to nature; it leads to the insight that the natural sciences, as in general all sciences, in spite of their progress, or perhaps precisely because of this progress, find themselves in a crisis. Indeed, as we hear today, “The prattle about the crisis of science should finally be toned down” (immatriculation discourse of the present rector, December, 1937). The “crisis” of science does certainly not consist in its not allowing professorships in paleontology, ethnology, ethnography, etc., nor does it consist in its not being relevant enough to life–that it is all too much. We would do well to stop speaking of the crisis of science in such terms. For these decriers of the crisis are in fact basically in complete accord with contemporary science, embrace it, and even become its best defenders, as soon as they find a satisfying position within it. The crisis is quite otherwise and stems not from 1933, and not from 1918, and not even from the much-criticized nineteenth century, but from the beginning of the modern age, which was not a mistake but a fate, and only a fate will overcome it.
The most acute crisis of today’s science might consist precisely in having no suspicion of the crisis in which it is involved: in other words, in believing that it has been sufficiently confirmed by its successes and its palpable results. But nothing spiritual, and nothing which is to dominate as a spiritual power and is supposed to be more than a business, can ever be validated by success and usefulness.
Historical reflections question the present and future of science itself and heap shame on its belief in progress, for such reflections show that in matters of essence there is no progress but only the transformation of the same. For natural science, and for any science, historiographical considerations are perhaps only an extrinsic concession to let its own past be seen as something to overcome. Historical reflection, on the contrary, belongs to the essence of all the sciences, insofar as it claims to prepare and to form for them, beyond every useful result, an essential knowledge of their subject matter and of the concomitant region of Being {Seinsbereiches}.
The sciences and certainly, in the ultimate analysis, their establishment today in their total administrative organization (the university) are far from suspecting anything of the necessity of historical reflection. Why? Because this presumably only abstract