OFF THE BEATEN TRACK
methodology, is the essence of the character of research as constant activity. That character, however, is the inner ground for the necessity of its institutional character.
It is in constant activity that the projection of the object domain is, for the first time, built into beings. All arrangements that facilitate the planned amalgamation of different types of methodology, promote the reciprocal checking and communication of results, and regulate the exchange of labor are measures which are by no means merely the external consequence of the fact that research work is expanding and diversifying. Rather, they are the distant and still by no means comprehended sign that modern science begins to enter the decisive phase of its history. Only now does it take possession of its own complete essence.
What is going on in the spread and entrenchment of the institutional character of the sciences? Nothing less than the establishment of the precedence of methodology over the beings (of nature and history) which, at a particular time, are objectified in research. On the basis of their character as constant activity, the sciences create for themselves the appropriate coherence and unity. For this reason, historical or archeological research that has become institutionally active is essentially nearer to research in physics that is organized in a similar way than it is to a discipline in its own faculty of humanities which has remained within mere scholarship. The decisive unfolding of the character of modern science as constant activity produces, therefore, a human being of another stamp. The scholar disappears and is replaced by the researcher engaged in research programs. These, and not the cultivation of scholarship, are what places his work at the cutting edge [geben seiner Arbeit die scharfe Luft]. The researcher no longer needs a library at home. He is, moreover, constantly on the move. He negotiates at conferences and collects information at congresses. He commits himself to publishers' commissions. It is publishers who now determine which books need to be written (Appendix 3).
From an inner compulsion, the researcher presses forward into the sphere occupied by the figure of, in the essential sense, the technologist. Only in this way can he remain capable of being effective, and only then, in the eyes of his age, is he real. Alongside him, an increasingly thinner and emptier romanticism of scholarship and the university will still be able to survive for some time at certain places. The effective unity and therefore the reality of the university, however, does not lie in the spiritual-intellectual [geistige] power of the primordial unity of the sciences, a power emanating from the university because nourished and preserved by it. The reality of
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