Friday, September 30, 2005
In-der-Blog-sein
Freetrader Blog on what Heidegger misunderstands about scientific experiments:
Freetrader Blog on what Heidegger misunderstands about scientific experiments:
Heidegger clearly only sees the intellectual side of the experiment as relevant for the relation of Modern man to nature and reality. For him the experiment is a totally controled situation, where nature is forced to show itself in a certain way, by man and his calculations.¶ 8:31 AM
But Heidegger can only see it like that, because he misses out on the practical side of the experiment [...] nature is actually one of the actors in the experiment. The essence of experiment is that something new can be discovered, because there's always the chance of nature behaving in ways we don't expect.
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I just posted the following observation to Freetrader:
"Within the complex of machinery that is necessary to physics in order to carry out the smashing of the atom lies hidden the whole of physics up to now." ("The Age of the World Picture" in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt, p. 124)
I think it is far more correct to say that STS and Latour provide (useful, empirical) footnotes to Heidegger. There is nothing to indicate that Heidegger did not have an eye for the practical side of experimentation. As this quote (from 1938) shows, he was well aware of the need to do a kind of hermeneutics of laboratory equipment in order to understand science. I.e., it was Heidegger, not Latour, who first proposed that humanists would be well advised to interpret our machines along with our texts. Indeed, it was from Heidegger (with footnotes by Latour) that I learned that physics, at least since Archimedes, has been an interpretation of how machines works (the lever, the pulley, the inclined plane).
"Within the complex of machinery that is necessary to physics in order to carry out the smashing of the atom lies hidden the whole of physics up to now." ("The Age of the World Picture" in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt, p. 124)
I think it is far more correct to say that STS and Latour provide (useful, empirical) footnotes to Heidegger. There is nothing to indicate that Heidegger did not have an eye for the practical side of experimentation. As this quote (from 1938) shows, he was well aware of the need to do a kind of hermeneutics of laboratory equipment in order to understand science. I.e., it was Heidegger, not Latour, who first proposed that humanists would be well advised to interpret our machines along with our texts. Indeed, it was from Heidegger (with footnotes by Latour) that I learned that physics, at least since Archimedes, has been an interpretation of how machines works (the lever, the pulley, the inclined plane).
I disagree with Freetrader's post that Heidegger only sees the intellectual side of science, only using empiricism to confirm it because central to Heidegger is the notion of Dasein trying to make meaningful sense of the world as already present to Dasein.
For example, in B&T it is the hammer breaking that causes Dasein to react to the world intellectually, rather than an intellect predicting the hammer will break and anticipating such.
For example, in B&T it is the hammer breaking that causes Dasein to react to the world intellectually, rather than an intellect predicting the hammer will break and anticipating such.
Doesn't the error (which seems unfortunately common) arise out of a kind of misapplication of "science" or "technology" in Heidegger to the uses of the terms in modern science? Science seems innately tied to inquiry and thus often is anything but what Heidegger worries about in many of his writings. Yet science as taught is often a blind dogmatic repetition which seems quite similar to what Heidegger discusses.
My impression is that the original error is in Kant's explanation of science and the a priori; e.g. when he discusses experiments as formulated to confirm of Newton's theories. This view is then ascribed to Heidegger, who does have his Kantian transcendental side and is the archetypal German transcendental philosopher of the XXth century to the analytical, but is more sophisticated about science than hoi polloi assume.
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