grasped only out of a knowledge of the history of being. Many "researchers" will still think of themselves as belonging to the reliable traditions of the nineteenth century. Just that many will still find in relation to their objects new and richer content as well as satisfaction and will perhaps incorporate this content into their overall theory. Yet none of this disproves the procedure in which the entire institution known as "science" is irrevocably caught up. Not only will science never be able to extricate itself from that procedure, but it will also, and above all, never want to do so. The more science progresses, the less will it be able to want to extricate itself.
This procedure, however, is emphatically not something that appears only in today's German university; rather, it touches everything that at any place or time in the future might still desire to speak as "science."
If thereby the previous, outgoing institutional forms still survive for a long while, then one day they will only all the more decisively make clear what has been occurring behind their seemingly protective shield.
77. Experiri—experientia—experimentum—experimentation"—ἐμπειρία—experience—test
In order to provide sufficient determinateness to the concept of scientific experimentation in the sense of the current, modern science, we need to survey the levels and modes of "experience," for "experimentation" belongs in that nexus. The long history of the word (and that also means of the matter itself) which resonates in the term "experimentation" must not mislead us into striving to find, in the place where experimentum, experiri, and experientia occur, knowledge also of today's "experimentation" or even of its immediately preceding stages. The clearer the differences emerge that are covered by the same word, the sharper will also be the grasp of the essence of modern "experimentation," or at least the viewpoints will be established from which alone that essence is visible. Instead of a historiological pursuit of the history of the word, let us here base ourselves on the matter itself and delineate a series of levels of "experience" and of the "empirical," as a preparation for circumscribing the essence of "experimentation."
1. "experiencing": striking up against something and indeed something that strikes us; having to take in something that comes upon us and does something to us, "affects" us, encounters us without our complicity.