout several texts but especially in "Science and Reflection," Heidegger will argue that no science has access to its own essence; he calls a science's basic concept "das Unumgiingliche" (SR 177 IVA 60), that which cannot be gotten around. No science can raise the question of the projection of the being of its objects that makes it possible. Yet the move to this blindness on the part of the sci-

16 HEIDEGGER'S PIDLOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

ences--called "one-sidedness" in What Is Called Thinking?-and hence to the problem of whence comes critical thinking of science is a development in Heidegger's thinking. In Being and Time and Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger holds that phenomenology is the method of scientific philosophy that can raise precisely the question of the grounding of the sciences in their a priori projection of being.

In Being and Time, Heidegger uses phenomenology as the method for raising the question of being. Both this text and Basic Problems of Phenomenology explore temporality as fundamental to the constitution of Dasein, and both texts are aborted projects. In 69 of Being and Time, Heidegger analyzes the shift in understanding from everyday, concernful dealings to the theoretical attitude. He is interested in the change in understanding being that the theoretical attitude involves. As in Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger holds in Being and Time that an understanding of being underwrites the sciences, and his interest is in laying this understanding bare. Hence the theses that philosophy is a science and that science is the mathematical projection of nature are entwined in Heidegger's phenomenology: scientific philosophy raises the question of the projection of being at work in the sciences. That is to say, philosophy is a science for Heidegger insofar as it is metaphysics, and metaphysics unfolds in 1927 in two tasks: first, Being and Time is an attempt at an analytic of Dasein; and second, Basic Problems of Phenomenology is an attempt at grounding the sciences.

In 1928, these two tasks coincide in the self-undermining of metaphysics. Heidegger argues in The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic that the concept of metaphYSics consists in fundamental ontology and metontology (MFL IS8/MAL 202). He introduces metontology to characterize the recoil (Umschlag) at the heart of fundamental ontology in which ontology turns back on itself by placing into question the very notion of questioning. In William McNeill's reading of this obscure moment of recoil, Dasein as questioner is unsettled. McNeill argues (1992:76) that the shift (Umschlag) Heidegger describes in 69 of Being and Time, which he attempts to analyze again in Basic Problems of Phenomenology, is this very turning into metontology in which ontology recoils upon itself, and that this moment of recoil is found again in the


interpretation of Antigone in Introduction to Metaphysics. In the former two texts, argues McNeill, the withdrawal of the meaning of being is so radical that the possibility of thematizing the projection of beings as a whole is "far from assured" (1992:77). In Introduction to Metaphysics, the question of being is displaced by the withdrawal of being which prevails as being's appearance in beings: "because such withdrawal prevails precisely as the appearing of being in beings, being can no longer be thought of as the 'earlier,' the apriori ground of beings" (McNeill 1992:78). The year 1935 is therefore a crucial one in Heidegger's thinking. The thesis that has driven his inquiry into being through Being and Time and Basic Problems of Phenomenology, that being is an a priori project, stands in conflict with the regional ontologies of the sciences. For the apophantic moment in which beings are uncovered is the withdrawal of being, not its presencing for thinking.

McNeill's reading of metontology can be applied to the tension at the heart of the entanglement of scientific philosophy with the sciences understood as the mathematical projection of nature. When the a priori projection of being becomes problematic because it is a withdrawal and not a presence, the projection of being at work in the regional ontology of science becomes likewise awkward. If phenomenological inquiry with being as its object is no longer possible, since the a priori nature of such an understanding of being has been undermined, then the question of what metaphysical assumptions underwrite science becomes not only sensible but also demanded: if being's withdrawal precludes its aprioricity, then on what basis can the sciences be taken to have a metaphysical grounding? It is precisely this question that Heidegger asks in Die Frage nach dem Ding, and which he answers with the notion of the mathematical.

Accordingly, the two theses that Heidegger holds until the 1930s with respect to science-that philosophy is itself scientific and that science is the mathematical projection of nature-are entangled insofar as he takes the task of scientific philosophy to be the investigation of being as a means for establishing the regional ontologies of the sciences on sure ground. The possibility of such an investigation is undermined by the realization that

18 HEIDEGGER'S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

the projection of the being of beings is simultaneously a withdrawal of being. Hence Heidegger is drawn to the question of the metaphysical ground of the sciences, an investigation he undertakes in Die Frage nach dem Ding by uncovering the metaphysics of modem science at work in Galileo and Newton and quintessentially formulated in Descartes's foundation of the sciences upon the self-certainty of the knowing subject.

Heidegger's move from philosophy as science to the question of the sciences themselves can be thought through by tracing the separation of the two theses that characterize his early view. Heidegger gives up the thesis that philosophy is scientific, and subsequently goes on to rethink the thesis that science is the mathematical projection of nature. He does not simply tum from metaphysics and thereby come to science. Rather, his thinking is driven by the question of being, and I argue that the failure of his attempt to give the sciences a metaphysical grounding is at the heart of his tum away from metaphysics.

To examine Heidegger's thesis that philosophy is itself a science, one must read that thesis against the background of Husserl's conception of rigorously scientific philosophy: phenomenology. Joseph Kockelmans (1985) has given an extensive treatment of the Hegelian and Husserlian background against which Heidegger's thinking of science comes about. Rather than repeat that work, I will point only to the question of philosophy as rigorous science. Heidegger repudiates Husserl's epoche and prefers to make ontology central rather than bracket it. For Heidegger argues that whereas ontic sciences proceed on the basis of a regional ontology, taking as object some realm of being, scientific philosophy (i.e., ontology) takes as its object being itself. His break with Husser!, despite the apparent ambivalence he shows toward Husserl in 1925 in History of the Concept of Time, is his insistence that ontology is precisely the issue at stake if philosophy is to be properly scientific.

It is the history of ontology that Heidegger wishes to destructure in Being and Time, and it is ontology that he names as scientific philosophy in Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Yet these texts lead Heidegger to the question, what is metaphysics? Heidegger's reading of Husserl leads him to Kant and away from the claim that ontology is the science that has being as its object,


to the claim that being is not an object at all. In his entanglement with Kant, Heidegger fails to distinguish the pure from the a priori in the first Critique. Hence when Heidegger appeals to the notion of certainty in modem science, he calls that certainty mathematical rather than a priori.

Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, situated between the inquiries into ontology and the 1929 address on metaphysics, is the text wherein Heidegger makes the shift from ontology to metaphysics. Heidegger holds, under the influence of Husserl, that philosophy is a science; and against Husser!, that scientific philosophy is ontology. The latter claim pushes Heidegger back to Kant, wherein he confronts metaphysics. It is Heidegger's overcoming of Kant that constitutes as a single move his abandonment of the claim that philosophy is itself a science and his abandonment of metaphysics. That move is the insight in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics that philosophy cannot provide a ground for the sciences. Philosophy as science had always been intended by Heidegger to do exactly that, and hence in discarding that task he discards the thesis that philosophy is a science.

Having worked through the history of philosophy as science, Heidegger is drawn to the sciences. In 1929, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, he thematizes the life sciences, specifically biology and zoology; and in 1935, in Die Frage nach dem Ding, he treats explicitly the physics of Galileo and Newton. In the claim that science consists in the mathematical projection of nature, Heidegger considers science in the narrow sense of natural science. He examines Galileo's free-fall experiment and Newton's first law of motion as a rethinking of the mathematical. On the basis of a radical interpretation, Heidegger proposes that the mathematical is the metaphysical moment of modem science.

My strategy is therefore straightforward. I look at how philosophy as rigorous science is different in Heidegger's account from Husserl's, and then assess Heidegger's reading of Kant on metaphysics and the a priori. This will bring me directly to the notion of the mathematical in Heidegger, and I will examine the thesis that physics consists in the mathematical projection of nature in Heidegger's analyses of Galileo and Newton. A concluding section on metaphysics and the mathematical will lay the groundwork for Heidegger's subsequent philosophy of sci-

20 HElD EGGER'S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

ence. Hence this chapter shows how Heidegger moves from philosophy as science to philosophy of science.

HUSSERL: PHILOSOPHY As RIGOROUS SCIENCE

In 1925, Heidegger argues that it was Husserl who founded scientific philosophy as phenomenology in his Logical Investigations (HeT 24/PG2 30). In Being and Time, Heidegger acknowledges several debts to Husserl. He dedicates the book to him and appropriates his maxim of phenomenology, "To the things themselves" (BT 58/52 34). In a footnote, he says that Husserl "enabled us to understand once more the meaning of any genuine philosophical empiricism" (BT 490, n. x/52 50, Anm. x). In another note, he attributes to Husserl the temporal interpretation of metaphysics as presence that he himself intends to investigate as an exploration of the ecstatical unity of Dasein (BT 498, n. xxiii/52 363, Anm. xxiii), but which remained unpublished. He further claims that Husserl's Logical Investigations prepared the ground for Being and Time, since it was therein that phenomenology first emerged (BT 62/52 38).

Yet Heidegger rejects Husserl's phenomenology by arguing that what is essential in phenomenology is not its actuality as a philosophical movement. "Higher than actuality stands possibility" (BT 63/52 38), and it is the possibility of phenomenology that Heidegger wishes to seize upon. When he distinguishes his project from anthropology, he cites Husserl's "Philosophy as Rigorous Science" for the recognition that a person is not a thing (BT 73, n. v / 52 47-48), that is, Dasein is not simply present-athand. Yet when he argues that the limitation of the anthropological inquiry is that "the cogitationes are either left ontologicaliy undetermined, or get tacitly assumed as something 'self-evidently' 'given' whose 'Being' is not to be questioned" (BT 75/ 52 49), he must be referring to Husserl. In Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger locates this criticism of Husserl-that he fails to question being-in the epoche.

Heidegger did not allow the text of his 1927 lecture course on phenomenology to be published until 1975, when it appeared as Volume 24 of the Gesamtausgabe. The explicit acknowledgment


of Husserlian phenomenology found in Being and Time is not evident in Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Yet the introduction appears to have been cribbed from Husser!'s contribution to the first volume of Logos in 1911, "Philosophy as Rigorous Science." Here Husser! distinguishes phenomenology as scientific philosophy from Weltanschauung philosophy, precisely the distinction at work in Heidegger's introduction to Basic Problems of Phenomenology.

Husser! argues in "Philosophy as Rigorous Science" for a philosophy that is scientific, rather than either naturalism or Weltanschauung philosophy. Naturalism in his account naturalizes consciousness and ideas on the basis of empirical science. The naturalist, Husser! claims, seeks to lay out the natural laws of thinking and "believes that through natural science and through a philosophy based on the same science the goal has for the most part been attained" (PRS 169). Like contemporary cognitive science, naturalism looks for laws of nature to describe thought. But, criticizes Husser!, this position is self-refuting since it begins with a theoretical absurdity. Since it binds itself to empirical science, which deals only in bodies, and consciousness is not a body, Husser! sees implicit in naturalism the preclusion of the very thing it seeks to investigate. Insofar as contemporary cognitive science looks to the brain to explain the mind, it is susceptible to the same criticism. Husser! suggests "a phenomenology of consciousness as opposed to a natural science about consciousness" (PRS 173).

This phenomenology investigates the intentional correlates of consciousness and hence clarifies all fundamental kinds of objectivities. It pursues the relation between consciousness and being not as the relation between mind and bodies but rather as the relation between subjective consciousness and intentional objects within consciousness. Hence it is related to psychology, but whereas psychology concerns itself with empirical consciousness, phenomenology in Husser!'s sense deals with pure consciousness, that is, essences and essential relations. It "makes no use of the existential positing of nature" (PRS 183) but seeks to investigate what the psychic is. Psychology, on the other hand, begins with a supposition of the psychic, and hence Husser! calls absurd its hope to "give scientific value to the designation of the


psychical" (PRS 184). Hence Husserl's philosophy as rigorous science can be neither naturalism nor psychology.

Furthermore, Husserl is not arguing for Weltanschauung philosophy. The latter seeks the wisdom of the age, he claims, that "according to the situation of the time, harmoniously satisfies both intellect and feeling" (PRS 194). Scientific philosophy, on the other hand, is impersonal and requires not wisdom but theoretical talent by means of which it "increases a treasure of eternal validities" (PRS 195). It bears the stamp of eternity, and hence it "alone is capable of providing a foundation for a philosophy of spirit" (PRS 189). Indeed, this is what scientific philosophy is about in Husserl's view: it is radical and foundational, a science of true beginnings, of origins, and it "must not rest until it has attained its own absolutely clear beginnings" (PRS 196) . Husserl envisions this philosophy as a scientific critique of reason that has a rigorous method of proceeding and which provides a sure foundation both for itself and for cultural practices like the sciences.

Likewise, Heidegger rejects worldview philosophy as inadequately radical in Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Like Husser!, he finds that worldview philosophy is limited by its belonging to "the particular contemporary Dasein at any given time" (BPP 6/GP 7). It arises for a particular factical Dasein. Although Heidegger is interested precisely in the scientific construction of a worldview, his philosophy "must define what in general constitutes the structure of a worldview" (BPP lO/GP 13). Hence that philosophy is not directed at the formation of a particular worldview, but nonetheless remains at the foundation of worldview formation. Accordingly, Heidegger's phenomenology is, like Husserl's, an alternative to Weltanschauung philosophy. But Heidegger's conception of phenomenology is fundamentally at odds with Husserl's.

For both Heidegger and Husser!, phenomenology is a method, and for each it begins with a reduction. Yet their reductions move in opposite directions. Husserl turns away from the question of being. He is prepared, at 148 to 150 of Ideas, for example, to take up the questions of formal and regional ontology. But he disregards the question of being by suggesting that for his inquiry, fantasies such as "winged horses, white ravens,


golden mountains, and the like" (Hussed 1983:356/Ideen 310) serve just as well as examples of physical objects as things in actual experience. Hussed is interested in physical objects as intentional correlates of consciousness and not as bodies constituted outside of consciousness. Subsequently, he claims at 59 of Cartesian Meditations that the task of an ontology of the real wodd is, though necessary, not philosophical, and at 60 of the same text that the results of his inquiry are metaphysical only as "anything but metaphysics in the customary sense" (1960:139; 1950:166). Hussed's concern is meaning, not being. And indeed, Heidegger repudiates Hussed in 1929 precisely for his idealistic epistemology, for failing to "ask the question about the being constituted as consciousness" (MFL 133/MAL 167).

Whereas Hussed's epoche is the bracketing of ontology, for Heidegger "phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being . . . to the understanding of the being of this being" (BPP 21/GP 29). Heidegger's reduction is precisely to the question of being. It is first a negative move away from the particular being, and second a positive construction of being that brings it into view "in a free projection" (BPP 22/ GP 29). This projection is free in that it does not reduce being by making it accessible as a being. These two basic components of Heidegger's method, combined with the destruction of traditional use of concepts as the third, are "philosophy as science, . . . the concept of phenomenological investigation" (BPP 23/GP 31). Phenomenology is for Heidegger the scientific method of ontology, and he therefore rejects Hussed's phenomenology, which begins by precluding the question of being.

Heidegger's criticism of Hussed here leads him directly to Kant, and indeed Heidegger's focal criticism of Hussed is that he is neo-Kantian. He charges Hussed with following Kant in taking existence to mean extantness (BPP 28/GP 36), and later with using Descartes's distinction between res cogitans and res extensa in order to characterize subjectivity (BPP 124-25/GP 175-76). Hence Hussed's separation of beings into subjectivity and objectivity presses the question of the unity of being.

Yet, as Hofstadter notes in the introduction to his translation, Heidegger chooses Kant, not Hussed, "as the most suitable rep-


resentative of the problem" (BPP xvi). Heidegger has already argued in 1925, in History of the Concept of Time, that the Marburg school misinterprets Kant by appropriating him to psychology, that is, by reading him as "working out the constitutive moments of knowledge in the form of a science of consciousness" (HCT 16/PGZ 18). For Heidegger, reading Kant is an opportunity to think his work as metaphysics rather than epistemology, and to retrieve a "philosophy of science" (HCT 16/PGZ 18), as he called it in 1925, that is obscured by Husserlian psychologistic subjectivism.

In his investigation into the thesis of logic, the "is" of the copula, Heidegger commends Husserl for bringing logic to light. But he "did not succeed in conceiving logic philosophically" (BPP 178/GP 253), rather tending to develop it as a separate science in the conceptual schemata of neo-Kantianism. Heidegger takes such preoccupation with propositional logic in questioning truth and being to be a "principal criterion of neoKantianism" (BPP 201/GP 286) and argues that it was Husserl who first drew the distinction between making a judgment and its factual content that makes such an approach possible. Husserl is accordingly not only neo-Kantian for Heidegger, but further, a basis for neo-Kantianism. Hence Heidegger's treatment of Husserl in Basic Problems of Phenomenology brings him face-toface with Kant.

Indeed, in his rejection of worldview philosophy, Heidegger pinpoints the entry of the word "Weltanschauung" into philosophy in Kant's Critique of Judgment. Here it means "a beholding of the world as simple apprehension of nature in the broadest sense" (BPP 4/GP 6). He says that this usage dies out, but he attempts to retrieve something of it by appealing to Kant's distinction between the academic and cosmic concepts of philosophy. The latter investigates the end of human reason, that for the sake of which reason is what it is, while the former is "the whole of all the formal and material fundamental concepts and principles of rational knowledge" (BPP 8/GP 10). This gets at the distinction Heidegger wants to draw between scientific and worldview philosophy, since in making his distinction Kant brings the question of the end of human reason to the center of the question of philosophy. But it is an inadequate distinction


for Heidegger, since philosophy in the cosmic sense does not have as its task the question of the development of a worldview, and Heidegger's inquiry, though not directed at the formation of a particular worldview, is aimed at the foundation of worldview formation.

Accordingly, Heidegger does not set his task in the early years differently from Husserl's vision of his task. Both seek to investigate what is foundational and hence prior to a worldview, and both resist naturalism, psychology, and the entrenchment of philosophy in a worldview. Yet the two are in fundamental disagreement about what the scientific philosophy is that pursues their chosen task. Each calls his method phenomenology, but whereas for Husser! that means the radical investigation of consciousness and not being, for Heidegger it means precisely the question of being. So formulated, Heidegger's phenomenology leads him from Husser! back to Kant.

KANT AND METAPHYSICS: GROUNDING SCIENCE

Heidegger's ear!y view of the sciences is colored by his commitment to metaphysics, which is for him philosophy proper because he holds that metaphysics is itself a science: the science of being. Basic Problems of Phenomenology operates within a tension in which metaphysics understood as ontology is a science, yet thoroughly distinct in Heidegger's view from the sciences. He separates them on the basis that the sciences are positive, that is, they work with some realm of beings whose being is posited. Metaphysics, however, has as its object being rather than a particular realm of beings. Whereas sciences proceed on the basis of regional ontology, scientific philosophy is fundamental ontology.

In 1929, two years after Being and Time, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics was published. This text begins the separation of philosophy and the sciences that will serve as the basis for Heidegger's critique of representational thinking. His abandonment of metaphysics as the science of being and his later critique of the sciences both arise from a tension in his reading of Kant: on the one hand, ontology is the science of being; on the other hand,


it is not a positive science. This cmoQLa dissolves in the claim that being is not an object of cognition. But therefore philosophical thinking cannot be for Heidegger a positive science. His interpretation of Kant plays a key role in his thinking on the relation between and subsequent separation of metaphysics and science.

In Being and Time, Heidegger distinguishes everyday understanding from the theoretical attitude. Basic Problems of Phenomenology aligns ontology with the theoretical attitude since Heidegger argues that philosophy is itself a science, "the science of being" (BPP Ilff./GP 15). Ontology is so scientific that "the expression 'scientific philosophy' contains a pleonasm" (BPP 4/ GP 4). Heidegger's concern in Basic Problems of Phenomenology is to show that scientific philosophy is ontology, and thereby to retrieve the question of being from its history. Yet ontology occupies the ambiguous position here that, though a science, it is distinguished from the positive sciences. The difference between the positive sciences and ontology is that whereas positive sciences "deal with that which is, with beings . . . with specific domains, for instance, nature" (BPP 13/GP 17), philosophy has being as its object. The positive sciences are grounded in regional ontology and are only possible on the basis of that prior understanding of being. The task of ontology is precisely the inquiry into that prior understanding.

Heidegger rejects ontotheology in his ubiquitous claim that being is not itself a being. In both Basic Problems of Phenomenology and Being and Time, he attributes to Kant the thesis that "being is not a real predicate" (BPP 27ff./GP 35; BT 127/5Z 94). In the latter text, he explains that this claim means exactly that being is not accessible as an entity (BT 127/5Z 94; d. BT 23/5Z 4). In the former, he explains further that the claim that being is not a real predicate means "that something like existence does not belong to the determinateness of a concept at all" (BPP 32/GP 42). The distinction at work here between existence and reality is one he draws from Kant.

Heidegger argues that reality for Kant is synonymous with Leibniz's term possibilitas. Realities are "the what-contents of possible things in general without regard to whether or not they are actual" (BPP 34/GP 45). Reality belongs to the category of quality, whereas existence belongs to the category of modality.


For, argues Heidegger, extantness belongs to an existent thing whether it is perceived or not, since it is only on the basis of a prior extantness that a thing can be perceived (BPP 49, 70ff. /GP 66, 98-99). Extantness is a sufficient but not necessary condition for being perceived. Accordingly, Heidegger objects that "position in the sense of positedness is not the being of beings . . . rather, it is at most the how of being apprehended of something posited" (BPP 49 /GP 49). Kant's account of being falls short. Although in 1925, in History of the Concept of Time, Heidegger saw the possibility of a retrieval of Kant away from epistemology and toward metaphysics, and the promise in Kant of a treatment of the question of being, in 1927 he finds the latter hope disappointed.

Yet Kant's metaphysics is the location Heidegger chooses to begin his laying bare of the basic problems of phenomenology. For Kant's claim that existence is added synthetically to the concept is food for thought about being. In fact, Kant's synthetic a priori cannot but be intriguing to the thinker who argues in Being and Time that the understanding which discloses entities in their possibility has a projective fore-structure that understands being (BT 192-93/5Z 151). Heidegger asks whether simply to say that this "fore" is "a priori" is to conceive adequately of its character. And he finds that it is not, for the a priori project is of meaning, which characterizes Dasein, and he instead wishes "to make the scientific theme secure by working out these forestructures in terms of the things themselves" (BT 195/5Z 153). In other words, the inquiry of Being and Time is scientific insofar as it investigates not transcendental subjectivity, but rather the question of being.

Hence the eventual abandonment of the project of Being and Time. As long as Heidegger undertakes his journey around the hermeneutic circle as an analytic of Dasein, he will remain in an idealist metaphysics. But he is not yet ready to give up the attempt to retrieve philosophy from that history of metaphysics as idealism. Instead, he goes at the problem differently in Basic Problems of Phenomenology. He seeks still a scientific philosophy for which the basic issue is the question of being, but in this text he explores the relation between ontology and the sciences. The positive sciences provide Heidegger with a different access to


the question of the projection of being, since each positive science is grounded in a regional ontology, precisely such a projection. Hence the grounding of the positive sciences is a perfect location for scrutinizing the a priori nature of understanding in which being is that a priori.

Early in Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Heidegger raises the question of being as a problem of the a priori (BPP 20/GP 27). Being is always prior to beings in understanding. It is not prior in the sense of clock time, but in the sense that "it is implicit in the basic constitution of the Dasein itself that, in existing, the Dasein also already understands the mode of being of the extant" (BPP 71 /GP 100). Likewise, in Being and Time, Heidegger notes the a priori nature of being in a world for Dasein (BT 144/ 5Z 110; d. BT 249/5Z 206). Furthermore, in Basic Problems of Phenomenology, he comes back to the question of the a priori in his closing statement. Plato is "the discoverer of the a priori" (BPP 326 /GP 463-64) who expresses that discovery in his doctrine that "learning itself is nothing but recollection" (BPP 326/ GP 464-65). Demythologizing this claim, Heidegger interprets it to mean that "being has the character of the prius which the human being, who is familiar first and foremost with beings, has forgotten" (BPP 326 /GP 465). Liberation from Plato's cave is precisely the retrieval of the a priori (i.e., being) from this oblivion in forgottenness. What is at stake in Basic Problems of Phenomenology is how being stands as an a priori in the ontological difference.

On this basis, Heidegger argues that there is a twofold possibility of objectivity and therefore two possible types of science: "objectification of beings as positive science; objectification of being as Temporal or transcendental science" (BPP 327/GP 466). That is, there are positive sciences whose grounds are laid in regional ontologies, the objectification of beings, and there is in Heidegger's account a further science that objectifies being yet is not grounded in a regional ontology. This is the science of being, and it is not positive for Heidegger. It does not posit being, but rather seeks to explain "why the ontological determinations of being have the character of apriority" (BPP 325/GP 462) by means of an inquiry into the temporality of the understanding of being.


Hence under Heidegger's reading, Kant, rather than denying the possibility of metaphysics, "is in search precisely of a scientific metaphysics, a scientific ontology" (BPP 30/GP 39). Yet in that reading, Kant's search fails. Kant speaks of the concept of being, but in Der einzig miigliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes (5.78) he declares it an unanalyzable concept. The suggestion "that the concept of 'Being' is indefinable" (BT 23/52 4) is one of the three presuppositions against which Heidegger argues for the necessity of raising the question of being in the opening pages of Being and Time. The meaning of being is not eliminated as a question by the indefinability of the concept. The latter shows, rather, that this question must be faced.

Kant never faces it, argues Heidegger in Basic Problems of Phenomenology, since he does not go beyond understanding being as position to the analysis called for by the indefinability of the concept. Likewise, Heidegger argues in Being and Time that Kant failed to achieve insight into the problem of temporality because "he altogether neglected the problem of Being . . . [and] failed to provide an ontology with Dasein as its theme" (BT 45/52 24). Heidegger does recognize that the problems of a theory of knowledge and of the question of being are related. He argues that attempts to solve the problem of reality "in ways which arc just 'epistemological' '' (BT 252/52 208) show that the problem, as ontological, must be taken back to an existential analytic of Dasein. But Heidegger's call to an analytic of Dasein toward a renewed metaphysics is a question of emphasis and a shift away from neo-Kantian interpretations. That is, it is an attempt to do ontology by means of an inquiry into human understanding that does not reduce the issue to idealism.

Heidegger sees himself in Being and Time and Basic Problems of Phenomenology as a revisionist. He is undertaking the Kantian task of grounding knowledge, but revising that task to achieve it successfully through an analysis of temporality. Kant's Copernican revolution can be truly revolutionary-in fact, scientificfor Heidegger only as an analytic of Dasein that does not lose sight of the question of being. Basic Problems of Phenomenology is then for Heidegger, as was Being and Time, an attempt to retrieve the question of ontology from its collapse into epistemology


through an analytic of Dasein. He reads Kant as undertaking also precisely that task, but failing in that he does not see beyond being as position. Heidegger of course fails also insofar as both these texts remain incomplete. He undertakes the task again in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Once again he locates his inquiry in the relation between philosophy and the sciences, specifically, metaphysics and physics. The development of Heidegger's thinking from the earlier two attempts is that now he denies that relation is one of ground, and on this basis he argues that his inquiry is into being, not knowledge.

Heidegger argues in 1929 in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics that there is a specific sense in which Kant's first Critique is not about knowledge. That is to say, "ontology in no way refers primarily to the laying of the ground for the positive sciences" (KPM 8/ KM 12), but rather serves a "higher interest" of reason. This claim is a shift in Heidegger's thinking. It is a rejection of the Husserlian thesis that philosophy is a rigorous science in the sense that its primary task is a securing of the epistemological foundation of the sciences. Heidegger argues in 1929, as he has consistently argued before, that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is to be read as a ground-laying of the problem of metaphysics, not as a question of epistemology. He again takes exception to neoKantian readings of the Critique as a theory of knowledge. But for the first time he voices his discomfort with the neo-Kantians as the suggestion that the relation between metaphysics and the sciences is not one of ground. The question of being is for Kant, he argues, rather a transcendental inquiry. It is formulated on the assumption that objects must conform to our knowledge (KPM 8/KM 12-13). The issue is not What must things be like such that we can know them?, but What are the structures of knowledge to which objects must conform in order to be known? This is taken as Kant's Copernican revolution precisely in that it rewrites the question of knowledge as the question of the constitution of the transcendental subject rather than as the question of the constitution of things.

But, Heidegger argues, Kant's inquiry does not shake the traditional account of truth as correspondence. Rather, foreshadowing "On the Essence of Truth," Heidegger argues that Kant's inquiry "actually presupposes it, indeed even grounds it for the


first time" (KPM 8/ KM 13), by showing that ontic truth can only achieve such correspondence if the being as a being is already apparent in its being, that is, on the basis of ontological truth. Kant's thinking is not revolutionary for Heidegger because it shifts the focus of the question of truth to the subject. Yet Heidegger sees in Kant's Copernican revolution the forcing of the question of ontology. He says the year before that reading an epistemological intent in Kant as a Copernican revolution is a misunderstanding (MFL 142/MAL 179). For Heidegger reads Kant as turning back the question of knowledge to its ground in the pre-understanding of being that makes any knowledge of particular beings possible (KPM l1/KM 17).

Accordingly, the knowledge of beings that is the sciences, for which an object is given in its being beforehand in a regional ontology, is exactly what Heidegger does not wish to pursue and does not see pursued in Kant's first Critique. Heidegger's claim that the purpose of the Critique is not primarily to ground the positive sciences is in essence the argument that ontology is not Simply propaedeutic to the positive sciences. In 1929 Heidegger is concerned to distinguish ontology from the positive sciences, that is, metaphysics from physics, as he was in Basic Problems of Phenomenology. In 1929 metaphysics is taken as ground-laying for the sciences, but ground-laying is now understood as "elucidation of the essence of comporting toward beings in which this essence shows itself in itself so that all assertions about it become provable on the basis of it" (KPM 7/ KM 10). Metaphysics establishes a comportment toward beings on the basis of which hypotheses can be proven. This change in view came about the year before. In fact, in 1928 Heidegger argued, contrary to his earlier view, that ontology is not a science.

In 1928 Heidegger gave the lecture course that is published under the title The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic. Here he thought through the conjunction of the idea of being with the idea of ground. He argues that the problem of ground is also the central problem of logic (MFL 117/ MAL 144-45). But for Heidegger, "logic is nothing other than the metaphysics of truth" (MFL 213/ MAL 275). Truth is already thought in this text as the presence of being that makes possible the assertion and its correspondence. Ground is thus understood by Heidegger in


terms of Dasein's transcendence. Because Dasein transcends, it is free to think toward ends and reasons, hence to ask, why? Heidegger formulates ground as "essence, cause, truth or argument, intention" (MFL lIS/MAL 143). In taking beings as their object, the positive sciences obviously then inquire into grounds.

But what of their ground? Heidegger argues that ontologythat is, the question of beings as a whole-is not "a summary ontic in the sense of a general science that empirically assembles the results of the individual sciences" (MFL 157/ MAL 199-200). One cannot simply combine the regional ontologies of the sciences to get at ontology. Accordingly, Heidegger argues for the first time, in what for him is a radical change from his earlier view, that "nonsensical at bottom is the expression 'scientific philosophy,' because philosophy is prior to all science, and can be so only because it is already, in an eminent sense, what 'science' can be only in a derived sense" (MFL ISO/MAL 199-231). In his supplement, Heidegger again explicitly rejects the thesis that philosophy is a science. His claim is that in order to ground the sciences, philosophy must be something quite different from them. The thesis that philosophy is a science is given up precisely in order to argue that the task of philosophy, albeit not its only or primary task, is the grounding of the sciences.

In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, when Heidegger again takes up the question of the metaphysical grounding of the sciences, he argues that metaphysics lays the ground for the sciences by establishing a comportment toward beings that is secure in its own truth. The possibility of such comporting lies in the method of the natural sciences, upon which, according to Kant, "a light broke . . . . They realized that reason has insight only into what it produces itself according to its own design" (CPR Bxiii; KPM 7/KM 10). Heidegger interprets this observation as the recognition of a preliminary understanding of being at work in the sciences, and he focuses on the fact that it is being that is understood rather than on the a priori nature of such understanding. Since what makes the sciences possible is their preliminary understanding of being, ontology stands in relation to the sciences. Regional ontologies, not fundamental ontology, ground the sciences. Fundamental ontology is an inquiry into


Dasein, as, for example, in Being and Time. A regional ontology, and not metaphysics, grounds physics in Heidegger's account.

For, he argues, the relation between the two is such that one only comes to metaphysics through physics. Heidegger quotes Heinze on metaphysics: "It is a science that is, so to speak, outside of the field of physics, which lies on the other side of it" (KPM 4/ KM 7). Metaphysics is meta precisely in that it is beyond physics, not prior to it. One does not, as the history of science shows, have first to do ontology to make scientific investigation possible. In Being and Time Heidegger argued that the sciences cannot and should not wait for philosophy to do its ontological work before they proceed (BT 76/5Z 51). He argued there that the task of philosophy is not one of grounding, but of recapitulating ontic discovery in greater ontological transparency. The insight that reason can be certain only of what it itself projects is an indication of a "fundamental conditional connection between ontic experience and ontological knowledge" (KPM 7/KM 12). One comes to the problem of fundamental ontology only when the sciences have done their work such that a pre1iminary understanding of being is evident. Metaphysics understood as fundamental ontology cannot ground the sciences because it necessarily follows upon them.

Yet neither is metaphysics grounded in physics in Heidegger's account. Mathematical natural science is exhausted at the point at which a pre1iminary understanding of being is uncovered. The connection between ontic experience and ontological knowledge does not solve the problem of the pre1iminary understanding of being, but rather only points to it (KPM 7/ KM 12). To proceed with the task of laying a ground for metaphysics, the inner possibility of ontology must be shown. This could hardly be construed as the task of the positive sciences. In Heidegger's account, then, in 1925, the sciences do not ground metaphysics any more than metaphysics grounds them. Hence Heidegger explicitly separates scientific philosophy from the positive sciences radically in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.

This is the sense for Heidegger in which Kant's first Critique is not about knowledge (KPM l1/KM 17). It is rather a groundlaying for metaphysics. Heidegger understands !-lETa Ta qJUOLXU as "the title of a fundamental philosophical difficulty" (KPM 4/


KM 7). Under Aristotle's much earlier analysis, Heidegger suggests, a doubling is uncovered in metaphysics. On the one hand, it is knowledge of beings as beings; on the other hand, it is knowledge about the region of beings from which being as a whole determines itself. This doubling is reflected in a division of metaphysics into metaphysica generalis, which is knowledge of beings in general, and metaphysica specialis, knowledge of the principal divisions of the former, that is, God, nature, and humankind.

An inquiry into metaphysica specialis is brought to the question of what makes possible such ontic knowledge, that is, knowledge about particular beings, whether supreme, natural, or human. The fundamental philosophical difficulty that is metaphysics consists in the fact that a being is always encountered with a previous understanding of its being. This preliminary understanding of being, questioned in metaphysica generalis, makes metaphysica specialis possible. The inquiry into metaphysica specialis is thus led back to metaphysica generalis, which is in the broadest sense the problem of ontological knowledge.

On this basis, Heidegger argues that "transcendental knowledge does not investigate the being itself, but rather the possibility of the preliminary understanding of Being" (KPM lO/KM 16). In Heidegger's account, Kant's inquiry in the first Critique is not simply a theory of experience or a theory of knowledge, but rather a laying of the groundwork for the problem of metaphysics that is ontology. Kant's text "signifies . . . the working out of a complete determination of the 'whole contour' and the 'whole internal, articular structure' of ontology" (KPM l1 /KM 16). What is at stake under Heidegger's reading of the Critique of Pure Reason is the inner possibility of ontology.

The task Heidegger envisions for Kant's text is to secure the possibility of questioning being, the a priori in knowledge. "How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?" is the question Heidegger acknowledges explicitly as that for the whole sake of which the Critique is undertaken (KPM 10/KM 15). But Heidegger has dislocated Kant's question "How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?" from transcendental subjectivity, that is, from neo-Kantian accounts, and relocated it in ontology. What,


then, of that question? How are synthetic a priori judgments possible in Heidegger's account?

SYNTHETIC A PRIORI JUDGMENTS

In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger finds many senses of "synthetic" at work in the first Critique. Initially, he defines the synthetic nature of judgments in a twofold sense: "first, as judgments in general [which synthesize-i.e., connect-subject and predicate]; and second, insofar as the legitimacy of the 'connection' (synthesis) of the representation is 'brought forth' (synthesis) from the being itself with which the judgment is concerned" (KPM 10/KM 15). These are the senses in which synthetic a posteriori judgments are synthetic. There is, however, a further sense of "synthetic" at work in synthetic a priori judgments. Because it is a priori, a synthetic a priori judgment "should bring forth something about the being which was not derived experientially from it" (KPM lO/KM 15).

These three senses of "synthesis" are complicated by a further distinction of synthesis into three kinds: veritative, predicative, and apophantic (KPM 19/ KM 29). Veritative synthesis is a mediation between thinking and its object by intuition which makes judgments true or evident and is recognizable as the second of the syntheses defined earlier. In veritative synthesis lies also the predicative synthesis: the unification of various representations into a single concept. Predicative synthesis did not appear in the earlier account. Although the name suggests it is the synthesis of predicate and subject, it is defined here differently, and here Heidegger calls that synthesis of subject and predicate apophantic. In yet a further synthesis (one could call it a meta-synthesis), predicative and apophantic synthesis are "joined together into a structural unity of syntheses" (KPM 19/ KM 29). Furthermore, the thrust of Heidegger's rea

Trish Glazebrook-Heidegger's Philosophy of Science (Perspectives in Continental Philosophy) (2000)

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