hmrnal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. Vol. 4 No. 3. October 1973.

ON THE DIMENSIONS OF A PHENOMENOLOGY OF

SCIENCE IN HUSSERL AND THE YOUNG DR.
HEIDEGGER
THEODORE KISIEL
Our theme, "Phenomenology and Science,"* is
problematic in many ways. Even the interpretation
of the little word "and," whether it is to be taken
as integrating or disjunctive, thrusts us into the
~ h i c k of the family feud between Husser! and
Heidegger, as yet by no means settled among their
respective followers. For Husser!, phenomenology
is the science of science, and the particular
sciences are to find their fulfilment as branches
of the all-encompassing science of phenomenology.
For Heidegger. in pursuit of what he considers to
be "a more faithful adherence to the principle of
phenomenology,"1 the disjunction between pheno-
menology and science becomes so sharp that here
he lets his most infamous pronouncement fall:
"Science itself does not think." Yet the works of
the very young and very Husserlian Heidegger
clearly belong to the philosophy of science. And
Husser! himself insisted on a difference in level
between transcendental phenomenology and
positive science. Clearly then, the issue between
Husser! and Heidegger on this point is none too
clear. What follows is dedicated in part to meas-
uring the distance between Husser! and Heidegger
on this issue.
But there is a related and more timely ramifica-
tion to our theme. Recently, from various quarters
and in various ways, the possibility of applying
phenomenology to the specific problems of the
philosophy even of natural science has been
broached. But Husserl's programme for pheno-
menology as a science of science still remains
programmatic, and the efforts of Heidegger and
Merleau-Ponty supply not so much a specific
phenomenology of science as rich veins of clues
yet to be mined. Current developments in the
philosophy of science promoted by other schools
suggest that the time is ripe on the part of pheno-
menologists not only to specify precisely the tasks
and bases of a phenomenology of science but
finally to test its fruitfulness in specific problems:
l. In continental Europe, the assumption of certain
elements from phenomenology into the meta-
science of ideology critique, the so-called
"philosophical anthropology of knowledge" pro-
posed in particular by Habermas and Apel. For
example, Habermas' "cognitive interest" bears
manifest relations to similar notions in Husser!
and to Heidegger's comprehensive notion of
"care" or "concern", and Apel's communication
apriori strongly suggests the social dimension of
the Jifeworld.
2. On this side of the continental divide, the
emergence of a new anti-positivistic philosophy
of science which emphasizes the ongoing process
of research in actual historical context (Hanson,
Kuhn, Toulmin), the role of subjectivity in
science (Polanyi) and a "presupposition theory of
meaning":! (Feyerabend and all the others just
mentioned).
But a confrontation of these trends by pheno-
menologists soon raises the same issue we began
with. For the rationalist ideals of the Enlighten-
ment operative in idealogy critique, the fusion of
theoretical and practical reason. and of freedom
through reason as the ideal pole of history: these
ideals are also operative in Husser!. But the dis-
continuous movement of the history of science
sketched by T. S. Kuhn is more in keeping with
Heidegger's epochal schema for history. More-
over, Husser! was a latecomer to the problems of
a historicity of scientific reason. The task of
specifying the bases of phenomenology of science
*This was the announced title of the paper delivered at the Edmund Husser! Conference at DePaul University
of Chicago on November 12. 1971. What follows is a somewhat longer version of what then had to be abbre-
viated because of time limitations.
l. Preface to William J. Richardson, S. J., Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague:
Nijhoff, 1963) pp. xiv-xv.
2. Dudley Shapere's phrase. Cf. his "Meaning and Scientific Change," in Robert G. Colodny (ed.), Mind and
Cosmos (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966) p. 50.
217
is nowadays inevitably drawn into this open
wound of phenomenology, into the issue of the
historicity of the foundations themselves.
In response to the foundational task. Husserl
outlined a system of foundations which are (1)
apriori in character and (2) unified by the correla-
tion of intentionality. Thus Husserl's way to
phenomenology through the critical effort to found
the positive sciences laboriously wends its way
from the empirical sciences to the formal apriori
of mathematics and pure logic, then to the mater-
ial ontologies of regions which culminate in the
comprehensive ontology of the lifeworld, all of
which receive their ultimate grounding in the
transcendental subjectivity) For in Husserl's
words "the function of phenomenology is to pro-
vide transcendental rationality to all sciences, to
give them a new and ultimate rationality, the
totally different rationality of all-sided clarity and
intelligibility and thereby to transform them into
branches of a single absolute science."4 In fact,
the positive sciences are themselves haunted by
this drive toward legitimation in perfect evidence
which can only be fulfilled by a science of higher
dignity.
Heidegger even now maintains that Husserl's
approach to foundations remains completely
foreign to the historicity of thought. It is in view
of this central issue that Heidegger was already
directly confronting Husser! as early as his contri-
bution to the 1929 Husserl-Festschrift under the
title Vom Wesen der Grundes (On the Essence of
Rationality). This same issue will underlie our
survey of each in terms of their treatment of
specific problems in the phenomenology of
science. We turn first to Husserl's development.
Husser/'s Archeology
So much is phenomenology a direct response to
the critical philosophical situation created by
modern science that it might even be said that
science first had to manifest itself in its fullness
before phenomenology could come into being.
Husser! says as much in a famous letter to
Lucien Levi-Bruhl. Merleau-Ponty echoes this
letter in the following words: "Phenomenology
could never have come about ... prior to the
construction of science. It measures the distance
between our experience and this science. How
could it ignore it? How could it precede it?";
Even the name "phenomenology" was in part
adapted or at least reinforced from a trend in
physics itself, which attempted to give concrete
content to scientific theories by a direct descrip-
tion of their relevant phenomena. Husser! viewed
this effort of the late nineteenth century on the
part of Ernst Mach and others as "a reaction
against a theorizing through mathematical specu-
lations, which form concepts far removed from
intuition. accordingly a theorizing in which an
intuitive clarity into the legitimate sense and
achievement of the theories is not attained."C
From this. we gather that the crisis to which
phenomenology responds is a crisis of distance.
the distance that gradually opened between the
sciences and life, thereby making it difficult to
found the significance of their abstractions in and
for concrete life. Such was the theme of pheno-
menology not only as specified in the Crisis --
which formulation we have just paraphrased -
but even the germinal task for Husser! already
in his first work. Philosophie der A rithmetik.
Two points in particular are to be noted in this
early work: (1) Husser! attempts to reactivate the
original sense of the most basic concepts of
arithmetic by tracing their roots to what later will
be called the Gestalt structures of perception, this
at a time when Ehrenfels was just beginning to
publish his pioneering papers on Gestalt psycho-
3. An account of this way is to be found in the essay ''Phenomenology as the Science of Science" in Joseph
J. Kockelmans and Theodore J. Kisiel, Phenomenology and the Natural Sciences (Evanston: Northwestern
U.P., 1970) pp. 5-44. . ..
4. Edmund Husser!, Erste Philosophie (1923-24) Vol. II, Husserliana Vlll, ed. R. Boehm (The Hague: NI]hoff,
1959) p. 358. .
5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The Primacy of Perception and oilier cssavs, ed. James M. Ed1e (Evanston,
Northwestern U.P., 1964) p. 29.
6. Edmund Husser], Phiinomeno/ogische Psychologic (1925). 1-lusserliana lX. ed. Walter Biemal (The Hague:
Nijhoff, 1962) p. 302.
218
Husserl is thus already moving toward a
radically different conception of experience, one
already thickened by a richness of human mean-
ing, than that which vitiated Mach's phenomenal-
ism and all positivistic philosophy of science
since, of an experience described in terms of the
thin immediacy of atomic sensations. Decades
later, Merleau-Ponty was to go much further in
developing for phenomenology a thoroughgoing
theory of perception, the indispensable basis for
any philosophy of science. (2) Against Frege,
Husser! insists that arithmetic cannot be founded
by an exhaustive formal-logical definition of its
most elementary concepts, and seeks rather an
intuitive description of how we come to the
intrinsically indefinable concepts of number,
plurality, unity and the The "ground"
concepts of sciences are to be clarified rather than
defined, and this task will become central in the
phenomenology of science. Husser! thereby locates
the ideal of knowledge in a direct intuition of the
ideational order rather than in the deductive
mathesis which had been the governing ideal since
Descartes.
And yet Husserl's next major effort moves
directly into the neighbourhood of the very deduc-
tive systems which remove empirical sciences
from their intuitive origins. But the same drive to
ultimate origins incipiently reasserts itself in
another, non-psychological way in the Logical
lnvesti[;ations. For the basic insight against logical
p'ychologism, the doctrine of the ideal object that
remains identically the same in and through the
multiplicity of acts in which it is grasped, will
become the basis for an ontological dimension
witnin formal logic itself. When formal ontology
and the concomitant theory of manifolds are
adequately situated in a pure logic of meaning,
the way is paved to trace their forms of a possible
world back to the world in which we live.
Here is Husserl's antidote to the highly techni-
cal and functionalized mathematical logic then in
the initial stages of its development, a develop-
ment that he viewed as perfectly natural, while at
the same time potentially dangerous in its un-
founded status. For a logician or mathematician,
like all working scientists, fortunately does not
need the full clairvoyance of essential insight into
his basic concepts in order to pursue his research,
but only a certain "scientific instinct" coupled
with his method. He is like an artist who creates
without being particularly aware of the basis for
his performance. He possesses a certain "technical
rationality" of his science, a relative and one-
sided rationality which leaves the other side in
complete irrationality and obscurity. It is only in
moments of crisis that the scientist feels the need
to clarify the more original presuppositions under-
lying his research. It belongs to the philosopher to
assume this clarification as a continuing and never-
ending task.
This natural tendency in science toward obfus-
cation of foundations, already sounded in the
Logical Investigations,9 becomes an increasingly
important theme for Husser!. In the later works, it
surfaces as a Sinnentleerung, a process of the
depletion of intuitive sense in the progressive
development of a science. Husser! now sees this
natural tendency to be severely aggravated and
exaggerated by a naturalistic Zeitgeist. For when
the philosophical temper of the times is naturalis-
tic, when the irrational fact is accepted as the last
court of appeal, when the task of science is
reduced to mathematical manipulation of these
facts, then the process of Sinnentleerung is left to
reign unchecked. A scientific theory finally comes
to be viewed as a mere calculating device, accom-
panied by only a bare minimum of the rational
insight that the Greeks honoured with the name
of theory. Theorizing is reduced to a subtle
mental game with symbols. in effect on a par with
the typical engineering student going through his
"math" problems. In Husserl's words, "one
works with letters according to the rules of the
7. Cf. Philosophic der Arirhmetik, ed. Lothar Eley, Husserliana XII (The Hague: Nijhotf. 1970) pp. 210-
2Iln.
8. Ibid., p. 119. This particular critique of Frege still holds. I believe, despite Husscrl's general retraction of
these pages in the Logical Investigations. trans!. J. N. Findlay (New York: Humanities, 1970) vol. I, 45.
p. 179n. Cf. Marvin Farber, The Foundation of Phenomenology (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard U.P., 1943)
p. 38.
9. Op. cit., 4. 54 and 71.
219
game, as in cards and chess. The original thought
that gives this technique its proper meaning is thus
obscured."lO Accordingly, "the rationality of exact
science is in direct line with the rationality of the
Egyptian pyramids." 11 Heidegger will extend this
discussion of the technical character of scientific
rationality. His themes of calculative thinking
and of technology as an ontological power in
science are already present in ovo in Husserl's
description of the "technology of knowledge" in
the Prologomena of 1900.
Another side of the same problem is objectiv-
ism. In the obfuscation of their original experien-
tial senses as well as of the processes of idealiza-
tion and formalization by which they are derived
from the lifeworld, the algorithmic entities of
science acquire a seeming autonomy and can be
taught without reference to their foundations.
One thereby tends to forget that these are mental
constructions and therefore also the "how" of the
constructive activities and that out of which they
are constructed. With the apparent autonomy that
the algorithmic entities acquire, it is now an easy
step to the declaration that this scientific world is
the really real world as it is in itself, and that the
chiaroscuro lifeworld is only a world of appear-
ance. The constructed universe derived through
the mathematization of nature thus comes to be
viewed as a replacement rather than the modifica-
tion of the lifeworld that it is. It is to reverse this
objectivistic tendency of the age that Husser! calls
for an ontology of the lifeworld in relation to
which the mathematical manifold is shown to be
only an overcoat of ideas. Hence one apriori
science based on eidetic intuition is evoked to
counter another utilizing mathematical construc-
tion. The eidetic ontology is to establish the
invariant content of the perceptual and cultural
experience of the lifeworld, the very same content
which mathematization then transforms into the
clear and distinct ideal dressing that comes to be
superimposed over the intuitive given. Since the
evidence of the lifeworld is the evidence of experi-
ence, from Husserl's transcendental point of view
it is the lifeworld truth rather than the natural
scientific truth which is considered the more
authentic truth. The transcendental sense of a
science like mathematical physics is therefore to
be established by tracing its structures back to the
structures of the world-experiencing life.
For the malady of our technological age,
Husser! thus prescribes the thoroughgoing ration-
ality of phenomenology, which seeks to rationalize
even the given, the doxa of everyday knowledge.
The scientific constellations of meaning are to be
viewed within the context of the total field of
meaning. The activities and motivations of the
working scientist are to be traced to their trans-
cendental origins. So, for example, in the problem
of analysing fundamental concepts, it is a matter
of "undressing" the concept of its logical and
formal clothing in order to reveal the naked given
"in the flesh" (leibhaft), and further, to determine
the how of this givenness in the transcendental
field of experience. It is against the background of
this contextual network of meanings which
precede science that a fundamental scientific
concept is to be assessed.
Critique
One cannot help being impressed by the over-
riding return to origins deeper and broader than
science itself which phenomenology pursues,
winning for it the etymological synonym of
"archeology". But it is precisely this radicalism
that has also promoted profound misgivings for
phenomenologists concerned with the problematic
of science itself. For does not the reduction to
origins other than science place in jeopardy the
entire endeavour of a phenomenology of science?
Is not the archeological sense of natural science
emphasized to the point that radical phenomen-
ology no longer does justice to the internal sense
of the science itself? In demystifying the ideo-
logical claims of objectivism, which pretends to
secure a world in itself, and in reducing the
scientifically constructed world of formal meaning
to the intuitive meanings of the lifeworld, does
not Husserl at the same time "reduce" to the
10. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental PhenomenoloJ:y, transl. David Carr (Evanston: North-
western U.P., 1970) 9g, p. 46. My free rendering of this passage.
II. Ibid., Appendix I, p. 295.
220
vanishing point a certain limited validity of
science's claim to establish a domain of sense
over and above the lifeworld? Is it because the
most extensive Husserlian treatment of mathe-
matical physics takes place in the context of
resisting the exaggerations of objectivism and the
mechanical technization of knowledge that the
negative theme of Sinnentleerung tends to over-
shadow the positive sense of natural science?
One need only to consult commentaries on
these Husserlian texts in order to note the tend-
ency on the part of phenomenologists themselves
to equate the intrinsic sense of physics with (1)
its technical sense and (2) even worse, with the
aberrant metaphysical assumptions of objectivism.
But quite often, the very problem of the intrinsic
validity of mathematical physics is literally over-
shot and overshadowed by the larger problem of
"the significance of science for life"Jt How much
the task of founding science in its larger human
context is essentially tied to the more specific task
of determining the proximate foundations of the
science is generally not confronted. The solution
to this difficulty lies in the recognition of the
relation between the different types of foundations
that science has.
In this regard, perhaps the metaphor of the
"ground" has not been exploited to its fullest.
The ultimate foundation according to phenomen-
ology is the transcendental field of the "world-
experiencing life". It is in the nutritive soil of this
field that the plant of science finds its roots.
However. not only science but also language, art,
society, morality, religion and other human
endeavours are cultivated from this soil. The
immediate task of a phenomenology of science is
to seek out the proximate origins of science, i.e.
not the soil itself. but the seed of science that
took root in this soil, and to trace the growth of
each of its plants according to its own guiding
telos as well as in terms of its assimilation of the
elements from the soil. And to extend the meta-
phor further, perhaps the soil needs preparation.
even a fertilizing catalyst, before the scientific
plant can hope to flourish, i.e. a certain level of
cultivation in the form of language and other
"strata" of human culture. Moreover, underlying
the efforts towards organized cultivation of the
jungle of natural growth, is the possibility of the
evolution of the earth itself. In other words, one
must take into account the possibility of a histor-
icity of the ground itself.
This extended metaphor may now help to
orient us in the assessment of various dimensions
of the conception of phenomenology as an arche-
ology. Some of the classical critiques of Husserl's
phenomenology of science suggest at least the
following topics for consideration: (1) the primacy
of perception, (2) the significance of scientific
formalization, and (3) the essence of historicity.
(1) The neo-Kantians of Husserl's day already
saw in his doctrine of the primacy of intuition a
commitment to perception as the prototype of
knowledge. Critical philosophy since Kant con-
centrated on the question of the apriori conditions
of possibility of theoretical objects and endeavour-
ed to validate scientific knowledge by constructing
these theoretical objects through the synthesis of
a transcendental-logical form with a given content.
From its perspective, therefore, Husserl's intuition-
ism seemed to shift the locus of knowledge to the
prelogical and pretheoretical. thereby doing
violence to the essential character of scientific
knowledge.
The classical response to this objection is to be
found in the almost notorious article written by
Eugen Fink in 1933 and blessed by Husserl's
unequivocal authorization. Fink points out that
the primacy of intuition does not necessarily
entail the primacy of perception. For perception
is only one instance of knowledge as a self-
givenness of things with evidence. Categorial
intuition, for example, is not necessarily a know-
ledge achieved in one stroke. but may require a
long and complex process in order to be fulfilled.
It is this fulfilment that is of the essence of
intuition, which accordingly is primary only in
relation to the signitive act, the empty intention
devoid of evidence. What is new in Husser! is the
12. !bid., 2, p. 5. Menschliches Dasein is here translated as "life'' by me in keeping with its ties with the
tifeworld.
221
intentional essence of evidence, of evidence as the
basic mode of intentionality, which always has as
its opposite the mode of empty
To which might be added, to anticipate the
issue of historicity, that it is from this intentional
character of evidence, whose goal is self-givenness,
that conscious life assumes a teleological charac-
ter. And when it is finally admitted that apodictic
and adequate evidence is a regulative idea, an
ideal pole, then this life situates itself between the
archeology and teleology of human reason and
finds itself posed with a never-ending task. In its
more advanced history. this life must labour
mightily for its intuition, i.e. for the more exten-
sive logical intuitions of the abstract structure of
science.
Merleau-Ponty in particular has made the
'primacy of perception" central to phenomeno-
logy. And yet he also tells us that we cannot let
perception have a monopoly on truthJ.I Science
finds itself both motivated by the perceptual world
and free in the translation of its text into formal
structures. Perceptual structures are thus necessary
but not sufficient conditions for science. Science is
not merely a variant of perception, just as percep-
tion is not an incipient science. On the one hand,
science only deepens the relations already
outlined in the perceived world. whose vague
typicality motivates its search. But on the other
hand, through its free variation, science transforms
and even enriches these perceptual structures by
refining them to their purity. Its contribution
therefore cannot be a defect but an excess of
knowledge. But in the course of the process. it
introduces the distance of idealization between
itself and the perceptual world. Formalization cuts
both ways: The Galilean genius both discovers
and conceals. Such is the price that the scientist
must pay for his exactness, finding that he must
constantly correct for the remotions of his
idealized schematismsJ" The scientific modifica-
tion of the lifeworld thus suggests a dialectic
between perceptual origin and the continuing and
never-ending formalization of it in the historical
movement of science.
The crucial issue then devolves upon the inter-
pretation of the identity and difference between
the terms that interplay within this dialectic. What
is the ultimate sense of the structural "sameness"
between science and the lifeworld that Husser!
affirms in the Crisis?lfi Are the structures of the
Jifeworld retained in the internal conceptual
structures of science in a simple Auflzebung that
leaves the former unchanged while merely ideali:J;-
ing them, as Marcuse concludes?ll Or is the gulf
between experience and thought unbridgeable to
the point that a "certain phenomenological dis-
continuity" must ultimately be affirmed. as
Mohanty concludes?IS Or is a principle of contin-
uity a la John Dewey,J-? which excludes both
mere repetition and complete rupture. sufficient
to account for the emergence of the rea 1 differ-
ences instituted by the "novelty" that science is?
(2) Curiously, if we follow Cavailles' interpret-
ation, Husserl defines the role and significance of
scientific formalization in a way that makes even
the question of continuity versus discontinuity
academic. Especially in his later works, Husser!
seems to reinforce the overwhelming privilege of
the primitive by granting to science only a tech-
nical function in relation to perception. Thus the
favourite theses of logical positivism in its nadir
of instrumentalism and operationalism still seem
to lurk behind Husserl's formulations of his own
phenomenological positivism: the empty language
of mathematics is applied to the invariant mass of
the lifeworld merely in order to acquire a measure
of predictive control over it. Physical theories are
thus reduced to merely an abstract interlude and
13. Eugen Fink. "The Phenomenological Philosophy of Edmund Husser! and Contemporary Criticism," in The
PhenomenoloRy of Husser/, trans!. R. 0. Elveton (Chicago: Quadrangle. 1970) pp. 73-147. e<p. 77.g3.
14. The Primacy of Perception, p. 34.
15. Cf. Kockelmans and Kisiel, op. cit., pp. 265-273.
J 6. 36, p. 139.
17. Herbert Marcuse, "On Science and Phenomenology," in Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky
(editors), Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. II (New York: Humanities. 1965) p. 285.
18. J. N. Mohanty. Edmund Husser/'s Theory of Meaning (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964) p. 145.
19. John Dewey, Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (New York: Holt. 1938) pp. 19, 23, 245-6.
222
useful complication in our practical concerns, and
therefore can be suppressed at any time without
the loss of any real knowledge.to
But ever since Godel's results, the orthodox
view of mathematics as a tautology, a deductive
nomology in which the initial axioms implicitly
contain all that comes after, cannot be maintained
for most mathematical and logical systems.
Cavailles even questions whether any philosophy
of consciousness is capable of coming to terms
with the nature of a movement which now seems
to generate its own contents. The deductive model
of an initial fixation from which a linear series of
juxtaposed results is directly explicated is now
replaced by the suggestion of a discontinuous
series that brings suppression as well as resump-
tion, interruptions in the movement and a compli-
cated branching out into a proliferation of
directions not evident from the initial positing of
axioms.2J "The rational increases by reorganizing
itself, by continually making new starts from
enlarged bases as more and more complex rational
structures establish themselves. In this way an
original power is always active in the very devel-
opment of rational science."2 The teleology of
science thus seems to generate a surplus of sense
that exceeds the promise of its archeology.
Because of this unexpected turn of events. the
reductive approach of .radical phenomenology
falls short in its assessment of the potentials of
scientific advance. Another model is thereby
suggested, that of a dialectical movement between
intuitive given and its formalization in and
through the mutually fertilizing tension between
the concretizing and the abstractive tendency of
thought. Science finds its full sense between the
two irresoluble horizons of given and system.
The attempt to resolve these horizons always
exposes an unbridgeable gap, which is at it were
the fount of continual surprises in the life of
science,.N
(3) Thus the two issues of the primacy of per-
ception and the significance of formalization
inevitably lead to the third and most central for
our topic, the essence of the historicity of science.
And here we encounter the same reductive
ambiguities, which have provoked from Cavaillcs
the charge of a "myth of the return to the
and from J. N. Findlay at the recent SPEP!:;
meeting the charge of romantic primitivism. There
is of course no question of empirical primitivism
here, since the issue concerns the genesis of mean-
ing and not of fact. Nevertheless, the explicit
emphasis of Husserl's treatment of historicity
favours the archeological regression to historical
origins, to the perceived bedrock hidden under
more advanced sedimentations and to the origin-
ating motivations that prompted departure from
it. Husserl's antiquarian interests even lead him
to identify his historical investigations with a
Ruckfrage toward origins. "For a genuine history
of philosophy, a genuine history of the particular
sciences, is nothing but the reduction of the
historical sense-formations or evidences given in
the present - along the documented chain of
historical references - back to the concealed
dimension of primal evidences that underlie
them."!!/
And yet, in Husserl's favour, it must also be
stated that the teleology that emerges from these
origins is also kept in view. Even though genetic
analysis has a way of separating the receptive
experience from the predicative production, no
deprecation of categorial activity is intended. The
two levels always work alternately and in recipro-
cal influence toward the achievement of meaning.
And ultimately the vague uncrystallized meanings
of prepredicative experience find their teleological
fulfilment precisely in the categorial productions.
The only difficulty is that our enthusiasm for the
goal tends to make us forget the origin. It is
precisely this tendency that Husser! seeks to
20. Jean Cavailles, "On Logic and the Theory of Science," in Kockelmans and Kisiel, op. cit., pp. 351. 401-8.
21. Ibid., pp. 404-9.
22. Suzanne Bachelard, "Phenomenology and Mathematical Physics," Ibid., p. 516.
23. Theodore Kisiel, "Husserl on the History of Science," Ibid., pp. 85-88. Cf. also the two essays by Jean
Ladriere in this collection.
24. I bid., p. 408.
25. Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, New Orleans, October 28-30, 1971.
26. Crisis, pp. 372-3.
223
counteract.:!!
Moreover. there is Husserl's discussion of the
historical teleology of European man in the Idea of
philosophy as science and the erratic modern
development of science with its telos of nature as
a mathematical manifold. In both cases. the goal
is seen as a Platonic-Kantian ideal of an infinite
pole of truth in itself. For Husserl, this becomes
the goal of apodictic evidence which philosophy
and its scientific branches approach asymptotic-
ally. For Heidegger, by contrast. the indefinability
of ground concepts is already an index of the
inexhaustibility of the ground into which these
concepts sink their roots. to the point that even
the goal no longer remains fixed. A constant regu-
lative idea is replaced by temporary teleologies
which are given up as particular projects exhaust
their possibilities.!,\
Which leads to a final objection: the kinds of
"historical" apriori that Husserl seeks are still
eidetically invariant and therefore supra-historical
to the movement of history. The treatment of the
historicity of history, essential to current philo-
sophical problems arising from the history of
science such as progress. historical continuity and
discovery, is sparse. One begins to perceive the
precise dimensions of Heidegger's charge that the
"historicity of thought remained completely
foreign to such a position."!''
The Young Heidegger' s Logical Conception
of Science
By contrast, Heidegger's futuristic conception
of phenomenology promises a basis for the solu-
tion of the very problems of the philosophy of
science which Husser! does not confront head-on.
And the surprising thing is that this preference for
the future is already present in avo in the only
work purely in the philosophy of science written
by the young student Heidegger strongly under
the influence of Husserl.
In an article on "Heidegger's Critique of
Science," Fr. Richardson opens with the follow-
ing remark: "On the longest day he ever lived,
Heidegger could never be called a philosopher of
science."f
11
I suggest that July 27, 1915 was just
such a day. For on that day, the young Dr.
Heidegger held his demonstration lecture, entitled
"Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft,"
before the philosophical faculty at the University
of Freiburg, conceiving it precisely as the investi-
gation of a particular problem in the philosophy
of science. This lecture by the 25-year-old Heideg-
ger may well serve as a basis for our venture in
Heidegger's phenomenology of science.
Beginning with the university student of the
years 1909-1915, we discover a very Husserlian
Heidegger enthralled by the Logical Investigations
and deeply committed to developing their impli-
cations in specific problems of logic and the
philosophy of science. In one of his recent auto-
biographical declarations, Heidegger speaks of
the fascination which the Logical Investigations
exerted on him, and of "the magic which emanated
from the work".n This display of superlatives by
'27. Edmund Husser), Erfahrung und Urteil (Hamburg: Claassen, 3, 1964) pp. 44, 239-240. Cf. Suzanne Bachel-
ard, A Study of Husser/'s Formal and Transcendenat Logic, transl. Lester E. Embree (Evanston: North-
western U.P., 1968) pp. 153-4; Robert Sokolowski, The Formation of Husserl's Concept of Constitution
The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964) pp. 171-2. The need to methodically ''zigzag" (e.g. Crisis, 9g, p. 58) in analys-
ing the sedimented strata is itself an affirmation of their intertwining and interplay.
28. Perhaps even the term "teleology" no longer applies to Heidegger's later metaphor of the "woodpath"
which abruptly trails off into the untrodden. which meanders within the wood without leading to anywhere
outside. Ct. Hannah Arendt, "Martin Heidegger at Eighty," The New York Review of Books XVII, No. 6
(October 21, 1971) pp. 50-54, esp. p. 51. Heidegger's description of his own Denkweg is thus described as
"the attempt to walk a path of which I did not know where it would lead. I know only the most immediate
short-range perspectives along that path, because they beckoned to me unceasingly, while the horizon
shifted and darkened more than once." On the Way to Language, transl. Peter D. Hertz (New York:
Harper & Row, 1971) p. 6.
29. Preface to Richardson, op. cit., pp. XIV-XV.
30. New Scholasticism 42 (1968) 511-536. But he condudes by suggesting how a philosophy of science could
be developed within a Heideggerian framework.
31. Martin Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1969) p. 82. "Yet I remained so struck
by Husserl's work that in the following years 1 read it again and again without sufficient insight into just
what fascinated me."
224
tne old Heidegger ecnoes the first published work
by the young Heidegger in 1912, a progress report
on research in logic, in which he refers to
"Husserl's penetrating and extremely fortunately
formulated investigations.";/! Engaged at first
with Aristotelian-scholastic philosophy and
theology and studying in the stronghold of the
southwest German school of neo-Kantianism
under the foremost of its exponents, Heidegger
nevertheless tells us that Husserl's influence dates
earlier, from the very first semester at the univers-
ity, lasted longer and was more far-reaching than
the others. Perhaps one could even defend the
thesis that most, if not all, of the Kantian echoes
one wishes to hear in Heidegger's first publications
on logic and the theory of science already resound
in the Logical Investigations themselves, and are
merely reinforced for Heidegger by his neo-
Kantian mentors. An intensive reading of the
Logical Investigations during these early years is
evident not only in the explicit problematic but
even in the interstitial detail of these early works.
It is well known that Heidegger's dissertation deals
with the "Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism"
after the pattern set by the Prole{?omena, and that
his Habilitationschrift is an exposition of a medi-
eval anticipation of the apriori logical grammar
which Husser! outlined in the fourth investigation.
But it is less recognized that the 1915 demon-
stration lecture by the young Dr. Heidegger is
equally an attempt to apply Husserl's general
programme of logic as a theory of science to
particular problems. And what emerges in the
opening pages of Husserl's Prolegomena is a
teleological definition of science which impressed
Heidegger so deeply that he not only makes it the
basis of his approach in 1915 but is still explicitly
avowing it in his magnum opus of 1927.-JJ In his
early lecture, Heidegger lays down the methodo-
logical principle that the logical structures
of the ground concepts of a particular
science are to be determined on the basis
of the aim of that science. Husser! himself
sanctions just such an approach when he suggests
that science in all of its facets is to be assessed
in terms of its e n d J ~ And the goal of science,
generally speaking, is specified by Husser! with
one of those pregnant German words which seems
to have fascinated the already word-conscious
Heidegger. This single word, Begrundungszusam-
menhang;J!j specifies first the systematic unity that
all science aims at, and second, that this unity of
coherence consists of grounded demonstration.
The essence of science accordingly resides in the
ideal unity that comes from the "systematic
coherence of demonstrated grounds," a goal which
is constitutive of its truth.
Important for our purposes is the point that
there are not only typical systematic forms com-
mon to all the sciences, whose exposition belongs
to pure logic, but also principles of coherence
peculiar to each science according to the respec-
tive objectives of each,36 whose elucidation belongs
to the philosophy of those particular sciences. It is
precisely on the basis of the unique structural
complexes aimed at by natural and by historical
science that the Heidegger of 1915 proposes to
determine their respective concepts of time.
No doubt other influences of that time were
operative in Heidegger's formulation of his basic
task. Particularly decisive could have been Jonas
Cohn's book of 1908, entitled Voraussetzungen
und Ziele des ErkennensJI which Husserl himself
32. "Neuere Forschungen tiber Logik," Literarische Rundschau filr das katholische Deutschland 38 (1912)
column 467.
33. Sein und Zeit (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1957) pp. 11, 357.
34. Logical Investigations I, 11, p. 71.
35. Ibid., 6, 63. Cf. Gerd Brand, Gesellschaft und personliche Geschichte (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1972) pp.
16 ff. Working out of the Husserlian tradition, this book bases itself precisely on the notion of rationality
as Begriindungszusammenhang.
36. Ibid., 8, p. 67. Compare Heidegger's review of Charles Sentroul's Kant und Aristoteles, in Literarische
Rundschau fiir das katholische Deutschland 40 (1914), esp. column 332. Here (c. 331) Kant's problematic
is said to belong to the philosophy of science. In Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1925-9), Heideg-
ger turns against his neo-Kantian upbringing by taking Kant's problematic as fundamentally metaphysical.
37. The subtitle is Untersuchungen iiber die Grundfragen der Logik (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1908).
Heidegger first cites this work in "Neuere Forschungen tiber Logik" (1912), c. 522, n. 2, along with
Heinrich Rickert's Der Gegenstand der Erkenntnis (Tiibingen: Mohr, 2, 1904), where the issue of the goal
of science is raised on pp. 1, 8, 28, 173, 204. Cf. also Heinrich Rickert, Die Grenzen der naturwissen-
schaftlichen Begriffsbildung (Tiibingen: Mohr, 1902) pp. III. 31. 36. 49, 103, 117. 124. 139. 680.
225
is known to have read soon after it appeared and
praised highly.3s Cohn. a follower of Rickert, also
taught at Freiburg during Heidegger's student
days. As the title indicates, the book treats the
paradoxical circular relationship between the pre-
suppositions and goals of knowledge. The aims of
knowledge, which enable it, must be presupposed
from the start. In relation to science conceived as
a body of propositions already on hand or as an
ongoing pursuit, the conception of it in terms of its
aim transforms "science" into a normative con-
cept, and accordingly a sought-for but unattain-
able ideal. And the grounded coherence of
judgments which is the general aim of science has
truth as its guiding value. This principle of
judicative coherence varies with the particular
science and does not necessarily prescribe a
direction of coherence that progresses linearly.
The problem of the truth value of science, the
relation of the judicative context to the context of
reality. leads to the problem of a doctrine of
categories. For categories are forms that pertain
to the context of reality and serve to ground its
knowability. In short, the categories serve to make
a context (Zusammenhang) out of reality, or
more phenomenologically, to constitute reality as
a context. Hence a theory of science ultimately
gravitates to the categories or fundamental con-
cepts of a science as to its "last objects." and these
can only be justified through their necessity for
the context to be investigated and determined
through their methodological relation to other
objects)!'
As we now know from his recent autobiograph-
ical statements, reference to the categories has
from his Gymnasium days been for Heidegger the
road to ontology.VJ Brentano's dissertation on the
manifold sense of Being in Aristotle (1862),
Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900-l), Cohn's
book ( 1908), Emil Lask's Die Logik der Philo-
sophie und die Kategorienlehre (1911), Heidegger's
own thesis on the doctrine of categories of Duns
Scotus alias Thomas of Erfurt (1915): all of these
are early stepping stones along the way to his
hermeneutical phenomenology, which crests in the
doctrine of existential categories in Being and
Time and the predilection for the basic concepts
of the West emerging from their pre-Socratic
ground.
This shift from an epistemological to the onto-
logical perspective lies at the background of the
1915 lecture, as evidenced by Heidegger's opening
reference to a certain "metaphysical pressure''.,{]
then manifesting itself in critical epistemology.
and to the indispensability of an ultimate meta-
physical foundation for the problems of the
philosophy of science. But with this brief glance
at the Zeitgeist, he then turns to the problems of
exposing the "logical" foundations (or better,
"epistemological," since logic is here taken in the
broad sense) of the particular sciences. The expo-
sition of the "logical" structure of the ground
concept of time in natural and historical science
is to be a contribution in this direction. And yet,
as we shall see, within this epistemologically
oriented lecture the ontological exigence already
begins to manifest itself.
Now to an outline of the essentials of the
lecture. Generally speaking, the logical structure
of a ground concept is to be exposed from its
function in the science, which in turn is deter-
mined by the aim of the science. Thus the issue
of the lecture specifically formulated becomes:
"What structure must the concept of time in
historiology have in order to be able to function
as the time-concept appropriate to the aim of this
science?"J! To answer this question, no particular
philosophical theory of historiology is to be
presupposed, i.e. a bracketing of sorts. Instead we
must go to actual historiology itself, we begin with
the science accepted as a fact.
38. lso Kern. Husser/ und Kant (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964) p. 33.
39. Jonas Cohn. Voraussetzum;en und Zie/e des Erkenncns. pp. 2-6, 313-334. 353-361, 404-5, 426, 451-2.
40. "'Doctrine of categories' is the usual name of the di>cussion of the Being of beings." On the Way to
Language, p. 6.
41. "Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft." Ze itschrift fiir Phi/vsophie und philvsophische Kritik 161
(1916) pp. 173-188; p. 173.
42. I bid., p. 175.
226
But in order to focus more sharply the distinc-
tive character of the concept of time in historio-
logy, Heidegger proposes first to conduct a parallel
investigation of the concept of time in physics.
The aim of physics is read off by Heidegger from
the fundamental tendency - he will later call it
the "project" of physics - that it exhibits from
Galileo to the present, which distinguishes it from
ancient and medieval natural philosophy.4J But it
soon becomes evident that the determination of
the aim of a particular science is no simple and
direct matter. In order to elucidate the end of
physics, Heidegger in fact examines the means to
this end, i.e. its method, from which he exposes
the determinants of the method that constitute the
aim of the science. And what ultimately
determines the method is the object of the
science and the viewpoint from which the
object is consideredJI The aim of a
science accordingly manifests the structure
"something as something." as the more herm-
eneutical later Heidegger will put it. The
object of modern physics is the law-governed
system of the movements of nature, and these
lawlike relations in the manifold of natural pheno-
mena are considered in an idealized way and
grasped mathematically. The goal of modern
physics is accordingly the reduction of all appear-
ances to the mathematically ascertainable basic
laws of motion that constitute a general
dynamics.-!;
What then is the function of "time" in the
mathematical determination of the systematic
of natural motion? There is a manifest
relation between motion and time, and in this
context motion becomes the integral sum of the
temporally successive positions of a material
point. Time accordingly serves to enable the
measurement of motion as change of place in
terms of the magnitudes of velocity and accelera-
tion. In order to perform its function of quantita-
tive determination, its logical structure must
therefore have the homogeneous character of a
43. I bid., p. 176n.
4-l-. Ibid., p. 174.
45. Ibid., p. 178.
46. Ibid., p. 183.
47. Sein 11nd Zeit, p. 393.
scale or parameter that orders position uniformly.
Time is the independent variable that changes in
a constant way, i.e. flows without leaps from point
to point.
Heidcgger's treatment of historical science
manifests at least the terminological influence of
Rickert's theory of history. The object of histori-
ology is said to be man as creator of culture and
the resulting objectifications of his spirit. The point
of view is their relation to value, which guides the
selection of what is to be considered historical
from the fullness of the given. "Accordingly the
aim of historiology is to represent the operative
and developmental system and interconnection of
the objectifications of human life in their unique-
ness. which can be understood in terms of their
relevance to cultural Time functions to
distinguish qualitatively one epoch from another,
according to the unique character of the Zeitgeist,
and thereby, on the basis of these qualitative
traits, to place e.g. suspect factual sources into
their proper time. The qualitative structure of the
time of history, essentially related to the meaning-
ful achievements of a period, involves as it were
the crystallization or thickening of particular
objectifications given in history. Even though
chronological reckoning of historical time is
possible, it is always based on a historically
meaningful event (birth of Christ, founding of
Rome, the Hegira). in keeping with the qualitative
values of history.
The Existential Conception of Science
It is well-known that Heidegger in Being and
Time backtracks to a more original pre-scientific
time that precedes any scientific conceptualization
of it. In fact, so basic is this original temporality
that even the teleological "Idea" of sciences like
history and mathematical physics are to be traced
back to it.F According to Heidegger now, science
in all of its dimensions finds its existential source
and ontological structure in the temporality of
Dasein. In this shift from logic to existence, from
227
epistemology to "fundamental" ontology, we find
once again the reductionism of phenomenological
radicalism and apriorism that shifts the center of
gravity from the foundations within science to
more original foundations which envelop it. But
now, even though the general intent of the regress
finds its inspiration in Husser!, Heidegger sees
himself parting ways with his old mentor precisely
on the issue "of the Essence of Ground," as he
clearly indicates in his contribution bearing this
title in the Husserl-Festschrift of 1929, for the
sake of what he considers to be "a more faithful
adherence to the principle of phenomenology".
The problem is still Husserlian, namely, the
transcendental constitution of the world,iS but in
situating this in the temporal project of Dasein,
Heidegger marks out a path that leads to the
radical temporalizing and ontologizing of the
conception of "phenomenological foundation";
whether of science or anything else. No longer the
"living present" of a transcendental ego, but the
futurizing project of Dasein; not the perceptual
invariants of a lifeworld, but the intrinsically
historical structures of Being-in-the-world. The
genesis is no longer described in terms of a mental
operation of idealization motivated by the vague
typicality of the world of perception, but rather as
the hermeneutical process of a mathematical
project which is determined by latent senses given
in one's historical situation. From the vantage
point of a phenomenology of science, Heidegger
thereby overrides the issue of the role of percep-
tion in science, but gains in providing a basis for
the problems of the historicity of science. With the
centerline of discussion now in the conceptual
articulation of "something as something," the
ground begins to gravitate to language rather than
perception.
The more comprehensive ground achieved in
Being and Time now gives us vantage to evaluate
the approach to science employed in the 1915
lectHre. Heidegger himself still sees a limited
validity in utilizing the factual content of sciences
- their fundamental concepts, for example --,
"but only as a possible clue to the primordial
constitution of the Being of history or nature. for
example ... which must itself be constantly
subjected to the sort of criticism that has already
taken its bearings in the fundamental problematic
of all inquiry into the Being of being."i'
1
Ontological evaluation of the basic concepts of a
science accordingly requires the prior determina-
tion of the pre-scientific content which "consolid-
ates itself" in such conceptions. Strikingly, the
elements of consolidation are now discussed in
terms similar to 1915, in terms of the projected
"what" and "how" of the Being of the domain,
48. Cf. the first enclosure to Heidegger's letter of October 22, 1927, to Husserl, in Plziinomeno/ogisclze Psycho-
logie, p. 601. Husserl's letters to Ingarden of the same period document the beginnings of his disenchant-
ment with Heidegger. April 9, 1927: "You simply must go to Marburg to experience at first hand Prof.
Heidegger's great and earnest originality." November 19, 1927: "Heidegger has become my close friend
and I consider myself one of his admirers, which makes me regret all the more that his work (and his
lectures as well) in method and content appear to be essentially different from mine. and at least at the
moment none of our mutual students have provided any bridge between us. A great deal is at stake for
future philosophy on how and whether he works his way through to an understanding of my general
intuitions. Unfortunately. I had nothing to do with his philosophical formation. he evidently had already
developed his unique style when he studied my writings. He is now a power house, absolutely honest and
ambitious, directed simply to the things themselves. Every great onesidedness, that of genuinely selfmade
thinkers, blazes the trail to what is new. Let us hope so." December 26. 1927: "I allow myself to become
depressed by the kind of impact that my publications have and by the fact that my better students over-
look the depth dimension that l point to and, instead of finishing what 1 have started, time and again
prefer to go their own way. So also Heidegger, this natural power of a genius, who carries all the youth
away with him. so that they now consider (which is not at all his opinion) my methodic style to be out
of date and my results to be part of a passing era. And this from one of the closest of my personal friends .
. . . The new article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica has cost me great deal of effort, chiefly because l
again thought through from the ground up my basic direction and took into account the fact that Heideg-
ger, as l now must believe, has not understood this direction and thus the entire sense of the method of
phenomenological reduction." Edmund Husserl. Briefe an Roman lngarden (The Hague: Nijhoff. 1968) pp.
39, 41, 42. 43.
49. Martin Heidegger. The Essence of Reasons, trans!. Terrence Malick (Evanston: Northwestern U.P., 1969)
pp. 24-6. We revert to this issue of the factual content of science in view of Aron Gurwitsch's suggestion
that phenomenology no longer takes science as a fact but as a problem. Cf. his "Comments on the Paper
by Herbert Marcuse." Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, ed. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W.
Wartofsky (New York: Humanities, 1965) vol. II, 291306.
228
which make up what Heidegger now calls the
ontological constitution (Seinsverjassung) of the
being under study. What in 1915 were the basic
constituents of the teleological structure of a
science now make up the hermeneutical structure
of the scientific project, the primary "something as
something," the hermeneutical "as", which guides
and determines the formulation of the multiplicity
of judgments in the form of the apophantic "as"
and provides these judgments with their principle
of coherence. The primacy of the terminating goal
is simply transformed into the primacy of the
inaugurating project, in a reversal that accords
with the Aristotelian-Scholastic maxim of the final
cause, which is "first in intention, last in execu-
tion". It is therefore not surprising that, in his
discussion of the "what," "how" and "toward
which" (Woraufhin) in terms of the "for the sake
of which" and the "who" of Dasein, Heidegger is
quite conscious of a certain proximity to the
Aristotelian doctrine of the four causes or
"grounds" .. ;u And the notion of the "end" contin-
ues to play a major role in his philosophy of
radical finitude. An end not only sets limits, but
at once delineates the "leeway" (Spielraum), the
horizons of a field of play within which something
begins to be)Z The end of science is at once its
origin - which is why the 1915 lecture is not so
far removed from Heidegger's later reflections on
science. But the context is now broader: one can
now ask about the existential as well as the logical
aims of science. In Husserlian terms, the approach
of 1915 serves as the noematic guiding clue to the
problem of the transcendental constitution of a
science. For Heidegger, it is the point of depar-
ture of that stretch of the road that leads from
science as a Begriindungszusammenhang, a
grounded system of propositions, to science as a
grounding project of Dasein. The constant in this
stretch of his Denkweg is a triple foundation which
can be read directly from the facticity of science:
the "what" and "how" of its domain, and its most
incipient articulation into fundamental categories.
50. /hid., pp. 118-9.
Hence his later discussion of the hermeneutical
process that lays foundations for any particular
science is in terms of a unifying project whose
primary functions are (l) to delineate its domain,
(2) to thematize the access routes to this domain
and thus provide it with methodic direction, and
(3) to outline the integral structure of the funda-
mental concepts which initially interprets the
aspects of the object under consideration. Thus
the scientific project manifests the more universal
triple hermeneutical apriori of a prepossession,
preview and preconception.-';!
And what the unified thrust of Vorhabe,
Vorsicht and Vorgrifj structures is a comprehen-
sive field of meaning in terms of which the more
particular something as something becomes com-
prehensible. The latter so-called "apophantic as"
suggests the familiar Frege-Husserl distinction
between referential object and connotative mean-
ing, whose model is the atomic meaning of words
and things. But the priority resides with the field
theory of meaning of the hermeneutical "as''
which, for example, gives an entire science its
topology in the form of "paradigms" (Kuhn) or
"ideals of natural order" (Toulmin), where mean-
ing is first an existential of Dasein, a mode of
scientifically being in the world, and not a property
of things. Heidegger on this point significantly
makes tacit allusion to Husserl's notion of signi-
tive or "empty" intentionality: the inaugurating
project opens up a space now to be "fi lied in" by
the particular discoveries of science.;:
Interestingly enough, the Heidegger of 1915,
even before his move from a logical to an existen-
tial conception of science, possessed another
guiding clue for the transition, which since has
become all-important in the philosophy of science.
In his I 912 report on logic, he points to the inter-
mediate character of the phenomenon of the
question, that poses a problem "which is not to
be solved either purely logically or purely psycho-
logically"Ji In line with this guiding clue, the
51. Martin Heidegger, Der Satz vom Grund (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957) p. 125; An Introduction to Mct<!physiu..
trans!. Ralph Manheim (New Haven: Yale U.P., 1959) p. 60.
52. Sein und Zeit, p. 150. The English translation of this text translates Vorhahe, Vorsicht and Vorgriff as .. for-
having," "fore-sight" and "fore-conception".
53. I hid., p. 15 J.
54. ''Neuere Forschungen iiber Logik," c. 521.
229
reduction of science to its project is notorsimply a
reduction to its prescientific origins in the world
of dailiness, but rather to its origin proper in the
inaugural question, which points forward to a goal
as well as back to a motive, where old concepts
like "time" are reshaped for new tasks, where old
presuppositions are channelled into the project by
way of the sense or direction of the question.
Later, the life style of scientists like Galileo,
Newton, Bohr and Heisenberg, their passion to
challenge old presuppositions, thereby creating
new ways of posing questions, and above all their
capacity to hold out in the questionable, will
suggest to Heidegger how science too has its
source in authentic existence. For the questioning
mode of comportment in which scientific discov-
eries are anticipated is in its way based on the
radical resolve in which man projects himself into
his fupdamental possibilities for truth)5 Here is
the central thrust of what Heidegger calls the
existential conception of science, which does not
consider science in terms of its finished results in
the judicative structure, as in the logical concep-
tion, but as an originative process in which man
discovers beings even in their being.7G
The Mathematical as Apriori
Another insight present in ovo in the early
student work concerns the historical uniqueness of
modern science when compared with the medieval
scientia and the Greek episteme. A constant in
Heidegger is that the distinctive trait of modern
science does not reside in its empirical observation
of facts, experimental verification, or the applica-
tion of mathematics to the physical world in order
to secure exact measurements, but rather in the
character of its mathematical projectJ" For the
project, in delineating in advance a particular
ontological structure of the world and Dasein's
mode of comportment toward this world, at once
lays down the ground plan which determines the
acceptable procedures for providing grounds and
proofs within the science, and accordingly how
facts are to be found and exact measurements are
to be obtained, as well as the manner in which
the experimental tests are to be set up. It might
be noted that Heidegger seems once again to be
basing himself on Husserlian terminology when
he calls the totality of the scientific project a
thematization, an act which objectifies beings and
makes them available for the intuition that makes
them present.;s
The apriori character of the mathematical
project is underscored by the broadened concep-
tion of the mathematical that Heidegger develops.
He traces mathematics in the narrow sense of a
discipline of numbers back to a more comprehen-
sive Greek sense of mathesis as a process of
learning, in which we come to know what we
already know. Ta mathemata, the learnable, thus
refer to everything that we already know in
advance: of bodies - the corporeal; of plants -
the v(getative; of animals- the animate; of man
- the human; and of things - ~ their thingness/;,r,
The mathematical in general is accordingly any
objrctive apriori whatsoever, not only the best-
known and well-established apriori, the formal
apriori of mathematics and logic, but also the
material apriori that for Husserl enter into the
foundations of the specific sciences. Heidegger
thereby seems to repeat in disguised and even
inflated terminology Hus,serl's reduction of each
science to its respective eidos in the lifeworld.
But it might be noted that Husserl himself
broadens the conception of mathematics in the
same direction, and even goes so far as to speak
of phenomenology as a mathesis universalissima,
a "mathematics" of cognitive achievements, whose
55. Sein und Zeit. p. 363. Cf. Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing? transl. W. B. Barton, Jr., and Vera Deutsch
Chicago: Regnery, 1967) pp. 65-6.
56. Ibid., p. 357.
57. "Der Zeitbegriff in der Geschichtswissenschaft" p. 176n. Sein und Zeit, p. 362; What is a Thing? pp. 66-8;
Holzwege (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 3, 1957) p. 70. In this way Heidegger retains the basic insight
of Kant's philosophy of science.
58. Sein und Zeit, p. 363. The Husserlian terminology of "theme'' and "object" has been amplified in particu-
lar by the school of Aron Gurwitsch. Cf. his The Field of Consciousness (Pittsburgh: Duquesne U.P.,
1964) and Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston: Northwestern U.P., 1966) pp. 182ff. Also
Richard M. Zaner, The Way of Phenomenology (New York: Pegasus, 1970) pp. 115-7.
59. What is a Thing? p. 73; Ho/zwege, p. 72.
230
noetic study carried out in pure subjectivity
comprehends the Jesser mathematics of the
noematic correlates of cJnsciousness.6a
Perhaps Heidegger's inflation of terminology is
even a veiled attack on Husser!, whose mathe-
matical orientation left its mark on the invariant
character of the eidos and even on the method of
determining it. For in his first acknowledgment of
the underlying material ontological structures
already available to the sciences from prescientific
experience, in the opening pages of Being and
Time,lil Heidegger at once moves to overcome the
static stratification that this structure conveys. In
emphasizing the immanent crises which on occa-
sion shift the conceptual foundations of a science
and thus constitute its real movement, he already
sees the material apriori in a historical and
projective role. In insisting that the real progress
of a science comes not so much from the accumu-
lation of facts as from foundational investigations,
which can revolutionize the ways in which
domains of research are basically constituted, he
suggests a dialectic between conceptual levels that
later will find resonances in the theories of scien-
tific historicity of such diverse thinkers as Jean
Cavailles and T. S. Kuhn. Cavailles with his
dialectic of concepts and Kuhn with his compari-
son of paradigm switch with linguistic translation.
both suggest Heidegger's hermeneutical model of
a historicity of language. The Ariadne's thread in
such investigations are the fundamental concepts,
whose roots go down to the prescientific interpret-
ation of the scientific domain, and whose
integrated contexture suggests a hermeneutical
revival of the metaphor of the "Book of Nature"Ji:2
The continual rereading of this text, which is basic
research at its most philosophical, in effect leaps
ahead of the positive sciences toward new founda-
tional structures, thereby opening up new possibil-
ities in the fields under study. The degree to which
the material apriori is drawn into actual historical
contexts is indicated by Heidegger's suggestion
that such preliminary research which served to
provide basic concepts to the sciences is concrete-
ly illustrated by speculative cosmologies like
Plato's Timaeus, Aristotle's De Anima and Kant's
transcendental logic of nature. The entire treat-
ment of the material apriori is pervaded by
Heidegger's futuristic conception of human exist-
ence, whereby presuppositions lie not so much
behind us as ahead of us, as possibilities awaiting
their projection. Science is not reduced to static
eidetic structures but projected into its possibili-
ties a tack which cannot but enhance it to its
fullest as a positive phenomenon.
The Epochal Conception of Science
Up to this point, the mathematical has been
discussed only in terms of its general apriori
character, which makes it applicable to all
sciences. But in what specific sense is modern
science mathematical, if not in the narrow and
usual sense that its norm, mathematical physics,
suggests to us? Heidegger deals with this issue in
a 1935 lecture course now published under the
title What is a Thing?, in a study of the approach
developed by the founding fathers of modern
physics, Galileo and Newton ~ about the same
time, it might be noted, that Husser! was preparing
a similar study which appeared in the Crisis article
of 1936 under the title, "Galileo's Mathematiza-
tion of Nature". According to Heidegger, both
Galileo and Newton dramatically exemplify the
project that leaps ahead of factual evidence and
verification through "thought experiments" of
idealization which develop and posit propositions
(hypo-theses) anticipating the "as" structure of
facts. the thingness of things. The project thereby
outlines an open field of meaning which prefigures
the ways in which things are to show themselves.
Inasmuch as the positing principles articulate
ideal standards according to which things :ue
evaluated, e.g. "freely falling body" and "friction-
less plane", they are axioms in the original Greek
60. Erste Philosophie II, pp. 249-250. This manuscript dates from 1921. i.e. during the time of Heidegger's
assistantship to Husser!.
61. Sein und Zeit, pp. 9-11.
62. Cf. Theodore Kisiel; "Zu einer Hermeneutik naturwissenschaftlicher Entdeckung," Zeitschrift fiir allw!meinc
Wissenschaftstheorie II (1971), no. 3. An earlier and shorter English version of this text is to be found in
David Carr and Edward Casey (ed.), The PhenomenoioRical Horizon (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1972), cf. e<:p.
note 10.
231
sense ot the word. The mathematics of modern
science is thus an axiomatic project, utilizing
axioms of the type exemplified by Newton's
idealized laws of motion. According to this
project, nature is no longer the inner capacity of
a body to determine its particular form of motion
and place, as it had been in ancient and medieval
science. but is now axiomatically predetermined
as a uniform context of space-time relations.
Because all bodies now move uniformly in space
and time. it is possible and even necessary to
establish a universally uniform measure for them,
i.e. numerical measurement. The condition of
possibility of mathematics in the narrow sense is
therefore the more profound mathematical project
of modern science. It is because of this axiomatic
project. and not vice-versa. that analytical
geometry and calculus could be and had to be
developed as a "language" to articulate the
instituting project. It is against the background of
this more comprehensive mathematizing project
that the burning question central to phenomen-
ology, of the justification and limits of mathe-
matical formalism in relation to the demand to
return to our intuitive experience of nature, is to
be assessed. This question cannot be decided by
an either/or but rather on a more fundamental
level. For the question of the justification and
limits of the mathematical in general remains the
more decisive one.fl-1
Accordingly, it is necessary to probe the deeper
grounds of the mathematical spirit as it emerged
in modern times. As such, it belongs to the mode
of historical existence of a particular time, its
basic attitude toward things and toward what is
at all. Investigating the mathematical in this
regard therefore takes us beyond the existential
conception of science to its metaphysical sense,
and this means for Heidegger its epochal sense,
inasmuch as science constitutes a terminal epoch
in the history of metaphysics. This history ulti-
mately grounds itself not in the grounding project
of Dasein but in an epochal movement that takes
its course beyond human controL
An account of Heidegger's reading of the
history of metaphysics or even of the origin of
modernity cannot be ventured Only a few
sketchy remarks relevant to our topic might be
presented by way of conclusion. Our most relevant
point: Heidegger sees Husser! to be still under the
63. What is a ThinR?, pp. 91-5.
64. A brief summary of his reading of the origin of modernity in relation to science may at least suggest the
overall style of his account.
232
In the medieval period of truth founded on faith. natural knowledge did not have its own grounds or
independent foundations. With the rejection of the tradition, a new freedom toward self-grounding arose.
Man no longer conceives of himself as a creature, but as a subject who freely proposes his objects to
!oimself. The certitudes of faith are replaced by the self-certitude of the human subject. Everything becomes
subject to the absolutely certain axiom of the Cogito and Volo. Because man falls back strictly on his own
resources, the mathematical posits itself as the authoritative principle of knowledge and binds itself to
self-imposed obligations. The spirit of modernity thereby becomes the spirit of the rnatlzesis universalis, the
System. Man now creates his own order: he proposes to himself what is to be known. determines in
advance the principles he needs to reach this goal, assures his way by means of the controls of calculative
thinking. Within the mathematical project, the dimension of the point of view becomes absolutized into a
worldview. The how becomes all-important, method usurps science. Scientific research becomes an indis-
pensable form of the planning and conquest that enter into fulfillment of the worldview. The newly
declared freedom of modernity manifests itself in the form of the thought experiments of idealization.
what Einstein later characterized as the free invention of hypothesizing. The scientist enters into the Zeit-
geist of the will to power. Not that the individual scientist acts outside of all controls. The axiom of the
Co[?ito and Volo manifests itself more in the fact that the final tribunal for the paradigms of science lies in
the scientific community, which sometimes exerts a communal dogmatism that smacks of the old ecclesiast-
ical dogmatism of the middle ages.
This Zeit[?eist of modernity now leaves its mark on the what. how and conceptual medium of science.
Scientific domains are objectively secured, sharply divided and distributed to. distinct disciplines for their
control and regulation. The objectifying approach adjusts and reworks a domain in order to be able to
"count on" it. The clear and distinct categories of the subject-object relation permit self-assured specula-
tion on the one hand, experimental confirmation on the other. themselves are sharply defined through
measurement in order to subject them to the rigorous control of the formalized schemes necessitated by
the subject-object relation. The spirit of confirmation overshadows its circuit with the inaugurating
project to the point that science is defined in terms of its context of justification. The vagaries of the
context of discovery are systematically excluded or explained away in terms of the "free invention'' of the
scientific "genius".
spell of the spirit of modernity, the period domin-
ated by the axiomatic project of the mathematical.
The period is characterized by the positing of
self-evident and indubitable principles in order to
secure the ground for a mathesis or System,
especially the "I posit" of the Cogito principle
that placed the subjectivity of method in the
central position. And Husser! still bases himself
on the Cartesian ideal of science: not a deductive
mathesis. to be sure, but instead the mathesis
universalissima comprehending all the sciences
and based on the methodological "principle of all
principles," the primordially giving intuition of
the transcendental subjectivity.cr;
As Heidegger sees it. the phenomenological
foundation in experience is no longer fully articul-
able in indubitable propositions which therefore
can be clearly located within the structure of our
knowledge. Because of the radical discontinuity
between our immediate experience and the know-
ledge that springs from it. foundational thinking
involves a leap from the said to its unsaid- even
to its prolongation in the unsayable. And openness
to experience in the full sense at times puts us on
treacherous ground. when the old ground gives
way in order to prepare for the emergence of the
new. Foundational thinking thus is no longer
mathematical in any sense but rather hermen-
eutical in the profoundest sense,liC where we learn
what we don't know, what springs the limits of our
knowledge and what nevertheless promises to
come into its purview. For life is more than science
can ever hope to be, even the self-grounding
science of phenomenology as Husserl sees it.
Science grounds itself in a bottomless Other which
is never capable of being secured by a method or
subsumed into a science.
Conclusion
Heidegger in this way seeks to justify his claim
to radicalize the phenomenological zu den Sac/zen
selbst beyond Husser!. Yet in many ways, the
Heideggerian strategy is reminiscent of the
65. Zur Saclre des Denkens, pp. 69-70.
Husser! of the Crisis: The history of science is con-
sidered within the history of philosophy, and this
in turn as a reflection of the history of the spirit of
the West. Even the phases in the rise of modern
science are comparable to Husserl's: The method
becomes dominant and first turns metaphysical in
the objectivism of the world in itself, and then
turns back on itself in the absolutizing of techniza-
tion. If anything, Heidegger's conception of
technical rationality is even more restrictive than
Husserl's. Heidegger's antidote to the crisis is
likewise a call to return to sources, often marked
by poetic and mystical nuances that seem remoter
from science than Husserl's "world-experiencing
life". As Heidegger at one point puts it, in a
reference strongly suggestive of Husserl's life-
world, the sciences manifest an "inconspicuous
state of affairs" of an unavoidable (unumgiinglich)
and indispensable presence which is nevertheless
inaccessible (unzugiinglich) to the sciences them-
selves and thus always passed over (iibergangen)
by them. This inconspicuous state of affairs is the
historical stream in which science finds its place,
accessible only to a more radical reflection on its
epochal sense.m
Such a comprehensive reflection is intrinsic to
the phenomenological return to the things them-
selves, whose system of foundations installs a
built-in tendency to broaden its issues beyond the
cognitive to the precognitive in all its phases. It is
thus that phenomenology strives to fulfil its
historical mission, namely, "to measure the dis-
tance between our experience and science". The
natural outcome of phenomenological questioning
is accordingly the larger issue of science in the
context of life and of history. But here it runs the
risk of overriding its initial orientation in specific
phenomena. This is particularly true of the pheno-
menon of science, which we are even methodo-
logically instructed to bracket in favour of the
prescientific. To counter the danger of overhasty
metabasis and its accompanying distortions. the
broader reflection on the epochal sense of science
66. Perceptive readers may have already noticed a certain overlap in Heidegger's conception of the mathe-
matical and the hermeneutical. I have tried to clarify this in a paper entitled "The Mathematical and the
Hermeneutical: On Heidegger's Notion of the Apriori," read at the Heidegger Conference meeting at
DePaul University in Chicago on March 25, 1972.
67. Martin Heidegger, Vortriige und Aufsiitze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954) pp. 67-8.
233
must at once cultivate the more specific orienta-
tions of the transcendental-existential and logical
conceptions of science. The time has come for the
particular and detailed investigations in a pheno-
menology of science to "fill in" the broad context
provided by classical phenomenology, and thereby
234
to make contact with parallel efforts which strive
to overcome the positivistic misreading of the
phenomenon of science.
Northern Illinois University