BABETTE E. BABICH
The reception of Heidegger's reflections on modern science is shadowed by the question of Heidegger's competence to utter the judgments he makes concerning science. The question is important because Heidegger offers notoriously tendentious judgments on the sciences, making statements as damning as the provocative claim in Was heißt Denken?, "Science does not think,"1 or emphasizing the "impotence of the sciences"2 to underscore the inability of the sciences to represent their own essence to themselves on scientific terms.
Accordingly, Patrick A. Heelan echoes William J. Richardson's plain assessment that Heidegger "was not well-versed in science,"3 as he reprises a conversation initiated at Fordham thirty years ago. But this assessment might just as well have been made with subtle but not substantively varying emphasis by other authors on Heidegger and science, such as Joseph Kockelmans or Theodore Kisiel. Even for those philosophers interested in exploring Heidegger's philosophy of science, it is important to affirm Heidegger's scientific limitations at the outset. Thus Richardson's own essay, "Heidegger's Critique of Science,"4 carefully begins with the unmistakeable disclaimer: "On the longest day he ever lived, Heidegger could never be called a philosopher of science. "5
In what follows, I argue that Heidegger's scientific limitations or qualifications are irrelevant and more importantly that the reflections Heidegger offers on the matter of science represent a wholly warranted and indispensable, properly philosophical concern. Thus precisely without naming Heidegger a philosopher of science in the analytic tradition of the philosophy of science, I argue that Heidegger's reflective critique of science together with the questioning he undertakes in the wake of (following the rule of, or after) technology (Die Frage nach der Technik), provides the basis for a continentally formed philosophical understanding of science as Heidegger's own philosophy of science.
What, it may be asked, is the philosophic issue of science, the question of the essence of science, for Heidegger? At least for Richardson, a first answer and the key to Heidegger's perspective is to be found in Heidegger's 1938 address to a group of scientists entitled, "Die Zeit des Weltbildes," translated by William Lovitt as "The Age of the World Picture,"6 and rendered by Richardson as "Foundations of the World View that Characterizes Modern Times." It should be emphasized that Richardson's effort to capture the coordinate significance of Zeit and of Weltbild, includes a reference to "modern times" lost in the more literal translation, "The Age of the World Picture," by which most English readers know the text.
For Heidegger, what specifically modern science is, conceived in its institutionalised, experimental projection, its Betriebscharakter, is nothing less than the realisation of the perpetual motion machine. These are my words.7 For his part, Heidegger writes, "institutions are necessary because science, intrinsically as research has the character of an ongoing activity" (WP 124). What Heidegger means by this coordination of institutionalization and research he says exactly if almost as gnomically: "Within the complex of machinery that is necessary to physics in order to carry out the smashing of the atom lies hidden the whole of physics" (WP 127). What is at issue is the literal constitution (both in the Husserlian as well as the banausic or mechanically constructive sense of standardized manufacturing and institutional technology) of scientific research and scientific results. For Heidegger, in "ongoing activity the plan of an object sphere is, for the first time, built into whatever is." This schematic, built-in plan is the constitutional element of modern scientific representation. The institutionalisation of science projects the plan (Richardson's original term is "blueprint") that then constitutes what Heelan in his work on the hermeneutic phenomenology of natural science distinguishes as a regional ontology of the specific science in question.
I maintain that the distinction between the antic and the ontological made at this level misses the ontological question altogether. For the ontological question here as elsewhere is the question of Being. What necessarily occludes the ontological question as the question of essence is modern science, qua representation and this is not limited to Galilean or Newtonian science in practice. If it is true for Heidegger that a much older mode of perception, a Greek modus, which Heidegger names apprehension, does indeed in accord with Heelan's suggestion offer a surprisingly likely articulation of complementarity, this does not for that render the sciences (i.e., "physics as physics" in Heidegger's terms) capable of inquiring after their own essence.
Heidegger's celebrated step back along a path of thinking, a path apart from and so other than representational, calculative thought is a return to the measured, saving apprehension that was the first, pristine Greek correspondence with or appeal to what is. This apprehension - an apprehension so vulnerable, we might add, that it began to fall away from itself almost from its very inception - is utterly different, Heidegger says, from the experience of nature available to modern physics, even as the notion of the physical sciences truncates and flattens φύσις, the word for nature borrowed from the ancients.
What is responsible for the alienation that is almost intrinsic to the modern notion of experience as such (and certainly of values, as Heidegger argues): is subjectism (objectism). And the meaning or ideal of subjectism is the essence of humanism as it is also the meaning and touchstone of modern science. The side of the subject is irrecusably implicated in objective representation not only in prototypically modern (Galilean, Newtonian) science, but also in contemporary science, including quantum mechanical physics. The meaning of mathematical physics, as Heidegger seeks to show, is measure(ment). Thus in so far as something is measured, Heidegger's analysis of the metaphysical foundations of science applies to quantum mechanics.
It is as a critique of modernity that Heidegger considers science. What is at issue is not the difference between modern and classical science, but that between Western thinking and its forgotten origin. The turn is one to ancient Greece, to retrieve a lost way of perceiving nature. This is the forgotten origin of thought, a physics of cjrucnc;, as the Greeks understood it, and that, precisely that, is obscured in "The Age of the World Picture." We are effectively, inevitably oblivious, and it is this oblivion that Heidegger invites us to bring once more to light.
Heidegger's fundamental challenge to our modern way of thinking as such is that this way of thinking has given rise to a representational view of the world as "picture." For Heidegger, this perspective is tied to the egoism of the modern subject, the talk of values, and the practical, world-mastering success of modern technology and science.
Science, for Heidegger, is the culmination of Western metaphysics, the fruit as much of the thinking of Plato and Aristotle as of, and here Heidegger is very instructive, Christian, scholastic theology. In this context, the Galilean project perfected in Newtonian mechanics is not superceded in its essence by quantum mechanics. Both remain nothing more than (measuring) representations.
The archaic Greek way of perceiving was a mode of revealing that was first and foremost a response rather than a challenge or a projection. Heidegger's signal insight was that insofar as we take ourselves to be the heirs of the earth, to have dominion over it, we have foresworn this archaic mode of perception. In the modern age, the whole of what is turns around us as object, as the real that can be known, anticipated, and harnessed for our own projects - as if these scientifico-technologico projects made up all of what there is, as if this were the only point or aim of what is.
Ecologically, pluralistically sensitized as we are, many of us have begun to wonder about the spirit of this and other totalising subjectivist convictions, but we remain incapable of doubting its ultimate or intrinsic value. Thus even those among us who are inspired to take a care for the e arth are most effectively moved to do so for the sake of our children, for the sake of the sons of men (or, since this is always a specialist project: the daughters of women) to come. None have thus far come forward who would hearken to another shepherding project, a one where what is to be safeguarded is not our own offspring, male and female - seven or however many generations beyond our own race - but Being itself. For Heidegger, it is Being that sounds in or subtends the archaic sense of τέχνη, where the arts invoked the presence of the gods and so "brought the dialogue of human and divine destinings to radiance." Such an art was "pious, πρόμος, i.e., yielding to the holding-sway and the safekeeping of truth." 8 What this yielding safeguarded in that "brief but magnificent time" was truth, as that "which shines forth most purely." It is truth as this shining forth that is lost in our preoccupation with technology, with challenging forth rather than with a "revelation that brings forth and hither." This shining forth is lost to us precisely as we are caught by the lure of calculative thought, just so far as we fail to preserve what appears to us, as what shows itself to us - from itself.
To address this question requires a discussion of mathematics (as well as, as Heelan expresses it, number) and the idea of certainty, among other related notions. I cannot address these issues in complete or rigorous detail. But it is possible briefly to review Heidegger's discussion of the mathematical character of modern science as it is related to his assessment of Cartesian objective certainty, a certainty which is tied to the (modern, subjective) self.
In "The Age of the World Picture," Heidegger observed obliquely that the reason that the ground plan of modernity as such (i.e., of the sciences) works as well as it does is because it is mathematical in essence, i.e., because the sciences are fundamentally mathematical "all the way down," as we like to say. This is significant because the idea of the binding rigor of research is not ultimately articulated by means of mathematics so much as it is first constituted by the same. "Τὰ μαθήματα means for the Greeks that which man knows in advance in his observation of whatever is and in his intercourse with things" (WP 118).
In What is a Thing? Heidegger offers us a roster representing the classifying framework within which the Greeks expressed what they meant by the mathematical. Starting with Τὰ φυσικά "things as they originate and come forth of themselves," Heidegger adds the nuanced spectrum of things for and of human concern: Τὰ ποιούμενα, Τὰ χρήματα, Τὰ πράγματα, and finally Τὰ μαθήματα.9 The listing is capital. For in this context, the definition Heidegger first leaves out in a suggestive aposiopesis almost spills forward to its ultimate expression of its own accord: "The μαθήματα are the things insofar as we take cognizance of them as what we already know them to be in advance" (WT 73). That is, "the mathematical, is that 'about' things which we really already know. Therefore we do not first get it out of things, but in a certain way, we bring it already with us ."
In this early lecture course, given in 1935-1936 and subsequently published in 1962 as Die Frage nach dem Ding,10 Heidegger makes two further internally related points. The first recalls the original essence of the tautological virtue of the mathematical (self-certain) and the second considers the flattening perspective of the shift from Aristotelian to Newtonian mechanics. One may note in advance that the virtue of tautology is the very virtue of an axiomatic system and that the mathematization of science depends upon this very systematization, and this is so no matter whether the logic one follows is Aristotelian (the law of non-contradiction) or quantum mechanical (the law of what may be called contextual-contradiction, but which like the weakly nonEuclidean character of non-Euclidean geometries alters the logical virtues of a quantum logic as little as the non-Euclideanicity of the latter geometries alters their geometrical, or measurement ideal).
Heidegger gives a simple illustration of this tautological "already known." In the Meno, we may recall, Plato offers a more dazzling version of the same idea. Talking about number, Heidegger explains, "We see three chairs and say that there are three. What 'three' is the three chairs do not tell us, nor three apples, three cats, nor any other three things. Rather we can count three things only if we already know 'three'" (WT 74). For Heidegger, number in this sense is properly "learnable," that is mathematical. But to say this says a great deal about the nature of learning as such. Heidegger continues his simple consideration of number "'Three' - what exactly is it? It is the number in the natural series of numbers that stands in third place. In 'third?' It is only the third number because it is the three. And 'place' — where do places come from?" In a reflection that should remind us of the specific excellence of Greek number theory, Heidegger continues, '"Three' is not the third number, but the first number. 'One' isn't really the first number. For instance, we have before us one loaf of bread and one knife, this one and, in addition, another one. When we take both together we say, 'both of these,' the one and the other, but we do not say, 'these two,' or 1 + 1. Only when we add a cup to the bread and the knife do we say 'all.' Now we take them as a sum, i.e., as a whole and so and so many. Only when we perceive it from the third is the former one the first, the former other the second, so that one and two arise, and 'and' becomes 'plus,' and there arises the possibility of places and of a series. What we now take cognizance of is not drawn from any of the things" (WT 74-75). Very nice, maybe even, maybe one will agree: very persuasive. But Heidegger's most penetrating, anathematising or damning point is offered when he then reflects "We take cognizance of all this and learn it without regard for the things" (WT 75). What is important here is that with mathematics, rightly acknowledged as the fundamental presupposition of the knowledge of things - as true for Plato as for Heisenberg as for Heelan — we need not account for things as such or in themselves. This insight is the heart of Heidegger's critique of modern science.
In the same way, the Newtonian project of natural science embodies a mathematical character, a character which, as Heidegger details, levels the distinctions between things, as between heaven and earth, as between motions. This flattening is crucial. It remains in the pure idea of science, the pure theory, the pure law. And I submit that neither quantum mechanics nor any other domain of modern natural science represent a significant departure from this ideal of purity - an ideal which, Heidegger says, here echoing a critique he has from Nietzsche, speaks of things that do not exist. It is this that as the essence of the mathematical project of modern science "demands a fundamental representation of things which contradict the ordinary. [That is) . . . the application of a determination of the thing which is not experientially derived from the thing, and yet lies at the base of every determination of the things, making them possible and making room for them. Such a fundamental conception of things is neither arbitrary nor self-evident" (WT 89).11 When Heidegger claims that the upshot of Cartesian metaphysics is that "man becomes the relational center of that which is as such" (WP 128), the question which must be answered is not whether what is is shown forth, whether it shines forth as it is or from itself. It is not this that counts as an ontological regard. The question Heidegger would have us ask, the one unasked by a humanistic subjectism which defines nature as objectness, is "whether nature, through its objectness, does not rather withdraw than bring to appearance the hidden fullness of its coming to presence" (SR 174). It is this question which the sciences are powerless to answer: "this impotence of the sciences is not grounded in the fact that their entrapping securing never comes to an end; it is grounded in the fact that in principle the objectness in which at any given time nature, man, history, language, exhibit themselves always itself remains only one kind of presencing, in which indeed that which presences can appear, but never absolutely must appear" (SR 174).
The emphasis in the question which science as a theory "cannot even ask" (SR 174) turns on the possibility of withdrawal. The aletheic issue is ever the question not of the drama of chiaroscuro, the dynamic tension between light and darkness, but of obscured darkness, forgotten concealment. And it now seems inevitable that what Heidegger means by objectification (objectness) cannot easily be ameliorated by the alternative of a double constitution, even following Heelan's persuasively articulated expression of it in his invocation of the "hermeneutics of experiment." That, as Heelan tells us, laboratory and mathematical theory "are in continuing hermeneutic dialogue" - so that the "scientific object so ontically constituted reveals the usually invisible horizon of ontology that sustains the constituting act" suggests that talk of a hermeneutic phenomenology of science may ultimately obscure what is fundamentally at issue in the question of modern science for Heidegger.
In What is Metaphysics? Heidegger explains that in what he calls the "pursuit of science" (which pursuit itself may with some profit be read as hermeneutic phenomenology) - "nothing less transpires than the irruption by one being called 'man' into the whole of beings, indeed in such a way that in and through this irruption beings break open and show what they are and how they are" (WM 97). Insistently, Heidegger adds, this irruption "helps beings above all to themselves." And both Kockelmans and Heelan are pleased to hear an account of scientific virtue in this last statement.
But what if, rather than attending to the ontological virtuosity of science, we were to recall Heidegger's own analytic triad? For Heidegger, science is related to the world. "That to which the relation to the world refers are beings themselves - and nothing besides" (WM 97). The scientific attitude bears on what is essential in things and, thus coordinate, guides the relation of science to the world. "That from which every attitude takes its guidance are beings themselves and nothing besides." But the last issue, the insistent irruption is key. "That with which the scientific confrontation in the irruption occurs are beings themselves - and beyond that nothing." It will be the exclusion of nothing, "rejected precisely by science, given up as a nullity" that is, as Richardson rightly did not fail to emphasise, Heidegger's own concern. For Heidegger, science owes its tremendous efficacy and success to just that impossible thought of nothing. "Scientific existence is possible only if in advance it holds itself out into the nothing .... Only because the nothing is manifest can science make beings themselves objects of investigation. Only if science exists on the base of metaphysics can it advance further in its essential task, which is not to amass and classify bits of knowledge but to disclose in ever-renewed fashion the entire region of truth in nature and history" (WM 111). This much is given. This much science has without trying. Here Heidegger, Husserl, (and Heelan) are in full accord. But what else comes from science, and from the same source? Nothing less critical for Heidegger 's thinking than the very forgetfulness of Being. We are reminded that Heidegger would call us to the heart of philosophy or wonder. But "only when the strangeness of beings oppresses us does it arouse and evoke wonder" (WM 111). This wonder turns all by itself, turns of itself, into a search for the why, and we are off after metaphysical gold, asking "Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?" (WM 112)
Note that if the essence of science follows from "nothing besides" as it were, it is not for that attuned to the task of thinking. Indeed, in "On the Essence of Truth," Heidegger cautions that where "technical mastery over things bears itself without limit, ... precisely in the leveling and planning of this omniscience, this mere knowing, the openedness of being gets flattened out into the apparent nothingness of what is no longer even a matter of indifference but rather is simply forgotten" (OE 131). What Heidegger seeks is nothing but "letting be," if he invokes the poet's word on modern science to help him do it:
But research strives and rings, never tiring,
After the law, the reason, why and how.
Doch Forschung strebt und ringt, ermüdend nie,
Nach dem Gesetz, dem Grund, Warum und Wie.12
For Heidegger, "questioning the space-time-law-regulated course of movement is how research pursues the 'why' of beings. But Goethe says 'You stick to the because and ask not why!"/"Du halte dich ans Weil und frage nicht Warum?" (PR 127/206) In this we hear the resonance of complexities neglected in the scientific question "why?"
In addition to Goethe, Heidegger turns to another poet to approximate the Greek origin, Johannes Scheffler, or Angelus Silesius. In his lecture course, Der Satz vom Grund, Heidegger quotes:
The rose is without a why, it blooms because it blooms
It pays no attention to itself, asks not whether it is seen.
Die Ros' ist ohn Warum; sie blühet, weil sie blühet.
Sie achtet nicht ihrer selbst, fragt nicht, ob man sie siehet. (PR 36/68)
Adding the second, routinely uncited line from The Cherubinic Wanderer along with his subsequent commentary on it, Heidegger underscores the importance of what it is to be as the rose is, without why. As the couplet of garden and leaf outline the rose: "It pays no attention to itself, asks not whether it is seen." The key for the forgotten perspective of sight turns between two innocences: the rational indigence of the reflected rose, seen to be "without why" and the calculative indifference or innocent diffidence of the rose, oblivious if "it is seen." What is at stake is the difference between modern, representational perception, wherever one draws the cut between subject and object, and where for Heidegger it reaches its culmination, and not, pace Heelan, its abrogation, where subject and object completely disappear.
In its working, its effect as a work, the Greek statue regards, appeals to, addresses, and claims the response of the beholder. To behold the work is to be transformed, to match the resplendent composure of the work resting in itself. It is to be transfigured in reflected mien, in ethical standing. Modern calculative, representational thought is inimical to this correspondent Greek shining and remains opposed no matter whether its calculations follow Aristotelian logic or quantum logic, whether its representations are Newtonian or complementary. The method of science, which Heidegger identifies, with Newton's best advocate, Immanuel Kant, as "transcendental" is the method of objectness. And the question of objectivity, or the intrusion of the subject into the object, the co-constitution of the object, is irrelevant, or much rather, already decided from the start. For Heidegger, "Cast as objectness, being clears and lights itself in a novel manner" (PR 87). This novelty is the essence, the core and key of modernity. It is to be distinguished from the ancient Greek. "For the Greek thinkers [by which Heidegger meant specifically the presocratic thinkers], beings were never objects; rather they were that which continues on towards us from what lies over against us." To understand this difference is to understand in a leap the very ontological difference itself, but it is to understand it differently. It is because we are so thoroughly modern, I submit- without being able to explore the significance of this suggestion here - that we have routinely heard Heidegger's recollection of the ontological difference as a tacit and traditional theology.
Thus, for Heidegger, the most significant quality of modern science is nothing less than its humanism, a humanism distinguished from medieval and renaissance humanisms, a humanism, he will tell Jean Beaufret, which cannot be accomodated within the return to the question of Being. The modern perspective is the one that turns to the question of the position of the subject, both as foundational and as implicated, as a critical determinant of what can be known. The project is the security of human projects. It is this, not objectivity, that is key. With modern times "begins that way of being human which means the realm of human capability as a domain given over to measuring and executing, for the purpose of gaining mastery over that which is as a whole" (WP 132). There is no contradiction to be found in the substance of the changing essence of science, and Heidegger who was not offering a science of science, but a philosophical critique of science, can thus be thought to have anticipated the "aletheic" issue of complementarity. But one may frame that issue in two ways, depending on one's perspective, depending upon whether one takes the issue of science in its modern sense or whether one hears an occasion to return to a Greek mode of apprehension in the issue of science. Qua mode of calculative representation, the end of quantum mechanics remains its efficacity. That is, quantum mechanics is a mechanics and works as such in physics, where it too represents and is represented by the experimental apparatus (and the scientist). Thus "Man becomes the representative of that which is, in the sense of that which has the character of an object" (WP 132). Indeterminacy changes nothing but is the full elaboration of this representative relation. Thus with the advance of modern science, of scientific progress, the world for Heidegger is correlatively transformed into picture and man into subject (which is the foundation of the world as picture, and of the project of certainty or calculative mastery). For Heidegger, this turns into the incalculable, into a "dangerous" (in Heidegger's poetic sense of the term) kind of indeterminacy. This becomes the "complete essence" of modern science - where completion and essence as well as modern science must be understood as correlevant: "the more extensively and the more effectually the world stands at man's disposal as conquered, and the more effectually the world stands at man's disposal as conquered, and the more objectively the object appears, all the more subjectively, i.e., all the more importunately, does the subiectum rise up, and all the more impetuously, too, do observation of and teaching about the world change into a doctrine of man" (WP 133).
Alternatively one may understand the possibility of complementarity in accord with Heidegger's own reflective addition to the "Time of the World Picture," the Zusätze. For Heidegger reads Protagoras, πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἐστίν ἄνθρωπος, τῶν µέν ὄντων ὡς ἐστιν, τῶν δὲ οὐκ ὄντων ὡς οὐκ ἔστιν, which Cornford translates, "Man is the measure of all things - alike of the being of things that are and of the not-being of things that are not," and Heidegger renders as "Of all things (those, namely, that man has about him in customary use and therefore constantly (χρήματα χρῆσθαι) the (particular) man is the measure, of those that presence, that they presence as they presence, but also of those to which it remains denied to presence, that they do not presence" (WP 144).13 This expression must be heard in terms of the human responsibility of tarrying within the horizon of unconcealment and for what comes to presence as something that is.14 What is at stake in this tarrying, this Verweilen, is not a matter of human relativity, of a subjective mean or measure. "Man who possesses the Greek's fundamental relationship to what which is and to its unconcealment is μέτρον, (measure [Mass]) in that he accepts restriction [Mässigung] to the horizon of unconcealment that is limited after the manner of the I" (WP 146). This best expression of the essence of complementarity ("to preserve the horizon of unconcealment that is limited at any given time through the apprehending of what presences" (man as μέτρον), is sharply distinguished from the essence of modern science which proceeds "into the unlimited sphere of possible objectification, through the reckoning up of the representable that is accessible to every man and binding for all" (WP 147).
Heelan throughout his work on the hermeneutics and phenomenology of the natural sciences has suggested that quantum mechanics entails such an aletheic perspective on truth, a reticent, indeed: measured representation. I think this is right — but only as far as it goes. For Heidegger extends his own argument within the terms of a limit or express restriction to the horizon of unconcealment. And for Heidegger the limitation of science is that for its part and on its own terms, it accepts and can accept no such boundary.
Here and elsewhere, I argue (following Nietzsche) that precisely this insight cannot be countenanced from the perspective of the scientist. In Heidegger's terms, "Physics as physics can make no assertions about physics" (SR 176). This entails many things, not least among them the irrelevance of the question of practical competence in a science for a properly philosophic concern with science. For the scientific, theoretical competence so useful for the practice of science implemented in a given area or specialized application exactly precludes thought on science itself: "the sciences are not in a position at any time to represent themselves to themselves [i.e., scientifically], to set themselves before themselves, by means of their theory and through the modes of procedure belonging to theory" (SR 177). If science cannot think on science this is no defect, for the concern of science is not its own essential ground but the specific objects of its study.
As Nietzsche has it, the position needed for any critical or philosophical or even an aesthetic vantage requires a specific and appropriate, proportionate distance.15 It is not science but philosophy (or, for Heidegger, reflection), that is called to think on science. More, for Heidegger, it will be Being that calls for this thinking, precisely when it is noted that it is never to be a matter of a calling to any account. Rather what is wanted in reflection, is "a calm, self-possessed surrender to that which is worthy of questioning" (SR 180).
As opposed to other modes of thinking and understanding, reflection is singularly indigent: it is a quintessentially inefficacious thought, inimical to science in its essence, where it effects and decides "nothing directly." But Heidegger maintains that "the poverty of reflection is the promise of a wealth whose erasures glow in the resplendence of that uselessness which can never be included in any reckoning" (SR 181). This kind of language gives philosophers of science pains beyond pause, perhaps especially where Heidegger suggests that reflective questioning can become "simply saying" (SR 182). However, it may be supposed that if the philosophy of science continues to exclude reflective thought beyond reckoning for the sake of analytic simplicity, it excludes itself as philosophy — and it does not think.
1 Martin Heidegger, Was heißt Denken? (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1961). Also "Was heißt Denken?" in Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954). ["Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht," p. 127.]
2 Heidegger, "Science and Reflection," p. 176. In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977). Cited hereafter in the text as SR.
3 Patrick A. Heelan, "Heidegger's Longest Day: Twenty-Five Years Later," p. 579 above.
4 William J. Richardson, "Heidegger's Critique of Science" New Scholasticism, Vol. xlii (4), 1968, pp. 511-536.
5 In contrast to Heelan's broad and considered review, one of the first responses to Richardson's essay was produced by a scholar who was manifestly so provoked by the first sentence that he offered an entire essay devoted to an exact refutation: Hans Seigfried, "Heidegger' s Longest Day: Being and Time and the Sciences" Philosophy Today 22: 319-331. Rather than following Richardson's careful lead, concentrating on Heidegger's express reflections on science (particularly physics and mathematics in) in "Die Zeit des Weltbildes," "Wissenschaft und Besinnung," "Die Frage nach dem Ding," Seigfried refers to the praxical analyses of Being and Time.
6 "The Age of World Picture," in The Question Concerning Technology. Cited hereafter in the text as WP.
7 See my "A Musical Retrieve of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Technology: Cadence, Concinnity, and Playing Brass, Man and World 26: 239-269. 1993. See also my Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Grounds of Art and Life (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 142 ff.
8 Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology," in The Question Concerning Technology, p. 34. Cited hereafter in the text as QCT.
9 What is a Thing?, trans. W.B. Barton and Vera Deutsch (South Bend, Indiana: Regnery, 1967), p. 70. Cited hereafter in the text as WT.
10 Heidegger, Die Frage nach dem Ding (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1962). Based on lectures first given in 1935/36.
11 See the translators's reference to Kant's discussion of the mathematical character of a scientific law as Ent-wurf in the Critique of Pure Reason (BXIII), What is a Thing?, pp. 88-89.
12 Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 126. Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1978), p. 206. Cited hereafter in the text as PR with page numbers to the German text following a slash.
13 Cf. the text in What is a Thing?: "πάντων χρημάτων μέτρον ἔστὶν ἄνθρωπος, τῶν δὲ μὲν οντῶν ὡς ἔστιν, τῶν δὲ οὐκ ὄντων ὠς οὐκ ἔστιν," p. 46.
14 "Through its tarrying (das Verweilen) in company with what presences, the belongingness of the I into the midst of what presences is. This belonging to what presences in the open fixes the boundaries between that which presences and that which absents itself. From out of these boundaries man receives and keeps safe the measure of that which presences and that which absents" (WP 145).
15 In his preface to The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche had argued that "the problem of science cannot be recognized on the ground of science." Cf. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy ii, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 18.
Babette Babich - Heidegger's Philosophy of Science:
Calculation, Thought, and Gelassenheit
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