realize that the Greek theory of natural processes did not rest on insufficient observation but on an other–perhaps even deeper–conception of nature that precedes all particular observations. For Aristotle, “physics” means precisely the metaphysics of nature.
A historical reflection will discern that even the modern science of nature is grounded on a metaphysics–in such an unconditional way and so firmly and so much a matter of course that most scientists do not suspect it in the least. A historical reflection on the foundations of modern natural science will perceive that the much-acclaimed facts, which modern experimental science accepts as the sole reality, become visible as facts and can be founded only in light of a wholly determined metaphysics of nature, a metaphysics that is not less operative because contemporary scientists are no longer acquainted with it. On the other hand, the great scientists who laid the foundations of modern natural science were great precisely in that they possessed the power and the passion of foundational thinking and had the education for it as well.
A historical reflection will acknowledge that it makes utterly no sense to measure the Aristotelian theory of motion straightforwardly against the results of the research of Galileo and to judge the former as antiquated, the latter as progressive; for in these two cases nature means something entirely different. According to historiographical calculation, modern natural science is certainly more advanced than the Greek, assuming the technological domination, and thereby also the destruction, of nature is indeed progress–versus the preservation of nature as a metaphysical power. From the standpoint of historical reflection, the advanced modern science of nature is not a whit more true than the Greek; on the contrary, at most it is more untrue, because it is altogether caught in the web of its own methodology, and, notwithstanding all its discoveries, it lets escape what is genuinely the object of these discoveries: namely nature, and man’s relation to it, and man’s place in it.
The historiographical comparison and account of the past and the present conclude in the progressiveness of the present. Historical reflection on the past and on the future leads to an insight into the groundlessness of the contemporary relation (or lack of relation)