Habermas, Heidegger and berg Science as Instrumental Reason

Science as instrumental reason: Heidegger, Habermas,Heisenberg

Cathryn Carson

Published online: 5 December 2009

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract In modern continental thought, natural science is widely portrayed as an

exclusively instrumental mode of reason. The breadth of this consensus has partly

preempted the question of how it came to persuade. The process of persuasion, as it

played out in Germany, can be explored by reconstructing the intellectual exchanges

among three twentieth-century theorists of science, Heidegger, Habermas, and

Werner Heisenberg. Taking an iconic Heisenberg as a kind of limiting case of ‘‘the

scientist,’’ Heidegger and Habermas each found themselves driven to place new

constraints on their previously more capacious assessments of science, especially its

capacity to reflect on its method. Tracing how that happened, through archival and

historical contextualization and close readings of their texts, lets us make visible

Heidegger and Habermas’s intellectual affinities and argumentative parallels, which

derived not only from their shared grounding in earlier reactions against positivism,

but also from confrontation with contemporary events. The latter included, for

Heidegger, the rise of a technically powerful science exemplified by nuclear

physics, and for Habermas, post-World War II controversies over science, tech-

nology, and their socially critical possibilities.

Keywords Martin Heidegger � Jurgen Habermas � Werner Heisenberg �Instrumental rationality � Science � Positivism

1 Introduction

Whatever their other disputes, modern German intellectuals have rarely disagreed

about science. Their consensus has been that modern science is, in a word,

C. Carson (&)

Department of History, University of California, 3229 Dwinelle Hall,

Berkeley, CA 94720-2550, USA

e-mail: [email protected]

123

Cont Philos Rev (2010) 42:483–509

DOI 10.1007/s11007-009-9124-y

instrumental at its core. That character is supposed to be anchored in its nomological

orientation, its experimental method, and its unreflexive constitution of nature as

object. Then lawful regularity obtained through scientific investigation opens the

door to prediction—and thus to control. In this view, instrumentality is simply in the

nature of science: the ‘‘I’’ of its investigator, the subject facing its objects, is

intrinsically in search of mastery over its world. And this has been true of the

venture, so the world-historical account runs, since the seventeenth century’s twin

revolutions in natural science and Cartesian philosophy, out of which the modern

age was born. Its character was reinforced by Enlightenment desires for dominion

over nature and by industrial-age scientism and positivism. And science is

intrinsically limited. Self-conscious reflection is ruled out by its own canons.

Instrumentality exhausts its essence, and there is nothing substantively more to it

than that.

It bears remembering, all the same, that the instrumental view has its own history.

At one time, quite different views had sometimes found a foothold instead. Rather

than a project defined only by self-asserting domination, science once also served as

a prototype of intersubjectivity in dialogic encounter with other inquirers guided by

reason. It was imagined to open up crucial realms of human freedom in a line

leading from the Enlightenment philosophes to the mid-twentieth-century left. Even

in Germany, it appeared as a cultural force in the tradition of the bios theoretikosand notions of Bildung, or self-cultivation. Older understandings of science saw it as

liberating and liberal; and if they had never been universal, they had been powerful

still. Exactly because the instrumental conception of science has so dominated

certain strands of recent discussion, it cries out to be taken as a historical problem,

not a self-evident truth.

In particular, a history of the accounting of scientific reason needs to take

seriously its engagements with practicing scientists and their science. Instrumen-

talist arguments about the nature of science took their cues from Nietzsche, Weber,

Dilthey, and Husserl, observers of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

when natural scientists, following Hermann von Helmholtz, were not just

proclaiming their project’s significance for progress and Bildung, but proudly

announcing that knowledge is power, Wissen ist Macht.1 The intellectual struggle

against positivism, understood as the unthinking elevation of natural science’s

cognitive authority, became a rallying cry for an otherwise diverse group of

thinkers. These were no merely abstract debates. Ongoing battles for disciplinary

authority powerfully shaped reactions to science’s claims. By the mid-twentieth-

century, ostensibly philosophical tracts could be found peppered with references to

atomic bombs, cyclotrons, satellites, cybernetics, science policy, and education

reform, invoking scientists by name.

This paper focuses on Heidegger and Habermas, in the mid-twentieth century

two of the instrumental view’s most influential spokesmen. With greater temporal

attentiveness than the philosophical literature usually musters, it seeks to chart how

their arguments about science developed in detail. The paper explores where their

understandings were grounded in an era’s singularity and concreteness, and where

1 Helmholtz (1903, p. 180).

484 C. Carson

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they spun off into universal, exceptionless assertions about the scientific project

itself. To this end it displays how both figures were in dialogue, open or hidden,

with the paper’s third man. Werner Heisenberg enters the story as a prominent

scientist with a reflective bent, with whom both Heidegger and Habermas found

themselves confronted in turn. For Heidegger and Habermas, this paper argues,

Heisenberg took on a role that was almost iconic—in Heidegger’s case, through

direct confrontation; in Habermas’s, in more mediated form. Heisenberg came to

figure for his philosophical colleagues first as a final hope for deviation from the

narrative of instrumentality, and then, as he changed and they changed, in a

curiously parallel manner, as the modern age’s unthinking embodiment instead. In a

fashion sometimes deliberate and sometimes strangely unconscious, he embodied

the possibilities and limits of a post-positivist, post-objectivist, post-classical

physics.2 By directing attention to matters epistemic (the subject-object relation and

the possibility of reflection) and societal (scientists’ growing technical and political

power), Heisenberg spotlights Heidegger and Habermas’s seeming convergence—a

convergence that, absent an appreciation of these historical conjunctions, may seem

philosophically dubious, even absurd.

2 First encounters

Heidegger’s theological and philosophical training are well known. Less often

discussed is his early interest, at the time of his famous vocational crisis, in logic,

mathematics and science.3 Natural science was not central to the young Heidegger’s

thinking; it would not take that place until the later 1930s. Yet the early works show

signs of attention, and many positions and strategies that later characterized his full-

blown concern made their appearance at the start of his thought.4

In a particularly telling instance, Heidegger’s habilitation address of 1915, which

dealt with concepts of temporality in historical scholarship, took up contemporary

neo-Kantian debates about methodological differences between the natural and the

human or cultural sciences.5 The starting point for so many twentieth-century

intellectuals, the conception of natural science articulated in this debate over

method, was both an answer to positivism and a thorough-going concession to it.

Positivism—the term will come up again—was the claim that direct sense

experience was the unique origin of all reliable knowledge. Science’s rock-solid

construction was built on stand-alone objectivity without interpretative intervention.

Positive knowledge had a self-confident automaticity to it, grounded in scientific

method. It allowed the empirical natural sciences to deliver lawful regularities about

phenomena; and asking for more than that from knowledge was a mistake. The

2 For Heisenberg on his own terms see Carson (2010a forthcoming).3 Ott (1988, pp. 69–70, 73–74, 86; Sheehan 1988).4 The essays on Heidegger in Kockelmans and Kisiel (1970) have not been bettered. See also

Kockelmans (1985), Glazebrook (2000).5 Heidegger (1978a). One picks up resonances here of Dilthey and, more proximately, Rickert and neo-

Kantian concerns. Cf. Heidegger (1988); Kisiel (1973).

Science as instrumental reason 485

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enormously diverse rubric of positivism was used to cover everything from careful

epistemological argumentation to simple-minded cheerleading for science, and it

generated a broad-ranging reaction among defenders of other methodologically

divergent branches of scholarship. In turn-of-the-century argumentation, positivism

was often identified with scientists such as the physicist and philosopher Ernst

Mach.6

In his habilitation address, in a move common in the philosophical debate of the

day, as a stand-in for natural science Heidegger considered physics. To articulate a

presumptive consensus on this science he selected two prominent theoretical

physicists of the early twentieth century. These were Max Planck and Albert

Einstein, among the originators of the challenges to nineteenth-century physics and

participants in their own disciplinary confrontation with Mach. And so beginning

from Planck, Heidegger defined the goal of physics as a unified dynamics

prescribing comprehensive equations of motions of masses in space and time. He

then used Einstein’s fixation on measurement to bring things to a point.7 Examining

special relativity a decade after its publication, Heidegger already felt confident that

Einstein’s operationalist treatment of time did not break with classical Galilean

notions of its measurability. Rather, it only confirmed them. Time was part of the

framework for the description of motion, and science’s concept of time centered

upon measurement in a positivist sense.

Out of physicists’ own post-positivist discussions Heidegger was drawing

conclusions about their way of grasping the world. At the same time, he was

articulating a world-historical continuity in their practice from its classical Galilean

origins to its most up-to-date form.8 And he was drawing from the thinking of two

practicing scientists, whose observations he put to work for his own ends. Now

practicing scientists typically had little interest in this kind of examination,

Heidegger noted, insofar as it contributed nothing useful in the sciences’ own terms.

But this itself was an interesting observation, Heidegger suggested, because of how

it defined the scientist’s legitimate task. It meant that such reflections, to quote him,

‘‘are significant for the researcher in a particular science if and only if he forgets

himself as such and—philosophizes.’’9

The interest in natural science would continue below the surface of Heidegger’s

thinking, though in the 1920s and early 1930s he put other issues first. While this

secondary preoccupation is sometimes noted, Heidegger scholarship has worked out

its implications only in part.10 Through his confrontation with neo-Kantianism and

6 Standard introductions are Schnadelbach (1984), Kolakowski (1968).7 Planck’s and Einstein’s positions were in fact in tension. Heidegger cites both Planck’s (1910)

Columbia lectures, whose introduction reworks his famous challenge to Mach, and Einstein’s (1905)

relativity paper, which, by contrast, draws on Machian inspirations. While the treatment of Einstein is

unexceptionable, Heidegger partly bypasses Planck’s point that mechanics (space–time description of

masses in motion) must be put alongside electrodynamics in a broader dynamical scheme unified by

thermodynamics. On Planck and Einstein see Heilbron (1986), Holton (1988).8 The motif of a grand trajectory from Galileo to the present served everyone from Cassirer to Husserl to

Koyre to Borkenau. See Carson (2010b forthcoming).9 Heidegger (1978a, pp. 416–417).10 Chevalley (1992).

486 C. Carson

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Being and Time (1927), then into the lectures on metaphysics, Heidegger continued

to think through the nature of temporality and the origins of the theoretical attitude.

The constitution of science’s objects out of ordinary experience raised questions

about the broad venture of scholarship (Wissenschaft) of which natural science was

a part. Over these years Heidegger grew more determined to revisit the subject-

object relation and reconsider philosophy’s Cartesian step. He also made

increasingly pointed allusions to contemporary academia’s struggles for disciplinary

legitimation and power. His 1929 inaugural address in Freiburg, for instance, began

playing his ideas against the modern university’s fragmented special sciences,

which made their cases more and more in terms of application and use.11

In this context, it is not really surprising that the philosopher’s attention was

attracted to a rising star of natural science. When Heisenberg was appointed in 1927

to Leipzig’s chair of theoretical physics, he was celebrated as Germany’s youngest

full professor, age 25.12 The son of a professor of Byzantine philology, Heisenberg

came out of the German educated bourgeoisie and the youth movement deeply

invested in making science fit into cultural patterns of meaning. In the second half of

the 1920s he had helped lay the foundations of quantum mechanics and begun

drawing epistemological consequences. While his philosophical background was

conventional and his allegiances somewhat unstable—he took up the interpretative

problems of the new physics at a level of sophistication characteristic of informal

collegial discussion, not the philosophical seminar—he was interested enough in the

questions and familiar enough with the issues to speak to professional philosophers.

He chose to lay out the significance of his discipline using the vocabulary of

contemporary philosophical debate.

The deepest lesson Heisenberg drew in these years was a lesson on the

methodology of science. Modern physics, following its own internal dynamic, had

been forced to reflect on, and revise, its epistemic presumptions. The demand that

the world be lawful and predictable, the assumption that a law of causality

obtained—were these truly preconditions of science? Just as Einstein’s general

relativity had shown that Euclidean geometry was no Kantian apriori, determinacy

and causality were not requirements for building up a secure science. Rather, those

constraints could be cautiously loosened without undermining the scientific

enterprise as a whole.13 As Heisenberg put it in an essay of 1931, the law of

causality certainly ‘‘formed the basis for the grand attempt at an objective natural

science undertaken by physicists in the last century.’’14 But, objectivity itself had to

be rethought: this was the strongest claim he articulated out of quantum mechanics.

The older, classical physics had intended to mirror a world of material elements

in motion, unfolding their trajectories in space and time. But after quantum

mechanics, this was no longer possible. Space–time trajectories had no meaning

11 For example, Heidegger (1973, 1978a, b), though with attention to the late-1930s notes that overlay

the latter text; for the Freiburg inaugural lecture, Heidegger (1930).12 Cassidy (1992; Heelan 1965).13 (For example Heisenberg 1931). Heisenberg is most famous for uncertainty, but in his thinking that

notion was actually comparatively marginal.14 Ibid., pp. 174–175.


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without making observations; it was only in the measurement process that they were

objectified at all. More than that, at the quantum level, observation was ineliminably

shaped by the observer’s intent. If a physicist set up an apparatus to measure a

system’s wavelike behavior, this was what he would observe. If he went looking for

particles, that was what he would find. Only in observers’ ordinary-language

communication—here Heisenberg followed the lead of Niels Bohr—could such

complementary aspects be coordinated. Objectivity gave way to something like

objectifiability, a more limited basis. And objectifiability itself was stabilized in

language. It was secured by a communicative community’s intersubjective

exchange.15

In Heisenberg’s stress on measurement there was an element of operationalism.

In the context of the physicists’ own debate over positivism, he indeed went through

a brief positivist phase. But by the early 1930s, he had broken with that allegiance

and settled into a view he chose to express as a revision of classical German

idealism. ‘‘Exactly an ‘objective’ physics in [Kant’s] sense, i.e., a completely sharp

division of the world into subject and object, is no longer possible,’’ he proposed.16

In his thinking, the reproblematization of the familiar subject-object relation was

central. It had been brought to attention by quantum mechanics, but it was

potentially productive far beyond. For if physics could make do so successfully

without old-style objectivity, then what about other branches of science? Here

transcendental attentiveness, he suggested, had to be brought back into science,

making reflection part of the game.

By the time Heisenberg was making these claims, Heidegger had already begun

reading popular accounts of the new physics.17 Points of mutual interest were not far

to seek. In the small world of German academia, the two men were introduced via

Viktor von Weizsacker, a founder of mind–body medicine, who was the uncle of

Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, Heisenberg’s young student and philosophical

sounding board. In 1935, the physicist and the philosopher met in Heidegger’s

retreat in Todtnauberg.18 Thereafter Heisenberg became a point of reference, open

or covert, in Heidegger’s commentary on science.

3 Science and the modern age

How Heidegger’s allusions unfolded is now the question we need to pursue.19

Through the 1930s, Heidegger would increasingly mark his distance from the

contemporary venture of Wissenschaft. Whatever one makes of the impassioned

15 (Carson 2003).16 Heisenberg (1931, p. 182). Heisenberg’s youthful positivism has often confused commentators, as

have his later Platonic and Aristotelian turns. If there is a common thread to this eclectic philosophy, it is

attention to the self-limitation of objective science.17 Chevalley (1992, p. 348), citing Pascual Jordan and Max Born.18 Von Weizsacker (1949, 1977).19 For a diligent but unfocused attempt to work out the connection, assuming that Heisenberg was a

Platonist and Heidegger simply right about science, see Hempel (1990). A more insightful, though

entirely textually based, discussion is Poggeler (1993).

488 C. Carson

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address of Freiburg’s new National Socialist rector, for instance, a crisis of this sort

dominates the text.20 Scholarship as a conventional, ongoing routine was distracted

from questions of import about being. Yet in Heidegger’s lectures of fall 1935,

startlingly enough, quantum physicists were given a partial exemption:

The greatness and superiority of natural science in the sixteenth and

seventeenth century goes back to the fact that those researchers were all

philosophers; they understood that there are no plain facts [in the positivist

sense]… Where real research is done that opens things up, the situation is no

different from three hundred years ago;… the leading minds of atomic physics

today, Niels Bohr and Heisenberg, think philosophically through and through

[durch und durch philosophisch denken] and for that reason alone create new

ways of posing questions and above all hold out in the realm of what bears

questioning.21

His scientific informants to the contrary, Heidegger still asserted that the essential

notions of science remained continuous across the classical-quantum divide, even as

quantum physics left old-style objectivity behind. Physics continued to occupy

itself, he maintained, with ‘‘regions of space in which something material moves

from place to place or rests in place’’—space–time trajectories still. But he gave the

theorists credit for keeping their eyes on the one thing that mattered. For they passed

beyond science’s conventional self-certainty to gain a transcendental view. This

move of ‘‘continual self-reflection [standige Selbstbesinnung] belongs to each

science,’’ too, he allowed.22

Yet the circumspection of these thoughts would soon fade. Already by 1935

Heidegger’s views were starting to shift, and over the next years, his construal of

science was universalized and radicalized. Heidegger’s line of thought increasingly

highlighted the creation of modern notions of subjective and objective, tied into the

new Cartesian subject’s demand for certainty of knowledge. That demand grounded

a view of mathematization as prescription that things make their appearance as

objects measurable, predictable, calculable, and governable in a technological

sense.23 Then from 1936 on, Heidegger dug into Nietzsche, thinking through what

came to seem the terminus of Western metaphysics itself. Under the influence of

this reading, the modern subject was transformed into the representer and producer

who imposed his demands for predictability and control.

In this view, Wissenschaft now simply extended the primacy of the technological

will, its essence being to set things up within the realm of ‘‘domination and direction

of what is made into objects in the service of use and breeding [Nutzung undZuchtung].’’24 Heidegger’s increasingly apocalyptic lectures from the later 1930s

are shot through with sharp, dismissive comments about Nazi enlistment of science

20 Heidegger (1933; see Bambach 2003).21 Heidegger (1962, p. 51).22 Ibid., pp. 15, 139. The discussion of transcendental reflection follows on Kant, naturally, though

Heidegger’s Besinnung is a more general mindfulness.23 Heidegger (1998, §26), (1953, p. 148), (1962, §B.I.5, esp. pp. 71–72).24 Heidegger (1989, p. 148).


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in industry-university partnerships and in the service of the Four-Year Plan. Human

beings became fodder for the nihilistic process; Heidegger imagined factories for

human material steered by the most recent biochemical discoveries.25 But the

paramount indicator of all that was wrong was the appearance of the man of

organization and mastery. Such ‘‘Fuhrer-natures,’’ the ultimate subjects, were only

‘‘the first to be set into service [die ersten Angestellten] within the routine of the

unconditional exploitation of what exists in the service of securing the emptiness of

the forgetting of being.’’26

The Third Reich’s mobilization of Wissenschaft, and scholars’ self-mobilization,

simply re-marked the course that Wissenschaft was taking itself. Science was

threatened by its own technical nature, which National Socialism hardly created,

only brought to the fore.27 And natural science increasingly served Heidegger as

paradigm for Wissenschaft as a whole.28 This was, he put it in a pivotal 1938

lecture, the ‘‘age of the world picture’’ (Die Zeit des Weltbildes), with the world

ordered into an objectified picture and any sense lost for another relation with being.

Object and subject were created at the same time. And as always, the point of origin

was marked by classical mathematical physics. Yet ‘‘[i]nsofar as modern atomic

physics, too, remains physics,’’ Heidegger now proposed, ‘‘the essential, which

alone matters here, holds of it, too.’’29 In fact, he put it late in the Second World

War, ‘‘physics must be technology, because theoretical physics is the real, pure

technology.’’30

Interestingly, similar experiences brought Heisenberg to similar reflections,

expressed in his own idiom but consonant nonetheless. When Heisenberg had

started in physics in the 1920s, he had sought science’s farthest-reaching

ramifications in the philosophical realm. By hard experience, however, he learned

in the Third Reich to defend his work against attacks for its ‘‘Jewish’’ abstraction—

by painting theory’s possibilities for technical use.31 Is science ideological? Is it

non-objective? Hardly; it works. The high point of Heisenberg’s own mobilization

was his leading role in applied nuclear fission research for German Army Ordnance

during the war, and the experience brought him to reflect on a kind of

instrumentality he increasingly suspected at science’s core. In private wartime

musings, he pondered the world-historical significance of science, situating its

strategy of objectifying impoverishment within a grander scheme of language,

thought, meaning, and value.32 In a famous lecture of the same period, treating

Goethe’s hostility to Newton’s objectification, Heisenberg played uneasily with

25 ‘‘Volkisch’’ science—examples might be Nazi racial hygiene or ‘‘Aryan’’ physics—belonged to the

same historic constellation, oriented to the ‘‘end effect’’ (Ergebnis). Heidegger (1954a, pp. 92, 95; 1989,

pp. 142, 148).26 Heidegger (1954a, p. 96).27 Heidegger (1991).28 Heidegger (1989, pp. 148, 155).29 Heidegger (1950, p. 71).30 Heidegger (1995, p. 8). On physics as paradigm see Heidegger (1991, p. 14, n. 2).31 (For example Heisenberg 1934). On the ‘‘Aryan’’ physics attack on Heisenberg see Beyerchen (1977).32 Heisenberg (1989b).

490 C. Carson

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what he called ‘‘the constant development of natural science towards an exact

mastery of nature.’’ Whatever a scientist’s intention, he concluded, objectifying

empirical investigation opened the door to intervention—and power.33

Heisenberg kept his grander thoughts to himself, but he sent Heidegger the

Goethe lecture in his collection of popular essays.34 In fact, Heidegger was the only

nonscientist on Heisenberg’s courtesy list; from Heidegger’s later texts, we know

the little collection was studied in some depth. The two men were thinking in similar

directions. For questions about science and technology would continue to preoccupy

the physicist, bringing him into loose contact with like-minded intellectual circles.

However, on one matter he diverged in practice from Heidegger’s prescription.

Heidegger had concluded that transcendental thinking by a discipline’s practitioners

was ruled out. It was not only missing in practice, but impossible in principle, a kind

of category mistake. That is, the kind of general ‘‘reflection on science’’ (Besinnungauf die Wissenschaft) that the situation required could be done by no special science

operating within its own frame. The only figure who could carry it out was the

philosopher, who stood above those rules.35 Heisenberg was of another view.

4 Staging a dialogue

Of course, with the war’s end, questions about science, especially physics, took on

an extraordinary point. Post-Hiroshima, post-Nagasaki, the atomic bomb was

central to every physicists’ reflections on the world-changing power of science.

Heisenberg’s own thinking stretched over a broader definition of science, with

illustrations from chemical warfare to psychologically guided propaganda to

nightmares of genetic engineering (Zuchtung).36 He sometimes thought the larger

problem was wrapped up in the scientific project itself. Reflecting on Nuremberg

revelations of human experimentation, he wrote of the ‘‘unheard-of crimes that

either presumed means made available by science or appeared to be influenced by

particular directions in science or medicine.’’ He continued, ‘‘There are forces at

work that aim to prevent misuse. But because we do not know if such defensive

moves can really dispel the dangers… we still face the question: whether something

about the way we pursue our science and pose our questions must fundamentally be

changed.’’37

For their part, Heidegger’s own postwar lectures insistently evoked nuclear

fission—as an indicator, again, of something greater at stake. ‘‘Man is fixated,’’ he

declared, ‘‘on what could happen with the explosion of the atomic bomb. He does

33 Heisenberg (1941), included in his lecture collection Wandlungen in den Grundlagen derNaturwissenschaft from the 1942 edition onward.34 Heisenberg to Held, S. Hirzel Verlag, 23 March 1948, Werner-Heisenberg-Archiv, Munchen

(henceforth WHM), Korrespondenz 1948.35 Enacted in Heidegger (1991, pp. 11–12), and going back, for instance, to Heidegger (1962, p. 5;

cf. 1989, p. 142).36 Heisenberg (1947).37 Heisenberg (1948, p. 7).


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not see what has already happened.’’38 For the metaphysical step had already been

taken. In the modern world, Heidegger suggested in semiprivate lectures of 1949, in

a formulation that has since become notorious, an essential sameness linked

industrialized food production to uranium mining for weapons, motorized agricul-

ture to manufacture of corpses in gas chambers and death camps and onto starvation

blockades and production of hydrogen bombs.39 Grasping the nature of technology

in the modern age meant coming clear on the nature of science. It required

understanding, first, in what ways science and technology were tied, and then

perceiving where technology might go beyond science.

Over the course of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Heidegger worked his way

towards formulating the question, then indicating a direction in which the answer

might lie.40 His thinking began slowly building from subject-centered notions like

Gegenstandigkeit (objectness), rooted in his late-1930s conceptions of modern

science. In those lectures of the postwar years, which are now recognized as critical

texts, certain new ideas came to the fore. These included such soon-to-be central

terms as Bestand (standing-reserve) and Ge-Stell (enframing), invented in order to

capture a collection of ways in which the world was taken hold of by human beings

for service. In the now-famous lecture ‘‘Das Ge-Stell,’’ Heidegger noted that natural

science stood at the beginning of this moment. ‘‘For physics,’’ he pointed out,

‘‘nature is the Bestand of energy and matter.’’41

Heidegger’s process of rethinking found its widely influential consolidation in his

celebrated text ‘‘The Question Concerning Technology’’ (Die Frage nach derTechnik). That essay, in fact, was a lecture, too, carried off in November 1953 in

Munich in a larger symposium sponsored by the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts.42

Heisenberg’s role in the latter event has sometimes been noted. What has not been

grasped is how central the physicist was to either the ideas or the framing. The 1953

exchange encapsulated Heidegger’s encounter with science: its form of objectivity,

its inner tie to technology, the possibility of a shift in its nature. Indeed, as staged on

the Munich platform, the symposium featuring the Heidegger-Heisenber encounter

threw into relief the very conceivability of a scientist engaged in reflection.

By 1953, Heidegger had in fact been after Heisenberg for several years, trying to

arrange a half-open confrontation. In his thinking, Heisenberg stood for ‘‘the

scientist’’ writ large.43 However, repeated proposals for a joint lecture series had all

fallen through.44 The Munich plan was better worked-out than these other projects.

38 Heidegger (1954b, p. 164).39 Heidegger (1994a, p. 27).40 Tracing the process in its cultural setting, see Allen (2006).41 Heidegger (1994a, p. 42); see also Heidegger (1994b).42 Heidegger (1954c). The lecture anchored this first major postwar collection, published in 1954. The

standard English translation in Heidegger (1977) dates the lecture to 1955, but this is wrong.43 There was talk of a jointly edited journal, for instance; Heidegger commented to a potential coeditor

that they needed to clarify ‘‘the relationship to what [Heisenberg’s] name represents.’’ Heidegger to

Nebel, Pentecost 1949, quoted in Junger and Nebel (2003, p. 783). On this network see Morat (2004).44 Hattingberg to Heisenberg, 4 March 1950, WHM Korrespondenz 1950; Stroomann to Heisenberg, 9

May 1951, WHM Korrespondenz 1951 under Buhlerhohe; Heisenberg to Eickemeyer, 28 August 1951,

WHM DFR Heisenberg; Heidegger to Heisenberg, 2 September 1951, WHM Korrespondenz 1951;

492 C. Carson

123

It involved a week-long program on ‘‘The Arts in the Technical Age,’’ tacitly built

around Heidegger. The symposium came at a point in the early 1950s when

sonorous discussions about technology—its relations to human intention or destiny,

its creative or demonic nature, and so on—were reaching an apex of popular

appeal.45 As a colleague communicated the point with some urgency to Heisenberg,

‘‘Heidegger can only conceive of his lecture as a continuation of yours in the frame

of the meeting.’’46

Despite some reluctance, Heisenberg came on board and eventually wrote up a

draft for private circulation.47 As a basis for discussion, Heidegger, too, sent around

his own preparatory piece. This was the essay later published as ‘‘Science and

Reflection’’ (Wissenschaft und Besinnung).48 That essay dealt centrally with the

nature of Wissenschaft as Heidegger had begun conceiving it in the 1930s, now

formulated via explication of the sentence, ‘‘Science is the theory of the real.’’ The

piece discoursed at length on modern physics, referred directly to Heisenberg, and

reached towards Heidegger’s newer formulations.49 Heidegger read it to a small

circle preparing the symposium, commenting to a colleague, ‘‘What matters to me

above all else is that Heisenberg hear [it].’’50 Then the month before the Munich

event, Heisenberg’s draft and Heidegger’s thoughts were discussed by the group.

Heidegger continued thinking and writing—‘‘I am severely taxed by the Munich

lecture… and related correspondence with Heisenberg,’’ he wrote to another

friend—and in the end would push his argument to a new point.51

It was on the Munich symposium’s second evening that Heisenberg delivered

his address on ‘‘The Picture of Nature of Modern Physics’’ (Das Naturbild dermodernen Physik). Heisenberg was willing to say that technical advance transformed

the human environment, removing its inhabitants from unmediated encounter with

nature. Instead of some original world, human beings now confronted structures and

situations that their own technological activity had called forth. In the modern world,

Heisenberg said in good idealist diction, ‘‘we encounter only ourselves’’ in the

Footnote 44 continued

Stroomann to Heisenberg, 4 January 1952; Pahl to Heisenberg, 2 February 1952, WHM Korrespondenz

1952.45 Beyler (2003); as background Rohkramer (1999), Hard and Jamison (1998), Herf (1994).46 Podewils to Heisenberg, 4 May 1953 (quotation); also Heidegger to Heisenberg, 18 March 1953 and 9

June 1953, WHM Korrespondenz 1953.47 Heisenberg to Podewils, 2 May 1953, WHM Korrespondenz 1953. Afterwards Heisenberg would

privately describe the venture as ‘‘particularly problematic’’: Heisenberg to Scholz, 24 April 1954, WHM.48 Heidegger (1954d).49 Heisenberg to Podewils, 17 September 1953, WHM Korrespondenz 1953; Fritz Heidegger to

Heisenberg, 25 September 1953, WHM New. In Heidegger (1954d) the emergent shift is visible on p. 61,

including some comments manifestly added after the fact. Otherwise the piece largely recapitulates

Heidegger’s earlier thinking in somewhat different terms.50 Draft minutes of discussion, 4 August 1953, Bayerische Akademie der Schonen Kunste, Archiv,

Ordner I,A; Heidegger to Podewils, 18 July 1953, emphasis in the original, in Kunze (1989), T. 3. I am

indebted to Frau Sylvia Langemann for helping me with this material. Heidegger delivered the piece in at

least two other venues, but this version is the one he finally published.51 Heidegger to Boss, 28 October 1953, excerpted in Heidegger (1987, p. 310); Heidegger to Heisenberg,

6 November 1953, WHM Korrespondenz 1953.


123

objectified consequences of our own actions.52 Yet this strange alienation was

actually—this was what he had to say that was new—the true point of contact with

science. For modern physics had already made plain the impossibility of abstracting

from human activity. It had gone beyond the Cartesian separation of subject and

object, no longer occupying itself with particles and motions in themselves. Rather

than nature on its own, its object, too, was nature as exposed to human posing of

questions. And these changes pointed, finally, to the appropriate course to take with

respect to technology. Technology was uncanny, threatening, and disorienting; direct

access to nature was lost. But physics had already learned to build without familiar

foundations, and the result was nothing unsure, but a science more secure than before.

So for technology, too, the task of the present was ‘‘to come to terms’’: while seeing the

limits of previous attitudes, to master the situation, not to run from it.53

When Heidegger entered the auditorium the evening after the physicist, the stage

was perfectly set. When science took hold of the world, the philosopher now

suggested, it challenged it to stand ready as energy; and this feature characterized

modern technology, too, from industrialized food production to uranium mining for

weapons.54 But modern technology’s creations were now no longer objects. In the

same way as physics (so Heidegger finally saw it) lost hold of the object, that

Cartesian creation, and began dissolving it into the subject-object relation itself, so

too Bestand, nature ordered to stand available as energy for service, made objects

secondary to the polymorphous fungibility of pure subject-object relationality—

relationality in which human beings were now caught up as well.55

So Heisenberg understood something, but not all that mattered; he was one step

short of thinking it through. ‘‘The impression spreads,’’ Heidegger said,

that whatever man encounters exists only insofar as it is a human product. This

impression calls forth a final deceptive aspect. It appears that man encounters

everywhere only himself. Heisenberg has pointed out, completely correctly,

that the real must present itself in this way to man today. Nevertheless, mantoday in truth no longer anywhere encounters himself, that is, his essence.56

In giving the impression of surpassing the old metaphysics, the physicist only

demonstrated how firmly he stood on its ground. In fact, he intensified the trend of

the age even as he thought he overcame it, remaining trapped in the ordering

attitude characteristic of science. And this, Heidegger suggested, was the real

danger: losing sight of ‘‘every other possibility of revealing.’’57 Shaping the will to

master technology was science’s instrumental stance, now beyond all restraint.

52 Heisenberg (1953, p. 47).53 Ibid.54 Heidegger (1954c, pp. 26, 22–23). The latter paragraph borrowed from Heidegger (1994a, p. 27), but

silently dropped the comparison to gas chambers and death camps, which now fit less well into the

framework of Bestand as energy alone.55 Heidegger (1954d, p. 61), paragraph added after Heidegger (1954c), foreshadowed in Heidegger

(1994a, p. 42), but in as yet unclear form. In his copy of Heidegger (1994a) Heidegger noted at that point,

‘‘Atomphysik.’’56 Heidegger (1954c, p. 35, emphasis in the original).57 Ibid.

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However, technology held open prospects for non-instrumental ways in which

being might again reveal itself, in a manner not dissimilar to art.58 For Heidegger,

invoking Holderlin, one found the saving power growing out of the danger. But the

danger first had to be brought into view. In his lecture he cryptically commented,

‘‘The unrestrainable in the ordering and the restrained in the saving pass one another

by as the paths of two stars in the sky.’’ Yet their very bypassing was ‘‘the hidden

aspect of their nearness.’’ On the Munich platform Heidegger enacted the bypassing,

with Heisenberg as his opposite number. If ‘‘the essence of technology is in an

eminent sense ambivalent,’’ both endangering and saving, then as Heidegger spoke

he was seeking to stage it.59 He had already told Heisenberg what the latter was

expected to say; even the title of the physicist’s lecture, ‘‘Das Naturbild der

modernen Physik,’’ was Heidegger’s choice.60 And in his preparatory discourse on

‘‘Science and Reflection’’ the philosopher had gone so far as to offer the following

instructions:

Even if the sciences by their own ways and means can never advance to the

essence of Wissenschaft, still each researcher and teacher of the sciences, each

human being who passes through a science, can move as a thinking being on

various planes of reflection and keep it alert. Yet even where, by some special

favor, the highest level of reflection is reached, it must be satisfied with merely

preparing a readiness for the word that our human race today needs.61

How Heidegger conceived Heisenberg’s role, and his own, was plain.

Certainly, Heisenberg’s formulation pushed Heidegger to express his point as he

did. As the pure relationality of Bestand came to the fore, dissolving both subjects and

objects, marginal comments in Heidegger’s copy of ‘‘Science and Reflection’’

directly quoted Heisenberg’s draft lecture text.62 At the same time, there was

something capricious in the philosopher’s claim that he had captured the essence of

modern physics. On the key question of continuity across the classical-modern divide,

Heidegger’s arguments had pointed in any number of directions. Thus he persisted in

asserting, against Heisenberg’s explications, that modern physics traced space–time

trajectories of material bodies. Then causal accounting was still supposed to make

objects calculable and governable, no less when absolute was weakened to statistical

causality.63 Remarking Heisenberg’s postwar interest in energy’s interconversions,

58 The point is still elusive in Heidegger (1954c); later essays make it clearer. See Dreyfus (2002).59 Heidegger (1954c, p. 41). On performance see Mehring (1992).60 Minutes on ‘‘Kunst und Technik,’’ 27 March 1953, WHM Korrespondenz 1953 under Podewils.61 Heidegger (1954d, p. 70).62 Ibid., p. 61. The annotation is reproduced in the Gesamtausgabe edition (v. 7).63 In addition, the tour of Aristotelian causality in Heidegger (1954c, pp. 15–20) may be a counter to

Heisenberg’s simple-minded comments (Heisenberg 1952). Heidegger was provoked by the piece, as well

as by his ongoing exchange with Heisenberg, out of which (he reported to a colleague) came the lecture’s

first draft with its long excursus on causality: Heidegger (1954d, p. 51); Heidegger to Boss, 28 October

1953, in Heidegger (1987, p. 310). On the larger relevance of Heidegger’s early thinking on Aristotle see

Feenberg (2005, ch. 2).


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Heidegger interpreted it in the direction of ‘‘standing reserve’’ (Bestand).64

Conspicuously, ‘‘Science and Reflection’’ went on at length about field physics,

under the impression, it would seem, that fields were intrinsically quantum.65 Later

the main issue would become the all-mastering nature of Heisenberg’s unified field

theory of elementary particles. Even if the last was probably the best thing for

Heidegger to latch onto, still these were not all the same point.66 Even if Heisenberg’s

own thinking was not crystal-clear, it would appear that Heidegger had his conclusion

before he quite had the reasoning to support it.

Finally, if there was an argument (that is, more than an assertion) in Heidegger’s

dismissal of science’s capacity to examine its foundations, it is hard to spell out

what that argument was. Heisenberg did practice something that looked like

reflection. Starting from strictly Kantian questions, he passed to a broader set of

concerns, asking how science’s objectifying approach to the world proceeded,

where it encountered limits, how else its power might be understood, and what other

ways of approaching the world there might be. The example could have borne

addressing or refuting in detail, if Heidegger had chosen.67 What made it easier to

bypass, of course, was the by now exceptionless affirmation that, as Heidegger put it

in short form about this same time, ‘‘science does not think [Die Wissenschaft denktnicht].’’ That is, thinking in his sense was reserved for something else. As for

Wissenschaft, ‘‘that [it] cannot think is not a shortcoming, but an advantage.’’ Only

by this kind of tunnel vision could it make its way.68

And yet, historically, Heidegger may have been right about one thing. There wassomething unreflexive going on. When the physicist told his Munich audience in

1953 about the current age’s task of ‘‘coming to terms,’’ the overtones were hard to

miss. Heisenberg, who was also advising the West German government on civil

nuclear power, spoke unself-consciously of turning atomic energy to human ends,

directing it by human values, subjecting it to human will and control. In the ‘‘atomic

age,’’ the culmination of the modern era, this was truly the instrumentalist

conception in fullest flower.69

64 (For example Heidegger 1962, p. 73; Heidegger 1994a, pp. 43, 42). The promotion of ‘‘energy’’ to its

uniquely central role, which it does not hold in 1949 in Heidegger (1994a), may owe something to

Heisenberg (1949), referenced in Heidegger (1954d, p. 61).65 Heidegger (1954d, p. 60). See also the supposed citation to Planck, ‘‘Wirklich ist, was sich messen

laßt,’’ on p. 58, which would have made Planck turn over in his grave. What Planck had offered was a

mildly ironic comment on the quantum, whose strangeness had given scientists pause: the quantum had to

be accepted because it had been experimentally measured; and ‘‘was man messen kann, das existiert

auch.’’ Planck (1949, p. 77).66 Heidegger (1954d, pp. 60–61), finally placed front and center in Heidegger (1997, esp. p. 46). Note the

language of Beherrschung in Heisenberg (1949, p. 97).67 The closest Heidegger came to addressing it overtly is Heidegger (1997, p. 9). For a different

assessment see Luhmann (2002).68 Heidegger (1954e, p. 133). He would repeat the point over the next decade and a half, sometimes with

specific dismissive reference to Heisenberg: e.g., Heidegger (1987, pp. 74, 161–162, 269). Heisenberg’s

attempts to respond include Heisenberg (1959) and Heisenberg (1967, esp. pp. 34–35, 38–39).69 The meaning of the Atomzeitalter is exposited in Heidegger (1997, pp. 45–47, 83). On the

contemporary discourse of ‘‘mastering’’ technology see Seubold (1986, pp. 284–288).

496 C. Carson

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5 Enter Habermas

To turn in a seemingly different direction, a brief, early essay on Heidegger provides

a surprisingly good entry point to Jurgen Habermas’s thinking on science. At the

same time as Heidegger was putting the finishing touches on ‘‘Science and

Reflection,’’ the 24-year-old philosophy student would make his first small public

splash.70 The year 1953 saw not just the delivery of ‘‘The Question Concerning

Technology,’’ but also the publication of Heidegger’s 1935 lecture course

Introduction to Metaphysics. Those lectures, finally published eight years after

war’s end, were marked by augural pronouncements—the flight of the gods, the

massification of man, the loathing suspicion of everything creative and free. They

also stood out for their foreboding for Germany as the country where these pressures

came most to bear. The now-published text added that what was being served up at

the time as the philosophy of National Socialism had ‘‘not the least to do’’ with ‘‘the

inner truth and greatness of this movement.’’71 For the young Habermas, authoring a

freelance review for a major national daily, the connection was eye-opening. In his

critical assessment, Habermas’s comments famously circled around that allusion

about National Socialism; and subsequent discussion has rightly made much of the

political portent.72

Tellingly, Habermas zeroed in on the phrase Heidegger placed parenthetically to

explain National Socialism’s ‘‘inner truth and greatness,’’ namely ‘‘the encounter of

planetarily determined technology and man of the modern age.’’ Although this point

has sometimes been neglected in recountings of Habermas’s challenge, it was not

simply the political logic that he was taking apart. The young reviewer was a

philosophy student, and he also wanted to make a philosophical point. Heidegger’s

radical stance, Habermas suggested, was made possible by two momentous

omissions. One was the counterweight of Christian conceptions of equality and

freedom. The other was a broader conception of reason. For ‘‘[w]hen it is not

acknowledged,’’ Habermas wrote, ‘‘that since Descartes, alongside the line of

thinking that through calculation puts things at our disposal [des rechnend verfugbarmachenden Denkens], there runs the other line of interpretative understanding, then

we lose sight of the dialectical plasticity of the modern age’s development—a

dialectic that provides the creative legitimation for that sort of thinking that aims at

mastery through objectification.’’73

This small intervention opens up three issues. First, Habermas was not contesting

the portrayal of science’s instrumental rationality. Instead he wanted to make room

for something alongside it. That move undercut the exceptionlessness of Heideg-

ger’s characterization of Wissenschaft; the question is in what the exception would

consist. Second, on display is a heavy load of humanistic-scientific tension, coded in

quasi-hermeneutic terms. Finally, Habermas’s framing of the problem (and his

70 Habermas (1953a). When reprinting his essays, Habermas often edited out allusions to concerns of the

moment. I use the originals wherever there is a difference; in this case the reprinted version is identical.71 Heidegger (1953, pp. 29, 152 [quotation]). See Janicaud (1992) and Kisiel (2001).72 (For example Holub 1991, pp. 16–18; Matustık 2003, pp. 12–17).73 Habermas (1953a, emphasis added).


123

diction) had powerful Heideggerian components; it was time, he suggested, ‘‘to

think with Heidegger against Heidegger.’’74 For whatever his politics, the young

Habermas had been, so he later put it, ‘‘intellectually strongly influenced by

Heidegger.’’ Before the 1953 article, which he came to mark as his break, he would

count him the thinker ‘‘in whose philosophy I lived.’’75

A year earlier, reviewing a book sympathetic to Heidegger by his colleague

Ludwig Landgrebe, Habermas had in fact celebrated Heidegger’s pursuit of the

‘‘question of being’’ as the culmination of philosophical thinking. This question was

simultaneously, he wrote, ‘‘the question of the basis of Western thought since Plato,

whose essence and blight has found its fulfillment in modern technology.’’ In truth,

Habermas suggested in these early comments, ‘‘the embarrassment that natural

science has gotten itself into’’ suggested exactly that nature ‘‘only receives its

essence when it is taken hold of by man in experiment.’’76 But this was not the only

way to approach the world, which was more than science’s continuous system of

relations of determination: that much Habermas took from his early education in an

extended neo-Kantian tradition distinguishing natural from human sciences.77

Instead of trying to ‘‘master’’ things, man had to learn how to ‘‘let them be.’’78

6 Between reason and politics: tacking maneuvers

As Habermas’s ideas evolved, they would be conditioned by a second line of

thought. In 1953 he read Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic ofEnlightenment. Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, especially its chapter on ‘‘Means

and Ends,’’ offered a new set of tools; Herbert Marcuse’s reaction to Heidegger

would help Habermas with his own.79 Without taking up the details of the Frankfurt

School’s argument about science,80 one thing is plain enough: on this topic its

rhetorical fusion with a Heideggerian idiom caused few problems. Habermas did not

switch his allegiances to critical theory until the mid-1950s. While certain aspects of

the move marked a radical break, others were a much smoother transition.

Through the 1950s Habermas, speaking in a voice now more recognizable to

most Habermasians today, also remained intellectually engaged with empirical

social research and critique. In this context a key line of his argument about science

was worked out in connection with a famous late-1950s assessment of the failures of

post-1945 West German university reform. Watching the transformation of

contemporary society, Habermas suggested that traditional ideals of contemplative

74 Ibid.75 Habermas (1992a, p. 147); Habermas (1981c, p. 515). For a thorough exposition see Moses (2007,

ch. 5).76 Habermas (1952).77 On the influence of Habermas’s teacher Erich Rothacker (which Heidegger perceived in the 1953

review: Heidegger to Podewils, 19 August 1953, in Kunze (1989) see Dahms (1994, pp. 363–373).78 Habermas (1952). See also the pathos-filled essay Habermas (1953b).79 Habermas (1981c, 1992b).80 see Vogel (1996).

498 C. Carson

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self-formation, of Humboldtian Bildung through Wissenschaft, had to be rethought

in this new postwar world in which state, economy, and research interpenetrated.

Even as he evoked theoretical examples from atomic physics to animal psychology,

Los Alamos served him, as it served so many others, as metonym for science’s post-

Cartesian orientation toward instrumental application.81 But as long as Wissenschaftwas cultivated in this way, and here Habermas pushed the point further, it backed

away from normative statements. When it did so, it emphatically neutralized itself

with respect to social praxis. This interest in praxis, practical action in the human

world, was the new preoccupation that Habermas brought into play.

For instrumental rationality spoke only of means, not of ends; positivism

declared ends to fall outside rational debate altogether. Praxis, of course, guided by

a deliberately non-instrumental conception of reason, was becoming Habermas’s

overriding concern. As for science, as long as it imagined itself as pure theory, it

would be trapped in a handmaiden role backed up by an ideology that condemned it

to blindness about its own state. Scientists needed to become more than deliverers of

means, to step up and address ends, to take up the social and political consequences

of their work.

In Habermas’s case, this was not some abstract demand. It responded to the

concrete historical circumstances of the nuclear age. In the face of nuclear

annihilation, physicists were entering into public dialogue out of urgent concern for

the socially irrational ways in which their work was exploited, as weapons

production overshadowed civil nuclear power. If, Habermas wrote, ‘‘one trusts

Landgrebe’s interpretation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation, we can even expect

that already today reflection on the foundations of science automatically extends

itself to reflection on the social arrangements under which physical research is

pursued.’’82 In Habermasian terms, this was a move of reflection in the tradition of

critical theory. It kept a tie to reflection in the transcendental sense. It had to be

carried out by each discipline’s practitioners; for as the special sciences grew more

specialized, no one else was capable of it.

Here was the shift: Physicists once again seemed available as exemplars of

reflection, in a new, wider conception of science. Through the late 1950s, into the

early 1960s, Habermas still held out hope for this critical chance. Weeks after his

little article appeared came the Gottingen Manifesto of West Germany’s most

prominent atomic scientists, led by Heisenberg’s colleague and confederate Carl

Friedrich von Weizsacker and a small core including Heisenberg himself. The

manifesto was an electrifying public stand against nuclearizing the new West

German federal army and a de facto critique of the government’s nuclear strategic

thinking. Habermas was a deeply committed supporter of the mass movement of

anti-nuclear weapons protest that was galvanized by the physicists’ statement. He

closely followed the arguments of von Weizsacker, now jumping from physics to

philosophy to politics, as the latter dissected the logic of graduated nuclear

deterrence. Reflections on ‘‘living with the bomb’’—here Habermas took up the

physicist’s words—were his prime example of scientists accepting their new

81 Habermas (1957, p. 273).82 Ibid., p. 283. The citation is to Landgrebe (1952, pp. 91ff).


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obligations in the atomic age.83 Clearly, scientists as contributor to critical societal

debate, far beyond instrumentality, still had real resonance for the author of 1962’s

Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas felt it within the realm of

possibility that he could mobilize them in the service of progressive political

change.84

Behind these hopeful representations, however, there were troublesome issues

that left Habermas’s position somewhat intellectually precarious. Into the early

1960s he occasionally poked at the problems, but mostly the tensions remained

unresolved. A starting point for scientists’ socially critical function was supposed to

be reflection upon their discipline’s epistemic stance. Of the latter sort of reflection

there were plenty of examples. But Habermas never fully resolved his ambivalence

about what these philosophizing scientists had to say. What Habermas was willing

to call ‘‘the self-reflection of physicists from Planck to Heisenberg and von

Weizsacker’’ was sometimes, he said, more like ‘‘positivistic-speculative sci-

ence.’’85 Exactly what he meant he did not fully spell out. Even more importantly,

Habermas needed to explain what really tied together the two strands of reflection.

What connected the epistemically and the socially critical? Historically, biograph-

ically, the one may sometimes have led to the other; but any connection of principle

was hard to puzzle out.86 While contemporary scientists vocally asserted the link

when it suited them, they failed to give any truly cogent argument. The most

principled thing on offer was a kind of thoughtful ambivalence, as a Heisenberg or a

von Weizsacker struggled to articulate how their factual knowledge and scientific

rationality gave insight into matters of value.87 So in philosophical terms, what wasthe status of theory (Heidegger’s old problem) and its relation to praxis (Habermas’s

new one)? The question needed an answer—for both the original era of German

idealism and the current, thoroughly scientized age.88 And how could natural

scientists’ critical reflection, of whatever sort, be reconciled with the idea that their

practice could deliver only calculative knowledge? Habermas seems to have wanted

both, but at this point he could really only juxtapose them, not work out how they

escaped contradiction.89

83 Habermass [sic] (1958); Habermas (1958); Habermas (1963a, p. 420), a reference omitted from the

version in Habermas (1981b).84 Habermas (1962a). When Habermas and Ralf Dahrendorf drafted a public appeal in the wake of the

famous Spiegel Affair of fall 1962, a watershed in West German public political life, they included von

Weizsacker and Habermas in the elite circle of targeted signers. See Habermas to Heisenberg, 11

November 1962, and Heisenberg to Habermas, 15 November 1962, WHM; Carson (2010a forthcoming,

ch. 11).85 Habermas (1957, pp. 282, 284); Habermas (1963b, p. 162 [quotation]; the passage is omitted from the

fourth expanded edition of 1971).86 He would make a similar point in Habermas (1973a).87 (For example Heisenberg 1967, p. 34). Values were what mattered in guiding science, yet ‘‘‘[d]iese

Wertvorstellungen… konnen nicht aus der Wissenschaft selbst kommen; jedenfalls kommen sie

einstweilen nicht daher.’’88 Habermas (1963a).89 Habermas (1963b, pp. 162 vs. 176).

500 C. Carson

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7 Natural science and human interests

By the early 1960s the combination was proving unstable. Two things seem to have

caused the balance to tip: first, Habermas’s engagement with debates over scientific

advising; second, theoretical controversies within social science. In these years, a

famous essay by the sociologist Helmut Schelsky provoked the so-called

‘‘technocracy debate’’ about the expert’s political role in a scientized society.90

Habermas weighed in against Schelsky’s technocratic portrait, as well as

‘‘decisionistic’’ alternatives making scientists mere deliverers of means. In place

of both he proposed a dialogic model in which social interests and technological

solutions were dialectically engaged. In this picture, open communication between

scientists and politicians, mediated via the public, was supposed to subject a

previously unreflected relationship to rational democratic scrutiny.91 It was a happy

picture, still imbued with the hope that scientists would step up to the plate, and it

became a major progressive point of reference in the ensuing debate. Unfortunately

for Habermas, in the real world of scientific advising a dialogic third way was hard

to make out. A few experts, led by the nuclear scientists, did ‘‘seize the initiative,’’

he said, to reflect publicly on their research. Still, ‘‘the examples are meager,’’ he

had to concede; most advising went on behind closed doors.92 In truth, over the next

years, nuclear scientists increasingly went in-house as advisors, appearing in public

principally to expound on the technological benefits of research to justify ambitious

resource demands.

The change in the landscape of scientists’ social reflection was then matched by

controversies internal to social science. Precisely because of the theoretical loading

of the famous ‘‘positivism debate’’ in which Habermas stood up for critical theory,

the confrontation would have major consequences for his conception of science.

Habermas’s ideal of a critical social science was set up in opposition to what he

portrayed as a value-free ‘‘social technology.’’ That target, identified first with

Schelsky, then with Karl Popper, operated with a more limited conception of social

science than Habermas could accept, ascertaining laws of behavior on a purely

empirical model, advising on smoothing out social conflicts and stabilizing society

in a feedback loop of observation and action. The debate, particularly Habermas’s

exchanges with the Popperian Hans Albert, ended up deep in the thickets of

contemporary Wissenschaftstheorie. That field was to Habermas’s mind still

governed by analytic philosophy, late nineteenth-century positivism’s intellectual

heir.93

Much was in flux, and clarification was needed. The result was a series of short

essays published beginning in 1963 in which Habermas finally began to fill out his

90 Schelsky (1961). In the background is Ellul (1954).91 Habermas (1964a). Most essays from this decade are translated in Habermas (1970), (1971), (1973b),

or Adey and Frisby (1976).92 Habermas (1964a, p. 143). There is also the problem that most of Habermas’s examples of advising in

practice look more like RAND than like democratic discussion.93 Habermas (1962b) and the contributions in Benseler (1969), including Albert (1964). For background

see Dahms (1994) and Albrecht et al. (1999, ch. 7). Holub (1991, ch. 2), gives a reading sympathetic to

Habermas.


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picture of natural science. As he now spelled out its functions, science’s capacity for

technical application was ‘‘not post facto or by accident.’’94 The character of science

emerged directly from the hypothetico-deductive construction of its theories. The

kinds of lawlike statements it produced, and its manner of testing them, showed

essential correspondence with something outside of science. That was the set of

ordinary-life processes of self-preservation and labor by means of which a subject

sought out stability in experience and regulated action by success in gaining mastery

over the world. This version of philosophical anthropology put science in its natural

place.

Habermas’s account served two purposes. First, it gave specificity to his claim

that science was just one way of approaching the world, rooted in a definite kind of

experience and action. Second, it intimated what other approaches might be

possible—specifically, ones not based on monologic objectification in the service of

technical control, but grounded in subjects’ mutual intelligibility and hermeneutics.

Natural science essentially served as contrast to Habermas’s hoped-for critical

social theory: this was the terminus ad quem. The latter’s legitimation as a coequal

mode of reason had been denied since positivists captured the Enlightenment legacy

and reduced Wissenschaft to purposive-rational control.

Habermas would spin out these ideas into an ambitious philosophical-historical

synthesis in the late-1960s Knowledge and Human Interests, whose origins and

arguments can only be briefly sketched here.95 Starting from thoughts tentatively

articulated as early as 1960,96 Habermas developed his famous notion of the

cognitive or knowledge-constitutive interests (erkenntnisleitende Interessen). These

interests, even though largely obscured in the contemporary sciences, fundamentally

governed knowledge-producing activity. In his 1965 inaugural lecture in Frankfurt,

installed to carry critical theory into the future, Habermas laid out his famous

schema of (now) three distinct kinds of Wissenschaften: empirical-analytical,

historical-hermeneutic, and critical. These originated in three separate interests

(technical, practical, and emancipatory) and went back to three kinds of species

activities (labor, language, and power).97 Then in Knowledge and Human Interests(published in German three years later) Habermas went onto make the philosophical

claim plausible in a historical narrative, tracing the theory of knowledge from Kant

through the trio of Peirce, Dilthey, and Freud, ending with Nietzsche’s own version

of interested knowledge.

For Habermas, knowledge-constituting interests became the point of fusion

among several distinct philosophical programs. These included Kantian transcen-

dental reflection on object-constitution, neo-Kantian distinctions among modes of

gaining knowledge, Marxian anthropological concern for species natural history,

and phenomenological attention to prescientific understandings and the lifeworld.

94 Habermas (1963d, p. 182); with some overlaps, Habermas (1963c). Relevant for developing the claim

is Habermas (1964b).95 Habermas (1968a). Good analyses are Vogel (1996, ch. 5), and McCarthy (1978, ch. 1–2).96 Habermas (1963b, p. 176). See also the analysis of origins in Dahms (1994).97 Habermas (1965). The key passage on natural science (pp. 156–157) is adapted from Habermas

(1964b, p. 244).

502 C. Carson

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Along the way, ideas about natural science fed in from different sources and

thinkers, all of them taken, however, to point the same way.98 They came from

Edmund Husserl as Heidegger’s more acceptable stand-in; from Franz Borkenau,

Horkheimer-Adorno, and Marcuse in turn; from Arnold Gehlen and Jean Piaget as

theorists of philosophical anthropology and human development; from as far afield,

even, as John Dewey and the American pragmatic tradition.99

The human interest in control anchored instrumentality in the essence of science.

This was not a historically contingent development. As Habermas would argue

contra Marcuse in 1968, it was in the nature of the ‘‘project,’’ and no alternative was

conceivable at all.100 At the same time, other origins were ruled out. It was a

mistake, for instance, to imagine that science had roots in pure theory, in

disinterested contemplation of natural order—a familiar understanding that might

give it some purchase for Bildung and some relation to praxis. To Habermas’s eye,

the idea of pure theory was science’s own attempt to obscure the constituting

conditions of its objectivity. Instead, purposive-rational technical control simply

served an interest entirely different from intersubjective understanding or eman-

cipatory reflection. And in the end, there was no way that natural science could

break out of its shell. Indeed, Habermas suggested with some irony, it was truly ‘‘the

glory of the sciences that they apply their methods without distraction, without

reflection on the interest that leads them. Because the sciences methodologically do

not know what they do, they are all the more certain of their discipline.’’101

8 Conclusion

Habermas did not go unchallenged by German philosophers of science. He later

partly conceded that he had done more suggesting than demonstrating that the

sciences definitively and permanently tied down to knowledge-constitutive interests

in a one-to-one fashion.102 But in the end, instead of rethinking his argument,

Habermas mostly reasserted it. He was interested in moving on; natural science had

98 Habermas incorporated each thinker as he encountered him, even as the argument shifted as he went.

Along with Habermas (1968a), the following examples are taken from Habermas (1963c, d, 1965, 1968b),

along with Habermas (1973a), where, following Marcuse (1964, ch. 6), Heidegger is finally given his due

on p. 396.99 For his account of natural science in Habermas (1968a), Habermas in fact placed the turn-of-the-

century pragmatist Charles S. Peirce at the center. Peirce supplied Habermas with three things at once.

The first was a logic of scientific inquiry conceived as a life process within the framework of self-

correcting technical action. The second, by contrast, was an anti-positivist attentiveness to the constitutive

role of the community of investigators, tying reality into intersubjectivity and discourse. All the same,

Peirce delivered, finally, a remnant objectivism (so Habermas saw it) that trapped the pragmatist, despite

himself, in a monologic positivist quagmire. Thus the intimations of discursive intersubjectivity in

science could be bypassed by Habermas in Peirce’s oeuvre, as they had been bypassed by Heidegger in

Heisenberg’s.100 Habermas (1968b, p. 55).101 Habermas (1965, p. 165). Without a belief in objectivity, he pointed out, science had no defense

against ‘‘Aryan’’ physics or Lysenkoist genetics.102 Albert (1964, esp. pp. 201–203, 233); Lobkowicz (1974); Kruger (1974). For Habermas’s concession,

Habermas (1973a, p. 394); for arguments about physics, pp. 392–393 (on the constitution of objects in


123

never been his main concern. Rather, natural science again served as the negative

foil for the positive message. This time, however, the positive pole was not

Heideggerian Denken, but emancipatory social science. Like Heidegger, however,

Habermas took up those aspects of other thinkers’ arguments that suited his needs,

picking and choosing, shifting the argument, highlighting and citing and leaving

behind. And yet by a strange irony, Habermas’s own bid to capture the

exceptionless nature of science had some of the same weaknesses as Heidegger’s

displayed. In particular, it was open to an objection not unlike the one Habermas

had earlier directed against Heidegger’s reduction of Wissenschaft. If social science

(for this was the argument’s telos) could be guided by more than one interest,

emancipation alongside sociotechnical control; if ‘‘alongside the line of thinking

that through calculation puts things at our disposal’’ there might run another strand

of reason in this object domain, then the monofocal restriction of natural science to

instrumental reason was hard to justify. Could science be otherwise? What elsemight it be?

This was not, however, an argument that Habermas or his followers happened

upon. Habermas’s next project, his theory of communicative action, essentially took

the instrumental picture of science as given.103 His identification of science with

instrumental reason did carry, and widely. It carried as part of a much broader body

of thinking, in which many other commentators, among them Heidegger, loomed

large. Certainly, Heidegger and Habermas took their arguments in different

directions. Habermas carefully said that he was not condemning natural science;

Heidegger’s criticism was more sweeping by far. The two also developed highly

divergent assessments of what should be done with and about science.104 But they

still had a great deal in common. Besides Habermas’s own Heideggerian origins,

they shared a common point of departure in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-

century reactions to positivism, as well as a partly overlapping trajectory through

the nuclear era.

Of course, positivism itself framed the argument that science’s essence was

circumscribed by prediction and control. Its flat view of science, like its flattened

view of its history, had originated in a particular intellectual moment. It was brought

to bear on a thoroughly scientized age by positivism’s opponents, but only by

leaving some of science’s complications out of the picture. Simply holding onto the

positivist view of science—even intensifying it in the face of the twentieth century’s

methodological challenges—was a kind of philosophical shortcut. It was a shortcut

Footnote 102 continued

quantum mechanics), pp. 374–376 (addressing certain transcendental-sounding propositions advanced by

von Weizsacker).103 Habermas (1981d). That massive Weberian-Husserlian undertaking was written up in the Max Planck

Institute for Research on the Conditions of Life in the Scientific-Technical World, which Habermas

co-directed in the 1970s with Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker. See Drieschner (1996) and von Weizsacker

(1981); for Heisenberg’s role, (Carson 2010a, ch. 10). Habermas’s group in the institute carried out a

program of study on the planning of research and the ‘‘finalization of science’’; cf. van den Daele et al.

(1979). The project developed Habermas’s mid-1960s thinking on science policy but did not revisit his

philosophical point.104 Habermas’s call to bring research under critical, reflective control would have struck Heidegger as

subjectivist and instrumental all over again.

504 C. Carson

123

that bypassed the empirical intricacies embodied in actual scientists like Heisenberg

and their thinking, in the service of a simple and polar conceptual scheme.

Acknowledgments I thank David Moshfegh, Michael Allen, Daniel Morat, Robert P. Crease, Paul

Forman, Arne Hessenbruch, Ulrich Wengenroth, Peter Eli Gordon, Dirk Moses, Ralph Dumain, and

Matthias Dorries for discussions, and reviewers of an earlier version of this essay for helpful suggestions.

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