"A Heideggerian Meditation on Science and Art," in Hermeneutic Phenomenology. Ed. by Joseph J. Kockelmans. Washington, D.C.

and Pittsburgh: Univ. Press of America and CARP, 1988. Pp. 257-275. [Read at Adelphi, John Carroll, San Diego SU, Fordham Lincoln Sq.]

Science, Art and Hermneneutics*

Patrick A. Heelan Department of Philosophy State University of New York New York, NY 11794

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Science, Art, and Hermeneutics: A Heideggerian Meditation on Science and Art* I have forgotten my umbrella. These words in quotation marks were written by Nietzsche in one of his notebooks.1 He was accustomed to write down things that occurred to him for possible future use, but this is one sentence he did not use. What then does the sentence mean? Derrida plays with the sentence--was it intended literally; if so why record such an insignificant event in his notebook? Was it sexual--was the umbrella a symbol of the phallus? Was it the loss of a psychic shelter against the storms of life? Derrida concludes that, though we understand the words, the sentence has no definite meaning. It is indeterminate. It is however of the stuff that solicits interpretation, it is a text or part of a text, but as a text it is incomplete--it is no more than an incomplete part of a great variety of possible larger texts indefinite in number, all themselves parts of yet larger texts also indefinite in number, and so on. Hermeneutics deals with the way we give meaning first of all, to words and sentences, secondly, to other signs and representations, such as pictures, and thirdly, to elements of human experience, the phenomena which comprise our world. I shall be concerned with all three, but principally with the last which is the domain of a hermeneutic phenomenology.2 Returning to the sentence I have forgotten my umbrella, and the inexhaustible variety of meanings it could have, is there one among them that is privileged? One that should be regarded as complete, as the single complete and privileged text, the one that the recording angel has written in the Book of the Life and Times of Friedrich Nietzsche? If there is one, surely it is that one in which the author would have spelled out his own intention. We know enough of Nietzsches ways to be sure that Nietzsche himself did not know what he wanted to do with the sentence. It was there on reserve for possible future use but it was never actually used. The sentence never received from Nietzsche a definite meaning. But even if it had, there would be no more meaning to it than was given by the story in which it was used. Stories for Neitzsche do not add up. There is for him no encyclopedia of knowledge, no Book of the Life and Times of Friedrich Nietzsche or of anybody else, only a tintinabulation of contrapuntal stories that weave in and out of one another without goal or end or pattern. Truth, says Nietzsche, is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropmorphisms--in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people.3 And when all stories are told, they then begin again to be retold with the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. At the opposite pole to hermeneutics is science, particularly the science of nature--I shall consider its most comprehensive form, cosmological science. If hermeneutics seems to give us no more than stories, science, it is thought, gives us truth. Nietzsche points out in its claim to having truth, science is like religion. Each supposes that there is a Book--or Encyclopedia--in which the one true story about the world and everything in it is written or will be written. Religion assigns this task to the recording angel; science to the publishers of its journals. Science, Nietzsche accuses, is no more than secularized religion, Judaeo-Christianity. For each, he has nothing but scorn and ridicule, because they force the dedication of human energies to a world that is essentially alien to people. Religion gives the world to God, science gives the world to impersonal laws; each is no more than an excuse for human weakness, stupidity, and irresponsibility. Both are caught up in their own illusion of objective truth. Nietzsche--or his following--is in some sense a parody of hermeneutical thinking. All knowledge is relative to human life; all knowledge is a human story. Science--or its following--often presents itself to the contrary as the parody of objective thinking. Knowledge is independent of human life; knowledge mirrors reality as it is apart from human life, apart from children and old people, from lovers looks and the feels of things and the experience of the sublime, apart too from the dangers of pestilence, famine, and war. If Nietzsche represents for many people the terrifying collapse of rationality and stable order, for many others to the contrary scientific rationality represents the annihilation of human life, freedom, and responsibility. The predicament I want to address is that of reconciling the hermeneutic point of view centered on human history and evolutionary culture with a science that is centered naturalistically on the cosmos. On the one hand, the cosmological story can be told almost it seems without reference to this small earth and the human species it engendered; on the other hand, the human story plays out its brief self-interested games entirely in a tiny niche within a cosmos indifferent and insensitive to its emergence, growth, and ultimate demise. To what extent is the cosmological story a story by and about people, a hermeneutical story, and therefore worthy to be celebrated by cultural rituals? And to what extent is the human story a cosmological one, one about nature, and therefore under the impersonal judgment of cosmological laws and of the book of the recording angel?

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Let me start with a sketch of the scientific account of the development of our cosmos. It is the cosmological story as told by science. In the beginning was the Big Bang when space-time, all matter and energy were concentrated in a tiny volume at a temperature so high that for a very short time before it was attenuated by the primordial explosion there were no stable particles and all force fields were one. Or so we surmise, forit is not yet known how to unite the space-time curvature or gravitational field with the strong force field to obtain a Grand Unifying Theory. But no matter! As the initial fire-ball expands, the story continues, it cools, primordial symmetries break, stable particles are produced, then galaxies, stars, planets, and among these planet Earth, and we know the rest. Whose story are we telling? If it is the story of the recording angel it is not one that gets what authority it has from some ancient Hermetic revelation. The need to seek a justification of science in revelation, though not dead, is hardly a motivating force in science today. Science grows from the interpretation of experimental data. Experimental data are artefacts of our culture, they do not occur naturally since they require instrumentation and theory, both of which are of human invention. Instrumental data provide the text and theory provides the interpretative model according to which that text is read. The Book of the Science of Nature did not exist before modern science came into existence, it is the first product of human scientific culture, and the cosmological story we have just told is a draft of one of its latest chapters. It is then a human story, humanly written, and humanly interpreted. Let me describe briefly in what way such a scientific story is hermeneutical whatever the intention of those who tell it. Recall that the sentence I have forgotten my umbrella has no definite meaning unless the context of its use is specified. There has to be a specific community of language users who use their language to contextualize the text for a specific purpose, and in so doing they give definite meaning to the text. The meaning of the text is then dependent on a community of language users--geographically, culturally, and historically situated--who appropriate the text for a specific purpose. Call their language the home language, then this is the langauge within which the text gets meaning. If the text did not originally belong to the home language, it would first have to be translated into that language before it could have a meaning in that language. Meaning clearly is not something that a text has independently of people, culture, history, and the resources of a home language. If all our knowledge were to depend on texts, no item of knowledge would remain permanent and unchanged because the home language changes and the community that possesses it changes its interests over time. Conditions of invariance can be roughly satisfied only locally, for some interval of time, for some geographic region, for some stable community of people, but it cannot be satisfied for all people, for all time, everywhere. Hermeneutics as a method is the art or science of translating into our home language and interpreting a text written in some language not our own, at another period of history, or within a culture different from ours. Every continuous tradition of inquiry, such as physics, will automatically reinterpret its findings as the home language of physicists and the interests of the physics community change and develop over time. New terms, new concepts take the stage, as if they were from the first actors in the drama that is later reenacted in text-books for our instruction. Electrical phenomena that were earlier taken to show the existence of an electrical fluid are now interpreted as evidence of a flow of charged particles. Lines of force give way to the electromagetic field. Gravitation gives way to space-time curvature. Such a process of reinterpretation is institutionalized in the scientific community, as Ludwik Fleck and Thomas Kuhn were among the first to show, in the writing and rewriting of professional text-books. Reinterpretation also characterizes the stories scientists tell about their own involvement in scientific developments. We remember Thomas Henry Huxleys account given long after the event of how he routed Bishop Wilberforce by pillorying his amateur status as a scientist (I had rather have an ape for grandfather than a bishop). Listening to this account we may want to applaud the lesson given to biblical fundamentalism by one of the greatest scientists of the age. But contemporary records show that Huxleys memory was at fault and they point up the bias of his later story. His is just the story of the victor written in the glow of hindsight about a situation that troubled him only later. Wilberforce was not a biblical fundamentalist, he was a serious scientist and a Baconian; he intervened against the Darwinian thesis as spokesman for many within the British Association--an eminent scientific body--of which he was vice-president. Huxley chose to challenge Wilberforce, and the reason turns out to have been more complex than just religion. Huxley was fighting for the professional status of scientists as against the amateur status of the majority at the time who were either landed gentry, military officers, or like Wilberforce members of the clergy. Scientists themselves, as this story shows, do not make good recording angels of the history of science, they generally write with a professionally interested bias that is historically situated.4 Texts are one thing, they depend on the artefact of language, but what about the facts of which theory speaks? Surely, they remain fixed and form bridges between generations, cultures, and home languages. This is not so. Facts too are artefacts, not merely because they are indeterminate in their expression without language, but

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because there is a certain textuality at the heart of all our intercourse with the world. What unites us with the world and at the same time what distinguishes us from the world is that we interface with the world through our practical activity. Our practical activity--and this includes experimentation--takes on the character of text for us to understand. Facts are fluid not because they can be described in whatever arbitrary way we choose--they cannot be described in an arbitrary way--but facts are fluid because we can invest different kinds of energies and different interests in our environment and the surrounding world will reveal itself in data that are a function of those interests and energies, zuhanden in relation to those interests. It is by our practical life that we write The Book in which is recorded the stories of our World. To such an extent we are the recording angel. However, we must be quick to add that though we do the recording, we wrote the Book of Nature, it is not given to us to say definitively how The Book is to be understood, since what one writes may come to have a meaning quite different from what one intended. Others, among them, perhaps, friends of ours, or at some future time, historians, will read The Book and discern the facts as they appear contextually to each. The hermeneutical character of facts is both in the making of the data and in the making sense of the data. The next part of this lecture will be devoted to unpacking the notion of fact and to the way facts emerge as the products of human interpretation. I show that interpretation works two ways, through experience and through language, that one is often not consonant with the other, and that one solicits development of the other. I shall start with the important notion of space--space as we experience it and space as our home language constrains us to describes it. I shall then go on to pictures, and show that what is represented by pictures is not fixed by the artist or by privileged viewers. Then, I shall show that scientific facts are themselves products of interpretation and bear the historical cultural stamp of who it is that produces them, namely, people on planet Earth. Space: There is much evidence, mostly informal but quite persuasive, that suggests that the geometrical structure of our visual environment as we experience this in real life is often not Euclidean, that is, it does not agree with scientific measurement of the physical objects it contains. Nevertheless, the home language of our culture, modern Western culture, embodies the scientific notion that physical space is Euclidean. It obeys rulers. However, that it obeys rulers is a contingent historical cultural matter, for visual space also follows an older and more primitive set of geometric models--let me call it Aristotelian, though our Aristotelian ancestors did not know the theory of its geometry--in which the infinity of the Euclidean model is mapped on the inside of a finite sphere having the observer at its center. This primitive set of models coincides with a family of Riemannian and nonEuclidean geometries. The home language of our culture did not always then embody the scientific Euclidean metaphor, but a different one, the Aristotelian metaphor. Let me try to convey to you an intuition of Aristotelian visual space. It is a clear night, and you are outside looking up at the Milky Way, and at the stars and planets. You see them all imbedded in the surface of the celestial sphere. This surface has the strange property you may not have noticed; it has no outside. The whole of physical space is inside this visual sphere. The Euclidean infinity of physical space is the surface of the celestial sphere that you see. There is no outside to it. Aristotle and the ancients sensed this. Archytas of Tarentum--a contemporary, I think, of Aristotle-- imagined a warrior with a spear mounting up into starry space and poking the outstretched spear through the celestial sphere. Archytas asked what lay on the other side of the celestial sphere. People laughed at him. The question, it was said, was a nonsense question. Everyone saw the heavens as a surface with no beyond--in modern terms, we would say that visual space is non-Euclidean. To characterize this Aristotelian visual world further we need the help of a theory of Aristotelian space, i.e., a geometry. We need it because our modern perception is so overlain with later cultural, mostly scientific interpretations of space, that it would otherwise be impossible to distinguish what belongs to the older Aristotelian sedimentation within perception from other anomalies that have their source elsewhere--and, of course, from those visual illusions that are thought to be real breakdowns of the perceptual system, such as those due to tiring of the receptor cells or a traumatizing of the cerebral cortex. The world is divided, as A. Schultz said, into two qualitatively different regions, near and far. Of these two zones, only the near zone which is directly in front of the viewer is fully and clearly three-dimensional, the far zone is a progressively shallow shell of finite depth where objects sufficiently distant from the viewer are stacked like painted images on a all-enclosing spherical backdrop. Nearby things would suffer certain kinds of deformations--wide-angle deformations; distant things would suffer other kinds of deformations--telephoto deformations; only in a limited zone directly in front of the perceiver would things appear in their customary physical size and shape. In such a finite space, railway tracks curve upwards and meet at eye level at a finite distance. Distant objects look both larger and nearer than they would be in the scientific picture; very close objects are smaller and more distant than they would be in the scientific picture. These aberrations cause a variety of what we usually call visual illusions. Some of these are not real breakdowns of the perceptual system, but rather remnants of an older way of

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seeing. Such illusions as, for example, the Moon Illusion and the Muller-Lyer Illusion presuppose an Aristotelian visual space and that fact constitutes the structure of these illusions. <-----------> >-----------< FIG. 1: MULLER-LYER ILLUSION. [Which of the two lines is the smaller? You say the upper of the two. Now consider carefully: which of the two lines is further away from you? Most of you will say, the upper of the two. What you are seeing then is a fully three-dimensional object, not just two lines on a flat surface. Moreover, the two properties you have just assigned to it are incompatible with the laws of geometry of a Euclidean space. If two lines subtend the same angle at a point, then the line more distant from the point must be the longer. The two lines of the diagram subtend the same angle with the viewers eye, but nevertheless contrary to Euclidean geometry the more distant line appears to be the shorter.] There are other strange effects due to the mingling of Aristotelian vision with Euclidean vision. Rudolf Arnheim, for example, noticed that inside a church or temple the columns that flank the nave appear to grow smaller and converge on a point behind the altar or in the apse, while at the same time they appear to be of equal size and parallel. Sometimes such inside spaces can be seen in a totally Aristotelian way with no Euclidean component, such as when one gets a sense of totally enfolding closure, sometimes claustrophobic, sometimes warm, protective, and womb-like, such as Vincent van Goghs depiction of his bedroom at Arles. FIG. 2: Vincent van Gogh, Bedroom at Arles The kind of visual world I have described is the residue of a primitive culture that we have lost, together with the home language that goes with it. A world in which near and far are immediately experienced as qualitatively different favors a human community where the focus of manipulable environmental pressures and opportunities is located nearby. Such a human community must be in early stages of cultural development, not yet dominated by technologies that unite near and far. When did the home language of Western culture change? How long ago is it since Western people ceased to see the reality of their environment entirely in such Aristotelian terms? I believe it was not earlier than Giotto (who began painting around 1300) and not later than Brunelleschi (who began working around 1400). The transition took place in Northern and Central Italy. As an exercise in coming to re-experience this older space and to illustrate the dependence of what we see on the hermeneutical background we bring to seeing, I want you to look at van Goghs Bedroom at Arles (Fig. 2). In this painting (which should be viewed from a point about thirty inches from the canvas), you are brought very realistically into the room. The bed with the two pillows suggests the company of two intimate lovers, separated from the busy world, in the satisfying solitude of their mutual companionship. Note how shallow the room is and yet how full is the space, how the floor slopes upwards, and the walls curve inwards. The shuttered window closes the space definitively. Nothing in the room suggests to the eye that it needs for its fulfilment anything beyond the room. This is an Aristotelian space, finite in size and totally encompassed by the walls of the room. Like the surface of the celestial sphere, the walls of the room have no beyond. Our visual imagination does not suggest the question but our scientific curiosity does: What lies beyond the shutters? Are there more things there? Perhaps, there is only empty space? Let us open the shutters and take a look. FIG. 3: Modified Bedroom (with shutters open showing the Cafe Terrasse.) Through the open window you see the Cafe Terrasse, one frequented by van Gogh near his house and painted by by him. A dialogue is immediately begun with the world outside the room. Note how the space of the room has changed. In the first place, it is deeper. In addition, it is no longer a singular totality but just a part of a larger space, one that has place for an outside as well as an inside. The dialogue has changed the perception of the room itself despite the fact that nothing has been changed in the representation of the interior of the room; the only change is that the shutters have been opened and the eye now needs for its fulfilment a new and larger space. If the new space you see is not Euclidean, it is at least a larger Aristotelian space. When you now go back to the original, you carry the concerns of the modified version back to it and you see the original now differently. The space is larger than it was when you saw it first. Some of you may be able to perform the following experiment with the modified version of the Bedroom. Try to persuade yourself that what you see on the wall of the bedroom facing you is not an open window but a large picture poster of the Cafe Terrasse hanging on the wall of the room. Try to tell yourself that there is no outside being shown, that there is no warrant for ones eye to include the space represented on the poster as an extention of

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the space of the room. If then you succeed in deliberately silencing this inside-outside dialogue, you will see the space change and return to its original size and shape. Pictures as representations: I have not tried to persuade you by verbal argument within our home language what the shape of the bedroom is or should be, I have shown you that for reasons unknown to yourself you gave the room a certain original space, and when the cues were changed telling you a different story about the room you then gave the room a different and contrasting space. What was the cause of the one and of the other? It was the dialogue your eye carried on in each case with the surface of the painting as if it were a text to be read visually. The dialogue was for the most part concealed from you, you were not even aware of it, and that secret dialogue surprisingly could not have been carried out in the home language you are accustomed to use, for the space you saw at least in the original picture was not that of the home language, Euclidean, but Aristotelian. The secret dialogue then that determined what kind of space would present itself to your vision as the represented space of the object was carried out in a language long replaced in the public domain of our culture. Such a secret, yet worldly, play of eye and mind over the surface text is a hermeneutical activity, and apparently not one limited to the constraints of our home language. Such a process as I described exemplifies the hermeneutical circle. A painting can be viewed for its own sake, the way, for example, a work of art is viewed. Such a viewing is not subordinated to the business or realistic needs of human life. Who cares whether a carpenter could build a chair to stand upright on the floor of van Goghs bedroom! We view the room for the purpose of letting the work bring to our presence what is there imaged or represented. What comes forth, however, as we have seen is the outcome of a more or less concealed back and forth play between the eye of the beholder and the painting governed by the background constraints that language, experience, interest, artistic traditions, and new--or old--possibilities provide. I have used the word play. This is the word that Hans-Georg Gadamer uses.7 Play is the serious, selfabsorbed involvement of players, grouped on a field of play, in an activity that is apart from the realistic business of life, that is governed by constraints usually in the form of rules, that has no other goal than the creative realization by movement of the freedoms that the constraints allow. Such activity is joyful, full of repetitive movements that are nevertheless variations on one another, and is shared though in different ways by players and by spectators. It is within such serious play in which the viewer and the materials of art are mutually and actively involved that Gadamer says a work of art has its being. Adopting this view, we can say that the being of a painting is not the canvas with the paint, nor is the being of a piece of music the musical score, it is what lives in the traditions of performance for, say, music, or in the traditions of viewing for, say, the plastic arts. This kind of being is not, of course, objective for the constraints of viewing (or performing) change with time, place, tradition, and culture. Essential to the art-work is its ability to re-present itself as ever old and ever new to different generations of viewers, each the bearer of its own tradition, each carrying its own secret agenda, concealed even from itself. Here we rejoin the concerns of language: does not a text have a definite meaning, the authors, say? The answer is No! It has many possible meanings determined by hermeneutical considerations. The author of a text, says Paul Ricoeur,8 is no more than the first of its readers. By extension, the painter of a painting is no more than the first of its viewers. Yvonne Korshaks work on multiple images in van Gogh and Cezanne attempts to explore a new way of viewing the works of van Gogh and Cezanne that provide access to new, less obvious images, connected with aspects of the life-styles and commitments of these artists that they explicitly refused to thematize in their works.9 With van Gogh, his religious faith; with Cezanne, his sexual fantasies. FIG. 4: Van Goghs Crows Over the Wheatfield In her Pantheon paper on van Goghs Crows Over the Wheatfield, Korshak shows that the marks on the surface of the painting are read first in their obvious sense, then by suggestions present in the scene itself--its sense of foreboding, the road that abruptly ends, the asymmetry between the orderly rhythms of the left side and the disturbed rhythms of the right side--one is led to discern other sets of figures that spell out the shape of a Crucifixion and Last Judgment. When verbal argument gives way to visual presence, details to whole figures, effort and strain to ease of repetition and recognition, singularity of interpretation to a communal tradition, and when the labor of research gives way to joy, then one has discovered a new art of play in viewing. It is one in which a new presence shows itself to viewers of the painting. In terms of this new tradition, the painting has acquired the power to represent a new subject matter. Such an achievement, as we have seen, may even force a change in the home language, for the home language--by the arts of poetry, metaphor, or science--has to learn (or re-learn) how to discourse about this new (or old but forgotten) subject matter. Scientific phenomena and Experimental Data: Let me turn now to scientific phenomena. What I have said about a work of art, that it is not to be confused with the materials out of which it is made nor with a fixed subject matter seen from a privileged viewpoint, its authors, say, is also true of scientific phenomena. Scientific phenomena are not identical with experimental data, for data only speak of such phenomena. Scientific phenomena

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have a place in the world, and that means they have a physical integrity in the space and time of our experience like trees, or dogs, or birds. Scientific phenomena have a perceptual presence among the things that surround us, and that means they persist in our environment, interacting with many things, e.g., the equipment that provides experimental data, and these data then show us the phenomena--they dress the phenomena for our viewing. I grant that few among us have direct access to the presence of many scientific phenomena, of electrons, protons, quarks, W-particles, stars of the main sequence, black holes, or to that unique thing--if thing it is--the Cosmos. We are shown traces of such phenomena, we are told of the ways these phenomena are harnessed for human needs and comfort, but for most of us, their existence is about as remote as countries we have not seen and famous people we have not met. The connection between experimental data and scientific phenomena is like the connection between a painting and the art-work it represents. Just as the painting represents the art-work but the painting alone does not make present the art-work, so scientific phenomena are represented by experimental data, but experimental data alone do not make present the scientific phenomenon. Data have to be made to speak, or better, data have to show the presence of the phenomenon about which they speak. Learning to recognize the presence of what is represented by the data is a practical skill, but more truly, it is an aesthetic skill. Pure research scientists and others who for the moment in question share a nonpragmatic interest in the ecology of our cosmic environment share much with artists or with the viewers of art. They live apart from the realistic business of life and engage in a form of serious play the purpose of which is to experience the presence of new phenomena, and to enlarge the home language to accomodate discourse about such phenomena. What Gadamer said about the being of the art-work achieving realization within the spirit of play according to a tradition of performing and viewing is also true about the being of the scientific phenomenon. It too exists only within the spirit of play in which the scientist performs according to a tradition the experimental skills he or she has learned; in such experiments the phenomenon shows itself and the scientist recognizes its presence as represented in the experimental data. But is not play the very anthithesis of the serious responsible business of science? To quote Nietzsche: Mature manhood: that means to have rediscovered the seriousness one had as a child at play.10 Thus we see that experimental science is a kind of aesthetic activity and this kind of aesthetic activity is a source of worldly scientific knowledge. One very honorable tradition would have it that the aesthetics of science is in the beauty of its mathematical theories. Truly, mathematics is beautiful, but as I have endeavored to show in this paper, insofar as science is about the world, it has a perceptual aesthetic peculiar to the activity of measurement and the life of experimental science. It is now possible to understand in what way cosmological knowledge is hermeneutical. The story we tell about the cosmos is a human story and it bears the specific marks of the terrestrial organism that tells it. Strange though it may sound, even from the scientific perspective, cosmological theory is indeterminate without an explicit recognition that theory has to be transformed into the story of this our cosmos by a human story-teller, for the theory is transformed into the story of this cosmos only within the context of experimental science and subject to the hermeneutical and aesthetic conditions of that kind of life. The cosmological story should really begin, like all good stories in medias res, with Once upon a time, because though our Cosmos is unique in being ours, according to the physicists, it is not the only one that could have been. The fundamental physical constants such as the speed of light, the charge and mass of the electron, etc. could have been different. The values they have depended on how the matter and energy of the universe squeezed through the cosmic keyhole, as John Archibald Wheeler said.11 Once upon a time, Cosmos emerged from the Big Bang and began to construct its own space-time, galaxies formed, then stars. In stellar furnaces the atomic constituents were produced of which organisms were made. Stars later prepared the planetary environment that gave birth to life and nourished it until it produced a human species capable of telling the story or stories of its development. Some cosmologists, such as Wheeler, have recently turned their attention from the story to the story-telling and the story-teller, how is it that there is the one and the other? It seems to be the case that galaxies, stars, planets with a stable aqueous and atmospheric envelope, biological life, and the human species could not have evolved, had the fundamental physical constants been even slightly different from what they are. This is spoken of today as the cosmological Anthropic Principle. Without people, there would be no cosmological story, no symbolic representation of the Cosmos by itself--or by agents generated by itself. Human beings are the cosmic agencies of such a image or representation, and--Carl Sagan notwithstanding--the only creatures capable of reading the representation. As Wheeler has said, our cosmos seems to be unique in that it is the only one that is capable of growing the eyes with which to see itself by looking back. This mirroring of the universe within itself is done by people through human images or representations, but it would be misleading to think of the image we make of the universe

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as independent of its origins in human culture. Scientific inquiry, as I said, is a hermeneutical search in two respects, experiential and linguistic--it crafts with the aid of instruments and an aesthetic sense, new scientific phenomena and crafts within the home language a way of discoursing about them. The Book of the Science of Nature that we write contains our representation or image of nature. But it is not a simple or objective copy of nature, and it is written neither in everyday language--and that seems obvious--nor, less obviously, in mathematics, but in experimental data, and these are produced by a combination of theory and aesthetic skills and read perceptually as life-world phenomena. How pretty is scientific truth, said the biochemist James Watson,12 when he learned how to put together the colored balls and rods to make the model of the DNA molecule, for only then did he understand DNA! If cosmological knowledge is hermeneutical, hermeneutical knowledge is also cosmological because it speaks as much of ourselves as cosmological agents as of the other things insofar as they all shape one another mutually within the environment of possibilities prepared by an evolutionary cosmos. Only when we forget that we are involved and necessarily involved in knowing anything do we become entangled in the illusion of objectivity and worry--and write papers--about what Nietzsche meant by I have forgotten my unbrella. END

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SOME ADDITIONAL REFLECTIONS Hermeneutics and Religion: Finally, I want to draw some conclusions about the possibility and limits of theology. 1. If the human species were nothing but the eyes that the cosmos evolved to look at itself, there would be no explanation for the fact that the human person also asks questions of the kind: Why does any cosmos exist? Does this cosmos have a goal? If so, what gives the goal its authority and sanction? Etc. etc. It seems that people are always asking the saem sorts of questions about the cosmos as such as they ask of things within the cosmos. Scientists are no different from ordinary people. Scientific cosmology as pursued today insists on raising transcendent questions, such as, why does this cosmos exist rather than some other possible cosmos? Is this questioning legitimaate? Should questioning be limited to the inside of the cosmos for the reason alleged by some that--like the celestial limit of the Aristotelian univ erse--there is strictly no outisde to the cosmos? Or is it possible to pursue a legitimate line of questioning about the cosmos from a platform, as it were, beyond the cosmos, that raises questions of transcendent causes? I am unhappy with such a line of questioning for I see no way in which, given what we knowe about the evolution of the cosmos, we could profitably imagine ourselves to be outside of the cosmos. Let me pursue then the hermeneutical roots of theology. 2. If all knowledge is hermeneutical both in the linguistic and in the experiential sense--then assuming that knowledge of the divine is possible--there must be a dimension of historical or cosmological human experience in which human meet with the presence of the divine. The character of such an experience could, of course, be different at different times, in different places and cultures, for such a presence would certainly have at least the kind of diversity and richness that human cultures have. From each then in its time, place, and culture would come a story descriptive of a certain human-divine economy, one on the basis of which philosophers (wherever philosophers exist--is this only in the West?) could then devise a theology or science of the divine presence. Such a science would not, of course, be a universal, absolute, atemporal science, one for all cultures, but just a science that articulates one of the historical possibilities of divine presence and action in human culture. I propose that each of the great world religions is one such historical possibility. 3. If all theological knowledge is hermeneutical, then it has the intrinsic (essential) triadic structure of all scuh knowledge, that is, there is 1. a subject (what C.S. Peirce called and interpretant, this is not an individual interpreter but a community of interpreters, in this case, a religious community), 2. a text or system of signs (such as, for example, mythic tales, or a written Scripture, or a particular set of historical events, or even perhaps, a particular set of cosmological or astronomical events--was astology once a divine science of astronomical events?) and 3. as the object of theological science, a divine presence in human affairs revealed to such a religious community by the religious interpretation of such signs. The outcome of such an interpretation must be a form of religious perception, the direct acknowledgment of a persistent, invariant, structure--such as, for example in Western monotheism, one that is free, purposeful, and loving, like a person--that is reflected in repetitive but varied profiles (such as healing, or the gift of tongues), recongized as a public entity (for example, by common worship), and serves as the referential object of religious language. Such religious perception would ground the religious faith and practice of the community, and give concrete relisious meaning to its home language. In Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, which today share the Greek philosophical heritage, this structure is apparent. All three affirm a monotheism of the Creator. In Christianity, however in addition, there is an explicit trinitarian assertion about God that both the text (2) and the hermeneutic power to read the text (attributed to 1) are separately divine--though not separate gods!--together with the object of divine revelation (3). God the Father--the object of revelation (3)--is revealed through the life and teaching of the historical Jesus, God the Son (2), to the community of Christians empowered by God the Holy Spirit, the divine spirit of interpretation working within those communities (1). The Christian God is unique but trinitarian. For example, Jesus is the text through which Christians come to know the Father: To have seen me, says Jesus (Jn 14/8, 19), is to have seen the Father. The Holy Spirit (also called The Paraclete and the Advocate) is the hermeneutic power sent by Jesus after his Resurrection to teach the community how to see the Father (Jn. 14/16, 26). In this context, the Trinity is the theological expression of the Greek view of the primacy of knowledge in relation to power and love. The Old and the New Testaments, however, are not Hellenistic documents, and the word of Yahweh to his people is not just the Hellenistic Logos, despite a theological tendency in the West to reduce it to such. The hermeneutic circle is a circle to knowledge because it is also a circle of power and love, or in modern terms, it is a circle that gets its energy from the interested of the empowered community. This was also reflected in the early

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Christian literature and needs to be recalled as a corrective to the more intellectualistic attitude. It is with such a corrective in mind, that the Father was also taken to be Power, the Son of the Word and the Holy Spirit to be Love. This represents the hermeneutical circle as an eternal in-itself structure within the Godhead. But I doubt the validity of such reasoning. I refer the original notion that the trinitarian structure to the Christian God is a historical form, namely, the form under which God revealed himself to the Christian community in history. The trinitarian form of the Christian God interpreted as a reflection of the hermeneutic character of revelation even within the impetus of Greek natural philosophy, a form of divine revelation that encouraged cosmological science, not for its own sake, of course, but insofar as the cosmos could be construed as a sign of God--not, of course, as God as Father but of God as Creator. It was as interpreteres of Goids creation that Galileo, Bacon, Newton, Darwin, and generations of scientists acted in their research, right down to the end of the nineteenth century. The classic New Testament approval of this is found ih the Epistle to the Colossians (Col. 1/14-16), where Jesus and Cosmos are both affirmed as images of God and instruments of revelation. In that epistle, St. Paul says, In Him [that is, in Jesus] were created all things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. This is taken to mean that the cosmos is in the image by interpretation of the unseen God the Creator just as Jesus is in the image by interpretation of the unseen God the Father. One last point, picking up on the anti-cartesian argument made earlier: if all knowledge is hermeneutical, then what we know best is not our own mental states, however prayerful and ecstatic these may be, but what others can share with us and we with them. A hermeneutical theology then would be, like science, the product of an authentic community (I hesitate to say an authoritative community because such a description for a religious community sets up in us disagreeable resonance; it is nevertheless the case that scientific communities are authoritative communities and it is in that sense that I would call also religious communities authoritative). Such communities are the possessor of a tradition of theological discourse and interpretation about a common if developing religious experience, a shared sense of what is perceived religiously in the religious practice of the religious community. It is for this reason that I choose to submit this paper to your judgment, rather than to go in search of Nietzsches forgotten umbrella. The Question of Reflexivity: In the transcendental claim that all knowledge is hermeneutical does one not fall into one of the paradoxes of reflexivity? If all knowledge is hermeneutical, then this claim too is hermeneutical-that means generally that such a self-reflexive claim is just historical and not transcendental. Like the Cretans claim that all Cretans are liars, the transcendental claim about the universality of hermeneutics is subject--or so it would be argued--to the deadly attacks of deconstruction.13 I do not think this objection destroys my argument. Hermeneutical means historical and incomplete, it does not mean lacking in evidence, only that all the evidence may not be given to any finite community with intuitive apodicticity. In that sense, knowledge is not self-transparent. Consequently, when I say All knowledge is hermeneutical, I apply this statement nonreflexively with intuitive evidence to all that I know. When turned to describe in addition my own claim that all knowledge is hermeneutical, the context shifts, for only you can have the intuitive evidence for my claim that it too must be hermeneutical. You and I share the same world but we occupy different positions within that world. My Da (There) is not your Da and my competences are not your competences. So some claims I cannot make with intuitive evidence can be made by you from the perspective of your Da and the competences you enjoy, and these claims when properly made must be taken as trustworthy for the community of knowers, that is, for Dasein. There is then no paradox to the claim because transcendental does not imply a world-less point of view but a condition of all worldly knowers. Thus, the hermeneutical character of all knowledge implies, not the contradiction of self-reflexivity, but the opaqueness of every act of knowledge to its own deepest conditions. Every truth conceals while it reveals. At the same time it implies an openness to the questioning of all knowledge claims by the larger human community that assesses those claims, for he or she who makes the claim is least aware of the constraints within which that claim is made. Such a position is the opposite of the Cartesian position that what we are most certain about are our own ideas, the contents of our own Minds, and what we are least certain about are the ideas that others possess. It is also opposed to any foundationalist position such as Husserls that places certainty in the individuals intuition of a worldless transcendental Ego. To the contrary, if all knowledge is hermeneutical, we know best what we share with others and least what we cannot share because these bear on the bodily praxes in which is hidden the text that carries the sense of our involvement in the world without itself being part of that sense.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS* I wish to thank many people for helping me clarify my ideas, particularly Babette E. Babich and Yvonne Korshak. NOTES 1. In Nietsches Nachlass; see reference in Derrida (1978). 2. The works of Heidegger against the background of which this paper is written are those listed in the references. I also found Kockelmans (1985) an excellent source. 3. On Truth and Lie, in Nietzsche (1954), pp. 46-47. 4. See Midgley (1985) 5. Heelan (1983), Part I. 6. See Heelan (1987). 7. Gadamer (1975), pp. 91-150. 8. Ricoeur (1981), p. 149. 9. Korshak (1985). 10. Nietzsche (1973), p. 76 (Maxims and Interludes, # 94). 11. See Barrow and Tipler (1986). 12. Watson (1980), p. 124. 13. Cf. Lawson (1985) REFERENCES Babich, Babette E. (1986) Nietsche and the Philosophy of Science unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston College, MA 02167) Barrow, John D. and Tipler, Frank J. (1986) The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. New York: Oxford University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1978). Spurs. Trans. by B. Harlow. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gadamer, Hans-Georg (1975). Truth and Method. New York: Seabury Press. Heelan, Patrick A. (1983) Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science. Berkeley: University of California Press. _______ (1987) Husserls Later Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Science. Heidegger, Martin (1962). Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. London: SCM Press. ________ (1977). The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Trans. W. Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row. Kockelmans, Joseph. (1985). Heidegger and Science. Washington, D.C.: CARP and University Press of America. Korshak, Yvonne (1985) Realism and Transcendent Imagery: Van Goghs Crows over the Wheatfield, Pantheon,vol. 43, pp. 115-123. Lawson, Hilary (1985) Reflexivity: The Post-Modern Predicament. London: Hutchinson. Midgley, Mary (1985) Evolution as a Religion. New York: Methuen. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1954). The Portable Nietzsche, ed. by W. Kaufmann. New York: Viking. ________ (1973) Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. by R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Viking Penguin Books. Ricoeur, Paul (1981). Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences. New York: Cambridge University Press. Watson, James D. (1980). The Double Helix. Critical ed. By G. Stent. New York: Norton.