Found Sci DOI 10.1007/s10699-011-9248-5 COMMENTARY
Thinking Through the Prism of Life Hans Ruin
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract The article provides an overview of the argument in Robert Scharff’s paper “Displacing epistemology: Being in the midst of technoscientific practice” (Scharff 2011), focusing on his central objective, to articulate a hidden ground of the current controversies in the philosophy of science and technology studies, between objectivism and constructivism, through a deeper confrontation with Heidegger’s legacy. The commentary addresses two aspects of Scharffs argument that deserve to be developed further, namely how it both criticizes and cultivates itself an ideal of the meta-knower, and how the idea of thinking from the perspective of life in Dilthey’s sense can be critically reflected through Heidegger’s later criticism. By rehearsing Heidegger’s understanding of truth as aletheia, and also his gradually increased criticism of the very concept of life, the commentary tries to show how Scharff’s intervention can in fact be strengthened against possible criticism. Keywords
Heidegger · Life · Truth · Meta-knower · Reflection
The overall goal of this article is to invite contemporary technoscience studies to a heightened hermeneutical and reflexive awareness, by recalling again the genuine philosophical stakes in the Explanation/Understanding debate. When Dilthey and some of the Neo-Kantian philosophers of that generation originally introduced the dichotomy of Erklären and Verstehen the idea was to highlight the distinctive nature of research devoted to a study of the human and its modes of expression, as opposed to the study of nature. Much of the criticism that was eventually articulated against this distinction, especially from the logical positivists and their followers, had to do with the reluctance to give up the ideal of the unity of science, a struggle that was also fought in the context of what at least initially was considered to be a progressive political agenda. Today, however, Scharff writes, “virtually all philosophers see themselves as post-positivists of some sort”, in the sense that they subscribe to some sort of contextual conception of knowledge and science, and the idea that knowledge always grows from “in the midst of things” (Scharff 2011, p. 230). But still there
H. Ruin (B) Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail:
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is no consensus about the implication of this conception, nor concerning how the condition itself should be thought in more precise terms. It is in order to articulate more clearly such a condition for knowledge, that Scharff goes back to Dilthey’s idea of knowledge from the “standpoint of life”. With this program Dilthey was not only arguing for an epistemological theory, nor was he interested only in the method of the human sciences. Instead, his interests, Scharff states, were fundamentally ontological. His question concerned what a human being is, and what this ontology implies for our way of practicing science in general. Perhaps the most important observation in this respect is that from the perspective of an ontology of life we can see how scientific knowledge is often based on a kind of “initial disinterest” in its own ontological condition. This tendency, not to recognize itself as the “human practice” it is, can be seen as a kind of necessary structural suppression of the very element out of which the natural sciences emerge. But whereas this is not a problem for science itself, it does become a problem for philosophy and the theory of science. For in these fields the suppression results in “arrogance”, and perhaps one could add: in ignorance precisely of that which it claims to theorize, namely its own foundations. Dilthey does not develop systematically the implications of this commitment to a standpoint of life. This was, however, to become a focal point for the subsequent phenomenological philosophers, and for Heidegger in particular. Husserl was supportive of Dilthey’s anti-naturalism, but suspicious of his historicist tendencies. In his attempt both to correct and to appropriate Dilthey he tended, however, to reinstate the ideal of the Cartesian disconnected subject of knowledge. It was only with Heidegger that the traditional conception was challenged in a more consistent ontological form, and precisely through an explicitly ontological appropriation of Dilthey’s standpoint of life. This required that he explicitly transcended the epistemological level of Dilthey’s project, in order to bring out its implicit ontology of temporal-historical existence. It is at this stage of his article that Scharff’s more critical conclusions begin to emerge, concerning the contemporary articulation of critical science studies. In the contemporary landscape we have a number of competing views. One is a kind of standard revisionist contextual post-positivism, that still upholds an objectivist ethos. Poised against it is a full-blown relativistic constructivism. But, Scharff argues, what is lacking in the debate between these alternatives, is a more sustained reflection on what “kind of philosophizing about science produces this set of criticisms and arguments” (p. 238). It is in order to articulate this hidden ground of the problem that we need to follow Heidegger’s critical ontology beyond its epistemological consequences (the contextual, pragmatic understanding of knowledge), down to a level where it discloses epistemology itself as bound to a certain philosophical prejudice. We then need to understand Dasein not just as a name for the human entity, but as a “formal indication” of how it is to “be in the midst of things”. Furthermore, Scharff shows the way towards thinking the theoretical as such as ultimately a “founded mode of being”. In the concluding section he has an argument with Hacking, using a passage from his book on social constructivism, to show how he comes out inadvertently as a representative of the traditional conception, defending a sense of the truth and falsity as also a moral and political agenda. The example is meant to prove that many people still think in accordance with an inherited framework where truth and objectivity stand over and against sentiment and subjectivity. What many people still lack, according to Scharff, is a more acute sense of what it means to be a “knower of knowers,” and a “meta-knower”. The paper culminates in an open call for rethinking the underlying philosophical presuppositions of contemporary science and technology studies, suggesting that its willingness to see itself as different forms of “post” or “after” conceals a deeper prejudice and conservatism.
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Scharff does not spell out what this new approach would amount to in any detail. There is therefore a risk that those who would most need to grasp it do not immediately perceive the urgency of his cause. This urgency, as I see it, has to do with the need to think through philosophically a certain contemporary complacent perspectivism, which has learnt from hermeneutic thought a general lesson concerning the contextual and historicist conception of knowledge, but that still neglects to draw the full conclusion of this view. Much of the thinking that today poses as radical, new, post-, and trans-, still remains tied to an unreflected objectivist framework, more so than it cares to recognize. Likewise a certain standard “relativist” consensus often fails to take in what it means to have and reflect on the event of truth. In this situation Scharff is calling for a radicalized philosophical reflection on the foundations of how we view and organize our knowledge in the field of science and technology studies. In my further comments I would like to suggest a way of continuing his argument, primarily by pointing to what I see as two inner tensions in the way it is articulated here. These critical remarks should be read as sympathetic with what I understand to be the overall agenda of this article. Since the main inspiration for Scharff’s intervention comes from Heidegger, I will refer mainly to Heidegger also in my comments, since what is at stake in this discussion can to some extent be articulated in terms of how we interpret his thought. The first problem I want to address has to do with the implication of Scharff’s projected ideal of a “knower of knowers”, and to a kind of “meta-knower”. The second problem concerns how we, with Heidegger, should interpret the standpoint of life and of life-philosophy as a basis for critical technology studies. What I hope to show is also how these two problems are interconnected, and that they both point to the ambiguous role of Heidegger in and for technology studies. Taken at face value, the idea of the meta-knower could first be seen as a blatant inconsistency on Scharff’s part. For if the perspective of life amounts to the recognition that we are always already immersed in life, as the ultimately unsurveyable context of being-in-theworld, how can there be any kind of meta-perspective? Is it not precisely this illusion of a gaze from nowhere that the hermeneutic critique has abandoned? If the fully realized existential-ontological perspective means that we should always recognize our own theoretical activity as embedded, then how could we at the same time aspire to becoming knowers of knowers? I would suggest that the ambiguity of this position comes from a tension within Heidegger’s own way of thinking that needs to be articulated somewhat further in order to discharge this appearance of inconsistency. On the one hand, Heidegger’s project for a fundamental ontology does indeed seek a deeper and more encompassing grounding than what we find in the logical-positivist unityof-science movement. For it seeks to grasp the theoretical as such, in its genesis from within life. In this sense, it does indeed aspire to becoming a “meta-knower.” And in doing so, it spells out what is only implicit in Dilthey, namely that the self-reflexive knowledge of knowledge from the position of life, is a knowledge from which also the sciences of nature appear as a restricted field within an overall hermeneutic exploration of the meaning of being. This, I would add, is also the reason why a cultural-historical and theoretical approach to the sciences and to technologies, as for example in Kuhn and later in Latour, can develop such powerful conceptual tools. There is something fundamentally cultural and interpretative also in the natural sciences, which the practitioners of these sciences tend to supress. But in this very capacity of the self-reflexive hermeneutic approach there also hides an element of hybris, the hybris precisely of believing oneself to possess the key to the disclosure of disclosure itself. Heidegger is not immune to this. Also in his thinking, in particular in his later reflections on the overall transformations within the history of being, there is a tendency
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to overestimate the reach of his own approach, to make himself the transhistorical witness of a historical-conceptual process. But at the same time, it was Heidegger who in a unique way diagnosed the inner tension in the theoretical itself, in ways that many of his followers still fail to appreciate. He was always aware that the very ability of theorizing the theoretical contains a kind of paradox that reaches down to the very form of philosophical language and the formation of concepts. This is partly what motivated him also to develop his reflections of the “formal indicative” nature of philosophical concepts, to which Scharff alludes in passing: namely the awareness that in designating the movement of life, including its theoretical concept-forming activity, we are not describing an entity or a process, but we are enacting this very movement in our own existence, signaling to ourselves a way of concept fulfillment as a way of “having” our world. Formal-indicative concepts do not designate objectively, but they indicate a way of life’s own movement. Indeed, they are meant to make us aware of the ultimate impossibility of a completed meta-perspective, while still engaging in a pursuit to grasp the movement of theoretization as such. Perhaps we could call them a kind of critical limitconcepts. There is always a parallel receding and emerging of being in disclosure, which is captured beautifully in the Greek word for truth as aletheia, where what stands forth does so against the inexhaustible background of forgetfulness and concealment. If we stay attuned to this double movement of disclosure-closure we are perhaps somewhat less inclined to indulge in the hybris of theory, while seeking its highest conceptual articulation. I interpret Scharff’s paper as pointing us also in this direction, even though it is not stated explicitly as such. My second critical reflection concerns the idea of “standpoint of life”, in view of Heidegger’s ambiguous relation to the concept of “life” itself. In his earliest writings, when he is most strongly under the influence from Dilthey, Heidegger often refers to his project as a kind of life-philosophy, and this is also how he initially reads Husserl, namely as a philosopher of transcendental Leben. But from the early twenties we can sense a shift in his emphasis, as he grows more skeptical about this particular notion, speaking more about “facticity,” and eventually about Dasein. In his unpublished review of Jasper’s “Psychology of Worldviews” from 1921, one of his critical points is that the idea of “life” is not sufficiently thematized ontologically. And this point will return again and again in his reading of many of the most prominent philosophers of life, including Dilthey himself, that we can not simply accept life as a basic concept, but that we must place also this category in a philosophical context, as a way of designating being. In short, life-philosophy must be given an ontological grounding. This is precisely what he attempts in Being and Time, even though he will later say that even this attempt was not radical enough, and that it is only in the later works that he has fully moved away from the anthropological and subjectivist, and also biologistic tendencies latent in this concept itself. This is why the idea of a standpoint of life must remain ambiguous from Heidegger’s viewpoint. And it is also why we should be cautious in referring unreflectively to this notion today when we have again a strong renaissance of life philosophy, through Bergson, read through Deleuze, and their followers, not seldom in conjunction with science- and technology studies. In relation to some of the work being done today it is worth rehearsing why Heidegger gradually became so skeptical about this notion, and why his ontological explorations eventually led him beyond the horizon of life-philosophy, toward a thinking of being as truth and as event. The core issue here, I would suggest, is that even in a dynamic conception of life as the foundation of the constitution of meaning, there is a risk that the event of meaningand knowledge-formation is objectified as an organic process, and thus made unreflectively into an entity of study. I can not go further into the details of this problematic here, I can
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only conclude by briefly recalling how these two points, taken from Scharff’s intervention to some extent mirror Heidegger’s very important lecture and essay from 1938, “The Time of the World Picture”. It is at the outset of this text that Heidegger states publically for the first time that what is of particular need of a philosophical reflection, Besinnung, today is precisely “science and machine technology”.1 The basic idea, which will later be expounded in his famous post-war essay on the question of technology, is then laid out, namely that a technical understanding of nature is already present in the very experimental method of research. Consequently, the scientist who seeks truth is in some ways already a technician, who produces results within a defined order or establishment, an Einrichtung. From this perspective on scientific activity, he does not see an essential difference between science and the humanities, since they both share a common approach to their objects, which comes down to “representing” that which has permanence and existence. Through the emergence of modern society with its industrial organization of result-oriented research, the individual researcher becomes increasingly like a technician who performs already defined tasks. In Heidegger’s interpretation this transformation and development rests on a metaphysical transformation in the way knowledge itself is conceptualized and understood, which he dates to Cartesianism. The point of his analysis is not, however, to criticize Descartes for a metaphysical invention, but rather to bring to philosophical, reflexive awareness, a transformation that guides inadvertently the way that modern scientific knowledge projects and constructs its objects. In this process, he argues, we can trace a tendency towards making being the object of a representing reason, and to an image, a Vorstellung and a Bild. A Weltbild, he writes, understood essentially, does not signify an image of the world, but the world understood as image. Already in seeking the answer to the question concerning the nature of our modern worldimage we committed ourselves to a decision about being in its totality. For in this question we seek, and find, the being of beings in the representativeness, Voregestelltheit, of beings. It is precisely this thinking about the world as image, as world-image, and also a world-view, that is mirrored in planetary technology. For in the extension of this technical development all distances are constantly shrinking, with the increase of speed. When we critically reflect on technology we therefore also critically engage in how the world is conceived as world-image. If this analysis is correct then we can sense that some of the work in science- and technology studies, while posing as critical reflection, also and on another level, works as the inadvertent accomplice in the production of a certain world-view, and subsequently of a world in itself. This is the still relevant critical leverage of Heidegger’s essay, in the direction of which I also read Scharff’s proposal for a contemporary reflexive philosophy of technology.
Reference Scharff, R. (2011). Displacing epistemology: Being in the midst of technoscientific practice. Foundations of Science, 16(2–3), 227–243.
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The text was published in the collection Holzwege, Pathmarks (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann 1950/1980), pp. 73–110. For a more detailed discussion of the sense and translation of Besinnung, see my “Prudence, Passion, and Freedom: On Heidegger’s Ideal of Besinnung”, Giornale di Metafisica XXVIII: 29–52 (2006), which also places this concept in relation to its dilheyan background.
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Author Biography Hans Ruin is Professor of Philosophy at the Department for Culture and Communication, Södertörn University in Stockholm Sweden. He specialises in phenomenology and hermeneutics, in particular the work of Heidegger. Among his publications are Enigmatic origins. Tracing the theme of historicity through Heidegger’s works (1994). His work has appeared in Research in Phenomenology, Continental Philosophy Review, Husserl Studies, Jahrbuch für Hermeneutische Philosophie and Nietsche Studien. He has co-edited a number of books, most recently Rethinking Time. Essays on History, Memory and Representation (2011) and Fenomenologi, teknik och medier (2011). He currently leads the multidisciplinary research program “Time, memory and representation” (http://www.histcon.se).
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