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76. Propositions about "Science" [145-146]

co-determine what we now know as "science" and what we now can exclusively pursue, in accordance with our historical situation.

2. Accordingly, "science" itself is not a knowing in the sense of grounding and preserving an essential truth. Science is a derived mechanism of a knowing, i.e., it is the machinational opening of a sphere of accuracies within an otherwise hidden—and for science in no way question-worthy—zone of a truth (truth about "nature," "history," "right," for example).

3. What is "scientifically" knowable is in each case given in advance by a "truth" which is never graspable by science, a truth about the recognized region of beings. Beings as a region lie in advance for science, they constitute a positum, and every science is in itself a "positive" science (including mathematics).

4. Thus there is never and nowhere anything like the science, as perhaps there is "art" and "philosophy," which are always in themselves essentially and fully what they are, if they are historical. "Science" is only a formal title whose essential understanding requires that the breakdown into disciplines, into individual and separate sciences, be thought along. Thus, to the extent that every science is a "positive" science, it must also be an individual scientific discipline.

5. "Specialization" is not somehow a manifestation of decline and degeneration of "the" science, and not somehow an unavoidable evil as a result of progress and vastness and division of labor, but rather a necessary and inherent consequence of its character as an individual scientific discipline and inalienable condition for its existence and that always means: its progress. Where is the actual ground for the division [of sciences]? In beingness as representedness.

6. Every science, even the so-called "descriptive" ones, explains: What is unknown in the region is led back, in various ways and ranges, to something known and understandable. Research provides the conditions for explanation.

7. Depending on how what is understandable here, and the claim to understandability, determines in advance the region of the individual scientific discipline, the context of explanation is shaped and circumscribed as in each case sufficient (e.g., explanation of a painting in its physico-chemical respect, explanation of its objectness in its physiologico-psychological respect, explanation of the "work" in its "historical" and its "artistic" respect).

8. Setting up a knowing (of an essential truth experienced in advance) is accomplished by erecting and building an interconnec tion of explanations which requires for its possibility the thorough binding of research to the particular disciplinary field—and indeed within the connection into which research is shifted. This binding of