Phenomenological reflections on the natural sciences

     ____________________________________________________

 

                        Gerard Numan

                   gtnuman@noord.bart.nl



               (received: October 28, 1995)

        (first printed - Vol. 2, No. 5 - December 1995)





THE PHENOMENON OF NATURAL SCIENCE

	

	If we want to speak about the *phenomenon* of natural science, 

it is precisely the term `phenomenon'  which should lead us to an 

unprejudiced view and understanding of what natural science *is*. 

Because there are various *ways* and *concepts* from which a thing can 

be understood (each of them having a right of being correct in their own 

context), the reflection upon how something appears itself is not a way 

or concept but the most open reflection itself. `Phenomenology' claims 

to be this reflection. Such a reflection upon the natural sciences would 

start `freshly' and should therefore begin with the foremost appearance 

of natural science, disconnected from historical or scientific notions. 

In this way we can meet science everywhere. Not only in universities, 

schools or in laboratories but every aspect of modern life seems to be 

penetrated with science. Debates on television involve experts, movies 

are hi-tech and display possibilities of hi-tech. I'm here writing a 

philosophical discourse on science on a computer. Our clothes, food and 

air have been produced or at least modified by scientific products. 

Children play with Pentium computers the way their mothers were playing 

with hand-made dolls. This shows the entanglement of science with 

everyday life and vice versa. The direction science takes is no longer a 

pure and selfless search for the true nature of things: it is influenced 

by the demands and financial investments from society. Society itself on 

the other hand is very much influenced by science and the demands 

society makes are in part created by science: the need for a home 

computer is not natural but can only rise in a society which has adapted 

itself to the computer and in which the computer is adapted to society.



	The different ways different groups of people deal with science 

is also striking: scientists merely `labour' in collective rather 

mechanical explorations of a defined region. They themselves work in 

order to reveal a truth which they themselves often never will live to 

experience or understand. The majority of the population, although 

relatively more and more people are scientifically educated, regard 

scientists as a kind of priests: as if they were oracles, speaking 

enigmatically from a grounding in a divine, yet obscure, truth. 

Scientific theories very often have the effect as if they were 

metaphysical thoughts. We see this at work where for instance in 

psychology neurological, biological and genetic theories are mistaken 

for an all embracing explanatory theory. It seems then, for example, as 

if we are merely neurological systems.

 

EDMUND HUSSERL (1859-1938)

 

	The godfather of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, started his 

philosophical career from his original discipline: mathematics. 

Eventually, he wanted to establish a philosophy which had the same 

evident deductive truth as mathematics. It was his uncompromising art of 

reflection which led him to realize that the evident truth which 

mathematics exhibited wasn't the `mathematical' but the `intuitive' the 

truth of a proposition according to Husserl, can never be disconnected 

from the subjective instance, i.e. the consciousness which attaches the 

predicate `true' of a proposition. `Truth' thus, according to Husserl, is 

essentially the *clarity* of an experience. The `correspondence-theory' 

of truth (in which truth is being thought of as the correspondence of a 

proposition with an experience) is thus abandoned by Husserl because the 

gap between a judgment and the subject of that judgment (something in 

the world) had been overcome in the experience which generates both 

empirical experience and judgment. This idea would be transformed 

eventually into Husserl's famous `phenomenological reduction': every 

notion of an actual existing (transcendent) being should be `put between 

brackets', and only `how' an experience or meaning is *given* is of 

primary importance to a true reflexive scientist.

 

	Subjectivity for Husserl is thus the only possible gateway to 

achieve `objective', d.i.  truthful or meaningful, knowledge. Knowledge 

in fact *is* what is given for the pure subjectivity. The forms, 

contexts and structures of the `givenness' for subjectivity are  what in 

everyday language we call `world' or `reality' The basic form of the 

givenness  Husserl calls `Lifeworld'. This world of life is the 

collection of experience people speak off  when interacting with one 

another. It's the empirical world of things as they appear to  us most 

ordinary. This Lifeworld is the constitutive source for all cultural 

developed notions, like the scientific descriptions. These descriptions 

Husserl calls `logisms': they are abstractions based upon the empirical 

things from the lifeworld, created by an inter-subjective practice: like 

the need a society has to have a functional knowledge of the weather, 

the sea or vegetation etc.. In this sense science is a rather natural 

attitude, probably always latent and actual in all human cultures.

 

	In his last work `The Crisis of the European Sciences and the 

Transcendental  Phenomenology', Husserl speaks of the natural sciences. 

The *crisis* of the European sciences consists, according to Husserl, of 

a forgottenness of the original lifeworld as the source (of sense and 

meaning) of science. The lifeworld can easily be identified with `every 

day life'. This association with a `natural', humane level of experience 

is not coincidental. The crisis of the sciences  is a crisis of mankind 

because science is the self-awareness of the ultimate subjective entity, 

humankind. If this self-awareness has itself been the cause of the 

forgottenness of the lifeworld as the ultimate ground of meaning, it is 

not what it should be, but the contrary. Husserl never wanted to 

criticize science in its immanent structure, logic or practice. It's the 

*place* science takes in the historical self- awareness of humankind as 

a rational developing of culture which is essential and at stake in the 

development of modern science. The natural sciences have, as a matter 

of speech, *taken over* the whole realm of self-awareness. This realm is 

the so called mind, culture and eventually self-awareness as a 

`universal responsibility' a knowing of being a human being in a 

historical context of a human morality in progress.

 

	According to Husserl the crisis of science has developed out of 

the abstraction of experience which has been realized in the 

mathematical methodology of the natural science. The enlightenment has 

thus grown into a darkness of reason because in the twentieth century 

there only seems to have been left two attitudes: that of a blind 

rationality, which proclaims only that to be true or real that is 

abstracted from the immediate realm of givenness; and an attitude that 

only can appeal to non-rational givenness, as a semi-romantic plunge 

into the lifeworld. Only a *rational recurse* to the lifeworld, 

according to Husserl, is truly rational and a true understanding of 

lifeworld.

 

	So Husserl's vision on the natural sciences stems forth from a 

teleological notion of what  in the phenomenological method is thought 

of as the absolute point in reflection: the subjective unity, the ego. 

Natural science is (just) a way the ego takes his world, the lifeworld, 

to himself. This way, natural science is it's own method of abstracting 

from  immediate experience: the mathematical method. The crisis of 

science consists in thinking this method *as* reality, thereby making 

immediate experience secondary.

 

MARTIN HEIDEGGER (1889-1971)

 

	I can't think of a time were the common `vision of life' wasn't 

led by some kind of  metaphor. Nowadays these metaphors are derived from 

the sciences. How can we, prisoners of the modern age, understand our 

age then? How can we leap out of the limitations set by the metaphors we 

live in? What is the universal anchorpoint from which we can view 

history? The phenomenological method only supplies us with meaning as it 

appears to us. What bridges the (artificial) gap between consciousness 

and the world this consciousness lives in?

 

	Precisely at this point Martin Heidegger wanted to enrich 

phenomenology. Phenomenology, according to Heidegger, only shows the 

`how' of meaning. What is `at stake' it simply postpones. For Heidegger 

the question after the `what' is the *underlying structure* (or sense) 

of existence; for a phenomenologist like his teacher Husserl the only 

possible way of examining was to ask for the `how'. Heidegger would add 

that consciousness needs to be understood as being part of a world, 

which is prior to the phenomena in it. Husserl reduced experience and 

meaning to `how they appear' in order to reveal the `meaning-structure' 

(German: Sinn). Heidegger reduces, also from the intention to reveal 

`meaning', the phenomena to a concrete `being in the world'. The 

structure of meaning can't be *fully* grasped by reflecting on the 

contexts within which meanings appear. They have to be understood in the 

structure of the being that `has' or `is' consciousness. This structure 

is an *ontological* structure. The basic relations in which things `are' 

Heidegger calls ontological. It doesn't mean `being' as it is: outside 

our heads, but it means the nature of the relation we, the human being, 

are. Human being is, ontological speaking, a `being there'. It is not 

just a being like all the other beings in the world (things) but a being 

that has a relation with its own being. This ontological scheme 

(Being/being-there/beings) is the basic structure from which the human 

being can be understood: a thing in the world, but a thing with a 

relation to itself and the world. The revolutionary aspect of Heidegger?

philosophy is his understanding of Being as nothing more and nothing 

less than the light from which the being-there receives his world. This 

world and being shouldn't be mistaken with any scientific notion of 

reality. In science `what is real' is considered as `that which can be 

proven to be'. For Heidegger this is a derivative question, Being 

foremost is the basic event in which experience exists. Heidegger's main 

work therefore is named `Being *and Time*', because `time' (the coming 

to be, the momentary) is to be revealed as the meaning of Being.

 

THE TECHNICAL

 

	Heidegger's philosophy is often divided up into two periods: 

that of the first period, characterized as the period of `Being and 

Time', Heidegger's magnum opus; and the period after the so called 

`Turning'.

 

	The first period is the period in which Heidegger's thoughts 

about the difference between the `present at hand' and the `ready to 

hand' is dominant.

 

	From these basic notions of the heideggerian philosophy, 

Heidegger's attitude towards the natural science can be deduced. In an 

article called `The question after the technical' Heidegger describes 

how everyday experience and understanding has been penetrated by a 

technical attitude. How people nowadays regard the world, and the 

`things' in it, in a functionalistic framework. How the foremost 

appearances and meanings of things have been suppressed by a `technical 

look'. Because this technical perspective goes so deep into the 

experiences and self-awareness of people Heidegger thinks something has 

entered the basic relation which man is: his relation with being.

 

 

 

	Being is thought of as the 'light' in which our world is 

revealed to us. This light however is structured by the 'being to hand' 

and the 'being for hand', i.e. the productive and  interaction 

between the human being and nature (excuse me for using this marxist 

terminology).

 

	In Heidegger's second period the light of being becomes 

dominant. The structure of the way the world is revealed to us is not 

completely determined by our way we `act', behave or live, but Being 

itself has a more autonomous status with regard to the human activity.

 

	Heidegger has in his first period thus a more Husserlian-like 

interpretation of human institutionalized activity and thinking like the 

sciences. Science is then a way we can relate to reality, be it an 

extreme and methodologizing way. In his second period, on the contrary, 

modern age is more or less a period in which Being has `left us' and 

it's not *we* who have left Being.

 

	The *background* of this rather controversial thought of the 

late Heidegger, as far as I am concerned, is one of the most important 

intuitions which has blazed like a cold wind through western thought: the 

intuition of an overwhelming finitude of the human mind. Important 

champions of this wind were of course Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, the 

great critics of consciousness. Already in `Being and Time' Heidegger 

has proven himself to be a philosopher of `existence': the concrete, 

finite situation of everyday life is being taken to be the basis of 

human being. But this situation, as I have explained above, is structured 

by human activity. Finite also has an element of conscious 

`self-control', a kind of `act' of will: determination (German: 

Entschlossenheit). It seems that in the late Heidegger these 

subjectivistic notions completely have vanished. The being-there is 

thought of then as an open place in a world, a gateway for the light of 

being to open up `world'.

 

	In this line of thinking it is impossible to understand a 

cultural phenomenon like the `rise and fall of scientific rationality' 

as an activity of the human spirit or, like Husserl does, to understand 

it in the context of intentionality. For Heidegger, who proclaims the 

absoluteness of finitude, cultural developments are like streams and 

gulfs in which humanity is moved, rather than that humanity is 

consciously planning and scheming its own course.

 

	For Husserl the `Absolute Reason' was the teleological principal 

of history, which means that science must be understood as an attempt or 

`project' of rationality to understand itself and its world. For 

Heidegger this position is untenable for two reasons. In the first 

place: the basic relation between the human mind and its world is a 

non-rational one, according to Heidegger. This relation is prior to any 

possible rational relationship and is more a `being-there' than a 

`seeing'. In the second place are, for Heidegger, cultural developments 

not determined or caused by an intentional activity. Heidegger has 

stripped Husserl's notion of the intentionality of consciousness from 

all of it's Cartesian elements and has left it to be an uncertain 

`upholding' in a given field of possibilities, whereby even choices are 

elements of the field of possibilities.

 

	`Technique', as Heidegger calls the essence of modern scientific 

rationality, is thus the way nowadays Beings sheds it's light upon us 

and our world. The influence of human history on the way `things reveal 

themselves' nowadays should be thought of as a history of Being rather 

than a history of humankind.

 

	It is this rather fatalistic view which has led Heidegger to 

think of modern age as an age which we have to `go through', which we 

have to carry to the end.

 

	What we have to go through is the age of `technique': a period 

of time in which the lighting of the world by Being has been obscured. 

As said before, it is Being itself who has `decided' to cover itself up 

with a givenness of the world in which `things' of the world aren't 

lighted up originally but in a technical sense only: when we see a spring 

in a forest we don't experience that spring as `it is': in a coherence 

with the forest, the air, the animals, us etc., but we can only `judge' 

it's possible functional place in our way of exploiting the world to our 

merely, all too human, needs. And even the latter, our human needs, are 

obscured. In an article called `Letter on Humanism' Heidegger suggests 

that Humanism is the least humanistic ideology or faith possible. In 

taking himself as the measurepoint of all things, man has lost the 

ability to `measure', i.e. understand, himself. To `know' or `be' human 

in a true sense, we have to think ourselves as part of a reality in 

which we are foremost only creatures (created). In placing mankind as 

the anchorpoint of the world it is impossible to understand anything, 

the only outcome of such a hierarchy of values will be an 

un-understandable exploiting and submitting of nature.

 

	It will clearly follow from this that Heidegger suggests that a 

truly felt belief is the only perspective, or to speak in his own 

words: openness to Being, in which man can find and understand the place 

he really exhibits. It will also be clear that the darkness of modern 

times can't be understood as something which mankind with a magnitude of 

effort can overcome: it is precisely a loosening up of the autonomous 

subject what is needed. Nor is it this activity, which has been the 

cause of the darkness of the modern age: man, as a victim of history 

rather than an actor, has been submitted in our age to a probably 

necessary stage in the history of Being.

 

	Science in it's internal structure, logic or practice never is 

criticized by Heidegger. Science is seen as a fate to be going through; 

as an interpretation of Being (which in effect it foremost is) it's 

fatal and overwhelming. Heidegger's `solution' is not a `re-education' 

of science (Husserl) but a stubborn openness to Being in order to give 

Being the possibility of enlightening our existence again.

 

 

 

	Phenomenology in any case has shown the reflexive poverty of 

scientific thought. No matter what truth or knowledge science has 

brought, it hasn't given insight, understanding or a higher level of 

spirituality. On the contrary: the methodological, systematical, 

mathematical and disciplinatory practice of science seems to have 

brought a narrow-mindedness which is almost impossible to overcome.

 

	It's obvious that Heidegger in his second period has left the 

boundaries of what a lot of people think to be the rational 

understandable. I think however that a thinker who has shown this grand 

qualities should always be treated seriously. A way to understand and 

re-value science is to bring it back to the source of it's own essence, 

history and practice: human experience. A philosophy like Heidegger's 

shouldn't be taken as a last word. It even isn't intended to be such, at 

least that's my intuition. It merely is an attempt or a path to achieve 

the openness to a real understanding and thinking. A thinking in which 

*meaning* is respected in it original givenness, a thinking which is 

active and critical, d.i. which judges phenomena on it's own 

principles.

 

        Phenomenology is an attempt *to be* the openness in which things 

and meanings are revealed to us. This article is nothing more than a 

contribution to such a reflexive dialogue with others, ourselves and 

Being.