>Does anyone out there have ANY specific ideas about how specific sciences
>(esp. physics and biology where I have some knowledge) would be changed
>with this reworking of our fundamental ontology?
Since Heidegger claims that physis (nature: can apply to both physics and
biology) is another greek word for being, I'm implying that Heideggerian
"natural" science is fundamental ontology. Furthermore, if the opposition
between Heidegger and modern science I am bringing forth is correct, the
specific sciences must be changed beyond recognition.
>I don't see how H's ideas about this get any credence. I would need to
>see an unpacking of the notion that describing change in terms of
>unchanging equations is misguided. Your argument seems to hinge on this
>leap, which seems confused.
First of all, it is not really my argument, but Heidegger's, although he
puts it into Aristotle's mouth. His argument is relatively simple: one
cannot gain access to beings that change (nature) through a theory of being
that says that being is the unchanging. According to his history of being,
we have done precisely that ever since Plato. My point is twofold: one,
that fundamental ontology (or the "other thinking") is incompatible with
modern science, and secondly, that Heidegger's point is serious enough to
warrant a reconsidering of the way scientist practice their craft from the
point of view of science and not merely some airy, poetic mysticism.
Heidegger was aware of why modern science relies on mathematics. He also
thought that it worked. If you understand that he thought it worked and
nonetheless opposed it, you take a step towards understanding his overall
point.
You raise the point of precision. Aristotle made a distinction in the
Ethics between sciences that could expect precision and those that cannot
expect perfect precision; this distinction aligns with the distinction
between the unchanging and the changing. In other words, a science can
only be as precise as its object of study. Heidegger for all practical
purposes eliminates this distinction and puts everything in the field of
the changing. What type of knowledge corresponds to this field? It cannot
be mathematics. For Aristotle and the ancients in general, there can be no
mathematically precise science of changing things. Heidegger, I argue,
follows this (while ignoring the field of being which Aristotle included
under the unchanging, which includes physics, astronomy, etc)
Modern science overcame this Aristotelian distinction by finding a means to
describe movement mathematically. It did this, as your example points out,
by redescribing things into relations between objects, the relationships of
which could be mathematically described. (This arose in part because of
the medieval nominalist revolution, which doubted our access to the what of
beings because of the ambiguity of sense data; the relationships between
sense data, however, could attain to precise description -- Descartes did
not come from nowhere.) Why would a scientist want to do this? In order
to achieve mathematical precision in a science that has the changing as its
object. But why precision at all? It makes sense only if the only kind of
knowledge that qualifies in a rigorous sense as knowledge is that knowledge
which is unchanging (and that is its source of precision), i.e., a theory
of being as the unchanging, the Eleatic thesis. The history of being,
which is also a history of truth (science), as Heidegger describes it, is
nothing other than the steady domination of the Eleatic thesis concerning
being. Within this theory of being, its scope or range of fields of being
could expand beyond ideal geometry to include everything in the world,
everything known to us.
Modern science achieves this by limiting itself to what can be described
mathematically and dismissing the rest as "metaphysical" nonsense. This
move was taken on quite self-consciously by early modern science, which was
quite impressed by its scientific achievements compared with scholastic
babbling about occult qualities; it also occurred, in a different way, in
the mid-nineteenth century after the Hegelian synthesis broke down and
neo-Kantians divided the world into a realm of science and another of
culture, facts and values. This means, of course, that the objections
Heidegger raised could be dismissed as metaphysical nonsense, and thus
ignored.
In part, I am trying to make a case for Heidegger that modern science might
respect: that to describe the changing in terms of the unchanging is a
category mistake. It narrows its vision so much it misses what it
originally wanted to explain.
For those who want to know, I am relying heavily in my description of the
rise of modern science upon Amos Funkenstein's excellent "Theology and the
Scientific Imagination."
Chris
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