Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh'S Eyes, and God

HERMENEUTIC PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE,
VAN GOGH'S EYES, AND GOD

BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Editors
ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University

JORGEN RENN, Max-Planck-Institute for the History of Science
KOSTAS GAVROGLU, University of Athens
Editorial Advisory Board
THOMAS F. GLICK, Boston University

ADOLF GRUNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh
SYLVAN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University
JOHN J. STACHEL, Boston University
MARX W. WARTOFSKYt, (Editor 1960-1997)
VOLUME225
HERMENEUTIC
PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE,
VAN GOGH'S EYES,
AND GOD
Essays in Honor
of Patrick A. Heelan, S .J.
Edited by
BABETTE E. BABICH
Fordham University, New York, N.Y., U.S.A.,
and Georgetown University, Washington D.C., U.S.A.
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-5926-0 ISBN 978-94-017-1767-0 (eBook)

DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-1767-0
Printed an acid-iree paper
All Rights Reserved

2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2002
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
Patrick A. Heelan, S.J., Universite Catholique de Louvain, 1964
Patrick A. Heelan, S.J.
Photograph by Ursula Bemist
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments IX
PREFACE I "Patrick Heelan" by JEAN LADRIERE & MARC JAGER xi
INTRODUCTION
BABETTE E. BABICH I The Fortunes of Incommensurability: Thoughtstyles,
Paradigms, and Patrick A. Heelan's Hermeneutic of Science
HERMENEUTICS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
SECTION SUMMARIES 19
STEPHEN TOULMIN I The Hermeneutics of the Natural Sciences 25
ROBERT P. CREASE I Experimental Life: Heelan on Quantum Mechanics 31
DIMITRI GINEV I The Hermeneutic Context of Constitution 43
RAGNAR FJELLAND I The "Copenhagen Interpretation" of Quantum
Mechanics and Phenomenology 53
BABETTE E. BABICH I Sokal's Hermeneutic Hoax: Physics and the New
Inquisition 67
ALLAN JANIK I Wittgenstein, Hertz, and Hermeneutics 79
JOSEPH J. KOCKELMANS I On the Interpretive Nature of Hertz's Mechanics 97
ROBERT C. SCHARFF I Comte and the Possibility of a Hermeneutics of
Science 117
THEODORE KISIEL I Was heiftt das -die Bewandtnis? Retranslating the
Categories ofHeidegger's Hermeneutics ofthe Technical 127
THOMAS M. SEEBOHM I The Hermeneutics of Texts 137
RICHARD COBB-STEVENS I Husserlian Hermeneutics: Mathematics
and Theoria 153
JOHN J. CLEARY I Abstracting Aristotle's Philosophy of Mathematics 163
WOLFE MAYS I Piaget and Husserl: On Theory and Praxis in Science 177
TONY O'CONNOR I Human Agency and the Social Sciences:
From Contextual Phenomenology to Genealogy 187
JOHN J. COMPTON I Toward a Phenomenological Philosophy of Nature 195
JOHN ZIMAN I No Man is an Island 203
ROM HARRE I Science as the Work of a Community 219
vii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TRUTH IN ART, VISUAL SPACE, AND THE PRAGMATIC
PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION
JOSEPH MARGOLIS I Patrick Heelan's Interpretation of van Gogh's
"Bedroom at Aries" 233
STEVEN CROWELL I Patrick Heelan's Innocent Eye 239
JACQUES TAMINIAUX I Merleau-Ponty's Reading ofHeidegger 251
BABETTE E. BABICH I Heidegger's Truth of Art and the Question of
Aesthetics 265
D. CYRIL BARRETT, S.J. I Phenomenology and 20th Century Artistic
Revolutions 279
IRMA B. JAFFE I Virtue and Virtual Reality in John Trumbull's Pantheon 287
LEO J. O'DONOVAN, S.J. I Getting at the Rapture of Seeing: Ellsworth
Kelly and Visual Experience 299
BARBARA SAUNDERS I Grammar(s) of Perception 305
JAY SCHULKIN I Cognitive Neuroscience of Social Sensibility 315
ROBERT CUMMINGS NEVILLE I Phenomenology and Pragmatism 323
GOD: RELIGION AND SCIENCE

WILLIAM J. RICHARDSON, S.J. I Psychoanalytic Praxis and the Truth
of Pain 339
RICHARD KEARNEY I Poetics of a Possible God- Faith or Philosophy? 351
THOMAS NICKLES & GA YE McCOLLUM-NICKLES I James on
Bootstraps, Evolution, and Life 361
DOMINIC BALESTRA I In-Between Science and Religion 377
GARRETT BARDEN I Thinking the Philosophy of Religion 385
THOMAS J. J. ALTIZER I Van Gogh's Eyes 393
STEVE FULLER I A Catholic Stance Toward Scientific Inquiry for the
21st Century 403
HEIDI BYRNES I The Dialogism of Meaning, The Discursive Embeddedness
of Knowledge, The Colloquy of Being 411
W. NORRIS CLARKE, S.J. I The Creative Imagination 423
ERNEST G. McCLAIN I A Priestly View of Bible Arithmetic: Deity's
Regulative Aesthetic Activity within Davidic Musicology 429
PATRICK A. HEELAN, S.J. I Afterword 445
BIBLIOGRAPHY: PATRICK A. HEELAN 461

Notes on Contributors 469
Index 477
viii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This collection was made possible in part by the institutional support generously provided by the
Graduate School of Georgetown University as part of the research project, Hermeneutic and
Phenomenological Approaches to the Philosophy ofScience, directed by Patrick A. Heelan, S.J.,
William A. Gaston Professor of Philosophy. I am grateful to Dominic Balestra, chair of the
Philosophy Department, together with the Deans of Fordham University for a course reduction
from three courses to two in the Spring of2001 to ease some of the time demands involved with
compiling, editing, and preparing the camera-ready copy for this volume. Joseph A. O'Hare, S.J.,
President of Fordham University, has warmest thanks for Feting the Jesuit scholar and priest
celebrated by this Festschrift in May of 2001 - and hence in advance of the official publication.
Jean Ladriere's gracious consent to David B. Allison's translation of the encyclopredia entry
on "Heelan, Patrick"- first published in the Encyclopedie Philosophique Universelle, III, Les
Oeuvres Philosophiques, Dictionnaire, Tome 2: Philosophie occidentale: 1889-1990, pp. 3322-
3323 -as well as permision granted from the Presses Universitaires de France, is here gratefully
acknowledged. Likewise, permissions from the Niels Bohr Archiv to reproduce the drawings in
Ragnar Fjelland, "The Copenhagen Interpretation" of Quantum Physics and Phenomenology
(Fig. 1) and from CERN (Fig. 2) (CERN/PIO/RA 77-4) are acknowledged with gratitude.
Permissions from the United States Capitol Historical Society, Yale University Art Gallery, and
the National Gallery of Canada to reproduce John Trumbull's paintings in Irma B. Jaffe, Virtue
and Virtual Reality in John Trumbull's Pantheon (Figs. 1-8) are gratefully acknowledged as is
permission from the Art Resource and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. I also
acknowledge with gratitude permission granted to reproduce Van Gogh's paintings in Babette
E. Babich, Heidegger 's Truth and the Question ofAesthetics (Fig. 1 and Fig. 3) from the Vincent
van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam as well as the Baltimore Art Museum (Fig. 2). I honor with
gratitude the contribution of the late Dr. Ursula Bemis, Buddhist nun, philosopher, and friend
to Patrick A. Heelan and to the editor, who took the frontispiece photograph (p. v).
Book collections are not only comprised of the essays included but are also conjoined with
an invisible but important domain of omissions - declined invitations and parallel or alternate
collections that might have been but for incidental exclusions and the compiler's oversight. I
express my deep thanks to those who, for a variety of reasons, were unable to accept the
invitation to contribute to this collection. Their humane, kind, and creative responses to my
queries cheered me in the task and reminded me of the project's broader value as a research
resource, just as Ivan Illich, who himself shares the same Jahrgang with Patrick, took care to
emphasize the importance of Heelan's work for his own thought in recent years. I note too, and
always with special gratitude, Alasdair Macintyre, and I note the kind words of others such as
Gerd Buchdahl, Peter Caws, Bas van Fraassen, Ronald Giere, Friedrich Rapp, and Elisabeth
Straker. I owe a special tribute to RobertS. Cohen for his important support of this project in its
early stages. I acknowledge the contributions offered by Evandro Agazzi, Adolf Griinbaum,
Jean Salanskis, and Carl Friedrich von Weizsiicker which, solely for technical reasons, could not
be included in the final volume. Many others expressed a kind of happy dismay d'escalier and
I regret my fault if I failed to include those who might have been included if another editor, or
better editorial perspective, had prevailed.
Heidi Byrnes deserves all praise for her extraordinary labors which yielded a second and
very valued copy-editing of the volume.
I express my own and deepest personal thanks to David B. Allison, Richard Cobb-Stevens,
and William J. Richardson, S.J .. And for being the kind of human being and scholar around
whom a book of essays can come to such a philosophically diverse and wonderful constellation,
I am grateful to Patrick A. Heelan, S.J.
ix
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
Photographs of Patrick A. Heelan, S.J., pp. v-vi and pp. xv-xvii, are from his personal collection
and reproduced with his permission.
In: Babich, Heidegger's Truth and the Question ofAesthetics, pp. 251-264.
p. 267. Figure 1. Vincent van Gogh. A Pair of Shoes, Paris, 1886. Amsterdam, Van Gogh
Museum, (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).
p. 268. Figure 2. Vincent van Gogh. A Pair of Boots, Paris, 1887. The Baltimore Museum of
Art. The Cone Collection, formed by Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore,
Maryland. BMA 1950.302.
p. 269. Figure 3. Vincent van Gogh. A Pair of Leather Clogs, Aries, 1888. Amsterdam, Van
Gogh Museum, (Vincent van Gogh Foundation).
p. 274. Figure 4. External approach. Temple of Apollo Epikurios, with protective tenting
structure, at Bassae, Greece. Author's photograph, 1998.
p. 275. Figure 5. Internal/External View. Temple of Apollo Epikurios, at Bassae, Greece.
Author's photograph, 1998.
In: Jaffe, Virtue and Virtual Reality in John Trumbull's Pantheon, pp. 287-298.
p. 289: Top. Figure 1. John Trumbull. The Declaration of Independence. 1818. United States
Capitol Rotunda. Courtesy of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society.
p. 289: Bottom. Figure 2. John Trumbull. The Surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga.
1821. United States Capitol Rotunda. Courtesy of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society.
p. 290: Top. Figure 3. John Trumbull. The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown. 1820.
United States Capitol Rotunda. Courtesy of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society.
p. 290: Bottom. Figure 4. John Trumbull. The Resignation of General Washington. 1824.
United States Capitol Rotunda. Courtesy, U.S. Historical Society.
p. 291: Top. Figure 5. Pietro Santi Bartoli. (Engraving) Detail from the Column of Trajan.
Rome, Italy. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
p. 291: Bottom. Figure 6. Benjamin West. The Death of General Wolfe. 1770. The National
Gallery of Canada. Courtesy of The National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa.
p. 292: Tcop. Figure 7. Giotto. Lamentation Over the Body of Christ. 1305-06. Arena Chapel,
Padua, Italy. Courtesy of Alisart/ Art Resource, NY.
p. 293: Bottom. Figure 8. John Trumbull. The Death of General Warren at the Battle of
Bunkers Hill. 1786. Yale University Art Gallery. Courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery.
X
FROM: ENCYCLOPEDIE PHILOSOPH/QUE UNIVERSELLE
PATRICK HEELAN
Born in Dublin. Entered the Society of Jesus [Jesuit Order] in 1942. Awarded his
Masters Degree in Mathematics by the National University of Ireland in 1948; [an
Associate at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Dublin, 1948-]; received his Doctoral
Degree in Geophysics from St. Louis University, Missouri, 1952; received his Doctoral
Degree in Philosophy from the University ofLouvain [Leuven] in 1964. He worked at
the Palmer Laboratory at Princeton University with Eugene Wigner from [1960-1962.
He taught [theoretical physics] at University College, Dublin from 1964-1965, then
taught [philosophy] at Fordham University in New York, and later at the State
University ofNew York at Stony Brook where he [was] a Professor of Philosophy [till
1992; currently he is a Professor ofPhilosophy at Georgetown University, Washington,
DC, USA]. At Stony Brook, he was Vice-President for Liberal Studies and Dean of the
College of Arts and Sciences; [he was subsequently Executive Vice-President for the
Main Campus at Georgetown University].
His works principally concern the philosophy of quantum physics as well as the
structure of perceived space. The philosophical interpretation he gave for quantum
mechanics led him to conceive of quantum logic (the non-classical behavior of proposi-
tions in quantum mechanics), not as an indication of incompleteness, but as resulting
from the contextual character of the descriptive propositions that belong to quantum
mechanics. Quantum logic for him is "the general logic of context-dependent
discourse."
- Jean Ladriere
QUANTUM MECHANICS AND OBJECTIVITY: A STUDY OF THE

PHYSICAL PHILOSOPHY OF WERNER HEISENBERG (1966)
It has practically become commonplace to say that the development of quantum

mechanics has brought into question numerous long established concepts of classical
physics. In the present work, Patrick Heelan analyzes one of these fundamental
concepts, namely, that of objectivity in light of Heisenberg's work. One of the first
steps he advances is to critique the principle of complementarity: in the context of this
xi
xii JEAN LADRIERE
critique the author shows, among other things, that psychophysical parallelism is an
insufficient explanation for scientific knowledge. Then he proceeds to critique the
theory of measurement, as developed by Heisenberg. The author points out that the
disturbance of a quantum system by the process of measuring has nothing whatsoever
to do with any limitation on our access to physical reality. He also shows that the
presence of the observer's subjectivity is the same in classical physics as it is in
quantum physics. The nature of the quantum object, however, is different, in classical
physics one has an "idealized and normative object," while in quantum physics the
object is an "individual instance of an idealized norm." Based on the analysis of the
logical structures of these physical theories, Heelan concludes that physics rests on the
articulation of two worlds: a world-for-us, as described by observational and operational
concepts, and a world-for-things, as described by explanatory concepts.
This book is the revised edition of Heelan's doctoral thesis, which was presented at
the University ofLouvain [Leuven] in 1964. At the end of the volume, the reader will
find a useful lexicon of the scientific and philosophical terms employed.
- Marc Jager
SPACE-PERCEPTION AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE (1983)
The present work develops the principles of a systematic philosophical theory, one
inspired by phenomenology and hermeneutics; indeed it employs them concretely to lay
out a vast problematic extending from aesthetics and the philosophy of science to the
mind-body problem and cultural theory. What motivates this project is the notion that
cognitive processes are context-dependent. The method adapted for studying these
processes is thus one which is capable of deciphering the sense of the objects of
knowledge, at the same time it reinstates those objects within the horizons of experience
(both interior and exterior) on the basis of which they were initially constituted. Such
a method is that of phenomenological hermeneutics.
The author sums up what is essentially his main position in three points: 1) The task
of hermeneutics is to go "to the things themselves." This task is governed by a set of
elements which constitute the "fore-structure of understanding." It follows that the
course of the hermeneutic project has a certain character of circularity to it, this is not
as much a vicious circle, however, as a back and forth process which, while always
incomplete, is, as it were, magnetized by "the thing itself," which is brought forth and
made manifest to our experience. 2) It must be acknowledged that there is an ontological
primacy to perception: "Reality is exactly what is or could be, manifested through
perceptual essences and profiles, understood as horizons of the world." Furthermore,
perception is essentially hermeneutic. It follows that the contents of perception never
have a "unique, definitive, complete, final, absolute, a-historical, or a-cultural"
character. 3) Within the contemporary, debates in the philosophy of science, the author
adopts a position that is neither that of "scientific realism" nor of"instrumentalism,"
but rather one of a "horizonal realism." Science clearly aims "to describe the elements
and structures of reality." But the latter can often be "hidden to (theoretically and
instrumentally) unassisted perception." Nonetheless, they do possess "authentic
PREFACE xiii
perceptual essences that can be rendered directly manifest in perception with the help
of theoretically structured instruments serving as 'readable technologies'." Scientific
knowledge should thus be understood as an extension of "unassisted" perception. A
perceptual fact has an outer horizon "which separates it from the ground on which it
appears," and an inner horizon "composed of a multiplicity of possible perceptual
profiles organized by an invariant essence." The perceiving subject can "bring forth a
representative sample of the profiles in question," occasionally by making use of certain
technological processes, which are themselves subject to interpretation in terms of
theoretical representations. The theoretical entities described in these representations are
not "simply detected thanks to an inferential operation, but rather, they are directly
perceived." It follows from this that the correspondence between the "manifest image"
and the "scientific image" is not done one-to-one, but by a "many-to-one or one-to-
many application between contextually defined perceptual objects within contexts that
are mutually incompatible but complementary." This should not, however, be
understood as a form of conventionalism, nor as a form of "cultural relativism." Pre-
comprehension, which guides interpretation imposes strict limits to the descriptive
categories which can be used and to the manner in which they can be linked to
appropriate empirical objects.
The author applies his hermeneutic principles to the study of visual perception. (In
fact this question is treated in the first part of the book. while the general theory is dealt
with in the second part. This mode of presentation is justified by "rhetorical or
pedagogical" reasons). Heelan shows (inspired in part by RudolfLiineburg's model of
spatial perception) that many visual phenomena have the characteristics of a hyperbolic
space, and that these structures of visual space have an essential character. (His very
detailed argumentation lays stress on an analysis of normal visual perception, on the
study of perceptual illusions, and on. a historical study of pictorial spaces.) Euclidean
structure is the product of a "technical and scientific praxis" which is inscribed within
common usage across a broad variety of artifacts. Like any theoretical construct,
Euclidean space can be directly perceived "provided that an appropriate readable
technology exists." In this way, it becomes an "essential structure of the everyday
world."
The method Heelan engages with regard to the particular problem [of visual space]
is again used in the second part of the book to construct a general theory of perception
(interpreted in a hermeneutical sense, always in conformity with Heelan's fundamental
positions), and on this basis, to elaborate a philosophy of science that gets articulated
according to the essentially phenomenological, thesis of "horizonal realism." The
author's epistemological position permits him to develop a radical critique of"identity
theories," which tend "in principle to reduce mental phenomena, such as acts of
perception to brain states or to material states, without residue." Such a position also
allows him, with regard to the problem posed by the interpretation of the history of
science, to construct a model of rational progress that includes a "linear part" and a
"dialectical part." The essential characteristic of the dialectical structure of the model
is that it is represented by a nondistributive lattice. The interpretation proposed for the
history of science is generalized within a theory of cultural diversity and cultural
xiv JEAN LADRIERE
dynamics, where the same formal structure is to be found, namely, that of quantum
logic. But quantum theory is only one particular case - albeit, strictly speaking, it is a
most illustrative case .... of a "context dependent discourse." The entire argumentation
developed by Heelan thus leads him to the following "provisional conclusion": "In the
degree to which reality is grounded on the general conditions of the possibility of
perception, the structure of this ground (very likely) has the historical and dialectical
structure of a nondistributive quantum lattice."
-Jean Ladriere
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity. A Study ofthe Physical Philosophy of Werner Heisenberg. The Hague,
Nijhoff, 1965.
-"Horizon, Objectivity, and Reality in the Physical Sciences," International Philosophical Quarterly, 7,
1967, pp. 375-412.
- "Quantum Logic and Classical Logic: Their Respective Roles," Synthese, 22 (1970): 3-33. Reprinted in
R.S. Cohen & M. Wartofsky, eds., Logical and Epistemological Studies in Contemporary Physics.
Dordrecht/Boston, D. Reidel Pub. Co., 1974, pp. 318-349.
-"Toward a New Analysis of the Pictorial Space ofVincent Van Gogh," Art Bulletin, 54, 1972, pp. 478-492.
-"Towards a Hermeneutic of Natural Science" and "Towards a Hermeneutic of Natural Science: A Reply
to Wolfe Mays," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 3,1972, pp. 252-260 & 277-
283.
-"Hermeneutics of Experimental Science in the Context of the LifeWorld," in D. Ihde & R. Zaner, eds.,
Interdisciplinary Phenomenal ogy. The Hague, Nijhoff, 1975, pp. 7-50,
-"Quantum Relativity and the Cosmic Observer," in W. Yourgrau & A. Breck, eds., Cosmology, History
and Theology. New York, Plenum, 1977.
-"Music as a Basic Metaphor and Deep Structure in Plato and in Ancient Culture," Journal ofthe Social and
Biological Structures 2, 1979, pp. 279-291.
- Space-Perception and the Philosophy ofScience. Berkeley/Los Angeles (Cal.), University of California
Press, 1983.
- Translated by David B. Allison

Standing: Alex Bradley, Esther [Heelan] Bradley, M.D., Louis J. Heelan, Esq.t
Seated: Matthew Henry Heelan, Esq., Patrick Aidan Heelan, S.J., Pauline Beirens Heelan. July, 1958.
Patrick Aidan Heelan as cox - far left, looking right.

River Liffey, Islandbridge, Dublin, Ireland. Summer, 1942.
XV
St. Louis University, early 1950. Driving the farm jeep, St. Louis, 1950's.
Father Heelan, dancing with one of the many Crowther cousins he has married over the years. Circa 1970.
xvi
From left to right: David B. Allison (seated), Patrick A. Heelan, S.J., Babette E. Babich,
William J. Richardson, S.J., Leo J. O'Donovan, S.J. , Georgetown University, 1995.
Prof. Patrick A. Heelan with Prof. Karl Pribram, following a class discussion on science and religion.
Georgetown University, Spring semester, 2001.
XVII
BABETTE E. BABICH
THE FORTUNES OF INCOMMENSURABILITY

Thoughtstyles, Paradigms, and Patrick A. Heelan's Hermeneutic of Science
PATRICK A. HEELAN, S.J. -PHYSICIST, PRIEST, PHILOSOPHER
Patrick Aidan Heelan was born, very romantically, in the 1066 and All That sense of
being romantically born, on St. Patrick's Day in Dublin in 1926, as the second son of
a mathematically gifted Flemish mother, Pauline Beirens, who had been sent from her
native Antwerp to a convent school in Ireland, where she eventually met Matthew
Henry Heelan, who, in addition to holding all the posts that are usually all we are told
of a father's life, also had gifts that left a lasting impression on his family, including a
passion for music, for sailing, and for roses, and who, together with his wife, raised his
family, two sons, Louist and Patrick, and a daughter, Esther, where they all grew up
in a small stone house that stood on a parcel of land that ran directly to the sea, near
Sandycove, in full view of the Martello Tower, not too far in space or in time from the
Dublin we tend best to know from James Joyce.
Heelan, who was to become a Jesuit earlier than some boys begin to shave, began
his studies at Belvedere College and, at University College, Dublin, took courses with
Erwin Schrodinger and John Synge at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin. A
traveling studentship would take him from Ireland to St. Louis for a first doctorate in
physics and then to a stint at the School of Cosmic Physics of the Institute for
Advanced Studies in Dublin along with studies for a Licentiate in Theology followed
by a two-year post doc in high energy physics at Princeton, for what was for him a very
influential meeting with Eugene Wigner, where he also began his association with the
physics department of Fordham University at Rose Hill in the Bronx. He then taught
physics and cosmology at University College Dublin, did a second doctoral degree in
philosophy at Louvain in Belgium, now: Leuven, writing his first book on Husserl and
Heisenberg, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity (1963). He took the opportunity to
return to New York's Fordham University, with a year spent as a visiting Professor in
Physics at Boston University along the way, and then, in 1970, he was invited to chair
the department of philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook,
directly overseeing its development into a leading center for continental philosophy,
he took on administrative responsibilities as Vice-President for Liberal Studies, taught
a certain ex-biology student, the present editor, a crucial course in the philosophy of
2 BABETTE E. BABICH
science, and began writing a book on Space-Perception and the Philosophy ofScience
(published in 1983) - a book that was to have surprising influence in fields such as
architectural design, cognitive and experimental psychology and even exo-biological
research but, and this is regrettably typical, much less than its share of influence in its
own focused reference to the philosophy of science. In 1983, Heelan was a Senior
Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for the Philosophy of Science. Ten
years later he returned to university administration as Dean of Humanities and Fine
Arts at Stony Brook. And in 1992, moved on to still more academic administrative
tasks as Executive Vice-President for the Main Campus of Georgetown University. He
is currently the William A. Gaston Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University.
These are the academic milestones and accomplishments of Patrick Heelan's life,
leading to a listing in the Encyclopedie Philosophique Universelle- (as Philosophe
irlandais), here translated from the French as part of the preface to this collection. But,
like the above, such a prestigious account is far too spare. It fails to convey his
intelligence, or his wit and Irish humor, as it has amused- and more than occasionally
also disconcerted- his American colleagues. Nor can such a complex personality and
the range of such a life be communicated here, to do that one needs to tell a real story,
with all the resources oflreland's fiction. Ifl lack the skills to tell such a story, I know
at least that it should be told. And in the "Afterword," we shall indeed hear the tale
from Heelan himself.
SCIENCE, ERROR, AND HERMENEUTICS
Ludwik Fleck, a Pole from the quintessentially rabbinical town of Lemberg (Lvov)
could hardly be further from Patrick Heelan- or his Irish, Catholic Dublin roots. But
they share more than one thing in common and both would endure a less than effective
influence due to resistance to the associative resonances of the language they used and
the very conceptual and, at the same time, very political, fortunes of incommensura-
bility.
If Patrick Heelan invoked the phenomenological resources of Edmund Husserl in
order to explore Heisenberg's quantum mechanics, such a reference together with its
associated language or conceptual terminology could not but clash with the then-
contemporary scholarship (authoritative references and conceptual schemata) of the
philosophy of science, which had already (as mainstream analytic philosophy in general
had done) relegated Husserl to a lesser post in an hierarchic philosophical scale of
clarity or fruitful philosophic expression leading not to cognizing quantum mechanics
but merely to a place alongside Frege, as author of a Logical Investigations somewhere
to be ranged behind Wittgenstein's canonic title. It was from within the climate of
analytic philosophy, the same climate that has not wavered in its dominance of
professional philosophy, that Heelan first articulated his conceptual vocabulary, with
talk of so many "Worlds" (of the Sportsman, of the Husband, of the physical scientist), 1
in order to express what he then called an "horizonal analysis. " 2 For Heelan, to talk of
horizons and world, particularly the Husserlian "Life-World," enabled an approach to
the paradoxical question of nothing less than the objectivity of quantum mechanics,
permitting "an analysis of the intentionality structure of quantum physics" 3 and
including the bugbears indeterminacy and complementarity- in terms of Husserl's
correlated conception of the noetic structure of knowing. Quantum mechanics could
THE FORTUNES OF INCOMMENSURABILITY 3
thus be expressed as "the formal material theory whose function is to describe a World-
for-things, and the experimental observational and operational part which makes the
World-for-things also a World-for-us." 4 For Heelan, such a twofold phenomenological
and hermeneutic reading of the structures of objectivity internal to quantum mechanics
both in theoretical and in practical expression meant that the life-world did not come
to an abrupt halt at the laboratory door. 5
Heelan's focus on instrumentally (and thereby significatively) mediated perception
provides the key to his insight into Heisenberg's epistemology at the level of the
Indeterminacy Principle, a principle which takes as its point of departure the
observation that the "act ofmeasurement,"6 as the critical micro-activity of physical
science, "perturbs the object" of scientific inquiry, "which yields the well-known result
that the object... can be known neither empirically nor formally." 7 Heelan's study of
complementarity, analysing the intentionality structure of quantum mechanics, argued
that measurement as such includes perturbation as a complementary component of
observation because "the measuring process" rather than being objectively extrinsic to
the object measured is intrinsic or "essential to the definition of a physical property."8
From a literally phenomenological point of view then, "the activities which take place
between object and instrument in the measuring process serve no other function than
to render some physical system or some property of it, accessible to a human observer
by magnifying it or otherwise 'translating' it into a form in which it can produce a
perceptible impression on a human observer." 9
Thus Heelan was able to argue that "quantum mechanics shares to the full the
public objectivity of science." 10 In consequence, he could also argue that an expressly
phenomenological or horizonal analysis of quantum mechanics was indispensable for
an adequate quantum mechanical theory of knowledge, 11 as Werner Heisenberg's own
definition emphasises: "quantum mechanics is a science of immanent acts and objects,"
describing not "nature but our knowledge of nature." 12 Hence, for Heisenberg, "there
is no place for an objective (i.e., physically objective) science of microphysical objects,
except as a science of how we know and not of what we know." 13
In Husserlian terms, the physicist appropriates or takes over the intentional
perspective of the instrument itself. For the scientist in this intentional relationship, a
"measuring instrument" would not then itself be an isolated thing but an extension of
the scientist's intentional orientation in which the instrument "played the part of an
'observing instrument' which 'felt' and 'observed' reality and 'spoke' of its
experiences to the scientist through the 'language' of observable physical symbols; for
the new science consciously took the point of view of an instrument immersed in
nature." 14 The whole of Heelan's later concern with readable technologies is thus pre-
articulated in this context which is importantly as much hermeneutic as it is
phenomenological: "The measured property produces a macroscopic effect in the
instrument; as for example, a pointer reading on a scale, a 'click' of a counter, or a
track in a bubble chamber. This macroscopic effect is a material sign. A sign has a
double reality: its mental reality as a pointer, sound or bubble track, and an intentional
reality proper to it as a sign." 15
Heelan invoked N. R. Hanson's "patternings" of discovery in terms of the
multifariously (depending on the research context in question) "dressed" world of the
research scientist for whom a laboratory or research center is differently experienced
than it can be for a journalist or a student, or the cleaning staff (just as the man who
4 BABETTE E. BABICH
operates a massive backhoe on an urban construction site experiences or "lives" the

heavy machinery he controls as well as the site itself as a discrete world - here
understood in contrast with those passers by, who, caught up in their own "worlds," as
we say, give neither machine operator nor construction site a second glance).
Heelan's application of Husserl's philosophy to an expression of Heisenberg's
physics, qua physical philosophy illustrates the indispensable force of both a
phenomenological analysis and a hermeneutics of the same objective recourse,
expressed in exact opposition to the epistemological failure of the one-to-one
correspondence language schematism required by logical positivism. 16 For Heelan, a
phenomenological analysis in the theoretical context of quantum mechanics necessari-
ly presupposes an hermeneutic account. And in this latter context, Heelan's
hermeneutics of scientific practice requires less the resources of pragmatism than the
critical sophistication (contra Robert Neville's critique) of phenomenology. To give
it a Kantian stamp, a phenomenological analysis of science without hermeneutics is
blind but a hermeneutic philosophy of science without phenomenology is empty.
In his earlier and later books, the phenomenological component is key to Heelan's
thinking. As Heelan expresses it, a "scientific observation" is necessarily techno-
logically and theoretically mediated, which is to say that it is "accomplished with the
aid of instruments." 17 Scientific observation is thus a matter of mapping out or
"outfitting" an entire world, presupposing a trained conversancy with the report of the
instrument, or the "readability" of the instrument-measurement-laboratory environment
as such. 18
It is tragic but all-too routine in the fortunes of the academy, i.e., the disciplinary
project of the philosophy of science as a profession and as such, that for Patrick
Heelan, as for Ludwik Fleck, the cognitive dissonance inevitably to be correlated with
conceptual incommensurability had to make communication within the disciplinary
confines and influence of the philosophy of science effectively impossible. Thus when
Lawrence Sklar was invited to comment on Space-Perception and the Philosophy of
Science at a book session on Heelan's work at a meeting of the American Philosophical
Association, 19 presided over by Heelan's fellow Irish countryman, Ernan McMullin,
the commentary was never able to overcome the shock of this same conceptual
dissonance to address the substance of the book charged for critical reception. 20 The
different styles of thought between Heelan and ordinary emphases in the philosophy
of science left Sklar no access to the thought at work in Heelan's study. But the
deficiencies of Sklar's conceptual reference were derived from Sklar's rather than
Heelan's hermeticism. Heelan had of course sought to address the reigning tradition
or received modality of the philosophy of science in his book, which not only begins
with a discussion of"Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and the Philosophy ofScience"21
but includes a very perfectly optimistic or "bridge-building" chapter on "Hermeneutics
and the History of Science. " 22 Heelan's book recommended a course avoiding the twin
dangers of traditional or analytic, received views in the philosophy of science as well
as traditional or routinely continental accounts of hermeneutics, which continental side
has for its part been burdened since Dilthey with an exactly impoverished view of the
nature of the distinction between the human and the natural sciences. 23 This was the
same distinction Heelan had earlier sought to bridge via the reconstitution of the fully-
fledged, carefully noetic-noematic horizon called forth in the "World of the physical
scientist" (a world excluding Dilthey's famous opposition just as it excludes the
unilateral correspondence rule and scheme of ordinary philosophy of science not only
of Bridgman and Campbell but also in the historical climate or episteme of the mid-
sixties: Niels Bohr, John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, and so on). For Heelan, both
continentally-minded scholars ofhermeneutics24 and traditional philosophy of science
exemplify the still today persistent conviction that "hermeneutics has nothing
whatsoever to do with natural science."25 The entrenched tradition in the philosophy
of science which Heelan opposes to the more socially and contextually lived views
advanced by Fleck and Thomas Kuhn remains to be addressed to a specifically
normative and practical research program of problem solving as instigated by Karl
Popper and continued in Larry Laudan and onwards in received or establishment
philosophy of science today. 26
INCOMMENSURABILITY AND STYLIZED RESISTANCE
The positive achievement of the present volume redresses the conceptual

incommensurability between Patrick Heelan's contributions to the philosophy of
science and traditionally analytic philosophy of science. Repatriating the term
"hermeneutics" within the conceptual armature of the philosophy of science is thus to
take a step beyond both analytic and continental perspectives in philosophy. And in
what I believe to be a parallel illustration of incommensurability, in the case ofLudwik
Fleck- rather than hermeneutics per se, as the explicit adoption of a method initially
conceived with reference to (religious and thence to legal) texts, to be applied to the
philosophic analysis of science (as ineliminably theoretical practice)- the problem is
the literal question of style: both Fleck's express invocation of styles of a thought
interior to science and the great obstacle to its reception in traditional philosophy of
science which was entailed by the tacit style of biological science and medical research
illustrations.
Fleck's conceptual terminology centers around thoughtstyle [Denkstil] and the
related if even more elusive conception of a thought-collective [Denk-Kollektiv],
particularly with regard to the latter's emergent properties. The alien implications of
Fleck's notion of thought-communities (throughout history as well as in modem
scientific research practice) challenge Western liberal ideas of individualism and
freedom - nor is it an accident that these ideas are more and not less crucial to
contemporary images of science in the West. In opposition to the contemporary
Western cultural emphasis on the individual and its correlative emphasis on individual
scientific genius, Fleck's philosophic reflection on the collective working or dynamic
function of science foregrounds the ineluctable dependence of the individual upon or
within any given, historical, thought-collective. In his landmark 1947 essay, "To Look,
To See, To Know," Fleck mused that "scientists, most frequently individualists, do not
want to see the collective nature of thinking. What would remain of their renowned
genius?" 27 But for Fleck, the individual cannot escape/surpass the collective: the
thought-collective of any era is the presumed, taken for granted, but above all, the
precisely unrejlected culture of that same era. Not a consciously received or dominant
perspective of thought, the collective is the world assumed in advance of a particular
research tradition. A given scientific thought-collective is the perspective within which
what is scientifically conceived can be conceived as such. 28 As Fleck's later editors
Cohen and Schnelle explain, "the individual member of a collective is not free to be
6 BABETTE E. BABICH
scientifically active otherwise than on the basis of his stylized socialization. His
thought must start with the propositions created by the collective."29 In Fleck's own
words,
the ordinary scientist of the day finds that "scientific truth" is a complex mental construction,
inseparably connected with investigative techniques, statistical interpretations and manifold
conventions. He knows that it may often be expressed only in a special jargon and be intelligible
only after a prolonged professional training. In his view, "scientific truth" depends on conjunc-
ture, i.e., scientific opportunity, environment, and the author's personal influence. 30
Maintaining that scientific truth is ineluctably social, Fleck takes the disciplinary
relevance of the sociology of knowledge to be no less central to an understanding of
science than history itself.
Yet to advert to the sociology of science (in particular) and to the history of
science31 (more broadly) is only to compound the troubles of incommensurability.
Sociology of science or, more radically, sociology of knowledge, particularly natural
science, is far from an entrenched, much less a secure, discipline vis-a-vis science
(witness the recent fury of the science wars, fading because the more radical
proponents of sociological, anthropological, rhetorical or cultural studies of science
have been chastened and are in due retreat: rendering unto science what is science's,
on the precise terms dictated by fealty to the hierarchical ideal of science as such) or
the philosophy of science. Nor was this conflict between world views (think ofDilthey
or Mannheim) less inchoate in Fleck's era. 32 The contributions ofboth John Ziman and
Rom Harre below testify to a renewed sensibility to the relevance to the sociological
context of and for the lived and cultural practice of science. With specific reference
to the philosophy of science itself, Ragnar Fjelland's essay offers an insightful
discussion of the Sokal hoax in terms of its coordinate parallels with the elusive words
of both Bohr and Heisenberg and my own more directed essay on the same hoax
emphasizes critical reflection in thinking about science as such. 33
Here, in the context of social theories of scientific culture, it is important to advert
to the camp quality or fairy-tale oddness of the Sokal hoax as it is one that has yet to
be regarded not as the kind of joke Sokal pretends it was - but as the still unexposed
ruse that took, and continues to take, science far too seriously and far too uncritically.
Throughout the past century, both critics and proponents of science alike have been
invited to swallow only what certified scientists endorse. This is the joke in the
overawed response to the authority of science, at work in the original locus or butt of
the joke played upon the editors of Social Text, just as it was a joke played on and
among friends: and therefore a double hoax effected by means of an exact "in" on the
game. It is a crucial piece of evidence (or gossip )34 that Alan Sokal was a friend of
Social Text editor and meteorological enthusiast, Andrew Ross, that Sokal met his
current wife at a party at Ross's home- and that exactly not nothing follows from that.
Academics who know editors should know better than to think that any kind of vetting
or review- blind or expert, humanist or scientist, or what have you -would or could
be at work in such friendly cases. The hoax was an academic set-up.
An overawed confidence in the ultimacy of current (no less! pace Laudan) physical
science is at work in Sokal's own presumption (like that of his plainly more
accomplished colleague Steven Weinberg)35 regarding the finished adequacy of science
as critically perfect and quite literally beyond critique. This totalising confidence in
science has sometimes been saddled by critics with a suffix - calling it scientism 36 -
to hold it at a critical distance from more nuanced views on science. But in the context
of the philosophy or sociology of science, etc., a charge of scientism is about as much

a reproof as deism in a religious community. The same overawed joke continues to
work in the wake of tiresome commentary on the story and (surprise, surprise) no one
who writes on it can be found to say anything but "how wonderful" 37 it was just to
think how Sokal rode into town to show up the postmodems, the Derrideans, the
feminists, the anthropologists and sociologists of science, the social constructivists -
at which point, in a spontaneous reflex of reflexivity, certain scholars are then to be
seen busily shoring up their own legacy by severing their own work from any even
putatively or remotely science-critical perspective. I name here only Bruno Latour and
Ian Hacking, where other names, are, despite themselves, lesser names. 38 The
philosopher of science, one can only be led to believe, must eschew critique if he or she
is to be taken as "knowing anything" about science. Thus, in the past, one has ruled
out the philosophical perspective of a Nietzsche or a Heidegger or even the later
Husserl. One cannot be, and one must affirm that one has never been, a member of any
such critical party.
BETWEEN THOUGHTSTYLES AND PARADIGMS
We have noted the relevance of terminological incommensurabilities in the thinking

of both Heelan and Fleck to indicate the conceptual difficulties presented for the
tradition of the philosophy of science.
Just how egregious these difficulties were - and in large measure remain - is best
seen by noting a striking conceptual limitation of the important collection edited by
Cohen and Schnelle, Cognition and Fact: Materials on Ludwik Fleck. 39 This
wonderful, but to date, little noted collection includes English translations of Fleck's
own essays dating from 1934-1960 as well as profiling leading scholarly responses to
Fleck both in his own time and in recent times. Intriguingly, not a single essay in this
extensive collection shows any comprehension of the function of the biological
dimension of science or medical metaphor for Fleck, as the very key to Fleck's
philosophical thought on science and scientific knowledge. Why is this and, more
importantly, what follows as a result?
This limitation both ironically and naturally proves Fleck's thesis, because, without
a fundamental background in biology, the task of getting Fleck's points proves
impossible, even in a sympathetic collection dedicated to advancing his reception. The
exception that might be thought to be found in the contributions by those scholars not
only biologists or physicians but Poles themselves, repeats a generally critical
perspective on Fleck and his medical limitations, attributing more sensitivity to the
workings of the immune system and much more wholism to medical research practice
than happens in fact to be the case, a deficiency evident given the AIDS crisis and
betrayed by the medical profession's oddly uncritical support of the healing promise
of genetic re-engineering chances inspired by the mere idea of decoding the human
genome - which same crisis confirms Fleck's critical charge contra the conceptual
deficiencies characteristic of modem medicine itself and its search for singular causal
agency (i.e., HIV). That is: the reigning thoughtstyle (and collective rule) ofbiological
as medical science is increasingly physical science, and even, in the case of genetics,
information science. Fleck's biology, by contrast, was the classic microbiology of the
early twentieth century.
8 BABETTE E. BABICH
Fleck challenges the standard story of the triumphalist emergence of modem

science as a break with the fearful, uncritical but above all unobserving medieval point
of view as an eruption into modernity effected by the plain and simple means of
observation, whereby the main empirical advance in modem science corresponds to
simply taking a look (through the microscope or the telescope). For Fleck, the standard
"sleep-walking" story was tendentious. It was absurd to "assert that a medieval scientist

did not have any positive relationship to observation." 4 Key for Fleck was the
conceptual schema within which whatever was observed or noted would be able to be
observed or seen:
Looking and seeing at that time differed from the present day, but it would be a sign of naivete to
think that a man of those days was asleep, and roused himself from his sleep only during the
Renaissance .... the 16th century could find bones in the neighbourhood of cemeteries and study
them, but the Middle Ages simply lacked any intellectual need of such observations; when looking
at a bone one could see only what one could find in books ... .''
For Fleck, those very books tell the story not only of scientific discoveries but also of
the ruling interests and the shifts in interests that accompany discoveries:
In 17th century anatomy books we find long chapters describing and enumerating the so-called
ossa sesamoidea which are disposed of with a few sentences in today's textbooks: they are
currently, so to speak, outside the osseous system and little of interest from the ontogenetic,
morphological, or physiological viewpoint. But at that time they were important because of certain
old myths according to which from one of such bones there will develop "sicut planta ex semine"
the complete body to appear at the Last Judgment. 42
For a further example, the 14th or 15th century anatomist or physician simply "knew"
that the male of the human species lacked a rib. They did not need to, more decisively,
they could not check for themselves to "see" that this was not so (nor, as, beyond Fleck,
Allan Debus and Peter Dear can explain, could simply pointing out such a "fact" have
had the power to alter these same convictions). 43
Fleck points out that contemporary anatomical preoccupations are as "incorrigible"
as such putatively erroneous medieval views because our own contemporary views are
as invisible (unquestionable) to us as their own medieval preoccupations were to the
anatomists of past times. We only see such preoccupations as preoccupations because
they are not our own. Contrasting the modem with the medieval scholar~ Fleck
concludes that "what is of importance to us, is for him inessential, inexplicable, alien,
just as, on the contrary, his own thinking is alien to us." 44
Fleck was not a pioneer of social studies of knowledge or scientific culture per se.
Such disciplinary approaches to science studies, including anthropology as well as
sociology, tend to be epistemically uncritical, for they themselves are articulated within
specific disciplinary or "scientific frames." And Fleck's concern, which is what
renders his thinking proper to the philosophy of science, was addressed to what he
called epistemology, which is why he ended up by elevating the promise (not the
reality) of sociology to the height of a veritable mathematics for the sake of science. 45
But Fleck's concern with epistemology was the question of what could be said to be
known, specifically as articulated in the terms of science, corresponding to what is said
to be true. This epistemological concern reflects the logical limits of scientific
discovery (research) and scientific justification (theory and philosophy). By reflecting
on the historical question of thoughtstyles and the relevance of precisely collective
communities of thought and the emergent properties that characterize such styles of
thought interior to such communities in specific cultural and historical context, Fleck
sought to show that that same history and range of cultures adumbrated nothing less
ambitious than the material dialectic of science in real and ineluctably communal
research practice. 46
Famously, and this is why we are able, in the insular context of English language
philosophy of science, to talk about Fleck at all, it was no one less important than
Thomas Kuhn himself who read Fleck's The Genesis and Development ofa Scientific
Fact, 47 as part ofhis own scholarship and as part of the preparation for his own work
on The Structure ofScientific Revolutions. Because, as Kuhn reports in retrospect, he
only read German "badly," he was also compelled, as he emphasizes, to read and re-
read Fleck. 48 But more significant than such a painstaking reading is that Kuhn
happened upon Fleck's book in an intensifying constellation of ideological
circumstances then rife in an era that today seems as distant as Fleck's vanished world,
as distant as Heelan's own then-still-Joycean Dublin has come to be from today's
prosperous, cybemeticized, cosmopolitan Dublin, regarded from the new, more than
postmodem, vantage of the twenty-first century.
Kuhn's time spanned prewar and wartime history and his crucial and formative
intellectual work found expression during the era of the postwar world known as the
cold war. In America proper, the climate of the cold war reflected the still virulent
McCarthyism dominating everything from art to criminal justice and including the
academy- or Ivory Tower as it was then unquaintly regarded. If the McCarthy era in
the land of the free and the brave was not Stalinism, it nevertheless had exactly
repressive parallels. Much of the social and intellectual repression characterizing the
1950s and 1960s expressed this climate of fear. The change that began to take place
in the late 1960s (really into the 1970s and, alas, coming there to an unsung and
unmarked dead-end) saw a world change in fashion and life-styles, if not in politics.
But if today, we no longer hear about the socialist or communist threat- to use the
language of the cold war- that is not because we have become more nuanced about the
psychoanalytic projection implicit in the language of a "communist threat" or about the
multifarious and complex dimensionality of political forms like socialism or
communism but rather and because like so many of the varied biological species that
have become extinct in the long course of the last century, the threat of
socialism/communism has been vanquished. The end of the cold war corresponds to
the extirpation of the political regimes of socialism and communism itself, almost like
the phantasm of democracy in the US. 49 But this does not quite mean that we've
evolved beyond the inanity ofMcCarthyism.
I do not think it an exaggeration to suppose that, given the then political climate and
despite the manifest relevance of Fleck's study, Kuhn could not cite Fleck, even had
he wished to do so in fact. And if, more radically, one supposes, as claimed above, that
Kuhn's "paradigm" is a periphrastic construction derived from Fleck's Denkstil/Denk-
Kollektiv, this is exactly because, and on more than one level, only such a paraphrase
was, per impossibile, possible. 5
The problem of citing Fleck for Kuhn had nothing to do with Fleck's "Polish"
German (this is a nonsens,ical claim as Steve Fuller advances it in his otherwise useful
book on Kuhn 51 -there is no 'false friend,' as language teachers say, to trip one up in
the translation of Denkstil [thoughtstyle] or Denk-Kollektiv [thought-collective]). Not
a problem of translation but the political restrictions of his era (from the forties through
the fifties and early sixties) entailed that Kuhn could not adequately cite Fleck. That is,
Kuhn could not have used such dangerously loaded terms as "thought-collectives" -
10 BABETTE E. BABICH
or "thoughtstyles" - in his 1962 book for the perfectly banal reasons we still attribute
to and name "politics." The language of collectives or thoughtstyles would have
evoked precisely reactive reactions in a time of the paranoia and anxieties expressed
in words like brainwashing, propaganda, the Iron Curtain and the Iron State, and the
inscrutable evil of Eastern Europe, ofRussiaoand (this is all that is left today) China.
And in 1976, the later Kuhn, writing an introduction to the belated translation of
Fleck's book, remained careful to underscore his personal, exactly gut distance from
these very same terms. Even after so much time, one may hear the echo of Western
anxiety vis-a-vis the image of the "collective" as the anti-individualist, veritably
mindless, socialist "horde."
Nothing but the then-times themselves gave birth to the unhappy coinage of the
term paradigm - among whatever other reasons there may also have been for Kuhn's
labile word. 52 This same historical echo reverberates through Kuhn's own revealingly
over frank and at times uncomprehending, at times brittle autobiographical reflections.
And in The Road Since Structure, in Kuhn's interview with Aristides Baltas, Kostas
Gavroglu, and Vassili Kindi, even the most hermeneutically impoverished reader must
note the relevance of Kuhn's most repeated word "anger"53 - articulating his actions
in terms of a fundamental, choleric impatience. This reflexive reaction to his own
academic legacy does not contradict as much as it complements the contextual
circumstances (or very Fleckian "genesis") of Kuhn's book, as Fuller has outlined it
in his own study of Kuhn and the development ofKuhn's own influence in the broader
culture of the academy itself. 54
In this context it is worth recalling the anecdote Kuhn found significant enough to
dedicate a great proportion of his own brief introduction to Fleck to retelling it. Kuhn
reports that his own mentor, Harvard University President James Bryant Conant, who
became US High Commissioner for Germany, unhappily made conversational use of
the German reference to the title of Fleck's book, as Kuhn had related his discovery of
Fleck on enthusiastic occasion. For Conant, the borrowed reference backfired, as such
borrowed references can do in trans-cultural contexts. Conant's German associate
responded to the mention of the title of Fleck's work with a spontaneous denunciation
of the concept as such: recoiling from its titular proposition in a bravely, determinedly
nai've positivism that is the unchanged ideal of the philosophy of science, latterly called
realism, then betrayed by the stolid conviction that the-facts-are-the-facts. By
definition, as Conant's Teutonic interlocutor painstakingly instructed him, and hence
contra the concept of Entstehung and Entwicklung - the one thing Tatsachen or
"Facts," did not as such have was anything like a "genesis" and the last thing they are
able to do is "develop." Facts are just "discovered" as what they plainly are.
Sidestepping such debacles, Kuhn eschewed Fleck's terminology and spoke instead of
paradigms and paradigm shifts, normal and revolutionary science. 55
But this genesis explains why Kuhn himself was never able adequately to specify
the meaning of or to defend or even to understand or to accept a conceptual
constellation he had only first discovered in Fleck. 56 It also explains the parallel
resistance to these same ideas in the philosophy of science as such. As Lothar Schafer
reflects: "keeping Kuhn's thorough-going dependency on Fleck in mind, one must
draw the obvious conclusion that the key presupposition for [the concept per se of]
revolution in the philosophy of science has to be found in the ahistorical
consciousness" of the philosophy of science. 57 Only a lack of historical background
THE FORTUNES OF INCOMMENSURABILITY II
sophistication (what the Germans call Wissenschaft with respect to history itself)
internal to the discipline of the history and philosophy of science could have permitted
the enduring influence of the idea of revolution as a "fact" so very contrary to the
complex dynamic of the empirical history ofscience. 58
ERROR AND SCIENTIFIC TRUTH
In the wake of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - that is, internal to the
hermeneutic history of its reception and effects - Steve Shapin can begin his small
volume on The Scientific Revolution with the grand declaration that there was no
scientific revolution. Shapin says this non-revolutionary thing for the same historical
reasons that Fleck himself could have given where the history of science outlines
neither unbroken scientific advances nor patent revolutions. Thus Fleck emphasized
the precisely non-cumulative (non-linear) character of scientific progress in contrast to
the cumulative character of past error.
For Fleck, as, more abstrusely, for Ernst Mach, error was not to be condemned to
the dustbin of history because from the same historical perspective it is impossible to
know exactly where true error lies or in what it consists or inheres. Nor can we be sure,
indeed, that the greater error would not be found in our own incorrigibly presentist
account of what we rudely and incorrigibly (currently) regard as past errors. For Fleck,
as for Mach and for Nietzsche, it is as difficult to say what error is as it is to say what
truth is - however much this important and radically post-Kantian corollary may be
expected to dismay latter-day Popperians. 59 Our perception of error is precisely as
context-dependent as our perception of scientific truth.
For both Fleck and Mach, as scientists, exactly as practitioners and for good
reasons, designing research possibilities and perspectives, the so-called "errors" of the
past represented veritable resources of future scientific truth. Past errors were regarded
as scientific reserves, representing realms not to be forgotten. 60 By contrast with the
ideal oftimelessly routine presentism,61 which is the ideal of scientific progress, Fleck's
historical reading of the history of scientific truth and the facts of the same offers a
sustained reading of nothing less than the erring truth of, for example, astrology as
such. For Fleck, astrological preoccupations and assumptions articulated nothing less
indispensable than that very errant context without which the scientific concept of what
we today regard as the disease entity, 62 i.e., syphilis, as such, could not have come to
stand: where a precise genesis and development was requisite for just the scientific
discovery of what we name the modem disease-entity as such.
In this same historical context, it is relevant that the contextual question is the one
question that Barbara Saunders never thinks to consider in her fine contribution below,
reviewing the historical and contemporary reception of Aristotle's account of the
mirror-reddening gaze of the menstruating woman. The contextual primacy of error
turns upon the cultural difference that ought perhaps to be made of the historically
differential matter of fact that ancient mirrors are not made of glass but polished metal:
bronze, copper, silver, etc. And all such metals and their alloys (even without attending
to the sobering limits of contemporary understanding of ancient metallurgy) have the
special characteristic that from the moment they are fashioned (and it is for this reason
very relevant, albeit not to Saunders, that Aristotle duly specifies a brand new mirror)
such metal mirrors oxidize. Newly fashioned (like newly polished) metal mirrors
tarnish upon exposure to the ambient atmosphere, an atmosphere including not only
factors of climate but also relevantly in the case of personal mirrors, the humidity of
respiration and perspiration, and notably the acidity in human breath - that same
chemical composition that undergoes circadian alterations in the course of the day as
well as in response to hormonal changes, the same colour-altering breath that is so little
a merely theoretical construct that its effects have closed the caves at Lascaux to
visitors in recent years, and so on. That is, Saunders does not, just as a good scientist
would not, raise the question of the possible locus of contextual fact in what we are
(already) persuaded to have been error or, indeed, ancient Greek, male prejudice.
But Fleck argues differently. Key for the development of the modem scientific con-
ceptual understanding of syphilis were, for Fleck, conceptions of that disease now
regarded as mistaken. These constructs, different historical schemas, work in a non-
linear development of the changing scientific accounts we have of syphilis, as a
precisely pleonastic disease, including a history of but not limited to therapeutic
measures, an understanding of the progressive character of the disease, and advancing
an ongoing inquiry into the causes of the disease. Even after Fleck, even after the
decisive challenges to the agent theory of disease, we continue to identify (mistakenly
on Fleck's account) syphilis with the spirochaete and to search for a singular or
decisive aetiology of all diseases in our search for cures for the same. This one-size fits
all scheme of illness and health persists and may well stand behind the current
enthusiasms for the genome project (one gene- one disease) as the latest instauration
of this causal conviction.
As a scourge from heaven, under the sign of venereal influence, syphilitic disease
could be transmitted through the blood, as the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons.
For this insight, the religious, astrological, mythological lore of the disease was not
merely a mistaken track in the history of scientific progress towards modernity and the
disease entity that we think to limit to and so to identify with the spirochaete itself(qua
disease vector/agent) but the veritably erring path of the scientific discovery of and the
emergence of scientific fact itself. Exactly this transition was required, Fleck argues
- as in a similar vein the historian Lawrence Principe has retraced the similar
importance of alchemy exactly for the sake of (and not as blocking) the development
of chemistry63 - in order to identify or "discover" a connection between a disease of the
skin (the integument as the symptomatic locus where primary, specifically observable
symptoms of syphilis are manifest) and the blood. It was the developmentally pleo-
nastic character of the disease of syphilis that made its scientific study and resolution
particularly difficult- and not only, as an argument that still recurs in the context of
HIV research, the taboo of sexual anxiety and prejudice. 64 More critically in terms of
the development of the modem disease concept, what, asks the serologist, has a disease
of the skin, the province of dermatology, to do with the blood? And what, we may and
we ought still to ask, has a disease characterized by serological changes to do with the
nervous system, the spinal fluid, the organism as a whole? How/why does syphilis, if
untreated, progress in approximately 25% of the those affected, to the later stages of
this disease? Why 25%? Or for a contemporary perspective, is there a relationship
between syphilis and HIV? Such questions address the problem of infection - and
immunology and public health- in nuce. 65 For Fleck, who was one of the first to
correlate not only the elevated count of leukocytes but also (so Fleck argued, though
this, significantly has not yieded a research tradition in the [accordingly inactive]
science Fleck established - leukergy) 66 other characteristic changes of those same

leukocytes as specific indices of immune response (notably, so Fleck theorized, as
adequate to differentiate between bacterial and viral infection and more), these
questions remain to be posed in a precisely complex (to emphasize the scientific and
research point Fleck insisted upon) context.
Thus it was the very erroneous idea of a scourge, of the "unscientific" (to use
Fleck's specification of the nature of the) notion of"befouled" or "bad blood" that was
a requisite, indispensable element in the development of the scientific concept of the
strangely unstable disease entity that Fleck himself in perfectly scientific sobriety did
not finally identity with the spirochaete. 67 For Fleck, bacteriological agency alone was
insufficient to explain the aetiology of the disease as such, specifically in its pleonastic
character, and which we, in the wake of AIDS and the ongoing global crisis of the
same, have learned to understand as an important precision, focused more upon the
immune system than the concept of the disease-entity as such. 68
Fleck thus maintained (for the sake of preserving the same complexity he thought
indispensable to medical research) that error was to be conserved (Nietzsche went
further in this, as in everything, and spoke of"cultivating error as the mother womb of
knowledge," 69 ): preserving past error like an attic full of things out of style, or a
basement collection of discarded and forgotten artifacts, broken, or bent, which are
nonetheless kept out of the prudential recognition that they might tum out to be useful
- once dominant sclerotic perspectives (no matter if we call them Fleckian
thoughtstyles or Kuhnian paradigms) have been altered by as yet unanticipated
influences.
Critically- logically, as Patrick Heelan tirelessly observes- it is only if our truths
are true, only if we can be certain of our scientific point of departure, that the process
of science can be a more or less ideally algorithmic and heuristically banal (Kuhn's
"ordinary") affair (this is the contention Laudan's progressive program eliminates by
designating as "revolutionary" the everyday ideal of science, whereby revolution turns
out to be a matter of normal, scientific problem solving).
Ludwik Fleck's conviction, which he shared with Ernst Mach, was that the complex
riches surrounding an abandoned path might hold a useful key for us when retracing
our steps after sufficient anomalies, or encounters with the limits of the ruling paradigm
(as the current scientific thoughtstyle) moves us to do so. For Heelan, a fuller, properly
hermeneutic understanding of science refers us to the broader scope of the human
values and the full resources of the life-world that must be incorporated, completing
the balance of the scientific notion oftruth.
Fordham University/Georgetown University
NOTES
1 Patrick A. Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity: The Physical Philosophy of Werner Heisenberg
(The Hague: Nijhoff, 1965), 4. By noting the range of"lifeworlds" differentially constituting the "World
of the physician, the World of the sportsman, the World of the husband, the World of the wife," the reference
is specific to its era and to the perspective of the author in the early sixties, and is accordingly as dated as it
is charming. Heelan lists an array of "World" possibilities as a prelude to his focus upon "the World of the
physical scientist in the twentieth century."
The terminology of a horizonal analysis is classically phenomenological. It refers to "an analysis of

'horizons' of the kind of cognitive intentionality-structure implicit in the conduct of a systematic investiga-
tion." Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity, x.
3 Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity, 22.
Ibid., 179.
The world of lived research of "pieces of apparatus and their behaviour" constitute "a World-for-[the
physical scientist]," whereby "the world to which [the scientist] orients himself is one structured about things;
it is a World-for-things." Ibid., 176.
6 Because the measurement process is "part of the activity whereby we contact and so observe physical
reality, it has a distorting effect on reality." Ibid., xi-xii.
7 Ibid., 62-63.
Ibid., xii.
Ibid., 63.
10 Ibid., 99.
11 It may be argued that this is so with respect to an epistemology of quantum mechanical physical theory
in a way that is not in the same way fashion essential for an epistemology of classical physics.
12 Werner Heisenberg, Physicist's Conception of Nature [Das Naturbild der heutigen Physik] A. J.
Pomerans, trans. (London: Hutchinson, 1958), 25; cited in Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity, 150.
For a scientist, the objective description of a quantum mechanical system "is the noumenal condition of
possibility of the wave packet (or objective knowledge) which accounts for the distribution of possible events
linked by the wave packet ... The objective tendency or potentia then is the noumenal correlate of this union
of subject and object in experience ... it [thus] bridges both the external world and the transcendental
subjectivty of the knower." Ibid., I 00; cf. 150.
" Ibid., 71. Heisenberg writes that the wave function "is objective but not real." Heisenberg, Niels Bohr and
the Development ofPhysics (New York: McGraw Hill, 1955), 27; cited in Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and
Objectivity, 150.
14 For Heelan, further, in an extension which would be critical for the rest of his thinking on science,
technology and readability: "The scientist translated these into mathematical symbols, in which they entered
a mathematical theory which, as an intelligible whole, gave meaning to its terms." (Ibid., 174.) This is the
general structure of Heelan's account of readable technologies, a hermeneutic endeavor which he JW~v
explains in Husserlian and even scholastic, Lonerganian agent-active terms (rather than with reference to
Heidegger, despite the language of questioning): "The intentional reality of the sign is the noematic correlate
to an act of inquiring intelligence which is not content with what it sees but looks for explanation." (Ibid.)
"Of itself," to take this structure of inquiry to a Kantian level, "the instrument is 'dumb'; it waits to be
questioned by the scientist, and the form of the question structures its response." (Ibid.)
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., 175.
17 Ibid., 58-9.
18 To trace the hermeneutic dimension of nothing less than mathematics in its physical referentiality, C.F.
von Weizsacker, offers a wonderful image: "The properties of a physical theory are formulated in abstract
mathematic language. Let us compare them with a musical score. For those who cannot read notes the
musical score is dead, but the man who understands them hears the melody in them." C. F. von Weizsacker,
The World View of Physics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 135. Cited in Heelan, Quantum
Mechanics and Objectivity, 5.
19 Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, 1984.
20 As a compensatory consequence, seeking a foothold, Sklar's discussion went on through the time allotted
for the commentary, as well as the time slotted for Heelan's response as well as the time for projected
questions and debate- a thoroughly unprofessional display- while both Heelan and McMullin stared out into
the confounded and impatient audience.
21 Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy ofScience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983),
1-23.
22 Ibid., 220-246.
23 And Dilthey 's own perspective was scientistic ab initio.
24 This includes sociology of knowledge and of science, as dramatized by the recent Sokal trauma as it has
affected social studies of science and as it has had, by drastic but heretofore unremarked contrast, almost no
effect whatsoever in the philosophy of science proper.
25 Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy ofScience, 222.
26 Thus Laudan resolves the challenge of Kuhn's theoretical distinction between normal and crisis or
revolutionary science: "science is normatively the effort to surpass old theories and research traditions by new
ones of greater explanatory power." Cited in Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy ofScience, 229.
Of course, it goes without saying that this redefinition of "revolution" means that the latest findings of
Fermilab, in perfect conformity with a public relations perspective, would thus constitute "revolutions" on
a par with Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, Heisenberg. This makes Weinberg and Sokal, Stephen Hawking
and Carl Sagan revolutionaries to a man. Normal science is revolutionary science. End of debate.
27 Ludwik Fleck, "To Look, to See, To Know" [1947] in RobertS. Cohen and Thomas Schnelle, eds.,
Cognition and Fact: Materials on Ludwik Fleck (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1986), 151.
28 For this reason, Fleck's critical notion of thought-collectives, as intrinsic to the progress of science as
such, contradicts the dominant, historically ideological ideal of scientific genius and the achievement of
Western liberal individualism. See Rom Harre and John Ziman in this volume. See also Ziman's Of One
Mind: The Collectivization of Science (Woodbury. NY: American Institute of Physics, 1995). But beyond
this, see also Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
29 Cohen and Schnelle, "Introduction," Cognition and Fact, xxxi.
3 Fleck, "Crisis in Science" [1960], Cognition and Fact, 153. Translation modified.
31 More than anything else, new approaches to the history of the science (deriving from changes in history
itself) have begun to undermine the standard or received view of analytic philosophy of science. One might
plausibly credit Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the
F::xperimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) for this growing historical emphasis, but if
such a study was one of the first to enjoy widespread attention, it did so only in the wake of a shift that had
begun even before Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science I 300- I 800 (London: Bell, 1957
[1949]) and A. C. Crombie, Augustine to Galileo: The History of Science AD //00-1700 (London:
Heinemann, 1952) but, arguably, with Pierre Duhem, Le systeme du Monde: Histoire des doctrines
cosmologiques de ?laton a Copernic (Paris: Hermann, 19-13-1959)- for a discussion ofDuhem and the
peripheral limitations attending the reception ofDuhem's work, see Babich, "Continental Philosophies of
Science: Mach Duhem Bachelard" in R. Kearney, ed., Continental Philosophy in the Twentieth Century
(London: Routledge, 1989), 175-221, 187-194. Other pathbreaking historical studies include Peter Dear,
Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995), etc. For a general- and generalist's- overview, see H. Flores Cohen, The Scientific
Revolution: A Historiographic Survey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994) and for a specialized,
more ethnographically influenced account, see too Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge. In the context of
the philosophy of science, a more genuine account of the history of alchemy and natural science may emerge
in the wake of a newer approach such as that exemplified in Lawrence Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert
Boyle and his Alchemical Quest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), which should be read for good
measure as a rather more nuanced pendant to Shapin and Schaffer. And last but first in the order of political
relevance or influence is the chapter being written even now which tells the story of the history of the
philosophy of science, most especialy in Michael Friedmann's still-all-too-positivist attempt to bridge the
analytic-continental divide. See Friedman and Ronald Giere in R.N. Giere and A. W. Richardson, (eds.)
Origins ofLogical Empiricism, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) and seeM. Friedman,
Reconsidering Logical Positivism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
32 In the words of one commentator, Fleck was "too much ahead of his time." But the sociology of science
(or the sociology ofknowledge), apart from distant disciplinary lions like Robert Merton, but qua sociological
studies, qua quintessentially social science, has yet to enjoy an uncontested status vis-a-vis "science" proper,
that is: natural science. But, in the wake of the science wars, sociology has been compelled to defend itself
precisely as a science, in the wake of works not only promising but offering an exact sociology of"taboratory
life" or the "manufacture of knowledge." In the same sprit, we may add the increasingly maligned
anthropology of science as it reflects the total distaste for cultural studies of science, including the rhetoric
of science. The history of science itself remains a methodological and conceptual problem precisely because,
unlike other "social" studies of science, the history of science refers very precisely to nothing other than "the
facts" - that most canonic of scientific notions.
33 This is the patent sense ofNicholas Jardine's recommendation as expressed in his book Scenes ofInquiry
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 [1991]), itself a book perpetuating the mainstream philosophical
habitus ofleaving continental philosophers like Patrick Heelan (and so many others) unnamed and hence out
of account, while coopting the larger iconic names (like Gadamer's own): an iceberg chipping strategy which
leaves the realm of needed reflection and reception as unfathomed as ever before, yielding conclusions of
inevitably, ultimately, limited or feeble weight Until a modest focus becomes a word not for politic exclusion
and selective inclusion but integrity and pluralistic respect and sensibility, it will end up, as Jardine's book
ends up, in its earlier as in its later instaurations, drawing a conservative line in the dust, that like Toulmin 's
fine recommendation at the end of his Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda ofModernity (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1992), needs far more than conviction behind it but vital and critical action.
34 I thank Steve Fuller for bringing this rather relevant detail to my attention. And I here underline that I
take this report, a perfect piece of gossip, on perfect faith. Hearsay is hearsay.
35 See for a specific discussion of this credulity and its limits, Alasdair Macintyre, "Preface," Babich, ed.,
with R. S. Cohen, Nietzsche, Epistemology, and the Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences
[Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 204] (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), xv-xvii.
36 See Tom Sorrel, Scientism: Philosophy and the Infatuation with Science (London: Routledge, 1991 ).
37 How could it happen that scientists not be asked to vet an article on science- as if the evening news did
not constantly present scientists happily saying speculative things about genetic engineering or evolution or
even (please let's do think of Carl Sagan) astronomy and evolution, in one blow, unmasked or debunked by
other scientists just as happily as misleading, overstated, and even erroneous.
38 Ian Hacking, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); Bruno
Latour, Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1999).
39 Cohen and Schnelle, eds., Cognition and Fact.
40 Fleck, "Scientific Observation and Perception" [1935], Cognition and Fact, 73.
41 Ibid., 74.
42 Ibid., 76. Translation modified.
43 See in particular, Peter Dear, Discipline and Experience, Ch. I. For a further list, see note 31 above.
44 Fleck, "Scientific Observation and Perception," 74.
45 This is the substance of the concluding reflections of"To Look, To See, To Know."
46 Certain sociologists have observed that Fleck's idea of collective knowledge is abrogated by the very idea,
as it were, of "intellectual property" and the very observable struggle in science for the ownership of an idea
and the authority and power deriving from such influential ownership. Fleck himself describes this struggle
concerning the possession of"Salvarsan" or the emergence of a single fact (like the Wasserman test) in his
book. But the notion of a thought-collective and its associated style for Fleck concerned the dynamic of
research and discovery, the genesis, that is to say and the development of the then and thus emergent "fact."
Tribal thinking or mindless identification with a research collective does not follow from Fleck's description.
47 Ludwik Fleck, The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, trans. F. Bradley and T. Trenn
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979 [1935]).

48 Note that Kuhn's self-deprecation indicates a language competence that itself requires a hermeneutic
articulation, different as it is from the case far more routine among American philosophers today of not being
able to read German at all. In the same way, we note Kuhn also reports that he likewise read and spoke
French very haltingly, a facility which was likewise different from illiteracy, as his own autobiographical
reflections make clear in his recollection of his time during and after World War II in France where what he,
as a military expert was able to do then required just as much ability in French as he similarly disavows with
a scientist's characteristic diffidence- a point of self-deprecating irony further attested by the praise of the
quality of his French which he received from Parisians.
49 This insight is hardly a resultant of recent events, but it is now unmistakable in the wake of the dramatic
demonstration of the limits of that same image of"democracy" afforded by the very events of the 2000 US
presidential election and judicial decision regarding the undecided results of the same.
5 Kuhn could not credit Fleck beyond his famous prefatory characterization of Fleck's book as "an essay
that anticipates many of my own ideas" and situating those same "ideas" in what Kuhn called "the sociology
of the scientific community." (Kuhn, The Structure ofScientific Revolutions (Chicago, University of Chicago
Press, 1970 [ 1962], vii). To the great disappointment of students of the sociology of science, Kuhn ultimately
failed to specifY or further to extrapolate upon this allusion to the "sociology of the scientific community."
In Kuhn's case, the author himself exemplifies the worst aspect of the so-called authorial-fallacy. Like works
of art, words like paradigm (or thoughtstyle or hermeneutics), may be seen to have lives and fortunes of their
own, apart from and often alien to their originators. Expressing, just as Kuhn maintains, the salient core of
Fleck's The Genesis and Development ofa Scientific Fact, the notion of a "thoughtstyle" presented Kuhn
with a research palimpsest, interpretive armature, or background structure for The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions, providing an exactly deployable heuristic device for articulating the historical course of scientific
change or revolution in science. And Kuhn needed such a structure just because it was otherwise unavailable,
as Kuhn himself rightly emphasizes in his 1976 introduction to Ludwik Fleck, Genesis and Development of
a Scientific Fact. See too the more comprehensive introduction by Lothar Schlifer and Thomas Schnelle in
their edition of Fleck, Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftliche Tats ache (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1980), vii-xlvii.
51 Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: An Intellectual Biography for Our Times (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2000).
52 Beyond political ecology but exactly due to this historical circumstance, Kuhn's Structure ofScientific
Revolutions fails to refer to Fleck, nor does Kuhn mention Fleck's notion ofthoughtstyle [Denkstil] and-
thought-collectives except- and this again is my contention here- by way of a periphrasis which would have
an extraordinary destiny: the very word paradigm.
53 Aristides Baltas, Kostas Gavroglu, Vassili Kindi, "A Discussion with Thomas Kuhn" in Kuhn, The Road
Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, 1970-1993 with an Autobiographical Interview, ed., J. Conant and
J. Hauge land (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 255-323.
54 Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn. Fuller follows Hart's 1993 article discussing the meaning of"style" as it
emerges in the context of the correspondence between Panofsky and Mannheim (see Fuller for reference).
But see, too, for a more contextually situtated discussion both of that correspondence and the scientific
context in which Fleck's term makes its appearance: Jonathan Harwood, Styles of Scientific Thought: The
German Genetic Community: 1900-1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1993).
55 As Fleck's notion ofthoughtstyle implies, and just as Nietzsche argues, Kuhn could find in Fleck only
what he had eyes to see, or ears to listen for. Hence, what exceeded Kuhn's capacity for understanding he
simply overlooked. Kuhn's mistake Jay- and with regard to Fleck he had only one- in assuming that the
history and sociology of ideas was a properly established or developed discipline with a patent and received
structure. A scientist by training and not a historian, Kuhn could not have guessed that nothing could be
further from the truth in the social dynamic one author has famously dramatized as the "two cultures" and
the still enduring abyss between the same.
56 This would mean, to oppose the dominant reading, expressed by one reader reflecting on Fleck's reception
by comparison with Kuhn's own influence, that at the very least, such a reliance shows less Kuhn's
prescience than his opportunism.
51 Lothar Schafer thus explicates the very problem of contemporary analytic philosophy of science as the
dominant thoughtstyle possible in and for the philosophy of science (Wissenschaftstheorie). For Schafer,
Kuhn is little more than Fleck's veritable epigone. See Schafer, "Theoriendynamische Nachlieferungen.
Anmerkungen zu Kuhn-Sneed-Stegmiiller," Zeitschrift for philosophische Forschung 31 ( 1977): 19-46.
58 The "very idea" of the history of science was conceptually problematic -and in many ways, it continues
to be so, if we are to believe Nicholas Jardine's mild and all-too-conservative warning in his own Scenes of
Inquiry, and we should. A recent review of the disciplinary relationship between the philosopy of science and
the history of science shows that this tension remaillS- although it is manifestly clear that the philosophy of
science can no longer insist, as a reconstructivist perspective could argue, that it is too bad for science if it
does not in historical fact accord with theoretical accounts of the logic of scientific discovery or invention.
And if talk of thought-collectives and thoughtstyles was problematic, to combine the former with the idea of
the history (specifically, fatally, expressed as the genesis and development) of a fact was exactly shocking
to the logical mindset of the philosophy of science- as, later, in Heelan's case, it would still be for Larry
Sklar, and as it continues today.
59 I discuss Nietzsche in this context in my study, Nietzsche's Philosophy ofScience: &!fleeting Science on
the Ground ofArt and Life (Albany: SUNY, 1994). For the connection with Kant see Babich, "Nietzsche's
Critical Theory: The Culture of Science as Art" in Babich, with Cohen, ed., Nietzsche, Epistemology,
Philosophy ofScience: Nietzsche and the Sciences II (Dordrecht: Kluwer, I 999), I- 13. The critical dynamic
of questioning both what we name as true and what we regard as error is the keystone of Kant's entire
philosophy of science. The aesthetic design of the scientific question effects its judgment power (Bxiii).
Rather than a science based solely on observation (and inductive regress) which would be no science at all
in the image of logic and mathematics, Kant resolves the Humean problem of induction in the Preface to the
second edition of the Critique ofPure Reason, in the empirical practice of questioning because the question
(or experiment) both concedes and exploits the epistemological limitations of reason (KdrV Bix) and
experience (cf. A 124-126). Just as mathematics owes its scientific integrity to the axiomatic character of its
conceptual groundwork, so physics operates with axioms or defining assumptions on both theoretical and
objective levels, that is both in its fundamental concepts and in its experimental processes (B2411AI96;
A713/B74 I -A 7271755). Two different readings of Kant's philosophy of science are useful here if they both
remain- for different reasons - oblique to the traditional or 'received' account of the philosophy of science
as such: the first providing an architectonic or schematic of the Kantian schema, Gerd Buchdahl, Kant and
the Dynamic ofReason (London: Blackwell, 1992) and the second insightfully bridging Kant's first and third
critiques in Heidegger's interpretation of Kant: Pierre Kerszberg, Critique and Totality (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1997). An excellent historical (but still exactly analytic) account is Michael
Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
60 This is the practical point of "going back to the drawing board" in a research context.
61 This opposes the casual presumption of one generalist in the history of philosophy, who thoughtlessly
invokes the presentist viewpoint (he is not better on Nietzsche) that "what was once believed true is now
known to be false, like the cases of astrology or alchemy." Robert Pippin, "Gay Science and Corporal
Knowledge," Nietzsche-Studien, 29 (2000): 136. Similar references may be sought in the literature of
philosophy, particularly with reference to science or truth, almost at random.
62 And Fleck was all for abolishing that unitary and reified perspective as obstacle to a dynamic conception
of a disease.
63 Principe, The Aspiring Adept (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
64 It is significant in this context that the larger number of sociological discussions, presumably more under
the influence of Foucault than Fleck, understand the term "social construction" of disease to refer to a kind
of parallel definition of the disease in the mind of the socius rather than the factual genesis and development
of the scientific or medical concept. Fleck's is an aetiological and thus epistemological concept.
6' See R. C. Lewontin, Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (New York: Harper, 1993) for a
provocative reflection on the relationship between ambient or non-microbial factors and virulent disease or
epidemiology.
66 It is relevant that the co-workers to be found for this discipline lacked the requisite background for Fleck's
conception and that Fleck himself would not cooperate in the formation of such a tradition (the method of
medical research science, as he understood it, preculuded any systemic or dynamically complex science as
leukergy). Thus modern medicine took only the most straightforward index of a much more complex
phenomenon because they lacked the conceptual framework for the diagnostic information Fleck could derive
from leukergic immune response.
67 Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact: "Syphilis is not to be formulated as 'the disease
caused by Spirochaeta pallida. "' 21. For Fleck such statements are problematic because "syphilis as such
does not exist" (39) a claim which he makes not to deny the disease but to point to the inadequacy of the
classic germ carrier theory of disease. For Fleck, anticipating today's increased attention to the role of the
immune system and the organism as a whole, the disease entity (so-called) is but one aspect, because disease
requires more than the presence of"agents" of infection, for healthy individuals carry such "disease agents"
without being themselves ill. Illness or sickness is a complex state rather than a state betraying the presence
of an alien invading element interior to an otherwise hermetically secure or integral biological system.
68 This same insight has been extended, in a direct line from Fleck's work, to oncology. G. Zajicek, "Ludwik
Fleck: Founder of the Philosophy of Modem Medicine," The Cancer Journal, 5:6 (I 992): 304-305.
69 Friedrich Nietzsche, "Wir miissen das Irren lieben und pflegen, es ist der MutterschooB des Erkennens."
Kritische Studienausgabe (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), IX, 503.

SECTION SUMMARIES
PART ONE
Hermeneutics and the Philosophy of Science
This collection of essays in honor of Patrick A. Heelan, S.J., was prefaced with an
encylopedia entry on Patrick Heelan translated by David B. Allison from Les CEuvres
Philosophiques, the second tome of the third volume of the Encyclopedie
Philosophique Universelle. Briefly detailing Heelan's biography, the entry includes
useful summaries ofHeelan's two books, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity: A Study
of the Physical Philosophy of Werner Heisenberg and Space-Perception and the
Philosophy ofScience, the biographical sketch and latter precis contributed by Heelan's
own teacher at Louvain, the Belgian philosopher of science, Jean Ladriere.
The collection to follow features three sections, each corresponding to Patrick
Heelan's main research interests: the philosophy ofscience, reviewed with respect to
hermeneutics and phenomenology; essays on art and aesthetics, including issues of
perception and pragmatism; and, finally, philosophic perspectives on religion.
Hermeneutics and the Philosophy of Science
In his precisely focal essay, "On Hermeneutics and the Philosophy of Science,"
Stephen Toulmin reminds us that Patrick Heelan has shown that the intellectual
operations of the natural sciences embody indispensable elements of interpretation that
make them effectively "hermeneutic" and, contra the dominant perspective interior to
traditional hermeneutics, Heelan was able to make this case for Hans-Georg Gadamer
directly. It is important to make this preliminary point because it is not the case, as one
might think, that continental philosophers support a hermeneutic or phenomenological
philosophy of science, whereas the analytic majority might be thought to be
conservatively against the same. Scholars instead seem to share similar prejudices on
both sides of the analytic-continental divide. Many continentally minded scholars,
including students ofGadamer as well as members of the Frankfurt school, have tended
uncritically to assume the essential rightness of a naive positivism in the philosophy of
natural science. Nor are their analytic colleagues always more nuanced, often
confidently employing an aperspectival perspective to support a hard line opposition
between Physics on the one hand, and History or Sociology on the other. Toulmin
observes that Heelan avoids such oversimplification, but raises the question of the
continuing appeal of such a dead-end track for so many philosophers.
In his essay, "Experimental Life: Heelan on Quantum Mechanics," Robert Crease
argues that Heelan's continentally-inspired work revitalizes the foundations of
19
20 SECTION SUMMARIES
philosophy of science overcoming the impasses of analytic approaches. Crease makes

this case via a biographical account of the genesis of Heelan's philosophic thinking,
from physics to philosophy. Thus Crease recounts that Heelan's earliest work
concerned Heisenberg's philosophy of quantum mechanics. Subsequently, Heelan
generalized the approach he had worked out for quantum mechanics into a context
logic with both Heideggerian and Husserlian elements. The Heideggerian aspect
corresponds to the circumspective role of context or world, to use Heelan's classically
hermeneutic phenomenological terminus from his first study, Quantum Mechanics and
Objectivity; while the Husserlian dimension provides the rigor of the noetic-noematic
structure of object constitution which Heelan later develops in his Space-Perception
and the Philosophy of Science. This context logic in every sense, both literal and
conceptual, plays a prominent role in Heelan's later work, and has much to offer in
explaining the so-called paradoxes of quantum mechanics, but also visual illusions,
social phenomena, and perhaps most fruitfully in the nature of experimentation.
In his essay "The Hermeneutic Context of Constitution," Dmitri Ginev draws upon
Heelan's "strong hermeneutics of science" to mark a path overcoming the traditional
context-distinction in the philosophy and history of science. At stake in the distinction
Heelan makes between weak and strong hermeneutics of natural science is the issue of
the possibility of an interpretative-ontological approach to the rationality of science.
Opposing both normative epistemology and the deconstruction of epistemology, Ginev
treats the hermeneutic context of constitution as an alternative to the context of
justification and the context of discovery. Ginev himself thus exemplifies an approach
opposing both the reification of scientific knowledge and the "post-epistemological"
conceptions of science-as-practice. At stake is the possibility of a context in which one
may carry out studies of the practical constitution of science's cognitive specificity.
Ragnar Fjelland, in his essay on "The 'Copenhagen Interpretation' of Quantum
Mechanics and Phenomenology" begins with the claim that much publicized attack on
(the Copenhagen Interpretation of) Quantum mechanics in the Science Wars was not
merely an incidental casualty of the old rift between the "two cultures" but endemic to
conceptual history of quantum mechanics. For Fjelland, quantum mechanics and
phenomenology have rather more in common than superficially being a common target
for such attacks.
Babette E. Babich, in her essay, "The Hermeneutics of a Hoax: Physics and the
New Inquisition," expresses complementary sympathies. From the perspective of a
philosopher, it is important to attend to the self-reflective weaknesses of the culture of
physics as well as those of physics-dominated philosophy of science. Echoing some of
the criticisms and highlighting the points of social advocacy of the late Paul
Feyerabend, the essay underscores the dangers for a society (and for science) which
insists on maintaining science in uncritical esteem.
In "Wittgenstein, Hertz, and Hermeneutics," Allan Janik reminds us that in all its
phases Wittengenstein's philosophizing bears a striking resemblance to hermeneutics,
despite its alien character with regard to classical hermeneutics. Janik uncovers an
explanation for this in the strategy for "dissolving" philosophical problems by the
expedient of "showing" the inherent limitations of our representations of reality
Wittgenstein appropriated from Heinrich Hertz. This Hertzian hermeneutics figures
essentially in all of Wittengenstein's philosophizing from his earliest days until his
death in 1941. Bringing out the links between Hertz's technique of presenting
PART ONE 21
alternative representations of mechanics to clarify its conceptual problems and

Wittgenstein's mature method for dissolving philosophical problems permits Janik to
dismiss the charges of irrationalism and obscurantism leveled against Wittgenstein and
to replace them with an account of the scientific origins of his mature view of the
nature of philosophy, a nature more in accord with hermeneutics than ordinarily
imagined.
Writing on the very theme: "On the Interpretive Nature of Hertz's Mechanics,"
Joseph Kockelmans reviews the results of his own lengthy historical and critical,
philosophical investigations concerning some aspects of Hertz's contributions to
classical mechanics. Kockelmans' report reflects a lifetime of critical, philosophical
reflections on the history of the natural sciences, specifically physics, in which
Kockelmans, like Heelan and like Kisiel, has sought in a systematic manner to develop
a hermeneutic phenomenology of natural science. In the wake of such an investigative
reflection, Kockelmans, argues that the natural sciences are genuine, interpretive
endeavors, permitting one to speak of the hermeneutic nature of natural science.
Robert Scharff s "Comte and the Possibility of a Hermeneutics of Science," argues
in opposition to a still perduring conviction that Auguste Comte's positivism does not
support the "rational reconstruction" of the scientific method. Scharff further claims
that the "pragmatist" character of his arguments against such positivist reconstructions
distinguishes Comte's treatment of science from later positivism. For Scharff, Comtean
and postpositivist philosophy involves thinking about science - i.e., reflecting on
scientific practice as one human activity among others, not just analyzing its cognitive
structure from within. Insofar as Comte still advocates a philosophy of science that
gives a historically reflective defense of itself, Scharff demonstrates that a rethinking
of Comte' s positivism can help clarify what is at stake in a hermeneutics of science.
With his challenging title, "Was hei[Jt das- die Bewandtnis?: Retranslating the
Categories of Heidegger's Hermeneutics of the Technical," Theodore Kisiel seeks to
review some basic features of a cultural hermeneutics of the natural sciences by way
of a factual philosophical dispute that allows us to draw a sharp contrast between
Carnap's positivism and Heidegger's phenomenology, especially in their respective
relations with neo-Kantian philosophy of science. Heidegger's contrast between the
ethos (usage, custom, practice) of Ge-Stell (artifactual com-positing) and of Bewandtnis
(appliance) constitutes a brief illustration of "technical practice," examined from the
perspective of a hermeneutic phenomenology, providing a paradigm for the
examination of the personal, political, social, and other forms of the ethos operative in
these practices.
Thomas Seebohm offers a review of the so-called second canon ofhermeneutics in
his essay, "On the Hermeneutic Circle: Wholes, Parts, and an Attempt to Solve its
Paradoxes." Seebohm observes that hermeneutics is plagued by paradoxes and
ambiguities in its application- including the terms of this canon: whole and part, the
hermeneutic circle, etc. Seebohm first sketches several such difficulties in the history
of hermeneutics. Subsequently, Seebohm offers an analysis of the formal problems of
the formula and then suggests an unambiguous formula with the aid of the
phenomenology of wholes and parts, concluding with a discussion of its application.
Reviewing "Husserlian Hermeneutic: Mathematics and Theoria" Richard Cobb-
Stevens invokes two themes from the later works of Husser! to suggest ways of
correcting what he regards as the contemporary imbalance between interpretation and
cogmt1ve intuition. In The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental

Phenomenology, Husser! adopts a specifically historical approach to the development
of modem philosophy, stressing how Vieta's invention of algebra and Galileo's
subsequent mathematization of nature transformed the traditional philosophical
understanding of theoria. By contrast, in Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husser!
reviews the role of axiomatic systems in modem theory formation and suggests a way
of coordinating a properly hermeneutic understanding of theory formation with the
ancient notion that theory is ultimately founded upon insight into the forms of things.
John Cleary's digest of his historical or hermeneutic book-length tour de force on
"Aristotle's Philosophy of Mathematics" adumbrates the argument that Aristotle's
philosophy of mathematics cannot be understood on the terms of our modem debate
regarding the foundations of mathematics: e.g., abstractionist, logicist, formalist, or
intuitionist. For Cleary, unless we restore Aristotle's puzzles regarding mathematics
to the appropriate context of a debate interior to Plato's academy concerning the claims
of mathematics or physics as the supreme science of cosmology, we cannot understand
Aristotle's philosophical perspective on mathematics. This context provides the
rationale for Aristotle's insistence that mathematics is not about separate Platonic
objects but about aspects of this sensible world logically separated for scientific study.
In effect, although physical objects are ontologically prior to mathematical objects, the
science of physics and mathematics are parallel in logical and epistemic structure.
Wolfe Mays, in "Piaget and Husser!: On Theory and Praxis in Science" reviews
Piaget's historico-critical approach to the philosophy of science in which the
interpretation and construction of scientific concepts in their historical perspective is
studied by situating this apporach in relation to Husser!. Mays then examines his
attempt to relate this to the development of our pre-scientific concepts, comparing
Piaget' s approach with philosophers of science like Kuhn who take account of the part
played by historical and social factors in determining the progress of scientific thought,
and thus refuse to draw a sharp distinction between discovery and justification. Mays
examines recent attempts by some philosophers with phenomenological leanings to
apply the hermeneutic method to the study of the natural sciences, uncovering the
extent to which Piaget's work follows a similar pattern.
Tony O'Connor, in "Human Agency and Social Sciences," makes the case that
Foucault can assist appreciation of some philosophical implications of the
phenomenological and hermeneutic emphasis on the historical conditions of thought
and action in connection with the problem of the determination of the conditions of the
possibility of the social sciences. O'Connor argues that a central feature of the thought
of Husser!, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, namely, that universal claims are made on
the basis of cognitive, historical, or embodied evidence, may best be understood in
terms of particular cultures and as part of interpreted traditions.
For John J. Compton, in "Toward a Phenomenological Philosophy of Nature,"
prior to any study of nature it is important to remember our inevitably
phenomenological point of departure. Thus for Compton, we engage the natural wor:ld
in all manner of daily ways long before we ever come to hear of science. Compton thus
argues that there is an inquiry- which we may properly call the "philosophy of nature"
- that aims to evoke our pre-scientific understanding of nature and, in a continual
dialectic with developing scientific concepts and practices, to show how these concepts
and practices may be seen to refer back to the pre-scientifically known world and how
PART ONE 23
they re-present the pre-scientific world in ways that must be seen, in the end, to be
coherent with fundamental features of that world. As part of this agenda, Compton
offers examples from physics, biology, and cognitive neuroscience.
John Ziman, in his essay, "No Man is an Island," notes the inadequacy of the
traditional philosopher's solipsist "first-person" view of the world. Famously, this view
has great difficulty in accounting for the "other minds" that it needs to complete itself.
By supposing as a given the knowledge of each other and of shared existence that
people develop in infancy, Ziman's essay explores the philosophical, psychological,
and sociological implications of treating intersubjectivity as a primitive fact of life, on
the same (as yet unexplained) terms as individual consciousness. Although inter-
subjectivity is not the key to all understanding of the world, it plays a much more
varied and important role than is usually recognized.
Rom Harre observes that the bare bones logicism that dominated philosophy of
science in the fifties and sixties has given way to a much richer conception of the way
science is created as a cognitive enterprise as the point of departure for his essay,
"Science as the Work of a Community." For Harre, Patrick Heelan has been one of the
contributors to this enrichment by drawing in to the discussion philosophical traditions
other than the orthodox Russellian logicism. Other sources too enrich this discussion
and the plain humanity of scientists is also revealed in the fact that they, like the rest
of humanity, are social beings. Science is not the work of automata, programmed with
something called "scientific method." Others, having realized the essential role of
concepts and linguistic conventions in how we see the world, have moved to the other
extreme, treating both the world and our knowledge of it as social constructions but
Harre attempts to find a point of view which acknowledges the discipline of logic
without falling into the paradoxes of logicism and which acknowledges the constructive
role of concepts and the influence of the scientific community both on their origins and
how they are employed without sliding into the nihilism of post-modernism.
STEPHEN TOULMIN
THE HERMENEUTICS OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES
One of the most creative transitions in twentieth-century philosophy is explicitly

recorded only in a footnote to an appendix to a translation into English of Hans-
Georg Gadamer's book, Wahrheit und Methode. The obscurity of this reference
conceals the fact that this transition was the work of Patrick Heelan. It was he who
succeeded in showing Gadamer, against the widespread academic opinion, that the
intellectual operations of the natural sciences embody indispensable elements of
interpretation that make them effectively "hermeneutic." To this day, scholars of the
Frankfurt School - I have in mind particularly Karl Otto Apel and Albrecht
Wellmer, with whom I have debated this point at the New School of Social Research
- assume the essential rightness of a naive positivism in the philosophy of natural
science, and use it to support a hard line opposition between Physics on the one
hand, and History, or Sociology, on the other. Patrick Heelan has always been
careful to avoid that oversimplification, and my aim in this paper is to ask why,
despite his good example, so many of our colleagues are still tempted to go down
this cul-de-sac.
To come straight to the central point: the key to understanding the sources of this
error can be found in a familiar way of reading Wilhelm Dilthey. Many readers take
Dilthey's emphasis on the hermeneutic character of History, Sociology, and Political
Theory as a sign that he regarded Physics (say) as studying more-or-less objective
facts, and so as being free of the subjective interpretations that were the concern of
hermeneutic philosophy. Historians, on this account, could not escape from slanting
their narratives in ways that reflect their backgrounds or interests, whereas physicists
who let their backgrounds or interests influence their analysis of natural phenomena
would be condemned for betraying the rational claims and methods of their subject.
The charm of this reading is clear enough, but it does not tell the whole story. If
Apel's position needs to be related to Dilthey's, Dilthey himself must be understood
in his relation to Kant. No one would suggest for a moment that Kant's view of the
physical sciences was positivistic in its tone or its conclusions. On the contrary, the
whole project of his three Critiques started from his belief that neither rationalists
nor empiricists could give an adequate account of the reason for the intellectual
success of Newton's Principia, and his own account of the operations of r e i n e
Vernunfi was a preparatory move toward a hermeneutics of physics.
25
26 STEPHEN TOULMIN
What distinguished Kant's position in the first Critique from the general views
current today is the fact that Kant saw Euclid and Newton's world-picture as having
a unique authority, to which there was no alternative compatible with the structure of
our experience of the world. To put this point in a phrase: Euclid and Newton had
defined the only hermeneutic standpoint for geometry and physics, and so made it
unnecessary to explore alternative standpoints. This does not, of course, imply that
the question of "alternative standpoints" did not make sense for Kant. Through his
mathematical friends, e.g., Lambert, he was quite aware of the formal possibility of
non-Euclidean geometries, and it was precisely for this reason that synthetic a priori
knowledge became an active problem for him: otherwise, there was no objection to
viewing Euclidean geometry as analytic rather than synthetic - an option Saccheri
had swept off the table.
In his own approach to scientific theory, Kant avoided both any claim to outright
objectivity and any retreat into a pure subjectivity. That is the reason why he called
our understanding of the Order of Nature intersubjective: Pure Reason leads us all to
organize experience in terms of a shared interpretive framework. The uniqueness of
the Euclidean and Newtonian systems thus depends, not just on their contribution to
physics, in the twentieth-century sense of an empirical science, but also on their role
in shaping the framework of sensory experience. So any reading of Kant's theories
as creating a possibility for different frameworks of experience would be foreign to
his view. Still, Euclid and Newton do not report "facts" just as they stand: they fit
our observations into a rationally coherent picture of Nature. Starting when he did,
then, Wilhelm Dilthey could assume that all questions about the status of geometry
and physics had been settled by Kant's demonstration of their singular hermeneutic
standpoint. His own philosophical task was to show how and why the human
sciences, unlike physics and geometry, have multiple standpoints.
Once again, there is a risk of falling into an idea that these standpoints introduce
an extreme subjectivity into our interpretation of other people's actions, whether
now or in the past. But this too is a mistake. Dilthey's alternative historical
standpoints are shared by many people, as much as Kant's unique standpoint of
Euclid and Newton. Dilthey's point is not that our interpretations are personal, but
that they vary with our other connections and commitments. In this respect, his
views paved the way for the position set out in (e.g.) Jlirgen Habermas's Knowledge
and Human Interests.
Given his time working with Schr6dinger at the Institute for Advanced Studies in
Dublin, Patrick Heelan would be the last person to think that the structure of
physical theory is independent of human interpretation, yet also the last person to
think that the world as we know it admits of only one such mode of interpretation.
In the context of this paper, therefore, it will be helpful to map some of the different
ways in which, intentionally or otherwise, scientific theories can be hermeneutic in
effect.
At its weakest, the initial contest from 1927 on between Erwin Schrodinger's
wave mechanics and Werner Heisenberg's quantum mechanics to be the foundation
for a post-Newtonian union of Matter and Energy might be so regarded; but it was
soon demonstrated that, whatever intellectual models the two theories suggested,
they are mathematically equivalent, and the difference of standpoint is in some
respects merely linguistic. Remaining within the physics of the early and mid
THE HERMENEUTICS OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES 27
twentieth century, too, we may view Niels Bohr's idea of Complementarity as a

hermeneutic move, and this reading is reinforced by Gerald Holton's suggestion that
Bohr was prompted in this direction by memories of childhood discussions at the
Bohr family Sunday luncheon table about Kierkegaard's Either I Or, with its contrast
between (say) the aesthetic and ethical standpoints in life. But this comparison
overstates the force of the physical contrast involved. Despite initial bewilderment
among physicists in the early 1920s, there was (Schrodinger and Heisenberg proved)
no direct conflict between the wave and particle wave aspects of subatomic
phenomena. So, on its own level, the belief that these two theoretical models are
complementary was not an unreasonable way to make Bohr's point, but the residual
differences between them are far less significant than those that were at issue for
Kierkegaard himself.
If we are to find a greater intellectual contrast within the fundamental physics of
the mid twentieth century, then, it is the argument about the scope of Causality in
quantum physics between Niels Bohr and the Copenhagen School on the one hand,
Albert Einstein and his supporters on the other. As many readers will remember, the
thing about orthodox quantum mechanics that Einstein could never stomach was the
argument that we can solve its equations of motion and change only statistically and
probabilistically. To accept that limitation would be to abandon the central mission
of physics, and imply that the Creator fashioned the Order of Nature in such a way
that its workings were radically indeterminate. Hence Einstein's dictum that God
does not play with dice: Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht! ("The
Lord God is refined, but he is not malicious!") In return, Bohr and his school
criticized Einstein for clinging to an outdated view of Causality. If probabilistic
explanations alone were on offer, so be it: insisting on classical Newtonian
explanations was sentimentality. Einstein's scruples passed to another generation. In
particular, having written the standard textbook of quantum mechanics, David Bohm
spent a lot of time looking for hidden variables on a sub-quantum level, without
much success, and finally took up a new mission searching for a deeper compromise
-as Schrodinger himself had done with the Vedanta- in Eastern Philosophy.
The richest examples of multiple hermeneutic standpoints in the natural sciences
are to be found, however, not in physics but in the biological sciences. I here say
"the biological sciences" rather than "biology" for good reason. In his Romans
Lecture at Oxford in 1953, for example, the theoretical biologist, J.B.S. Haldane,
surveyed the conceptual systems used in one or another branch of biology, and spoke
about the multiple levels on which biological explanations are typically given. His
lecture was called "Time in Biology" and analyzed the scales of Space and Time on
which the biological sciences theorize about living things. In doing so, he showed
that the varied fields of biological explanation are conceptually independent in ways
that make it impossible to "reduce" any one field to another one.
The most basic processes studied in contemporary biophysics and biochemistry,
for instance, take place on the level of individual macromolecules, in special niches
within particular organs. They involve mechanical interactions and/or biochemical
reactions that may be both minute and swift, and apparently conform to all the same
physical and chemical patterns as they follow outside the organism, on a laboratory
bench: as Claude Bernard put it, they exemplify the operation of physical and
chemical laws "in the special field of Life." The things that give these processes
28 STEPHEN TOULMIN
their additional, physiological characteristics are the special "niches" that exist
within the body.
On a second level, physiologists study the ways in which the functioning or
malfunctioning of bodily organs and systems affects the health and survival of the
entire organism. Here, of course, the scales of space and time are those relevant to
normal life-size living things with life cycles that range up to a hundred years or so.
Notice that the basic terminology of physiology is functional rather than physical: in
particular, it can make no claim to be value-free, as it is concerned with the right
functioning and/or malfunctioning of the organs and systems in question. To study
mechanical and chemical processes in those organs helps throw light on the success
of these bodily functions, but no formal definitions link the functional language of
physiology with the structural language ofbiophysics and biochemistry.
On two further levels, Haldane distinguishes the terminology and subject matter
of morphogenesis and the overall life-cycle, and the terminology and subject matter
of organic evolution, in tum, from processes and functions on the smaller scale
levels of biochemistry and physiology. Developmental biology is concerned with
changes of function over time, in the life cycles of typical individuals, and
evolutionary biology is concerned with changes in the distribution of observable
characteristics, within the populations that make up different species. Once again,
these further kinds of study have distinct terminologies, and select their objects of
investigation in ways that are logically independent of all the other biological
sciences.
If we are to think of "hermeneutics" as concentrating on differences among the
interpretations of texts and/or situations, as considered from the standpoints of
people who approach those texts and situations with different backgrounds and
interests, Haldane's biological examples are among the most clearly "hermeneutic"
to be found in the natural sciences, as these are known in the Western World. Other
examples with a cross-cultural basis are, however, worth mentioning here. In our
experience of Time, for instance, we use for the Seasons names such as Spring or
Fall, which reflect their agricultural significance. In the United States, by contrast,
Spring and Fall are understood as fixed parts of a four-fold year, which is defined
and divided up by astronomical calculations. It makes no clear sense, from this
second point of view, to say (e.g.) "Spring came late this year": that represents a
switch back from astronomy to agriculture, which we are liable to take unthinkingly.
Again, in the current discussions of Traditional Chinese Medicine - acupuncture
and the rest - it turns out that traditional healers approach the body with a view of its
make-up and workings very different from a standard mechanical Western account
of the matter. These differences are of two kinds. They are undergirded by no system
of theory recognized in the West: instead, they are more practical than theoretical in
their implications. Chinese healers thus speak of the body's workings not in terms of
material processes governed by laws, but of patterns of energy that are manipulated
in acupuncture (say), and in suitable cases their procedures seem effective. Scientists
who approach the behavior of living things, and their associated phenomena, with
the concepts and questions in their minds that derive from different fields of
biological science may, thus, provide the purest illustration of "scientific
hermeneutics" now available.
THE HERMENEUTICS OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES 29
If we make a further move on, to consider the additional factors introduced by

mentality and/or culture - either animal or human - we enter fields of psychology
and anthropology in which scarcely any one will call the hermeneutic differences in
question. Only an arbitrary insistence that language-using humans alone can take up
standpoints or present interpretations that are hermeneutically distinct can compel us
to deny the possibility of "hermeneutics" in the sciences, too. If, on the other hand,
people hesitate to extend the scope of"hermeneutics" to Bohr's complementarity, or
to the rivalry between SchrOdinger and Heisenberg, their scruples may be justified.
As a general matter, disputes about the make up and interpretation of quantum
physics are conducted in terms that quite often shift with the discovery of
mathematical or empirical equivalences in both their form and content, as a result of
which we can move freely from one position to another without change of meaning.
It would be interesting to know, in this connection, how far Patrick Heelan's
association with Erwin Schrodinger led him to see these disputes in and around
quantum physics as also being "hermeneutic" in nature.
To sum up: like so much in the history of philosophical hermeneutics, the desire
to limit "hermeneutics" to history and the human sciences had its origins in a reading
of Immanuel Kant's Critiques. Kant's works had one thing in common with the
Vienna Circle philosophers of science in the inter-War years, and with their logical
empiricist successors in the United States from the late 1920s on: viz., the ambition
to show that all of the mathematical sciences could be accommodated within a single
logical system, which was the goal of the twentieth century campaign to establish the
comprehensive, formally integrated scientific theory known as the Unity of Science
Movement. The equation of "pure reason" with "logicality" was particularly evident
in the latter campaign; but, in both cases, one basic conviction was the existence of a
unique framework of concepts to served as foundation of all our formal and
empirical knowledge of nature, whose validity was not demonstrable in "analytic"
terms alone -hence, the problem of "synthetic" a priori knowledge again.
So long as we continue to take as proven the existence of this unique conceptual
foundation - whether rooted in Euclid and Newton in Kant, or Russell and Einstein
for the Wiener Kreis - we risk trapping ourselves in dogmas that we may later regret.
Once emancipated from this assumption, we are free to go a hundred ways, and the
idea of alternative hermeneutic standpoints is essentially liberating. As Wittgenstein
once remarked, though in a quite different context: "Does this sound like nonsense?
Well, talk a little nonsense for a change- Language is not a Cage!"
University of Southern California

ROBERT P. CREASE
EXPERIMENTAL LIFE:
HEELAN ON QUANTUM MECHANICS
"Measurement is not an impersonal event that occurs with impartial universality," says
Niels Bohr in Michael Frayn's Tony-award winning play Copenhagen. "It's a human
act, carried out from a specific point of view in time and space, from the one particular
viewpoint of a possible observer. " 1
Patrick Heelan has spent most of his career addressing and elaborating the
philosophical implications of just this issue. His route to it began while studying math
and theoretical physics in the course of earning his BA and MA at University College,
Dublin ( 1947 -8) during which time he worked with Erwin Schr6dinger at the Dublin
Institute for Advanced Studies (1948-9). Heelan earned a Ph.D. (1952) in geophysics
at St. Louis University, returned to the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (1953-4),
studied theology during his Jesuit training ( 1954-60) and then went to Princeton on a
Fulbright award to work as a postdoctoral student with Eugene Wigner ( 1960-2). At
Princeton his attention was first seriously drawn to the philosophical issues raised by
quantum mechanics. For while he had no difficulty understanding or using the theory
of quantum mechanics, which worked quite effectively in the laboratory, he found that
he had trouble understanding the way Princeton physicists spoke about it. He was
puzzled by the disparity between the clarity and correctness of the theory and the
obscurity and inaccuracy of the language used to speak about it.
This disparity seemed to have arisen at the very beginning when quantum
mechanics had been formulated by its progenitors, particularly Niels Bohr and Werner
Heisenberg in the 1920s and 1930s, as a theory of the microscopic domain to
complement the Newtonian theory of the macroscopic domain. But the disparity had
continued and even been exacerbated when John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, and
others had reformulated it in the 1940s and 1950s, as a universal physics to replace
Newtonian physics and become a theory for all realms.
The way Bohr had spoken about quantum mechanics was essentially Kantian:
Human beings are endowed with the ability to think and imagine according to certain
(classical) categories and schemata. These categories and schemata are adequate for
macroscopic events and are appropriate for the classical physics which sought to
provide the theory for such events. The pioneers of the quantum realm, however, had
discovered that these categories and schemata do not apply to microscopic events. This
31
32 ROBERT P. CREASE
is most evident in connection with the Schrodinger wave equation, which depicts a
particle as a "packet" or superposition of possible states without a definite position,
momentum, energy, and so on; when that packet is measured- by a macroscopic (non-
quantum) object, the instrument- the wave packet "collapses," and all but one
possibility is excluded by random anonymous choice. But we cannot get around the
classical schemata in our thinking and imagining. Therefore, concluded Bohr, in our
thinking about the microscopic world we are forced to depend on classical categories
and schemata - such as position and momentum - but these categories are to be used
in nonclassical ways, as in "complementary" pairs. One therefore had to give up the
notion that the concepts and schemata adequate for sensible phenomena in the
macroscopic world corresponded to what was "really real" in the microworld. This
Kantian approach therefore severs any ontological connection between the quantum
theory and the world of"real" pbenomena. "[A]n independent reality in the ordinary
physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomena nor to the agencies of
observations," wrote Bohr. 2 Physicist Frank Wilczek has aptly characterized this
Copenhagen strategy as a "renunciation. " 3
But if Heelan found that unsatisfactory, he found the way of the Princeton
reformulators of quantum mechanics - von Neumann and Wigner - more
unsatisfactory still. Whereas Bohr and Heisenberg had treated the act of measurement
as involving the interaction of a quantum object and a classical object and viewed that
interaction as sufficient to collapse the wave function, von Neumann and Wigner, in
universalizing quantum mechanics - treating both the object measured and the
measuring instrument as quantum objects - introduced a new and more challenging
problem: how does a single complex wave function of object and instrument get
reduced to a single eigen function and one value in the course of measurement? Von
Neumann and Wigner thought that the answer had to lie in another kind of interaction,
one involving the human element: they took the reduction of the new, enlarged wave
packet to be proof that the real world is not entirely materialistic. The human mind
changed the state of the object being measured, and therefore quantum phenomena
testified to the ineradicable presence of mind or soul in the world. 4
Both of these ways appeared to undermine the Western view that objectivity
belongs to those things whose fundamental properties - in principle at least - are
independent of the human realm and can all be specified at every instant and in every
place, with the corollary that what the measurement process does is to sample a pre-
existing ideal value. This view is oriented by the image of a divine demiurge able to
intuit the world's already present and fixed essences. In challenging this view, these
articulations of the nature of quantum mechanics appear to give credence to the claim
of undermining objectivity- feeding skepticism, New Agey views ~bout the illusory
nature of reality, and superficial parallels to Eastern mysticism. 5 However, Heelan
sensed in Heisenberg's writings a dissatisfaction with the Copenhagen view- even
though Heisenberg himself overtly agreed with it and had contributed to its formulation
- and also sensed that this dissatisfaction could be articulated with the aid of certain
approaches taken by continental philosophers. Heelan would write, "[T]he modern
European continental philosopher feels closer to him in spirit than does, perhaps, his
Anglo-American counterpart."6
When Heelan left Princeton he went to the University of Louvain in Belgium to
work on a dissertation on Heisenberg's philosophy of science, and simultaneously
HEELAN ON QUANTUM MECHANICS 33
began an intensive study of continental philosophy, especially the works of Husserl,

Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Heelan learned that Heisenberg's first understanding
of quantum mechanics had differed sharply from Bohr's: initially, Heisenberg had
thought that the right approach was to change the meaning of words like "position" and
"momentum" -to give them nonclassical meanings -while Bohr wanted to keep their
(classical) meanings, admit that they were irretrievably classical, and change the way
they were used. Heisenberg's approach resembled Einstein's approach to relativity in
his paper of 1905. Whereas Einstein aimed to redefine "time" in his theory of
simultaneity by claiming that real simultaneity was what was observable in a real
situation, so Heisenberg set out to redefine position and momentum in his matrix
mechanics - which stated the suite of possible values that a quantity could have and
said something about their mutual relationship - by claiming that real position was
what was observable in a real measurement, when only one of these possibilities would
appear. This approach (which involved rejecting Schrodinger's wave mechanics)
finally crystallized on that famous stay on Helgoland in 1925, during which Heisenberg
wrote his epochal paper to which he gave the title, "Uber quantentheoretische
Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen," with the word
"Umdeutung," or "reinterpretation," signaling his adherence to the Einsteinian
strategy. 7
Bohr, however, was adamantly opposed, taking the Kantian tack that position and
momentum were inherently classical concepts, and while necessary for us humans were
inherently inapplicable to events in the microworld except in certain loose and strictly
inaccurate ways. Heisenberg, who was all of25 in spring 1927, when he wrote a paper
on his approach, was deeply swayed by his mentor Bohr, whom the quantum
revolutionaries had nicknamed "the Pope." Though Heisenberg redrafted his paper
outlining the approach several times in a futile effort to placate Bohr, neither Bohr nor
Heisenberg wound up satisfied. 8 This paper bore the title, "Uber den anschaulichen
Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematic und Mechanik," 9 with the word
"anschaulichen," or "intuitive," signaling this time its Kantian background and
ambition, for it set out to explain to classically trained physicists how quantum
mechanics might be intuited or imagined in classical terms. Eventually, motivated
largely by a desire to link arms with, Bohr in a unified front, Heisenberg came around
to consent to Bohr's formulation of what was soon called the "Copenhagen
Interpretation" of quantum mechanics, ceasing to try to develop a nonclassical meaning
to replace the classical terms. Only later did Heisenberg move away from Bohr, using
the dramatic and apparently radical conclusions of Bohr's philosophically naive
perspective as an incentive and inspiration to develop a more sophisticated approach.
"Heisenberg," writes Heelan, "played Kant to Bohr's Hume." 10
While Heelan was working on his dissertation in Louvain, Heisenberg was at the
Max Planck Institute in Munich. Heelan corresponded with Heisenberg, visited him,
and was given access to his archives. When Heisenberg read the final text, his only
objection- significantly- was to Heelan's assertions of his early disagreement with
Bohr. Heelan was able to point to historical and archival material proving the point, to
which Heisenberg gave no response. Ten years later, however, Heelan, taking
advantage of the taped interviews that Thomas Kuhn had with Heisenberg and the other
principals of the quantum revolution (presently stored in the Archives for the History
of Quantum Physics maintained by the American Physical Society and the American
34 ROBERT P. CREASE
Philosophical Society), wrote an article, "Heisenberg and Radical Theoretic Change,"

on Heisenberg's view of"scientific revolutions." 11 This taped material, collected in the
sixties, was not available to Heelan at the time he was writing his dissertation. Heelan
sent Heisenberg a prepublication copy of the text of this article to which Heisenberg
responded with a letter spelling out his previous objections more clearly. The journal
editor included Heisenberg's comments and Heelan's reply on unnumbered pages at
the end of the published article. The body of the exchange is illuminating for the light
it sheds on Heisenberg's early thinking, and Heelan's interpretation of it. Heisenberg
wrote:
I think I can agree with most of your statements, but I would like to make one exception
concerning the difference of opinions between Bohr and myself. I think that you overemphasize
these differences, and I might mention in this connection a few passages of your paper. You say
that "I attributed descriptive force to the newly interpreted variables while Bohr chose to speak of
wave and particle 'pictures' which were not in his view true models of atomic phenomena." But
I am sure that Bohr would have agreed if one would say that he attributed descriptive force to the
pictures he used; but he would perhaps have added that he did not know what the word 'true'
means, when you speak about true models of the atomic phenomena. With respect to the "blurring
the distinction between signifier and signified" I may remind you of my discussions with Bohr on
the problem whether the cut between that part of the experiment which should be described in
classical terms and the other quantum theoretical part had a well defined position or not. I argued
that a cut could be moved around to some extent while Bohr preferred to think that the position
is uniquely defined in every experiment. For instance the water droplets in a cloud chamber could
either be considered as the "signifier" for the motion of the electron or as being "signified" by the
black lines on the photographic plate. Bohr and I sometimes disagreed when we tried to approach
to the same goal (namely the interpretation of quantum theory) from different directions. But
finally I did not see any important difference between the principle of complementarity and the
reinterpretation of classical variables after I had understood that the relations of uncertainty are just
a special case of complementarity. Perhaps you should formulate more clearly what you mean by
such terms as "true models of atomic phenomena.""
Heelan replied as follows:
No model of atomic phenomena is of itself either true or false, only statements purporting to use
the model to state what is the case are capable of being true or false. Statements are true, if they
make the correct semantical use of the model and if they state what is in fact the case. Two kinds
of models occur in the interpretation of quantum mechanics: one which Heisenberg preferred,
constituted by the (non-classical) mathematical formalism of quantum mechanics, and the other,
which Bohr preferred, constituted by the (classical) wave and particle 'pictures' of complementar-
ity. If true statements can be made by the use of both models, then clearly different semantical
usages are involved. Bohr could make true statements and Heisenberg also: they approached the
same goal (a true interpretation of quantum theory) from different directions. But this does not
imply that Bohr and Heisenberg are using their respective models in the same way. I would hold,
for example, that Heisenberg used the mathematical model literally of atomic phenomena, while
Bohr used the wave and particle 'pictures' metaphorically of the same phenomena. Heisenberg's
usage, I believe, was the more scientific, because, unlike metaphorical usage, it implied nothing
that was hidden and oblique. By a 'true model of atomic phenomena', then, I mean one that, when
correctly used, is used in a literal, as opposed to a metaphorical manner. By that, I do not mean to
imply that there is no truth in metaphor, or less truth, but that in science, truth aims at non-
metaphorical expression. Thus, Bohr and Heisenberg could both be right, but not right in the same
way, since they used different models and hence different semantical rules to reach the goal of true
expression. The route Heisenberg took, however, was in my opinion both more illuminating from
a philosophical point of view, and more scientific in what it foreshadowed about the future
development of physics.
Heelan's dissertation was published as Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity 13 and
his article 'Heisenberg and Radical Theoretic Change' was published in 1975. 14 As
would become characteristic, Heelan's work does not attempt to criticize the short-
comings of predecessors and stake a claim to a fully novel view. Rather, he attempts
mainly to recover, restore, and repair the work of some thinkers - Heisenberg and
Husser! in this case- and then to use that to address other seemingly contrary positions
-here, a strict Bohrian interpretation of complementarity and the von Neumann-
Wheeler objectivist model. The book's approach is partly Heideggerian and partly
Husserlian, though Heelan saw anticipations in Aristotle and Aquinas as these were
brought up to date by Bernard Lonergan. 15
What's Heideggerian is the insistence on the moment prior to object-constitution,
the context or horizon or world or open space in which something appears. This is the
"ontological condition of possibility established by a milieu, which governs the kinds
of systems and processes capable of taking place within the milieu." 16 The actual
appearing or 'phenomenon' 17 is a second moment. This Heelan analyses in a
Husserlian way by studying the intentionality structure of object constitution and
insisting on the duality therein of its noetic and noematic poles. "The noetic aspect is
an open field of connected scientific questions addressed to empirical experience; the
noematic aspect is the response obained by the scientific experiment from experience.
The totality of actual and possible answers constitutes a horizon of actual and possible
objects of human knowledge and this we call a World." 18 The world then becomes the
source of meaning of the word "real," which is defined as what can appear as an object
in the world. The ever-changing and always historical laboratory environment with all
its ever-to-be-updated instrumentation and technologies belongs to the noetic pole; it
is what makes the objects of science real by bringing them into the world in the act of
measurement. Measurement involves "an interaction with a measuring instrument
capable of yielding macroscopic sensible data, and a theory capable of explaining what
it is that is measured and why the sensible data are observable symbols ofit." 19 But
isn't it then a symbol of the real - the data - that is being observed, not the "real"
itself? "Our answer is that the observable symbol can reveal a real property if it denotes
or indicates the real presence of a variable whose intimate nature, though not per se
representable in sensibility, is known, however, in some other way and simul-
taneously." Heelan continues, "We take the observable symbol to be the criterion of
reality for something whose nature is known only as part of a complex relational
totality expressed symbolically in linguistic or mathematical terms." Heelan later
specifies this object to be the invariance underlying all theoretically possible data
presentations. 20 Although this process sounds complex, Heelan points out, it is
something we perform "continuously and with ease in daily life," 21 for instance, we
speak of the city ofDublin as a worldly entity, but we cannot comprehend it except as
what is intended in a series of connected but partial views. What's different in the case
of quantum phenomena is that "deterministic and statistical elements are organically
and inseparably united." 22 Deterministic elements are involved in the wave function,
which is an idealized formula from which the results for individual and concrete acts
of measurement can be computed and statistically correlated. (These results are treated
as Husserlian 'profiles' or, using the Dublin metaphor, 'individual views ofthe same
worldly object'). "[T]he strict object of quantum mechanics is not an idealized formula
of an individual system, but the individual and concrete instance of a physical
system." 23 Thus the difference between quantum and classical physics does not lie in
the intervention of the observer's subjectivity but in the nature of the quantum object:
"[W]hile in classical physics this is an idealised normative (and hence abstract) object,
in quantum physics the object is an individual instance of an idealised norm."24 For
36 ROBERT P. CREASE
while in classical physics deviations of variables from their ideal norms are treated
independently in a statistically based theory of errors, the variations - statistical
distribution - of quantum measurements are systematically linked in one formalism.
The apparent puzzle raised by the "reduction of the wave packet" is thus explained via
an account of measurement. In the "orthodox" (von Neumann and Wigner) inter-
pretation, the wave function is taken to be the 'true' reality, rather than any empirically
given 'symbol' of that reality. Consequently, the act of measurement is seen as
changing the incoming wave packet into one of its component eigen functions by an
anonymous random choice. The sensible outcome of this change is the eigenvalue of
the outgoing wave function which is read from the measuring instrument. The agent
of this transformation for von Neumann and Wigner was the human spirit or mind as
a manipulator of mathematical models.
Heelan also sees this "reduction" of the wave packet as depending on the conscious
participation of the scientist-subject, but through a much different process. The wave
formulae relate, not to the ideal object in an absolute sense, apart from all human
history, culture, and language, but to the physical situation in which the real object is
placed - an ensemble or system which admits of numerous potential experimental
realizations. The reduction of the wave packet then "is nothing more than the
expression of the scientist's choice of a measuring process which is different from the
means used to prepare the pure state" prior to the measurement. 25 The wave function
describes a situation which is imperfect as a fact of the real world. That does not mean
there is more-to-be-discovered ("hidden variables") which will make it a part of the real
world, nor that only human participation is able to bring it into the real world, but that
what becomes a fact of the real world does so by being fleshed out by an instrumental
environment to one or another complementary presentations. Heisenberg, Heelan
claims, expressed this implicitly in his matrix mechanics: the theory only provides an
account of possibilities, while the actuality is what appears in the experimental
situation. Quantum mechanics, therefore, testifies in tum to what Heelan calls the
"polymorphous" character of human knowledge:
If there is one conclusion which imposes itself before all others as a result of the inquiry we have
made, it is the ambiguity hidden in the sense of the term "physical reality." This is founded in tum
upon the underlying polymorphism of the human way of knowing reality. The neglect of some
elements of this polymorphic consciousness, or undue emphasis on certain aspects of it, are the
roots from which spring a multiplicity of epistemological difficulties; for in every question there
is a hidden structure directing implicitly the search for answers... [ P]rior even to the formulation
of the answer [this hidden structure imposes an a priori] structure upon the answer even before it
is formulated. This hidden structure is the domain of intentionality and, like the nine-tenths of an
iceberg below water, it lies perilously below the level of our cognitive activities. Because of failure
to appreciate this, especially wherever positivism or linguistic analysis is dominant, many
ontological and epistemological discussions tend to founder; for, in such cases, problems are
generally formulated uniquely in the light of the one-tenth that is in public view. 26
Heelan does not fail to notice that, by denying the existence of universal and necessary
laws of scientific phenomena, quantum mechanics had a significant impact on the his-
tory of philosophy by undermining Kant's metaphysics. "This collapse of the most
prestigious of classical metaphysical schemes was certainly one of the major
contributing causes of the practical hegemony of positivism in scientific circles during
the years following the discovery of relativity and quantum mechanics." 27
After publishing Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity, Heelan began to generalize
the continentally based approach to the philosophy of science that he had worked out
for quantum mechanics, and wrote several papers using continental philosophy to
explore the interrelationship of intentionality, horizon, objectivity, and inquiry as a
form oflife in natural sciences. 28 In 1970, he wrote two papers fashioning these insights
into a quantum logic. 29 Ordinary logic is propositional, and its truth or falsity concerns
statements of fact. The logic of quantum mechanics - the ordering of its empirical
propositions- involve paradoxes which defy resolution within traditional logic. Several
people, including G. Birkhoff and John von Neumann, therefore had proposed that
quantum mechanics implies a non-classical "quantum logic," and proposed as well that
this would be a universal logic to which ordinary logic would be an approximation in
the same way that Galilean space/time geometry is an approximation to the Einsteinian
space/time geometry of general relativity. 30 But Heelan concluded that the origin of
these paradoxes lay in fields other than physics, in their necessary relatedness to a
choice among contexts or horizons; he invoked the continental insight that facts, when
they appear, only do so in a relevant context or against a relevant horizon.
What is the effect of different contexts/horizons on what may purport to be the
same fact? If the different contexts/horizons are mutually compatible, the fact need
undergo no change with a switch from one context or horizon to another - as is
generally the case, for instance, in classical physics. But if the different contexts/
horizons interfere - if they are "entangled" with one another- then the fact will appear
changed depending on whether it tries to appear in the simultaneous entanglement of
both contexts/horizons. This is a function of the context- or horizon-dependence of
every fact and such entanglements are not the exclusive province of quantum
mechanics. "The point I am making is that one does not have to look to physics to find
quantum logic. One finds it in the meta-[logic] of context-dependent statements."31 For
instance, criticizing Putman and Finkelstein's formulation of quantum logic in
subjunctive conditionals, which are then subject to various logical operations, Heelan
says:
Consider the sentences: 'If I were drunk, I would dance a jig' and 'Ifl were sober, I would trim
the hedge'. The fonner implies I am not drunk; the latter implies I am not sober. What then would
the conjunction of the two sentences imply? If the basic sentences of quantum mechanics were
subjunctive conditionals, the antecedents of the basic sentences would include all the mutually
exclusive physical conditions into which the system could be placed. Just as in the example I have
chosen and for the same reason, if a conjunction of a set of basic sentences were formed, it would
not be clear what such a conjunction would imply. 32
The apparent paradoxes arise when one attempts to order such context-dependent
statements while forgetting their context-dependence and overlooking the possibility
that the contexts interfere or are entangled. One may inquire into something and choose
a certain (e.g., scientific) context in which to pursue the inquiry- but one could have
chosen other (e.g., visual) contexts, in which the products of the inquiry would have
been different. Heelan then attempted to describe that relationship via his own context-
dependent quantum logic, which he frequently represented graphically as a sextagonal
figure or lattice (Fig. 1).
The lower (forking) point, L0 , represents the possibility of discourse branching out
into two (incompatible) but not simultaneously realized contexts/horizons (here,
scientific and visual), while the upper (juncture) point, LAB, the possibility of discourse
when the two branches are simultaneously realized and actually 'entangled.' And the
two "arms" of the figure, LA-+ L' 8 , and La-+ L'A represent two isolated but practically
incompatible contexts. The point is that human inquiry is constantly faced with the
38 ROBERT P. CREASE
challenge of such competing and antagonistic branchings that are reconciled in practice
in one of three ways: they ultimately rejoin, die out, or branch still further.
L'8 L'A
t f
\I Lo
Figure 1: The complemented Lattice of LA (Scientific) and La (Visual). L0 is the greatest lower
bound that identifies the common possibilities of predication that do not include LA or La. LAB is
the least upper bound that is the most general descriptive language that includes the possibilities
ofLA andL9
This lattice figure, and an account of the contextual logic associated with it, would
appear again and again in Heelan's work in the following years, including Space-
Perception and the Philosophy ofScience. 33 The earlier accounts of contextual logic
postulated the lattice as mirroring the structure that thinking followed, while the later,
more fully developed and more Heideggerian accounts present the lattice process as
emerging out of the structure of thinking itself. 34 These later accounts appropriate the
Heideggerian insight that words and ideas don't mirror a structure of reality across a
gap, as it were, that is antecedent to them, but rather that thinking brings them together
using words and ideas. The reciprocity between words and things transpires in a
horizon or praxical space in which words and things, subject and object arise together.
Some of these later articles explore the application of contextual logic to the
"mysteries" of quantum puzzles, such as Schrodinger's Cat Paradox 35 and Bell's
Theorem (a series of unpublished papers). Other articles explored contextual logic at
work in areas other than science, such as book cataloguing,36 the logic of the social
sciences (where context is critical in describing things), 37 and- most notably- visual
perception. 38 Heelan would use optical illusions- including the Hering, Miiller-Lyer,
and Moon illusions, and the famous duck-rabbit image - to show that their
contradictions and seemingly puzz ling features arise from the way the images are
connected with a variable imagined visual background - in contrast with ordinary
"non-puzzling" perception where the imagined background is fixed. 39
Consider, again, the lattice in Figure I. The lower point, L0 , comprises
representational elements of a 'pictorial language' which could speak of ducks or
rabbits, but is no more than marks on paper. LA comprises only the pictorial elements
of a duck and L8 comprises only the pictorial elements of a rabbit. The upper point,
LAB, contains the complete set of pictorial elements of both ducks and rabbits, but there
happens to be an overlap among the pictorial elements that can be used to portray either
a duck or a rabbit. L' 8 , the language directly above LA but before LAB, is an 'extended
duck language' comprising all the pictorial elements that could be used to portray
ducks, but which includes some that could also be used to portray rabbits, while L' Ais
an "extended rabbit language" which comprises all the pictorial elements that could be
used to portray rabbits, but which also includes some that could be used to portray
ducks. However, the peculiar thing about the duck-rabbit illusion is the relative
poverty ofL' 8 and L'A in relation to LA and La, for one generally sees the figure either
as duck or as a rabbit, and not as something in between. This is principally a function
of the absence in the imagined visual backgrounds of plausible intermediary types
between ducks and rabbits. In most of the contradictions we encounter in visual space
- whether they be in the pictorial space of Van Gogh's painted rooms or the
architectural space of Amheim's churches, to use two of Heelan's favorite examples
- the conventional choice and use of one language, say, scientific, makes something
appear while also opening it to various task-oriented questioning, say, within everyday
experience. This inevitably reveals more than is spoken of in the conventional
language.
More recently Heelan has addressed contextual logic not in terms of horizons but
in the more comprehensive terms of what he calls task orientation. 40 Task orientation
assumes that a fact or object is in a horizon precisely because it responds to a familiar
task-oriented interest that is constitutive of that context or horizon. This is a function
of a worldly goal or orientation and raises the possibility of addressing the back-and-
forth relation between objects and horizon.
Heelan's approach to the philosophy of science points to new and productive ways
for it to explore hitherto barren territories: to mention one in which I have written, the
nature of the experimental process, or the staging of an action in order to understand
the still enigmatic present. 41 In this process, scientific objects are often not known at
first with Cartesian clarity. They often have to be brought into focus, somewhat like
the ship Merleau-Ponty describes that's run aground on the shore, whose spars and
masts are at first latent and mixed confusingly with the forest bordering on the sand
dune, producing a vague tension and unease, until suddenly our sight is recast and we
see a ship, accompanied by a feeling of satisfaction as the tension is relieved. In the
laboratory, however, there is an important difference, for what is at first latent and then
recognized is brought forward in an actively structured and programmed process. We
are staging what we are trying to recognize - we built both the ship and the environ-
ment in which we try to separate it out from its sourroundings. As a result, the very
way we are staging it may interfere with our ability to recognize it, and we may have
to alter how we are staging the experiment before what we are seeking comes into
relief.
The value of Heelan's work on quantum mechanics thus goes far beyond teaching
us how to read Heisenberg's thoughtful and earnest but often awkward writings on the
nature of quantum mechanics. Heelan's work revitalizes the foundations of the
philosophy of science in ways that are able to overcome impasses confronted by
analytic-inspired approaches. It does so by exploiting the key insight of continental
philosophy that the most fundamental connection between human beings and world is
not an epistemological one, or one based first and foremost on knowledge, but rather
an ontological one, or one based on the (always historical and local) human life activity
40 ROBERT P. CREASE
of which knowing the world is constitutive. Heelan's work incorporates the classic
triad of orienting ideas ofhermeneutical philosophy of science: the priority of meaning
over technique, the priority of the practical over the theoretical, and the priority of
situation over abstract forrnalization. 42 Analytic approaches often deride such issues
as metaphysical, and assign metaphysics in turn to a place "somewhere between
mysticism and crossword puzzles. " 43 But these approaches wind up sneaking an
(unexamined) metaphysics back in through the side door, in the form of all the baggage
accompanying the assumption that the primary relation of human beings to the world
is cognitive. But the world grasped by scientists according to Heelan - like the world
grasped by perceivers according to Merleau-Ponty- is always richer than the concepts,
techniques, and theories which they use to grasp it. Every LA challenged by an L8 will
have to develop an L 18 And every L 18 will seek incorporation with an L 'A into an LAB.
The philosophy of science Heelan offers us leaves science undivorced from life:
experimental life.
State University ofNew York at Stony Brook/Brookhaven National Laboratory
NOTES
M. Frayn, Copenhagen (London: Methuen, 1998), 73.
2 N. Bohr, Atomic Theory and the Description ofNature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934),
54.
3 F. Wilczek, "What Did Bohr Do?'' Science 255 (1992): 346. Cf. M. Beller, "The Rhetoric of Antirealism
and the Copenhagen Spirit." Philosophy ofScience 63 (1996): 183-220.
4 P. A. Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity (Nijmegen: Nijhoff, 1965), 95-7, 133.
5 R. Crease, The Play ofNature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993 ), 140-1.
6 Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity, ix.
1 W. Heisenberg, "Ober quantentheoretische Umdeutung kinematischer und mechanischer Beziehungen,"
Zeitschriftfiir Physik, 33 (1925): 879-893.
SeeM. Beller, "The Rhetoric of Antirealism and the Copenhagen Spirit." Philosophy of Science 63
(1996): 183-204 for a technical review, and R. Crease and C. Mann, The Second Creation: Makers of the
Revolution in 20th Century Physics (New York: Macmillan, 1986. Repr. Rutgers Univ. Pr. 1996). Ch. 4 for
a nontechnical review.
Heisenberg, "Ober den anschaulichen Inhalt der quantentheoretischen Kinematik und Mechanik."
Zeitschriftfiir Physik, 43 (1927): 172-198.
11 Heelan, "Heisenberg and Radical Theoretical Change," Zeitschriftfiir allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie,
6 (1975): 113-136, and following: 136.

12 Heelan, "Heisenberg and Radical Theoretical Change," following 136.
13 Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity (Nijmegen: Nijhoff, 1965).
14 Ibid.
15 B.J.F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1972).
17 Ibid., 16.
18 Ibid., x; also 3-4.

19 Ibid., 30- I.
20 Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy ofScience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983);
"The Scope of Hermeneutics in Natural Science," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 2912
(1998): 273-98; and [with Jay Schulkin], "Hermeneutical Philosophy and Pragmatism: A Philosophy of
Science," Synthese 115 (1998): 269-302.
21 Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity.
22 Ibid., 107.
23 Ibid., 109.
24 Ibid.,xii.
25 Ibid.,184.
26 Ibid.,156.
27 Ibid.,141.
28 For example, Heelan, "Horizon, Objectivity and Reality in the Physical Sciences." International
Philosophical Quarterly 7 (1967): 375-412.
29 Heelan, "Quantum Logic and Classical Logic: Their Respective Roles," Boston Studies in the Philosophy
of Science XII, 318-349; "Complementarity, Context-Dependence and Quantum Logic." Foundations of
Physics I ( 1970): 95-110.
30 Heelan, "Quantum Logic and Classical Logic," 322; or, one might add, to the Riemannian geometry of
vision; Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983).
31 Heelan, "Quantum Logic and Classical Logic," 335.
32 Ibid., 341.
33 Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983), 178-187.
34 "Why a Hermeneutical Philosophy of the Natural Sciences?" in R. Crease, ed., Hermeneutics and the
Natural Sciences (Dordrecht: Kluwer, I 997), I 3-40.
35 Ibid.
36 Heelan, "The Logic of Changing Classificatory Frameworks" in J. Wojciechowski, ed., Proceedings of
the International Conference on the Classification of Knowledge (Munich: Verlag Documentation, 1974)
260-274.
37 Heelan, "An Anti-epistemological or Ontological Interpretation of the Quantum Theory and Theories
Like it," in B. Babich, et al., eds., Continental and Postmodern Perspectives in the Philosophy of Science,
(Aldershot/Brookfield, VT: Avebury Press, 1995), 55-68.
38 "Toward a New Analysis of the Pictorial Space of Vincent van Gogh." Art Bull. 54 (1972): 478-492.
39 Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science, Ch. 5.
40 Heelan and Schulkin, "Hermeneutical Philosophy and Pragmatism: A Philosophy of Science."
41 Crease, The Play of Nature.
42 Crease, Hermeneutics and the Natural Sciences, 262-3.
43 Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity, x.
DIMITRI GINEV
THE HERMENEUTIC CONTEXT OF CONSTITUTION
In this paper I concentrate on two distinctions introduced by Patrick A. Heelan. At

stake in the distinction between weak and strong hermeneutics of natural science is the
issue of the possibility of an interpretative-ontological approach to the rationality of
science. The distinction between cultural praxis-laden meaning and theory-laden
meaning has much to do with a philosophico-hermeneutic critique of the account of
scientific theory elaborated in the post-positivist philosophy of science. My primary
aim is to show that the "hermeneutic turn" in the philosophy of science as informed by
the two distinctions allows one to delineate a particular context of scrutinizing science.
In opposing both the normative epistemology (the rational reconstruction of science's
cognitive structure) and the deconstruction of epistemology (the denunciation that there
are aspects of science's cognitive structure which have to be approached as non-
empirical objects of inquiry), I shall treat this hermeneutic context ofconstitution as an
alternative to the context of justification and the context of discovery. What I am
referring to is an attempt to forge a notion of scientific rationality by studying the
hermeneutic fore-structure of scientific research. 1 It is my aim to show that in the
context of constitution one can hold the view that (pace Rorty) the science-nonscience
opposition "cuts culture at a philosophically significant joint" without appealing to the
uniqueness of epistemological features like a special method, or a special relation to
reality.
I. WEAK AND STRONG HERMENEUTICS OF SCIENCE

Weak hermeneutics of science is a heading for all interpretative studies of the
production of scientific texts and the forms of scientific communication (including the
historical dynamics of these forms). The kernel of these studies is the comparative
analysis of the author-text-reader relationship constitutive of different genres of
scientific publications - working papers, journal articles, monographs, volumes of
essays, textbooks, yearbooks, and so on. Ideas and programs of weak hermeneutics of
science are developed in a wide range of disciplines -history of ideas, cultural history,
rhetoric (both as informal logic of argumentation and as literary rhetoric), media and
communication studies, cultural studies, social psychology, literary criticism, and
others. Champions of weak hermeneutics are predominantly preoccupied with the
historico-cultural being of scientific languages. In particular, they are interested in the
43
44 DIMITRI GINEV
communicative openness of the idealized (formalized, standardized) languages of

natural science. The specification of this interest in the framework of the comparative
analysis of the author-text-reader relationship helps one to address issues like the
"implicit reader" as a mediator between production and reception of scientific texts, the
historical distance necessary that a scientific text may gain a status of classical work,
the role the "generic characteristics" of the different types oflinguistic representations
of scientific results play in the formation of communicative spaces in scientific
communities' life-worlds, the ways of achieving a depersonalization of scientific texts'
authorship, and so on. (To the weak hermeneutics of natural science one should
attribute also the studies in the "rhetorical production of epistemic objectivity and
axiological neutrality" as well as the interpretative studies of the historico-cultural
forms of popularizing natural science.)
A sui generis transition from weak to strong hermeneutics of science is represented
by the approaches of authors (e.g., Robert Crease)2 who are trying to disclose the role
of interpretation in the "production" of experimental objects. Like the champions of the
weak hermeneutics, these authors concentrate on the specificity of scientific languages.
In contrast to the former, the latter hold a much broader concept of scientific language.
According to them, the language of science arises first and foremost from and is
addressed to experimental practices. Following this view, they go on to recast claims
raised by the champions of the weak hermeneutics in terms of a context that includes
aspects of the cognitive structure of scientific research. For example, they recast the
problematics of the reading process in a manner that allows one to construe the
experimentation (and not only the reception of scientific texts) in terms of such a
process. By suggesting a hermeneutics of the reading process of what is written on the
instruments of experimentation, these authors evoke Galileo' s conception that scientific
research is a reading of the Book ofNature. It is this orientation towards an "exegesis
of the experimental practices" that leads to the problematics of the strong hermeneutics
of science.
In what follows, I use the expression of "strong hermeneutics of science" to
designate studies in the hermeneutic phenomenology of the process of constituting
domains of scientific research. The basic claim of weak hermeneutics is the
impossibility of a hermeneutic approach to natural science's cognitive content. More
specifically, champions of the weak hermeneutics contest the relevance of the post-
Heideggerian ontologizing approach to natural scientific practice and the cognitive
constructions arising out of this practice. On the principal argument for this claim, the
ontologizing approach does not have resources for answering the question of why the
interests and methods of hermeneutic philosophy can not, from the viewpoint of natural
scientific practice, help in reaching a deeper understanding of scientific rationality. A
leading exponent of the weak hermeneutics goes on to say that "it is insufficient to
indicate or to demonstrate that some of philosophical hermeneutics' ideas and concepts
are nevertheless applicable in some sense to the field of natural scientific inquiry as
well." 3
Heelan's defense of the strong hermeneutics of natural science is by no means
restricted to indicating and commenting particular examples of such an applicability. 4
For Heelan, a strong hermeneutic philosophy of natural science must center on the
phenomena of research praxis as these make their appearance in scientific
communities' laboratory everydayness. The task is not to derive meanings from texts
THE HERMENEUTIC CONTEXT OF CONSTITUTION 45
and other representations used in the process of communication, but to highlight the
fore-structuring of scientific phenomena in the living-worldly horizons oflaboratory
everydayness. The problem-situation that brings into the world the program of strong
hermeneutics concerns the way of covering theoretical discontinuities by a unity of
practices of scientific research. 5
2. THEORY-LADENNESS AND CULTURAL PRAXIS-LADENNESS
Heelan's starting-point in working out this distinction is the thesis that theory and
praxis are coordinated in a complex manner that follows a repetitive pattern, from
theory to praxis, then back to theory. He uses the metaphoric notion of"hermeneutic
spiral" in order to illuminate both the cycling and the progressive character of scientific
research. In my view, this processual interpretation of theory-praxis relation in the
research process is a mutatis mutandis specification of the relation between
understanding, prejudice, application and tradition as it is construed in Gadamer's
conception of "effective history." More generally, Heelan's treatment of the
"hermeneutic spiral" between theoretical understanding and practical instrumentation
provides a rationale for giving meaning to the notion of "effective-historical
consciousness" operative in the process of scientific research. Heelan's distinction
between theory-laden meaning and praxis-laden cultural meaning in the process of
scientific research may be seen against this background.
The experimental equipment involved in laboratory everydayness is semantically
theory-laden, whereas the experimental observations are semantically praxis-laden like
"all dedicated or designated cultural objects of the lifeworld presented as fulfilling
experience." The types of meaning corresponding to the two kinds ofladenness are not
independent, for the theory-laden meaning makes sense only in the process of using the
experimental equipment in the practices of scientific research. Thus, the two kinds of
meaning's constitution are involved in an interplay that informs the dynamics of
scientific research. On Heelan's account, the process of measurement mediates this
interplay, for it fulfills two coordinated functions. "It presents the objects-as-
measurable, this is the praxis-laden cultural function. And it takes the data from the
presented object, this is the theory-laden data-taking process. These are the binary
valences of scientific data. The data-taking is usually called 'observation'; but there is
no 'observation' without the prior preparation and presentation of the object-as-
measurable as a system open to the data-taking process."6
There are overtones of Gadamer's priority of phronesis-rationality over epistemic
rationality in all this. But Heelan is much more radical than the representatives of the
contemporary hermeneutic philosophy. When Gadamer, for instance, goes on to
demonstrate the "universality of the hermeneutic problem" through overcoming the
various kinds of the "experience of alienation" in modem culture, he does not forget
to pay attention to the task of reintegrating the natural-scientific research in the
"conversation in which we are all caught up together." But in so doing, Gadamer takes
for granted the monological character of scientific inquiry. For him, to reintegrate
natural science in culture's dialogical experience means only to disclose the
dependence of all scientific constructions upon the primordial "hermeneutic experience
of the world" to which the "linguistic constitution of the world" corresponds. In
contrast to this attitude to natural science, Heelan's strong program is an attempt not
46 DIMITRI GINEV
only to reintegrate the (allegedly monological) scientific research in the hermeneutic

experience, but to reveal the intrinsic hermeneutic experience within the research
process. 7
3. OVERCOMING THE TRADITIONAL CONTEXT-DISTINCTION

In its critique of the "stubborn" epistemological dilemmas in the philosophy of science,
Professor Heelan's strong program seems akin to Shapere's8 piecemeal approach to
science's cognitive structure. I shall pay a special attention to this approach, since its
comparison with the strong program provides an opportunity to draw a clear
demarcationalline between (ontological) hermeneutics of science and (non-essentialist)
epistemology of science.
Shapere's approach represents an interesting attempt in the philosophy of science
to overcome the essentialist view of scientific rationality without succumbing to a
certain form of cognitive relativism. Shapere opposes the relativist rejection of the view
that changes in the epistemological criteria of scientific rationality are not themselves
rational. I share his critique of essentialism as a supposition that there are constitutive
features of science, themselves not open to revision in the light of science's historical
dynamics. Shapere is absolutely right when insisting that there is a chain of develop-
ments connecting the set of first-level criteria of doing research as a rational enterprise
and the set of second-level criteria assessing the historical progress in science. Through
this chain one can trace a "rational evolution" between the intrinsic rationality of
everyday research work and the rationality of science's historical dynamics.
Unfortunately, Shapere leaves us without a clear idea of how to reconstruct the
"traceable relationship of changes," although the success of his antiessentialism
depends crucially on such a reconstruction. Since he is not willing to transcend the
epistemological framework of analysis of scientific rationality, his antiessentialist
approach (the approach that operates without invoking some kind of transcendental
argument, or invariant essence) does not enable one to specify the rationality of the
changes taking place in the "rational evolution" between the two sets of criteria. In
avoiding the shortcomings of the essentialist metascience, Shapere's undertaking is not
so successful in figuring out an alternative to relativism. The specter of relativism
comes back in his piecemeal approach through the back door.
According to the central thesis that will emerge in the rest of this essay, a full-
fledged defense of the antiessentialist approach to scientific rationality demands a move
from epistemology to hermeneutics. In other words, a cogent version of anti-
essentialism, which does not collapse into a kind of relativism, requires a
hermeneutico-philosophical context of scrutinizing science. It is this context that I
called earlier the context of constitution. Basic here is the distinction between
hermeneutic fore-structure and cognitive structure of scientific research. It can be
construed as a further articulation of Heelan's distinction between praxis-laden cultural
meaning and theory-laden meaning in the research process.
The structural unit of scientific research I shall refer to in my further elaborations
is the domain. On Shapere's definition, domain is each body of information constituted
by items for which an answer to an important problem is expected. (Let me refer to
molecular genetics as an example of scientific domain. The main items in this domain
are the molecular structure of the gene; the central role of DNA and RNA in the
production of various structural, catalytic, and regulatory proteins; decreased enzyme

production; biosynthetic pathways; the network of chemical reactions between genes
and gross phenotypic structures; and the phenomena as epistasis, pleiotropy, and the
position effect which have no satisfactory explanations in terms of Mendelian genetics.
Each item is characterized by a central problem, which is realized theoretically [or
better, realized as a theoretical problem] by means of a model that provides an
explanatory scenario as to how the problem is to be solved. For instance, the model that
unifies in an explanatory scenario DNA replication, transcription to RNA, translation
to protein, and the genetic code enables one to conceptualize the biosynthetic pathways
as an item of molecular genetics. In fulfilling explanatory functions, each model is a
specification of a domain's theory. This thesis needs a further qualification. A scientific
domain with an internal theory that conceptualizes [without attracting models of
external theories] all items is an extreme case which finds only a few real
exemplifications. As a rule, in a domain of scientific research there are two or more
[sometimes partially competing] theories. In addition, there are the so-called "interfield
theories" which serve the functions in relating [through integraLexplanatory scenarios]
items of two or more domains. Thus, the operon theory and theory of allosteric
regulation are relating items ofbiochemistry and molecular genetics.) The semantico-
structuralist picture of scientific domain, I will follow here, provides a good
opportunity for analyzing the dynamic complementarity of hermeneutic and cognitive
dimensions of scientific research.
On the one hand, a scientific domain is an open horizon for theorization,
conceptualization, experimental instrumentation, and so on. It is a life-world of an
interpretative community whose members have a basic consensus regarding the
existence of kinds of theoretical objects (e.g., statistical states represented by a class
operators in Hilbert space, physical magnitudes represented by hypermaximal
Hermitian operators, etc.). This consensus is not due only to shared cognitive aims and
methodological norms, and for that reason, it can not be subjected to a "rational
reconstruction" in the context of justification. The belief in the esoteric theoretical
objects is beyond the scope of this reconstruction. It is a belief that is grounded upon
what Heidegger calls a fore-sight, a fore-having and a fore-conception of a
community's interpretative mode of being-in-the-world. At the same time, this belief
is the "source" of that "hermeneutic conservatism" (the lack of willingness to break
down the horizon of expectation), which occupies a prominent place in Kuhn's
conception of scientific revolution. Accordingly, the basic consensus regarding the
existence of a kind of theoretical object is formed and maintained in the interpretative
milieu of a community's laboratory everydayness. Yet, the reverse claim is also of
prime importance for a strong hermeneutics of science: Without the community's belief
in the existence of theoretical objects of a specific kind, a laboratory everydayness
would be impossible.
On the other hand, a scientific domain is a set of semantic models related through
conceptual apparatus and mathematical formalism of one or more (intrafield and
interfield) theories. These models provide meaning to theoretical objects in whose
existence a community of researchers believes. A domain's cognitive structure is at any
particular moment a configuration of theoretical models, where each model refers to
a number of phenomenal systems illustrating a domain's issue. (For example, a central
issue in the domain of special relativity is the priority of Lorentz over Galilean
48 DIMITRI GINEV
transformations with respect to the scope of validity of the principle of relativity.

Special relativity provides a scenario that explains why the use of the Lorentz [rather
than the Galilean] transformations provides better rules for transforming the results of
measurements on a phenomenal system in one frame of reference into the results that
would have been obtained in another frame. Phenomenal systems illustrating this issue
are the systems in which the reciprocal electromagnetic action of a magnet and a
conductor takes place.) In elaborating on a concept of a domain's cognitive structure
that is relevant to the strong hermeneutics, I have to indicate a problematics whose
discussion is far beyond the thematic range of this essay. The theoretical models that
build up the cognitive-semantic structure of a scientific domain are to a great extent
mathematical constructions. In view of the circulative-iterative relationship between
hermeneutic fore-structure and cognitive structure upon which I am going to
concentrate below, one has to figure out an adequate conception of the ontological
status of the mathematical constructions. Since the study of scientific research in the
context of constitution represents a kind of Aristotelian paradigm of philosophical
reasoning, the adequate conception should follow the same paradigm. The view (held
in particular by Kitcher)9 that mathematical constructions are idealizations of operations
performed by an ideal agent is in full agreement with the view of the discursive-
practical constitution of scientific domains. Needless to say, a strong hermeneutics of
science hinges upon the possibility of developing a strong hermeneutics of mathematics
- a program that would not invoke a prearranged harmony to map the Platonist world
of idealized mathematical objects back onto the physical world, but would ultimately
"derive" mathematical constructions from everyday discursive practices of the
interpretative being-in-the-world.
A scientific domain is at once a hermeneutic fore-structure and a cognitive structure
of doing research. It is this inseparability of interpretative-practical and cognitive-
semantic aspects of constituting domains (alongside with the self-constitution of
scientific communities) that makes necessary the move beyond the traditional
distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification.
Anticipating the further analysis, one may assert that the clarification of the
hermeneutico-circulative relationship between laboratory everydayness and theoretical
objects of a specific kind in whose existence a community of researchers believes
makes necessary the context of constitution.
But before touching upon the question of how one is to introduce this new context
of scrutinizing science, let me take a closer look at the notion of hermeneutic fore-
structure of a scientific domain. This is a notion that arises from the existential analysis
of an understanding-interpretation nexus. To put it in terms ofHeidegger's Daseins-
analytik, interpretation is a second-order "understanding" that appropriates the Being-
towards-possibilities projected by Dasein's first-order understanding. In interpretation
(as existential phenomenon), primordial understanding becomes itself. And vice versa,
interpretation is always grounded existentially in first-order understanding. Further-
more, interpretation appropriates understanding not in the sense of offering a reflexive
position towards that which is understood by it. On Heidegger's reading, interpretation
is much rather the (immanent in understanding) "working out of possibilities projected
in understanding." 10 Interpretation is to be attributed to "everyday Dasein." According
to the existential meaning of this claim, interpretation articulates possibilities within the
routine practices constituting an everydayness. Since the correlations and the "fusions"
of these practices presuppose an irreducible intersubjectivity, "everyday Dasein" is to

be ascribed not to isolated individuals, but to interpretative communities distinguished
by characteristic modes of everydayness. Interpretation and intersubjective (communal)
everydayness are existentially "equiprimordial." Moreover, interpretation is not to be
disentangled from the pre-predicative, practical "seeing of the ready-to-hand
circumspectively." In this regard, it is an everyday articulation of possibilities guided
by the "hermeneutic as." The latter makes up the structure of the explicitness of what
is practically understood (in terms of a totality of involvements) in everyday practices.
Under this analysis, everydayness is the totality of interrelated discursive practices
that constantly transcends the accomplishment of particular practices. By means of this
transcendence, the totality fulfills the function of a horizon of a community's everyday
circumspective interpretation. It is a horizon through which all projected possibilities
of community's being-in-the-world come to the fore as inclinations, preferences,
orientations, and anticipations. These are embedded in a community's everydayness as
fore-having ,fore-sight and fore-conception of everyday circumspective interpretation.
The actualizations of possibilities that a community has in advance is a fore-having of
interpretative dealing with an environment that is ready-to-hand. The (pre-predicative)
seeing of the circumstances under which possibilities may become actualized is a fore-
sight of a community's everydayness. Finally, the anticipation of how projected (and
actualized) possibilities can be utilized is a fore-conception of everyday interpretation.
A starting-point of a strong hermeneutics of natural science is a specification of the
existential analysis of understanding-interpretation nexus with regard to the totality of
discursive practices that build up the everydayness of a community of researchers. This
totality transcends always the particular configurations of practices characterizing a
community's being-in-a-domain-of-scientific-research. For this reason, the totality is
a horizon of all projected possibilities for doing research in a given domain. It is a
"practical horizon" with respect to a community's everyday dealing with the equipment
for experimentation that is ready-to-hand. Furthermore, the range of all possible
discursive-practical settings of a community's everydayness is the immanence informed
by the practical horizon of scientific research. The transcendence informed by this
horizon is the hermeneutic fore-structure of the possibilities actualized as a domain's
cognitive structure. In other words, the transcendence is again a horizon of the range
of all possible models (as semantic specifications of given theories) tna.t are relevant
to domain's issues. The models are constructed in the variety of situations taking place
in the research process. For the transcendence of a community's discursive-practical
settings of doing research is also a horizon of theoretical possibilities, this horizon is
characterized, on its part, by a transcendence that manifests itself as a community's
basic cognitive aims and values. These are aims and values that remain relatively
unchangeable in the dynamics of the research process.
The two kinds of transcendence I tried to spell out are "united" by community's
belief in specific theoretical objects. This belief is rooted in the hermeneutic fore-struc-
ture of the research process and, at the same time, it is the "ultimate source" of all basic
aims and values which direct this process. (To repeat again, the "irrational" belief in
the existence of"objects that are only known" to community's members is a requisite
for having consensus about the significance of the peculiar mode of everyday
circumspective interpretation. If a community loses its belief in the respective objects,
50 DIMITRI GINEV
the scientific domain will vanish both as a hermeneutic fore-structure and as a cognitive
structure.)
What becomes explicit as actualized possibilities in the research process creates the
evidential basis of what transcends these possibilities. The interrelatedness of everyday
discursive practices bears witness to the hermeneutic fore-structure as transcendence
of everydayness' practical horizon. Each discursive practice (e.g., statistical calculation,
computer modeling, building and solving differential equations, testing hypotheses,
designing new experiments, and so on) can be described and analyzed in its own terms.
In addition, networks of discursive practices representing a community's everydayness
can be studied empirically under various angles- ethnomethodology, constructive soci-
ology, ethnographic studies of the laboratory everydayness, and others. Yet, the whole
interrelatedness of ongoing and potentially accomplishable practices that (as a horizon)
transcends each particular actual state of a community's research work is never
empirically given. By the same token, the set of all possible theoretical models of a
domain's cognitive structure bears witness to the projection of the hermeneutic fore-
structure onto all theoretical possibilities of the research process. It is this projection
through which the hermeneutic fore-structure becomes explicit as basic cognitive aims
and values.
The differentiation of two kinds of transcendence does make sense when one takes
into account the "double projectedness" of the hermeneutic fore-structure. First, as a
practical horizon of inclinations, orientations, preferences and anticipations that
transcends the particular situations and settings of a community's everydayness, it is
projected upon the possibilities of discursive-practical being-in-a-domain-of-scientific-
research. On another formulation of this claim, as fore-sight, fore-having and fore-
conception of everyday circumspective interpretation the hermeneutic fore-structure
is projected upon discursive-practical possibilities of a community's everydayness.
Second, it is projected upon the possibilities of constructing theoretical models relevant
as explanatory scenarios to a domain's issues.
In its "double projectedness" (upon theoretical possibilities and onto everyday
discursive practices), the hermeneutic fore-structure mediates between a community's
everydayness and a domain's cognitive structure. More specifically, it mediates in
transforming a community's primordial everyday interests (arising from the circum-
spective interpretation) into stable cognitive values and aims. At bottom it is the idea
that (as projected possibilities) the inclination, preferences, orientations and
anticipations informed by the everyday circumspective interpretation delineate in each
particular situation of the research process a domain's thematic issues that have to be
"covered" by relevant theoretical models. One consequence to be drawn from this view
is that the "double projectedness" of the hermeneutic fore-structure becomes "incor-
porated" in a domain's cognitive structure as a unity of fore-sight, fore-having and
fore-conception. Thus considered, the hermeneutic fore-structure is a "situated trans-
cendence" of each actual state of the research process. In transcending the actualized
possibilities of a particular state, this fore-structure determines the issue which deserves
to be studied.
Although I am referring to two kinds of transcendence and to a "double
projectedness", there are good reasons to admitting that the whole research process in
a scientific domain is "embedded" in an integral iterative hermeneutic circle. (No
doubt, this circle is to be addressed from different perspective, as one may admit that
the research process is predicated on a plurality of hermeneutic circles.) It is not a circle

between theory and empirical data. Neither is it a co-interpretative relationship between
explanatory framework and procedures of experimentation. In view of the complexity
of constituting interpretative everydayness of discursive practices, on the one hand, and
the complexity of constituting cognitive structure of semantic models, there is no
immediate relationship between praxis and theoria of the research process.
Nevertheless, praxis-laden meanings and theory-laden meanings constituted in this
process are involved in a common hermeneutic circle. The lack of immediate
relationship I pointed out means that there is no possibility for this relationship to be
thematized and studied in a purely empirical manner. There is "something" that both
transcends the empirical realities of practical everydayness and theoretical structure
and (by means of this transcendence) mediates between praxis-laden and theory-laden
meanings. This "something" is the hermeneutic fore-structure that makes possible a
twofold hermeneutic circle: (a) between the particular discursive practices taking place
in different settings of the research process and the hermeneutic fore-structure which
by transcending the empirical reality of these practices constitutes the laboratory
everydayness of a scientific community; (b) between actualized theoretical possibilities
of the research process (the set of the constructed models as a subset of all possible
models that may take place in a domain's cognitive structure) and the hermeneutic fore-
structure that by transcending the empirical reality of the actualized theoretical
possibilities constitutes a domain's cognitive structure.
Now, I am in a position to shed some more light on the specificity of the context of
constitution. It is a hermeneutico-phenomenological framework for studying the
iteration of the triadic hermeneutic circle of discursive-practical everydayness -
hermeneutic fore-structure - cognitive structure of doing research in a scientific
domain. Because of the non-empirical character of this circle, the context of
constitution is irreducible to any kind of empirical studies of science. At the same time,
the hermeneutic fore-structure is a "pre-epistemological transcendence" that can be
illuminated through a phenomenological constitutional analysis but not by means of a
normative rational reconstruction. This is the central argument against the reducibility
of the context of constitution to the context of justification.
At stake in the context of constitution is the effective-historical process of
constituting a domain of scientific research through self-constituting a community of
researchers. This process is informed by the iteration of the hermeneutic circle of
"everydayness- fore-structure- cognitive structure." (On this point, see also my essay
[ 1999] where the types of studying science in the context of constitution are
delineated.) Thus considered, the effective history of the research process proves to be
a type of history (and historiography) of science that differs essentially both from the
external and the internal types of history (and historiography) of science. (Notoriously,
the distinction between internal and external history of science is a sui generis
extension of the traditional context-distinction.) By studying the effective history of the
research process, one is able to demonstrate the ineliminable cognitive specificity of
science. However, in so doing, one does not need to appeal to invariant epistemological
(and meta-methodological) norms of scientific rationality. The cognitive specificity of
science is due to the processual hermeneutic fore-structuring of the construction of
theoretical models (and domains). Although there is no epistemological codex of
rational scientific behavior, science is a specific mode of being-in-the-world. This
52 DIMITRI GINEV
claim opens the door to discussing the problematics of scientific rationality in the
context of constitution. The considerations developed here should be regarded as
serving only a preparatory function with respect to this discussion.
University of Sofia, Bulgaria
NOTES
1 See further Dimitri Ginev, "On the Hermeneutic Fore-Structure of Scientific Research," Continetill!ill
Philosophy Review, 32 (1999): 143-168.

2 Robert Crease, The Play of Nature: Experimentation as Performance. Indiana University Press:
Bloomington, 1993.
3 Gyorgi Markus, "Why Is There No Hermeneutics of Natural Sciences? Some Preliminary Theses," Science
in Context, I (1987): 5-51, 10.
4 Patrick A. Heelan, "Galileo, Luther, and the Hermeneutics of Natural Science" in T. Stapleton, ed., The
Question of Hermeneutics (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 363-375; Heelan, "The Scope of Hermeneutics in
Natural Science," Studies in History and Philosophy ofScience, 29 (1998): 273-298.
s In accordance with the peculiarity of this problem-situation, a central concern of Heelan's work is the
specification of the main hermeneutico-philosophical notions in the context of a strongly hermeneutic study
of science. See, in particular, "Context, Hermeneutics, and Ontology in the Experimental Sciences" in D.
Ginev and R. Cohen, eds., Issues and Images in the Philosophy ofScience (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), I 07-
126.
6 Heelan, "Why a Hermeneutical Philosophy of the Natural Sciences?" Man and World, 30 (I 997): 271-298;
282.
7 On this view, strong hermeneutics of science is not only a new philosophy of science, but a position in
debate between modernism and postrnodemism as well. See Heelan, "The Authority of Science: A Post-
Modem Crisis," Divinatio, 8 (1998): 35-52.
8 Dudley Shapere, Reason and the Search ofKnowledge (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1984 ).
9 Phillip Kitcher, The Nature ofMathematical Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
10 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Macquarrie & Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962, 189.
RAGNAR FJELLAND
THE "COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION"

OF QUANTUM MECHANICS AND
PHENOMENOLOGY
INTRODUCTION: THE "SCIENCE WARS"
The conflict that has come to be known as the "Science Wars" started when the
biologist, Paul R. Gross, and the mathematician, Norman Levitt, published the book,
Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science. The book was
a fierce attack on certain quarters within the history of science, philosophy of science
and sociology of science - such as existentialism, phenomenology, postmodemism,
feminism, multiculturalism and so on. The next year, 1995, the book was followed up
with a conference in New York given by the New York Academy of Sciences titled The
Flight from Science and Reason. The conflict gained momentum when the physicist
Alan Sokal published the article "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a
Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" in the journal for cultural studies,
Social Text. Soon after the article was published, Sokal revealed that the entire thing
had been a hoax. He had intentionally written an article that contained a lot of
nonsense, however it was written using fashionably correct terminology with references
to a range of"postmodem" thinkers. The hoax gained worldwide publicity, and many
of the participants in the debate have claimed that this debate shows that C.P. Snow's
"two cultures" still exist. 1
Yet the fronts in this debate do not coincide with Snow's "two cultures" right off.
The two camps are not divided between the humanities/social sciences on the one side
and the natural sciences/technology on the other. The majority of the contributors to
The Flight from Science and Reason were humanists and social scientists. Among these
were a well-known philosopher of science (Mario Bunge) and a well-known historian
of science (Gerard Holton). At the outset, therefore, the issues raised apply to different
academic disciplines. Alleged irrational tendencies in the natural sciences were also
attacked. That Ilya Prigogine would be criticized could be expected. But it has not been
generally recognized that Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were attacked from the
very beginning. Indeed, Higher Superstition has an article attacking Bohr and
Heisenberg, accusing them of advocating irrationalism and subjectivism. 2
53
54 RAGNAR FJELLAND
The stumbling block is what is known as the "Copenhagen interpretation of

quantum mechanics." The name alludes to the central role played by Bohr and his
institute in Copenhagen in the development of the interpretation. However, it was early
accepted by the majority of physicists, and in ordinary discourse the "Copenhagen
interpretation of quantum mechanics" is synonymous with "quantum mechanics."
One example is the article by Mara Beller, professor of history and philosophy of
science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: "At Whom are We Laughing?" Its main
thesis is that Sokal's hoax applies to the founders of quantum mechanics as much as
it applies to the "postmodern" milieus that Sokal wanted to ridicule. 3 The irony is that
the attacks on Bohr and Heisenberg indirectly constitute an assault on what may be
regarded as the very foundation of modern physics.
In this article I shall try to show that the attack on (the Copenhagen intepretation of)
quantum mechanics in the Science Wars is no accident, and that quantum mechanics
and phenomenology have more in common than being attacked in the Science Wars.
A SHORT HISTORY OF QUANTUM MECHANICS
It is now one hundred years since Max Planck hesitatingly introduced the notion of the
quantum, as an attempt to solve a specific problem in physics concerning so-called
black-body radiation. The next step was taken by Albert Einstein in 1905. He was able
to explain a hitherto unexplained phenomenon related to the photoelectric effect by
assuming that light can only transfer energy in specific quantities, so-called light quanta
or photons. In 1913, Bohr proposed his model of the hydrogen atom, which implies that
electrons in an atom can only circle the nucleus in certain orbits, and that a light
quantum is absorbed or emitted when the electron jumps from one orbit to another.
This was in accord with Einstein's photon hypothesis. In 1924, Louis de Broglie
assumed that matter, for example electrons, may be regarded as waves. But this
assumption implied a paradox. Light, which was previously regarded as waves,
revealed properties which could only be explained by assuming that it consisted of
particles. Matter, which was regarded as being made up of particles, revealed properties
that could only be explained by assuming that the alleged particles behaved as waves.
But can something be both a wave and a particle at the same time?
Bohr early recognized that quantum mechanics was incompatible with some of the
basic assumptions in classical physics, assumptions that had been taken for granted
since Galileo and Descartes. One assumption was that a complete description of the
world in the final outcome had to be deterministic. Another was that objectivity means
describing reality as it is independently of man. According to Bohr and his pupil
Heisenberg4 it is impossible to maintain this notion of objectivity. The observer has to
be taken into consideration, and they emphasized that in quantum mechanics it is
impossible to maintain an absolute separation between the knowing subject and the
object of knowledge. In Heisenberg's words:
... the traditional requirement of science ... permits a division of the world into subject and object
(observer and observed) ... This assumption is not permissible in atomic physics; the interaction
between observer and object causes uncontrollable large changes in the system being observed,
because of the discontinuous changes characteristic of the atomic processes. 5
Therefore, in observing a property, for example, the position of an electron, a
disturbance of the object is unavoidable. In 1927 Heisenberg formulated his famous
QUANTUM MECHANICS AND PHENOMENOLOGY 55
uncertainty relations, according to which the product of the uncertainties in two (non-
commuting) entities must necessarily exceed a given constant. This can be written
ax ap ~ h/41t
For example, x can denote the position of a particle, and p its linear momentum. ..::.x is
then the uncertainty in the determination of the position, and ..::.p is the uncertainty in the
determination of the momentum of the same particle. h is Planck's constant. The
implications are radical. For example, if we know the position of a particle exactly, its
momentum is totally unknown, and if we know the momentum exactly, its position is
totally unknown.
However, this relation may be interpreted in different ways. One might argue that
the particle has a well-defined position and momentum, but our knowledge of these
magnitudes is limited. This is the hidden variable interpretation of quantum mechanics.
We shall later see that among others Albert Einstein maintained this view. However,
according to the Copenhagen interpretation, we cannot ascribe physical reality to
magnitudes that are not measured. Heisenberg put it this way:
When one wants to clarify the meaning of the words "the position of an object," for example an
electron (relative to a given frame of reference), one has to specifY certain experiments with which
one can measure the "position of the electron": if this is not the case, the words have no meaning.
EINSTEIN: QUANTUM MECHANICS IS INCOMPLETE
Although the Copenhagen interpretation was quickly accepted by the majority of

physicists, there were some famous dissidents. They count Einstein, SchrOdinger, and
Bohm, to name a few. In a paper from 1935, "Can Quantum-Mechanical Description
of Physical Reality be Considered Complete?" Einstein and his co-authors Podolsky
and Rosen challenged the Copenhagen interpretation. Because this article set the stage
for all subsequent debates on the interpretation of quantum mechanics, I outline the
main arguments of the article.
Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen start with two criteria which any acceptable theory
must satisfy: 1) It must be correct and 2) it must be complete. The first criterion was
not a problem, because quantum mechanics was in agreement with known observations
at the time. Therefore, the paper discusses the second criterion exclusively, the question
if quantum mechanics may be regarded as a complete theory. Completeness is defined
as the requirement that "every element of the physical reality must have a counterpart
in the physical theory (condition of completeness)." But the term "physical reality"
which appears in the definition cannot be taken for granted. The authors do not attempt
to give a complete definition of reality, but give the following criterion, which is
crucial in the later discussion:
If, without in any way disturbing a system, we can predict with certainty (i.e. with probability
equal to unity) the value of a physical quantity, then there exists an element of physical reality
corresponding to this physical quantity [criterion of physical reality]. 7
The first deals with the observation of a single particle. According to Heisenberg's
uncertainty principle, in the case that the position is exactly known, the momentum is
completely unknown. According to the criterion of physical reality the momentum has
no physical reality because it cannot be predicted at all. In this case one may argue that
this is due to the inevitable disturbance of the system in carrying out measurements. So
far it looks plausible. However, when Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen extend the
example to two particles, an apparent paradox arises. I shall give a simplified version
56 RAGNAR FJELLAND
of the example, leaving out all technicalities, but retaining the essential features. In the
thought experiment two particles have interacted so that we know that they have
correlated properties. The properties used by Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen are position
and momentum of each particle. After the interaction the two particles fly off in
different directions. They do not interact any more, and may therefore be regarded as
two separate systems.
Let us call the two particles I and II respectively, and we carry out measurements
on particle I. Because the two particles are correlated, we can infer from particle I to
particle II. We have then two possibilities: 1) We can either measure the position of
particle I, and infer the position of particle II, or 2) we can measure the momentum of
particle I, and infer the momentum of particle II. According to Einstein, Podolsky, and
Rosen, the paradox arises in the following way: On particle I we either measure the
position or the momentum. When one of them is measured, the other is excluded. This
follows directly from Heisenberg's uncertainty relations and can be explained by the
inevitable disturbance involved in the measuring process. We should keep in mind that
according to the Copenhagen interpretation the unknown property has no physical
reality, and this applies to particle II as well as to particle I. Therefore, in case 1) the
position of particle II has no physical reality, and in case 2) the momentum of particle
II has no physical reality. But according to Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen, particle II
is a different system, separated from particle I. In observing particle I, particle II has
not been affected. They therefore ask the question: How is it possible that what we
observe on particle I, may determine which property of particle II has physical reality?
Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen propose two possible alternatives: The first
alternative is that the magnitudes do not have physical reality when they are not
observed8 According to their view this implies that the event that particle I is observed
is transmitted to particle II with a velocity that exceeds the velocity oflight. According
to the special theory of relativity signals cannot be transmitted faster than the velocity
oflight ("Einstein locality"). Therefore, this alternative violates Einstein locality, and
Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen exclude this possibility. (Einstein later called this
alternative "spooky action at a distance"). According to the second alternative there are
elements of physical reality (in case 1 the momentum of particle II and in case 2 the
position of particle II) which are not represented in the theory. They conclude that the
theory is incomplete.
In an article with the same title as Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen's article, Bohr
answered the criticism, and argued that quantum mechanics is indeed complete. He
makes two main points. The first is that the expression "without in any way disturbing
the system," in the criterion of physical reality is inadequate. Any description of
physical reality must include the measuring instruments required to observe this reality.
Bohr gives a detailed analysis of measurements of the position and momentum of a
particle. The conclusion of these considerations reflects "even at this stage"
there is essentially the question of an influence on the very conditions which define the possible
types ofpredictions regarding the future behavior of the system. Since these conditions constitute
an inherent element of the description of any phenomenon to which the term "physical reality" can
be properly attached, we sec that the argumentation of the mentioned authors does not justify their
conclusion that quantum-mechanical description is essentially incomplete!
Bohr's second point is that the two particles in the thought experiment cannot be
separated into two systems. Even if the two particles are travelling in opposite
directions with the speed oflight, they are from a quantum mechanical point of view
one unseparable system. Bohr therefore choses the second of Einstein, Podolsky, and
Rosen's alternatives: violation of Einstein locality (non-locality or quantum entangle-
ment).
Bohr rejected Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen's definition of physical reality. His
own alternative goes like this: "In objective description, it is indeed more appropriate
to use the word phenomenon only to refer to observations obtained under specified
circumstances, including an account of the whole experimental arrangement." 10
It is worth noticing that whereas Einstein, Podolsky, and Rosen's definition of
physical reality is basically the same as Galileo's and Descartes', Bohr's definition is
more in accordance with the notion of objectivity held by a working scientist. The basic
requirement in experimental science is the reproduceabililty of an experiment by fellow
scientists. However, this is only feasible when an adequate description of the
experimental setting is provided.
The controversy between Bohr and Einstein concerned the philosophical
interpretation of quantum mechanics, and not its empirical validity. On the contrary,
it looked as if the two interpretations would always yield the same predictions.
However, in 1964, John Bell formulated the relations that have later been known as the
"Bell inequalities." If Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen's interpretation of quantum
mechanics was correct, the inequalities would not be violated, but if the Copenhagen
interpretation was correct, they would in some situations be violated. Therefore, it
looked as if the controversy could be settled through experiments. The first experiments
were carried out in 1972, and later a series of experiments have been carried out, the
most famous being the "Aspect experiments." With a few exceptions they have all
violated the Bell inequalities and supported the Copenhagen interpretation. However,
needless to say, the experimental results have not ended the controversy.''
IS THE COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION POSITIVIST?

Bohr's and Heisenberg's position is sometimes regarded as positivist or instrumentalist.
Like Ernst Mach they allegedly regarded physical magnitudes as nothing but theoretical
constructions. There are reasons for maintaining that at least Heisenberg was
influenced by Mach, and if we look at the quotation from Heisenberg cited above, this
allegation has some plausibility. There are also quotations from Bohr that have a
positivist flavour. One example is the following: "There is no quantum world. There
is only an abstract quantum description. It is a mistake to think that it is the task of
physics to find how nature is. Physics is about what we can say about nature." 12
But nevertheless it is a misunderstanding to regard the Copenhagen interpretation
of quantum mechanics as positivism. The root of this misunderstanding is the simple
dichotomy used in much of the literature addressing this question. It is inferred that
Bohr was a positivist by using the following argument: Einstein was a realist and there
was a fundamental disagreement between Bohr and Einstein. Therefore, Bohr was a
positivist. In this context, "realism" means Einstein's realism. But Einstein's realism
is not the only realist alternative. We remember that according to realism, scientific
objectivity describes physical reality independently of man. This is essentially the
realism of Galileo and Descartes. Bohr doubtless did not accept such a naive realism.
But this does not make him a positivist. 13 To avoid this fallacy requires distinctions
other than the realist/ instrumentalist dichotomy. I shall not discuss realism. But I shall
58 RAGNAR FJELLAND
try to show that there are interesting parallels between Bohr's philosophy and
phenomenology (in particular the later Edmund Husser!), and that the Copenhagen
interpretation of quantum mechanics is much closer to phenomenology than to
positivism.
THE REJECTION OF "OBJECTIVISM"

The primary source ofHusserl's later philosophy is the (partly unfinished) manuscripts
that were later published as Die Krisis der europiiischen Wissenschaflen und
transzendentale Phiinomenologie, mainly written around 1935. 14 As the title indicates,
Husser! was concerned with what he regarded as a deep crisis in modem science. In
spite of tremendous success, the crisis was rooted in a lack of understanding of modem
science, and he traces this lack of understanding back to Galileo Galilei and the birth
of modem science.
Husserl's Galileo is different from the traditional view ofGalileo using a telescope
to observe the moons of Jupiter. Husser! emphasizes the importance of measurement
and the uses of mathematics in Galileo's science. According to Husser! there is nothing
wrong with making measurements the basis of science. The problem is that Galileo
took the mathematizability of nature more or less for granted, and he had no reason for
asking for the very meaning of this mathematization. Therefore, he was "at once a
discoverer and a concealing genius." 15
Husser! was not the only one to maintain this view. The view ofGalileo as a good
empiricist was modified in the 1930's, and different authors pointed to the "Platonist"
elements of his philosophy of science. One of the first was the French historian of
science Alexandre Koyre. 16 According to Koyre, modem science is characterised by
two changes, which are intimately related: the geometrization of space and what he
calls "dissolution of the Cosmos." By the second phrase Koyre means the substitution
of an abstract Euclidean space for the orderly Cosmos of pre-Galilean physics. As
geometrization is the most fundamental of these two, the very essence of modem
science, according to Koyre, is geometrization. Hence" ... the precursor and inspirer of
classical physics was not Buridan or Nicole Oresme but Archimedes." 17
Thus we can draw a line from Plato via Archimedes and to Galileo. Galileo
developed an "abstract" physics, in which the laws of motion, the law of freely falling
bodies, are deduced "abstractly" without involving the idea of force, and without
recourse to experiments with real bodies. The "experiments" that Galileo appealed to,
even those which he did actually perform, were not any more than thought experi-
ments.18 These are the only kind that could be performed on the objects of his physics,
because the objects ofGalileo's physics were not real, but ideal bodies. Real, material
bodies cannot be introduced into the unreal space of geometry. According to Koyre,
Aristotle understood this perfectly well. But he had not understood that one can
postulate abstract bodies, as had been recognised by Plato, and as had been done by the
Platonist Archimedes. There was, however, one important difference. Plato and
Archimedes could not think of setting these abstract bodies in motion. This was first
carried out by Galileo. 19
At another locus where Koyre describes the disagreement between Galileo and his
Aristotelian opponents, he places an even stronger emphasis on the Platonist aspect of
Galileo' s science:
No wonder that the Aristotelian felt himself astonished and bewildered by this amazing attempt
to explain the real by the impossible - or, which is the same thing, to explain real being by
mathematical being, because, as I have mentioned already, these bodies moving in straight lines
in infinite empty space are not real bodies moving in real space, but mathematical bodies moving
in mathematical space. 20
Koyre was a historian of science. But Husser! regarded history as a key to the present,
thus his project may be regarded as a "rational reconstruction" ofGalileo's science, and
of modem science in general. His basic idea is that the fundamental misunderstanding
of modem science is that one has forgotten that even the most theoretical sciences are
grounded in the life-world. In Husserl's words:
Briefly reminding ourselves of our earlier discussions, let us recall the fact we have emphasized,
namely, that science is a human spiritual accomplishment which presupposes as its point of
departure, both historically and for each new student, the intuitive surrounding world of life,
pregiven as existing for all in common. Furthermore, it is an accomplishment which, in being
practiced and carried forward, continues to presuppose this surrounding world as it is given in its
particularity to the scientist. For example, for the physicist it is the world in which he sees his
measuring instruments, hears timebeats, estimates visible magnitudes, etc. - the world in which,
furthermore, he knows himself to be included with all his activity and all his theoretical ideas. 21
Husser! does not mention quantum mechanics, but he makes explicit reference to
the theory of relativity. According to Husser!, the theory of relativity relies on
Michelson's experiment (usually known as the Michelson-Morley experiment),
including his apparatus with scales of measurement, etc. 22 Although the reference to the
Michelson-Morley experiment is historically erroneous/ 3 his main point is correct:
measuring instruments are explicitly referred to in the (special) theory of relativity.
Bohr's position is similar to Husserl's, although to my knowledge none of them
ever referred to each other. Bohr never tired of emphasizing that physics is a human
accomplishment, and presupposes skill and ordinary language. The human agent cannot
be abstracted away from the results of science. Therefore, objectivity in science is not
depicting a world independently of man. According to Bohr, it is impossible to
maintain such an ideal of objectivity. Objectivity must rather be understood as
intersubjectivity. 24 In a letter to the Danish author H. P. E. Hansen, Bohr writes: "In
physics we learn [... ] time and again that our task is not to penetrate into the essence of
things, the meaning of which we don't know anyway, but rather to develop concepts
which allow us to talk in a productive way about phenomena in nature." 25
Attention has often focussed on Bohr's emphasis on ordinary language as a
precondition for the language of physics, and one draws a parallel to Wittgenstein's
later philosophy. However, it can be argued that Wittgenstein's later philosophy entails
a relativism: language is an integrated part of a lifestyle, and one lifestyle is as good as
another. There is no yardstick to measure and compare them. However, in Bohr there
is no trace of this kind of relativism. In the next section I shall try to show why.
AN ALTERNATIVE ACCOUNT OF SCIENTIFIC OBJECTIVITY

We have seen that both Bohr and Husser! pointed to the importance of technology, in
particular instruments, in science. Bohr, for example, emphasized the indispensability
of "rigid, stable bodies like measuring rods, pointers, clocks, plates etc." in making
observations. 26 However, according to Bohr, the measuring instruments must be
described in the language of classical physics. One might think that it is quite the
opposite, that quantum mechanics is a precondition for classical physics, because
quantum mechanics describes the world at a more fundamental level than classical
60 RAGNAR FJELLAND
physics. Formally classical physics is a limiting case of quantum mechanics, when we

operate at a scale where Heisenberg's uncertainty relation is insignificant. Nevertheless,
Bohr argued that classical physics - in a certain sense - is a precondition for quantum
mechanics. His argument is that the measuring instruments must obey the laws of
classical physics in order to function as measuring instruments. This is one of the more
difficult points of Bohr's theory, and one of the most important.
Figure la. Figure lb.

Measuring instruments constructed by Bohr for use in the thought experiments discussed with Einstein.
I will go one step further, and emphasize the importance of Euclidean geometry in
the construction and operation of scientific instruments. Therefore, as Husser! argued,
a proper understanding of Euclidean geometry is the key to understanding the
mathematical sciences. This view is supported by Bohr's own illustrations (Figures la
and 1b and 2). The instrument consists of a diaphragm with a slit suspended by weak
springs from a solid yoke bolted to the support. It is important to recognize that the
bolts and the springs in Bohr's illustrations are not just ornamental. They are there to
show which parts of the instruments are rigidly connected, and which parts are
moveable. Even more striking are the basic Euclidean forms of the instruments. The
bolts and the springs can be replaced by technically more sophisticated devices, but in
the last resort we need rigid bodies to carry out measurements.
The philosopher of science Ronald Giere reports how surprised he was when he
noticed that the geometrical forms of a cyclotron facility were clearly visible in aerial
photographs. 27
Figure 2. The CERN proton syncrotron from 1967.

Figure 2 gives an illustration of an accelerator. The basic Euclidean forms, straight

line, circle and right angle, are evident. Giere points to the fact that geometrical aspects
also appear in formal and informal presentations in particle physics. He seeks part of
the explanation for this in cognitive patterns in our brains, making us predisposed to
Euclidean geometry. He refers to experiments with rats which allegedly demonstrate
that rats are also predisposed to Euclidean geometry. However, although I certainly
agree with Giere when he points to the significance of Euclidean geometry, I disagree
with his explanation of its significance. I think he is wrong in indicating that our
perceived world is Euclidean. Heelan has shown convincingly that the structure of
perceived space is not Euclidean. 28 The history of geometry supports this view. For
example, Greek geometry was not a theory of(the structure of) space. The two relevant
Greek words are "topos" and "chora." Neither of these words should be translated as
"space," and especially not as "Euclidean space." I think Martin Heidegger is right
when he asserts that the Greeks had neither a word nor a concept for what we call
"space.'m What Comford says of Plato's use of the word "chora'' could be said of the
Greek use of that word in general:
Chora is used of the post, station, office, 'place' that is filled, not vacant space ... 'Place' would,
indeed, be a less misleading translation of chora than 'space', because 'place' does not suggest an
infinite extent of vacancy lying beyond the finite sphere of the universe 30
Aristotle's theory of the universe as a system of "natural places" is very well in
agreement with this view. The natural place of a thing cannot be determined by, say,
three values in a coordinate system. To be in a natural place means to be part of a
whole. I think it is a good analogy to the Greek conception of place to say that a thing
is in its natural place in the same way as an organ is in its natural place in the organism.
Indeed, the Greek way of thinking was highly organic. This applied both to their
thinking about society, nature and the universe.
In "The Origin of Geometry," 31 Husser! sets out to trace the origin of Euclidean
geometry. He reconstructs the origin of geometry roughly as follows: The world
consists of material bodies, with different shapes and "material" qualities (color,
warmth, weight, hardness and so on). For technical praxis some particular shapes were
preferred. These are partly selected, partly produced and improved according to certain
directions of gradualness. Husser! describes how special forms are singled out: surfaces
according to if they are more or less smooth, more or less perfect. Edges according to
if they are more or less rough or even, for example more or less pure lines, angles,
more or less perfect points. Among surfaces, even surfaces are preferred and among
lines, straight lines are preferred, and so on. As technology makes progress, there is an
increasing interest in what is technically more refined. The ideal of perfection is pushed
further and further. So there is always an open horizon of conceivable improvements
to be further pursued.
The ideal shapes of Euclidean geometry, like straight lines and planes, grew out of
the praxis of technical perfecting. Husser! called them limit-shapes [Limesgestalten].
These can be regarded as the ideal limit that the process of perfection is approaching.
When these ideal shapes are made our objects of investigation, when we are engaged
in determining them and in constructing new shapes out of those already determined,
we are "geometers." Therefore, the ideal geometrical figures are produced by the
"method of idealization."
Patrick Heelan objects that Husser! makes an unwarranted assumption: we cannot
in general assume that "the sequence of particulars-and the technologies necessary to
62 RAGNAR FJELLAND
produce or recognize them- is infinitely perfectible. 'm On the contrary, the practising
experimental scientist knows that there is no such ideal limit: "Experience with
experimental processes indicates that for every kind of measurement process, there is
an optimal level of precision beyond which the validity of background assumptions
fail." I think Heelan is right. Husserl's background from pure mathematics and his
focus on an axiomatic ideal of mathematics and scientific theories prevented him from
being fully aware of the preconditions of scientific practice. However, he was aware
of some of the preconditions of measurements, for example in the following quotation:
This purpose [of producing objectivity] is obviously served by the art of measuring. This art
involves a great deal, of which the actual measuring is only the concluding part. On the one hand,
for the bodily shapes of rivers, mountains, buildings, etc., which as a rule lack strictly determining
concepts and names, it must create such concepts- first for their "forms" (in terms of pictured
similarity). 33
It is interesting to notice that Husserl mentions rivers and mountains. That the
problems involved in measuring this kind of object are far from trivial has later been
demonstrated by the mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot. He asked what might look like
a trivial question: How long is a coastline? He had observed that when he asked how
long the coast of for example Britain is, he always got one of two answers: "I don't
know, it is not my field," or "I don't know, but I will look it up in an encyclopaedia."
In both cases it is assumed that the question has an unambiguous answer. But it is not
that easy, and Mandelbrot used the coast of Britain to illustrate the difficulties involved.
A coastline is an example of an object where the ideal limit does not exist. It is a fractal
curve, and strictly speaking it is infinitely long. 34
ANTI-REDUCTIONISM
It is one of the main insights of Husserl's Crisis that almost all philosophers since
Descartes have taken a scientific world view as their starting point. In contrast to this
the slogan of phenomenology was: "Zur Sache selbst." I think that an even better
characterization ofHusserl's later philosophy would be the slogan: "Back to the life-
world!"
The most important difference between the life-world and the world of physics is
that the former has meaning, whereas the latter does not. This fundamental aspect of
the life-world may be illuminated by Heidegger's analysis of the concept of a thing in
Sein und Zeit. Heidegger starts by asking: Is it not an obvious starting point to claim
that the world consists of things? His answer is "No." According to Heidegger the
entities of the world of science are the result of theoretical attitude. But this way of
looking at things is secondary. Primarily we use and regard things as articles for
everyday use. A hammer (to take one ofHeidegger's favourite examples) is primarily
an article which we use for driving nails and so on, and only secondarily it is a physical
thing. Hence the hammer has a meaning, it refers to what tasks it can be used to
perform. To understand the meaning of a hammer is precisely to know what it can be
used for, and how to use it. Heidegger points out that the meaning of articles does not
come in addition to their being physical objects. On the contrary, to regard something
as a physical object presupposes an assumption of it as a tool. The experimental
physicist normally uses more complicated equipment than hammers, but measuring
instruments are nevertheless tools. To make experiments he has to handle those
instruments in a competent manner, and he needs good instruments. If he is
incompetent or his tools are bad, the measurements will be poor as well. But how can
we decide if an instrument, for instance a watch, is a good one? Regarded as a physical
object it can neither be good nor bad. But regarded as a tool its quality can be assessed,
and it is assessed in relation to the function it was constructed to perform.
One of the explicit aims ofHusserl's Crisis was to demonstrate that a "scientific"
psychology cannot be constructed after the ideal of physics. "The world of physics" is
grounded in the life-world, and constructed by idealization, as indicated previously.
"The world of psychology" is rather the life-world. Therefore, Husserl's program for
psychology was contrary to the "unity of science" movement of the logical positivists.
His program was rather the "disunity of science." Bohr maintained a similar view. His
alternative to reductionism in both biology and psychology was the notion of
complementarity. He first used the term complementarity in 1927 in the discussion of
the particle/wave dualism in quantum mechanics: The particle and wave pictures
display complementary, mutually excluding aspects of matter. Bohr later extended the
notion of complementarity to biology and psychology. For example, free will and
determinism are examples of complementary phenomena.
However, although free will and causal explanation of human actions represent
complementary aspects, they are not on the same par. In the same way as Husser!
argued for the primacy of the life-world vis a vis (for example) the world of physics,
the notions of free will and oflife are prior to notions like determinism and control. The
following quotation on the irreducibility of the phenomenon of life supports this view: 35
[W]e must keep in mind, however, that the conditions holding for biological and physical
researches are not directly comparable, since the necessity of keeping the object alive imposes a
restriction on the former, which finds no counterpart in the latter. Thus we should doubtlessly kill
an animal if we tried to carry the investigation of its organs so far that we could describe the role
played by single atoms in vital functions. In every experiment on living organisms, there must
remain an uncertainty as regards the physical conditions to which they are subjected, and the idea
suggests itself that the minimal freedom we must allow the organism in this respect is just large
enough to permit it, so to say, to hide its ultimate secrets from us. On this view, the existence of
life must in biology be considered as an elementary fact that cannot be explained, but must be
taken as a starting point in biology, in similar way as the quantum of action, which appears as an
irrational element from the point of view of classical mechanical physics, taken together with the
existence of the elementary particles, forms the foundation of atomic physics. The asserted
impossibility of a physical or chemical explanation of the function peculiar to life would in this
sense be analogous to the insufficience of the mechanical analysis for the understanding of the
stability of the atorns. 36
CONCLUSION
The "Science Wars" are about many things. However, I want to draw the attention to
an article by one who has been fighting at the frontlines from the very beginning:
Norman Levitt. He was the co-author both of Higher Superstition and The Flight from
Science and Reason. In a recent article, Levitt sums up the state of modem science:
I shall merely assert what can easily be argued: From the conceptual point of view, the sciences
are in an unprecedentedly robust state of health, strength, and vigor. Theoretical understanding
from biology to physics is deeper and sharper than it has ever been. Overall, there is greater unity
and greater cross-fertilization among the various scientific disciplines than has ever been seen. The
monistic, reductionistic point of view that form the main philosophical current of science seems
increasingly to be vindicated by a string ofbreakthroughs. 37
I think that monistic and reductionistic are key words here. According to this view
of science, both phenomenology and (the Copenhagen interpretation of) quantum
64 RAGNAR FJELLAND
mechanics are regarded as "subjectivist" and therefore anti-science. Hence it is no

accident that they are both under fire in the "science wars."
University ofBergen, Norway
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I want to thank the Niels Bohr Archive for the permission to reproduce the two drawings in Figure I and I
thank CERN for the permission to reproduce Figure 2 (CERN/PIO/RA 77-4).
NOTES
I want to point out that I find Sokal's article both clever and amusing, and that I regard the reaction of the
editors of Social Text as both irrational and even ridiculous.
Sheldon Goldstein, "Quantum Philosophy: The Flight from Reason in Science" in Paul Gross & Norman
Levitt, eds., Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and Its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1994). 119-126.
3 Mara Beller, "The Sokal Hoax: At Whom Are We Laughing?," Physics Today, September 1998: 29.
4 In this article I stress the close relationship between Bohr and Heisenberg. However, as pointed out by
Patrick A. Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity. A Study of the Physical Philosophy of Werner
Heisenberg (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965) there were no doubt important differences between them.
5 Werner Heisenberg, Physikalische Prinzipien der Quantentheorie (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut
1958 [1930]): 48
6 Heisenberg, "The Physical Content of Quantum Kinematics and Dynamics," reprinted in J.A. Wheeler,
W.H. Zurek, eds., Quantum Theory and Measurement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983 [1927]),
64.
7 Albert Einstein, Boris Podolsky, and Nathan Rosen. "Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical
Reality Be Considered Complete?" Physical Review 47/1935:777-80, reprinted in J.A. Wheeler and W.H.
Zurek, eds., Quantum Theory and Measurement.
8 In an article with the title "Is the Moon There When Nobody Looks?" (Physics Today, Aprill985: 38-47)
David Mermin quotes the following passage from Abraham Pais: "We often discussed his notions on
objective reality. I recall that during one walk Einstein suddenly stopped, turned to me and asked whether I
really believed that the moon exists only when I look at it." Pais, 'Subtle is the Lord... 'The Science and Life
ofAlbert Einstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).
9 Niels Bohr, "Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?"
Physical Rf?View 48/1935:696-702, reprinted in Wheeler and Zurek, eds., Quantum Theory and Measurement,
148.
10 Bohr, "Science and the Unity of Knowledge," reprinted in Niels Bohr: Collected Works, vol. 10
(Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1999 [1955]), 79-98. 89.

'' On the Bell inequalities and EPR experiments, see for example J. S. Bell, Speakable and Unspeakable
in Quantum Mechanics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
12 Quoted from Abraham Pais, Niels Bohr's Time, in Physics, Philosophy and Polity (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1991 ), 426.

13 In support of this view, see for example Dugald Murdoch, Niels Bohr's Philosophy of Physics
14 For historical details, see Heelan, "Husserl's Later Philosophy ofNatural Science," Philosophy ofScience
54/1987: 368. Heelan has a much more detailed description ofHusserl's project in Crisis than I can offer
here.
15 Edmund Husser!, Die Krisis der europiiischen Wissenschajlen und die transzendentale Phiinomenologie,
Walter Biemel, ed. (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1954), 52.

16 See Edwin A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundation ofModern Physical Science (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1972, Sec. rev. ed. [1924]). On the Platonist aspects ofGalileo's science, see especially pp. 64-
73.
17 Alexandre Koyre, Galileo Studies (London: Harvester, 1978 [1939]): 3.
18 Needless to say, this is an extreme interpretation. An almost opposite view, stressing the importance of
Galileo's experiments, can be found in Stillman Drake, Galileo at Work (Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 1978). However, without following Koyre all the way, one may nevertheless maintain that
he focussed on an essential aspect of Galileo's science.
19 Koyre, 37-38.
20 Koyre, "Galileo and Plato" in Koyre: Metaphysics and Measurement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1968 [1943]), 34.

21 Husser!, 121.
22 Ibid., 125.
23 For more details, see Pais 'Subtle is the Lord... ' The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, 116-117.
24 Cf. Murdoch, 105.
25 20 July 1935. In Pais, Niels Bohr's Time, in Physics, Philosophy and Polity, 446.
26 David Favrholdt, Fysik, bevidsthed, liv. Studier i Niels Bohrsfilosofi (Odense: Odense Universitetsforlag
1995), 89.
27 Ronald H. Giere, Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1988), 133.
28 Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy ofScience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
29 Heidegger, "Yom Wesen und Begriff der fysis" in Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1978), 246.
3 F. M. Cornford, Plato's Cosmology. The Timaeus of Plato (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977),
200n.
31 Included as Appendix VI in the English translation of Edmunds Husserl's, The Crisis of the European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1970).
33 Husser!, 1954, 27.

34 Benoit Mandelbrot, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (New York: Freeman and Company, 1983), 25ff.
35 For a more detailed discussion of complementarity and biology, see Henry J. Folse Jr., "Complementarity
and the Description of Nature in Biological Science," Biology and Philosophy 5/1990: 211-224.
36 Bohr, "Light and Life" in Bohr, Collected Works, vol. 10: 34.
37 Nom1an Levitt, "The End of Science, the Central Dogma of Science Studies, Monsieur Jourdain, and
Uncle Vanya" in Noretta Koertge, ed., A House Built on Sand. Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science
(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 280.
BABETTE E. BABICH
SOKAL'S HERMENEUTIC HOAX:

PHYSICS AND THE NEW INQUISITION
As a so-called post-analytic philosopher of science, 1 if also from the marginalized

sidelines, I have been able to tease analytic philosophers, calling them to account for
their desire to imitate scientists and their habit of numbering their paragraphs and their
passion for the acronym. Much more seriously, the scientists themselves have recently
begun to raise the ante for analytic philosophers in the so-called science wars. In essays
and op-ed pieces, physicists are repaying the philosophers' compliment - not only by
adopting, as popular science writers have long done, the role of cultural critic, but also
by assuming the mantle of philosophy. Science, once the arbiter of scientific truth,
proposes now to vet the truth about everything else. And, as we shall see below, the
philosophy of science appears to find itself compelled to offer an uncritical response.
In May of 1996, Alan Sokal, a New York University physicist, submitted an
inauthentic article to the journal Social Text. 2 Its inauthenticity, in Sokal's mind,
consisted in his pretending to articulate the political and philosophical implications of
recent physics research relevant to various theorems of cultural criticism
(multiculturalism or pluralism, deconstructive indeterminacy, and the valorization of
feminist or gender-open logical schemes). Next, in Lingua Franca, a journal devoted
to academic gossip and scandal, Sokal published a briefretraction. 3 Sokal's first article
(in ST) was bogus, 4 the second (in LF) explained why. For the world of academic
publishing, it seemed scandalous that the editors of ST failed (or pretended to fail) to
notice that the parallels he detailed between the results of recent physics research were
"nonsense." Sokal, for his own part, regarded his effort as "parodic."
In other words, and we do need to invoke other words here, it is possible to define
Sokal's STarticle as a parody (as Sokal insists) because the author was lying when he
wrote what he wrote. He did not mean it, as children say. But Sokal's definition of
parody is idiosyncratically superficial. Like a hoax or the related but just as banal
genre of the practical joke, the ST article required a complementary supplement in
order to be properly decoded. Thus Sokal's LF text retracted his ST text,
deconstructing it as less than earnestly intended - a coreferentiality reinforcing the
plausibility of the hypothesis that Sokal also enjoyed an "in" assured not only by his
own authority as a physicist, but by the lead ST editor himself where the complicity of
the LF editors may for their part be assumed. The difference between the parody Sokal
67
composed and what ordinarily counts as parody or satire is the difference between Jerry
Seinfeld and Jonathan Swift. Yet it is asserted again and again, much like the
populace's response to their naturalist emperor's new clothes, that Sakal's ruse is
uproariously funny. 5 Sokal, we are given to believe, is a great laugh for those who are
in on the joke, or more accurately, those who aspire to be thought of as in on the joke. 6
Accordingly, popular science writers, physicists and others, but above all, practitioners
of the philosophy of science have been united in their convicted assertions of
appreciative resonance. 7 The general response thus continues to be a strikingly uniform
affirmation of the amusement value of the "hoax" as amusing - even worthy of "awe"
in the case of Peter Caws. 8 Even Mara Beller's critical perspective does not deny but
only proposes to deepen the target and the consequences to be drawn from the joke. 9
Parody or prank, classification of Sokal 's game is hardly the issue. The stunt, the
sheer achievement of it (I suppose this is what drew Caws's good philosophical breath),
is the thing. A number of attacks and counterattacks have been proffered, mostly, as
with Steven Weinberg's vigorous effort, 10 on behalf of the prankster- for who among
philosophers of science would willingly assume the part of the dupe? The only
defenses on offer are those from the side of Social Text's editors, and none of these
take more than an overly legalistic tack in charging "science fraud." Science, they tell
us, "ought" to play fair and Sokal, they tell us, right though he is, ought to have known
better. Other, embarrassingly irrelevant, defenses follow the thematics, though
occasionally correcting the schematic flaws, of Stanley Fish's uninflected and less than
tactful argument in the New York Times. 11 Better defenses, like Dorothy Nellkin's essay
in the Chronicle ofHigher Education, analyze the science wars in terms of desperate
scientists seeking scapegoats to blame for the economic troubles in which they now
find themselves, while Nelkin advises against the long-term efficiency of divisive
academic bickering. 12 Defenses of ST offered from the left likewise, and this is
important to emphasize, assume the accuracy of all charges raised (one ought to have
invited "peer"- i.e., other physicists'- reviews) and, as accurately summarized in
Ellen Willis's Village Voice essay, recall the scrambling for credit among extremist
groups in the wake of a terrorist attack. 13 Thus most of the reviews concur with Sakal's
fundamental claim: Eliminate unclarity and all will be clear in (science) love and
(science) war. And Willis herself, decidedly on the left and writing for the defense,
decries the fuzziness of "porno lingo" and the "hermetic verbiage .. . covering up
muddled thinking," Weinberg, on the right and on the attack, is no less confident in his
claim that physics prose (he is thinking of the theory of special relativity) is clearly
written, whereas philosophical expression (he invokes Jacques Derrida, other authors
on the clarity rampage name Theodore Adorno, himself a dedicated opponent of jargon
- and who will ask what to make of this? - and who will draw the still-needed
connection that remains to be articulated between Derrida and Adorno, refracted via
Husserl's Origin of Geometry?) is not. 14 IfWeinberg is compelled to refrain from citing
physics prose per se to make his point, that is because, as he affirms, physics naturally
requires technical terminology while philosophy requires no such terminology and has
no comparable training prerequisites. 15 The leftist contingent asserts this same
imperative , which conveniently reflects the stylistic mandate of establishment analytic
philosophy. Ah, well, sigh the intellectuals who ought to know better, if only things
were said simply and plainly, clearly and distinctly, we would then have the truth. This
SOKAL'S HOAX: PHYSICS AND THE NEW INQUISITION 69
is a popular and democratic ideal. But we need to ask, as Nietzsche once did, is truth
simple? 16 Better go further and ask, Is anything simple?
The conviction about which the science wars are fought is that there exists a well-
established, explicitly anti-science and irrationalist movement. This perspective
antedates the Sokal affair, corresponding to a series of inquisitorial books by Paul
Gross and Norman Levitt, beginning with the book Higher Superstition: The Academic
Left and its Quarrels with Science in 199417 and it is reflected in the title of the 1995
meeting of the New York Academy of Science, The Flight From Reason. According
to the various scientists, logicians, and philosophers speaking at the New York
conference, the problem is that the grand and noble enterprise of science is under attack
from feminist, deconstructive, and postmodernist critiques. The culprit is the
disciplinary obscurantism indulged in by critics of science who fail to "understand"
science: which failure yields complex and vague academic discourse. Accordingly, and
this is the neatly emotional (not logical) conclusion found, the responsibility for an
increasingly negative public perception of science and thus for the recent decline in
federal support for science research - translating to a "war" on science - lies in the
subversive effects of the cult of irrationalism in the academy or at least in the English
departments of various universities. Nip the obscurantism, bad writing, and thought
patterns of deconstruction and postmodernism in the bud, and social enthusiasm (and
government funding levels) for the supercollider and other high ticket research
programs will be up to speed in no time. No more social constructivist talk: bring back
scientific reality.
I do not here propose to review the merits of the claim that only irrational forces
could be behind the decline in federal support levels (the projected budget for the
supercollider was on the order of billions rather than the physics routine measure of
millions of dollars) not only because the arcana of the national economy manages to
elude comprehension from either conservative or liberal perspectives but also because,
as the level of support for research on the human genome project makes very clear, that
same potential public support seems undiminished, given the right appeal. Hence I
address the myth of a war on science as a rhetorical fancy. For what is worth
emphasizing is that both sides in the so-named science wars claim the side of science.
As Nelkin argues, the Sokal affair should be read in terms of the ideological
program of the pro-science, anti-irrationalism movement. Yet, the anti-science
movement that the anti-irrationalist faction is supposed to oppose lacks a manifest
foundation in popular culture. That is, the charge is not that one or two voices critique
science (these can surely be found) but rather that this critique has popular or mass
support as well as undue public influence in the academy itself But this is false.
Academics are convicted pro-scientists, one and all. And the public (which includes
the academy), far from being anti-science lionizes science as much as it ever did,
agitating not for less research to solve social problems, such as AIDS or breast and
prostate cancer, but for more and better research. If the public advocates support for
alternative medical research, say, it is because the public believes in empirical efficacy,
scientific tests, and the value of experiment far more than it believes in blindly
submitting to AMA conservatism. In other words, what the public expects of science
is that it be science, that is: that it employ scientific or experimental investigation rather
than relying on paradigmatic authority. The public even turns to science and scientists
for spiritual guidance, regarding Stephen Hawking as a cultural as well as an
intellectual hero, like Albert Einstein. Both New Age movements and fundamentalist
conservatives appeal to scientific authority in arguing their various positions - even
those proposed against received scientific views. To claim an anti-science attitude lacks
a basis in popular sentiment does not mean that I argue that the scientists' own anxiety
is not genuine. Plato, inventing the kind of thinking that would make science possible,
pointed to unregulated mythic beliefs, poetry, and particular musical modes as the
greatest dangers to, or enemies of, rational society. In the same tradition, modem
science long ago named the church or religious belief the incarnation of irrationality,
and, borrowing the notion of martyrdom from the church, wrote its own story as a
history of persecution. The conviction of the threat posed by ongoing religious
hostility to science persists even where the scientific sensibility is dominant or
unrivaled. (Just think of the pro-Darwinist perspective fueled in no small part by a
knee-jerk response to creationism, a response happily ignoring the confidence on the
part of the creationist not that science is wrong but rather that creationism is science.)
Such change as there has been in public sentiment toward science ought not be
interpreted as a sign of distrust but the excess of confidence which exactly modem
approbation and enthusiasm yields at the postmodem end of the day as the increasing
disappointment and impatience - still not with the ideal of scientific progress but rather
and only with its slow pace. Rather than an anti-science perspective, this
disappointment results from the public's overweening trust in science. The value of
science was never the production of pure knowledge; the strong cultural "good" of
science (in Charles Taylor's economically informed sense of strong) has been all along
inseparable from its technological embodiments or inventions. The rhetoric of scientific
and technological progress has been a rhetoric of war against the foes of humankind:
the war on cancer and poverty, the battle against HIV, the struggle against old age and
death itself. The public that heard these claims subscribed to the implications of the
metaphor, which implies a resolution or, ideally, a victory in a finite matter of time,
accordingly the public happily assumes that the "scientific future" (with its attendant
technological benefits) should have arrived by now.
This is the time of our inevitably postmodem discontent. Thus I have argued that
any changed public perception of science results not from growing distrust but
disappointed confidence. It is not that the public has lost its trust but that the public is
increasingly eager to see science fulfill its promise.
CHAOS AND PARADIGM

For most commentators, the scandal is that Sokal's ST article was accepted for
publication. Yet the conviction (which is equally modem and postmodem) that
scientific rationality represents the supreme intellectual perspective played a vastly
more pernicious role in this case. Not anti-science sentiment on the part of the ST
editors but exactly pro-science prejudice worked to invite a scientist to offer a
"hermeneutic" analysis in the first place. And this pro-science prejudice persists, after
the fact, in the happy fantasy that all the trouble could have been avoided had real
("natural," mathematically sophisticated, not literary scholars and not "social")
scientists been invited to referee Sokal's essay.
The problem is twofold: it is a problem of translation between conceptual schemes,
as Donald Davidson or as Alasdair Macintyre might say, or as the late Thomas Kuhn
might (but would not) have said, of translation across incommensurable paradigms. For
Sakal's difficulties began with his consummate inability (an inability typical of natural
scientists) to attempt to comprehend the theoretical project of different social scientists'
and cultural critics' reflections on the social and political conditions and implications
of science, together with a flat-footed theoretical grasp of linguistic functions not to
begin to speak of the meaning of hermeneutics. As some humanists are weak in
mathematics and science, perhaps it is only fair that some physicists be deficient in the
discursive complexities of rhetoric and thought. But what is to be said of and for those
humanists on the postrnodem side, who - in their enthusiasm for the literary value of
the sheerest notion of information science, chaos theory, and indeterminacy (that most
delicious of free-play terms)- have been so thoroughly seduced by those metaphors
that researchers and theorists have, for their own part, appropriated to express scientific
and mathematical relations? Attracted by the literary resonances of these metaphors,
postrnodemists have gone on to "detect" significances irrelevant to their use within the
confines of science. Yet, pace N. Katherine Hayles and a mixed array of grad students,
chaos theory per se neither uses nor entails reference to Hesiod's invocation of the
primordial generativity of chaos 18 nor does it invite parallels with Joycean chassis much
less the inventions ofThomas Pynchon. The belief in an openness to radical questions
within such disciplines as physics and information science, explicitly asserted by Jean-
Franc;ois Lyotard and characterizing a "new" philosophy of science in the mind of Don
Ihde and others, depends upon a na1ve optimism betraying once again an ordinal and
ordinarily modernist- an exactly pro-science- sensibility. The position of science as
arbiter of truth and value from its inception and throughout modem culture - a status,
as more than one critic has noted, akin to that of religion in premodern societies -
remains utterly unchallenged and all-too-modem a constant in postmodem thought. 19
HERMENEUTICS OF DECEPTION AND RHETORICS OF SUSPICION
This supreme value of science ought to be kept in mind for the sake of an hermeneutic
reading of the text Sokal offered to perpetrate his hoax. Sokal 'sST essay proposed to
offer the reader "A Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity." What was
claimed in this essay, if read on its own terms and how, again on its own terms, ought
the reader to have read this text? These are perfectly fine hermeneutic preliminaries to
a reading of any text, but in the case of Sokal 's averred hoax, it must be underscored
that any reading is necessarily a re-reading in the way that most texts are not usually
re-read but simply read again and again (one returns to the text, like the Bible or
Aristotle's Ethics, one does not re-read it so much as one reads it again, where re-
reading has the tone of the peremptory finality with which a disputed decision is re-
read or a questionable exam is re-read). And to complicate the task of re-reading, the
academic reader reflexively eschews a text retracted and stigmatized as a hoax by its
author. That is the part in us that strains to see both duck and rabbit, that
conscientiously reminds us that the two horizontal lines of the Muller-Lyer illusion are
"really" equal in length. The intellectual's desire for truth is not unrelated to the
schoolchild's fear of being tricked.
But, just to read his text, Sokal's stated intention or programme as expressed in his
ST essay was exactly not a claimed argument and exactly not the affirmation of
anything like a finished assertion. Thus in the introduction to his ST article, Sokal
cautions that his remarks are "of necessity tentative and preliminary." Thereby Sokal
claims to offer no more than an experimental reflection, a venture, an exactly essayistic
musing. He goes further as he builds his Trojan horse for the editors of Social Text:
"I do not pretend to answer all the questions that I raise. My aim is, rather, to draw the
attention of readers to these important developments in physical science and to sketch
as best as I can their philosophical and political implications. I have endeavored here
to keep mathematics to a bare minimum ... " 20
The interpretive problem for an appropriate hermeneutic of this text is not then at
issue, given Sokal's prefatory disclaimers. Armchair physics, just like armchair
metaphysics, must be given a great deal of antinomic leeway. At issue, since Sokal
does not claim that his text is conclusive but offers only "tentative and preliminary"
speculation, is not the physicist's accuracy per se of what he reviews as his own
articulation of"the philosophical and political implications" of certain "developments
in physical science." Moreoever, Sokal offered to give not an account of those
developments (as he cannot do in any case as he promises not to employ the very
symbolic language that would be needed to do so, that is mathematics, the language of
physical science) but an explicit interpretation offered perforce on the level of the
dilletant, for Sokal's own formation is physics, not philosophy (not even analytic style
philosophy), not political science or cultural criticism. Thus the "philosophical and
political implications" he proposes are not those of an expert witness, where in recent
recuperations of the history of the physical sciences, such expertise has come to be
named not for its authoritative bravado but for the restraint, however calculated, of
modesty.
Since Sokal does not propose to relate an expert scientific account of such
"developments in physical science" but only to offer an interpretation of the same and
employing disciplinary terms which are not his own, the text in question can only
represent what philosophers since Plato quite technically name opinion. Since we are
talking not about the "real world" of physical facts much less the "truth" as such but
merely what Sokal professes to believe, it is essential that what is at stake is only the
meta-textual- and withal non-hermeneutic- issue of whether Sokal meant (as he has
since told us that he did not mean) what he said in his original essay, disclaimer and all.
For apart from qualifiers routine enough in a provisional or speculative or experimental
text, Sokal's only clear assertion, no matter whether earnestly intended or not, concerns
his effort "to keep mathematics to a bare minimum." Here his claim is accurate enough
for the subsequent text cites a single equation, Gii = 8 GTu. All things considered then,
in his preface, Sokal does no more than give himself a warrant for a scientific extern's
superficiality, renouncing the responsibility ofhis own specialist's rigor, and even duly
warning the reader in advance against evaluative skepticism.
And yet if Sokal' s ST text begins with such tentative disclaimers, his LF text takes
an altogether different tone. Here, maliciously indignant, he announces the success of
his ST hoax, claiming his right to serve as judge, jury, and executioner of whole
disciplines other than his own. Yet nothing could be more obvious than that Sokal fails
to understand his own sentences - he seems to regard his disclaimers as the equivalent
of protocol statements in co-authored science texts, fatuously pro forma and adjunct
to the report of the text as such - nor does he seem to comprehend the point of
reflective critique. In essence, Sokal has no sense of the complex nature and range of
the kind of things one can do with words. For texts proposed as speculative and critical,
drawing the implications assessed in the author's view as "philosophical and political"
are offered for the similar judgment of the reader's assessment of the same. Such non-
assertoric texts do not report fact but invite further reflection; as readings of possibility,
they are submitted to question. Such texts are under no compulsion to follow the logic
of a physicist, particularly one who does not mean what he says. That is, although
Sokal' s text is presented under the aegis of a physicist's authority (this applies to both
STand LF texts), his ST text does not argue on the basis of authority because it does
not argue. Speculative, interpretive texts exceed authorized limits as exactly alternate
readings. While meaningful discourse need not (although it may well) observe
ordinary patterns of logic, it is a capital if also a paradoxical and inevitably obscure
point that philosophical speculation does not always do so. And it is salutary to add
that reflection on the fundamental value oflogical constructions cannot do so. It is for
this reason from Nietzsche to Davidson (never mind Duhem and Quine and scholars
of mathematical and formal systems can add other names beyond Godel and Turing)
that a critique of logic and truth cannot be conducted on the ground of logic or truth.
It is for this reason that Nietzsche wrote in "tissues" (in aphorisms and patterned
discussions, ranging contradictory points in productive tension): "the problem of
science," as Nietzsche put it, "cannot be recognized in the context of science.'m This
together with Nietzsche's penchant for inconsistency and explicit self-contradiction,
is usually taken to mean all manner of things - not one of them good with respect to
Nietzsche's scientific qualifications- but, in the current context, Nietzsche's claim is
reasonable enough. All it entails is that the problem of science is ineluctably
philosophical not scientific. We need to hear from philosophers on the problem of
science- not from physicists. And when I say this I am very aware that this claim flies
in the face of an old conviction of the very young discipline that is the philosophy of
science (a discipline, notably, that did not exist as such in Nietzsche's day). This is the
conviction that to philosophize on science one ought to be a scientist oneself (this is an
ideal prerequisite as, however much they may aspire to be regarded on the same level,
philosophers of science typically are not scientists). Yet I have argued elsewhere that
Nietzsche's point is not without substance and that to the extent that the scientist Ernst
Mach philosophised about Knowledge and Error, as indeed he did, to that same extent,
he too, like Ludwik Fleck, was a philosopher. Patrick Heelan's fine lattice of
languages and discourse communities illustrates something of the way one wears such
different hats, not simultaneously, and not merely cumulatively - that is: what is
phenomenological about it, to borrow Bob Crease's language, is the aletheic dimension
-to use the only word, regrettably Heideggerian, we can have for the intuitively real
(phenomenological) but counter-intuitive aspect of any revelation of truth as an
occluding focus or emphasis that is always and also concealing or distraction.
While in LF Sokal challenges the editors of ST for failing to check the accuracy of
his claims about the "new" physics' research standards, the editors of LF clearly
granted him the same leeway, clearly unchallenged, with respect to the "new" physics
as with his use of the coordinate and not scientific but patently philosophic terms
subjective (by which he may mean relative, if we adopt the interpretive generosity that
Sokal attacks) and objective (by which he means something vague yet commanding
enthusiasm). When Sokal asserts that there is an objective world, he apparently means
to speak of a world real and independent of the knower and of the knower's capacity
and way of knowing. But there is a difference of a whole philosophical kind between
the claim that we cannot know the world (real, true, and objective) except on the terms
of our capacity to know the (real, true, objective) world and the claim that there is no
world. The difference has to do with the transformation of understanding involved in
speaking of the real world, the true world, following upon consideration of what it
means to speak of knowledge and truth. This last is an issue demanding an
epistemological sophistication rarely characteristic of scientists.
Without question, Sokal is an academic "mole" of precisely the kind necessary to
an utterly fantastic or imaginary "war" between science and the supposed demons of
postmodemism or feminism (which last is an odd place to find enemies as most
"feminist" treatments of science and the philosophy of science are largely about
enfranchisement - that is, getting more women in on the practice and thus in on the
discourse of science- andfar less about critique) or "the left" (thus Sokal's political
sympathies with past leftist traditions are often mentioned to ensure his role as such a
mole or else as vouching for his "moral" honesty). Yet assuming the mole's function
is the only possible war-making tactic, just as mockery is the only weapon at the
disposal of analytic philosophy contra continental approaches to philosophy (and as I
practice the same from the other side). This is not because continental approaches are
otherwise unapproachable, it is because, as in the case of most cold-wars, the battle has
already been won and winning and losing sides have both been decided in advance.
Given the institutional dominance of both science and its acolyte, analytic philosophy,
any kind of"reasoned" debate would have to be conducted on the ground of(real: hard
or true) science and this just because it is essentially and inevitably irrational to
question the value of rationality. For this same self-referential reason, the task of
critical reflection on science, on rationality and logic, is not at all the first or proper task
of cultural and social criticism, thus it is not on evidence in the sort of work that
generally appears in ST or LF. Much less can the task be undertaken on the basis of
sociological or anthropological studies of science, inasmuch as sociology and
anthropology are and very much wish to be- see Bruno Latour's sorrowful recantation
in his recent book, Pandora's Hope 22 - part and parcel of the scientific enterprise. No
one, as Nietzsche repeats the old proverb, can jump over his own shadow. A reflective
inquiry into the nature of science, reason, or truth requires the resources not ofliterary
or cultural critique, nor indeed of the social context of science, but only the resources
of critical philosophy, if such a critique is indeed possible in an exclusively science-
approbative climate such as our own. It is essential to add that just such a critique is
presupposed by (although this has come to mean: foreclosed in) the very enlightenment
ideal of science as such.
The point of this paradoxical coincidence is that those philosophers who make it
their business to question science, or reason, or truth are routinely charged with the
offense or crime of irrationalism and are accordingly re-categorized - at their Sunday
best - as poets (Nietzsche), mystics (Heidegger and sometimes Wittgenstein), or
romantics (all three). But this same categorization is also the basis for denigrating and
excluding such perspectives. That I think such repudiation is wrong is by now clear,
but my reasons are far from postmodem. Philosophy has long defined itself as the
discipline of the rational, the science of science, the love of truth. But the philosopher,
as lover of wisdom or truth, was from the first a seeker, a radical questioner, an inquirer
after origins. Where the pursuit of truth is not to be confessional or devotional but
much rather critical- that is: where it is possible not only to pursue the ideal of truth
but always also to ask "Why truth?"- the philosophy of science cannot simply invoke
the value of science as an unquestioned ideal but ought first to raise the question of
science, in Nietzsche's words, "as problematic, and questionable.'m This task has yet
to be accomplished, but Nietzsche, Heidegger, and other nontraditional philosophers
have at least made the project of a critical philosophy of science plausible. 24
AGAINST POSTMODERN SOPHISTICATION IN SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
The reason so many postmodemists believe that science is on their side is because they
are persuaded, like everyone else in Western, which is to say, global society, that
science is inherently liberating: science is conceived as free play- the sphere in which
orthodoxies have no purchase. But this belief comes at the cost of a coopted
conventionality. Any assumption ofpostmodem sophistication on the part of science
and technology is illusory, yet this does not mean it is not an accidental
misunderstanding. With deadly earnest levity and self-declared irony, the vision of
postmodem sophistication promises to overcome the limitations of the modem idea of
progress by means of what is "technically" called "playfulness." What is meant by this
playfulness is modem, techno-jocularity- Feynberg style.
There is and there can be nothing like a postmodem perspective interior to science
itself and this is essentially because the project of science is an ineliminably modem
project. Hence there is no postmodem science as such. The project of science is not the
reflection upon, not the thinking of, or theory of, but and only the consecration or
certification of, knowledge. And science is non-self-reflexive because it is the only
"episteme" in town. As science occupies the place once held by the church in Western
society, so, whatever our politics and whatever our stand on global warming,
pesticides, gene-altered grains, we all run to science for justification of our position.
As the free thinker once said of the church, we have no choice but to love its poison. 25
We are all courtiers of truth, however awkward our rhetoric; we are all defenders of
rational inquiry, no matter our critical suspicions. Hence we are bound to go, in
Nietzsche's words, "straight into-the old ideal." 26
The critique of science cannot be conducted by social scientists -neither historians
nor anthropologists, neither sociologists nor rhetoricians for the good and simple reason
that all of these specialist scholars, "social" or not, are scientists themselves. Instead
such critique, in order to be a critique must be the task of a philosophy prepared, for
the sake of truth, reason, and science, to question rather than to assume the values of
truth, rationality, and science. Facing that task, Nietzsche proposed to illuminate the
project of science on the ground of art, and to consider art, in tum, in the light of life.
Does this mean that science, like art, is a human invention? Does this make it, horror
of horrors for Ian Hacking, a social construct? 27 Yes, and of course. But we ought not
forget that social constructs, like art and like science, exceed in both influence and
significance the cultural world that give them birth. The Vichian axiom that we can
know only what we make does not mean, as Nietzsche' genealogical critique has taken
pains to emphasize, that we already know what we have done. Still, this is not to say,
to speak in the vernacular of an Alan Sokal, that there is an objective (really real) world
apart from our knowledge of it. The question of the objective reality of the world apart
from our knowledge of it is an absurdity. Not because it is patent that the objectively
real world is given with or without the human knower- the very logic of the claim, of
what it means for the world to be given without one to whom it would be given denies
the possibility of the assertion - but because it makes no sense, to use yet another
Nietzschean metaphor, to wonder about the way the world would appear if we could
(as we cannot) cut our heads off and still take a look. 28 The "really-objective" look of
things is unknowable - not so far, not up until now - but intrinsically unknowable
because the world as it can be known by human, subjective inquiry, however scientific,
however objectively attuned, can only count as an object as such for a knowing subject.
It is not uniquely the role of science to prove the patently objective existence of an
objective world. Medieval theologians could "prove" the existence of angels on the
grounds of their necessity, much as current physicists demand or posit the existence of
neutrinos to enforce modem theories of stellar evolution. The aether once consigned
to the realms of romantic fancy by scientists seems poised to be reinstalled one day as
the framework for the energies of the universe. Physicists and scientists generally have
very simple notions of reality, truth, and objectivity, and (as social and historical
studies of science attest) they are notoriously unreliable witnesses to their own practice.
They are in a word, incompetent philosophers of science. But the reliability of
scientists in accounting for science reflects a quite ordinary self-reflexive limit, and in
any case the value of science is practical. Science is skilled labor and, in that sense, an
art. Scientists know how to do things, but that does not mean that science has to do
with thinking. For calculation is not about reflection; it is about the production of
effects, within limits, for the sake of appearances. 29
CONCLUSION
I began with a reference to jesting and the perspective that can aid such jests. Unlike
Alan Sokal' s, I fully intend the literal point of such provocations. Philosophy of the
analytic and reigning kind does in general seek to model itself on the image of science,
and physics now has adopted the pose (for the media, anyway) of wisdom. But why
should physics neglect its own affairs to play the role of purveyor of meytaphysical
truths or indeed to stage elaborate hoaxes? Little of moment has occurred in physics
since 1925 - some would even argue that the great era of scientific achievement is not
still to come and that that is not, as some popular science writers argue, because the
truth has been discovered. And it may have made a difference for his scientific career
that Werner Heisenberg, for example, enjoyed a classically traditional education,
requiring that already as a young man he had read Immanuel Kant's reflections on the
problem of space and time. Might Heisenberg's familiarity with philosophical concepts
(as the very philosophical tradition of thinking hard and unthinkable questions, where
philosophy is neither logic nor science nor art but a kind of love) not have been
essential to his scientific work as well as his later popular essays on these very themes?
It is fashionable to claim that Einstein was not a great expert in mathematics. But, like
Heisenberg, Einstein enjoyed the broad education, including the study of philosophy,
that is altogether missing in the formation oftoday's scientists, not only in physics but
increasingly in biology (and this means medical science) as well. The mathematical or
computer literacy required for the sake of practical proficiency in any given scientific
discipline has come to replace the kind of conceptual literacy once taken for granted
in the formation of an Einstein or a Heisenberg.
I am far from making a plea for courses on Shakespeare for Cosmologists. I argue
for the special value of philosophical study in the education of scientists just because
that study is a step in the direction of learning how to think. Heidegger observed that
science does not think; and before him, not only Nietzsche but also Descartes, who was
a mathematician as well as a scientist and philosopher, emphasized the danger of
assuming that thinking was a skill one did not need to learn. 30 Science can learn to
think. What a revolution thinking might be for science I do not pretend to say. But there
is no way to thinking without philosophy.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The current essay was first presented to a meeting of international scholars focusing on Hermeneutics in the
Philosophy ofScience at Stony Brook in June of 1996. The original version of this essay appeared in Common
Knowledge 6/2 (September 1997): 23-33 and acknowled special gratitude to Patrick Heelan. A second, more
popular revision of the essay also appeared in Telos.
NOTES
Among others, I take this enthusiastic description from a graduate student correspondent at Cambridge
University.
2 Alan Sokal, "Transgressing the Boundaries Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,"
Social Text, 46147 14.1-2 (Spring/Summer 1996): 217-52 (hereafter cited as ST). The bulk of the essay is
comprised of citations from other authors, notably Luce Irigaray and Stanley Aronowitz, and fully half of the
page range given corresponds to footnotes and references (231-52). Sokal 's text is absent from Science Wars,
ed., Andrew Ross (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), which reprints the essays in the original ST issue
with additions but only an obliquely casual reference to Sokal, his hoax, or its aftermath. "Preface," 14. The
silence of philosophers of science in the five years that have intervened remains striking. One has to cast
in one's lot, and philosophers of science are anxious to ensure that their vote be counted along with Sokal
-not Social Text.
Sokal, "A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies," Lingua Franca (May/June 1996): 62-64 (LF).
See comments on this in my introduction, "The Fortunes oflncommensurability" above.
See the first footnote to Ragnar Fjelland's essay above, or see any standard discussion of the Sokal hoax.
This is the more sobering implication and the point of the article by Mara Beller, "The Sokal Hoax: At
Whom are We Laughing?" Physics Today (Sept. 1998): 29-34.
7 Thus strikingly little has been written on the issue from within the philosophy of science as such. And
this reticence or caution easily crosses the analytic-continental divide- strange as that may (or should) seem
-given the fact that Sokal's assault on hermeneutics as such appears right there in the title of the hoax itself.
Thus despite the fact that this essay was first given at the above acknowledged conference on Hermeneutics
in the Philosophy of Science in June of 1996 and although the essays then presented were subsequently
published in a special issue of Continental Philosophy Review, this particular essay was exactly exluded
because the journal editor expected to feature a previously solicited text from another author (perhaps himself
a scientist) on Sokal in some (still today) forthcoming issue and thought the matter settled.
8 In a letter published in reaction to the topic; Caws does not devote an essay to the theme.
Beller, loc. cit.
10 Steven Weinberg, "Sokal's Hoax," New York Review of Books, 8 August 1996, 11-15. For a rare and
insightful analysis ofWeinberg's project and ambition see Alasdair Macintyre's preface to the second volume
of the two volume collection, Nietzsche and the Sciences: B. Babich, ed., Nietzsche, Epistemology, and
Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), xv-xvii.
11 See Lingua Franca (July/August 1996): 55-64 for a round of letters from assorted academics, including
a four-page reply by Bruce Robbins and Andrew Ross, editor of the original Social Text issue. See Liz
McMillen's review of the hoax and its aftermath in the Chronicle ofHigher Education, 28 June 1996, Al3.
12 Dorothy Nelkin, "What are the Science Wars Really About?" Chronicle of Higher Education, 26 July
1996, A52. See also Nelkin, "The Science Wars: Responses to a Marriage Failed" in Ross, Science Wars,
114-22, and Charles E. Rosenberg's review of Marcia Angell's Science on Trial ("The Silicon Papers," New
York Review of Books, 14 July 1996, 9-10). A wryly oblique defense of "ironic" or postmodem science
appeared in the July 16th issue of the New York Times, authored by John Horgan, senior writer at Scientific
American and author of The End of Science.
13 Ellen Willis, "My Sokaled Life: Or, Revenge of the Nerds," Village Voice 25 June 1996,20-21.
14 Weinberg's case works because, although he tactically cites Derrida on (of all things) relativity, he does
not cite physicists' writing on the same theme.

15 See Heidegger's comparison of the training and sensitive exigence commonly recognized as required for
understanding art, such as painting (Heidegger gives the example of Paul Klee's last paintings) or of poetry
(such as Trakl), or physics (Heisenberg), and the still common expectation that philosophy might somehow
be immediately transparent to the understanding. Martin Heidegger, Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh
(New York: Harper, 1977), 2.
16 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols. Nietzsche further asks, "What really is it in us that wants 'the
truth'?" Beyond Good and Evil, I I, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 15. That
many scholars continue to fail to understand Nietzsche is nicely underscored in practice in Steve Fuller's
contribution to the present volume.
17 Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academy Left and Its Quarrels with Science
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). See also Norman Hackerman and Kenneth Ashworth,
Conversations on the Use ofScience and Technology (Denton: North Texas University Press, 1996). For an
extended, critical review, see Roger Hart, "The Flight from Reason: Higher Superstition and the Refutation
of Science Studies," in Science Wars, 259-92.
18 For a discussion of this archaic meaning see my "Nietzsche's Chaos sive natura: Evening Gold and the
Dancing Star," forthcoming: Portug. revistafilosofia. Vol2, 2001. Most continentally minded discussions
of chaos such as the French pro-science enthusiasts Edgar Morin and Henri Atlan as well as younger scholars
in the literary, cultural wake ofDeleuze, Baudrillard, and fractal fancy do not take chaos in this sense. For
an ex'ception, see Jean Granier, La probleme de la verite dans la philosophic de Nietzsche (Paris: Seuil, 1966).
19 Though for a reading of the subversive power of science as an agency of patriarchy and violence, and thus
as inimical to leftist ideals, see the introduction and lead essay in Geraldine Finn's, Why Althusser Killed His
Wife: Essays on Discourse and Violence (Atlantic Highland: Humanities Press, 1996).
20 Sokal, "Transgressing the Boundaries," 218. This qualifying introduction thus purported to offer the
services of a physicist to champion the views of feminist and leftist critics on the ultimate meaning of
quantum theory. The editors of STwere not prepared to look such a flattering gift horse in the mouth.
21 Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, "Attempt at a Self-Criticism," 2, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Vintage, 1967).
22 Bruno Latour, cited, with Hacking, in Babich, "The Fortunes oflncommensurability" above.
23 Nietzsche explains this as his own achievement, articulating "the problem of science itself, science
considered for the first time, as problematic, as questionable" (Ibid.).

24 See my Nietzsche's Philosophy ofScience (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994) and the
two volumes, Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge and Critical Theory and Nietzsche, Epistemology and the
Philosophy ofScience, Babich, with R. S. Cohen, ed., Boston Studies in the Philosophy ofScience (Dordrecht:
Kluwer, 1999).
25 Cf. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy ofMorals, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Book, 1969), I, 9.
26 Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, III, 25. Translation modified.
27 See Ian Hacking's post-factum effort to retrieve his own words from the tender mercies of more cavalier
readers, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999).
28 This charming image is Nietzsche's Kantian variant: "We behold all things through the human head and
cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remains what of the world would still be like if one
had cut it off." Human, All Too Human, II, 29, trans., R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986), 15.
29 This is the practical conditionality that yields Nietzsche's best proposal for a philosophy of science: "to
look at science in the light of art, but at art in the light oflife."' Birth of Tragedy, 19.
30 Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking, trans. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 8.
See the beginning reflections of Rene Descartes, A Discourse on Method, Part One.
ALLAN JANIK
WITTGENSTEIN, HERTZ, AND HERMENEUTICS
"How does Wittgenstein stand with respect to hermeneutics?" is a question that has
often been posed by interested but puzzled hermeneuticists. They feel instinctively a
certain sympathy for his idea of"seeing the world rightly" in the Tractatus as well as
with his views about, say, what it is to understand persons in the Philosophical
Investigations. Yet, there remains something strange, even foreign to the hermeneutic
tradition from Dilthey to Gadamer in Wittgenstein 's philosophical writings. 1 Like the
hermeneuticists, Wittgenstein insists, for example, that description must replace
explanation in philosophy but what he understood by description has precious little to
do with either the historically-oriented contextualism ofDilthey or the phenomenol~gy
of the early Heidegger. Wittgenstein describes in the form of thought experiments,
examples, aphorisms, analogies, metaphors and questions- the most interesting single
fact about the Investigations is that it contains 784 questions of which only II 0 are
answered of which in turn 70 are answered falsely on purpose. 2 This is a very curious
way to do hermeneutics indeed. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein, despite his insistence that
philosophy was a kind of analysis (PI, I, 91), always distanced himself from the
tradition of Logical Positivism by emphasizing that it was fundamentally about
meaning rather than truth. Indeed, the later Wittgenstein' s lack of concern for issues
relating to truth in philosophy has been perceived by many, not least Bertrand Russell,
as scandalous. His ways of "reminding" us of the multiple modes of interweaving
words and gestures into meanings are, nevertheless, highly reminiscent of hermeneutic
techniques. Yet, Wittgenstein's rejection of Positivism was never for a moment
connected with a temptation to develop an anti-positivistic philosophy like those of
Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer. The question is why? The answer is to be found in
his scientific background - the last place that either a Positivist or a hermeneuticist
would look.
Wittgenstein's mature concept of philosophy is in fact heavily indebted to the
concept of philosophy of science developed by Heinrich Hertz in the long introduction
to his Principles ofMechanics Presented in a New Form of 1894.3 The fact that this is
the case has long been recognized by Wittgenstein scholarship; its implications,
however, have hardly been explored. In his efforts to show graphically that alternative
modes of presentation of the principles of mechanics could eliminate the difficulties
surrounding such problematic notions as "force" in mechanics that tormented scientists
and philosophers alike, Hertz delivered Wittgenstein with a highly original hermeneutic
79
80 ALLAN JANIK
technique, which would influence all his thinking and in fact become the cornerstone
of his mature philosophical method. Thus we shall see that all of the main features of
Wittgenstein's mature conception of philosophy in fact emerge from his early scientific
background only to be complimented and embellished, but in no sense fundamentally
altered, by his later encounters with thinkers of different moulds.
We forget at our peril that Wittgenstein was not only a lifelong reader of Hertz, who
gave Hertz's Introduction to the Principles to his students as the paradigm for doing
good philosophy,4 but also actually contemplated taking his motto for the Philosophical
Investigations from its pages 5:"when these painful contradictions are removed, the
question about the essence [of force] is not answered, but the mind is no longer
tormented and ceases to pose illegitimate questions."6 Moreover, it was his mature
method for dealing with philosophical problems, i.e., his techniques for "discovering
or inventing intermediate cases" (PI, I, 122) for drawing our attention away from the
"one-sided diet" of examples (PI, I, 593) in terms of which traditional philosophers
posed their problems, that Wittgenstein took to be his major contribution to philosophy.
Bringing out the links between Hertz's technique of presenting alternative
representations of mechanics to clarify its conceptual problems and Wittgenstein's
mature method for dissolving philosophical problems will thus be a way of dismissing
the charges of irrationalism and obscurantism that have been leveled against him, and
replacing them with an account of the scientific origins ofhis mature view of the nature
of philosophy. Further, looking at Hertz will help us to see the continuity within
Wittgenstein's philosophical odyssey. Moreover, it will contribute to the rehabilitation
of an important neglected philosopher of science. In any case, the crucial point about
the concept of philosophy that the physicist, Hertz, developed for handling
metaphysical problems in science and bequeathed to Wittgenstein is the insistence on
the immanent character of the philosophical enterprise: if philosophical problems arise
in physics, then they must be handled in physics itself rather than in some theory about
physics. Physics must take care of itself as it were. What, then, did Hertz maintain to
be the proper mode of procedure in the philosophy of physics?
The first thing that we must remind ourselves of with respect to Hertz is that he
wrote in the days before Einstein, i.e., before Relativity Theory and Quantum
Mechanics. So, although he anticipated a\1 of the conceptual difficulties these startling
innovations in physics would bring, his problems belonged most definitely to a physics
that we hardly recognize one hundred years later. In any case, Hertz's new strategy for
dealing with metaphysical problems in science was first and foremost a contribution
to the resolution of debates about the role of concepts, in particular the concept of
force, in Newton's physics. In order to understand the importance of Hertz's
contribution to the philosophy of science we must begin by taking a look at the
problems that bothered Ernst Mach, the founder of the (then) new discipline of
philosophy of science. 7 Therefore it is necessary to begin our story with a brief
recapitulation of the problems that led Mach to formulate his Principle of Economy
with respect to scientific modeling and Hertz to want to emend the Machian view
thereof. It should be emphasized that the aspects of Hertz's philosophy of science that
most interest us are the points at which he departs from Mach.
In the course ofthe nineteenth century Newton's physics was unquestionably the
basis of all investigation into the nature of physical reality and the ideal against which
claims to the status of "scientific knolwedge" were measured. However, the critical
WITTGENSTEIN, HERTZ, AND HERMENEUTICS 81
spirit of nineteenth century positivism increasingly came to question the form of

Newton's presentation of his physical theory. Scientists with an empiricist
philosophical bent like Ernst Mach became increasingly discontented with the
conceptual framework upon which Newton's Platonic mathematical synthesis rested.
Why, for example, should Newton base his system upon notions of"absolute space,
time and motion" which could neither be perceived nor measured? In this context
Newton's notion of "force" came under particular scrutiny. Like the "absolutes,"
"force" is unobservable (but, of course, not unmeasurable); however, it is absolutely
essential to Newton's development of dynamics. Thus scientists and philosophers were
permanently tempted to ask the question what sort of thing is this unobservable cause
of motion, the "force of gravity"? From Mach's positivist perspective8 the confusion
arising from the continual temptation to reify the concept of force was disastrous. Such
confusing, i.e., metaphysical, elements in science offend against its essential
characteristic, its "economy": "It is the object of science to replace, or save,
experiences, by the reproduction and anticipation of facts in thought." Mach considered
scientific theories, even those that had to be considered among the greatest
achievements of mankind, to be, nevertheless, embedded - and limited by - the culture
of their epoch. Therefore, the language in which scientists expressed themselves was
in continual need of purification from contingent cultural accretions. Since Newton's
age was an age whose typical cultural idiom or mode of expression was theological
speculation, his central concepts are not entirely free of the rhetoric of theology. His
employment of a word such as force highly suggestive of a causal agency to express
what is in fact a mathematical relationship between mass and acceleration reflects this
sociological fact and is thus an indication of our need for a critique of scientific
language. By inviting us to ask what the force is that works upon the mass in question
the word force only obscures that exact mathematical description of physical reality
which is the goal of physics. Therefore it must be eliminated from the vocabulary of
science in a more enlightened era. Henceforth the goal of science should be the
representation of observable phenomena in terms of the simplest mathematical
relationships (functions) between observations. Observations were to be represented
as points on a graph and the most adequate mathematical model of the situation would
be the function which corresponded to the shortest line connecting the points. That in
essence is Mach's Principle of Economy.
The most important of Hertz's questions to Mach is: what is simplicity? "Here it is
not certain what is simple and permissible and what is not," Hertz writes. 9 In fact
Hertz's query about the nature of simplicity turns out to be a series of questions about
the role of what Kant termed "regulative ideas" with respect to scientific theory: what
sorts of considerations have guided us as we shaped our models of physical reality in
the past? what sorts of considerations should guide us as we shape our representation
now? what sorts of considerations with respect to shaping our models of physical
reality help us to understand how we confuse ourselves in the interpretation of models?
To be sure Hertz's questions about the nature of simplicity are inspired by Mach's
reflections and hardly hostile to them, 10 but in fact reveals a very different perspective
on the question of how to eliminate metaphysical problems from science (even if it
should sometimes seem that there is little or no difference between their positions).
Like Mach, Hertz believes that the aim of physical theory is the simplest representation
of observed phenomena. However, Hertz, rather in the Pragmatist manner of C.S.
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Peirce 11 than the Positivist manner of Mach, poses a question that Mach had not at all
mentioned: simple - for whom? Mach had drawn attention to the importance of the
rhetoric of science, but he had not considered all of its implications. For Mach the
rhetorical element of science is always distorting and never useful. For Hertz, who is
well-aware of the distorting possibilities of scientific rhetoric, it is nevertheless
something useful and necessary in the development of physical theory. For Mach the
question "for whom" does not arise because he simply presupposes that our
representations are always made for the same audience of scientific experts, and one
of these will always be the simplest mathematically for them.
Hertz proceeds from the view that even within science it is necessary to construct
different representations of the same data depending upon whom you want to talk to.
He offers us the analogy with presentations of grammar: pupils learning to master their
mother tongue require an altogether different presentation of the rules of grammar than
philologists do. 12The more we consider the analogy the more complex it becomes; for
it will soon become clear that students in the course of mastering their mother tongue
will require a very different grammar from those foreigners who struggle with the same
language, whereas different groups of foreigners will find different presentations of
grammar more or less helpful depending upon the characteristic modes of expression
in their own language, etc. For these different purposes we need different "pictures"
or models of the rules of grammar. The same is true in physics: a representation that is
suitable for theorists is hardly suitable, say, for engineers or for chemists working with
the same subject, let alone introductory students. At the very outset, Hertz differs from
Mach by emphasizing how it is that the normal development of science requires a
plurality of representations.
For Mach, as for the early Wittgenstein, the underlying similarities between
different presentations of the same theory, i.e., the common mathematical structure in
its simplest expression, provided the key to understanding the nature of scientific
concepts. Hertz in no way denies this. In fact he insists just as much as they do that it
is only by means of a consideration of the mathematical structure of physical theories
that we come to grasp their actual structures and actual ontological commitments.
However, unlike them, he does not stop there. He goes on to stresses how close
reflection upon the differences between these presentations would provide the key to
eliminating philosophical perplexities concerning the nature of scientific concepts
inasmuch as the rhetorical reasons why they arose in the first place would become
crystal clear. In Mach's account of physical theory there are two questions which must
be handled, in Hertz's there are three. For Mach, our representations must be physically
correct and logically coherent; for Hertz they must be rhetorically apposite as well, i.e.,
they must be constructed with a view to the communication situation in which the
scientist finds himself. In other words the physicist's models must be fittingly
constructed so as to be in a position to convey the sort of information that the audience
wants to learn about in a form it can assimilate. The most rigorous and elegant
presentation of a theory will be of no help to students who are just beginning to deal
with the subject.
Thus Hertz will speak of three characteristics of our models of nature. They must
be logically permissible, i.e., internally consistent, empirically correct, and communi-
catively appropriate or effective. 13 The third criterion for the acceptability of a model
is its usefulness in a given situation. Without referring to Mach, Hertz actually
criticizes him for failing to see that representations have to be constructed with a view
to the questions that are being posed to us. As well as accuracy and rigor sensitivity
belongs to our models of physical reality. Put differently, rhetorical adequacy is as
important as architecture in the development of our models of physical reality.
Although Mach was hardly opposed to the idea that models are constructs, his con-
centration upon empirical accuracy and architectural simplicity led him to overlook the
positive significance of the teleological element in modeling. Although Hertz is as
sensitive as Mach to the demands of empirical accuracy and logical coherence (indeed,
one problem with his introduction is that it on a superficial reading seems to be the case
that he is merely restating Mach's view with a somewhat different emphasis), he is
adamant in insisting that the crucial feature about models of physical reality is that we
construct them "our requirement of simplicity does not apply to nature, but to the
models we fashion of it." 14 If we sometimes paint ourselves into a comer by so
constructing our models as to confuse ourselves about the objects to which they refer
as in the case of Newton's concept of force, we must eliminate the problem in precisely
the way that we have created it, namely, by creating alternative models, which dispense
with the unessential characteristics - Hertz refers to them somewhat confusingly as
"contradictions" 15 -that we have built into those models which have come to puzzle
us (we should not forget that Hertz's own contribution to physics, which led to the unit
of frequency being named for him, was his clarification of the meaning of the mass of
mutually inconsistent equations which Maxwell developed for interpreting the results
of Faraday's experiments with electricity).
Thus Hertz's way of handling the metaphysical problems which arise in the course
of developing physical theory entails literally a (mathematical) re-presentation of our
theories such that we are able sharply to distinguish those elements in the model (Bild)
which arise from logical necessity, and those that are matters of empirical evidence,
from those that we have arbitrarily interjected into them with a view to rhetorical
effectiveness. To be sure Hertz's emphasis upon purging our models of inconsistencies
has a lot to do with logical analysis (i.e., the mathematical component in modeling).
However, it is all too easy to be misled by his very real concern with logical
clarification into thinking that it was the main element in his program; whereas he in
fact wants to place the main stress on our capacity to achieve conceptual clarification
in physical theory on the basis of alternative presentations of our theories. In short,
Hertz wants to solve the sort of problems that bothered Mach in physical theory by
working within physics, rather than developing a theory about the nature of physical
theory as Mach did. Thus, his contribution to the conceptual clarification of
foundational problems within physics came in the form of the axiomatic system that he
presents in the body of his text (which, if successful, would amount to fulfilling the
Cartesian program for mechanics). 16 Again, the notion that his contribution to physical
theory should take the form of an axiomatic system has tended to create the erroneous
impression that his principal concern was with the formalization of mechanics pure and
simple, rather than with demonstrating the value of that formalization for clarifying
conceptual problems within scientific theory on the basis of an illuminating alternative
representation of the same body of mechanical knowledge.
However, we forget at our peril that this axiomatization of mechanics, which would
surely be a tour de force by any scientific standards, 17 is not an end in itself (as
axiomatization would tend to become in logical positivism especially in the hands of
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Carnap) but part of a program for articulating the conceptual foundations of physical
theory, whose sense is to be found in the ways in which that axiom system differs from
the traditional Newtonian presentation and the alternative presentation developed at the
tum of the century known as Energetics. Thus the task of his philosophical
"Introduction" to the Principles is to present the two currently available systems of
mechanics as an introduction to his own, which in tum is part of a way of doing what
we would today call philosophy of science. The first ofthe representations is that of
classical mechanics, which begins with an account of statics, i.e., the study of space
and force without respect to motion, proceeding to kinematics, i.. e., the purely
descriptive study of motion without reference to mass or force, and culminating in
dynamics, i.e., the study ofbodies under the action of forces which produce changes
in their motion. The basic concepts upon which Newton's development of mechanics
rests are space, time, force and mass. Here Hertz is in full agreement with Mach
concerning the conundrums that the Newtonian notion of force brings with it. 18 The
very word tempts us to ask the wrong sorts of questions and thus into metaphysical
speculations about the "nature" of forces, which only confuse us with respect to our
empirical expectations.
The program of Energetics (developed by Wilhelm Ostwald, father of physical
chemistry and later Nobel Prize winner) was a reaction to those conundrums strongly
influenced by the development of thermodynamics in the nineteenth century. On the
energeticist view the problems that the notion of force presents for classical physics can
be avoided if all observable changes are treated as transformations of energy. 19 This
entails basing mechanics upon the concepts of space and time as mathematical
quantities and mass and energy as physical quantities. For energetics the properties of
force are derived from fundamental laws and definitions, which function as ways of
simplifying notation such that is becomes clear that they are matters of the
appropriateness of the theory. In energetics there are no intangibles; there are no
"arbitrary and ineffectual" hypotheses. 20 However, the idea of a complex fundamental
principle offends against our demand for simplicity with respect to principles in an
analogous way to Newton's "force," i.e., epistemologically rather than ontologically.
Hertz himself offers us a third possibility in the form of an axiom system which
purports to deal with both of these problems in terms of what Helmholtz called
"concealed masses and motions."21 In this third presentation of the principles of
mechanics all mechanical phenomena are explained in terms of masses and movements,
although the masses and movements that enter into explanations are not always
perceived by us. Nevertheless, they are in principle identical with the sorts of masses
and movements that we perceive and in no way "occult" qualities. In short, Hertz offers
a way of going beyond our actual experiences without going outside of experience, i.e.,
by modeling possible experiences mathematically. Thus to speak with Kant all of
mechanics is represented within the limits (Grenzen) of the empirical, but not within
the bounds (Schranken) of the empirically given. 22 Whether Hertz succeeds or fails in
his efforts to axiomatize classical mechanics is a question that need not concern us
here, for it is his strategy as a philosopher of science that is important for Wittgenstein.
Let us tum to Wittgenstein's mature conception of philosophy as presented in
sections 89 to 133 of the first part of the Philosophical Investigations. By now it is
familiar territory to Wittgenstein's friends and foes alike. Coming from the Introduction
of Hertz's Principles to Wittgenstein's text we ought to be struck at once by a number
of similarities both in philosophical strategy and mode of expression - similarities that

are hardly co-incidental given the fact that Wittgenstein seriously considered giving the
Philosophical Investigations a motto from the Introduction to Hertz's Principles.
Like Hertz, who could marvel at "how easy it is to attach to fundamental laws
considerations which are quite in accordance with the usual modes of expression in
mechanics, and yet which are an undoubted hindrance to clear thinking,"23 Wittgenstein
is concerned with the problem that our usual ways of speaking, like Newton's, conceal
as much as they reveal of reality, rather like spectacles that allow us to read but are not
themselves "seen" (PI, I, 103). We are held captive by a picture (PI, I, 115) both in a
general sense and in a specific sense. Generally philosophers have a picture of language
as exclusively a matter of representing the world, that at once 1) leads them to consider
the logical basis of representation as constituting an ideal language, and 2)
systematically prevents them from seeing the most obvious fact about it, namely that
there are a myriad speech acts which are both non-representational and irreducibly
different from one another. Wittgenstein's discussion of the nature of philosophy thus
begins with a consideration ofhow we tend to become fixated upon an ideal language
when we do philosophy. Specifically, we are all like philosophers inasmuch as we are
so tied to specific, one-sided ways, of seeing things that we forget that it is legitimately
possible to understand words in startlingly different ways than we normally do. So we
associate the word "cube" with the drawing of a cube, but there is also a very real sense
in which it describes a triangular prism as well. (PI, I, 139) Although the latter is always
there we need to be reminded of that fact occasionally. What we need in this situation
is "eine iibersichtliche Darstellung" or an overview (PI, I, 122), which shows us what
other possibilities there are. We need a "depth grammar" or logical grammar (PI, I,
664) that diverts our focus from the seductions of surface grammar and permits us to
liberate ourselves from our "grammatical illusions" (PI, I, 11 0) and focus our attention
upon a number of simple, commonplace truths, whose very obviousness prevents us
from grasping them. In the preface to the Investigations Wittgenstein had already
compared his task to that of an artist (in ways reminiscent of Cezanne painting his
various pictures of Mont Ste. Victoire from different points of view) making sketches
of a landscape from different directions in order to get a comprehensive overview of
something that was most definitely visible but which could not be taken in with a single
glance. It is precisely in aid of obtaining said "overview" that Wittgenstein speaks of
the needs to discover or invent intermediate cases (i.e., language games other than that
of representation) to help lead the philosopher away from the confusing exceptional
cases and back to the rule, i.e., away from the tendency to want to speculate about the
nature of thought and reality and back to the things we actually do with words. Just as
in Hertz an alternative to time-honored ways of thinking in physics shows us how those
ways of thinking go astray, so Wittgenstein wants to "teach us differences" to
paraphrase Kent in King Lear, which was another of the mottos he considered for the
Investigations. 24 Similarly, the metaphor ofbeing entangled in our own rules is no less
suggestive of Hertz. Further, Wittgenstein likens the confusions of philosophers to
people inexperienced with machinery who confuse an idling engine with one that is
running (PI, I, 132); whereas Hertz will describe the role of "forces" in physics as
"idling side-wheels" that have nothing to do with the machine's functioning (the
standard translation obscures the similarity between Hertz and Wittgenstein here by
rendering leergehende Nebenriider as "sleeping" - Americans would say silent -
86 ALLAN JANIK
"partners" in a business, PM, 14). Thus on Wittgenstein's view the traditional

philosopher is "whipped" (gepeitscht) by questions that seem logical but in fact are not
answerable (PI, I, 133), because they are not questions at all; whereas in the very
passage that Wittgenstein contemplated as motto for the Investigations Hertz speaks
of the mind of the physicist ceasing to be "tormented" (gequiilt) by the contradictions
in a concept like force or electricity. 25 What the philosopher needs to discover is the
spectacles on his nose to put his vain questioning to rest.
The influence (a problematic term, but we have no better one and it is
Wittgenstein's own for describing his relationship to Hertz26) of Hertz would seem at
this point to merge curiously with that of Freud; for philosophy thus becomes a
therapeutic art (PI, I, 133) that seeks to assemble techniques for attaining the goal of
disabusing the philosopher of his obsession with seeing the relationship between
language and world exclusively as a matter ofrepresentation27 : '"It is high time for us
to compare these phenomena with something different' -one may say- I am thinking,
e.g., of mental illnesses." ( C & V, 55") In an unpublished early version of section 106
of part I of the Investigations Wittgenstein writes: "One of our most important tasks is
to express all false thought processes so characteristically that the other says: yes, that's
just the way I meant it."28 He has to be put into a position where his difficulties cease
to be difficulties and he finally attains peace of mind. Lest this expression seem an
overly religious description ofWittgenstein's concept of philosophy it is important to
note that in the very same text he asserts that to so eliminate the source of our
questioning in philosophy is to find the "redeeming word," an expression that he first
used in his struggle with fear of death as he manned a searchlight in World War I. (GT,
21.XI.14) Already in 1914 in his daily encounters with death as the ideal target for
enemy fire Wittgenstein was insisting that in philosophy as well as in existential
matters the solutions to our most distressing problems must be immanent ones: the
problem oflife must be solved in the living of it and the problem of representation must
be solved in the act of representing and not in some theory about it: "the hard problems
have to dissolve of themselves before us" (GT, 26.XI, 14; cf. C&V, 27); whereby it is
clear that he refers to both his personal problems and the problems he was having
understanding the nature of mathematics (GT, 6-7.VII.16; cf. N, 39, 54, where the
English translation misleadingly renders the phrase as "the key word").
If the above is correct there ought to be other earmarks of Hertz both in
Wittgenstein's other mature works as well as in his development generally. What might
these be? In fact the closer we look, the more similarities we find in the form of 1)
shared claims, 2) deep concern for appropriateness of presentation as a means to
attaining clarity, or 3) for showing us how alternative modes of presentation and
representation can dissolve philosophical problems, 4) inter-textual similarities, and,
finally, 5) striking similarities of tone.
One surprising place where we encounter a clearly Hertzian notion is in
Wittgenstein's last work, On Certainty, where Wittgenstein denies that there is a fixed
distinction between the propositions which function normatively, i.e., as criteria, in our
inquiries and those which have merely empirical status. For Wittgenstein it is a matter
of choice (although by no means arbitrary) which propositions are in Wittgenstein's
words "hardened" into the systematic framework of scientific inquiry and which remain
"fluid" as empirical facts (OC, 96). Here we find a direct parallel both in substance and
tone to Hertz's idea that "the concept of a mechanical principle has not been sharply
fixed." 29 In the course of articulating his position that the principles of mechanics
ought to be developed in various ways with a view to showing how fundamental
difficulties are in fact more a matter of our modes of representation than they are of
ontology Hertz came to see clearly that what in one presentation functioned as a
principle could be a corollary or a mere proposition to be demonstrated in another. 30
Thus Hertz anticipated Pierre Duhem, Otto Neurath, and W.V.O. Quine as well as
Wittgenstein himself in rejecting the analytic/ synthetic distinction. It is noteworthy that
Wittgenstein's way of alluding to the propositions which have been "hardened" into
the framework for raising empirical questions is strikingly similar to that of Hertz. Thus
Hertz writes at the very beginning of the Author's Forward to the Principles about
what we know with certainty as that which "stands fast" (steht fest); 31 whereas
Wittgenstein will assert, "I do not explicitly learn the propositions that stand fast for
me" (die Siitze, die fiir mich feststehen, Ierne ich nicht ausdrilcklich [OC,. 151]) and
"what I hold fast to is not one proposition but a nest of propositions" (Das, woran ich
festhalte, ist nicht ein Satz, sondern ein Nest von Siitzen (OC, 225, cf. OC, 125, 144,
235, 343). The point is that for both Wittgenstein and Hertz there is no such thing as
a principle as such, only propositions whose functions change in differing representa-
tions of physical systems (cf. OC, 318-21 ).
This takes us right to the heart of the matter with respect to the continuity in
Wittgenstein's thought; for it is too seldom recognized how closely the view that there
is no qualitative distinction between what belongs to the conceptual framework and
what is an empirical matter in our scientific inquiries in On Certainty is related to the
Tractarian view that there are no logical propositions that are by their nature axioms.
Let us ask ourselves how this idea enters into the Tractatus.
If one simply reads the seven propositions that constitute the mains ideas of the
Tractatus consecutively one quickly comes to the realization that the book's center is
in fact propositions 5 and 6. Proposition 5 tells us that all meaningful sentences are
truth functions; whereas 6 tells us that double negation is the general form of all truth
functions. The force of this assertion is that all of the propositions of logic are of equal
logical significance. The philosophical significance of the truth table method of
representing propositions (as opposed to its significance as a logical decision
procedure) is literally to show that nothing that is a proposition can be anything other
than a tautology, a contradiction, or an empirical proposition (T, 5.101 ). If this is true,
not only is the Kantian notion that the propositions of philosophy are synthetic a-priori
truths shown to be logically nonsensical, the Fregean notion in the Begriflsschrift that
logic is based upon privileged propositions designated as axioms turns out to be equally
nonsensical. 32 Thus Wittgenstein's central concept, which in fact rules out there being
a theory oflogic, in the Tractatus directly parallels the Hertzian view that there are no
principles as such in science. The best that one can do is get straight about what makes
a proposition a logical truth on the one hand and what we do when we apply
representations to the world on the other. No theory can help us with the latter because
logical form cannot be represented logically. Once we realize this we arrive at the limits
of logic and, like good Hertzians, cease to be bothered by unanswerable questions.
It is evident from Wittgenstein's correspondence with none other than Gottlob
Frege that the latter found such a Hertzian conception of clarity incomprehensible. It
seems that his views on clarity and Wittgenstein's were profoundly different. "I cannot
pass a judgment on your treatise, not because I am in disagreement with its content, but
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because its content is insufficiently clear to me," wrote Frege. 33 Yet, for Wittgenstein
the whole of the Tractatus was nothing but an exercise in clarity. If what he had written
was not clear, then it was worthless. Thus enormous frustration emerged on both sides.
For Frege, who saw the whole task of philosophy as that of producing a razor-sharp
distinction between the intelligibility (sense) and the object (reference) of an assertion,
clarity is a matter of strict formal consistency34 (Hertz's idea of obtaining clarity on the
basis of axiomatization would thus hold great appeal for him). What formal analysis
shows to be consistent is clear; what formal analysis proves to be inconsistent is
unclear.
Wittgenstein accepted this account of clarity in his early work inasmuch as it bore
upon scientific statements. However, even in his early phase philosophical clarity was
more than that. For better or worse philosophical clarity in the Tractatus is something
that is neither an empirical nor a formal matter, but first and foremost a matter of
obtaining the right perspective on the relation between the empirical and the formal,
i.e., something that neither empirical nor logical propositions can say, but is in fact a
matter of understanding the application of propositions (T, 5.557).35 In short,
Wittgenstein understood clarity as something essentially attached to showing the limits
oflanguage appropriately. Thus the point of his Tractatus essentially related to the way-
Wittgenstein presented his thoughts.
The ever perspicacious Frege only dimly recognized this; but he rejected
Wittgenstein's "showing" gesture as being more artistic than scholarly. That is why the
extremely curious very first sentence of the preface, which asserts that only those
persons who have already had the thoughts contained in it will understand the book,
was "displeasing" (befremdlich) to Frege. 36 To his credit, the skeptical Frege
recognized, as nearly all commentators since then have not, that the importance of the
Tractatus to its author lay in its form and was thus principally a matter of aesthetics to
him, 37 which in tum is probably why Wittgenstein was to tum to a publisher of fiction,
Ludwig von Ficker, when it became clear that Frege would not agree to publishing the
book in any form but that of a logical treatise. (W-F, 22).
The importance of the book's form is again stressed towards the end of the preface
where Wittgenstein insists that the achievement that he sees in his book bears upon the
way it expresses the thoughts it contains. Wittgenstein makes no claims to novelty
(something that always seemed absurd to his readers, since there is considerable, even
astonishing, novelty in the book), rather he insists that what is really important about
the book is the form in which it presents the results of his wrestling with the nature of
logical symbolism. Rather like the author of an ancient tragedy Wittgenstein claimed
only to tell a well-known story in a more powerfully nuanced language than it had yet
been related. Seen from the point of view of Russell and Frege's (Machist) project for
the purification of language this had to be a virtually incomprehensible thing to do;
however, from the point of view of Hertz, Wittgenstein was doing exactly what a good
philosopher of science should do: presenting a strictly immanent account as he wrote
to Ficker (W-F, 22), of the limits of the domain of language (viewed as a
representational system) as opposed to Russell's profoundly disturbing but continual
efforts to solve problems in logic by means of dubious stratagems such as the Axiom
oflnfinity or a Theory of Types, which arbitrarily stipulated how things had to be in
logic from without. 38 1t is not my intention to examine all of the various ways in which
Hertz had an impact upon the Tractatus here; that would go far beyond the scope of
this paper, rather, I want to identify yet another echo ofHertzian thinking with respect
to the problem of the aims and goals of philosophizing that illuminates what is
normally taken to be a very curious text.
Wittgenstein's encounters with Schlick and the Vienna Circle proved to be no less
frustrating to his interlocutors than that with Frege. There is much to be said for the fact
that what made Wittgenstein's views, say, of contradiction so puzzling was the
Hertzian perspective he had upon the matter. In those discussions Wittgenstein returns
repeatedly to Hilbert's attempt to introduce a technique for proving that a calculus does
not contain a contradiction. (WWK, 119) Wittgenstein was totally convinced that this
was an entirely false approach to mathematics. He insists that it is not a proof that is
required here, but an analysis that substitutes a clear expression for a vague one,
because the contradiction does not arise in the mathematics but in our mode of
projecting mathamatical problems. (WWK, 120) Ifl am confused in formulating my
mathematical problems, no proof will help me. Ifl am clear about how I pose them,
the question of contradiction does not arise. In no case does clarity bear upon proof,
rather it has to do with what has to be done before proof is possible. Thus Wittgenstein
insists that we need to get clear about our frame of reference, our mode of posing
problems (cf. BBB, 169), in order to eliminate our problems with respect to
contradictions, which do not arise from our doing mathematics, but from the sorts of
questions we pose mathematically. This view connects the frequently expressed
Tractarian idea that there are no surprises in logic and a-fortiori mathematics (T,
6.1251, 6,1261; cf. 5.473, N., 42, 2) with the view expressed in the Investigations that
philosophy does not resolve contradictions in mathematics but seeks to get clear about
the situation in mathematics that led us into contradiction (PI, I, 125). From the
Hertzian perspective of a non-dogmatic empiricism, contradiction merely indicated that
it is necessary to form another representation of the situation at hand to extricate
ourselves from this entanglement in our rules. It is in no way a catastrophe, rather a
challenge to our ingenuity to reformulate our way of representing matters such that the
tension that our model has introduced disappears. If there is nothing to fear in a
tautology, then there is also nothing to fear in its logical equivalent, contradiction.
(WWK, 131) The challenge is to find out how our normal procedures for projecting
problems have gone astray. The matter is as "clear" as that. 39
There would seem to be yet other echoes of Hertz in Wittgenstein that are perhaps
not entirely obvious or documentable, but which also should not simply go ignored. I
refer to the role that alternative modes of presentation play in Wittgenstein' s way of
writing philosophy, which he compared with writing fiction: Philosophie dilrfte man
eigentlich nur dichten (C&V, 24). We have seen that "discovering and inventing"
intermediate cases to correct the philosopher's bad diet of examples is fundamental to
the sort of therapy that Wittgenstein wants to employ for the sake of extinguishing our
urge to raise philosophical questions of the traditional sort. Wittgenstein's "dissolution"
(GT, 26.XI.14) of philosophical problems is accomplished by showing us aspects of
reality that were invisible because they were always before our eyes. To make us
astonished at the "splendor of the simple," to employ Heidegger's phrase, 40
Wittgenstein became increasingly convinced that he had to invent concepts, even
natural histories, whose peculiar, striking character could shock us out of our
intellectual fixations on the representational character of knowledge. By giving us
examples of how things could be, but in fact are not, Wittgenstein shows us how many
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different ways there are of"weaving language and actions" (PI, I, 7) together: This is.
of course, something quite different from what Hertz did in his Principles but is
continuous with Hertz's philosophical strategy, a kind of variation on a theme as it
were.
Moreover, Wittgenstein's very mode of writing philosophy would seem to
incorporate the Hertzian method of dissolving problems on the basis of alternative
modes of representation as philosophical tactics at a relatively simple level. He was
fond of trying to determine how many different ways the same thought could be put
into words, or of showing us how the same word functions quite differently in
sentences which are very similar with respect to their surface grammar: Consider how
the following questions can be applied, and how settled: "Are these books my books?";
"Is this foot my foot?" "Is this body my body?" "Is this sensation my sensation?"
Each of these questions has practical (non-philosophical) applications" (PI, I, 411)
or
compare knowing and saying:
how many meters high Mont-Blanc is-
how the word game is used -
how a clarinet sounds. (PI, I, 78)
It is hardly a secret that there are any number of similar sets of sentences for us to
compare with one another in Wittgenstein's works. Hertz would seem to be the
ancestor of this approach. In any case, the point is that it is hardly unlikely that
Wittgenstein, who was so well-versed in Hertz's views about the role of alternative
presentations of physical theories, developed such analytic methods wholly
independent of him.
It has recently been argued with considerable brilliance on the basis of copious
analysis of unpublished manuscripts that Wittgenstein' s almost absurdly painstaking
mode of formulating and reformulating questions, assertions, observations and the like
involved collecting alternatives such as "we could say... ," "we might say ... ," "one is
tempted to say ... "; "could one say... "; "or- could one say... ," "we are tempted to say... "
and literally hundreds of variations are essentially related to his philosophical goal of
obtaining clarity about how philosophical problems arise through our tendency to
misunderstand the logic of our language. 41 Wittgenstein seems to have seen variation
in mode of expression as a mode of battling against our tendency to let ourselves be
bewitched by language. This, too, would seem to be part of his Hertzian heritage.
Even Wittgenstein's Worterbuch for Volksschulen bears traces of this Hertzian
concern with the ways in which alternative ordering of material can either confuse us
or prevent confusion. This example is particularly interesting because it has nothing
directly to do with philosophy and because the speller is merely made up of a list of
words that pupils have had problems with, i.e., it contains no text; it is simply a list that
has to speak for itself. Here Wittgenstein is primarily concerned with preventing
confusion. So he must consider the relative merits of alphabetical presentation in
relation to that of presenting groups of etymologically related words with the
derivatives following the base word, which would clash with the alphabetical principle
(WV, xxviii). How should he organize the series alt [old], Altar [altar], Alter [old age],
Altertum [antiquity], altertiimlich, [antique], etc.? (WV, xxix) The ususal modes of
presentation for adults are sure to be either confusing to children or to make too
sophisticated demands upon them. Appropriateness thus dictated to Wittgenstein that
he opt for an unorthodox, but practical, solution:
alt, das Alter

der Altar
D[ d]as Altertum, altertiimlich; etc.
Thus the central list in emphatic print contains the alphabetic order; whereas the
derivatives follow the base but are printed normally. In every instance Wittgenstein
follows Hertz by asking systematically what is the appropriately simple, the "natural"
order (cf. PI, Preface) of presentation- a question that would preoccupy him till the
end of his life with respect to the ordering of his philosophical thoughts in the
Investigations. Here too we have an exercise in Hertzian hermeneutics.
What is remarkable in all this, however, is that the scientific origins of the kind of
analytic hermeneutics42 that Wittgenstein practiced should have remained so long
obscure. We are accustomed to associating hermeneutics with a philosophical tradition
that has tended to be suspicious of, when not overtly hostile to, science, as well as to
analytical philosophy. 43 Failure to take Hertz seriously as a precursor to Wittgenstein's
philosophical method has gone hand in hand with locating his mature thought in the
Machist tradition and then in an incapacity to understand how it could possibly be that
anyone could at once belong to that tradition and want to undermine its central tenets
about the nature of philosophy. Or it has led to a superficial identification of
Wittgenstein's views with the much better-known hermeneutics of Dilthey and
Gadamer. Such hermeneuticists who have found something congenial in Wittgenstein's
mature philosophy have nevertheless been deeply puzzled at the absence of any
reference to typically hermeneutical themes such as historical narrative or the
relationship between texts and contexts in the Investigations. Such puzzlement now
becomes understandable in terms of the little known and less understood Hertzian
hermeneutic program for the elimination of metaphysics within mechanics. A good part
of the reason why the scientific origins ofWittgenstein's linguistic hermeneutics seem
obscure certainly rests generally with Hertz's obscurity as a philosopher of science, but
more specifically with the failure to grasp the importance of his notion of"appropriate-
ness" and alternative modes of presentation as the basis for a kind philosophical
thinking which is at once analytical and hermeneutic. It also helps us to understand why
Wittgenstein never moved in a more conventionally hermeneutic direction. There was
simply no reason to do so.
However, another part of the reason why the scientific origins ofWittgenstein's
mature thought have remained obscure bears upon the fact that we have been
accustomed to dividing his development into an early, more or less positivistic phase
and a later assault upon Positivism. This is something that Wittgenstein himself wanted
to avoid, for example, in insisting that the Tractatus be published along with his later
work. Maurice Drury has pointed out that even Sraffa's devastating critique of his
views of the dependence of meaning upon "logical form," which left him like a tree
bereft of its branches, did nothing to disturb the "roots" of his thinking. 44 These,
Wittgenstein insisted, came to him early in life. Indeed, K.T. Fann insisted long ago
that perhaps the "later" philosophy was in fact earlier than the "earlier" philosophy in
its origins. 45 This sketch of the Hertzian origins of Wittgenstein's concept of
philosophy should help us to understand more clearly what that claim means. Till we
have a complete picture ofWittgenstein's texts all discussions ofhis development will
be to some extent speculative; however, that is not to say that such speculations must
be idle. There is any amount of evidence from the extant notebooks that Wittgenstein
kept during World War I that themes such as the distinction between wishing and
92 ALLAN JANIK
willing (N, 88), the emphasis upon use and application (N, 82), the idea of the
importance of"etc." (N, 89-90), and even the more existential idea that in the course
of fighting he sometimes became like an animal that he discussed there (GT, 29.VII.l6)
clearly anticipate central ideas in the so-called "later philosophy." Indeed, it seems to
be the case that Wittgenstein's return to philosophy was a matter of taking out the notes
he kept and studying them carefully by continually revising them and producing
alternatives of them as was his wont: he seems to have done this after returning to
philosophy around 1930 and once more at the very end ofhis life in the manuscripts
that have come to be known as On Certainty and On Color. There is at least some
inter-textual evidence for this hypothesis. If this is true, there is no less reason to
believe that he returned to Hertz as well with equal enthusiasm. 46
Further, Hertz himself distinguishes the a-priori procedures of a "mature" science
from the more expedient modes of concept formation in practical scientific work in a
way that clearly anticipates Wittgenstein' s perspectives on Bilder both in the Tractatus
and in the Philosophical Investigations: "in mature knowledge logical purity has to be
taken into consideration above all. Only logically pure models [Bilder] are to be tested
for correctness, only [empirically] correct models are to be compared for
appropriateness. Pressing need frequently prompts us to proceed in the reverse manner:
models are invented that are suitable for specific purposes, then tested for their
correctness, and finally cleansed of inner contradictions" (PM, 12). There is much to
be said for the thesis that Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus with the first half of this text
in mind, the Investigations with the second.
Finally, approaching Wittgenstein's later philosophy after reading the Introduction
to Hertz's Principles it is clear why a scientifically-oriented thinker would maintain
that there were no theses to advance in philosophy, no explanations to offer, only a
description of how our concepts systematically confuse us into thinking that we need
theories to explain the nature of concepts when we really only need to get straight about
their functioning. After Hertz it becomes clear how philosophy can dissolve problems
by leaving everything as it is, i.e., by giving us a new perspective upon what has till
now puzzled us such that we no longer are impelled to raise questions, without lapsing
into a know-nothing anti- scientific irrationalism. Finally, after taking Hertz seriously
as an influence as profound as it was early in Wittgenstein's career, we can understand
more easily how "unscientific" thinkers as different as Kierkegaard and Weininger,
Tolstoi and Lichtenberg, Spengler and Kraus could have impressed him to the point of
taking on profound philosophical significance for him, i.e., by presenting radically
striking alternatives to the cliched "absolute presuppositions" informing both everyday
thinking and philosophy. In short, in Wittgenstein's eyes they were capable of offering
just the sort of freshly liberating points of comparison that could bring philosophy to
rest. They were allies in the battle to gain clarity, not about some specific object before
us, but about the ways in which our preconceptions about said object often
systematically confuse us by leading us to ask inappropriate and impossible questions.
If this is true, then Wittgenstein's turn to religion during World War I was preceded by
his encounter with Hertz, which explains why the scientific and religious elements in
his thought, which all of his contemporaries, both Positivists and Hermeneuticists, took
to be absolutely incompatible, could nest comfortably in his thinking. Fifty years after
his death it remains a challenge to Wittgenstein scholarship to reconstruct
Wittgenstein's philosophical odyssey from science to what he himself termed the
"religious point of view47 essential to his way of approaching problems. There is much
to be said for the view that the first step is to be found in the hermeneutics of Heinrich
Hertz. Wittgenstein studies, philosophy of science and hermeneutics can only profit
from it.
The Brenner Archives Research Institute

University ofInnsbruck, Austria
NOTES
I refer to Wittgenstein 's writings in the text parenthetically as follows: PI with paragraph/page number
(for parts I & 2 respectively)= Philosophical Investigations, trans., (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958). Other
works by Wittgenstein will also be referred to in the text parenthetically with page; date, or section number
as is appropriate as follows: BBB with page number= The Blue and Brown Books, ed. Rush Rhees (New
York: Harper's, 1956); C&V with page number= Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago, University
of Chicago Press, 1980); GTwith date= Geheime Tagebficher, ed. W. Baum (Vienna: Turia &Kant, 1992);
Nwith page number= Notebooks 1914-16, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961); OC
with paragraph number= On Certainty, trans. Anscombe & Denis Paul (New York: Harper's; 1969); Twith
proposition number= Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961 ); W-Fwith letter number= Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker, ed. G.H. von Wright
("Brenner Studien" Vol. I; Salzburg: Otto Muller, 1969); WV with page number = Worterbuch for
Volksschulen (Vienna: Holder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1977); WWK with page number= Wittgenstein und der
Wiener Kreis shorthand notes by F. Wasimann, ed. B. F. McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967).
2 K.T. Fann, Wittgenstein 's Conception ofPhilosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 109.
Heinrich Hertz, Die Prinzipien der Mechanik in neuem Zusammenhange dargestellt (Leipzig: J. A. Barth,
1894), 9. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as PM with the appropriate page number. Translations are my
own unless otherwise noted.
Professor G. H. von Wright emphasized this to me in conversation in 1966; cf. von Wright, Wittgenstein,
trans. J. Schulte, (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 29. Brian McGuinness emphasizes how it was the
boldness of Hertz (and Boltzmann), as opposed to Mach's less daring way of thinking- and of presenting
his thoughts- that impressed Wittgenstein so deeply, Young Ludwig (London: Duckworth, 1989) 39; whereas
Ray Monk writes, "throughout his life, Wittgenstein regarded Hertz's solution to the problem [of force in
Newtonian physics] as a perfect model of how philosophical confusion should be dispelled," Ludwig
Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Jonathan Cape, 1990), 446. Monk sees Hertzian elements in
Wittgenstein's wartime suggestion to the doctors with whom he worked at Guy's Hospital that they always
write the word "shock" with a line drawn through it to remind themselves of how many different things it was
used to refer to and thus of its dubious classificatory value.
5 G. P. Baker and P.M. S. Hacker, Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980),
16.
PM,9.
Ernst Cassirer, The Problem ofKnowledge, trans. W. Woglom and C. Hendel (New York and London:
Yale University Press, 1950), 85 et passim. See Ernst Mach, The Analysis of Sensations, trans. C. M.
Williams ((New York: Dover, 1959); The Science ofMechanics, trans. T. J. McCormack (LaSalle, Ill.: Open
Court, 1960); Erkenntnis und lrrtum (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1905); cf. A. Janik and S. Toulmin, Wittgenstein 's
Vienna (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 132-45. In Wittgenstein's Vienna, the opposition between
Mach and Hertz is exaggerated; moreover, the crucial role of "appropriateness" in Hertz is all but
unrecognized. I am grateful to my Innsbruck student, Walter Klingsbigl, for pointing out that already in The
Analysis ofSensations, Mach's "elements" are only perceptible in terms of a syntactical framework, which
confers a coherence upon them. For Mach this means that ordered perception is only possible on the basis
of mathematical models (which is precisely what rules out an "impressionist" reading of his notion of the
"elements" of experience). What makes Hertz different from Mach really becomes apparent only when we
begin to consider the various roles that the "appropriateness" of models plays in his philosophy of science.
' Leszek Kolakowski, The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positivist Thought, trans. N. Guterman
(Garden City: Doubleday, 1969), 102;120. Mach steadfastly disputed being termed a Positivist. However,
the associations he rejected are with nineteenth century Positivism, not "Logical Positivism." Nineteenth
94 ALLAN JANIK
century Positivism was unacceptable to Mach for at least two reasons: its ontological commitment to
materialism, and its epistemological commitment to Newtonian mechanics as the ideal to which all rational
enterprises should aspire, both of which were under fire within the community of scientific philosophers. See
Cassirer, lac. cit. et passim. As the principal inspiration for the Vienna Circle nobody has a better claim on
the term in the twentieth century. In fact the official organ of the group of philosophers who have come to
be termed the Vienna Circle was the "Ernst Mach Verein." Moreover, if by positivism one understands strict
rejection of all forms of unobservable entities in explanations of the world order, nobody better deserves the
title than Mach, although, given his efforts to distance himself from nineteenth century Positivism, the term
"Nee-Positivism" (which was previously often used) is perhaps the most appropriate description of Mach's
phenomenalist position. For a defense ofNewton 's Platonizing against Mach's Positivist critique, see Stephen
Toulmin, "Criticism in the History of Science: Newton, Time and Motion," Philosophical Review LXVIII
(1959): 1-29, 203 -227.
9
PM, XXV.
10 PM, xxviii.
11 "A sign or representamen is something which stands to somebody for something in some respect or
capacity" C. S. Peirce, "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," Philosophical Writings ofPeirce, ed. J.
Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 99. It follows from this definition that we never know the meaning of a
sign till we understand it in the sense of the person or persons for whom it functions as a sign.
12 PM,47.
13 PM,2.
14 PM,28.
15 PM, 9 et passim.
16 RobertS. Cohen, "Hertz's Philosophy of Science: An Introductory Essay" in Hertz, The Principles of
Mechanics Presented in a New Form, trans. D. E. Jones & J. T. Walley (New York: Dover, 1956), section
4.
17 I have benefited from conversation with Kelley Hamilton on Hertz generally and particularly on the
question of how successful Hertz's program for axiomatizing mechanics really is.
18 PM, 13-16.
19 PM,19.
20 PM, 22.
21 PM,3!.
22 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena zujener kilnftigen Metaphysik (Werke, 3 Vols.; Berlin: Knauer, n.d.), II,
353.
23 PM, 6.
24 William Shakespeare, King Lear, I, 4, 88. Cf. Baker & Hacker, op. cit., 17.
25 PM, 9
26 On problems surrounding the notion of "influence" as they bear upon Wittgenstein, see my "Wie hat
Schopenhauer Wittgenstein beeinfluBt?," SchopenhauerJahrbuch, 73 (1992): 75-76.

27 On Wittgenstein's relationship to Freud, see Brian McGuinness's excellent "Freud and Wittgenstein,"
Wittgenstein and His Times, ed. B. F. McGuinness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 27-43.
28 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische Untersuchungen: Frilhversion 1937-1938, eds. G.H. von Wright
& H. Nyman (Helsinki: privately printed, 1979); I, I 06.

29 PM,4.
30 Ibid.
31 PM,xxv.
32 Anthony Kenny, Wittgenstein (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 33.
33 Frege to Wittgenstein, 30.X.l9, "Gottlob Frege: Briefe an Ludwig Wittgenstein," eds., Allan Janik & C.P.
Berger, Grazer Philosophische Studien, Vol. 33/34 (1989), 3-33.

34 See John Passmore, A Hundred Years ofPhilosophy (London: Duckworth, 1957), 154.
35 In a sense the difference between Wittgenstein and Frege with respect to clarity could be formulated as
a difference of opinion with respect to value axiomatization as an aspect of the permissibility or appropriate-
ness of a theory. In any case both of them could have appealed to aspects of Hertz in defending their
particular notions of clarity. However, "philosophical thinking began for him with 'painful contradictions'
(and not with the Russellian [and Fregean] desire for certain knowledge," Ray Monk, op. cit., 26. Moreover,
it is altogether too little recognized that the truth table method of showing the distinction between empirical
propositions and tautologies is for Wittgenstein simply a way of getting clear about things that we already
know in practice, i.e., with respect to things that "show themselves" in practice: in theTractatus, he
emphasizes that the mark of a tautology is that you can do anything with it in reasoning, nothing with a
contradiction. Everybody knows this. The problem is that we caonot always distinguish between the different
types of propositions. Thus the value of the truth table method of representing them, T, 6.1262.
36 Frege to Wittgenstein, 16.1X, 19.
37 Loc. cit.
38 Kenny, Wittgenstein, 42.
39 For the similarities between Wittgenstein's mature concept of philosophy aod R. G. Collingwood's view
of metaphysics see my Style, Politics and the Future ofPhilosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), xiii et passim.
40 On Heidegger see A. Jaoik, "Carl Dallago und Martin Heidegger: Ober Anfaog und Ende des Brenner,"
Untersuchungen zum Brenner: Festschrift for lgnaz Zangerle, W. Methlagl, E. Sauerrnannn & S. P. Scheichl,
eds., (Salzburg: Otto MUller,l981), 28-29.
41 Alois Pichler, "Wittgensteins spiitere Maouskripte: einige Bemerkungen zu Stil und Schreiben,"
Mitteilungen aus dem Brenner Archiv 12 (1993), 8-26.
42 JOrg Zimmermann has brilliantly explored the hermeneutic moment in Wittgenstein in Wittgensteins
sprachphilosophische Hermeneutik (Fraokfurt/Main: Klostermaon, 1975). The fact that Prof. Zimmermaon
was long a practicing geologist perhaps accounts for his perspicacity here.
43 For example, Haos-Georg Gadamer, the most distinguished contemporary hermeneuticist, only reluctantly
aod very late (thaoks to the persuasive efforts of Patrick Heelao) came to see that natural science was relevaot
to hermeneutics and vice versa. See Gadamer, "Naturwissenschaft und Hermeneutik, "Filosofi och Kultur
3 (Lund, Sweden, 1986), 39-70.
44 Maurice O'C. Drury, The Danger of Words (London: Routledge & Keegao Paul, 1973), ix.
45 K.T. Faon, Wittgenstein 's Conception ofPhilosophy.
46 It might be objected that my emphasizing Wittgenstein's debts to Hertz ignores the role that Boltzmann,
the first figure on his list, played in his development. I take it that Wittgenstein would not have had to
mention Hertz at all were he only influenced by the (considerable) elements on Boltzmaon's thinking that the
latter shared with Hertz. IfWittgenstein found Hertz worth mentioning, then he got something from him that
he could not find in Boltzmann himself, namely, the importaoce of "appropriateness" in philosophical
analysis. Boltzmaon took Hertz principally as contributing to the logic of science in suggesting a program
for mechaoics in the distant future. For Boltzmann's views of Hertz see the essays "On the Development of
the Methods of Theoretical Physics in Recent Times," aod "Lectures on the Principles of Mechaoics" in
Boltzmann, Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Problems, trans. P. Foulkes ("The Vienna Circle
Collection," Vol. 5; Dordrecht: Reidel, 1947), 77-100, 223-254.
47 See Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?, ed. Peter Winch (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1994) for a provocative exploration of the importaoce ofWittgenstein's "religious point
of view" for his philoso-phizing.
JOSEPH J. KOCKELMANS
ON THE INTERPRETIVE NATURE

OF HERTZ'S MECHANICS
For several years I have been engaged in philosophy of the natural sciences from a
hermeneutic phenomenological point of view. In my critical, philosophical reflections
on the history of the natural sciences, mainly physics, I have been able to develop this
hermeneutic phenomenology of natural science in a somewhat more systematic manner.
In this process it has gradually become clear to me that the natural sciences themselves,
too, are genuine, interpretive endeavors so that one can speak legitimately of the
interpretive or hermeneutic nature of natural science.
Once I had become convinced that the natural sciences do not really explain what-is
in the domain of nature by stating or even describing what-is, but rather explain natural
phenomena by means of interpretive processes of a specific kind, I began then to reflect
more carefully on the meaning of this basic "thesis," and particularly on the question
of how the typical character of these interpretive processes can be specified further.
In my efforts to give satisfactory answers to these and other questions I have lately
started to make a critical, philosophical study of some aspects of the works of Brahe,
Kepler, Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, and Heisenberg. In this paper I shall report briefly
on some of the results of my historical and critical, philosophical investigations
concerning some aspects of Hertz's contributions to classical mechanics.
HERTZ'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO MECHANICS

IN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
Heinrich Hertz (February 22, 1857- January 1, 1894) received his Ph.D. in theoretical
physics, magna cum laude, from the University of Berlin in 1880, where he studied and
worked with Hermann von Helmholtz. In 1883 he began his investigations concerning
the electro-magnetic theory of James Clerk Maxwell. Between 1885 and 1889 he was
professor of physics at the Karlsruhe Polytechnikum; it was there that he was able to
produce electromagnetic waves and measure their length and velocity. He was able to
show that the nature of their vibration and their susceptibility to reflection and
refraction were the same as those oflight and heat waves. As a result he established
that light and heat are also electromagnetic radiations. In 1889 he finally became
professor of physics at the University of Bonn were he continued his research on the
97
98 JOSEPH J. KOCKELMANS
discharge of electricity in rarefied gases. He died prematurely and unexpectedly in

1894.
This brief description, to which one could add that he was the first human being to
broadcast and receive radio waves, does not at all describe the person Heinrich Hertz
or even his work and genuine achievements. One might have assumed from the
description given above that Hertz was a brilliant gymnasium student, who later under
von Helmholtz would write an earth-shaking doctoral dissertation, and after graduation
immediately would start to search for solutions for problems affecting Maxwell's
electrodynamics. Yet the real Hertz did not attend an official gymnasium, the
secondary education which would have guaranteed him entrance to the university.
Instead he studied at a Realschule and also at a Gewerbeschule with the intention later
to become an engineer. Yet his parents convinced him of the need to also study the
main subjects of the gymnasium and eventually submit himself to the Abitur. But even
then Hertz still intended to become an engineer and enrolled at the Polytechnikum in
Dresden where he mainly studied mathematics insofar as this is relevant to engineers;
yet he also read Darwin and Kant. After one year of military service he continued his
studies at the Polytechnikum of Munich. It was only in 1878 that he changed course
and enrolled at the University of Berlin where he began to focus on theoretical physics.
Eventually von Helmholtz advised him for his doctoral degree to work on an important,
but difficult problem in electrodynamics. Hertz politely rejected this proposal and
instead wrote his dissertation on electromagnetic induction in rotating spheres. In little
over two months he produced a publishable paper which he then submitted as his
doctoral dissertation.
Only after he had moved to Karlsruhe could Hertz finally tum to the issues that in
his view were very important and interested him most of all. But even then he did not
really search for what ultimately he would become famous for, namely the verification
of Maxwell's electrodynamics. It appears that Hertz was driven by a very deep desire
to do something highly original and discover something important but still completely
unexpected. One could perhaps say that he always dreamed of a life in which he would
not have to spend his time verifying hypotheses already formulated, but rather in
unearthing phenomena still unheard of. His book, The Principles of Mechanics
Pre~ented in a New Form, falls somewhat outside his main interest. It is a work of the
last half year ofhis life. He turned to this project that had been in the back of his mind,
so to speak, for quite some time after he had learned that he would only have a few
more months to live. Afflicted by an incurable cancer he resigned his position at the
University of Bonn and started immediately to work on his last book.
In view of the fact that it seemed impossible to do justice to the genuine meaning
of Hertz's more empirically oriented, main research, I decided in the remainder of this
paper to focus on The Principles ofMechanics which is Hertz's main contribution to
theoretical physics. As we shall see the main characteristic feature of this presentation
of classical mechanics is the fact that the concept of force has been eliminated from the
list ofbasic concepts of the theory. Hertz's ideas in this regard are not totally new in
view of the fact that several scientists before him had already pointed to the
problematic nature of the concept of force in classical mechanics and some had even
stated that in their opinion the concept would have to be eliminated altogether if
classical mechanics was ever going to be applied in a systematic study of the
ON THE INTERPRETIVE NATURE OF HERTZ'S MECHANICS 99
"imponderable fluids." This state of affairs makes it necessary to say a few words
about the history of the scientific concept of force.
A GLANCE AT THE HISTORY OF THE CONCEPT OF FORCE

AND ITS PLACE AND FUNCTION IN CLASSICAL MECHANICS
If one is to understand fully what moved Hertz to write The Principles ofMechanics,
one must begin by realizing that during its 200-year history the concept of force
gradually developed, from being a basic concept with a clearly defined content in
Newton's Principia, into a merely auxiliary, or perhaps intermediate, concept of
primarily methodological importance under Kirchhoff and von Helmholtz. Few
scientists even today are fully aware of the fact that in contemporary physics there is
a clear trend toward eliminating the concept altogether.
In a nutshell, the history of the concept of force can be described as follows. As is
the case with all other basic scientific concepts, the concept of force developed from
the everyday experiences all human beings are familiar with. In our prescientific life
we relate the notion of force to effort, power, and work; we tend to speak about force
when we have to push or pull to get something that is at rest into motion, or something
that moves to come to a standstill. It is this awareness of pushing and pulling that
played a leading part in the historical development of the scientific concept. In
antiquity the scientific or philosophical reflection on the notion of force culminated in
the work of Aristotle, who in his own work in this regard tried to refute the mechanistic
conception of natural phenomena of Democritus and others; Democritus had tried to
explain all natural phenomena with the help of masses and motions only.
Aristotle begins his reflections on the concept of force by distinguishing two
different kinds of forces: the force that is inherent in each substance (phusis) and the
force of push and pull that goes from one substance over to another and is the cause of
movement in the latter. In his book On the Heavens III, 2, 301b 18-19) he writes:" ...
phusis is the source of movement within a thing, while a force (dunamis) is a source
of movement in something other than itself ... " Now for Aristotle there never can be
a gap between the mover and the moved. This is true for both forces mentioned.
The implications of this view appear to be enormous, iflooked at from our modem
point of view. First of all one should note that Aristotle does not attach a quantitative
determination to the various forces, he does not measure them. A theory of forces, in
his view, must exclude every force that has the character of being an action at a
distance. Aristotle also must completely separate the celestial from the terrestrial
movements. Finally, for an explanation of the planets he must appeal to "divine" forces
as well as to the First Mover.
Aristotle's ideas concerning the notion and function of forces were quite generally
accepted in the West, even though there was for some time also a Stoic conception of
force, but its influence was very limited.
From our point of view a decisive stage in the development of the scientific concept
of force was reached by Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) who tried to come to a
mathematical formulation and a more accurate definition of the notion of force. Yet
one must observe that what is important here is not the result he came to, but rather his
completely new approach and his search for a quantitative definition of force. In his
early work Kepler had still adhered to the traditional conception of force as being some
"soul" animating the celestial bodies. Some years later Kepler then begins to speak
about the gravitational force and calls gravity not an activity but rather some passivity.
(Letter to Herwart ofHohenburg, March 28, 1605).
In October of the same year he mentions that both the earth and the moon attract
each other; thus the force of attraction appears to belong to the material aspect of each
physical thing. On November 20 of the same year he wrote in a letter that the forces
of gravity are subject to some mathematical formalism. Finally, he explicitly stated that
the forces of attraction are at work between terrestrial as well as between celestial and
terrestrial bodies.
With respect to the magnitude of the attractive forces Kepler conjectured first that
the intensity of these forces is proportional to the reciprocal value of the square of the
distance of the two relevant objects, but soon he had to reject this hypothesis. After
several investigations, he then suggested that the gravitational force is proportional to
the velocity ofthe moving body, for example the earth around the sun. Yet this velocity
itself is the inverse of the distance between the planet and the sun. In other words,
Kepler then held that the gravitational force is proportional to the inverse of the
distances. Galileo was skeptical in regard to any effort to define the nature and
quantity of the gravitational force. As he saw it, the present was not the proper time
to investigate the cause of the acceleration of natural motions. In his view there were
in his time several theories proposed, but none of them had been very successful. To
him it made no sense for a scientist to define the concept of force merely by
metaphysical speculation, as some had tried to do; force is a physical concept, but we
have not yet succeeded in defining it accurately.
In the mechanics of Descartes, the concept of force is eliminated altogether. His
physics was based, on the one hand, on a philosophical mechanism of the kind
proposed much earlier by Democritus and, on the other, on purely geometrico-
kinematic conceptions, and above all on the notion of impenetrable extension. When
he had to use the notion of force he appeared to define it as quantity of motion or
momentum (mv); on other occasions, he seems to identify force with what is now called
work (Y, mv).
After these brief observations of the earliest attempts to define the physical concept
of force we must now tum to the concept of force as defined in Newton's Principia.
Elsewhere I have already indicated in a similar context that in his conception of force
Newton was deeply rooted in the tradition of his time. However original his own ideas
may have been, they too arose in a hermeneutic situation, the nature of which we
recognize only after the facts, so to speak, in the prejudgments which Newton tacitly
accepted from his predecessors.
The term "force" appears in Newton's Principia for the first time in the third
definition, where Newton formulates his conception of the innate force of matter, the
vis insita. The innate force is a power of resisting by which every body "continues in
its present state, whether it be of rest, or of moving uniformly forwards in a right line."
The inert force or inertia is thus conceived as a force of inactivity. It is latent as long
as no other force impressed on the body tries to change its present condition. Yet it can
be considered as resistance and also as impulse. It is, as Newton expressly says,
resistance insofar as the body, maintaining its present state, opposes the force
impressed; yet it is also impulse as far as the body, by not easily giving way to the
impression of the other body, tries to change the state of that other body. In other
words, the innate force is resistance if the body is taken to be at rest, it is impulse if it
is taken to be in motion.
The innate force, as defined here, is not conceived as a cause of motion or
acceleration. Yet Newton explicitly calls it a force. Jammer suggests that Newton here
made a concession to Peripatetic mechanics, which conceived of dunamis as having a
dual nature: insofar as it can affect other objects it is active, but insofar as it is
susceptible to external causes, it is passive. In opposition to inertia Newton defined the
impressed force as an action exerted on a body, in order to change its state, either of
rest, or of uniform motion in a right line. This force differs from inertia in three
important respects: it is pure action; it does not permanently remain in the body once
the action has been completed; and contrary to inertia which is a universal force of
nature, the impressed force may have several origins. Newton himself interpreted the
impressed force as the cause of motion.
Depending on their origin Newton distinguished explicitly three different kinds of
forces. The most important ofthese is the centripetal force on which Newton focussed
almost exclusively. The centripetal force is that force by which bodies are drawn or
impelled, or in any way tend toward another body, as to their center. (Principles, p. 2).
Newton gave this force a central place because he identified this force with gravity
which is the central concept in his explanation of the Kepler laws and the tides, with
which the Principia were concerned mainly.
Newton distinguished three kinds of centripetal forces: the absolute force, i.e., the
absolute quantity of the centripetal force which is proportional to the efficacy of the
cause that propagates it from the center through the spaces round about; the
accelerative force, i.e., the accelerative quantity of the centripetal force, which is
proportional to the velocity which it generates in a given time; and finally the motive
force, i.e., the motive quantity of the centripetal force, which is proportional to the
motion which it generates in a given time. In the explanation of these forces Newton
may already have been thinking of forces in terms of a field. What is called "absolute
force" is barely used in the rest of the Principia. Newton was manifestly interested
mainly in the accelerative and motive forces as is clear from his three basic axioms.
The first axiom states the principle of inertia, the second defines the motive force,
and the third states that to every action there is always opposed an equal reaction. The
first two laws have their origin in the works of Galileo and Huygens, whereas the third
is anticipated in the works of Kepler.
The second law states that "the change of motion is proportional to the motive
force, and is made in the direction of the right line in which that force is impressed."
On another occasion I have already pointed to the fact that in this axiom the expression
"the change of motion" must be read as "the change of the rate of motion," or in
modem notation: f= d(mv)/dt.
Newton conceived of the motive force of a body as "an endeavor of the whole
towards a center, arising from the properties of the several parts taken together and the
absolute force to the center, as endued with some cause, without which those motive
forces would not be propagated through the spaces round about," regardless of whether
that "cause be some central body (such as is the magnet in the center of the magnetic
force, or the earth in the center of the gravitational force), or anything else that does not
yet appear. For, says Newton, "I here design only to give a mathematical notion of
these forces without considering their physical causes and seats." A few lines later
Newton stresses the same point once more, namely that he is "considering these forces
not physically, but merely mathematically." In modem language one could say that
Newton defines the forces operationally and admits that he is unable to define the
physical agents that appear to produce them.
Newton must have been somehow aware of the problematic nature of his
conception of force. This however would come to full light only in the long discussion
that the nature and the origin of the gravitational force would generate in the period
from Newton's own time on into the 20th century. We do not have to enter into details
here. For our present purposes it suffices to briefly summarize the preceding before
moving on to the critical discussion of the concept of force in the 18th and 19th
centuries.
In Newton's view, the concept of gravitational force is ultimately an irreducible
notion in the conceptual framework of mechanics. It is distinguished from other kinds
of forces by its universality and thus its importance for astronomical and cosmological
considerations. Its quantitative aspects are ascertained from experimental observation,
but its nature is ultimately unknown. For Newton and his contemporaries this meant
practically that the force of gravitation remained an unexplained phenomenon, for to
explain a physical phenomenon at that time meant to be able to give its mechanical
causes, i.e., to account for it in terms of the fundamental qualities of matter together
with the laws of motion.
FROM NEWTON TO VON HELMHOLTZ
After Newton's Mechanics had appeared in 1688 the book made a very deep
impression on many "philosophers of nature" who soon enthusiastically accepted
Newton's views, tried to improve on them, and applied them to ever new domains of
phenomena, far beyond the domain Newton himself originally had envisioned. Yet
from the very beginning there also were very serious objections. These came from two
different sides, on the one hand dynamism, and on the other mechanism.
Dynamism is the view that all phenomena of nature, including matter, are
manifestations of force (dunamis). In a strict sense dynamism was formulated for the
first time by Roger Boscovich (1711-1787). In his theory Boscovich relied heavily on
both Newton and Leibniz. Newton had given the first accurate definition of force as
the product of mass and acceleration (j=m.a.). He also had established the central and
all-important role of the force of gravity in the entire physical world. Furthermore, his
definition of inertia, which Newton considered to be the most fundamental property of
matter, the vis insita, prepared the way for Boscovich's view that matter is completely
to be interpreted dynamically. At this point he turned to Leibniz who had already
shown that there are insurmountable difficulties connected with extended, smallest
participles of matter and an attractive force acting at a distance. Leibniz had therefore
proposed an atom without any extension but a source of force or energy. From these
ideas ultimately Boscovich's atom was derived as well as his entire dynamist
reinterpretation ofNewton's mechanics.
Mechanism on the other hand, focuses on a mechanical account for the gravitational
force. Mechanistic theories also oppose the theory that implies action at a distance and
conceives of force predominantly in terms of push and pull. The first of these theories
(after Newton) was Robert Hook's theory of gravitation which postulated an ether and
furthermore assumed that all parts of the earth execute small, imperceptible, rapid
vibrations and spherical pulsations with the center of the earth as their center. Another
such theory was proposed by Jean Bemouilli who appealed to Descartes's theory of
vortices. Another well-known mechanistic theory was proposed by Leonhard Euler,
who again appealed to a universal ether.
The details of both these theories need not occupy us here. Instead we must now
pay more close attention to a third alternative in all efforts made to overcome the
intrinsic weaknesses in Newton's original views. This third option tried to explain
force in a relational manner. It is to this group of authors that Hertz's work on the
principles of mechanics belongs; this group also provides us with the perspective from
which his theory must be understood.
The third school of thought in the interpretation of the concept of force developed
from the general view that one must conceive of force either as a primitive and irredu-
cible notion of mechanics, or as a purely relational concept devoid of a separate
ontological status, and to be defined only "operationally" in relation to two other basic
concepts. Both these interpretations can be traced back to Newton and his immediate
successors. In the long discussion that developed the issue is usually about the
gravitational force, seldom about any other forces. One should realize that the gravita-
tional force was certainly the most important force to be considered, and in the opinion
of many theoreticians even the only force. The first interpretation may have been the
one Newton himself may have held; this view was promoted by Cotes, John Keill,
Samuel Clark, and several others. The second can be traced to the works of Berkeley
and is explicitly found in Maupertuis.
Among those who adopted the second interpretation one sees gradually a tendency
develop to eliminate the concept of force altogether, or at least as a fundamental
concept of modem mechanics. These ideas were developed systematically first by
Ernst Mach, and later by Kirchhoff, and Hertz. Jammer correctly observes that with
the works of Mach, Kirchhoff, and Hertz the logical development of the process of
eliminating the concept of force from mechanics altogether was finally completed. In
their view, from a physical perspective, the concept of force reveals itself as an empty
scheme, a purely relational or mathematical function. The contributions of Mach,
Kirchhoff, and Hertz constitute the final stage of a process in which all the artificial
trappings and embroideries were finally stripped away. The concept of force in its
ontological meaning as a casual, transitory activity, has no place in the science of
nature. (Jammer, 201-214).
HERTZ'S "THE PRINCIPLES OF MECHANICS"

Hertz's conception of the principles of mechanics was influenced by the ideas of his
predecessors, Mach and Kirchhoff, but above all, however, by his own work in electro-
dynamics. His criticism of the concept of force in particular originated in his study of
the theory of electrodynamics as advanced by Maxwell and von Helmholtz. Other
scientists before Hertz had felt a similar aversion to the classical conception of force
the moment this is applied in reflections on electrodynamic phenomena. They thus
proposed different ways to replace the notion with some other representation that
would be in harmony with the nature of mechanics as well as the phenomena known.
Maxwell conceived of electrodynamic forces as due to the motion of concealed forces,
Lord Kelvin reduced the effects to a mechanism of vortex atoms, and Helmholtz had
reduced them to a cyclical system of concealed motions. Hertz thought it possible to
account for all electro-dynamic forces, and also for the gravitational forces, and for all
actions at a distance as well as for all other forces introduced by mechanics, by
concealed masses and motions. Hertz added to this that if such an approach is capable
of eliminating the mysterious forces of classical mechanics, it should then also be
possible to prevent them from entering altogether.
In developing his own idea, Hertz begins with the realization that all physicists
agree that the main problem of mechanics consists in reducing the phenomena of nature
to simple laws of mechanics. What these simple laws are, are, according to the
generally accepted view, the laws ofNewton's mechanics. But critical reflection shows
that this assumption is by no means clear. For Newton's laws depend in their physical
meaning on the assumption that the forces they speak of are of a simple nature and that
they possess simple properties, but there is no common agreement among physicists as
to the nature and properties of these forces. Now instead of trying to clarify the vague
and obscure notion of force, Hertz decided to attempt to reconstruct the theory of
mechanics by taking as fundamental only those concepts about which there is common
agreement, namely space, time, and mass.
The Introduction to The Principles of Mechanics begins by stating that the most
important problem of science consists in the anticipation of future events. In trying to
anticipate the future we take a starting point in our experiences of past events, and then
try to draw inferences as to the future from the past by forming images of external
objects in such a way that the necessary consequents of the images in our thought are
always the images of the necessary consequents in nature of the things so pictured. In
so doing we assume a necessary conformity between nature and our thought, but this
conformity is founded in experience, insofar as experience teaches us that such a
conformity in fact does exist, at least as long as we limit ourselves to the particular
aspect which is necessarily contained in our presuppositions. We do not have any
means of knowing whether or not our conceptions of the things as expressed in our
images are indeed in conformity with the things in any other than this one particular
and vital aspect. (Ibid., 1-2)
It is often possible to develop more than one image of external objects, each of
which may fulfill the requirement that the consequents of the images must be the
images of the consequents in nature. In Hertz's opinion one can nevertheless dismiss
immediately all images and models which do not fulfill the following three minimal
conditions: 1) the model must be logically permissible, i.e., it must be consistent with
the laws of thought; 2) it must be correct, i.e., its relations must not conflict with the
observed relations between things; and 3) it must be simple and distinct, in the sense
of containing the fewest possible superfluous or empty relations. (2)
With these postulates, which govern the constitution of our images or models, Hertz
maintains, we must now connect three postulates which determine the scientific
(mechanical) representation of the images. First of all these representations must be
adequate, i.e., the pictures must be represented with the help of the most appropriate
notations, definitions, and abbreviations. Then they must also be correct, i.e., the
models must be represented in terms of immediate data of experience. Finally, they
must also be permissible, insofar as they may not contain anything that is contradictory
to the laws of thought as determined by the very nature of our mind. (2-3)
Assisted by these conditioning postulates one can now determine the value of
physical theories as well as the value of their models. In the Introduction Hertz limits
himself to considering the models of the principles of mechanics which were actually
developed in the past. (3)
By "principle" Hertz understands here any selection from among mechanical
statements such that the whole of mechanics can be deductively derived from them,
without any further appeal to experience.(4) He then briefly examines three possible
representations of images, or models of theories; two of these are taken from the history
of mechanics and the third one is his own. The latter will be unfolded systematically
in the remainder of the book.
The first is a theory usually found in textbooks of mechanics. It follows closely the
history of mechanics and especially introduces four fundamental concepts: space, time,
mass, and force. For Hertz this representation of our images of things is unsatisfactory.
Although one could seriously doubt the permissibility of this representation, insofar as
the concept of force lacks all clarity, Hertz nonetheless thought that this lack of clarity
was due mainly to the accidental characteristics, which we arbitrarily have introduced
into the essential content presented by nature. (Hertz, 8) As a matter of fact, Hertz does
not so much object to the content of this image as to the form in which this content is
represented. The logical value of the separate statements is not sufficiently defined
with clarity; and this could perhaps be corrected. (13) But the model is not only
inappropriate, it is also incorrect, insofar as the motions considered in mechanics, do
not exactly coincide with the motions actually found in nature, and furthermore as
many relations studied in the former are probably absent in nature.
As an example oflack of clarity in logical thinking Hertz discusses briefly the con-
fusion of the centrifugal cause with the inertia of a body. He gives an example well
known to everyone. Let us assume that we swing in a circle a stone tied to a string.
In so doing we are conscious of exerting a force on the stone. This force constantly de-
flects the stone from its straight path. If we vary the force, the mass of the stone, and
the length of the string we find that the actual motion of the stone remains in harmony
with Newton's second law. As we know, the third law requires an opposite force to the
force exerted by our hand. With respect to the opposing force the usual explanation
given is that the stone reacts upon the force exerted by the hand as the consequence of
a centrifugal force, and that this centrifugal force is in fact the exact equal and opposite
of the force exerted by the hand. In Hertz's view this conception is not permissible.
For what we call the centrifugal force is in fact the inertia of the stone. "Can we," he
asks, "without destroying the clearness of our conceptions take the effect of inertia
twice into account," (namely first as mass and then secondly as force)? In the laws of
motion force is the cause of motion and it was already present before the motion
started. Now can we without confusing our ideas first speak of force as cause of
motion and then suddenly begin to speak of force as the consequence of motion? For
Hertz to avoid confusion we must hold that a centrifugal force is not a genuine force
at all. (5-6) This way of speaking was introduced when inadvertently and uncritically
a conception of our historic tradition was incorporated into a new way of thinking in
which it no longer fits.
The second type of image used to describe mechanical processes which Hertz
discusses was of a more recent origin. It was proposed in the last quarter of the 19th
century by several progressive physicists. It takes as fundamental concepts: space,
time, mass, and energy. This way of looking at the phenomena, which was suggested
by the discovery of the principle of the conservation of energy, was able to avoid
innumerable actions at a distance between atoms and bodies by conceiving of them in
terms of transformations of energy. In this view force is only introduced later, by
definition, in order to facilitate our calculations. By claiming that energy depends
merely on position and velocity, one was able to show that all basic notions depend
only on immediate experience.
In Hertz's view this kind of theory is indeed superior to the first in appropriateness
and perhaps even in correctness. Yet it too shows a weakness in the lack of logical
permissibility. What he takes to be the basic weakness of this way oflooking at the
phenomena, Hertz describes in the following manner. If one wants to introduce energy
as a fundamental concept one cannot proceed in the usual way, starting with the
concept of force, and proceeding from there to force functions, to potential energy, and
then finally to energy in general.
For if one were to proceed in this way one would be led back to the first conception
of mechanics. Thus without assuming any previous considerations of mechanics, one
would have to specify by what simple, direct experience one proposes to define the
presence of a store of energy and to determine its amount. The scientists who defend
this view tend to attribute to energy the properties of a substance so much so as to
assume that every smallest part of energy is associated at every instant with a given
place in space, and that through all the changes of place and all the transformations of
energy into ever new forms of energy it retains its identity. Hertz does not deny that
perhaps definitions of the required type could be given. Yet it is a fact that until his day
no one had succeeded in doing so.
Furthermore, there is the grave problem that this "substance" occurs in two totally
dissimilar forms, namely as kinetic and as potential energy. Kinetic energy can be
accounted for by an appeal to velocity and mass; yet potential energy does not lend
itself at all well to any definition which ascribes to it the properties of a "substance."
For the amount of a given substance is necessarily a positive quantity, whereas we all
assume that the potential energy contained in a system is negative. Furthermore, when
we represent the amount of a substance by an analytic expression, an additive constant
in this expression has the same importance as the rest; yet in the analytic expression for
the potential energy of a system an additive constant never has any physical meaning.
Finally, the amount of any substance contained in a physical system depends only on
the state of the system; but the amount of potential energy contained in a given piece
of matter depends on the presence of distant masses which perhaps never had any
influence on the system. Now if the universe, and therefore also the number of such
distant masses, were to be infinite, then the amount of the many forms of potential
energy contained even in a finite quantity of matter would also be infinitely great.
In Hertz's view these difficulties must be removed or avoided by the desired
definition of energy. He did not think that such a definition would be impossible, but
as yet it had not been formulated by anyone. (Hertz, 22)
There is still one other reason why Hertz felt that the second system must be
rejected. An image of an external thing is permissible only if its characteristics are
consistent amongst themselves and do not contradict the characteristics of other images
already established in mechanics. On this ground alone one can then claim that it is
inconceivable that Hamilton's principle, usually employed in the exposition of the
second system, or any other such variational principle, should play the part of a
fundamental principle of mechanics. A fundamental law of nature must be simple and
plain, whereas Hamilton's principle proves to be a very complicated statement. For it
does not only make the present motion dependent upon consequences which will
manifest themselves only in the future, thereby attributing intentions to inanimate
nature (design), but also attributes to nature intentions that are void of meaning. For
the integral, whose minimum is required by the principle, has no simple physical
meaning. Furthermore, for nature it would be an unintelligible aim to make a
mathematical expression a minimum, or to bring its variation to zero. Hertz was
convinced that when all is said and done he still would be able to maintain his position.
The reason for this conviction is that there is a much simpler manner of looking at the
same phenomena. This new way oflooking at the phenomena is Hertz's own creation,
which he then briefly describes. (Hertz, 22-23)
In the description of his own conception Hertz begins with the observation that his
conception differs from all others in this respect that it admits only three independent,
basic concepts, namely, time, space, and mass. Any effort to describe the natural
relations between these three quantities without using any others runs into a grave
problem. In the past this problem had been met by introducing a fourth basic concept,
namely force or energy. Hertz had just shown that these two solutions will not do. To
explain his own position he begins his reflections with an observation made by
Kirchhoff in his Textbook ofMechanics, to the effect that three independent concepts
are necessary and sufficient for a systematic development of mechanics. The deficiency
created by this way of looking at nature is avoided by filling up the gap by using an
hypothesis, which had been suggested before in another context, and by making this
hypothesis one of the basic elements of mechanics. Hertz explains what he has in mind
as follows.
If we try to understand the motions of the bodies around us, and refer them to
simple and clear rules, paying attention only to what can be directly observed, our
attempt generally will fail. It appears that the totality of things visible and tangible do
not form a universe conformable to law, such that the same results always follow from
the same conditions. The manifold of the actual universe must be greater than the
manifold of the universe directly revealed to the senses. If we want to obtain a well-
rounded, complete image of the universe, which is conformable to law, we must
assume that behind the things we see, there must be other invisible things, we must
"imagine confederates concealed beyond the limits of our senses." Such deep lying
influences were also assumed in the first two conceptions of the principles of
mechanics; they appear there as entities of a special and peculiar kind. In order to
represent them in their image or model, the authors created the concept of force or
energy. Yet in Hertz's view these approaches are not really viable. We must therefore
admit that there is some hidden something at work, and yet deny that it has to be of a
special and novel category. Instead of assuming that this hidden something is a force
or energy, we now assume that it is of the same nature as the rest, nothing else but
motion and mass again; yet motion and mass are now taken not to be different from the
visible ones in themselves, but only in relation to us and our usual way of perceiving
them. In other words, we assume that it is possible to combine with the visible masses
of the universe other masses obeying the same laws, which are of such a kind that the
whole of nature becomes thereby intelligible and conformable to law. (Hertz, 25-26)
In addition, we also assume that this is possible everywhere and in all cases and that
there are no other causes of the phenomena than the ones we have admitted thus far.
What we usually call force and energy now becomes nothing more than an action of
mass and motion recognizable by our senses. Explanations of force from processes of
motion, i.e., dynamic explanations, are not at all uncommon in physics, and in several
domains of mechanics concealed masses and concealed motions have already been
introduced, namely the forces of heat have been traced back with certainty to hidden
motions of tangible masses, electromagnetic forces are due to the motion of hidden
masses, and von Helmholtz has treated the most important form of concealed motion
in a manner that admits of a general application. The expressions "verborgene Masse"
and "verborgene Bewegung" have become current technical expressions. This
hypothesis appears to be capable of gradually eliminating all mysterious forces from
mechanics. And if the hypothesis is capable of doing that, it must also be capable of
entirely preventing them to enter into mechanics.
Hertz then briefly describes this new conception and discusses its strengths and
weaknesses. He begins this presentation by introducing the three independent,
fundamental concepts of time, space, and mass as objects of experience; he also
specifies the concrete sensible experiences by which they can be determined. With
respect to the masses he stipulates that in addition to the masses recognizable by the
senses, concealed masses can be introduced by hypothesis.
Hertz next describes the relations which always obtain between these concrete ex-
periences and which, thus, we have to retain as the essential relations between the fun-
damental concepts. First he connects the fundamental concepts in pairs. Relations be-
tween space and time constitute the subject matter of kinematics. There are no relations
between mass and time alone. Finally, experience teaches us that between mass and
space there are a number of important relations. The details need not occupy us here.
Let us instead immediately tum to the manner in which all three basic concepts are
to be connected with each other. The general connection, in accordance with
experience, can be summarized in one single fundamental law, which shows a close
analogy with the law of inertia as formulated by Newton. Hertz presents this law in the
following words: Every natural motion of an independent material system consists
herein, that the system follows with uniform velocity one of the straightest paths." This
statement becomes fully understandable only when the necessary explanation of the
mathematical mode of expression used is given; yet the law can also be expressed in
the usual terminology of mechanics, in that the law brings together in one single
statement the usual law of inertia given by Newton with Gaus's principle of least
constraint. It asserts thus that if the connections of the system momentarily could be
destroyed, then its masses would become dispersed and move as nearly as possible in
straight lines with uniform velocity. In Hertz's image or model this fundamental law
is the first proposition derived from experience in mechanics proper; it is also the last
such proposition. From it, together with the hypothesis of the hidden masses and
movements and the normal connections, one can then derive all the rest of mechanics
systematically by purely deductive reasoning.
In this model force and energy are not yet mentioned thus far. Yet they can be
introduced later for convenience's sake. But they do now no longer appear as
something external and independent of us and apart from us, but merely as a
mathematical aid whose properties are entirely in our power. (Cf. Jammer, op cit., pp.
227-229 for further details.)
ON THE INTERPRETIVE NATURE OF HERTZ'S

THE PRINCIPLES OF MECHANICS
In the space of some 250 pages, Hertz effectively shows that it is indeed possible to
give a mechanical account of all known phenomena of nature on the basis of the
assumptions outlined above. With respect to the three basic concepts, time, space, and
mass, one can say that for time and space Hertz basically maintains Newton's position;
he does not define them and assumes that one knows how to define them operationally.
Yet what he says about them is formulated from the perspective of Kant's Critique of
Pure Reason. The concept of mass, on the other hand, is introduced by means of a
definition: "The number of material particles in any space, compared with the number
of material particles in some chosen space at a fixed time, is called the mass contained
in the first space." In his clarification of this notion he adds that one may consider the
number of material particles in the space chosen for comparison to be infinitely great;
the mass of each separate material particle is therefore by definition infinitely small.
A material point is a finite or infinitely small mass conceived as contained in an
infinitely small space. A number of such points taken simultaneously are called a
system of material points.
The assertions made above are for Hertz all expressions of a priori judgments in the
sense of Kant. They are completely independent of experience and have with outer
experience no other connection than these intuitions and the logical forms with the help
of which they are formulated themselves may have. The implications of Hertz's
decision to interpret the basic concepts from the perspective of the critical philosophy
of Kant are truly enormous. They also may very well have been the main reason why
most scientists paid little attention to his work. Yet from the viewpoint of mechanics
this typical Kantian interpretation is of little importance. Every empiricist may
reinterpret these basic statements in any other reasonable way. Mechanically the point
is that Hertz, like Newton, does not see a need to define space and time, as Einstein
later will do, but defines the other variables explicitly. That this definition verbally is
not the same as Newton's definition is obvious, but it mainly reflects the fact that
Newton made his claim from the perspective of a planetary system, whereas Hertz's
main work was located in electrodynamics.
Be this as it may, and I admit that much more should be said about all of this, on the
basis of these basic concepts Hertz is then able to reformulate Newton's three basic
laws. The first law of Newton can be formulated as follows: "Every free system
persists in a state of rest or uniform motion in a straightest path." In this law Hertz,
thus, combines Newton's law with Gauss's principle of least constraint so that the
concept of force can be eliminated. Since the second and third law also employ the
concept of force they are no longer needed as basic laws of mechanics. Yet it is to
some degree necessary (from a practical point of view) to introduce the concept of
force as a derivative concept in the discussion of the behavior of unfree systems. In
this discussion the second law can then be maintained for that limited domain and
expressed by the following definition: "By force we understand the independently
conceived effect which one of two coupled systems, as a consequence of the
fundamental law, exerts upon the motion of the other." Two systems are said to be
coupled when one of more coordinates of the one system is always equal to one or
more coordinates of the other. Finally Newton's third law must be maintained for that
domain in the following form: "Force and counterforce are always equal and opposite."
(Prine. OfMech., 145, 184, 190)
If one looks at Hertz's work from the perspective of hermeneutic phenomenology
and considers it in the manner in which it historically came to be one sees how under
one's eyes a certain manner of thematizing natural phenomena gradually begins to
develop that appears to lead in a new direction so that at the end the very principles on
which the original thematization rested, or in which it even to some degree consisted,
begins to appear in a new form.
What drove this development is undoubtedly the fact that the Newtonian conception
of the principles of mechanics appeared to be in need of improvement, adaptation, and
eventually even fundamental changes. One of the basic "forces" at work here was the
realization that the progressive application of the Newtonian framework to ever new
domains of phenomena for which originally it was not developed, appeared to force a
conceptual framework on these phenomena that did not always fit very well. This
became manifestly clear in the systematic study of heat and all the other "imponderable
fluids," particularly electromagnetic phenomena. Furthermore, from the very
beginning the thoughtful and critical, theoretical physicists have been aware of the fact
that the framework developed by Newton was notwithstanding its enormous successes
somehow imperfect and in need of improvement.
We have seen that in the 19th century several leading physicists have felt that
particularly the notion of force as an independent and fundamental concept of
mechanics becomes ever more problematic. Those who had tried to substitute the
concept of energy in the place of force in the fundamental framework of mechanics,
soon realized that this cannot be the genuine solution, either. After Kirchhoff
unsatisfactorily had tried to eliminate the concept of force altogether, Hertz very
gradually began to realize that there is a way to eliminate the concept of force as basic
concept and to place a strange, but quite legitimate, purely mechanical hypothesis in
its place. What classical mechanics tried to explain with an appeal to forces can also
be explained by hidden masses and motions.
It is important to note here that Hertz manifestly never doubted that mass must be
considered to be an independent, fundamental concept of mechanics. Like Lord Kelvin
and many other leading scientists of the time, Hertz took it to be obvious that the
science "mechanics" can be maintained only on the basis of some implicit mechanistic
conception of the universe of the kind first developed by Democritus. Thus the science
"mechanics" cannot be anything except the scientific study of material masses and
motions. In the subsequent years this mechanistic conception would gradually give
way to a completely new way of looking at natural phenomena. This new development
was made necessary by the great discoveries in cosmology and particle physics, and
involved a careful definition of space and time and the introduction of a new
conception of energy. But this obviously lies far outside Hertz's horizon and would
for us be the subject of other sets of historical interpretations and critical philosophical
reflections.
One will object to my interpretation of the meaning of Hertz's work by arguing that
Hertz's great discoveries in theoretical physics have little to do with the manner in
ON THE INTERPRETIVE NATURE OF HERTZ'S MECHANICS Ill
which we understand the phenomena of nature, i.e., with the manner in which in the
modern age we have learned to look at natural phenomena. Hertz was and remained
committed to classical mechanics as developed by Newton. His research was guided
mainly by the desire to present the principles ofNewton's mechanics logically more
rigorously than they had been presented before his time. In other words, what drove
Hertz in this research was nothing but a set of logical and methodological concerns.
The end result of his "logical" investigations merely was that he opened the door for
what in philosophy of science later would become known as logical empiricism,
operationalism, and conventionalism.
As I see it, there is a core of truth in this objection and my simplified description
of Hertz's ideas may contribute to such criticism. My presentation of his ideas seems
to show that there is really nothing new in Hertz's mechanics. His work contains, as
the title explicitly states, the principles of (classical) mechanics presented in a new
form. Furthermore, it is undeniably true that Hertz's approach to mechanics has
influenced the manner in which philosophers of science think about the natural
sciences. It is clear to me that Hertz's The Principles ofMechanics has been influential
in the full realization later on that Newton's Principles constitute just one out of an
"infinite" number of mechanical explanations. (Poincare, Electricite et Optique, 1901 ).
What the science "mechanics" presents us with is not the truth, if by this one
understands that one and only one, necessary, invariable true description of what is in
the realm of nature can be developed. The phenomena of nature can be legitimately
described and interpreted from more than one perspective. In this sense it is in my
view true that Hertz prepared the way for what later would be called conventionalism.
Yet one should also realize that there is much more to it than this. Hertz most
certainly never would have defended the kind of conventionalism in the radical form
defended by Poincare. Poincare was basically a mathematician, whereas Hertz at heart
always remained an empirical scientist, and an experimentalist at that, who fully
realized that only very few interpretations will be possible on the ground that
mechanics is not a pure mathematical discipline, but a science of nature. This is why
he always maintained that no concept can be accepted as fundamental and basic if it
cannot be defined in a manner that relates to what is given in experience. With Kant,
Hertz would repeat again and again that all our knowledge begins in experience even
though not all of our knowledge is derived from experience. Having said this, it
obviously is also true that Hertz was equally concerned with precision and logical rigor.
ON THE TRUTH OF SCIENTIFIC STATEMENTS AND THEORIES
I have observed more than once that by ontological problems posed by the natural
sciences I understand problems of meaning and truth. Until now I have been concerned
mainly with problems of meaning: precisely what do scientific statements mean? Let
us now turn to the problem of truth.
In discussions about truth in the sciences, practically all authors define truth in
terms of correspondence. Yet although they maintain some conception of the
correspondence theory, they nonetheless often leave room also for coherence and
pragmatic theories of truth. In their opinion the other conceptions of truth mentioned
are not so much concerned with the nature of truth as with the criterion that must be
fulfilled if in a certain context the notion of truth is to be applied, and can be applied
there in a meaningful manner.
I share the view of those who define truth in this manner. Yet I do not accept this
view simply dogmatically, or on the basis of a dogmatic interpretation of the meaning
of the classical theory, nor do I limit myself to purely semantic or linguistic reflections
when I ask questions about the nature of truth and about the conditions under which
this notion is to be applied. Rather I proceed to ontological refections in order to
preclude that eventually I will have to accept a theory which is both epistemologically
and ontologically underdetermined, or the thesis that calling a scientific statement or
a theory true is no more that setting a limit to reasonable belief.
Thus with the tradition I hold that the proper place of truth lies in the
correspondence between our judgments and the things about which we make our
claims. As I see it, this conception may be true in principle; yet it is also affected with
serious difficulties because of its formal emptiness. In addition, the theory is also
unfounded if taken in the form in which it was presented in the tradition.
If we say that there is a correspondence between our judgment and the thing about
which we speak, how is in this context the thing to be understood if my judgment is to
be conform to it? By correspondence I do not mean that our judgments must state the
thing as it is in itself independent of our understanding of it. Because if we proceed in
this way we shall again be confronted with the basic problem that Kant tried to deal
with in the Critique of Pure Reason. The agreement is not one between an actual
psychic process and an actual physical thing, either; nor is it one between a psychic
process and an ideal object or idea. Yet it is not an agreement between a representation
and an actual thing, either. The agreement appears to be rather one between the content
of a claim about a thing and the thing insofar as this can be discovered by us
independently of the claim we now make about it, by means of some process of
"confirmation," so to speak. Thus to say that a scientific statement is true really means
to say that this statement appears to reveal the thing as it manifests itself to be in some
process of confirmation that logically antecedes this claim.
One must realize here that in order for a thing to manifest itself to us, it has to reveal
itself time and again in some context of meaning. Such a context of meaning ultimately
belongs to the totality of meaning of which we can now conceive. Thus the limits
which we must impose at once on all our judgments and on the possible confirming
activities, as well as the limits to be imposed on the contexts of meaning within which
things can manifest themselves, make it impossible for us to claim that in our
judgments we shall ever be able to state how things are "in themselves,"
comprehensively, exhaustively, absolutely, and definitively. The only claim we can
possibly make is that our judgments state how things are as seen from some limited
context of meaning and, in the final analysis, from the perspective of the totality of
meaning of which we can now conceive. In other words, every form of revealment
implies at the same time some concealment. But if every human effort to reveal things
implies various forms of concealment, then for us truth is in principle always connected
with untruth, and meaning with lack of meaning. And yet we still may claim that our
statements are true to the degree that they reveal things just as they manifest themselves
to be independently of those statements.
We must now see how this conception of the correspondence theory of truth can be
employed in a systematic discussion of the problem of truth in the science of nature.
One can say first that what has been said about statements in general, also applies to
scientific statements. Scientific statements are also context-bound, and it is generally
accepted that these contexts always involve elements that are not necessary.
Furthermore, it is also clear that the scientists approach natural phenomena by means
of scientific theories and models. Now these models are formed by processes of
abstraction and idealization; they thus involve the development of mathematical
relationships that at a certain moment in the argument are substituted for empirical
generalization. In so doing principles are formulated which, by themselves, may very
well not refer to any concrete set of natural phenomena. In other words, there always
will remain a gap between the scientific model and the empirically observed
phenomena, whose observation in science is equally theory-laden. And yet all of this
does not change the fact that the suppositions made in scientific theories, however
conventional they may be in one sense, can nonetheless be shown to be rational and
reasonable assumptions, and not merely arbitrary ones. Making these assumptions
makes it possible for us to engage in research projects in which new discoveries are
often made and in which furthermore processes of verification of a special kind play
an essential part. It is through these processes of verification that we try to bridge the
gap between model and observed phenomena, even though we know that we never will
succeed fully in doing so.
From the conception of truth just described in outline we can under the proper
circumstances state that certain scientific statements are true in a genuine sense of true.
By calling a scientific statement true we mean to state that everyone at any time under
similar assumptions and under similar circumstances can approach the relevant
phenomena from the same context of meaning, and will then find the same insights as
we have come to, even though at a later time in history one may discover another
model that is even more fertile and more adequate from an empirical point of view.
Yet claiming that a scientific statement is true does not imply in my interpretation
of truth some one-to-one correspondence between what the proposition states and the
things, taken independently of that or any other claim we can make about it, the thing
in itself so to speak. For the claim that a scientific statement is true, taken in my
interpretation, does not imply that the thing is, and is nothing but, what my scientific
statements posit about it. This interpretation does not entail either that things genuinely
are what sciences claim them to be, and that our prescientific conceptions of the same
things are false or less likely to be called true. For the scientific claim and the
prescientific conception may very well be two legitimate, but different interpretations
of the same thing.
From the point of view outlined here it would be difficult to defend the view that
all the theoretical assumptions implied in scientific theories should be taken to be true.
The same is the case also for the statements in which these assumptions are articulated.
Many theoretical assumptions are merely invitations to see or approach the relevant
phenomena in one way rather than in another. Thus one cannot defend the view that
all elements of the theory or model must correspond with certain elements of the real
phenomena. Just think of the "hidden masses" in Hertz's The Principles ofMechanics.
In almost every theory elements may be found in the model to which nothing
corresponds in reality. This realization is particularly important for our understanding
of the theory of relativity and of quantum mechanics.
To realize that scientific theories contain elements that are not essential and can be
explained only historically, as well as the fact that scientific theories in the final
analysis are only possible interpretations of the meaning of natural phenomena, is not
to dispute the fact that scientific theories, provided they are fertile, accepted by the
scientific community, and are adequately verified by observation and experiment, are
and remain theories of what-is in nature and can legitimately be said to be true to the
degree that they do indeed make an essential contribution to the revealment of natural
things. Scientific theories can be said to be true, not because they present us with a
precise replica of the relevant natural phenomena, but because they make it possible for
us to give a rational account of natural things and their states, relationships, and
interactions, and thus to reveal them in a manner which appears to be in harmony with
the manner in which they manifest themselves to be independently of that theory in
observation and experiment.
CONCLUSION AND PROSPECT

Over the years I have become more and more involved with a philosophical critical
study of the history of the sciences. Using a critical, hermeneutical study of the history
of the sciences as a means to bring to light the precise meaning of the interpretive
character of natural science appears to be affected by intrinsic difficulties. To mention
just a few of them, there is first the question of what kind of history the history of the
natural science really is? In developing a "proof' for the basic thesis is one to focus
on the work of individual scientists, communities of scientists, "great' discoveries,
discoveries in the theoretical domain, discoveries on the experimental level, or is one
perhaps to focus on the gradual development of a science over the course of its history
as a whole? Another obvious problem is that one manifestly begins to go in circles by
following this route: one uses the history of science to prove the hermeneutic character
of natural science and then turns to the same history in order to explain the precise
meaning of the thesis and the limits within which such an interpretation has to maintain
itself.
If one carefully, philosophically, and critically investigates how leading scientists
at the very moment in which they discovered what we today still highly admire in their
work as lasting contributions to physics, go about their work, what can one then learn
from such a critical study with respect to the precise meaning of scientific research in
physics and the implications of this investigation for the kind of truth one must attribute
to these great discoveries?
Thus, for example, Kepler's first and second laws were more or less contained in
the data which Brahe and he himself had collected over the years. But this is not the
case for the third law. One must thus ask the question of precisely what motivated
Kepler later to go beyond the framework ofBrahe and to begin to look for a third law,
and what were the decisive factors in the subsequent discovery and development of that
law? Why does Newton's Mechanics begin with: "The quantity of matter is the
measure ofthe same ... ?" Why is this definition formulated in this peculiar way? Why
is a definition of mass the first thing to be stated in Newton's mechanics? Why did
Newton opt for four basic mechanical concepts instead of three, for instance, and why
is mass the first one to be defined? What is one to think about the first axiom that at
first sight runs contrary to what everyone on earth has directly observed? What were
the motives that moved Hertz to eliminate force as a basic concept of mechanics? How
could he ever defend the view that "inventing" hidden masses about which he did not
know anything, would be preferable from a mechanical point of view over maintaining
Newton's conception of force?
What is important in these and all similar questions is that historically they were
eventually answered in one way or another, and yet they also could have been
answered, and often actually were answered, by the majority of scientists in a different
way? But if this is the case, what are the implications of this realization for the nature
of natural science, and the meaning and truth of scientific claims and theories?
The Pennsylvania State University
REFERENCES
Buchwald, Jed Z. The Creation ofScientific Effects. Heinrich Hertz and Electric Waves. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Dampier, W. C. A History ofScience and Its Relation with Philosophy and Religion. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, I 971.
Dugas, Rene A. History ofMechanics. Trans. J. R. Maddox. New York: Central Book Company, Inc.,
1955.
Hertz, Heinrich Rudolf. The Principles ofMechanics Presented in a New Form. Trans. D. E. Jones and J.
T. Wallace. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1956.
Jammer, Max. Concepts ofForce. A Study in the Foundations ofDynamics. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1957.
Kockelmans, Joseph J., Ideas for a Hermeneutic Phenomenology of the Natural Sciences. Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993.
Mach, Ernst. The Science ofMechanics: Accounts ofits Development. Trans. Thomas J. McCormack, La
Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1960.
Poincare, Henri. Electricite et Optique. Paris: Carre, 190 I.
-The Foundations ofScience. Trans. George Bruce Halsted. New York: The Science Press, 1929.
ROBERT C. SCHARFF
COMTE AND THE POSSIBILITY OF

A HERMENEUTICS OF SCIENCE
One surprising feature of Comte's positivism is that it does not support the sort of
"rational reconstruction" of the scientific method promoted by 20th Century positivism.
Still more surprising is what one might call the "pragmatist" character of his arguments
against such reconstructions. Of course later positivists, too, sometimes claim to be
heirs to pragmatism; but Comte's pragmatism is of a different order. Later positivists
speak of pragmatism within their context of a purely internalist, epistemic analysis of
scientific reasoning - a task they sharply distinguish from what they see as the
"extraneous" and non-philosophical study of the psychological, social, political, and
historical factors that impinge upon actual scientific practice. In contrast, Comte's
pragmatism does not yet even recognize such a distinction. Indeed, in this respect, and
certainly most surprising of all, his treatment of science has less in common with later
positivism than with the views of some contemporary postpositivists. For in both
Comte and postpositivism, philosophy is charged with thinking about science - i.e.,
with reflecting on scientific practice understood as one human activity among others,
not just analyzing and/or idealizing its cognitive structure from within.
Ultimately, however, even evaluations of "science as a human practice" like
Comte's can fail to be genuinely hermeneutical evaluations - i.e., evaluations as
concerned about the lifeworld from which scientific cognition arises as about science
itself Patrick Heelan has recently discussed this matter at length, in a comparison of
classical pragmatism and hermeneutical philosophy of science. 1 As he points out, to
be philosophically effective, a concern about the lifeworld cannot just be tacked on to
an already established preoccupation with science, however broadly and contextually
construed. For in our time, this sort of additive strategy inevitably tends to confuse the
historical dominance of science with its essential status. In other words, in the present
atmosphere, the mere acknowledgement that scientific practice arises out of lifeworld
concerns still tends to create the impression that life is the pursuit of science "plus
something" - rather than presenting the more phenomenologically accurate picture,
viz., that out of human life there arise any number of activities, one of which is the
currently dominant pursuit of scientific knowledge and its applications.
The problem, I believe, is that there is in all the positivists (and there remains in
postpositivism) a strong tendency to be misled by the longstanding habit of placing
117
118 ROBERT C. SCHARFF
excessive emphasis on the "outcome" of scientific thinking. Later positivists may

explicitly focus on the narrower question of the outcome of scientific theories (i.e.,
their verification). Implicitly, however, they remain at one with classical positivists in
their progressivist conviction that the ultimate point of their analysis of scientific theor-
izing is to further the influence of science as a global practice. What defines the atmos-
phere within which both classical and 20th Century positivism move, then, is this deep
background sense that scientific investigation, because of its theoretical and practical
results, deserves to be the dominant epistemic practice. And it is important to see that
today' s opponents of positivism, given the characteristic angle of attack in their opposi-
tion, actually do very little to change this. Their arguments either for the replacement
of reconstructivist epistemologies with less formal and more pluralistic ones, or for still
wider construals of science as social practice, continue to occur, so to speak, in the
same place as reconstruction. Indeed, even if one goes further and worries about whe-
ther all of these new philosophies of science, however anti-reconstructionist, might still
"leave something oflife out," this cannot change the fundamentally scientistic atmos-
phere in which its opponents work. By initiating their opposition to positivism through
revisionist philosophies of science, the same practice is silently reaffirmed and privi-
leged in its dominant role, and the whole scientific process continues to be understood
as effecting a successful, progressive displacement of pre-scientific thinking. And then
its analysis- now, of course, including its context and social influence as well as its
procedures- still constitutes the hardest core of good philosophy.
In contrast, the main task for a hermeneutics of science is to illuminate with equal
discrimination the way we live through various concerns and practices that are
precisely not susceptible to scientific/technological treatment. I do not claim that
Comte had a clear and explicit understanding of this point. He is no proto-hermeneut.
Nevertheless, I believe that insofar as he still insists that philosophy must give a
historically reflective defense of itself, rethinking his positivism can help clarify what
is at stake in a hermeneutics of science.
1. LOGICAL POSITIVIST PRAGMATISM
Let me begin, then, by recalling a typical 20th Century description of what is supposed
to be "pragmatist" about logical empiricism. In Experience and Prediction,
Reichenbach characterizes his theory of meaning as just a "further development" of that
"healthy tendency...to combine meaning and action" which he finds in both pragmatist
and Vienna Circle positivist epistemologies. To say that the meaning of a proposition
is the "method of its verification," he explains, is "the same idea" that pragmatists
express "by calling observation propositions the 'cash value' of indirect propositions." 2
Reichenbach concedes that cash value and true-false are not adequate tests for a really
scientific theory of meaning, and he goes on to argue for the importance of the concepts
of weight and probability. Yet he concludes that his modified verificationist theory
furthers the same basically anti-metaphysical and pro-scientific intentions of the
theories of his pragmatist progenitors. 3
A pragmatism of sorts this undoubtedly is, but it is not Comte's. Both might claim,
for example, that they see a close relation between good theory and effective practice,
that they are fallibilists, and that they understand intellectual progress as the product
of continuous interaction between human organisms and their environment. 4 But when
COMTE & THE POSSIBILITY OF A HERMENEUTICS OF SCIENCE 119
Reichenbach asserts that "there is as much meaning in a proposition as can be utilized

for action," he sees himself as treating experience/meaning/action in terms of the
empirical testing of scientific theories. Among other things, this permits him to con-
clude, in familiar fashion, that he can admit there are statements with "super-empirical
content," while at the same time reducing this content to its having a "suggestive
effect" on our feelings, and thus denying that it is such content "itself' that is the basis
of any decisions. 5 In contrast, Comte thinks of experience/meaning/action at the level
of a historico-critical reflection about science as a human practice. At this level, one
can question - as Comte does question - whether all concern for human practice is
properly met by employing procedures modeled on natural science, or even whether
formal reconstruction of these procedures is the appropriate conceptualization of
natural science itself. Yet for precisely this reason, logical empiricists regard Comtean
pragmatism as philosophically worthless. Reichenbach, for example, calls the whole
story of the pre- and extra-scientific life from which science emerges and diverges mere
tales of the "mystical mist lying above the research methods of science" - a
"superstructure of images and wishes" through which real philosophers must penetrate
to find "the solid foundation ... of inductive operations" that lies evident "below."6
Reichenbach's sharp distinction between extra-philosophical superstructure and
solid epistemic ground exhibits, of course, the internalist stance adopted by positivists
generally. 7 In the present context, however, I am concerned not with the distinction
itself but with the standpoint from which it is supposedly drawn. As analytic
postpositivists and Heidegger's offspring agree, to distinguish so sharply between the
"sociological fact" of science and its epistemic essence, a mind must imagine itself to
be at voluntary remove from the pull of ordinary life and actual scientific practice and
to be operating as if from nowhere. Comte is opposed to this ahistorical image of
epistemic analysis- a fact we know from his opposition to John Stuart Mill's idea of
the construction of a formal "logic of science." Mill argues that with the ages of
theology and metaphysics behind us, such a logic, conceived as an "organon of proof,"
should become philosophy's primary project. 8 But just as he argues against Mill, so
Comte would object against Reichenbach that formal epistemologies are fundamentally
misconceived. Comte's objection, however, is not driven by a desire to promote
epistemic pluralism, as has been the case with numerous analytic philosophers since the
1950's. 9 In Comte's view, the formalist urge rests on a misperception of philosophy's
proper role in relation to science.
Comte's objection is this. In order for Mill (or Reichenbach) to make their kind of
reconstructions, they must assume that what Comte calls the dogmatical [dogmatique]
standpoint from which their reconstructions are produced is identical to the standpoint
from which they are philosophically evaluated. But the assumption is mistaken. 10 For
Comte, philosophers must first of all reflect on the relation between theoretical
expositions/reconstructions and the larger life context of experienced phenomena from
which these expositions selectively draw their material. It is not meeting criteria of
rationality that makes a theory valuable. The much-loved tests of rigor and conceptual
clarity, for example, are qualities that scientific theories might share with metaphysical
ones. 11 Today, says Comte, we know that the real value of a scientific theory lies in its
power to illuminate something about the relation between ourselves and our
surroundings more effectively than a theological or metaphysical one. In other words,
scientific rationality and its products can only be properly appreciated when its
operations are reflectively placed against the background of the historical emergence
of science itself. Postpositivists call this "recontextualizing" science; Continental
hermeneuts call it recognizing the historicity of science. For Comte, it means seeing
scientific constructs as expressions of the "third stage" of intellectual development as
measured by his famous 3-stage law- a law according to which human intelligence
successively utilizes three methods of philosophizing in three developmental stages-the
theological, metaphysical, and scientific (or positive). 12
For later positivists, of course, Comte's appeal to this law at best expresses an ex-
traneous sociological interest in science. Empirical claims about real events, which
Comte's law presumably asserts, must be evaluated by science and therefore can offer
no grounds for philosophical judgments about science. To Comte, however, this objec-
tion only makes sense if one assumes a forced option between "mere" socio-historical
accounts and "genuine" epistemic analysis; and this idea in tum depends upon the
acceptance of an essentially ahistorical conception of epistemic analysis. When Mill
says he wants to banish all "outlying" historical and metaphysical issues from his
"correct analysis of reasoning," or when Reichenbach says he can "look through" the
superstructural mists "above" ongoing research to find the latter's "supporting struc-
ture"13 - that is, when they claim to restrict themselves to the analysis of scientific
rationality "in itself' - they both act in accordance with a basically similar, unques-
tioned understanding that philosophy of science is conducted by neutral and decontext-
ualized minds. Comte regards this assumption as irresponsible, even self-deceiving.
2. COMTEAN "PRAGMATISM"
Here, then, we can identify a fundamental difference between Comte's positivism and
later varieties. Comte, we might say, is concerned with being a positivist, not just
behaving like one. He thinks that how to philosophize about science is a contested
question, and he responds to this circumstance by developing a critical self-
understanding of the context in which his own philosophizing occurs. Later positivists
not only do not engage in such reflection; they have a story that explains it away. To
them, there is scientific reasoning; there are the empirical conditions that affect its
practice but not its principles; and there is the analytical mind that neatly separates the
principles from the practice. The epistemologist of science, says Reichenbach, is
concerned with the procedures and the "content" of knowledge, not with the "social
fact" of knowing. For Comte, however, no phenomenon answers to the name, "pure"
scientific reasoning and its "content." There is only science as a distinctive sort of
activity within the general context of human affairs. Granted, he does think scientific
cognition deserves epistemic hegemony; in this, he shares the scientism of other
positivists. Yet he also insists that, given its contested condition, good positivists must
explain why this scientism is defensible.
Comte's "pragmatism" about science, then, moves primarily at the level of a
reflection on science as an especially worthy sort of human practice. By means of his
three 3-stage law, he intends to provide a historico-critical defense of the growing
dominance of scientific cognition and reflectively legitimate this defense itself.
Philosophy of science thus becomes a kind of strategic as well as epistemic conscience
for science. Positive philosophers must cultivate a heightened awareness of both their
intellectual heritage and their current experience, in order to shoulder the extra-
epistemological task of explaining why science rather than theology or metaphysics is

turning out to be the best of the "three [possible] kinds of philosophy." Human beings,
he says, have always had two related goals, one intellectual, the other practical. 14
Intellectually, we have always sought a "comprehensive theoretical system"- namely,
one that could give us a unified understanding of all the facts of our surroundings, not
only as they now are ("simultaneously") but especially as they may become
("successively"). 15 This interest in succession as well as simultaneity does not arise out
of curiosity or wonder. In fact, it does not express a primarily intellectual interest at
all. It is fundamentally life-driven. What we really want from our theoretical system
is that it should form the basis of a universal praxis that conquers the cosmic and social
disruptions that deprive us of the harmonious and predictable relations with our
surroundings that human beings have always desired and expected. According to
Comte, it is its superior capacity to fulfill this desire for harmonious natural and social
relations - not something essential to the positive method or style of thought - that
justifies the coming dominance of scientific understanding. There is nothing superior
about science in itself, any more than there is something essentially misbegotten about
theology or metaphysics. Scientific rationality deserves our special favor because its
applications better fulfill the same human desires that have already been addressed by
theology and metaphysics. Ultimately, what is inadequate about theology and
metaphysics is that the application of their theories to human affairs gives us neither
the power to handle nature nor adequate tools for social peace.
The naturaVsocial efficaciousness of theories and the historically determinate
character of our understanding of that efficaciousness itself are not, however, the only
aspects of the relation between science and life that Comte stresses. For him, one must
recognize the inevitable historical insensitivity of all intellectual "schemes," however
efficacious. Broadly useful in human affairs or narrowly satisfying of methodological
criteria, all theorizing, under any measure, ignores or suppresses a great deal
concerning the existential origin and development both of itself and the criteria that
measure it. For later positivists, of course, this is as it should be. Epistemology, says
Reichenbach in a sloganeering mood, is not psychology. 16 For Comte, however, an
ahistorically constructed epistemology cannot understand what scientists actually do.
Formal reconstructions not only give a distorted picture of scientific activity, but
scientists, if they adopt this picture as their own self-image, will be poorer scientists.
We must always keep in mind, says Comte, the "necessarily artificial" character of any
epistemic scheme, lest its purity mislead us into thinking we have grasped some
timeless truth with it. Philosophically speaking, then, the artificiality of epistemic
generalizations can be forgiven, but only if it is not forgotten. 17
In short, Comtean and later positivism are "pragmatist" at different levels. Comte
not only analyzes the methods of science, but considers the historicity of these methods
themselves. Still more fundamentally, he is aware that he is considering scientifically
meaningful interaction itself as a contemporary phenomenon, and he therefore
contrasts it with other different contemporary sorts of interaction - typically, in his
case, with the theological and metaphysical. Today, however, we might well ask, By
what right was meaningfulness ever deemed ultimately "positive" in Comte's sense in
the first place? By what powers of divination was it determined that the desire for what
he calls "natural order and social peace" is primary among our interests? Note that
these questions challenge Comte's positivistic standpoint, not just his methodological
claims about science or what it can accomplish. To his credit, Comte has answers to
these questions, and he thinks philosophers ought to have them. But his answers, we
find, cannot be our own. Yet we can praise Comte for insisting upon the historically
minded sort of reflection that addresses these questions. Comte's writings, we can say,
do frequently enact the kind ofhistorico-critical, pragmatic positivism I have described.
Yet Comte himself never explicitly identifies this as his position. Here, then, I shall
start drawing the line between praise for Comte's more incisive positivism and our own
need to rethink in a more hermeneutical direction the issues to which he draws
attention.
3. PRAGMATISM AND HERMENEUTICS
To start with the praise, I think the historico-critical character of Comte's positivism
brings him closer to Continental hermeneuts like Heidegger than to the analytic
postpositivists. All too often, the latters' recognition of the historicity of thought is
made only for the sake of exposing the time-bound outlook of their supposedly
ahistorical forbears - while the minds doing the exposing never ask about their own
historicity. 18 On this issue, Comte is more like Heidegger, who insists that genuinely
hermeneutical philosophers must first ask themselves what it is to "be historical." 19
Although with different reactions, Comte and Heidegger both understand their projects
to originate from a place where modem technoscience is emerging as the
"consummation" of Western intellectual development. Stated in Comte's terms, the 3-
stage law provides an explanation of why this is so. Recast in Heidegger's language,
Comte is thus rightly committed to facing the reflective task of"securing proper access
to philosophical inquiry," where this inquiry is understood to originate at the "ending"
of the Western tradition.
Or is he? True enough, Comte encourages us to reflect upon scientific practice in
relation to other human practices. Yet he always does so facing toward and arguing in
celebration of science. With nineteenth century eyes, he sees the emergence of science
and its technologies as a happy, progressive, even utopian event. For us, however,
there is no avoiding the depressing, retrograde, and dystopian threat that appears
equally constitutive of this very same event. For Comte, since the positive stage
promises to bring about the orderly and predictable relationship to our surroundings
that we have always sought, the very idea of a fourth stage - that is, a postscientific or
postpositive stage- makes no sense. In Heidegger's language, Comte does not yet
experience any "distress" over the suitability of our inherited and currently dominant
understanding of the relation between Being and human being. We, however,
experience "danger" in the current condition first, and we must therefore learn to
dismantle and rethink everything we inherit to find in this condition a "saving grace." 20
Yet notice that the unhappy Heidegger reflects upon his distress in the same
determinately historical manner as the satisfied Comte. For treatment of this distress
cannot lie either beyond or anterior to our technoscientific condition. No standpoint
exists from which the possibility of an idyllic pre-technological or post-technological
world could be divined. 21 Moreover, we are all to some extent happy Comteans-
satisfied with technological practices that enhance our lives in just the ways Comte
envisaged. The romantic idea of giving it all up might be imagined, but it cannot in
Heidegger's sense be "thought." Simultaneously, however, there is for us the whole
disturbing array of unhappy experiences at the margins of these happy practices. In an

attempt to come to terms with this ambiguous and ultimately unsatisfactory condition,
some have tried to recast Comte's original vision by separating everything good that
is happening within technoscience from what might lie essentially and problematically
outside its practices - in the foolish hope that the latter might then be properly
addressed without disturbance to the former. 22 The trouble, of course, is that human
beings are already "within" any possible practice- and thus unable to wish themselves
to a place outside of it.
Ultimately, then, Comte's scientistic optimism makes it impossible for him to do
justice to those human concerns and activities that might in some way be "covered" by
positive knowledge and technological practice but are never in this way satisfactorily
"known." I conclude by identifying three major reasons why Comte's positivism must
inevitably fall short in relation to the hermeneutical task pioneered by Heidegger.
(1) Within the bounds of a Comtean reflection, there can be no critique of the
modem tendency to see all reflectiveness as a kind of "subjective" response to an
"objective" natural process. Comte, we know, intended something more by reflection.
He promoted a historico-critical self-understanding, integral to the positive spirit itself,
and he charged it with the task offirst disclosing that inherited, largely pre-scientific
orientation which still came most naturally to everyone, and then condemning the
increasingly unacceptable price that the maintenance of this orientation exacts under
increasingly successful scientific circumstances. But even Comte could do little more
than imperfectly enact such a reflectiveness; he found no voice to speak of it. He
therefore could not prevent later positivists from embracing his scientism while
demoting reflection to a kind of "subjective" shadow counterpart of the more
respectable, "objective" analysis of the scientific method. Eventually, "reflection" was
dismissed altogether, as the mere "introspective" monitoring of those "subjective"
reactions which happen to accompany "philosophical analysis" rightfully so-called.
(2) Under this ontological handicap, all efforts to relate science to allegedly "other"
forms of human activity arrive too late and without proper credentials. Even if it can
initially seem that there are qualitatively distinct, non-scientific forms of activity, how
they differ from scientific activity remains an issue with no recognizable philosophical
legitimation-and in a world where scientific practice displays a record of such success
that it generates a strong presumption that we already know "what" any intelligent
activity is. 23
Finally (3), taking (I) and (2) together, so long as reflection on science continues
to be conceived as carried out by Comtean or post-positivistic subjects, an
unsympathetic mainstream will insist upon privileging the "objective outcome" of
science and scientific thinking, whether in its specific theories or as a global
technoscientific practice, in a way that makes any expression of fundamental doubts
about this dominant practice appear backward and "merely subjective." As a result,
every analysis of the structure/process/ usefulness/dangers of this practice- however
revisionist in inspiration - will inevitably tend to leave intact the familiar, inherited
ontological understanding that prompts us (i) to regard our surroundings as basically
something "out there" to measure and control, (ii) to depict scientific thinking as just
an innocently "neutral" and disengaged response to what is there for measuring, and
(iii) to assume that since this response is itself no more than a rule-guided analysis of
what is "really" there, the whole activity can have no (epistemically) legitimate
alternative.
Ultimately, then, Comte's tale of the Western tradition's consummation in scientific

technologies gets no further than articulating what Heidegger calls philosophy's "first"
and now seemingly "last possibility."24 Nevertheless, Comte's formulation of this last
possibility, framed as an emerging "positive spirit," might still shed light on how there
could be today a "further possibility" for us that was not there for him. Comte insisted
that positivists must be reflectively attuned to "being" positivists, though he himself
had no cause to question the definitiveness of this orientation. The problem he
bequeaths to us is how to reformulate his idea of reflection so that this allegedly
definitive point of departure itselfbecomes a philosophical issue.
Considered from this angle, Heidegger's pervasive ontological distress over the
same "culminating event" that makes positivists happy eventually leads him to speak
as if we must tum the Comtean position inside-out. In Heidegger's language, we must
explicitly "make known" to ourselves what Comte himself only silently "understood,"
so that we can work out our ontological dissatisfaction with a dominant mode of being-
in-the-world that we do not experience so happily. What Comte understood is that
insofar as we encounter our surroundings in terms of expectations of natural
predictability and social orderliness, all articulation of our encounters with these
surroundings - whether theological, metaphysical, or scientific - must (and in any case,
will) be evaluated in terms of the successful technoscientific "handling" of these
expectations. Heideggerian hermeneutics, speaking out of less happily experienced
circumstances, measures its own articulations by how well they can "overcome" the
pull of this dominant positive orientation and illuminate the ways we encounter things
as not susceptible to technoscientific handling and thus not adequately tested in terms
of pre-established criteria of "outcome."
Stated generally, the primary hermeneutical task, as I have argued elsewhere, is thus
to rethink the Western tradition in accordance with an issue that neither Comte nor the
later positivists experienced any need to explore: How does it come to pass today that
so much is encountered which seems ontologically "out ofplace" wherever knowing
and acting proceed in the usual ways? 25 This question is posed neither objectively nor
subjectively. It concerns phenomena now pushed to the margins of what "positively,"
presumptively, matters more. On this question, Comte can shed no light. For had the
question occurred to him at all, he would have happily replied that even asking it is just
a sign that pre-scientific thinking still claims territory it will eventually lose.
University ofNew Hampshire
NOTES
1 Patrick A. Heelan and Jay Schulkin, "Hermeneutical Philosophy and Pragmatism: A Philosophy of
Science," Synthese 115 (1998), 269-302. See also Heelan's "The Scope ofHermeneutics in Natural Science,"
Studies in the History and Philosophy ofScience 29/2 (1998): 273-98, and "Why a Hermeneutical Philosophy
of the Natural Sciences?" Man and World 30 (1997): 271-98; Joseph J. Kockelmans, The Idea for a
Hermeneutic of the Natural Sciences (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993); and in a related vein, from a "science
studies" viewpoint, Joseph Rouse, "Feminism and the Social Construction of Scientific Knowledge" in Lynn
Hankinson Nelson and Jack Nelson, eds., Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht:
K1uwer, 1997), 195-215, and Engaging Science: How to Understand its Practices Philosophically (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1996), esp. 237-59.
2 Hans Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1938), 49; also,
53.
3 Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction, 80; cf. 30, 69, 73.
As should be clear by now, I am not concerned here to pin down the precise characteristics or fatal
limitations of pragmatism. My interest is in the "level," or reflective angle at which pragmatism of any
plausible sort may be asserted. On the general issue of what constitutes pragmatism, see, e. g., John J. Stuhr,
ed., Classical American Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 4-11; Russell B. Goodman,
ed., Pragmatism: A Contemporary Reader (New York/London: Routledge, 1995), 1-11; Charlene Haddock
Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social Fabric (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), 3-16, I 74-201; Hilary Putnam, Pragmatism (London: Blackwell, 1995); John P. Murphy, Pragmatism:
From Peirce to Davidson (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990); and Arthur 0. Lovejoy, The Thirteen
Pragmatisms and Other Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), esp. 1-29.
5 Experience and Prediction, 80, 62-69. "Super-empirical propositions," he says, "are like inconvertible
papers which we keep in our safe without the possibility of any future realization" (68). In this regard, super-
empirical propositions resemble certain logical propositions, insofar as the latter are not utilizable for action,
either (70).
6 Experience and Prediction, 403-404, my emphasis. Whether reflecting political commitments or not, this
"base-superstructure" imagery in fact dominates most logical empiricist conceptions of the philosophy of
science. For Carnap, too, "above" the level of scientist practicing as scientist, there is only the domain of the
traditional "philosopher," where one finds no hypotheses but just "theses" that make no cognitive difference
["Pseudoproblems in Philosophy," in Logical Structure of the World, trans. Rolf A. George (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1969), 306, 333-34]. See also Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic, 2nd ed.
(New York: Dover, 1952), 46-57.
7 This orientation is now widely challenged, of course, in sociological, feminist, and science studies
critiques. See, e.g., the collections, Science as Practice and Culture, ed. Andrew Pickering (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992); Feminism, Science, and the Philosophy ofScience, ed. Lynn Hankinson
Nelson and Jack Nelson (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997); and The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy. Science, and
Culture, ed. David R. Hiley, eta!. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991)
8 See my Comte After Positivism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 58-63.
At one end, see, e. g., Morton White's Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism [1949]
(Boston: Beacon, 1957), ch. I; at the other, Richard Rorty, "Pragmatism without Method," in Objectivity,
Relativism. and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 ), 63-77.
1 For Comte, this false assumption is a good example of our intellectual tendency to forget that every
theoretical exposition is just a selective articulation of some cognitive and socio-political inheritance that
continues to furnish its context of "intelligibility." This tendency is perfectly understandable, says Comte,
since only the dogmatical method is truly "suited to the mature condition of our intelligence" CPPI(2), 79
[F, 47]. Cf. Discours sur I 'esprit positif(Paris: Carilian-Goeury and V. Dalmont, 1844), 25-26.
11 "It is ultimately just as impossible," says Comte, "to construct a universal logic using purely abstract
concepts in isolation from all definite phenomena as it is to construct a universal [method for all] science.
In all efforts to make such constructions there lurks the secret survival of the absolutist spirit oftheologico-
metaphysical times" (Discours sur /'esprit positif, 47). Here, too, Comte's evaluation of metaphysics differs
interestingly from that of the later positivists. Like them, he of course criticizes the unscientific character of
metaphysical doctrines. His sharpest criticism, however, is directed at what he identifies as the much more
disturbing feature of metaphysical cognition, viz., its excessive love of the sheer logical power of reason.
Beginning with supposedly "indubitable" convictions, metaphyskal minds construct competing dogmatic
systems. Because each system is (or presumably can be made) logically consistent, but all are inattentive to
observable facts, ultimately the only grounds for choosing among them is intellectual pride. In the end, then,
metaphysical thinking succumbs to infatuation with analysis, argument, and abstract rules-plus the use of
force when hearts and minds must finally be "convinced." The age of metaphysics is past, but
"metaphysicians" are still among us. At bottom, says Comte, the metaphysical mind is that state of"chronic
distemper which naturally inheres in our ... evolution between childhood and maturity" (Discours sur /'esprit
positif, II).
12 Scharff, Comte After Positivism, 73-91.
13 In Carnap 's similar phrasing, one must ignore the "subjective origins" of knowledge in order to provide
a "constructional system .. .identical for all observers" (Logical Structure, 7). In an unpublished letter to
Carnap dated May 9, 1936, Neurath remarks that Comte should be defended for promoting the idea of the
unity of the sciences but condemned because his "metaphysics" gives the very term "positivism" a bad name
[cited by Rudolf Haller, "Was Wittgenstein a Positivist?" in Questions on Wittgenstein (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1988), 34-35].
14 Discours sur /'esprit positif, 19-22.
15 So, what is wrong, e.g., with theological divination is not that it tries to know the future, but that it tries
to do so with theories that are speculative instead of empirical.

16 Experience and Prediction, 4-5. In other words, epistemology is concerned about the structure and
content of knowledge only, and never either "the external features which appear to an observer who takes no
notice of its content" or the "vague and fluctuating" psychological operations of actual thinking (ibid.).
17 Opponents of rational reconstruction have been arguing since at least the 1960's that the epistemic
forgetfulness of logical empiricism has led to serious distortion of the very scientific practice for which
reconstruction was initially designed. In a line with which Comte would entirely agree, one recent
commentator has observed that while positivists dreamed of making scientific methodology "more secure than
physics; the [real] challenge is to make it as secure as physics" [Larry Laudan, Beyond Positivism and
Relativism: Theory. Practice. and Evidence (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), 141; cf. pp. 3-25]. This
legacy of the modern epistemological tradition has been under explicit attack in Continental circles at least
since Heidegger's use ofDilthey against Husser! during the decade before Being and Time [SZ] when he was
sharpening his conception of the historicity of philosophical practice. See my "Heidegger's 'Appropriation'
ofDilthey before Being and Time," Journal of the History of Philosophy 3511 (1997): 124-26. Under the
influence of Thomas Kuhn, English-speaking philosophers of science began debating the possibility of a more
intimate relation between the historical rise of scientific practice and the logical analysis of scientific
statements in the 1960's [Rouse, Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy ofScience (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1987), 26-40], but Anglo-American opposition to a fundamentally ahistorical stance
in philosophy more generally did not really begin to coalesce until the 1970's. See, e. g., Philosophy in
History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, ed. Richard Rorty, et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1984); and Charles Taylor, "Overcoming Epistemology," in his Philosophical Arguments
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 1-19.
18 Hence, e. g., Hilary Putnam accuses Rorty of attempting "to say that from a God's Eye View there is no
God's Eye View" [Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 25].
That this is also true to somewhat lesser degrees of Charles Taylor and Putnam himself is my point in the
second half of Comte After Positivism, esp. 160-75, 199-207.
19 See, e.g., my "Heidegger's 'Appropriation ofDilthey before Being and Time," I 05-106.
20 Heidegger uses these expressions to characterize his central topic on that part of his inquiry path running
from 1923's "hermeneutics of facti city" to his "immanent criticism" of SZ in "Das En de der Philosophie und
die Aufgabe des Denkens" [trans. Joan Stambaugh, altered by David Farrell Krell, Basic Writings, rev. ed.,
ed. D.F. Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 431-49] and in the 1956 "Zusatz" to Der Ursprung des
Kunstwerkes (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1960), I 00 [trans. Albert Hofstadter in Basic Writings, 211].
21 For discussion of this impossibility, see Don Ihde's Technology and Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), esp. 1-20,42-71.

22 Think, e. g., ofHans-Georg Gadamer's remark at the beginning of"The Universality of the Hermeneutical
Problem," in which he claims that today "our task is to reconnect the objective world of technology which
the sciences place at our disposal and discretion, with those fundamental orders of our being that are neither
arbitrary nor manipulable by us, but rather simply demand our respect" [in The Hermeneutic Tradition: From
Ast to Ricoeur, ed. Gayle M. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1990), 147. But if, as Gadamer says, this task involves a "reconnection" of our "natural view of the world"
with "the unassailable and anonymous authority that confronts us in the pronouncements of science" (ibid.),
what is the character of the reconnection (if it is not itself either "natural" or "anonymous"); who is the
"reconnector"; and when does its being get asked about?
23 As numerous critics have argued, in such a scientistic atmosphere it is not just difficult to raise in a fresh
way the question, What is knowledge? (for rational reconstruction takes for granted that whatever it is that
science does when it gets it right simply is knowledge), it is also all but impossible to explore seriously the
relation between that aspect of scientific practice which leads to such knowledge and the other human
practices to which it is related, let alone determine whether scientific practice so understood has unrecognized
and problematic cultural specificity. See, e. g., Sandra Harding, Is Science Multicultural? Feminist and
Postcolonial Perspectives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); and Rouse's argument that it will
take a "post-epistemological" philosophy to ask such questions (Engaging Science, 125-57).
24 Heidegger asks apropos the ending of metaphysics in technoscience: Is this "already the complete
actualization of all the possibilities in which the thinking of philosophy became set? Or is there a first
possibility for thinking apart from the last possibility [of philosophy's dissolution into the technologized
sciences], a first possibility from which the thinking of philosophy would have to start, but which as
philosophy it could still not expressly experience or take up?" [On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh
(New York: Harper & Row, 1972)], 59.
25 Scharff, "Comte and Heidegger on the Historicity of Science," [Special number on Auguste Comte] Revue
Internationale de Philosophie 52/I (1998): 29-49.
THEODORE KISIEL
WAS HEI]3T DAS-DIE BEWANDTNIS?

Retranslating the Categories ofHeidegger's Hermeneutics of the Technical
Recent accounts of the historical genesis oflogical positivism tie it to the genesis of the
analytical-continental split in American philosophy in ways that begin to appreciate
why and identify where the "hermeneutic supplement" of continental philosophy is
"naturally" evoked in the more recent attempts in philosophy of science to "overcome"
positivism. One such account concedes the "interpretative and hermeneutic shallowness
of analytic philosophers" due to their "antihistorical approach." 1 Another account,
which traces the differing approaches toward "overcoming metaphysics" in Camap and
Heidegger back to their different neo-Kantian roots, couches its philosophical
conclusions in a final political contrast, reminding us that neo-Kantianism as such was
ultimately a philosophy of culture complete with a Kulturpolitik. Camap's objectivist
and universalist concept of philosophy via mathematical logic "best serves the socialist,
internationalist, and anti-individualistic aims" of his espoused political philosophy,
whereas Heidegger's "particularist, existential-historical conception of philosophy ...
based on an explicit rejection of the centrality of logic . . . best serves the
neo-conservative and avowedly German-nationalist cultural and political stance" of his
would-be Nazism. 2
The following scrutiny of Heidegger in this context seeks to situate the herme-
neutical within his philosophy and its application to the philosophy of science:
1. A hermeneutic logic. Camap's claim that Heidegger rejects the centrality of
"logic" must be qualified by the distinction between the formal logic (apophantic "as")
so dear to the positivist Camap and the transcendental logic of application to the
particular context "je nach dem" (hermeneutic "as") that Heidegger, following the
tradition from Kant to Emil Lask, sought to develop for his hermeneutical "logic of
philosophy." It is the distinction between a logic of judgment and the logic of category
formation which, in Kant's terms, shifts the locus of discussion from the generically
universal categories of the understanding, imposed judgmentally from above, to the
spatial-temporal schematisms of the imagination coming from below that mediate the
application of the Kantian forms to reality: how e.g. the pure logical form of a
categorical judgment becomes the category of substance when it is schematized in the
pure temporal representation of permanence, and the form of a hypothetical judgment
becomes the category of causality when it is schematized temporally as succession.
Michael Friedman rightly identifies the central role played by the neo-Kantian Laskin
127
128 THEODORE KISIEL
guiding the young Heidegger to his position on a "logic" of category formation. Central
to Lask's argument is the rejection of Kant's metaphysical deduction of the categories
from the logical forms of judgment, such that transcendental (material) logic is not
based on formal logic, but rather the reverse. "For Lask, what is fundamental is the
concrete, already categorized real object of experience: the subject matter of formal
logic only arises subsequently in an artificial process of abstraction, by which the
originally unitary categorized object is broken down into form and matter, subject and
predicate, and so on. " 3 What the young Heidegger will do is to elaborate this fundament
of"the concrete, already categorized [i.e., contextually interpreted] originally unitary
object" in more hermeneutical terms than the hybrid Husserlian Lask did. Lask's
transcendental material logic has as its "object" [Sache] an a priori categorized realm
of intentionally structured meaning (intelligibility, truth) that he calls the "panarchy of
the logos," which Heidegger will transform into a "hermeneutics offacticity."
2. Hermeneutic universals. Neo-Kantianism divides into two acknowledged schools
in its philosophy of science and culture. Camap takes after the more mathematically
minded Marburg school of Cohen, Natorp, and Cassirer, as opposed to the more
historically inclined southwest German school of Windelband, Rickert, and Lask, in
which Heidegger (1912-1916) was schooled. This distinction between the schools
recalls Windelband's famous distinction between the nomothetic and the idiographic
types of science. Accordingly, the political contrast made above is in fact not between
the universalist and the particularist but more accurately between two types of
universals, the abstract generic universal of the "all" with which formal logic
traditionally works, and the concrete distributive universal of the "each" that varies
according to historical or hermeneutical context. The tradition called these historically
instantiating universals the analogical universals of being, which is never a genus.
Heidegger will eventually call them the existentials of the temporal ontology of
Da-sein, of the human situation that is "in each instantiation mine." Heidegger's
ontology of Dasein is in fact an ontology of "occasional expressions" subject to the
variable of temporally individuating contexts, of what the analytic tradition called
"indexicals" (1, here, now, this, even "es gibt"). Such indexical existentials are to be
shaped and developed by way of a methodology that Heidegger calls "formal
indication," the key to his transcendental "logic of philosophy" that seeks to explicate
the naturally hermeneutical "logos oflife" ("panarchy oflogos").
3. Scientific philosophy. The early Heidegger, following Husser!, regarded his
fundamental ontology, oriented toward the being of Da-sein and culminating in a
temporality of be-ing, to be a scientific philosophy. But the first definition of
phenomenological philosophy that he gives, "the pretheoretical original science of
original experience,"4 is from the start fraught with paradox. To begin with, such a
"pretheoretical science" (is this phrase not a "square circle"?) is an overt and direct
challenge to the starting point of the then prevalent neo-Kantian scientific philosophy
in the "fact of science" and in the field of the extant sciences. By way of the
phenomenological reduction, science is no longer accepted as a given fact, but as a
problem that is to be resolved by tracing the eidetic "genesis of the theoretical" 5 from
its pretheoretical roots. The first task is to articulate this original pretheoretical domain
of the "give" of givenness and objectivity in which the fundamental dynamics of the
giving of meaning (Sinngebung) takes place. Such a temporal ontology must articulate,
by way of a peculiar retracing-of-sense (Besinnung: not "reflection," which objectifies
HEIDEGGER'S HERMENEUTICS OF THE TECHNICAL 129
this phenomenological procedure), the protopractical realm of human be-ing that

precedes and underlies, and thus "destroys," the customary subject-object structurations
of modem metaphysics.
But is this prate philosophia of a pretheoretical realm of meaning that lies this side
of all theorizing and "transcendent positing" (ZBP 117) of the "real" and "given," of
all reification and objectification, still "science"? In WS 1928-29, after a decade of
vacillation over this strange pretheoretical primal science so unlike any other science,
Heidegger definitively abandons the project of developing philosophy into a strict
science. "What science on its part is, resides in philosophy in an original sense.
Philosophy is indeed the origin [ Ur-sprung = "primal leap"] of science, but precisely
for that reason it is not science, not even the original science" (GA27: 18). He observes
that it is not a science not out oflack but rather out of excess, since it springs from the
ever superabundant and ebullient "happening ofDasein" itself, the most fundamental
dynamic "evidence" oflife. Superlatively a science from its abiding intimate friendship
(qnA.{a, GA27: 22) with this comprehensive evidence, "scientific philosophy," much
like the formula "round circle," becomes a misleading and even dangerous redundancy,
deceiving us into pursuing the wrong tasks in both philosophy and philosophy of
science. Philosophy should be regarded in its finite tentative (and so inventive)
character as ever "under way," as ever philosophizing in response to its ever unique
situation with its ever unique fundamental evidence. Philosophizing becomes explicit
transcending by letting transcendence happen, repeatedly enacting the transition from
the preconceptual understanding-of-being to a precursory conceiving of being. In this
way, it repeatedly actualizes the ontological difference between be-ing and beings
without objectifying be-ing itself. Philosophy in this frenetic transcending nevertheless
continues to function as the foundation (now however as afundamentum concussum)
that makes sciences and their regional ontologies possible, and moreover in its epochal
time and history also accounts for their periodic revolutions (GA27: 16-19, 219ff.).
This genetic-historical conception of the sciences was totally at odds with the
logicist conception of the Vienna Circle of logical empiricists. One can imagine how
Camap must have bristled at Heidegger's various remarks on the superior
"transcendental" status of philosophy over the sciences in Heidegger's inaugural
lecture of 1929, "What is Metaphysics?," such as the following concluding remark:
Meta-physics [= transcendence] is the ground happening of Da-sein. It is Da-sein itself. Because
the truth of metaphysics dwells in this groundless ground, it has as its nearest neighbor the
constantly lurking possibility of the most profound error. Accordingly, no amount of scientific
rigor ever arrives at the level of seriousness belonging to metaphysics. Philosophy cannot be
measured by the standard of the idea of science. (WM 43/112)
In the same year, Camap and Otto Neurath are proclaiming, under the title
"Scientific Worldview," the international socialist political program implied in their
technocratic logicism, that would place the rational knowledge of scientific experts at
the service of society's needs. The "Program of Unified Science" is an exposition of
the collective intersubjective nature of scientific knowledge expressed in a "neutral
system of formulae" and in a clear and distinct "symbolism free from the slag of
historical languages." Its objectivity is the "ethos of the interchangeable and featureless
observer- unmarked by nationality ... or by any other idiosyncracy that might interfere
with the communication, comparison and accumulation of results." 6 The same
scientific ethos of a "transcendental" community of observers is to be found in
Husserl's phenomenology. No autonomous genius like Heidegger need apply. This
130 THEODORE KISIEL
transcendental commonality of impersonal objectivity stands in marked contrast to

Heidegger's facti cal sense of "objectivity" [Sachlichkeit] as access to the intentional
evidences of indexical be-ing. Heidegger goes one step further and takes this
"evidence" to be ineluctably chiaroscuro and ever in temporal foment, whose
uniqueness and mystery tend to disseminate errancy. Against the public and neutral
objectivity of the logicists, Heidegger invokes the original temporality of a Da-sein that
is in each instance "mine," or "ours" (say, of a particular generation of a people)
subject to a peculiarly hermeneutic logic of indexicality and application that varies
according to each unique context, "je nach dem."
4. Overcoming Metaphysics. Camap, totally oblivious of this "transcendental
logic" of chiaroscuro evidence from the works available to him at the time, attacks
Heidegger's "meaningless metaphysical statements:' in a talk first given in 1930 and
published in late 1932 under the title, "The Overcoming of Metaphysics through
Logical Analysis ofLanguage."7 Heidegger's deliberately provocative and ambiguous
use of the term "Nothing," for what we now know to be the insuperable concealment
and eminent questionability of our non-objectifiably finite and temporal be-ing,
obviously contributed to the modem-minded Camap's total incomprehension of
Heidegger's grounding "statements" on science, which he cites:
The purported soberness and superiority of science becomes ridiculous if it does not take the
nothing [the unknown of mystery] seriously. Only because the nothing [non-objectifiable be-ing]
is manifest can science make what-is itself (beings) into an object of investigation. Only when
science exists out of metaphysics [=transcendence from beings to be-ing] can it always regain its
essential task anew, which does not consist of amassing and ordering bits of knowledge but in the
disclosure, ever in need of new enactment, of the entire expanse of the truth of nature and history.
(WM 40fllll)
The restless dynamism that temporal transcendence toward the unknown, in a
never-ending disclosure, imparts to science is anathema to Camap, who approaches
science through its clear and distinct context of justification rather than its dynamic
context of discovery. Curiously, Heidegger, upon reading Camap 's essay, will in 1936
not only coopt the phrase "Overcoming of Metaphysics" and make it his own task, in
a major about-face in direction which completes the "tum" begun in 1928 with the
abandonment of"scientific philosophy." He will also take the static positivistic image
of science understood as idealized formal systems mapping empirical data, in which
logic and scientific method reign supreme over the development of scientific content,
as the ultimate metaphysical conception of science in the modem epoch of the "history
of be-ing's oblivion" entering its final phase of global dominion of technology and
finding its ultimate metaphysical expression in the Ge-Stell, the artifactual com-posite
of the planet's standing reserve. The "international" program of technocratic logicism
proclaimed in 1929 is now exposed as one of the millennia! harbingers of this endphase
of the history of Western metaphysics.
A HEIDEGGERIAN HERMENEUTICS OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES

Mainstream philosophy of science (Kuhn, Toulmin, Feyerabend, etc.) in mid-century
likewise identified the limitations of the positivistic image of science and began to take
steps to replace it with a more historical image, in terms quite often suggestive of
Heidegger's genetic, hermeneutical, and situational conception of science. Could this
"existential conception of science" (SZ 357) with its radical predilections that ground
science in its Other, in a pretheoretical non-scientific origin, provide the radical basis
for this historical sense in the philosophy of science? The shortcomings of Karl
Popper's "situational analysis" of a scientific discovery, suggestive of an analytic of
Da-sein in proposing an "idealized reconstruction ofthe problem situation in which the
creative agent finds himself," lie more in its imperfect amalgam of a Hegelian objective
mind (a "third world" storing science's objectivized formulations in a written tradition)
with evolutionary epistemology's demand-response dialectic of"natural" selection. But
Popper invites the resources of a hermeneutic ontology when he remarks, to underscore
the linguistic milieu of the tradition in which science ineluctably operates, that
"science, after all, is a branch ofliterature."8
The historical image, simply put, now views science as ongoing research in a
changing problem situation ever interpreted and resolved according to the resources
of a particular historical and conceptual context. I) The scientific problem situation
in fact suggests a derivative mode of the Da-sein experience itself, ever caught up in
the crisis of transition by way of the challenge of the interrogative mood in which it
always finds itself. 2) "Re-search" suggests its dynamic sense of truth in via, as an
unending historical voyage of discovery. Heidegger thus defines science as "being in
the unconcealment of beings for the sake ofunconcealment" (GA27: 179).
3) Resolution occurs in the project of understanding the problem and interpreting
it in and according to its finite situation and fallible context. 4) The expository inter-
pretation of meaning is guided by a contextual preunderstanding of its particular "her-
meneutic situation" explicated according to the what of its domain (Vorhabe); the
access routes to this domain, how it is to be approached (Vorsicht); the prefiguration
of this domain in basic concepts that provisionally interpret the "already categorized"
object (Vorgriff). Hermeneutically put, it is a something (what) as something (how)
schematized by the conceptuality developed in this articulated union. 5) This hermen-
eutic language being applied to a problem situation with an eye toward its resolution
is a practical language deeply rooted in the inherited practices of a human "culture."
The hermeneutic "as" of practice, which is the very structure of the being ofhuman life
(GA21: 150n. ), precedes and underlies the apophantic "as" of overt assertions, which
is a derivative mode of interpretation. It is by way of the hermeneutic "as" of discursive
practice that Dasein first "builds," and so discloses, its world. This applies just as much
to the laboratory world of the scientist who has cultivated the skills needed to make
"theoretical entities" like electrons appear - and only in this way can they appear-
within the nexus of the instrumental complex of a carefully crafted experiment.
It is this humanizing dimension of discursive practice that has come to dominate
current approaches to the increasingly technicized disciplines and their domains
examined by current philosophy of science. To call science a "cultural practice" is
virtually the vogue, to approach it by way of "cultural studies" ( Geistes-
wissenschaflen!) is the current fashion, to do a cultural anthropology of the laboratory
world is the current sensation. Even the most theoretical work of a scientist is still a
work, a practice, in this case a "conceptual practice" with its own ethos (say algebraic),
custom, usage, culture, 9 a point that Heidegger often made in his own accounts of the
genesis of the theoretical from the practical (SZ 358).
It is against this background of potential usage in a cultural hermeneutics of the
natural sciences that I wish to briefly bring together two of Heidegger's most
untranslatable "technical" terms, Bewandtnis (implicative appliance) and Ge-Stell
132 THEODORE KISIEL
(artifactual com-posite), the latter his metaphysical conception, the former his factical
and protopractical sense of"technique."
As pretheoretical, facticallife is the practical life of simply be-ing, in the world,
with others, among things. Taken back to its intentional domain of origin, it is in fact
the protopracticallife ofbe-ing, before any distinction between the theoretical and the
practical: prototechnique in the intentional dimension of being-close-to (Sein-bei)
things in working with them habitually, protopolitics in being-with-one-another in
understanding agreement, protoethics in coming to terms with oneself, in
"being-ahead-of-itself' explicitly and in good conscience. Bewandtnis addresses itself
to the onto logically primordial level of our naturally finding ourselves among things
and becoming intimate with them by way of working with them and using them. And
being-among-things by way of making in the end belongs equiprimordially in the
actional contexts of being-with-others and of being-ahead-of-itself, each with its
correlative protopractice of politics and ethics. All of these protopractices taken
together in their variegated customs and "usage" (Brauch) and cultivation of a world
would constitute the concept of a protoculture. Ge-Stell, by contrast, is an extreme
manifestation of technique that has been "reworked" over centuries of "theory" by the
onto-theo-logic of metaphysics. A practical hermeneutics thus inherits two radically
different senses of technique.
The non-metaphysical nature of being-close-to things becomes evident in the
phenomenological discovery that our most normal relation with things is to "dwell
with" them in habitual familiarity, especially characteristic of our instrumental
relations. The "in" of being-in-the-world is the "in" not only of intense inter-est but
also of intimate involvement and implication to the point of latency or oblivion. We are
absorbed in the world as in a whole of implicative relations of pertinent application
toward a "cultural" end. The whole is defined by the human end ("for-the-sake-of')
which makes its parts, the means ("in-order-to"), understandable in and through their
varying functions serially working together toward that whole.
A context of implicative appliance [Bewandtniszusammenhang] does not consist in one [appliance]
being consecutively defined by another, but rather such that all is in each [appliance] referred to
the whole .... Each individual has incorporated the whole into itself. But the appliance-whole itself
likewise only comes to the fore in this way [through its incorporation in each of its appliances] ....
That there is such an implicative appliance with chalk, eraser, and blackboard is defined in the
whole such that the opportunity to write on the board is employed in the classroom, and the writing
on the blackboard serves to communicate the lecture more pointedly in the context of the course.
But the classroom as a whole is in advance defined by this task (GA27: 76).
I have translated the above passage in order to test the efficacy of translating
Bewandtnis as "appliance." In SZ it is characterized as the very being of the handy
[Zuhandenes], of the ready-to-hand immediately "at hand" for use. The being of the
handy, its ontological structure, is said to lie between two other structures, that of
reference and significance. Bewandtnis: involvement [Macquarrie & Robinson],
relevance [Joan Stambaugh], functionality [Albert Hofstadter], appliance [Kisiel]), a
highly idiomatic word from the Swabian dialect, is perhaps the most difficult German
term in SZ for the translator of any language. The French translations stress the sheer
conjuncture of relations either in their fittingness or in their "destination," i. e., the
satisfying fulfillment of their purpose and coming to a closure. The modem Greek
highlights their intertwining into a nexus, sumplexis.
Bewandtnis is a category that is located between reference and significance, but is
closest to the references of the mediating "in order to," while significance
[Bedeutsamkeit], the full meaningfulness of the totality called the world, comes only
with the final closure of"for the sake ofDa-sein," making significance an existential
and not a category (SZ 84, 88). References of"in order to" (listed seriatim on SZ 68,
83, 144) include manipulability (handiness, Handlichkeit), conduciveness (e. g., the
beneficial aids of accessories), detrimentality (preventive measures that ward off
harmful effects like corrosion and wear), serviceability (e. g. easily repaired), and
usability. The last (Verwendbarkeit = applicability) is related to Bewandtnis and
Bewenden, which in older Swabian mean "application" and "use" [Anwenden]. We
therefore choose to translate Bewandt-nis as "appliance," whose suffix implies the
present perfect state of having-been-applied by way of accustomed usage and practice,
which continues to be applicable (effective) only if we repeatedly "let it be" and allow
it to ply its course to term [Bewendenlassen]. The translation "ap-pliance" is also
intended to suggest, in its other stem-senses, other features that tools include: pliancy
(workability, adaptability, suppliance), compliance (fittingness, suitability), impliance
or implication (more of a hermeneutical connective than Macquarrie & Robinson's
"involvement"). Between generic reference and existential significance there is
appliance, the being of the handy and the ontological structure of the surrounding
world in which we get around with the handy and with which we are preoccupied.
The test of any translation of this term is its illuminating fit into the particular
prepositional nexus that it is supposed to interconnect and weave into a world. Three
slightly different prepositional idioms are intercalated here: the generic reference 1) of
something to something (SZ 68), say, of a hammer to hammering, becomes, in
Heidegger's oft repeated idiomatic expression, "Mit etwas hates seine Bewandtnis
beim etwas" (SZ 84), 2) "There is with this hammer its appliance to [or implication in]
hammering." That is, an intimate habitual "with" explicates its implication expressly
to hammer in the action of hammering. In the closely related third prepositional nexus
of strict "in order to," in which we say that the handy hammer is 3) for hammering, it
is clear that "the to-what [nexus 2 above] of appliance is [correlative to] the for-what
[nexus 3] of serviceability, the wherefore of usability" (SZ 84). There is thus a whole
referential chain of the noetic "with .. in, to" (nexus of habitual human applying), or the
noematic "in-order-to ... for" (nexus of applied tool handiness), where the same action
within the series turns from being the to of an inter-mediate end "into" the following
with of means:
The for-what of serviceability can in turn have its appliance. For example, with this handy thing
which we accordingly call a hammer, there is its implied appliance in hammering, with hammering
there is its appliance in nailing fast, and with this fastening together its appliance to protection
against bad weather; this protection "is" for-the-sake-of providing shelter to Da-sein.... The
implicative totality of appliance itself[thus] ultimately leads back to a for-what which no longer
has an appliance, which itself is not a being with the kind of being proper to something handy
within a world. It is rather a being whose being is defined as being-in-the-world, to whose
constitution worldliness itself belongs. The primary for-what is not just one more "for that" as a
possible to-what of another appliance. The primary "for-what" is a for-the-sake-of-which. But the
"for-the-sake-of-which" always refers to the being of Da-sein which in its be-ing goes about this
be-ing itself." (SZ 84)
This crucial passage on "Appliance and Significance" illustrates the care needed in
translating the complex of prepositions that defines the tone of each frame of reference,
which is not sustained with any kind of consistency and clarity in the Stambaugh
translation (SZ 84-87, 353f, et passim). But more importantly, this phenomenological
account of human actions in their orienting frames of reference has just made its crucial
134 THEODORE KISIEL
(Aristotelian) distinction between two types of praxis and frames of reference, 1) the
instrumental action of appliance referring externally to things of use (and tools), and
2) the self-referential action for the sake of its own be-ing of properly human being that
is the ultimate ground, reason, or "significance" of instrumental reference. This
properly human frame of self-reference, the self-world (worldliness as such), grounds
and anchors the environing world of getting by and around with things. With the
emergence of this basic distinction in frames of reference, one begins to see the
inadequacy of the translation of Bewandtnis with the generic "relevance" (Stambaugh),
a word that is equally synonymous with "significance" as well as "applicability," and
is not all that distinct from the equally generic "reference." The blurring of this crucial
distinction in reference by such a generic translation is most evident in statements like
the following: "The referential connection of significance is anchored in the being of
Da-sein toward its ownmost being- a being with which there essentially cannot be a
relation of-relevance [appliance, functionality]- but which is rather the being/or the
sake of which Da-sein itself is as it is" (SZ 123). Its own being clearly is of acute
relevance to an intrinsically self-referential being, which "in its be-ing goes about [geht
um =is concerned with] this very be-ing" (Heidegger's repeated formal formula for the
understanding-ofbeing that Da-sein itself is: SZ 12, 42, 52, 84, et passim). But this
very same be-ing (Sein) cannot itself directly assume the character of appliance that
properly refers to things; for such a reference would disengage the self-reference that
Da-sein essentially is, an ontological self-reference which in fact is the very basis for
encountering beings of the character of appliance at all. "Da-sein in each instance
always already refers itself from and by way of a for-the-sake-of-which to the
with-which of an appliance" (SZ 86). To put it another way: appliance is the middle
voice of instrumental intentionality, the present-perfect milieu of usance where the
noematic applied and noetic apply ing meet; but only the latter properly refers back to
the self-reference implicated in significance.
This self-referential understanding brings us to the most central noun-prepositional
phrase of SZ, das Woraufhin, the very sense or meaning of Da-sein, destined to find
its place at the very root of originative temporality. Stambaugh by and large adopts,
though not without inconsistency (SZ 85f = for which), the Macquarrie and Robinson
translation of this key phrase, "the upon-which." But such a translation is only
half-right, in view of the essentially "circular" teleological 10 character of the
self-referential and double-genitive understanding-ofbeing, whose presuppositional
fore-structure is at once before and forward, already and ahead. The full, temporally
circular translation would therefore be (in a crucial sentence first introducing the
hermeneutic circle) that "sense" (more directional than "meaning") "is the
toward-which of the projection structured by prepossession, preview, and
preconception, according-to-which something becomes understandable as something"
(SZ 151 ). One does not need, of course, to cite the full circularity of das Woraufhin,
"the toward-which-according-to-which," in every context. The "upon-which" or
"according-to-which" would suffice in less futuristic contexts where the present perfect
suffixes of worldliness in its meaningfulness prevail, which includes the habitual
referential contexts of appliance. But one should at least on occasion be reminded of
the full temporality of the archeological/teleological sense incorporated in das
Woraujhin.
Through this climactic prepositional phrase defining the movement of the sense of
Da-sein, one should sense the importance of getting the vectorial (spatio-temporal)
sense of ordinary prepositional phrases as right as possible, which as the most idiomatic
"parts of speech" in any language (some, like Hungarian, only have postpositions!) are
most resistant to facile one-to-one translation. One should still strive to translate each
distinctive prepositional constellation into one's own idiom in a way that would capture
its specific tonality (the intimacy of bei) and maximize its prefiguration of the
sense-structures of spatiotemporal reference. As Heidegger explicitly notes (SZ 112),
the usance of appliance first defmes the lived spatiality of the "around" [das Um] of the
handy within the surrounding world [Umwelt] in which we get around [umhergehen]
and make our rounds [herumgehen] in a daily circulation "in order to" [um-zu] carry
out our habitual chores. Handiness is first of all the quality of the ready to hand
proliferating around us, accessible to the hand by being in the right place at the right
time. In the end, the "substantial being" of the things in place is being "volatized" (SZ
87, 117), they "evaporate" into a subtle spatiotemporal constellation of active habitual
relations and the overall tonality of the actions within it. For Bewandtnis is a term that
suggests two interrelated insubstantial ontological traits, one structural and the other
elemental in nature: 1) a conjuncture of available relations, the operative "means"
[Verhiiltnisse] that provision a working milieu, its working conditions, the "lay" [Lage,
Gelegenheit] of a land, place, or situation; 2) the imponderable atmosphere that
pervades such a state of affairs, the aura radiated by the milieu, the "air" about it, its felt
quality, the mood of a relationship and its environment. 11 The conservative sense of
comfort in the intimately familiar and pragmatic sense of convenience of already extant
conventions are the overtones suggesting themselves in the German idiom of
acceptance of the status quo used by Heidegger in this context, "lassen es bewenden:
let the implications [of familiar appliance] apply," let the accustomed practice continue.
"Letting something (things) be relevant, in relevance" (SZ 84-87, llOf, 353-356 in JS)
is wrong also for appearing to reinstate the substantial "things," which can and should
be left "volatized" in this reference to the network of references, to the background
hermeneutic context of a "referential totality of implications."
Thus, Bewandtnis is at once an order concept and a style concept; it depicts the
overall style or tenor of a set of actions in a practical setting (workshop, homestead)
that necessarily shapes the practice. It is the very first of a line of concepts that the later
Heidegger will gather under the pre-Socratic Greek rubric of ethos, which is first the
spirit that haunts a dwelling, its genius loci, then the transmitted custom, practice,
usage, tradition (Brauch) that structures our current dwelling; in short, the habit of a
habitat, how it is inhabited. The tenor of usage in the "homey" Swabian workplace
conveyed by its nexus of"appliance" ("relevance" is too generically neutral to suggest
a style or mood, but "functionality" has American pragmatic possibilities) will have to
be compared with the style and "working conditions" that Heidegger uncovers in the
essence of modem technology. He characterizes it with the deliberately artificial word,
Ge-Stell, the artifactual com-posite of planetary resources that repositions the world
into a global warehouse (the Internet!) that holds its "natural" resources including
"manpower" in standing reserve. The style of efficiency and efficacy pervading a
workplace furnished by the Internet with a global reserve that supplements and
supplants the more local ready-to-hand, e.g., that of a modem laboratory which
facilitates its innovative experimentation with all forms of global networking, clearly
136 THEODORE KISIEL
assumes a different tenor and ethos than a medieval workshop/farmstead ensconced in

the domesticity of guild custom.
Northern Illinois University
NOTES
So Alan Richardson in his Introduction to Origins ofLogical Empiricism, Ronald N. Giere and Alan W.
Richardson (eds.), Vol. XVI of The Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy ofScience (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1996), 13, note 4.
2 Michael Friedman, "Overcoming Metaphysics: Camap and Heidegger" in Giere and Richardson, Origins
ofLogical Empiricism, 45-79, esp. 70.
3 Friedman, 58.
"Die vortheoretische Urwissenschaft des Ur-sprunges." This is a simplified composite drawn from
Heidegger's first overtly phenomenological courses of 1919 into 1920. The matter of phenomenology, "the
domain of origin or primal leap of experience," is at this time variously called the primal something
([ Ur-etwas ], life in and for itself, factic life experience, the historical I, the situational I, facticity, before it
is given its fully ontological name, Da-sein, the indexically original experience of "being here." Original
names like "primal leap" ( Ur-sprung, Natorp' s play on the German) suggest the degree to which Heidegger' s
"hermeneutics of facticity" is a genetic phenomenology, a genealogy of meaning. See Theodore Kisiel, The
Genesis of Heidegger 's BEING AND TIME (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, pb 1995), esp.
Chs. I & 3.
Martin Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, GA-Vol. 56-57, the early Freiburg lecture courses
ofKriegnotsemester 1919 and SS 1919, edited by Bernd Heimbiichel (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1987). 88,
91. Subsequently cited as ZBF. Further abbreviations ofHeidegger's texts to be cited here are: GA21 =
Heidegger Gesamtausgabe Volume 21: Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, Marburg lecture course of WS
1925/26, edited by Walter Biemel (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976); GA27 = Heidegger Gesamtausgabe
Volume 27: Einleitung in die Philosophie, Freiburg lecture course ofWS 1928/29, edited by Otto Saame and
Ina Saame-Speidel (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1996); SZ = Sein und Zeit (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1927, 7 1953,
17 1993). English translations of Being and Time by Macquarrie & Robinson in 1962 (Harper & Row) and Joan
Stambaugh in 1997 (SUNY Press) provide the German pagination of SZ in the margins; WM = Was ist
Metaphysik? (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1929; 8 1960, with Introduction & Postscript). Translation by David
Krell (modified here) in Basic Writings (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 95-112.
6 These citations of the Neurath/Carnap Program are taken from Alan Richardson, "Toward a History of
Scientific Philosophy," Perspectives on Science: Historical, Philosophical, Social (University of Chicago
Press, forthcoming). The contrast between the analytical and phenomenological sense of scientific philosophy
inspires the present section. Richardson is alert enough to Heidegger' s nuanced formulations to pick up on
the pleonastic "redundancy" of the phrase "scientific philosophy" as early as the opening hour of the course
ofSS 1927.
Rudolf Carnap, "Die Oberwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache," Erkenntnis 2
(1932): 219-241. Here I am still following Friedman's account of the interchange.
8 Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (London: Oxford University Press, 1972),
179, 185.
9 Andrew Pickering, The Mangle ofPractice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1995), Ch. 4.
10 In the Aristotelian-scholastic tradition, telos, "final causation," is "first in intention, last in execution."
11 Word associations of the first group under Bewandtnis relate structure with spatiotemporal site: "Gelegen-
heit-Konjunktur-Konstellation-Lage-Ort-Phase-Sachlage-Sachverhalt-Situatio n-Stadium-Stand-Stell
ung- Stufe-Tatbestand-Zeit-Zustand- Verhiiltnisse-Verumstiindung." The second grouping suggests a more
elemental milieu: "Atmosphiire-Aura-Bedingung-Begleitumstiinde-Bewandtnis-das Drum und Dran-
Fluidum-Gefiihlston-Imponderabilien-Milieu- die Lufl um die Dinge- die Unwiigbarkeiten - Gefiihlswerte
- Stimmung." Finally, some ordinary idioms that point to conditions thus qualified or bewandt: "was los ist
- woran man ist- es steht (liegt) so, das." Franz Dornseiff, Der Deutsche Wortschatz nach Sachgruppen
(Berlin: de Gruyter, 5 1959), 196. Note also in this connection the particular aptness of translating Umwelt as
"environment," which in the English idiom can be cozy or hostile, friendly or unfriendly, comfortable or
threatening, etc.
THOMAS M. SEEBOHM
THE HERMENEUTICS OF TEXTS

The Second Canon
WHOLES, PARTS, THE HERMENEUTICAL CIRCLE

AND AN ATTEMPT TO SOLVE ITS PARADOXES
The second canon is the canon of the whole and the parts and implies the hermeneutical
circle between the whole and the parts: understanding the whole presupposes
understanding the parts and vice versa. The task of this essay is not to solve the
methodological difficulties of the practical application of the canon to texts and their
contexts. Such a solution would require a complicated and lengthy investigation of the
different aspects of the application of the canon to the methodology of philological text
interpretation and historical research concerning the original contexts of texts. A brief
sketch of one simple aspect of the application of the second canon will be given in the
last section. Yet even such a sketch presupposes an analysis of the material ambiguities
and formal paradoxes of the second canon. The central task of this essay is to provide
such an analysis. The first section of this essay discusses the material ambiguities and
equivocations behind the terms "whole," "part," and "circle" in the development of
hermeneutics. The second section offers an analysis of the formal problems of the
circularity of the second canon from a logical point of view and the third section offers
a version of the formula which eliminates the formal paradoxes of the second canon.
1. THE GENESIS OF MATERIAL AMBIGUITIES OF THE SECOND CANON

Rules recommending consideration of the context of a text in attempts to achieve a
proper understanding of its parts may be found in tracts on the art of grammar, rhetoric,
and juridical hermeneutics in the concluding centuries of classical antiquity. 1 But the
"context" or the "whole" is not always the whole of a text. More is involved when
Celsus, for example, recommends that a law be understood and applied according to
the context. 2 In other cases, the whole is the sum total of all the texts composed by an
author. The problem of circularity and even vicious circularity in the grammarians'
methods is attested in the literature of the Sceptics of late classical antiquity. 3 Both
aspects have been present in the literature on hermeneutics and rhetoric throughout the
following centuries. The scopus principle introduced by Flacius added new aspects to
the concept of the text as a whole. 4 Two main viewpoints can be distinguished in the
137
138 THOMAS SEEBOHM
further development. According to the more formal and objective point of view, the
whole is understood if the genre of the text is understood. According to the more
subjective, "romantic" point of view, the whole is understood if the "original intention
of the author" or the "spirit" is understood. Schleiermacher was the first who named
the rule a canon, i.e., the second of two basic and inseparable principles of
hermeneutics. 5 Following Schleiermacher's formula for the "Second canon: The
meaning of each word in a given place must be determined according to its being
together with the surrounding words."6 Schleiermacher's formula is decent and, taken
on its own, it is by no means circular. (a) The formula refers to words and words
surrounding them on the grammatical level. There is no application of the canon in
Schleiermacher's technical or psychological interpretation, i.e., the interpretation of
genre, style, and the author's original intentions. (b) The canon recommends that a
word be understood in its connection with other surrounding words. Neither the text
as a whole nor a whole in any other sense is mentioned. What the canon says is that
a part ought to be understood in its relation to some other parts. The formula of the
canon could, with some adjustments, be used as a recommendation for chess players:
"The significance of each pawn is understood in a game situation of the game if and
only if its significant relations to all other relevant pieces of the game is understood."
There is no vicious circularity, indeed, there is no circularity at all here. What we have
is an innocent biconditional without any reference to wholes. (c ) It is obvious that the
application of the canon requires knowledge of the grammatical structures connecting
the words for the selection of the significant other words in the surroundings of a word.
A published version ofSchleiermacher's hermeneutics and its canons was available
after 1838, but his second canon was never mentioned in the methodological
hermeneutics from Boeckh to Birt. 7 Their main concern was the theory of these levels
of interpretation and critique and the question of how vicious circularities between the
levels and between interpretation and critique might be avoided. It is possible that they
understood Schleiermacher's second canon verbally as merely a rule of grammatical
interpretation in their own sense. Understood in this way, the rule is not very
fascinating and completely irrelevant for all higher levels of interpretation. The second
canon and the hermeneutical circle received its basic significance only after Dilthey
applied Schleiermacher's second canon to all levels of methodological hermeneutics
and to his own general theory of understanding. The consequence of the application of
the canon to all levels or dimensions of hermeneutics caused serious equivocations in
the terms "part," "whole," and, by implication, "circle." It is obvious that the term
"whole" refers to strictly different structures in interpretation on the level of grammar,
history, individuality of the author, style, and genre. It is, furthermore, by no means
clear why and how the circular part-whole structure can serve as a methodological
principle if it already belongs to the pre-methodical structures of the understanding of
life expressions in general. 8
The discussion of the canon of the whole and the parts and the hermeneutical circle
in the twentieth century has its roots in Dilthey's universalized version of
Schleiermacher's grammatical canon. However, not all hermeneuticists accepted his
version of the second canon and the hermeneutical circle as one of the basic principles
of hermeneutics. Some methodologists, above all, Emilio Betti, shared Dilthey's views
and had no qualms about applying the concept of whole and parts to all the different
contexts mentioned above. 9 Others, following Heidegger and Gadamer, disinterested
THE SECOND CANON OF THE HERMENEUTICS OF TEXTS 139
in method and critics of the claims of methodological hermeneutics, denied that the
canon could be used as a methodological principle. 10 Methodologically interested first
rate philologists, e.g., Ernst Robert Curtius, 11 rejected all talk of"hermeneutical circles"
as useless and misleading. Additional difficulties and ambiguities entered into the
discussion with Heidegger's "hermeneutical circle" as a universal principle of
understanding. Although Dilthey applied the second canon in his general theory of
higher understanding, the application of the term "understanding" remains restricted
in this case to the understanding oflife expressions. Heidegger's circle is a fundamental
ontological principle, significant even in deficient modes of understanding, such as the
understanding of objects and nature in the natural sciences.
Long before Heidegger, the circularity of understanding was a fundamental
principle in the epistemology of German Idealism beginning with Fichte. Fichte says
in 4 of his Ober den Begriff der Wissenschafislehre ( 1794), that the system of a
doctrine of science can prove its correctness and completeness only if it is able to reach
the beginning again in the end. The principle of circularity is also of significance for
the regress leading from the first principles of logical reflection back to the first
principles of the doctrine of science and vice versa. Such a circularity is not a mistake,
because circularity governs human understanding in general. Hegel criticized Fichte
in his presentation of the Fichtean system and the preceeding section in his Differenz
des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems (1801) for not being able to realize this
rigid methodological criterion of the true system of philosophy in his own system. The
metaphor of the "circle of circles" that Hegel used for the characterisation of his own
system is well known. This conception of circularity is fairly rigid and cannot be
applied if the finitude of the human mind in one sense or another is a basic principle
of philosophy. Set aside the problem of the projection "innermost possibility" of
Dasein, the projection of the whole in practical as well as theoretical understanding in
more or less inauthentic projections in the sense of Heidegger is open to revisions
revealing the fallibility of understanding in general.
One must strictly distinguish the meaning of the "circle in hermeneutics" in
Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and, again, in the context ofHeidegger's Being and Time. In
the literature on philosophical hermeneutics, the question is whether the problem of the
second canon can be solved by reducing it to the more basic circularity within the
understanding of Dasein. Closer considerations reveal that such an attempt is doomed
to failure. The circularity in the fore-structure (Vorstruktur) of the understanding
(Auslegung) of Being-There (Dasein) is an existential and has, according to
Heidegger, 12 nothing in common with methodological principles of scientific philo-
logical interpretation. Seen from the viewpoint of the various discussions and
applications of the fundamental ontological circle, it should be kept in mind that this
type of circularity can be found in all types of human actions and activities, including
science and art. The fore-structure is a structure of Being-There underlying not only the
understanding of the Being of Being-There and authenticity in choosing its innermost
possibility. The fore-structure also determines all types of derivative understanding.
Accordingly, it could be applied to the philosophy of science as well as to philosophical
reflections on the creation and interpretation of poetry. Such applications are of interest
in general philosophical reflections on the different disciplines, e.g., in the philosophy
of science, but taken in themselves, they are insufficient for the development of meth-
odologies. In different disciplines, whatever the common denominators of scientific
140 THOMAS SEEBOHM
methods may be, they have to be applied to different materials, e.g., to sets, relations,
functions and the like in mathematics and in the interpretation of texts in philology. A
methodology of a science or discipline cannot neglect the specific nature of its material.
Set aside the fundamental ontological significance of the pre-structure and its circular-
ity may be considered as a phenomenological account of all human activities. An
application of the pre-structure to a general theory of understanding in literary
traditions is of interest and its merits and limits have been noted above. But such an
application is not and cannot be concerned with in methodology. Some remarks about
Gadamer may elucidate this thesis.
Methodologically guided understanding of texts is one-sidedly founded in a pre-
given written tradition and the pre-methodological understanding of texts in this
tradition. Gadamer applied Heidegger's fore-structure of the understanding to the
problem of an understanding of texts as part of a theory of hermeneutical experience
and the historicity of understanding. What he wants to discover, aufdecken, is authentic
understanding prior to a questionable methodic hermeneutics as an art or technique
guided by the principle of objectivity. In Gadamer's theory of the historicity of
understanding after Heidegger, the "hermeneutical circle" is a circle with a positive
ontological significance. Thus the reader projects the meaning of the whole of the text
as soon as he/she has understood a first meaning in the text. This descriptive assertion
should be taken with a grain of salt in a phenomenological account of pre-methodologic
reading but this requires another investigation. The essential point for the distinction
between the circle in the second canon as a methodological rule and a circle in
understanding with a positive ontological significance is that the application of the
latter to the reading of a text has, according to Gadamer, nothing in common with a
possible circularity in a methodic rule.
A further point must be taken into account. The Heideggerian circle is embedded
in a theory of temporality and historicity. Some methodological hermeneuticists like
Betti have no qualms applying the concept of whole and parts not only to the whole of
a text and its parts but to different dimensions of historical contexts of texts as well.
Such an application has serious consequences. The very application of the second
canon to texts as wholes and their parts raises difficult questions. Application to texts
as parts of a historical context as a whole and even different types of such wholes
leaves us with an array of hopelessly vague and ambiguous concepts of wholes and
parts. It might be meaningful to talk about historical contexts as "wholes" but one has
to hold that the meaning of"historical context" is determined not only by the second
but primarily by the first canon. The attempt to speak of historical contexts as wholes
with parts has to deal with the problems of both, the first and the second canon, at the
same time. Descartes' old rule says that, given a complex cluster of problems, one
should try to isolate and solve the simple problems first. This will be done below after
adding some concluding remarks about the circle in the fore-structure of understanding
and in the second canon.
Gadamer's application of the fore-structure in the understanding of texts
immediately entails the structure of historicity and efficient history. Disregarding
Gadamer's implicit rejection of both canons as viable methodological rules, it can be
said that the Heide ggerian circle in the fore-structure of understanding and its
application to the structure of hermeneutic experience by Gadamer is a fore-structure
for the first as well as for the second canon. As such it cannot be used as a medium for
the solutions of the methodical difficulties in the second canon. What is a whole and
what is a part in the second cannon cannot be reduced to the ontological fore-structure
and its circle.
Therefore it is also meaningless to discuss the problem of vicious circularities in
terms of the fore-structure. The circularity of the fore-structure is not vicious. The
"parts" are not yet given in the original projection of the whole happening in the
present. They appear later in a temporally structured process guided by further partial
projections and the original projection of the whole is realized and perhaps modified
in this process. Seen in a more pedestrian way it can be said that all human activities
are "circular" in this sense. There is a more or less vaguely projected whole and the
whole is realized in the partial projection and realization of its parts. The whole itself
will be actualized and modified in this essentially temporal process. For example, in the
activities of the empirical sciences there is the original projection of a paradigm
followed by the corroboration of the paradigm to a full fledged scientific theory with
the aid of the methods of normal science.
What has been said is nothing more than a commentary on Heidegger's judgment
about wholes, parts, and the circularity in the fore-structure and on Gadamer's theory
ofhermeneutic experience in the framework of the fore-structure. Neither is interested
in the possibilities of a methodological interpretation of texts and in Gadamer's case,
it is at least questionable whether he believes in such a possibility. Thus it follows that
the fore-structure, even if applied to the analysis of the structure of a pre-methodic
living written tradition, is incapable of solving problems of the methodology of the
interpretation of texts. Such a methodology is one-sidedly founded in a pre-given
written tradition. But, as we shall see further below, a one-sidedly founding level never
determines and implies the generation of what is founded upon it.
2. FORMAL PROBLEMS OF THE FORMULAS FOR THE SECOND CANON
Schleiermacher emphasized that in methodically guided understanding, the first and the
second canon are not separable and, as mentioned above, some hermeneuticists take
this for granted. But it is possible to isolate a certain application of the second canon
to certain types of interpretation and critique that may be analyzed methodologically,
at least to a certain degree, without referring immediately to the historical context and
the first canon. In terms ofBoeckh's levels this is the level of grammatical and generic
hermeneutics and critique. The thesis is not that they do not presuppose certain
historical contexts, but it is possible to "bracket" such presupposition with the aid of
abstractive reduction in the Husserlian sense. The first and simple abstractive step is
to bracket all questions concerning historical contexts on other levels and aspects of
interpretation and critique.
The task of this section is to clarify the questionable terms used in the formulas for
the second canon: circularity and vicious circularity, wholes and parts. The goal is to
propose a precise and meaningful explication of the technical terms with a survey of
different possible candidates for circles and vicious circularities in traditional and
modem logic. The question is whether they can be used to characterize the alleged
circularities and vicious circularities of the formulas for the second canon. Such an
analysis concerns the formulas and is not yet interested in the concrete methodological
application of the formulas. It might be possible that the real difficulties and paradoxes
142 THOMAS SEEBOHM
are not difficulties of method. It is possible that they are simply caused by the vague
and ambiguous formulas for the basic principles of methodologically guided
hermeneutics.
The term "vicious circle," circulus vitiosus, and the related term "question
begging," petitio principii, is originally a technical term in Aristotle's Posterior Analy-
tics. It was used as a technical term for a certain mistake in logical proofs. Another
derived application may be found in the traditional theory of the defmition. But, on the
one hand, there are in addition certain figures of speech in the logic of question and
answer leading to question begging and, on the other hand, certain metalogical
problems inviting a metaphorical application of the term "circular." All these cases will
be considered briefly. The question is whether the alleged circularity of the second
canon reveals a certain analogy with such applications of the term "circularity."
There is an explicit vicious circularity in a proof if the conclusion is listed explicitly
among the premises. Such a derivation is, of course, logically valid and it is, seen from
a formal point of view, also sound. There is no formal contradiction in the premises and
the conclusion is not a tautology. A vicious circularity in a proof is, therefore, not a
formal logical fallacy. It is also not an informal fallacy in the narrower sense. A vicious
circularity is pointless and useless as a proof because all other premisses are a useless
ornament added to the tautology, "Ifp then p." Vicious circularity is, therefore, not a
question of formal logic in the narrower sense. It is a question of applied logic and
proofs. It is obvious that the circularity of the second canon has nothing in common
with the circularity in proofs simply because the second canon is neither a syllogism
nor a proof.
The term "circularity" has also been used in the tradition of the informal theory of
proofs. The thesis is that all proofs are circular. The thesis is old and has still its
defenders. Seen from the viewpoint of the proof theory of traditional logic, the thesis
has a certain plausibility. There must be a universal premiss in all valid syllogisms. A
proof requires that all premisses must be true in a materially sound and useful syllogism
if the syllogism is a syllogism used in a proof. The truth of a universal judgment needs
a warrant. The warrant is nothing else than the knowledge that all the cases subsumed
under the universal premisses are true. Every syllogism has either a singular or a
particular or a universal conclusion of a lower degree of universality. In both cases the
conclusion is true only if the warrants are true warrants of the universal premises of the
proofs. But the conclusion is nothing else than one of the warrants for the truth of the
universal premiss. Hence all proofs are circular. As said, the thesis is plausible in the
case of traditional syllogistic proofs. It is less plausible in case of more complex proofs,
e.g., proofs involving relations and functions. But the first question for the present
problem is whether such a circularity is vicious. There are different kinds of warrants
in proofs and arguments: inductions, abductions, commands and laws, intuitive truths,
synthetically a priori judgments and others. What kinds of warrants are admitted
depends on the preferred type of epistemology. The reasons for the choice of
recognized warrants are, therefore, beyond the scope of the investigations of logic and
proof theory in applied logic. In the case of an explicit vicious logical and proof
theoretical circularity the circularity can be discovered with the aid of an analysis of the
logical structure of the proof. The circularity mentioned in the thesis is a circularity on
a higher epistemological level. It can be said that it already belongs to the type of
circularity that can be found in all types of understanding. It appears as "vicious" and
question begging only in proofs with the primitive formal structure of traditional
syllogisms. Applied to proofs in general it is obvious that their "circularity" is
grounded in the last instance in the fore-structure of understanding in Heidegger's
sense. But its circularity is (a) not a vicious circularity and has (b) nothing in common
with the second canon. The second canon is no proof and surely lacks the formal
structure of a syllogism.
The term "circular" is used explicitly in the theory of definitions as well. The theory
of definition also belongs to applied logic, not to the realm of formal logic in the
narrower sense. A definition is circular and therefore useless if the definiendum occurs
explicitly in the definiens. It is not necessary to analyze all the different types of
definitions known in traditional logic for the present purpose. A circular proof in
general is vicious and useless because the truth of the conclusion is explicitly assumed
in one of the premisses. The question of a formal definition is not a question about the
truth of a judgment or statement. A definition is an answer given to a question about
the meaning of a term or a concept, or, in a more traditional formula, a question about
the content of a concept.
Prima facie, there seems to be on the one hand a certain analogy between a
definition and the second canon and their circularities because both are about meaning
and on the other hand an analogy between vicious circularities in definitions and
Boeckh's vicious circles in hermeneutic arguments. Closer considerations reveal that
a definition is the exposition of the meaning of one term. There are some analogies of
definitions in the realm of lower hermeneutics. Lexicographical expositions of the
meaning of a term on the level of grammatical interpretation and the explanations of
technical terms in historical interpretation can be understood as rude and imperfect
definitions. The second canon, on the contrary, is likewise of significance for higher
interpretation and critique. It says something about the whole of the text and about the
parts of the text and their meaning. The second canon and its circularity cannot be
explained in terms of a circular definition.
Thus it ought to be clear that the alleged circularity of the second canon has
nothing in common with the use of the term in traditional applied formal logic and
traditional proof theory. But this implies that Boeckh's vicious circularities in
hermeneutic arguments likewise have nothing in common with vicious circularities in
proofs if they can be explicated in terms of the formula of the first canon. The second
canon requires that the understanding of all parts is the presupposition for a proper
understanding of the whole and that the proper understanding of the whole is the
presupposition for the proper understanding of all parts. A vicious circularity in
Boeckh's sense can be understood as the assertion that one part has, for example, a
certain property on the level of style. The vicious argument is that because the property
of one and only one part determines and justifies the assumption that the genre is of a
specific type, e.g., an ode, and vice versa. The proposed formula for Boeckh's vicious
circularities is formal and general but it can be accepted as a formula offering a
distinction between "vicious circularities" and the problem of the circularity in the
second canon.
The formula of the circle in the second canon and the proposed fomula for
Boeckh's vicious circles have the logical structure of a biconditional: "If A then B; and;
ifB then A" or, defined in terms of a replicative conditional: "B only if A; and; A only
if B." It is not a logical equivalence because neither side exhibits the structure of a
144 THOMAS SEEBOHM
logical derivation. The difference is that in case ofBoeckh's vicious circles, A is one
part of the text and in the case of the second canon, A represents the sum total of all
parts. A circle in hermeneutics is, therefore vicious in Boeckh's sense if A does not
refer to all parts but only to one. It is possible metaphorically to characterize
biconditionals as "a circle of conditions" but it is impossible to call them vicious as
well. The upshot of such considerations is that circles in hermeneutics, be they vicious
or not, cannot be understood as simple logical circularities. The application of the term
"circle" in hermeneutics is only a weak metaphorical use of a term borrowed from
formal logic. It is thus worthwhile to look for other logical structures and problems that
similarly invite a metaphorical application of the term "circle."
Vicious circularity is question begging and one figure in the informal logic of
question and answer represents question begging in the verbal sense of the expression:
the stoic diallele. The old example or prototype of a diallele is the following: Person
A asks "Where does Dion live?" Person B answers "He lives where Theon lives." But
A wants to know the place where Dion lives and now asks "But where does Theon
live?" and receives the answer from B "He lives where Dion lives." A's question is not
answered at all. The answers are useless for A and it can be said that B's intentions in
giving these answers are vicious. A diallele is vicious question begging. A diallele
implies that A wants information about a relation of x to z and B answers mentioning
a y that has the same relation to z yet without giving any further information about z.
Hence the answers given in a diallele are not without any information. What the
answers tell us is that x andy are in a reciprocal or symmetrical relation to each other
with respect to z. The information about Dion and Theon is that they are neighbors or
linked in a chain of neighborhood relations. But the information is no answer to the
intention of the question. One further point needs to be emphasized: a dialelle
presupposes a symmetrical relation - in this case "neighbor" - between two
individuals.
The formula for Boeckh's vicious circularities can be brought into that pattern
without difficulties:
-"What justifies the proper understanding of the whole?"
-"The justification of the proper understanding of the whole is the proper understanding
of one part."
-"What justifies the proper understanding of this part?"
-"The justification of the proper understanding of this part is the proper understanding of
the whole."
Boeckh's vicious circularity can be characterized as a vicious circularity in a
diallele, a speech figure in the informal logic of question and answer. The formula for
the second canon, however, has the same structure. Replace "one part" and "this part"
by "all parts" in the pattern for Boeckh's vicious circularity and you have a version of
the formula for the second canon. But it may be claimed that there is a difference. What
is at stake is not a relation between two individuals but a "relation" between the whole
and all of its parts. The relation in question is "a determines the meaning of b" and "b
determines the meaning of a." The formula for the second canon inviting the talk of
circularity has the character of a complex variant of a diallele and this explains why
many philologists rejected the language of"the circle in interpretation" and also why
there was a certain reluctance on their part to mention the second canon. None of them
recognized why the formula was suspect but anybody who is entrapped in the speech
figure of a diallele will be deeply dissatisfied. The immediate consequence is that
something is wrong with the general formula for the methodological viewpoints
guiding the hermeneutic exposition of parts and the wholes in texts. A closer
consideration can show that there are yet more serious difficulties in the formula of the
second canon and its circularity.
The most primitive type of a whole in set theory is a set. Elements are elements of
a set if they can be selected by the predicate representing the set. Seen this way it is
possible to define a set of sets with the predicate "sets that contain themselves as one
of their elements." Russell's antinomy uses the concept of a set that contains itself as
one of its elements asking whether the set of all such sets contains itself as an element
or not. It is possible to use the term "circularity" metaphorically and call such sets
"circular." It can also be said that this circle is "vicious" because it leads into the
vitiosum ofthe antinomy and has to be avoided with the aid of a theory of types. The
set theoretical antinomy has its counterpart in predicates admitting self-reference, i.e.,
predicates that can refer to themselves. On the first glance such a circularity has
nothing in common with the other circles mentioned above and also nothing with the
second canon because "a whole is more than the sum of its parts." The formula is
ambiguous in two respects. The "whole" of a set without any ordering relation is
nothing else than the collections of its elements and nothing "more." To speak of a sum
means to have a perhaps unknown but well defined cardinal number in mind. But to
think something like this presupposes structures determined by ordering relations
and/or functions. Certainly this is required if the set is an ordered series of ordinal
numbers. The thesis "the whole is more than the set of its parts" requires in general a
set with ordering relations defined over its elements. But the nature of such sets still
allows the addition of further elements. What leads to Russell's paradox is the
assumption that the set as such is added to its own elements and treated as an element
of itself. If there are ordering relations then the relations must determine the relation
of the set to its parts. This idea is most absurd.
The question is whether the formula of the second canon treats parts and whole on
the same level, i.e., it treats the whole like a part. There is then a certain analogy
between Russell's set and the formulas for the second canon. This is a further reason
for the suspicion that the circularity of the second canon is vicious. The whole in the
second canon in such formulas is also treated as its own part on the same level with its
parts.
The outcome is that the formula for the second canon, though it seems to be a neat
formula, is indeed a misconstruction. Precisely for that reason it had, taken for itself,
no methodological value. Prima facie, it seemed to be of significance for all aspects of
methodical hermeneutics but it was impossible to see how it could be applied to them.
In addition it seemed to be suspicious because, understood verbally, it is a circular,
question begging dialle/e. The formula and with it the talk of the "circle in
hermeneutics" ought to be abandoned once and for all. What is hidden behind these
misleading metaphors is that the correlated concepts of whole and part are of crucial
significance for the methodology of hermeneutics. But such an observation does not
have the character of a rule or canon. The first step leading to an application of the
vague observation must be the explication of the correlated concepts whole and part on
the logical and formal ontological level. A final step of the preliminary logical
considerations yields a hint in the right direction. Modem logic provides us with an
explication of the statement "a whole is more than the set of its parts." A set can be
146 THOMAS SEEBOHM
ordered or has a structure if a set of relations with certain properties is defined over the
set. A whole is a set with a certain structure.
Seen in this way it is immediately obvious both that the naive talk about parts and
wholes as well as the second canon harbors equivocations. On the one hand, the whole
of a text can be understood as a set because it is given as an extensive whole with
extensive elements, i.e., signs, then words, phrases, paragraphs and so on. (The term
"extensive" will be explained in detail in the next section below.) But the text is a
whole in addition as a whole ordered by an abstract structure that is itself determined
by a set of relations. The genre of a text can be understood formally as such an abstract
structure. It is possible to call the abstract structure the whole because it constitutes the
"wholeness" of the text as an extensive whole. Finally the whole of the text can be
understood as the unity of the abstract structure and the text as an extensive whole. But
there are also equivocations in the term "part." The parts of a text are by no means
simple elements. Sentences are parts of texts. But these parts are themselves extensive
wholes having words as their parts and these parts are in turn ordered by a certain
structure, the grammatical structure of the sentence. That indicates that different types
of structures, different types of relations order the parts of the lower and higher levels.
The whole of a text on the highest level is not ordered by grammatical relations. It is
ordered according to the relations determining the genre of the text. What has been said
is insufficient for an immediate application of such distinctions to the problems of
hermeneutic methodology. Further semi-formal descriptions belonging to the theory
of the whole and the parts are necessary. Husserl's third and fourth Logical
Investigations will serve as a bridge.
3. THE THEORY OF THE WHOLE AND THE PARTS
Husserl's attempt to give an adequate formalized axiomatic account of his theory of the
whole and the parts was not successful but today we have strictly formalized systems,
though the question remains whether they are adequate explications ofHusserl's intui-
tions. This question will not be of significance for this section. Nevertheless, today it
is a generally accepted thesis that Husserl's theory belongs to what is called mereology.
It is not necessary for the present investigation to present Husserl's theory on the level
of formalizing abstraction. It is evident that texts are pre-given as extensive wholes. All
fixed life expressions are given as extensive wholes and extensive wholes are given in
and for perception. The analysis of the whole and the parts in the Third Logical
Investigation but also in 30-32 in Experience and Judgment for the present purpose
has, on the one hand, the advantage that Husser! starts with the phenomenology of
perception. But there is, on the other hand, the disadvantage that the most essential
structures of fixed life expressions have a much higher degree of complexity than the
structures of wholes with dependent and independent parts given in perception. Husser!
himself applied his theory of the wholes and the parts in the analysis of independent
and dependent meanings of expressions in the realm of pure logical grammar in the
Fourth Logical Investigation. His general claim was in addition that the formal
ontological theory of the whole and the parts is applicable to all the realms of material
ontology. The realm of cultural relations and objects is, taken for itself, a special
material ontological realm. Therefore the theory ought to be applicable in this field as
well. But it is obvious that there are already essential differences between the
application of the theory in the realm of pure logical grammar and in the realm of
grammars of natural languages and nothing has been said before about the essential
formal properties of the structure of cultural objects as concrete wholes. Their analysis
requires an account of the formal and material properties of higher order wholes.
The task of the theory of the whole and the parts is the formal ontological analysis
of the concrete whole. What comes closest to the concrete whole in Husserl's sense is
prima facie the Aristotelian concept of substance. But such a projection is deceptive.
A concrete whole is a unity given as an independent content, i.e., a content that can be
recognized as identically the same in the context of a perhaps steadily modified, even
chaotic and unarticulated background. This first attempt to give a descriptive account
of a concrete whole needs qualifications and corrections. What can be said in the
beginning is that the extensive wholes mentioned in the previous section are nothing
else than concrete wholes given in sense perception. Concrete wholes of this type have
two kinds of parts: abstract moments and pieces. Abstract moments cannot be given for
themselves: they need foundations in which they are given. That does not mean that
they can only be given in concrete wholes, i.e., Aristotelian substances. Abstract
moments are not immediately one-sidedly founded in concrete wholes. Foundation
relations are first of all foundation relations between abstract moments like space and
quality in the visual field. This assertion along with its main consequence is
incompatible with Aristotelian ontology. The immediate consequence is that "whole"
can be defined in terms of certain properties of abstract moments and foundation
relations between abstract moments. The Third Investigation 21 in the translation of
Findlay offers the following definition:
By a Whole we understand a range [Inbegriffl of contents which are all covered by a single
[einheitliche]foundation without the help of further contents. The contents of such a range we call
its parts. Talk of the singleness [Einheitlichkeit] of the foundation implies that every content is
foundationally connected whether directly or indirectly, with every content. 13
A "concrete whole" given in perception has as its covering single (better: unifying)
foundation an abstract moment of the genus extension, i.e., space and/or time.
A piece is a part of a whole that can be given as the same identical part outside the
context of the concrete whole. The extensive parts of extensive wholes are pieces.
Since pieces can be given for themselves and abstract moments cannot be given for
themselves, pieces are called independent parts and abstract moments dependent parts.
Given pieces, the concept of a concrete whole is relative: both have the same basic
definition, they can be given as the same in varying contexts.
Foundation relations have some of the formal properties of relations but apart from
their foundational property they have no specific content or quality of their own. Rela-
tions are represented in natural languages by n-adic predicates like "married", "brother
of." Foundation relations have only one content shared by all of them: they are founda-
tions. The brightness of a visual quality is one-sidedly founded in the visual quality and
the givenness of a certain shade of color is one-sidedly founded in extension. Abstract
moments are founded in other moments, e.g., the color blue is one-sidedly founded in
a certain shape of the momentum spatial extension and a certain spatial shape, e.g., a
triangle, is one-sidedly founded in certain contrasts between different visual qualities.
There are different formal properties of foundation relations. It is essential to keep in
mind that the abstract and formal properties are also the formal properties of relations
with additional material content. It is sufficient to give a brief list:
148 THOMAS SEEBOHM
I. A foundation can be one-sided, i.e., asynunetrical.

2. A foundation can be double-sided, i.e., synunetrical.
3. A foundation can be mediated, i.e., transitive.
Seen from a formal point of view, deliberately complex structures of foundations
are possible.
Abstract moments of the genus extension can have a certain spatial or temporal
form or gestalt if they serve as foundations for one-sidedly founded quality structures.
The presupposition is that (a) the thus constituted concrete whole is separated by
contrast phenomena from its background and it is (b) possible to vary the background
without varying the concrete whole, i.e., it remains untouched if the background
changes or ifthe concrete whole is moved through different backgrounds. A first order
concrete whole occurs, therefore, as distinguishable "piece" of perhaps changing
contents of its baGkground or its "outer" horizon. The upshot is that a concrete whole
is given as a concrete whole only in a background of other contents given in abstract
moments of the genus extension. The concrete whole is given only because its
structure determined quality constitutes the separating border between the concrete
whole and its "surroundings." But that implies that abstract moments of the genus
extension are also determining structures for the background of a concrete whole. It is,
therefore, an ideal possibility that other concrete wholes can be found within this
otherwise unspecified, undetermined background. The outcome is a collection or a set
of concrete wholes. Such a set can be ordered with the aid of external relations
between a given collection of concrete wholes and such relations are one-sidedly
founded in the concrete wholes of the collection. If such relations refer to an ordering
determined by the internal structure of abstract moments of the genus extension like "to
the left," "to the right," "under," "above" they constitute an external whole of extrinsic
relations of extension, e.g., in a series, in a circle or some other extrinsic gestalt
patterns or configurations.
There are other relations adding certain relational qualities to the concrete wholes
connected by them. They are one-sidedly founded not only in the connected wholes as
locations in abstract moments of the genus extension but also in the qualitative
structures of the concrete wholes. The relation of mother and child presupposes that the
mother is a woman. Such relations have formal properties that can be treated on the
level of formalizing abstraction because they have certain formal ontological proper-
ties. Seen from the viewpoint of the material ontology of a certain realm they are of
interest first of all because they add certain relational qualities to the concrete wholes
linked by the relation. Extrinsic relations of both types can be connected by further
higher order relations. Such higher order relations are one-sidedly founded in the first
order relations. They constitute concrete wholes of second order, e.g., a family and
other groups of social communities but also the ecological structure, e.g., of a pond or
the structure of fixed life expressions like a church or a town as a whole system of
buildings.
First order wholes can have pieces. Pieces can be distinguished in a concrete whole
if and only if a part of the extension of the concrete whole has an abstract structure of
foundation relations separating it from the concrete whole and/or the background of the
concrete whole like, e.g. the leg of a horse from the horse and the background of the
horse. Pieces can have pieces. It is an ideal or essential possibility that a first order
whole can have an indefinite hierarchical series oflevels of pieces n-1, n-2, n-3 ... n-m.
Pieces within a first order concrete whole have a structure determined by intrinsic
relations. Such intrinsic relations are one-sidedly founded in two or more pieces of a
concrete whole. Intrinsic relations can be spatial or temporal relations determining
intrinsic configurations, i.e., the intrinsic gestalt qualities of the concrete whole. Other
relations can in addition be one-sidedly founded in the abstract quality structures of the
pieces and add relational qualities to the pieces. Such relations constitute functional
relations and a functional structure for the concrete whole of first order. Seen from the
viewpoint of a strictly formalized theory of relations there is no difference between
them and configurational relations. The difference is a material difference. Configura-
tional relations are determined by structures of the genus extension. Functional or
quality relations are relations requiring certain qualities in the connected pieces and add
relational qualities to them.
In the case of a hierarchical series of types of pieces there are relations between
pieces on each level. Properties of such relations that can be analyzed in terms of
formal ontological properties are, of course, the same on each level. What can be said
about them can be said with the aid of a second order formalized mathematical theory
of properties of relations and functions. Since concrete wholes are in addition
determined by material quality structures such relations will have material characteris-
tics in addition. In this respect, it is possible to distinguish two different types of
concrete wholes. We have (a) the "primitive" type. The material properties of the
relations are the same on each distinguishable level of pieces of the concrete whole.
Concrete wholes of first and also second order in classical physics can serve as
examples: the parts and sub-parts of a complicated clockwork or the bodies and their
movements in a planetary system with moons. The governing relations on all levels are
relations implied in the classical system of mechanical and dynamical laws. There are
(b) other concrete wholes in which the material quality properties of the relations and
the material properties of the one-sidedly founding properties of the pieces are different
on different levels. In this case it can be said that concrete wholes of first order but also
of second order are determined by a hierarchy of different types of relations. Such
concrete wholes are organic wholes, i. e., organic bodies. Cells in an organism are such
pieces and analogues of such pieces with the same structure can exist outside the larger
context of an organism in other organisms. It is even to possible to separate the cells
of an organism without destroying them if it is possible to provide the required environ-
ment outside the organism. They have an in-itself closed structural identity determined
by a set of relations and this set of relations is different from the set of the relations
connecting the set in some organ of the body or on a still higher level the organs in the
organic body as a concrete whole. It is obvious that cultural relations and cultural
objects represent concrete wholes of an even higher degree of complexity. The follow-
ing survey can serve as a map of the formal distinctions that will be used as tools in the
explication of the second and the first canon of hermeneutics:
A. Structures of first order concrete wholes.
0. Structures of foundation relations without pieces and proper relations between pieces.
1. Structures with pieces and intrinsic configurations of the pieces that can be defined in terms
of abstract moments of the genus extension.
2. Structures with pieces and configurations determinable in terms of material qualities of the
pieces and connecting relations.
3. Structures with a hierarchy of pieces with different structures on different levels in the
hierarchy of pieces.
B. Structures of second order concrete wholes.
150 THOMAS SEEBOHM
Structures of second order are structures of one-sidedly founded relations in

collections of concrete wholes of first order. The most primitive case is the immediate
foundation of the structure in concrete wholes with structures of type 0. Beyond that
second order concrete wholes can have structures of type I, 2, and 3. Concrete wholes
with structures of type 0 and I and concrete wholes of second order one-sidedly
founded in them are concrete wholes given in sense perception. Explicitly given
concrete wholes of first and second order are given on the level of judgmental
categorical articulation if and only if the formal and material properties of the relations
of the structure and the structure itself are given in categorically articulated judgments.
It is now possible to give an explication of the traditional formula of the second canon.
The concrete whole is determined as a concrete whole by its structure. The structure is the in
itself abstract structure of relations and/or foundation relations. The abstract structure is as such
not a piece, i.e., a part of the whole in the usual sense.
No circularity is left in this explication. This is the advantage. But the given
explication of the formula still shares the material ambiguities of the old formula. It
speaks about wholes, parts, abstract structures, pieces and configurations, concrete
wholes of first and second order and types of structures without mentioning the
necessary distinctions between the whole of a text and its parts, the whole of a context
of texts and its parts, the whole of historical connectedness and so on. The distinctions
will be essential for the question of the application of the formula to hermeneutics,
interpretation, critique and the emergence of the historical dimension implied in the
first canon. Such applications are highly complex because of the interplay of the first
and second canon in these fields. They cannot be discussed in the framework of this
paper. But there is, as mentioned, the more simple and natural application of the second
canon to the interpretation of one text. At least a sketch of the problems of this
application can be discussed in the last short section.
4. A SKETCH OF THE PROBLEMS OF THE APPLICATION OF THE NEW

FORMULA TO TEXTS
A text is of course an extensive whole of type 0 given in perception. But such an

extensive whole is not what is of interest for the second canon. What is of interest is
its structure and the structure of the text is the specific genre of the text, i.e., the
extensive whole. The genre is an abstract structure of type B. As such it cannot be
treated as the extensive whole and a part of this whole. The extensive whole has
extensive pieces not structured by the genre, first of all sentences. They have
themselves structures determined by relations between their words not determined by
the abstract structure of the genre but by the abstract structures of the grammar of the
language of the text. They are independent because their grammatical structure is not
determined by the genre of the text. It is possible to understand one sentence or groups
of sentences as such if the text is not given at all but only a small fragment. It is also
possible to give a methodically guided interpretation of such isolated sentences with
the aid of grammatical interpretation.
A significant distinction has to be introduced before some final words about the
application of the second canon can be said. The application of the canon is possible
only in methodical interpretation and critique. But that presupposes that the text as an
extensive whole is already known. It can be known as such on the level of pre-
methodical first reading and pre-methodical re-reading. It is essential to keep in mind

that sentences are understood before the text as an extensive whole is understood in
first reading, i. e., the parts can be understood without understanding the whole but not
vice versa. Methodical understanding of sentences is guided by grammatical
interpretation and critique. Pre-methodical reading can be blocked by not-
understanding of a sentence and it can be plagued by not noticed misunderstanding.
There is a complex interplay between these two shortcomings and some others. It is
neither possible nor necessary for this brief sketch to analyze this interplay and all of
its aspects. The remedy is grammatical interpretation, i. e., lexicographical knowledge
and an explicit knowledge of possible grammatical structures. Grammatical
interpretation thus requires a methodically guided re-reading. The sentences as
extensive wholes must be pre-given and the task is to recognize their abstract structure
and the possible meaning of its parts, i.e., the words used in the sentence. The attempt
to eliminate not-understanding and to discover and correct misunderstandings will
sometimes fail because there can be sentences with corrupted grammatical structures
and/or words that cannot be understood or are misunderstood because of serious
misspellings. To determine what is wrong and how it could be repaired is the task of
grammatical critique. Thus interpretation and critique are not separable.
An experienced reader has a vague knowledge of different types of genres, i.e.,
she/he recognizes somehow the difference between a fairy tale and a law. Methodical
generic interpretation and critique presupposes the pre-methodical understanding of the
text as an extensive whole. Its task is to determine the specific properties of the
structure of the text and perhaps also new creative modifications in the generic
structure of a text. But it is also possible that such modifications are simply
shortcomings of the text. It is a bad poem, a bad novel or a bad law. To determine this
is the task of generic critique. Interpretation and critique are also inseparable on this
level.
One further point must be mentioned before corning to the conclusion. Grammatical
interpretation and critique presupposes the knowledge of grammar and lexicographics
and it is obvious that generic interpretation presupposes a knowledge of the system of
genres and their structures. Such a knowledge presupposes comparative methods: many
sentences and many texts must be compared. Furthermore such a research will be very
soon confronted with the problem of the historical development of such systems.
Especially a system of genres can undergo radical changes in a comparatively short
time. Thus such comparative methods have to take the first canon into account. The
second canon will be of significance only in its connection with the first and the
"wholes" and "parts" on this level are contexts of texts as wholes with texts as their
parts. These problems have been bracketed in the beginning.
Thus there is no circularity in the application of the whole/part distinction to the
methodical interpretation of texts. The "wholes" that are of interest for methodical
interpretation are abstract structures and not extensive wholes. It can be said, on the one
hand, that generic interpretation presupposes one-sidedly (a) the pre-methodical
understanding of the text as an extensive whole and this in turn requires (b) a pre-
methodical understanding and then methodically guides understanding of the parts, i.e.,
on the lowest level of sentences. But it can also be said, on the other hand, that the pre-
methodical and methodical understanding of the sentences does not presuppose the pre-
methodical understanding of the text as an extensive whole and it does not presuppose
152 THOMAS SEEBOHM
the methodical analysis of its genre structure. It is, however, possible that the extensive
whole and then the analysis of its structure add certain additional shades of meaning
to the sentences. They tell us something about the significance 14 of the sentence for the
whole as an extensive whole and its genre structure. Significance is indeed a relation
between a part of the text and the structure of the genre of a text but this relation is not
symmetrical. To recognize the significance of a sentence presupposes both: the
methodical grammatical understanding of the sentence and the methodical
understanding of the structure of the genre of the text.
Emeritus, University ofMainz
NOTES
Emilio Betti, Allgemeine Aus/egnngs/ehre a/s Methodik der Geisteswissenschaflen (Tiibingen: Mohr,
1997), pp. 219-225 mentions numerous loci ranging from the time of classical antiquity to our century in
which references to the second canon can be found.
2 Betti, I. c. p. 219, cf. p. 223
Cf. Sextus Empiricus Adversus mathematicos, Vol. IV, book I Against the Grammarians.
See now: Reimund Sdzuj, Historische Studien zur lnterpretationsmethodologie der frilhen Neuzeit
(Wiirzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1997), and the quotes there from the c/avis scriptae of Flacius
Illyricus.
5 [For an expression of the first canon, see Schleiermacher, note 6 below.- Ed.)
Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik mit besonderer Beziehung auf das Neue Testament,
ed. Friedrich Lucke (Berlin: Reimer, 1838). Under the title: F. D. E. Schleiermacher, Hermeneutik und Kritik,
ed. Manfred Frank (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977).- Part I, Grammatical Interpretation: 116 ff.:
"Zweiter Kanan: Der Sinn eines jeden Wortes an einer gegebenen Stelle mujJ bestimmt werden nach seinem
Zusammensein mit denen, die es umgeben " p 116. It should be noted that Scheiermacher' s version of the
first canon is also restricted to the grammatical level: "Erster Kanan: Alles, was noch einer niiheren
Bestimmung bedaif in einer gegebenen Rede, darf nur aus dem Verfasser und seinem Publikum
ursprilnglichen Sprachgebiet bestimmt werden" p. II 0.
7 For Boeckh, see the abbreviated translation of the Encyc/opaedie und Methodologie der philologischen
Wissenschaflen by J.P. Pritchard On Interpretation and Criticism (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1968) and my "Boeckh and Dilthey: The Development of Methodical Hermeneutics" in J. N. Mohanty, ed.,
Phenomenology and the Human Sciences (Dordrecht: Martin us Nijhoff Publishers, 1985).
8 Dilthey, GS VII pp 195, 243 ff; GS XIV, p. 758 ff.
Betti, I. c. p. 221 - 233
10 Jean Grondin, Einfiihrung in die philosophische Hermeneutik (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buch-
gesellschaft, 1991 ), p. 94 on Schleiermacher's canons and rules.

11 Ernst Robert Curti us, Europtiische Literatur und /ateinisches Mittelalter, note 5 in the introduction of the
introduction and p. 297 about the "circle of interpretation."
12 Heidegger, Being and Time, 32. What Heidegger does not mention but doubtlessly knew is that the
circle is not only a methodological scientific principle but also in the fore-structure of all higher
understanding oflife expressions including self-understanding in Dilthey.
13 Edmund Husser!, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (New York: Humanities Press, 1970), vol.
2 p. 475.
14 The term was introduced by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. in the introduction to The Aims ofinterpretation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1976).

RICHARD COBB-STEVENS
HUSSERLIAN HERMENEUTICS:
MATHEMATICS AND THEORIA
R. G. Collingwood, the British historian and philosopher, raised the following

objections to the claim of his Oxford colleagues that philosophic texts are reducible to
a series of ahistorical propositions. He first observed that truth and falsity do not
belong to such propositions but rather to complexes of questions and answers. He next
pointed out that an author's guiding question and its context may often be difficult to
reconstruct. Encumbered by our own philosophic baggage, we bring questions to the
reading of any text that may not coincide with the question that animated the author's
reflections. Moreover, original thinkers often succeed in refining the sense of their
questions only gradually in the process of reflecting upon them. Their most important
contributions thus take the form of a retroactive realization that they or their traditions
had been asking the wrong question. Collingwood offers as an example the radical
transformation of the philosophy of nature brought about when the Pythagoreans first
replaced the question asked by Thales and Anaximander, i.e., "What is the fundamental
stuff of which things are made, and how do qualitative variations of this stuff (hot and
cold, moist and dry) account for differences among things?" by the question: "What
combinations of fundamental shapes or forms and what mathematical ratios among
them account for the composition of various stuffs?" 1
Collingwood's position is an example of hermeneutics for it calls attention to the
role of historical conditions in shaping the questions that in tum shape the operations
of understanding in the interpretation of texts. Collingwood also called attention to the
potentially relativistic and skeptical implications of the now widely accepted notion that
truth in science depends upon a historically conditioned sequence of questions. His
early works suggest that since the application of mathematics to the natural world
requires the bracketing of our ordinary experience of the world we must conclude that
the truth claims of science will always remain abstract, hypothetical, and inconclusive.
In his later works, however, Collingwood rejected this pessimistic view and affirmed
that the quantitative methods of science do in fact yield genuine knowledge about the
world. He assigned to philosophy the task of determining precisely how and why this
should be so, while acknowledging his own inability to meet this challenge.
Collingwood's challenge continues to defeat the best efforts of contemporary
philosophers.
153
154 RICHARD COBB-STEVENS
Not only does hermeneutics introduce the theme of history into philosophy,
hermeneutics itself has a fascinating history. The term 'hermeneutics' first emerged in
the exegetical writings of the church fathers which were devoted to setting of
guidelines for both manifest and symbolic interpretations of the sacred texts of the
Jewish and Christian traditions. An earlier and more secular manifestation of the
hermeneutic approach had surfaced implicitly in those works of antiquity devoted to
"the art of grammar" which often included rules for the interpretation of the classical
texts. The goal in both instances was to fix the boundaries of interpretation given the
differing historical contexts of original and subsequent readers of the same texts.
Stanley Rosen points out that this task was not considered hopeless because it was
taken for granted that without the aid of esoteric interpretive strategies these texts
ordinarily convey a core meaning to perceptive readers, and that readers from different
historical eras are able to discern that core meaning because they share a common
humanity that transcends variations in historical context. He adds that these premises
were at least implicitly recognized in the maxims formulated by more recent
representatives of the hermeneutic movement: subtilitas legendi (Schleiermacher), der
richtige Takt (Boeckh), Verstehen (Dilthey), and phronesis (Gadamer). 2
Such intellectual virtues, however, are of little help in containing the threat of
relativism posed by the introduction of hermeneutics into the domain of science. Like
Collingwood, many other twentieth century philosophers have concluded that
hermeneutics is an intellectual stance requisite not only for the consideration of texts
but also for the appraisal of other sources of knowledge. Indeed, many contemporary
philosophers suggest that all modes of human knowledge, including our everyday
perceptions, are forms of interpretation. Their argument goes something like this: if
seeing itself is already shaped by language, and if our languages are historically
contingent ways of structuring the spectrum of meaning, then we must conclude that
every intentional act is at least to some extent an interpretive act. Hermeneutics thus
becomes the universal method of philosophy: it is relevant to perception, linguistic
articulation, theory formation, experimentation, and verification.
Consider, by contrast, what science had meant for the ancients. For the Greeks,
theory was always founded upon intellectual insight. Indeed, the very word theoria is
derived from the root verb 'to see.' For Plato, theoretical knowledge meant
contemplation of the forms manifested imperfectly in the perceived objects in the world
around us. The purpose of dialectic was to liberate us from our fascination with these
everyday objects so that we might intuit their timeless forms. For Aristotle, science was
more immediately founded in sensuous and intellectual perception of natural beings.
We have no access to forms except as they are instanced in some particulars. Moreover,
knowledge of a particular and its form always occurs as a unity. The nature or form of
a thing is revealed to us by its specific 'look' (eidos). 3 Speech gives syntactical
articulation and thus completion to the inarticulate insights of cognitive intuition. There
is therefore a continuity between intuitive and discursive logos, but there is also a
certain priority of seeing over speaking. 4
This attitude towards the interplay of intuitive and discursive modes of knowing
may well have underestimated the influence of historically conditioned linguistic forms
upon our perceptions of the forms of things. On the other hand, contemporary emphasis
on the interpretive character of both sensuous and intellectual intuition tends ultimately
to minimize the role of seeing as such. As a result, we have come to consider odd and
HUSSERLIAN HERMENEUTICS 155
outmoded the Greek conviction that theory requires insight into the forms of things.
Theory is no longer linked to seeing; it has become interpretation. Moreover, the
meaning of interpretation itself has been transformed. Conjoined with the modem
rejection of intentionality and the modem historicist view of human nature,
interpretation becomes construction. The first manifestation of this transformation may
be found in the axiom expressed by Vico and subtly espoused by Hobbes that "we
know only what we make." With the establishment of this principle, theory is no
longer founded on intellectual insight. To judge is now to interpret, in the sense of
projecting conceptual constructions in the hope that they may serve to master reality.
A more proximate manifestation of this view may be found in Kant's theory of concept
formation. Having accepted the modem premise that sensory affections, caused by
hidden and unknowable things-in-themselves, provide the only link between mind and
nature, Kant's strategy was to appeal to the mind's mysterious but consistent
application of rules (i.e., conceptual categories) to the flow of sensory data, in order
to account for the objectivity of our knowledge. However, he never adequately
explained how empirical concepts are acquired in the first place, or how the
understanding manages to select just the right rules to fit specific sensory affections.
His references to the mysterious workings of the transcendental imagination, concealed
within the depths of the human soul, do little more than restate the problem. On the
grounds that our perceptions are guided by culturally determined interpretive horizons,
post-Kantian philosophers tend to look to the repository of language for an alternate
solution to these issues. The conceptual constructions which we impose upon the
sensory manifold are said to be relative to the history of interpretations encoded within
our languages. We acquire our concepts by being introduced to the institutionalized
practice of languages which have contingent histories and inaccessible pre-histories.
It follows from this contemporary version of nominalism that conceptual constructions
are true only in the sense that they make it possible to deal more effectively with
reality. The itinerary is complete: theoria has become interpretation, interpretation has
become construction, and construction has become a coping strategy.
In what follows, I shall develop two themes from the later works ofHusserl which
suggest ways of correcting what I take to be the contemporary imbalance between
interpretation and cognitive intuition. In The Crisis of European Sciences and
Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl adopts a specifically historical approach to
the development of modem philosophy, stressing how Vieta's invention of algebra and
Galileo's subsequent mathematization of nature transformed the traditional
philosophical understanding of theoria. In Formal and Transcendental Logic, he
discusses the role of axiomatic systems in modem theory formation and suggests a way
of coordinating a properly hermeneutic understanding of theory formation with the
ancient notion that theory is ultimately founded upon insight into the forms of things.
Let us consider each of these works and then reflect briefly on Husserl's synthesis of
modem hermeneutics and ancient theoria.
1. GALILEO'S AMBIGUOUS ACHIEVEMENT
In The Crisis, Husserl offers a penetrating analysis of the sources of our current
inability to arrest the drift of hermeneutics towards relativism. His analysis takes us
back beyond Kant to two early founders of modernity, Galileo and Descartes.
According to Husser!, the modem forgetfulness of the distinction between theory and
interpretation is manifested most clearly and most dramatically in Galileo's
methodology. He also points out that an understanding ofGalileo's method requires an
appreciation of the transformation of the notions of form and formalization first
introduced by Vieta's invention of algebra and subsequently reinforced by Descartes'
Geometry. As we shall see, Husserl's account of this intellectual itinerary incidentally
demonstrates in practice his own understanding of hermeneutics.
The opening chapters of the Crisis trace the breakdown of the ancient notion of
theoria to the ambiguous "motivation" of Galileo' s bold decision to overcome the
obstacle which perceived qualities presented to calculative rationality by treating them
as subjective indices of objective quantities. 5 This "indirect mathematization of nature"
had the double effect of revealing the world as mathematically structured, while
simultaneously concealing it as the horizon of everyday perception. 6 Husserl contends
that two factors contributed to the concealment of the latter effect.
In th~ first place, he observes, we must not forget that Galileo was heir to a
relatively advanced tradition of"pure geometry," which by reason of its very advances
had already lost contact with the fundamental insights on which it was first constructed.
Geometry, he observes, most likely had its origins in the invention of practical
techniques of surveying and measuring. Its ideal figures were thus first derived by
abstraction and progressive idealization from the perceived forms of things. Once
having acquired the notion of a field of pure "limit-shapes," mathematical praxis was
able to achieve an exactness and a freedom that is denied to us in empirical praxis. This
other-worldly ideal geometry was subsequently translated into applied geometry in the
field of astronomy, where it became possible to calculate "with compelling necessity"
the relative positions and even the existence of events that were never accessible to
direct empirical measurement. This achievement constituted a partial fulftllment of the
dream of the ancient Pythagoreans who had observed the functional dependency of the
pitch of a tone on the length of a vibrating string which produced it, and had therefore
evoked the possibility of a generalized theory of correlation between perceived
properties and measurable changes in geometrical properties. All of this, Husserl
speculates, inclined Galileo to bracket the problem of the original derivation of
geometry from the perceived qualities of things, and to interpret such qualities as
merely subjective indicators of the true quantitative being of the world. 7
In the second place, Husserl continues, we must take into account the "portentous"
influence on Galileo's thinking ofVieta's invention of algebra and Descartes' algebraic
formalization of geometry. He points out that the discovery of algebra introduced a
quite different sort of formality from that known by the Greeks. The algebraic mode
of thought does not use symbols as substitutes for determinate objects. Rather,
algebraic equations express indeterminate magnitudes and define the conditions for the
possibility of their subsequent determinacy. Hence, the algebraic mode of thought is
not immediately linked with an intuitive ontology of the physical world. Concepts like
space, dimension and even number are understood in a purely mathematical sense,
without direct reference to their ontological interpretations. 8
It was only with Descartes' development of analytic geometry that the full
implications of Vieta's brilliant accomplishment would be realized. For example,
Descartes' Geometry in effect construes the sides of triangles as representing
relationships between indeterminate magnitudes whose determinate applications might
relate objects belonging to entirely different categories. In the Regulae, he calls

attention to the implications of this decisive break with the classical interpretation of
dimensionality, noting that by "dimension" he understands any respect in which
something is measurable. For example, weight, velocity, and time are just as truly
dimensions as are length, breadth and depth. He adds that "the same figures may serve
to represent sometimes continuous magnitudes, and sometime multiplicities or
numbers. " 9 This thesis is the key to understanding the way in which analytical
geometry and eventually the calculus functioned in the writings the great geniuses of
the scientific revolution.
Galileo had independently understood that Euclid's geometry could now be
interpreted as a general logic of discovery rather than as a theory limited to the realm
of pure shapes. Consider, for example, the role of his diagrams for his theorems about
uniformly accelerated bodies. The lines and angles of these diagrams no longer refer
literally to spatial shapes created by geometric relations between linear magnitudes but
rather to a sequence of ratios between time and velocity. Galileo thus implicitly
considered such "geometric" diagrams as expressive of relationships among any
magnitudes whatever. Although this realization contributed significantly to the advance
of modem physics, it also initiated a process of further alienation of scientific method
from its roots in the perceived world. Unlike traditional geometry which requires
insight into the reasons for every step in its demonstrations, algebra lends itself to the
development of techniques of calculation which no longer demand such comprehension
but require instead only the blind implementation of procedural rules. Galileo himself
continued to employ the more traditional geometrical style of demonstration and hence
demanded of his readers conscious insight into the point of each transition.
Nevertheless, his method took mathematics further along the road towards its eventual
emancipation from the constraints imposed by the intuition of Euclidean shapes. 10
Husser! argues that this great discovery of modernity was both an advance and a
setback. On the one hand, freedom from servitude to intuited forms would give to the
geometer a greater potential for mastery over nature; on the other hand, it also further
promoted the modem forgetfulness of the priority of insight into perceived structures
over technical virtuosity. This forgetfulness would eventually lead to a bracketing of
those acts and attitudes of the human spirit that render scientific and other modes of
cognition possible, and finally to a naturalistic interpretation of reason as an adaptive
power whose operations are mechanistic processes devoid of intuitive insight. Husser!
concludes that Galileo was at once "a discovering and a concealing genius." 11 This
phrase invites a comparison between the style ofHusserl's historical analysis and the
method of psychoanalysis. Husser! deciphers in the subsequent history of philosophy
a hidden and unintended project concealed by Galileo's manifest intentions and
accomplishments. Of course, Husser!' s purpose is not at all to understand the hidden
motivation of Galileo himself, but rather, as Paul Ricoeur puts it, to grasp the hidden
logic of the idea" ... which passes through him historically." 12 Husser! describes the
task of this inquiry as an effort to uncover an "original motivation and movement of
thought" whose origin lies hidden in an inaccessible pre-history and whose subsequent
history is obscured by "shifts and concealments of meaning" which may be deciphered
only by a properly hermeneutic methodology:
We find ourselves in a sort of circle. The understanding of the beginnings is to be gained fully
only by starting with science as it is given in its present day fonn, looking back at its development.
But in the absence of an understanding of the beginnings the development is mute as a

development of meaning. Thus we have no other choice than to proceed forward and backward
in a zigzag pattern; the one must help the other in an interplay. Relative clarification on one side
brings some elucidation on the other, which in tum casts light back on the former. In this sort of
historical consideration and historical critique which begins with Galileo (and immediately
afterward with Descartes) and must follow the temporal order, we nevertheless have constantly to
make historical leaps which are thus not digressions but necessities. 13
As I noted above, Galileo still requires of his readers the same kind of geometrical
intuition required by Euclid. Moreover, his use of Euclid as logic of discovery is built
on the Pythagorean premise that the world is structured by mathematical forms. The
question guiding Galileo was the same as that guiding the Pythagoreans: "What
combinations of fundamental shapes or forms and what mathematical ratios among
them account for the composition of various stuffs?" In this sense, he is less modem
and less audacious than Descartes. However, his decision to bracket the priority of
ordinary perception made possible an ongoing process of concealment that would
eventually lead in practice to the suppression of geometrical seeing in favor of
algebraic construction.
2. ALGEBRAIC EQUATIONS AND AXIOMATIC SYSTEMS
David Lachterman points out that Descartes' analytic geometry radically transformed
the ontological setting in which ancient geometry had been conducted. Greek
mathematicians worked within a context where it was generally agreed that to be is
always to exhibit a determinate nature. They regarded individual geometric figures
(e.g., parabolas or ellipses) as tokens which exhibit specific types about which the
theorems of geometry are concerned. By contrast, Descartes' general equation for any
conic section does not denote any one specific type or even any one generic type in
which specific types and their tokens might be said to participate. The equation does
not spell out the characteristics of an intuited shape, but instead presents a formula for
the production of shapes. Each evaluation of the variables bound within the equation
yields a determinate conic section from a "continuum of abstract possibilities." 14
It is uncertain that it follows, as Lachterman's analysis suggests, that Descartes
understood his geometry as a construction freed from all dependence upon intuited
forms. However, it is surely true that he initiated a process that would eventually
culminate in the development of formal mathematical structures even less dependent
upon Euclidean intuitions. In the Logical Investigations, Husser! briefly discusses the
status of axiomatic systems such as Riemann's geometry and hints that the
phenomenological method is well equipped to deal effectively with the "metaphysical
fog" that had been generated by confused talk about the relationship between such
systems and the structures of reality. He cites as an example contemporary discussions
about the ontological status of spaces for which the axiom of parallels does not hold. 15
In Formal and Transcendental Logic, Husser! sets out to disperse this metaphysical
fog. It would be inappropriate, he points out, to claim that the formal structure of
algebraic equations may be mapped directly onto the formal structures of the cosmic
and subatomic realms. If this were the case, they would articulate the world in the same
way that our predicative articulations bring out relationships within things,
relationships that are given in an unsyntaxed manner to our perceptual consciousness.
We could then say that parts of equations (function-expressions) correspond to formal
structures of the world in the same way that predicates correspond to eidetic features
of things. This would make for an altogether too facile restoration in modem terms of
the Aristotelian notion of form, for it would not take into account how the discovery
of algebra at the beginning of the modem era contributed to a radically new
understanding of the formal dimension. Vieta in effect liberated the logical forms
common to arithmetic and geometry from their limited domains. He then retained the
propositions already established within those domains while ceasing to intend the
domains to which the propositions originally referred. 16 It follows that the forms
articulated by algebraic equations are one step removed from any direct intellectual
intuition of a Euclidean type.
The problem of correlating algebraic equations with structures of the world is
further complicated by an additional nuance given to the modem sense of the formal
by the incorporation of mathematical formulae, such as Descartes' general equation for
the conics, within axiomatic systems. Contemporary mathematicians tend to bracket all
concern about the ontological status of multiplicities governed by axiomatic deductive
systems. Husser! explains that this is why mathematicians may legitimately talk about
multiplicities without raising ontological questions about their actuality or even their
possibility: " ... the mathematician as such ... does not need to presuppose possible
multiplicities, in the sense of multiplicities that might exist concretely ... he can frame
his concepts in such a manner that their extension does not at all involve the
assumption of such possibilities. " 17 It is therefore inappropriate to describe the object
regions of non-Euclidean geometries as spaces, for Riemann and his successors were
not talking about actual or possible ontological regions, but rather about manifolds
defined exclusively as the correlates of theory forms. Husser! adds that even Euclidean
geometry may be reduced by formalization to a theory form. It would then cease to be
a theory of intuited world space, for its object region would be determined uniquely by
the formalized Euclidean deductive discipline. 18
Although axiomatic systems may sometimes have genuine applications within the
ontological domain, as was the case for Riemann's geometry, the transition from
axiomatic systems to the ontological domain does not occur by fiat. The evidence
requisite for axiomatic systems differs in kind from the evidence needed for ontological
claims. Like carefully framed judgments, theorems in axiomatic systems must be
coherently articulated and consistent with one another and with their governing
axioms. 19 Ontological claims, on the other hand, are always founded on the kind of
evidence yielded by intuitions of things and their intelligible structures. When
axiomatic structures pay off in eventual physical applications, this is not because they
are free projections of mathematical virtuosity upon a malleable nature. It is because
they are complex categorial achievements that disclose formal structures in the world.
Husser! observes that if we focus upon the "intentional genesis" of such structures we
will find that they are rooted not only in syntactical forms but also in the "cores which
seem to be functionless from a formal point of view." He adds that mathematicians and
formal logicians easily overlook these cores because, influenced by the algebraic mode
of thinking, they tend to construe them as "empty somethings" and therefore regard
them as "theoretical irrelevancies."20 They thus suppress the priority of intentional
activity originally directed to objects of everyday experience. In the process of
formalization these objects are treated "as if' they were irrelevant. As William James
once put it, if we trace the "trunk line" of meaning back far enough, it always leads us
to the pre-scientific world of perceptual discriminations. 21
3. TRACING THE TRUNK LINE OF MEANING

Husserl's comments on the relationship between mathematical systems and ontological
formal structures suggest that the most fruitful contribution phenomenology can make
to contemporary philosophy of science is to provide a genealogy of the intellectual
operations involved in the constitution of mathematical systems and in their subsequent
application to the ontological domain. The great strength of the phenomenological
method is that it enables us to notice the intellectual operations requisite for various
transformations of mathematical thinking, e.g., from the praxis of early forms of
measurement, to the idealization entailed by the intuition and manipulation of
Euclidean shapes, to the successive formalizations required by Vieta's algebra,
Descartes' analytic geometry, and finally by modem axiomatics. Each of these
operations takes mathematics to ever more sophisticated levels of abstraction. If we
forget or blur the intentional shifts involved in moving from one level of formalization
to the next, we may become convinced that there is no link whatsoever between such
mathematical systems and the "core" contents which are transformed into "empty
somethings" by the algebraic mode of thinking. Husserlian hermeneutics permits us
to reestablish the linkages between each level of formalization.
After Husser!, the phenomenological tradition has tended to focus primarily on the
lifeworld as perceived and articulated from first-person and intersubjective
perspectives. There has been little effort to explore the intellectual operations involved
in achieving the third-person perspective requisite for scientific inquiry. Patrick Heelan
is one of the few philosophers within this tradition who rightly stresses that the
experimental and theoretic viewpoints of scientific inquiry have their own attitudinal
stances and their own modes of embodiment. He explores the epistemological and
ontological implications of the interplay between everyday cognitive performances,
praxis-laden experiments, technologically aided observations, and "third-person"
theory-making. In all of this, his goal is to reconcile the world as it is manifested to us
in ordinary perception and the world as articulated by our physical theories. He argues
that our immediate perceptions may well have been transformed by the changes in our
environment introduced by the "carpentered" world of technical artifacts. He adduces
evidence from the development of perspective in the history of painting that our
original perceptions may more accurately be described by a hyperbolic geometry rather
than by the carpentered shapes of Euclidean geometry. This emphasis on a history of
perception is not proposed as a way of undermining the priority that phenomenology
ascribes to the lifeworld. On the contrary, it is motivated by Husserl's hermeneutic
insight that we have no other choice than to proceed in a zigzag pattern in our effort to
understand the interplay of seeing and interpretation. In a similar vein, Heelan also
explores the complex interpretive achievements involved in the use of measuring
instruments ("readable technologies") which extend our perceptual capacities.22 There
is nothing irretrievably relativistic about this broadening of the range of hermeneutics.
To say that ordinary seeing has a history, or to call attention to the complex operations
involved in reading instruments of measurement, is not to say that seeing is entirely
reducible to interpretation, or that interpretation is reducible to construction. Heelan's
goal is to trace the trunk line of meaning backward from axiomatic formal systems to
the perceived forms of things and to reconstruct the multiple transitions in intentional
attitude and the multiple cognitive operations involved in the constitution of ever more
elegant and more fruitful mathematical structures. This genuinely phenomenological
approach combines a hermeneutic understanding of theory formation and of seeing
itself with an updated and reinvigorated version of the ancient notion that theory is
ultimately founded upon insight into the forms of things.
Boston College
NOTES
1 R. G. Collingwood, The Idea ofNature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), 39-40; 49-55. See also
Collingwood, An Autobiography (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1939), 29-43.

2 Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 153-166.
3 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 104!7-27. See Deborah K. W. Modrak, Aristotle: The Power of Perception
fhicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 168.
Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics, 146-148.
5 Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 23-59.
6 See Paul Ricoeur, "Husser! and the Sense of History," in Husser/: An Analysis of his Phenomenology,
trans. Edward Ballard and Lester Embree (Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press), 163.
7 Ibid., 29.
8 See MichaelS. Mahoney, "The Beginnings of Algebraic Thought in the Seventeenth Century," in Stephen
Gaukroger, ed., Descartes: Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics (Sussex: Harvester, 1980), 142-3.
9 Rene Descartes, Rules for the Direction of Mind, in The Philosophical Works ofDescartes, trans. John
Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), I, 62-65.
10 Galileo Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (New York: Dover, 1954), 173-180.
11 Husser!, Crisis, 43-52.
12 Ricoeur, "Husserl and the Sense of History," 163-4.
13 Husser!, Crisis, 57-8.
14 See David Rapport Lachterman, The Ethics ofGeometry: A Genealogy ofModernity (London: Routledge,
1989), 198-200. I am grateful to Babette Babich for first calling to my attention Lachterman's remarkably
evocative work.
" Edmund Husser!, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1970), Prolegomena, 70, 242-3.
16 See J. Philip Miller, Numbers in Presence and Absence: A Study ofHusser/'s Philosophy ofMathematics
{The Hague: Nijhoff, 1982), 111-113.
7 Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969),
Pss;bid.,40. See Miller, Numbers in Presence and Absence, 113-120.

Husser!, Formal and Transcendental Logic, 51. See Miller, Numbers in Presence and Absence, 118.
. 19
20 Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, 89b, 218.
21 William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to Pragmatism (New York: Longmans, Green, 190 I),
140.
22 Patrick Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,
1983), 147-154. See also Heelan, "Natural Science and Being-in-the-World," Man and World, XVI (1983):
207-219; Heelan, "Wby a Hermeneutical Philosophy of the Natural Sciences?" Man and World, XXX
(1997):. 271-298.
JOHN J. CLEARY
ABSTRACTING
ARISTOTLE'S PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS
In the history of science perhaps the most influential Aristotelian division was that
between mathematics and physics. From our modem perspective this seems like an
unfortunate deviation from the Platonic unification of the two disciplines, which guided
Kepler and Galileo towards the modem scientific revolution. By contrast, Aristotle's
sharp distinction between the disciplines seems to have led to a barren scholasticism
in physics, together with an arid instrumentalism in Ptolemaic astronomy. On the
positive side, however, astronomy was liberated from commonsense realism for the
conceptual experiments of Aristarchus of Samos, whose heliocentric hypothesis was
not adopted by later astronomers because it departed so much from the ancient
cosmological consensus. It was only in the time of Newton that convincing physical
arguments were able to overcome the legitimate objections against heliocentrism,
which had looked like a mathematical hypothesis with no physical meaning.
Thus from the perspective of the history of science, as well as from that of
Aristotelian scholarship, it is important to examine the details of Aristotle's philosophy
of mathematics with particular attention to its relationship with the physical world, as
reflected in the so-called 'mixed' sciences of astronomy, optics and mechanics.
Furthermore, we face a deep hermeneutical problem in trying to understand Aristotle's
philosophy of mathematics without drawing false parallels with modem views that
were developed in response to the foundational crisis at the end of the 19th century. On
the one hand, it is an inescapable fact about our mode of understanding that we cannot
jump over our own shadow, as it were; so that we cannot avoid asking whether
Aristotle was a platonist, or an intuitionist, or a logicist, or a formalist, or some kind of
quasi-empiricist. When pursued in this way, the attempt to grapple with Aristotle's
philosophy of mathematics is reduced to asking how well his view matches one of the
standard modem views that were developed within an entirely different problem-
situation in the history of philosophy. But, on the other hand, one wonders whether it
is even possible to recover the original problem-situation in which Aristotle's views
about mathematics were developed.
163
164 JOHN J. CLEARY
THE ROLE OF MATHEMATICS

IN ARISTOTLE'S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
William Wians 1 rightly attaches great significance to the large number of mathematical
examples used by Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics, by contrast with the Prior
Analytics where they are quite rare. This leads one to wonder whether there are exact
parallels between Aristotelian demonstration and Euclidean proof. Aristotle himself
seems to assume that mathematical proofs can be given in syllogistic form, but he
provides no good examples that might satisfY modem scholars like Mueller and Barnes,
who find little or no fit between them. However, I am convinced that Aristotle felt that
mathematical proofs could in principle be reformulated in syllogistic format (though
he did not carry out this plan) 2 because he used a logical method of subtraction to
explain how mathematics is possible as an exact science. For him subtraction is a
logical device for identifying the primary subject of any per se attributes, which can
then be proved to belong to such a subject in a syllogistic way.
It is clear from Aristotle's mathematical examples that he is concerned not so much
with analysing the mathematical disciplines themselves as with illustrating his own
theory of demonstration. For instance, he names elementary entities like the point, the
line, and the unit as objects of study, while identifying number and magnitude as the
genera studied by arithmetic and geometry. 3 To avoid modem misunderstandings, it is
important to notice that for Aristotle the basic elements or principles of mathematics
are not propositions but objects that fall naturally into different subject genera. This is
the ontological basis for his famous prohibition against "crossing into another genus,"
e.g., trying to prove something in geometry by means of arithmetic. Thus, for instance,
in Posterior Analytics I.9 Aristotle rejects Bryson's attempt to square the circle on the
grounds that it is based on a logical fallacy, due to his failure to limit the premises to
the subject genus studied by geometry. Aristotle's criticism takes for granted the
discovery of incommensurability which led to a sharp distinction between arithmetic
and geometry. This historical development in Greek mathematics is also relevant in 1.5
where Aristotle refers to Eudoxus' general theory of proportion, remarking that the
theorem about alternating proportions was once proved separately for numbers, lengths,
times and solids because these were not named under a single genus. Eudoxus grouped
all of these under a single comprehensive term and this somehow made possible a
general theory of proportion in which certain properties can be demonstrated to belong
to all of them per se. I will return to this historical achievement of Eudoxus later
because it provides Aristotle with an important illustration for his claim that one can
logically separate (by subtraction) a primary subject of per se attributes (thereby
making demonstration possible) without ontologically separating it, as Plato is reputed
to have done.
But a simple rejection of Platonism is not quite so easy for Aristotle, given that he
accepts its fundamental epistemological claim that knowledge is universal (1.4-5),
whereas perception is particular (1.31 ). Since mathematics is scientific and precise
(I.13), Plato's objectivity argument implies that it must have separate objects about
which it is true, given that it is not true of changing and particular sensible things. We
see Aristotle squaring up to this epistemological problem at Posterior Analytics 1.24
where he admits that if a demonstration is true then it holds true of some thing. But this
seems to imply that there must be a universal object corresponding to a universal
ABSTRACTING ARISTOTLE'S PHILOSOPHY OF MATHEMATICS 165
demonstration; e.g., a triangle apart from individual triangles, or a number apart from
individual numbers. But atAPst. 85b19-23 Aristotle denies the ontological implications
which Platonists drew from this epistemological situation. He admits that there must
exist some universal account (logos), which holds true of several particulars, and that
this universal is imperishable. Yet he denies that this is a separately existing thing; i.e.,
it does not signify some individual substance but rather some quality, quantity or
relation. Here Aristotle is appealing to his Categories (5, 2all-b6), according to which
individual substances are the basic realities, while quantities and qualities depend on
substances for their existence. Thus from Categories 6, 4b20-5 it would appear that the
objects of mathematics are either discrete or continuous quantities, so that they are
attributes of substance rather than being themselves substances. However, the Platonist
account cannot be wholly misguided because mathematicians treat their objects of
study as if they were completely separated from sensible things.
GOING THROUGH THE PUZZLES

If one wants to understand Aristotle's problem-situation within its proper historical
context, one must consider how he understood his own philosophical enterprise with
respect to previous thinkers by paying particular attention to Aristotle's aporetic
method, which typically begins with a review of competing opinions. Such a review
is carefully constructed so as to produce an impasse which must be broken by any
successful solution of the aporia. Usually the solution is already being prepared through
his review of opinions, which is structured in terms of an exhaustive outline of logical
possibilities. If all of the logically possible views except one have been surveyed and
refuted, then the remaining logical option must be considered a likely solution. The
final dialectical test which Aristotle uses for such a solution is to examine whether it
"saves the phenomena" or captures the grain of truth which he finds to be present in all
the reputable opinions (endoxa) of his predecessors.
Here, I can only sketch how this aporetic method of inquiry operates with respect
to some central questions about mathematics which one fmds in Metaphysics Beta and
Kappa. The first aporia in Beta which deserves scrutiny goes as follows:
And we must also inquire into this, (4) whether sensible substances alone should be said to exist
or besides these also others, and if others also, whether such substances are of one genus or of
more than one; for example, some thinkers posit the Forms and also the Mathematical Objects
between the Forms and the sensible things.
One can see immediately from this aporia that it is implicitly connected with the
previous problem (995b10-13) about whether there is a single science dealing with all
substances. 5 These questions arise as part of an extended discussion about the subject
matter of his so-called science of first philosophy (or metaphysics) which Aristotle
treats as if it were a science in the making. For instance, in Metaphysics Kappa
(1059a38), he says that it is difficult to decide whether this science deals only with
perceptible substances or with some other separate substances. If the latter is the case
then it must deal either with the Forms or with the Mathematicals. Although Aristotle
takes it to be evident that the Forms do not exist, he argues that even if one supposes
them to exist, there will be a puzzle as to why there are not Forms for other things
besides the objects of mathematics.
What he is raising difficulties about in Metaphysics Kappa is the reputedly Platonic
view that the objects of mathematics constitute an intermediate class of substances
166 JOHN J. CLEARY
between Forms and sensible things, even though no such intermediates are posited
between perceptible men and the Form of Man. On the other hand, if such
mathematical intermediates are not posited, then it is difficult to see what the
mathematical sciences will have as objects of inquiry, since it appears that mathematics
cannot be about perceptible things. This is a neat summary of the problem about the
ontological status of mathematical objects, as we find it outlined both in Metaphysics
Beta and Kappa. On the one hand, mathematics cannot be about such a class of
independent substances because they do not exist, just as Platonic Forms do not exist;
but, on the other hand, the mathematical sciences cannot be about sensible things which
are subject to change and are perishable. So in his search for a solution to the problem
Aristotle must find a middle way by discovering another mode of being for
mathematical objects. For him it would be unthinkable that mathematics should not
have its own proper subject matter, since this would undermine its status as a
paradigmatic science of"things that can be learned" (paOrfpar:a).
The second aporia I want to consider is listed last in Metaphysics Beta 1, though it
is closely connected with the aporia already outlined. That aporia covered mathematical
objects in a general way under the question about different kinds of substance, whereas
this deals more specifically with the ontological status of mathematical objects:
Moreover, (14) are numbers and lines and figures and points substances in any sense or not, and
if substances, are they separate from sensible things or are they constituents ofthem. 6
When Aristotle tries to resolve this aporia in Metaphysics XIII, he considers
precisely the same two options for mathematical objects as substances; namely as
separate from sensible substances or in them. There he also attributes each option to
some contemporary thinkers, including the Platonists, though Aristotle has changed the
framework with his assumption about the primacy of sensible substances. 7
BREAKING THE IMPASSE

Any adequate account of Aristotle's views on the ontological status of mathematical
objects must take its bearings from Metaphysics Mu 1-3. Yet here his search for a
solution to this problem takes a step beyond the aporetic strategy in Beta, where he
merely reviewed the difficulties on both sides of the question. In Mu 2 he engages in
elenctic argumentation by using many of the same difficulties to refute his opponents,
so that in forensic terms one can say that he ceases to be an impartial judge and
becomes a plaintiff in the case. This seems to be a further step in the dialectical search
for truth because one should not remain bound in puzzlement forever, even though
being so bound may be an essential first step towards philosophy. 8 But to break the
bonds of doxa (typified in the review of difficulties) one needs a "hard-hitting
elenchus" to clear the road into the realm oftruth. 9
Thus it is clear from Aristotle's concluding methodological remarks in Mu 1 that
he regards philosophy as a shared enterprise whose ultimate goal is the extraction of
truth from common opinions. As to the rationale for considering the opinions of others,
he explains (1076al5-16) that one should be content if one states some things better
and other things no worse. This involves some sort of elenctic test for deciding whether
things are said well or badly. Indeed Aristotle espouses a rather modest ideal for philo-
sophical inquiry, when he claims that one has done an adequate job if one formulates
some theories that avoid the mistakes of previous thinkers (as exposed through a
successful elenchus), while accepting those views which have survived the critical
scrutiny involved in a failed elenchus. That is why one must begin every inquiry with
the opinions of predecessors and pursue the truth by attempting to refute them.
For purposes of completeness, Aristotle usually classifies the opinions of
predecessors in terms of the logically possible answers to a given question, and so at
Met. 1076a32-37 he outlines the possible modes of being of mathematical objects,
some of which correspond to the opinions of previous thinkers. For instance, the first
logical possibility, i.e., that mathematical objects are in sensible things (tv rois
aia8rrroz s), corresponds to the opinion reported in Metaphysics Beta 2 (998a7 -19). 10
By contrast, the position represented in the second logical possibility is that mathe-
matical objects are separated from sensibles (KexwpzaJliV rwv aia87Jrwv).
Although Aristotle does not identify its proponents, I think they must be 'strict'
Platonists who all share the view that mathematical objects are separated from sensible
things as independent substances, whether these are called Ideas or Intermediates or
both. Furthermore, it corresponds exactly with one of the possibilities listed in
Metaphysics Beta (996al2-15 & 100lb26-28) under the aporia about whether or not
mathematical objects are some (kinds of) substances or not. Assuming a positive
answer, the aporia lays out two possibilities for mathematical objects as substances; i.e.,
either separated from sensibles or belonging in them.
Since the first two possibilities cover the ways in which mathematical objects can
exist as substances, the last two possibilities must be about alternative modes of being:
(iii) either mathematical objects do not exist ( ij oiJK eiaiv) or (iv) they exist in some
other way ( ij a.A.A.ov rp6n:ov eiaiv). The third possibility is included only for the sake
of logical completeness, as Aristotle does not consider it further. This apparent
oversight can be explained away by reference to the Platonic argument "from the
sciences," whose fundamental assumption is that any genuine science must have a real
or existent object. 11 Since Aristotle shares that assumption, he would probably find it
unthinkable that the objects of mathematics should not exist at all because that would
leave these paradigmatic sciences without foundations.
So, if the first two possibilities are to be denied and the third be ruled out, the
remaining option takes on a new importance. As stated, this is the possibility that
mathematical objects exist in some other manner. Obviously, it must be some mode
of being which lies between complete non-being and being in the primary sense as
substance. However, Pseudo-Alexander 12 is premature in describing this mode of being
as "abstract" (t( ciJazpiaews), since Aristotle's own account emerges from the
dialectical inquiry rather than being a presupposition for it.
It is from this dialectical perspective that we should view any argument which
serves as a refutation in Mu 2 and which is used again in Mu 3 to support Aristotle's
own positive solution, since it illustrates perfectly the complex role which difficulties
play in his procedure. On the one hand, they provide the material for refuting an
opponent's view while, on the other hand, they also belong among the phenomena to
be "saved" by any solution that emerges from the process of refutation. In this case,
Aristotle bases his objection against the Platonists on the development of a general
theory of proportion by mathematicians within the Academy:
Again, some mathematical propositions are universally expressed by mathematicians in such a way
that the objects signified are distinct from these mathematical substances. Accordingly, there will
be other substances which are separate, which lie between the Ideas and the Intermediates, and
168 JOHN J. CLEARY
which are neither specific numbers nor points nor specific magnitudes nor time. If this is
impossible, it is clear that the others, too, cannot exist separate from the sensible substances. 13
Although Aristotle does not specify the referent, the passage indicates it is some
kind of universal (Ka86A.ov) theory in mathematics whose range is not limited to any
particular quantity, such as the general theory of proportion in Book V of Euclid's
Elements. 14
In order to illustrate Aristotle's point here, Ps.-Alexander (729.21 fi) supplies an
example from this theory and another from the general axioms of equality, while
Syrianus (89.30 ff.) also cites the same two examples. Similarly, modem commentators
treat Eudoxus' theory of proportion as the best example of such a universal
mathematics. 15 From this historical perspective, one can now see the power of
Aristotle's objection when it is directed against the Platonists, especially those who
accepted the general theory of proportion. Given that this theory is not specifically
about numbers or points or lines or any of the other kinds of continuous magnitude,
which the Platonists considered to be separate substances, they are faced with the
following difficulty. One implication (1 077al 0-11) of their position, when applied to
the general theory of proportion, is that there must be some other substance which is
separated from and between (per-a(v) Ideas and Intermediates. Furthermore, (to com-
pound the difficulty) such a substance cannot be either a number or a point or a
magnitude or time. If this result is impossible, as appears to be the case, then it is also
impossible for these other mathematical objects to exist apart from sensible things. The
whole objection depends on the assumption that the separation of mathematical objects
involves treating them as independent substances.
In the final argument ofMu 2, Aristotle identifies the nub of his dispute with the
Platonists about mathematical objects:
Let it be granted that they are prior in formula to the body. But it is not always the case that what
is prior in formula is also prior in substance. For A is prior in substance to B if A surpasses B in
existing separately, but A is prior in formula to B if the formula of A is a part of the formula ofB;
and the two priorities do not belong to the same thing together. For if attributes, as for example a
motion of some kind or whiteness, do not exist apart from substances, whiteness is prior in formula
to the white man but not prior in substance; for whiteness cannot exist separately but exists always
in the composite. By "the composite," here, I mean the white man. So, it is evident that neither is
the thing abstracted prior, nor is what {cfsults by addition posterior; for it is by addition of
whiteness that we speak of a white man.
The initial concessive pevhere shows that Aristotle is prepared to accept that mathe-
matical objects are prior in definition ( r-ciJ A.6yrp ;rp6r-epa) to sensible bodies, but he
minimizes the concession by saying that not all things which are prior in definition are
also prior in substance (r-fi ova{f! ;rp6r-epa). He supports this distinction by citing
different criteria for the two types of priority. Some thing A is prior in substance to
something else B if A surpasses B in existing separately, whereas A is prior in
definition to B if the definition of A is part of the definition of B. Aristotle warns that
the two types ofpriority do not always belong to the same thing. 17
Despite the clear logical basis for Aristotle's argument, one might still ask how it
is an objection to the Platonist claims about the ontological status of mathematical
objects. Given the whole topic of the treatise, it is rather curious that he chooses a
quality like whiteness rather than some quantity, in order to make his point about the
non-coincidence of two kinds of priority. According to his own categorial framework,
however, both quantities and qualities are accidents of primary substance and so can
be defined separately from it. Thus the point of Aristotle's example is to suggest that
the Platonists have been misled by this logical possibility. The fact that whiteness can
be defined independently of sensible substances does not mean that there is some
Whiteness Itself apart from sensible things, as the Platonists thought; cf. Phy. 193b35
ff. Although mathematical quantities are more separable from sensible things than
qualities, one cannot infer that they are independent substances from the fact that their
definitions do not presuppose any sensible subjects to which they belong per se.
This is the general thrust of Aristotle's rather strange conclusion (1 077b9-11) in the
present passage to the effect that "the result of subtraction" ( n) t( tiHnpfaews), is not
ro
prior nor is "the result of addition" ( iK 1rpoa8faews) posterior. The terminology
of 'abstraction' is introduced quite suddenly, and the context provides little guidance
as to how it should be interpreted, except for an explicit contrast with some process
called "addition." Fortunately, Aristotle does give us a clue as to what he means by
'addition' when he says that it is as a result of adding to whiteness that the white man
is spoken of. 18 From the previous passage we may assume that he is here referring to
the addition of a subject (i.e., "man") that is not the primary subject to which the
quality of whiteness belongs per se. Conversely, "abstraction" would be the process of
taking away that subject and defining white separately. This is consistent with
Aristotle's denial of priority to "the result of subtraction," since he had previously
argued that "the white" is not prior in substance to "the white man" even though it may
be prior in formula.
In fact, it is quite clear that priority in substance is being denied to the so-called
"results of subtraction." This may have led some ancient Greek commentators to the
conclusion that Aristotle is here referring specifically to mathematical objects. 19 Yet
they give no adequate explanation of how mathematical objects could be intelligibly
referred to as "the results of abstraction" or of what implications this terminology has
for their ontological status. This is a lacuna even in modem Aristotelian scholarship,
which needs to be filled by explaining such terminology and by showing how it
describes the logical situation of mathematical objects. Such an analysis must also
explain the peculiar fact that the terminology of"abstraction" is not used by Aristotle
in Mu 3 for his positive account of the mode of being of mathematical objects. 20
PROVIDING SOLUTIONS TO THE APORIA!
Having refuted the views of others, Aristotle's next task is to provide an alternative
account of mathematical objects which will escape the difficulties raised. Ifhis solution
manages to do this, while also saving the most authoritative phenomena, then it will be
a successful resolution of the problem according to his methodological criteria. Among
these phenomena we expect to find the reputable opinions (endoxa) of mathematicians
who are the 'wise' in this case. Thus it is not surprising that Eudoxus' general theory
of proportion is made the starting-point for Aristotle's own proposed solution:
Now, just as certain universal propositions in mathematics, which are about things not existing
apart from magnitudes and numbers, are indeed about numbers and magnitudes but not qua such
as having a magnitude or being divisible, clearly, so there may be propositions and deTfnstrations
about sensible magnitudes, not qua sensible but qua being of such-and-such a kind.
Here Aristotle appeals to the fact that mathematicians use general axioms and
propositions about quantity as such without positing other objects besides magnitudes
and numbers. Structurally, the argument draws a parallel between the fact that there are
such general propositions and the possibility that other statements and proofs can be
170 JOHN J. CLEARY
made about sensible magnitudes. The first part of the parallel assumes as established
that the propositions of general mathematics are not about separated things apart from
magnitudes and numbers. Yet, while a proposition from the general theory of
proportion is about magnitudes and numbers, it is not about them in so far as [Jf] these
things have continuity or are discrete.
Therefore, starting from the general theory of proportion, Aristotle draws a parallel
which is crucial for his alternative account of all the sciences as being about sensible
things. He claims (Met. 1077b20-22) that, in a similar way, there can be propositions
and proofs about sensible magnitudes, not insofar as they are sensible but insofar as
they are such-and-such [A.A. ' ?f z-maoz} What he appears to mean by this claim is that
one can select some definite quality [ z-ozaoz1 of sensible magnitudes and construct
demonstrations with respect to it as subject, while excluding the sensible aspects from
consideration. Thus he makes the following loose analogy: just as there are
propositions about quantity as such, which leave out of account whether the quantity
is continuous or discrete; so also there are propositions about sensible magnitudes
which do not consider them as sensible but only as magnitudes. 22
Let us now consider how Aristotle's use of Eudoxus' theory has advanced his
alternative account of mathematical objects. The argument based on the theory of
proportion draws the following logical parallel: just as it is possible to have a science
about numbers and magnitudes in so far as they are quantities, without the ontological
separation of some entity called "quantity"; so also one can have a science of sensible
magnitudes in so far as they are such and such [?f z-ozaoz} Perhaps Aristotle is being
deliberately vague here so as to make the point that the "qua" locution can pick out any
aspect of sensible magnitudes and bring it under the subject matter of a particular
science. It also establishes the possibility of demonstrative knowledge of that
unseparated aspect because the "qua" locution indexes the primary subject of whatever
attributes are proved to belong to something qua such-and-such. 23
Now it is upon this logical basis that Aristotle continues to build his argument as
follows:
For just as there are many propositions concerning sensible things but only qua moving, without
reference to the whatness of each of these and the attributes that follow from it- and it is not
necessary because of this that there should exist either a moving of a sort which is separate from
the sensible thing or is some definite nature in the sensible thing- so also there will be proposi-
tions and sciences about things in motion, not qua in motion but only qua bodies, or only q~~
planes, or qua lengths, or qua divisible, or qua indivisible with position, or just qua indivisible.
As in the previous argument, the general structure of this argument is that of an explicit
parallel which is drawn between an actual and a possible situation. Here Aristotle starts
from the existence of many statements about things only in so far as they are changing
[Jj Kl vov,u eva ,u 6 vo v], quite apart from the particular essence of such things or their
accidents.
It is clear that what he is proposing as a basis for the truth and objectivity of any
science is the possibility of logically separating its subject-matter from the complex
appearances of sensible things. For instance, he emphasizes that we are able to make
true statements about sensible things qua moving, while leaving out of account the
essence of these things along with all other accidental attributes. Obviously, such a
leaving out is logical because the essence of anything is onto logically inseparable from
it and could not be ignored, for instance, if we were considering something under its
species description. It is important to notice, however, that Aristotle mentions the
possibility of leaving the essence out of account through this logical technique of
subtraction. If this were not possible then there would be only one science of sensible
things; e.g., a science of natural kinds. But he clearly rules out this possibility at the end
of the above passage when he draws the second part of his parallel: just as there are
propositions about sensible things qua moving, so also there can be propositions and
sciences about moving things, not qua moving but qua bodies only [tf ucJpara
p6vov]. In other words, just as one can select some aspect of sensible things as a
primary subject for attributes related to motion, so also one can select the bodily aspect
of moving things as a subject to which some attributes belong primarily and
universally.
Despite the ambiguity of the word ucJpat:a, it seems very likely that Aristotle has
in mind the solids [ uTept'a] whose per se attributes are studied by the science of
stereometry. The selection of solids as the primary subject of such attributes is
indicated by the "qua" locution and is achieved through subtraction. Indeed, the
passage goes on to list a series of such subtractions which itself seems to have an
inherent order. First, one considers moving or changing things, not qua moving but
only qua solids. This step involves the logical subtraction of the sensible and changing
aspects of things, together with the per se attributes that belong primarily to this aspect;
e.g., sensible contraries like hot/cold, light/heavy, wet/dry. The analogous step in
Posterior Analytics I.4 (74a33-b4) is the subtraction of "bronze" from the complex
subject "bronze isosceles triangle," thereby eliminating certain sensible attributes. Such
a logical step makes possible the isolation of the solid as a primary subject for the
attributes which stereometry will demonstrate as belonging to it per se.
The method of subtraction can be used again in a logical way to "strip off'
[ tiJazpeiv] the third dimension and thereby eliminate its per se attributes; cf. Met. Z
3, 1029al0 ff. & K 3, 106la28 ff. This is presumably what Aristotle has in mind atMu
3 when he says that there can be a science of sensible things qua planes [tf brfJrEoa];
i.e., plane geometry. Similarly, the second dimension can be logically removed so as
to make possible the study of sensible things qua lengths [tf f.l rJKrJ]. The method of
subtraction allows one to identify certain attributes as belonging universally to the line
as a primary subject; e.g., straight and curved belong to bodies in so far as they contain
lines. Therefore, strictly speaking, it is only qua line that a sensible thing can be said
to be either straight or curved. Although Aristotle does not mention Protagoras within
this context, one can now see how one might defuse his well-known objection that
mathematical definitions (e.g., for the tangent of a circle and a line) are not true of
sensible things. When Protagoras objects that a sensible circle and ruler do not meet at
a point, he is wrongly assuming that this property belongs to the contact of the circle
and the line in so far as they are sensible. In general, this mistake is being made by
anyone who appeals to some empirical fact about a sensible diagram in order to refute
a geometrical claim.
In terms of his whole project in Metaphysics Mu 1-3, however, we would expect
Aristotle to specify an alternative mode of being for mathematical entities which
conforms with the actual practice of mathematicians, as he does in the following
passage:
A thing can best be investigated if each attribute which is not separate from the thing is laid down
as separate, and this is what the arithmetician and the geometrician do. Thus, a man qua a man is
one and indivisible. The arithmetician lays down this: to be one is to be indivisible, and then he
investigates the attributes which belong to a man qua indivisible. On the other hand, the
172 JOHN J. CLEARY
geometrician investigates a man neither qua a man nor qua indivisible, but qua a solid. For it is
clear that the attributes which would have belonged to him even if somehow he were not
indivisible can still belong to him if he is indivisible. Because of this fact, geometers speak rightly,
and what they discuss ~~beings, and these are beings; for "being" may be used in two senses, as
actuality and as matter.
What Aristotle here proposes as a solution, i.e., that mathematical objects exist "as
matter" [ v,luaJS'], has itself prompted many different interpretations. 26 Instead of
rehearsing these views, I will follow the hermeneutical maxim that Aristotle's brief and
ambiguous solution must be interpreted in terms the whole aporetic inquiry. 27
The above passage begins with a methodological recommendation for the other
sciences based on the procedure of mathematicians. I take the word ovrw to refer back
to that procedure, which is then redescribed in a conditional clause as follows: "if one
posits as separate what (in reality) is not separated ... " 28 This clause contains a clear
contrast between the logical and ontological implications ofthe positing activity of the
arithmetician and the geometer. While their subject-matter may be treated as logically
separate, Aristotle insists that it is not separated in reality. Therefore he recommends
this procedure for each of the other sciences because it promotes greater accuracy
without leading to error.
The most obscure part of this passage is the description of how the arithmetician
considers a man as one indivisible thing, while the geometer treats him as a solid. One
may be tempted to object that the mathematician does not deal with man at all, whether
as unit or as solid, but that would be to miss the whole point of his argument. 29 For
Aristotle does not want to claim that mathematics is about mankind, though he does
wish to establish that these sciences can be viewed as dealing with sensible things
under highly specific aspects. Obviously, he is concerned with the truth of mathematics
which, according to his correspondence theory, depends on the existence of real
entities. For instance, the statement about the arithmetician begins with an explicit
comparison between what is posited by him and what is actually the case. On the one
hand, Aristotle says, a man qua man is one and indivisible [iv jliV ... Ktri aOLa(pcrov]
while, on the other hand, the arithmetician posits the unit as indivisible [ 0 'fficro iv o
aOLa(pcrov] and then considers whether any attributes belong to the man qua
indivisible. The point implicit in the Greek construction seems to be that the
arithmetician has not assumed any falsehood, despite the fact that he posits the unit as
if it were independent of the sensible world. Aristotle's use of the aorist here, combined
with a temporal index word [cir- '],suggests that the arithmetician simply goes ahead
and posits an indivisible unit without reflecting on his ontological assumptions, and this
conforms quite well with what Aristotle says elsewhere 30 about the practice of
mathematicians. In fact, he does not think it is any part of their business to investigate
foundational questions. 31 As a philosopher, however, Aristotle must ground the
mathematical sciences in the reality of the sensible world, especially since he has
undermined the foundations which the Platonists gave them in the supersensible realm.
In the present passage, therefore, he tries to establish that these sciences are true of
sensible things under a certain description. For instance, one can count men without
falling into error because a man qua man conforms to the definition of a unit which is
posited by the arithmetician. By contrast, if one tried to count the same things qua
colored, the possibility of error and confusion is greater. In modem jargon, one might
formulate the difference between "man" and "color" as follows: whereas the former is
a sortal term that divides its reference cleanly, the latter is a mass term that does not. 32
There is also some basis for a corresponding distinction in Aristotle's work where he
recognises that only certain concepts provide us with a measure for counting a
collection of things; cf. Met. 10 14a26-31, 1088a4-11. Here he specifies very carefully
the aspect under which an arithmetician might consider a sensible thing such as a man.
Even though a man is one and indivisible in so far as he is a man (i.e., under the species
description), the arithmetician is not interested in him as such; otherwise he would be
engaged in some kind of biology. Indeed, the mathematician only deals with a man in
so far as he is an indivisible unit and so far as some numerical attributes belong to him
under that description.
All ancient varieties of Platonism are being resisted by Aristotle as he struggles to
find a plausible way of connecting the science of geometry with sensible things. This
is why he uses a counter-factual conditional to talk about what could belong to a man
if he were not indivisible, and so it is only through the 'qua' locution that he can
establish the logical possibility of talking about a man insofar as he is a solid [?f
orepe6v]. When this aspect has been isolated as a primary subject, it is possible to
claim without contradiction that a man has certain per se attributes which are directly
opposed to those which belong to a man qua unit. In addition to the logical situation,
however, the mode of being of this aspect must be clarified before one can be assured
of the truth of geometry as a science concerned with sensible things. This appears to
be what Aristotle has in mind when he insists that geometers speak correctly [ opBws-]
and that they are speaking about "beings" [ ovra] which really do exist. In support of
this claim, he appeals to two general senses in which "being" is used; namely, being
in the sense of actuality [tvrdexdt;i'] and being in a material sense [ v.A. lKWS']. Given
the familiar look of this distinction, it is natural to think that VAlKWS' must stand for
potential being, but yet we must wonder about Aristotle's reasons for choosing this
word rather than orJvaj.lZS'. To grasp his meaning, however, we should confine
ourselves to asking how the conclusion should be understood within the context of the
whole argument in Mu 1-3, especially in view of the linguistic hint that mathematical
objects may have a mode ofbeing analogous to that of matter rather than to that of
substantial form. The simplest way to interpret this hint is that mathematical objects
have a dependent mode of being by contrast with the independence that is characteristic
of substances. But, in order to save the phenomena, this must also provide a solution
that satisfactorily resolves the difficulties raised in Metaphysics Beta.
Firstly, it clearly avoids all the difficulties arising from treating mathematical
objects as independent substances either in sensible things or separate from them, since
Aristotle denies them the mode of being of substantial forms. Furthermore, given that
mathematical bodies are not substantial, they will not be competing for the same place
with physical bodies, since they are potentially but not actually in sensible things. Just
as the statue of Hermes is potentially in the marble block before it has been sculpted,
so the geometrical lines, planes and solids are potentially in sensible objects before they
have been separated out by the method of subtraction. But this parallel also tends to
suggest that the mathematician is like a craftsman who actively shapes the matter which
would remain merely potential without his agency, and it is unclear whether Aristotle
is committed to such an implication. In Metaphysics Beta he does talk about the
"generation" of geometrical divisions but that is an instantaneous rather than temporal
process, so that it is quite different from any kind of physical or artistic generation.
174 JOHN J. CLEARY
However, there may be some parallels with the activity of the intellect in grasping
mathematical objects which are paradigmatic "things to be learned."
CONCLUSION
Returning to my hermeneutical point of departure, I want to reconsider whether

Aristotle's philosophy of mathematics can be expressed in any of the standard modem
views such as platonism, logicism, formalism, intuitionism, or quasi-empiricism. Given
his rejection of ancient Platonism in mathematics, it would seem difficult to treat him
as a platonist even though he does accept that mathematical objects are real entities
independent of the human mind. Yet this would make him a realist at least, and perhaps
even a platonist like Frege. But a better case might be made for treating him as a
logicist, given the logical basis for his theory of subtraction that grounds his account
of the mathematical sciences. 33 However, this does not seem to fit either because
Aristotle regards logic as preparatory for the sciences, whereas mathematics is one of
the theoretical sciences. Unlike Frege and Russell, he makes no attempt to reduce
mathematics to logic and his defense of the principle of contradiction in Metaphysics
IV relies more on ontology than on logic. In fact, given the explicit parallels which
Aristotle draws between mathematics and physics, one might try to classify him as a
quasi-empiricist like Lakatos who insists that mathematics has many experiential and
a posteriori elements just .like physics. But again Aristotle never draws a clear
distinction between a priori and a posteriori propositions, and his model of
mathematics as a demonstrative science does not fit very well with the quasi-
empiricism of Lakatos and his more radical followers.
On the other hand, given Aristotle's views on the potential infinite, it would appear
that he should be classified as an intuitionist like Brouwer and Heyting. Yet, as Lear
rightly points out/4 we must be wary of the apparent similarity between these ancient
and modem views. While Aristotle makes the potential infinite dependent on the nature
of magnitude itself, modem intuitionists make it dependent on the existence of a finite
process carried out by the creative mathematician. This difference in emphasis nicely
illustrates the post-Cartesian shift in perspective from an object-centered to a subject-
centered epistemology. Indeed, from this post-Cartesian perspective, we can better
understand the difficulty of classifying Aristotle's philosophy of mathematics in terms
of any contemporary view. The sceptical gap that Descartes opened up between knower
and object known led modem philosophers to focus on questions about subjectivity and
objectivity in science, rather than on questions about truth as simple correspondence
between the object known and the knower. It is precisely because of sceptical doubts
about the human mind's access to reality that the distinction between a priori and a
posteriori propositions became relevant. Within this modem problem-situation, British
empiricists such as Locke and Hume tried to combat scepticism by appealing to
abstraction as an epistemological process by means of which the human mind can begin
from sense experience and reach universal knowledge. Such an appeal to a traditional
Aristotelian view seemed to be legitimated by ancient and medieval commentators on
Aristotle who described his epistemology in terms of abstraction. However, Frege's
critique of abstractionism as a psychological theory made it appear unsustainable, so
that Aristotle's epistemology lost the legitimacy which it seemed to have for British
empiricists. Yet, if I am correct about Aristotle not being an epistemological
abstractionist, one might still treat Aristotle as a logical realist like Frege himself. In
any case, whatever modem parallels one draws with Aristotle's position, it should be
clear that all of them will tend to be misleading unless one pays close attention to the
different problem-situations involved.
Boston College I NUl Maynooth, Ireland
NOTES
See W. Wians, "Scientific Examples in the Posterior Analytics" in Wians, ed., Aristotle's Philosophical
Development:. Problems and Prospects (Lanham: University of America Press, 1996), 131-150.
2 But see Posterior Analytics II.!! (94a28-31) where Aristotle puts a Euclidean proposition (Elements
III.31) into syllogistic format. Aristotle's Prior and Posterior Analytics, ed. W.O. Ross (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1949). [APst.]
3 Cf. APst. 71a15, 72a21, 75b2-5, 84all-26, 88b26, 90b33, 93b24.
4 Met. 995b13-18: Aristotle's Metaphysics, trans. H. G. Apostle (Grinnell: Peripatetic Press, 1979). [Met.]
The parallel aporia in Met. XL I (1059a37 ff.) goes as follows: "In general, there is this problem, whether the
science we now seek is concerned at all with sensible substances or not, but rather with some other
substances. If with others, it would be either with the Forms or with Mathematical Objects."
5 Cf. Alexander, in Metaph. 175.14-176.16. Syrianus (in Metaph. 2.15 ff.) goes one better by combining
three aporiai together, though he quotes and discusses each one separately.
6 Met. 996a12-15.
7 Perhaps it is by way of reaction against this assumption that the Neoplatonic commentator, Syrianus (in
Metaph. 12.25 ff.) adopts the strategy of simply asserting the Platonic order of priorities, beginning with the
Forms of mathematical objects and concluding with their appearance in sensible things.
8 Thus Aristotle's methodological attitude differs fundamentally from that of the ancient Sceptics who used
the aporetic method as an end in itself within their philosophical inquiries.
9 In terms of his method, therefore, Aristotle owes something to "father Parmenides," but his greatest
methodological debt is to Plato's Parmenides and its deliberately constructed antinomies. At Parm. 136c5
Parmenides recommends the gymnastic exercise of constructing antinomies as a way of seeing the truth more
completely ( eltw~) and better (Kvp(w~). See M. Schofield, "The Antinomies of Plato's Parmenides,"
Classical Quarterly 27 (1977): 140-158.
10 In order to signpost this view as it is represented by Aristotle, I adopt the convention of italicizing the 'in'
as follows: " ... mathematical objects in sensible things."

11 In addition, Aristotle connects the argument "from the sciences" with the Parmenidean dictum that it is
impossible to think or inquire about not-being; cf. Cael. III.!, 298b17-25.
12 Cf. In Metaph. 725.4.
13 Met. 1077a9-14.
14 Cf. T.L. Heath, The Thirteen Books of Euclid's Elements. 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1925), ii, 112 ff.
15 Cf. Heath, 138; W.R. Knorr, The Evolution of the Euclidean Elements (Dordrecht-Boston: Reidel,
1975); D.R. Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometry. A Genealogy ofModernity (New York & London:
Routledge, 1989), Ch. 2.
16 Met. I 077a36-b II.
17 Cf. Cleary, Aristotle on the Many Senses ofPriority (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1988) for discussion of the different senses of priority in Aristotle.
18 eK 1tpoo8eoew~ yap 'tcj> A.euKcj> 6 A.euKo~ &v8pw1to~ Mye'tat -Met. 1077bll.
19 Cf. Ps.-Aiexander In Metaph. 733.23-24 & Syrianus, In Metaph. 93.22 ff.
20 D. D. Moukanos, Ontologie der 'Mathematika' in der Metaphysik des Aristoteles (Athens: Potamitis
Press, 1981 ), 24 ff., claims that the conclusion of Mu 2-3 is that mathematics is about abstract objects, which
exist through the separating reflection of mathematicians, but he fails to explain why the terminology of
abstraction is conspicuously absent from Mu 3. For my explanation, see Cleary, "On the Terminology of
Abstraction in Aristotle," Phronesis 30 (1985): 13-47.
21 Met. 1077b17-22.
176 JOHN J. CLEARY
22 Syrianus (In Metaph. 95.13-17) expresses some surprise at what he sees as Aristotle's attempt to find a
parallel in ontological status between universals and mathematical objects, since the former are logical entities
belonging in the soul, whereas the latter are in sensibles and are also mental abstractions [em vo(az s
tiazpovuazs] from sensibles. But such remarks cannot be taken to represent Aristotle's views accurately,
and they may even suggest that abstractionism was a product of commentators like Alexander, who proposed
it as the official Aristotelian doctrine that was later opposed by Syrianus.
23 In his logical analysis of what he calls Aristotle's theory of reduplication, Allan Back, On Reduplication.
Logical Theories of Qualification (Leiden: Brill, 1996) points out that a qua proposition is actually a
condensed demonstrative syllogism in which the qua term functions as a middle term and as a cause; e.g., an
isosceles triangle has this property because it is a triangle. He also argues that the qua phrase is attached to
the predicate and does not change the reference of the subject term, which he takes to be a particular existent
like this bronze triangle. He has objected (in personal communication) that my approach of making qua
propositions fix our attention on the primary subject has the consequence of changing the reference of the
subject term to some kind of Platonic entities about which it would be difficult to verify any knowledge
claims. But I respond that the distinction between natural and logical priority in Aristotle separates the de
dicta question of the primary logical subject from the de re question about the basic subject as substance.
24 Met. I 077b22-30.
25 Met. 1078a21-31.
26 F.A.J. de Haas, "Geometrical Objects in Aristotle," (unpublished mss.) finds two major types of
interpretations within the range given by scholars like I. Mueller, "Aristotle and the Quadrature of the Circle"
inN. Kretzmann, ed., Infinity and Continuity in Ancient and Medieval Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1982), 146-64; J. Lear, "Aristotelian Infinity," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1979-80: 188-
210; J. Barnes, "Aristotelian Arithmetic", Revue de Philosophie Ancienne 3 (1985): 97-133; M. Mignucci,
"Aristotle's Arithmetic", in Graeser, ed., Mathematics and Metaphysics in Aristotle, 175-211; J. Annas, "Die
Gegenstande der Mathematik bei Aristoteles," Graeser, Mathematics and Metaphysics in Aristotle, 131-147;
Modrak, "Aristotle on the Difference between Mathematics and Physics and First Philosophy" in Penner &
Kraut, eds., Nature, Knowledge, and Virtue (Edmonton: Academic Printing, 1989), 121-139; E. Hussey,
"Aristotle on Mathematical Objects" in Mueller, ed., Peri Ton Mathematon (Apeiron 24.4) (Edmonton:
Academic Printing, 1991 ), I 05-133.
27 Hussey (cited above) recognizes that Aristotle's discussion in Metaphysics Mu 3 is incomplete on its own,
but he fails to see the broader aporetic context within which one should understand the solutions given there.
Although Barnes and Annas (both cited above) insist that the solution must be seen exclusively in terms of
the inquiry at Mu 1-3, yet that context is surely too narrow.
28 d ns ro f.1 i] Ke;rwplUf.livov BdTJ ;rwp(uas- Met. I 078a21-22.
29 If one accepts Frege's analysis of number as a second-order property, one might still object that Aristotle
is simply wrong to think of it as a first-order property of sensible things. But that would be a different
objection from the one that I describe as missing the point.
3 Cf. APst. 76a31-36, 76b3-ll, 92bl5-16, 93b21-28.

31 Cf. Met. 1025b3-18, 1059bl4-21, Phy. 184b25-185a5.
32 Cf. P.F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959), 167 ff.
33 In fact, R. Netz, The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999), 214 claims that Aristotle should be regarded as a logicist in the modem sense but I think that
Netz fails to take into account the different problem-situations that prevailed in the widely separated historical
eras.
34 Lear, Aristotle: The Desire to Understand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 68n34.
WOLFE MAYS
PIAGET AND HUSSERL:

On Theory and Praxis in Science
PIAGET'S HISTORICO-CRITICAL METHOD AND HERMENEUTICS

Throughout his career, Jean Piaget was interested in the study of the historical develop-
ment of scientific concepts. An early contribution to this field is to be seen in his
inaugural lecture "Psychologie et critique de Ia connaissance," 1 in which he employed
what has been termed the historico-critical method. This method, used by some French
philosophers of science, concerns itself with the comparative analysis of scientific
concepts at different historical periods rather than at any specific one. Piaget contrasts
this approach with the more a-prioristic one of Kant, for whom, he says, we know
things only through the schemes and forms that our minds impose upon them. On
Kant's view we find a certain number of concepts which underly all our experiences:
the formal laws oflogic, the notions of time, space, cause, quantity and classification,
which all have a necessary character. On the other hand, the simple given or facts are
the product of experience and are contingent.
Kantian philosophy, Piaget goes on, based itself essentially on Newtonian science.
What Kant took as necessary for mental functioning were the principles of the science
of his time. However, the history of these notions since Kant shows that that which is
taken as necessary at one moment of history no longer appears so at a later one. For
Kant, space was Euclidean space - an a priori form of sensibility imposed by the mind
on things. But with the development of modem physics and its use of non-Euclidean
geometry, Euclidean space lost its necessity together with the rest of the Kantian a
priori. There has been, Piaget says, no principle, concept, or scheme which has not
evolved since Kant. Even logic has not escaped, and as an example he quotes
Brouwer's rejection of the law of excluded middle. Thus, he maintains that those
concepts which Kant took as necessary for any possible experience, are not given a
priori, but have undergone development and change both in the history of science and
in individual thought.
A striking feature of Piaget's approach is the parallels he draws between the
historical development of scientific concepts and his own studies on individual
conceptual development. But, as he admits, such a parallelism seems to apply largely
to the history of early science, for example, Aristotelian physics, and to the early
history of geometry, algebra and mechanics rather than, say, post-Newtonian physics
177
178 WOLFE MAYS
which has become highly mathematised. 2 Nevertheless, he claims that despite the
changing nature of science, similiar cognitive processes are employed in the
construction of the concepts of pre-scientific and scientific thought, and that this is the
reason for some of the parallels he discovers between them. "Our point of departure",
he says, "is that there is a continuity in the development of the cognitive system from
the child to the average adult (one not educated in science) to the scientist. " 3
It is interesting that Piaget employed the historico-critical method many years
before the appearance of Kuhn's Structure ofScientific Revolutions, in which the latter
stresses the importance of history and culture in determining scientific progress. Kuhn
was aware ofPiaget's work and acknowledged him as a predecessor. Piaget developed
some of these ideas further in his Introduction a Ia epistemologie genetique, and in a
much later work Psychogenesis and the History of Science co-authored with Rolando
Garcia, although the sciences discussed there are in the main the mathematical and
physical ones. 4
Piaget's use of the historico-critical method with its emphasis on the need to study
scientific theories in their historical context, together with his view that physical facts
involve an interpretation in terms of logical-mathematical systems, has certain
similarities with what is known as the hermeneutical method. Traditionally this method
was used in the interpretation of texts, sacred or otherwise, in order to bring out their
underlying meaning. Thinkers such as Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer, have also
maintained that whereas the human sciences need to employ the hermeneutic method
(or that of understanding) for the study of historical, philosophical, and social
questions, the method used by the natural sciences was rather one of explanation.
More recently, some philosophers with phenomenological interests have attempted
to show that the hermeneutic method is also applicable to the study of the natural
sciences. 5 They argue that scientific understanding depends on both theory and praxis.
In this respect, their approach to the philosophy of science parallels that of Piaget.
Both stress the need to study the development of scientific ideas in relation to their
historical and cultural background, and both take account of the part played by
historical and intellectual constructions in scientific development.
The hermeneutic approach to the philosophy of science may be contrasted with that
employed by the analytical school ofphilosophy. 6 The latter largely concerns itself
with formalising the methods of science, and is uninterested in the process of discovery
in which historical, social, and personal factors enter in. As it is assumed that science
deals with ahistorical natural kinds, the part played by interpretation is largely ignored.
The hermeneutical approach, on the other hand, believes that in the natural sciences,
as in the human ones, interpretation plays a key role.
HUSSERL'S PHENOMENOLOGY AND HERMENEUTICS
Although Husser! was one of the founders of phenomenology, he would not usually be
considered as a hermeneutical philosopher. Nevertheless, he claimed that what he
called the natural attitude, namely, our perception of the world as made up of physical
objects, was theory-laden, and thus involved interpretation. In his later Crisis, he
argued that Galilean physics clothed our life-world in a garment of ideas or
mathematical symbols. 7 In doing this it by-passed the life-world, and with it the role of
the subject in the construction of knowledge. Husser! believed that we could get back
PIAGET AND HUSSERL: THEORY AND PRAXIS IN SCIENCE 179
to our originary experience by putting aside (or bracketing) this theoretical structure.
And insofar as he emphasised the constructive nature of scientific knowledge and the
part the subject plays in it, his approach has again something in common with Piaget's,
despite the latter's attempt to distance himself from phenomenology.
Husserl, like Kuhn and the social constructionists, notes that varying accounts of
the world (pre-scientific and scientific) and of truth may be given in different cultures
and periods. But he differs from them since he tells us, that if we look for truths about
objects with which normal Europeans, normal Hindus, Chinese etc., agree in spite of
all relativity- with what makes objects of the life-world, common to all, (even though
conceptions of them may differ) such as spatial shape, motion, sense-quality and the
like- then we are on the way to objective science. 8 It is these invariant features of
experience which form the basis for any natural science. 9 In this respect he cannot,
unlike, perhaps, Kuhn, be said to be putting forward a scientific relativism.
Husser! explains this further by saying that in our prescientific experience the world
is already a spatio-temporal world, although "to be sure there is no question of ideal
mathematical points, of 'pure' straight lines or planes, no question at all of
mathematically infinitesimal continuity or of the 'exactness' belonging to the sense of
the geometrical a priori. The bodies familiar to us in the life-world are actual bodies,
but not bodies in the sense of physics. " 10 Although these categorial features of the
life-world have similar names, they do not, he tells us, deal with the theoretical
idealizations of the geometer and the physicist, but are directly experienced as elements
in our everyday world. 11 Scientific development for Husser! proceeds by something like
a process of archeological sedimentation, in which the concepts occurring at different
historical periods, are successively laid down - so that the earlier ones can be disclosed
under the later, if we, as it were, dig deep enough.
For both Piaget and Husser! our perception of objects is perspectival. We only
gradually approach the actual object by a series of approximations, in which each new
perspective supplements the earlier one. In physical science Husserl referred to physical
objects as limiting cases, and talked of ideal limits in the field of geometrical shapes.
Piaget too compares the process by which we arrive at our knowledge of physical
objects with the way we approximate to a limit in a convergent series. 12 We deal, he
says, with a series of approximations which exhibit a certain order, itself explainable
by the existence of natural objects. Although our knowledge of the real world of
objects progressively increases, as theoretically they can have an infinite number of
perspectives, in actual practice we are only able to grasp a limited number of them.
But it is doubtful whether much light is thrown on the nature of physical objects and
our manner of arriving at them by calling them limit concepts. There seems to be a
radical difference between the regularity of a mathematical convergent series which is
a formal process, and the increase in our knowledge of objects, which may result from
insightful behaviour as well as trial and error learning. The learning process does not
exhibit such a regularity. In learning, mistakes are inevitably made so that one may
often have to return to one's starting point in order to make further progress. And
indeed elsewhere Piaget compares trial and error learning with a feedback process, and
Husserl seems to recognise that the method of approximation is inapplicable to the
more qualitative aspects of experience. 13
180 WOLFE MAYS
THE HERMENEUTICS OF PRAXIS
Husserl's approach to scientific knowledge through the abstraction and idealisation of

perceptual experience has been criticised by hermeneutical philosophers of a more
pragmatic cast of mind, who have pejoratively referred to it as "theoretical
hermeneutics." Despite their claim that the early Heidegger (as far as science was
concerned) had still not emancipated himself from the Husserlian theoretical attitude,
they nevertheless follow him in asserting the primacy of praxis, of the 'ready to hand,'
and have formulated a hermeneutics of praxis, which gives priority to the practical
situation over passive perception and abstract formalization. They have argued that
scientific knowledge is always a disclosure of something to someone in a particular
cultural and historical context. Here they agree with Kuhn and the social
constructionists, for whom scientific work is made meaningful by the socio-cultural
framework in which it occurs. Husser! in his later work did take account of this factor,
but his critics would say that he placed insufficient emphasis on the role of praxis in
the construction of scientific knowledge.
A further criticism of theoretical hermeneutics made by the practitioners of practical
hermeneutics, and here we will largely follow Joseph Rouse's critique, 14 is directed
against its claim that there is some sort of correspondence between the structures of our
theories and those of the life world. They contrast this with their own approach which,
they tell us, is rather concerned with the success of our laboratory practices, and not
with the truth of abstract theorising. Like the pragmatists they tend to take success of
a scientific theory as a criterion of its truth. Science is conceived as a way of acting on
the world rather than of observing and describing it. We know the world, they say, not
as subjects representing to ourselves the objects before us, but as agents manipulating
them. Science is based on such manipulations rather than on representations,
On this view scientific theories -like tools such as hammers -have an instrumental
function. "Hammers," we are told, "are those things that tum out to be good for
hammering, where hammering in tum is understood in terms of success or failure in
satisfying certain purposes." 15 In the same way, scientific theories are good for (or
successful in) enabling us to manipulate our laboratory instruments and apparatus. Thus
practical hermeneutics emphasises the primacy of practice over theory, and of the social
and cultural situations in which these practices occur. According to Rouse if we view
science as involving practices, capacities and equipment and a scientific apprenticeship,
this will provide an alternative to representationalism in science, namely, the view that
our theories are true if they represent or correspond to the physical facts. Theorising is
then as much a practice as other scientific work, in which one is concerned with
remaking the world and not with redescribing it.
On the hermeneutics of praxis approach, as may be seen from the title of Rouse's
book Knowledge and Power, theories are not primarily concerned to give us knowledge
about the natural world. Their role is largely utilitarian, to enable us to obtain control
over nature. Insofar as this Baconian identification of knowledge with power is
concerned, it is doubtful whether, for example, Newton's Principia was written simply
because of a desire for power or prestige on his part - for a knighthood or the
Mastership of the Mint. In scientific invention and also in creative art, curiosity,
self-expression and other factors may also enter in. Further, it is questionable whether
the primary function of science is to remake the world. It is only applications of science
which try to do this, and their influence is not always benign, witness the use of nuclear
energy for destructive purposes. In the formal sciences at least, new discoveries have
been made without any such practical aim entering in.
Rouse following Tarski, regards truth as a meta-linguistic predicate. 16 Nevertheless,
he tells us, "Theories are to be understood in their uses and not in their static
correspondence (or non-correspondence) with the world. " 17 Despite Rouse's linguistic
disclaimer, he would seem here at least in practice, to be putting forward a pragmatic
theory of truth. Such theories entail certain difficulties. The success of a scientific
theory in making predictions does not mean that it is necessarily true. Ptolemaic
astronomy with its complex system of epicycles and equants was in its day eminently
successful in explaining the anomolous movements of the planets, but no one would
take it as true today. Further, a theory is unlikely to be successful unless it has a certain
applicability to the real world with which its predictions are concerned. Russell brought
out the shortcomings of the pragmatic theory of truth when he remarked a propos of
William James' account of it, "I have always found the hypothesis of Santa Claus
'works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word' therefore 'Santa Claus exists' is
true, although Santa Claus exists is not true." 18
The hermeneutics of praxis account of scientific theorising, seems to be somewhat
simplistic. Even if it is a practice, it is a different kind of practice than that of
hammering nails into a piece of wood. There is little formal thinking or generalisation
entering into such a skill. To use a hammer successfully does not necessarily mean that
we understand the reasons for its successful employment. We simply have to be
instructed in its use and learn to follow this practice. Similarly we can learn to drive a
motor car successfully without understanding the mechanical principles underlying its
functioning. A distinction needs therefore to be made between manipulative skills and
intellectual ones as they occur, for example, in formal thinking.
POLANYI AND SKILLS

Michael Polanyi made this point when he distinguished between what he called tacit
knowledge or connoisseurship involving the acquisition and practice of specific skills,
manual or otherwise, and the more intellectual ones such as those involved in the
formalisms of the exact sciences, Thus, he tells us, that the process of hammering in a
nail into a wooden board causes a material change which is an achievement and not a
form of knowledge. Knowledge, he argues, can be true or false, while action can only
be successful or unsuccessful, and success or failure is unrelated to knowledge.
Polanyi goes on to describe technology as trick-learning in contrast to science
which involves understanding. 19 He would seem here to identify technology with arts
and industrial practices, which aim to satisfy our needs and wants. It is true that success
itself does not give us knowledge as to why this practice has been successful. As
Polanyi makes clear this would require an understanding of the reasons for this success.
But to say as he does that the successful performance of a skill is unrelated to
knowledge seems strange. There certainly is such a thing as practical knowledge or
knowing how to carry out a specific task successfully.
Most skills whether they be riding a bicycle or even hammering a nail into a piece
of wood involve specific sequences of movements directed towards a certain end. They
have, as it were, an implicit structure built into them, and are not usually reversible as
182 WOLFE MAYS
they might be if we lived in an Alice-in-the-looking-glass world. Even if the person

exercising a skill is unaware of such an order in his movements, there is some
unconscious grasp of them. One can play a piano sucessfully correlating one's
movements with the physical arrangement of the keys without having to think about
what one's fingers are doing, and this is presumably what Polanyi means by tacit
knowledge. Polanyi might have been on firmer ground if instead of describing the
practice of skills as trick learning, he had made the point that they did not necessarily
involve a conscious understanding of their underlying rationale.
CREATIVE THOUGHT
Practical hermeneutics, we are told, also gives primacy to the social situation and
tradition. It makes the agent arise through such practices. But this has the effect of
identifying the individual with his social and cultural practices, making him largely a
creature of social forces, with very little control over his own destiny. As against this
one might say that the individual as a conscious agent has a certain independence from
the complex cultural situation in which he finds himself, and that this is the basis for
his individual freedom. It would be difficult otherwise to account for cultural
innovation which may conflict with the tradition, and the part played in such innovation
by social mavericks like Rousseau.
Interestingly enough this is something both Husserl and Piaget appear to neglect,
namely, the role played by the individual in the creation of new ideas and fields of
scientific research. Without necessarily subscribing to a great man theory of the history
of science, one might say that scientific innovation not only depends on communities
of scientists working together in teams for a common purpose, as Bacon, for whom
science had primarily a social function, envisaged it in his conception of Solomon's
House. It also requires its innovators, its Galileo 's, Newton's and Darwin's, who broke
out of the established scientific tradition to charter new fields of enquiry, and
something similar might be said about artistic creativity.
Husserl and Piaget seem then largely unconcerned with individual scientific
creativity, with the scientist's personal idiosyncracies which may lead him to work in
unexplored fields and make new discoveries. For example, Kepler's obsession with
Pythagorean mysticism led to his new astronomy. Discoveries may sometimes arise
through pure accident as in the case of Fleming and the discovery of penicillin. Piaget
does talk of the unconscious processes involved in novel kinds of thought, but there is
little discussion on his part as to what creativity in science consists in; whether it is the
seeing of analogies or the insightful restructuring of Gestalten. However, in his account
of adolescent thinking, Piaget identifies problem solving, with the rational selection of
one out of a number of alternative possibilities. 20 But he is there much more interested
in the general features of scientific problem solving, than with the different ways
particular individuals come to solve such problems. Further, although Piaget compares
scientific revolutions with social revolutions, in both he seems to neglect the role of the
innovatory non-conforming individual as a catalyst for change.
On the other hand, the hermeneutists of praxis who do emphasise individual
performance, although making it largely socially determined, fail to recognise that the
results of scientific research are usually answers or solutions to specific problems.
These require a rational explanation, especially if they are to be reproduced by other
scientific workers in the field. Russell has pointed out that to view scientific theories
as practices i.e., as tools used in the way in which a hammer is used, overlooks that
their function in science is to answer questions about natural phenomena so as to
understand and explain them. It is through our theories that we are enabled to give a
rational explanation of the success (or failure) of the techniques or skills we employ.
Piaget makes this point when he says that from the practical level to the most
advanced theories, we try to find "reasons" to explain our successes and failures- to
see them within a specific context or structure. In his experimental studies he has
brought out the difference between the notions 'to succeed' and 'to understand.' To
succeed, he says, is to understand through action (i. e., unconsciously) a given problem
situation in order to achieve certain ends, whilst to understand, is to succeed through
thought by finding a conceptual solution to the same problem. Such informed action
in which means are related to ends, is necessary, he tells us, even for the solution of the
simplest ofproblems. 21
As a matter ofhistory skillful techniques preceded the appearance of the particular
sciences or systematic technologies. Early man, for example, perfected tools and
handicrafts as well as agricultural practices. The use of machines as labour saving
devices goes back to Ancient Egypt and the Greeks. But the point is that although
science may start from such individual practices as land measuring, constructing
mechanical devices - the wheel, the lever, the pump, etc., - we do not deal with the
sciences of geometry or mechanics, unless we can arrive at certain general principles
embodied, as it were, in these practices. The Babylonians, for example, were able to
solve particular geometrical problems arising through land surveying, but it was
through the Greeks' generalisation of them to all such cases, that geometry came into
being, and with it the notion of proof.
A scientific explanation then aims to be both systematic and general. Even although
historically intuitive practices may come first, unless one is able to provide a rational
explanation for their success, we would not deal with a science but with a practical art,
such as wine or tea-tasting. Scientific principles can also be applied to practical
techniques which then take on the features of an applied science. Examples may be
found in engineering, computing, and biotechnology. In their tum such technologies
can be applied to solve particular problems.
Although Piaget bases the development of scientific knowledge on our practical
activities, he clearly recognises such knowledge can only arise at a conceptual level.
In order to construct a successful scientific theory, we need to have at our disposal a
set of general truths applicable to a range of possible facts or situations. But as we have
seen, even if we deal with particular experimental practices or techniques they do not
become a science until they are explicated in terms of a generalised theory which
provides their rationale. A hermeneutist of praxis would no doubt think this to be a
mirage on our part as he would claim that in science we only deal with particular
situations and their analogical extensions. This assumes that science largely consists
in the drawing of analogies between observed facts, which is already a simple form of
generalisation. It is also unclear how theoretical concepts are defined by practice,
unless they are defined operationally. But in order to do this we would need to be in
possession of these concepts in the first place.
184 WOLFE MAYS
THEORY-LADEN AND PRAXIS-LADEN PERSPECTIVES

The attempt to reduce theoretical to practical hermeneutics is then beset with
difficulties. Theory and praxis in science are closely related. Even the scientific
instruments we use have theoretical elements built into them. The more complex the
instrument the more complex these may be. Thus the electron microscope involves
scientific theory as well as practical engineering techniques. In this respect an
instrument might already be said to be a hermeneutic device.
Heelan in discussing this question recognises that although it is possible to
distinguish between a theory-laden perspective and a praxis-laden one, they are,
nevertheless, to be regarded as aspects of one single enterprise. 22 For example, in the
case of a hammer, the theory-laden perspective refers to the physical structure that
makes hammers possible, i.e., its specification as a tool; the praxis-laden one refers to
the cultural context, namely, its actual and possible use. Duhem made a related point
when he noted there was a difference between the concrete scientific instrument used
by the experimenter in the laboratory, and the more abstract symbolic model in which
our formulae and deductive operations are expressed, and which is applicable to any
particular instrument. 23 What Heelan calls the "specification" or "physical structure,"
is for Duhem taken to be a symbolic model of the concrete tool or instrument.
Both the theory-laden perspective and the praxis-laden one can each, Heelan tells
us, lead to new discoveries in science. Much theorising has arisen from the use of
practical techniques, just as abstract mathematical theories have found practical
applications in the physical world. 24 Piaget's approach to this question is similar to
Heelan's. Sometimes, he says, it is the structures and operations constructed by the
mathematician which at a later date find a fruitful application in physics, as in relativity
theory and microphysics, sometimes it is the discovery of new experimental facts which
lead to the construction of new mathematical tools. 25
It could be argued that the reason for this close relationship is that in some way the
theoretical principles were embodied in the practical device or invention. Heelan has,
for example, noted that steam power in the nineteenth century led to the science of
thermodynamics. 26 It could be argued that the principles of thermodynamics were
already implicit in the functioning of the steam engine, just as Newton's laws were in
terrestrial and planetary motion, and that the scientist's task was to extract and
formalise such regularities in terms of causal laws. Yet it might be difficult to show that
this is the case in quantum mechanics, especially as probability theory in terms of
which it is expressed, was originally developed from the observation of games of
chance. This no doubt led Einstein to remark that "God does not play games with dice."
There is also the question of earlier theories being surpassed by later ones. Unless one
assumes that scientific theories are largely conventional then these too must be assumed
to have been embodied in some form in the natural phenomena to which they apply.
PRAGMATISM
As some of the difficulties involved in the pragmatic theory of truth have already been
touched on, we will now look at criticisms made of pragmatism itself as a philosophical
doctrine, particularly by Piaget and Russell. Despite Piaget's belief that scientific
theories have a pragmatic aspect, he is critical of such pragmatists as James and Dewey.
They have tried, he says, to see science as a higher game conditioned by action alone,
an approach inspired by a certain psychology, which only concerns itself with knowing
why the success of our actions satisfies us. It neglects to clarify the ties which unite
action to reason, and does not adequately analyse the nature of intellectual coherence.
In explaining scientific activity, it skips over the problems posed by mathematics and
the reasons for its agreement with physical experience. 27 The fundamental difficulty
Piaget finds with pragmatism is that it is concerned with success rather than
understanding why an action has been successful. 28 He does not believe that the true
can be subordinated to the useful. In one of his earliest writings, Recherches, he
described pragmatism as "only the twilight of philosophies, like a deceived husband
wanting only that much of reality which is useful to him, for fear of discovering his
misfortune. " 29
Russell has also made a number of cogent criticisms of pragmatism, especially that
of Dewey. These also seem applicable to the views of those hermeneutists of praxis
who identify truth with success, knowledge with power, and the individual with
society. Russell quotes Santayana as saying "as in current science and ethics there is
a pervasist quasi-Hegelian tendency to dissolve the individual into his social functions
as well as everything substantial and actual into something relative and transitional."
Russell goes on to remark of Dewey's philosophy, that it "is a power philosophy,
though not like Nietzsche's a philosophy of individual power; it is the power of the
community that is felt to be valuable. It is this element of social power which seems to
me to make it attractive to those who are more impressed by our new control over
natural forces than by the limitations that control is still subject to. The concept of
"truth" as something dependent on facts largely outside human control has been one of
the ways in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of
humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road
to a certain kind ofmadness." 30
CONCLUSION
It seems clear that there is a place for hermeneutics as a method for studying the
philosophy of the natural sciences. Interpretation and conceptual construction appear
to enter in at every stage of the scientific process, just as they do in the study of history
itself. The hermeneutic and constructionist approach to science emphasises the role
played by the subject in interpreting natural phenomena, as well as the historical and
cultural situation in which the scientist finds himself. Both are necessary in order to
understand scientific progress. It was argued that the hermeneutics of praxis approach
was deficient as it deals with only one aspect of the scientific enterprise, namely,
praxis, and tries to reduce the more theoretical aspects of science to it. It was further
shown that the pragmatic approach to truth in terms of success in place of rational
explanation and verification was inadequate. It fails, among other things, to take
account of the problem solving nature of much of science and of our ordinary everyday
thought, and of providing an adequate framework of ideas in terms of which our
actions and observations may be interpreted.
Manchester Metropolitan University

186 WOLFE MAYS
NOTES
Jean Piaget. "Psychologie et critique de Ia connaissance." Archives de Psychologie, Geneva, 1925.
Jean Piaget and Rolando Garcia, Psychogenesis and the History of Science, Helga Fielder, trans. (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 81.
3 Piaget and Garcia, Psychogenesis and the History of Science, 263.
As a joint work it is difficult to disengage their respective contributions. But we would assume that at least
some of the discussions of the history of physical concepts as well as that of scientific method are due to
Garcia who is a physicist, and that Piaget is in agreement with them, although the psychogenetic discussions
are clearly Piaget's own. For simplicity when quoting from this work we will refer only to Piaget, although
it must be understood that as it is a joint work its views must also be attributed to Garcia.
5 Robert P. Crease, ed., Hermeneutics and the Natural Sciences (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1997).
6 Crease, "Introduction," I.
Husser!, The Crisis of European Philosophy and Transcendental Phenomenology trans., David Carr
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 51.
8 Ibid., 51
For Husser! then our concepts of space, time, causality, number, etc., in terms of which the physicist
describes nature, are based on structures initially given in our life world although, as he has noted, they have
taken on different forms in different cultures and periods.
10 Ibid., 139.
11 Husser! showed himself critical of modern mathematical logic iftaken as a universal, a priori fundamental
science on which all objective sciences are to be based. It needed, he said, to be grounded in experience,
otherwise it hangs in mid-air without support" (Crisis, 141). Piaget's position on this question is somewhat
similar except that he tries to found logic on our actions: on such elementary acts as classifYing and ordering
from which he claims propositional logic develops on a higher conceptual level.
12 Piaget has also referred to this process of approximation as divergent which would seem to contradict his
description of it as convergent. However, by this he appears to mean that as we learn more about the object's
properties or aspects, we get progressively closer to it, so that it becomes more complete. M.
Piatelli-Palmarini, Language and Learning. The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1980).
13 Husser!, The Crisis ofEuropean Philosophy and Transcendental Philosophy, 35.
14 Cf., Joseph Rouse, Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Power (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press 1987).
15 Rouse, Knowledge and Power, 155.
16 Ibid., 47.
17 Ibid., 24. In his later work Rouse comes out much more positively in favour of the Tarskian concept of
truth. He appears to think that accepting this theory will prevent him from embracing representationalism.
He would also seem to abandon the hermeneutics of praxis for the narrative method. Cf. Rouse, Engaging
Science: How to Understand our Practical Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996).
18 Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1946), 845.
19 Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), 174-184.
20 Barbel Inhelder and Jean Piaget, The Growth ofLogical Thinking: From Childhood to Adolescence, Anne
Parsons and Stanley Milgram, trans., (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958).
21 Cf., Piaget, Success and Understanding (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
22 Patrick A. Heelan, "Why a Hermeneutical Philosophy of the Natural Sciences," in R. Crease, ed.,
Hermeneutics and the Natural Sciences, 22-24.
23 Pierre Duhem. The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, Philip Weiner, trans., (New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1954, 149.

24 Heelan, "Why a Hermeneutical Philosophy of the Natural Sciences," 23.
25 See Piaget and Garcia, Psychogenesis and the History of Science, 249-250. Bacon noted the close
relationship between science and technology. and the need for closer cooperation between artisans and
manual workers on the one hand and scholars on the other.
26 Heelan, "Why a Hermeneutical Philosophy of the Natural Sciences?", 28.
27 Piaget, Psychologie et critique de Ia connaissance.
28 Piaget, Success and Understanding.
29 Howard Gruber and Jacques Voneche, The Essential Piaget (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977),
45.
30 Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London: Allen and Unwin, 1946), 856.
TONY O'CONNOR
HUMAN AGENCY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES:

From Contextual Phenomenology to Genealogy
Husserl established the standard phenomenological approach to the social sciences with
his claim that transcendental phenomenology determines the universal a priori and
fundamental grounds for all objective descriptions and claims. Such a position,
however, appears to leave phenomenology open to the charge that it presupposes some
kind of disinterested observer, who offers non-contextual, value-free descriptions of
our cognitive structure, motives, values, social practices. It could be objected that this,
in tum, prevents Husserlian phenomenology from properly taking account of the socio-
historical conditions under which human action occurs and of the explanation of such
actions offered by the social sciences.
Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger are sensitive to this question of the historical
conditions of thought and action. Merleau-Ponty is keenly aware that phenomenology
should take into account the complex and changing sources of human agency, as well
as its social conditions and practices. Likewise, in Being and Time, Heidegger's stress
on ontology as a "genealogy of different possible ways of Being" is meant to facilitate
clarification of the proper subject-matter and methods of the natural and social
sciences. 1 This takes the form of a "universal phenomenological ontology," which
begins from a hermeneutic analysis of the human existent, or Dasein?
Merleau-Ponty, for his part, proposes a modified transcendentalism considered as
intersubjectivity. However, he never fully reconciles phenomenological evidence,
gained under changing historical circumstances, with the universal apodicticity
demanded by transcendental phenomenology. Heidegger has a similar difficulty when
he asks whether it is possible to provide "ontological grounds" for ontology, or if
ontology also requires an ontical foundation. 3
In what follows, I will argue that Foucault's archaeological-genealogical
philosophical strategies can assist in the preservation of what is valuable in both
phenomenological and hermeneutic investigations, while rejecting their foundationalist
aspirations. In particular, Foucault helps us to see that Husserlian "universal a priori
and fundamental grounds" for all objective claims are intelligible only in terms of the
contextual meanings of cultural history. Likewise, from this perspective, Heidegger's
problematic can be pursued, without relying on ontological or hermeneutic privilege,
in terms of finite and fallible interpretations of human agency and its changing world.
187
188 TONY O'CONNOR
HUSSERL AND "THE SOCIAL SCIENCES"
Husser! claims that the social sciences are in danger of falling into naturalism and
positivism if they rely on the methods of the natural sciences, because they tend to
assume that their descriptions, proposals, and claims about human agency and the
world can be derived independently of the intentional relationship between agent and
world. The social sciences should recognise, rather, that self-awareness, self-under-
standing and self-reflection are universal and irreducible characteristics of human
beings and, consequently, they are inexplicable in naturalistic terms. Recognition of
this fact leads Husser! to identify the fundamental philosophical task as one of a rigor-
ous phenomenological description of the essence of consciousness, which relies on the
absolute givenness of consciousness and its operations. A central feature of this
undertaking is the suspension of the "natural attitude" by means of"phenomenological
reduction," which is held to reveal the apodictic character of"pure consciousness."
It has long been recognised that problems arise for Husser! in carrying out this
bracketing operation. Chief among these is a question concerning the validity of the
evidence, used to support apodictic descriptions or claims. At least three major
difficulties arise for Husser!:
(a) his account of the reduction leads him to suspend the independent existence of the world and
its object, so that judgements made after the reduction are entirely subjective and lack objective
validity;
(b) the natural attitude is not necessarily a prejudiced view of the world, one that must inevitably
be overcome;
(c) the implications of his position for the philosophy of the social sciences are not at all as
objective or as rigorous as he presumes.
MERLEAU-PONTY'S PERSPECTIVE
The early work ofMerleau-Ponty seeks to preserve the link between phenomenological
evidence and apodicticity, while avoiding the foregoing difficulties. He thinks that this
is possible in terms of descriptive phenomenology as a "genetic" or "constructive"
enterprise. He holds that if phenomenology is practised as a philosophy that "puts
essences back into existence," then it can be defended successfully from the above
difficulties, or at least from their worst excesses. 4
Thus, Merleau-Ponty can argue that if phenomenology shows that our scientific and
non-scientific knowledge of the world is gained from our own particular perspectives,
then phenomenology is not consigned inevitably to a complete subjectivism. On the
contrary, it sets a philosophical task of determining how to interpret our knowledge of
the world: "To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes
knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks." 5 Merleau-Ponty might also claim that
he avoids the problems arising from the Husserlian account of the phenomenological
reduction of the natural attitude. He suggests that Fink's indication should be followed
here, so that the reduction is what follows from our wonder before a strange and
paradoxical world. 6 In other words, phenomenological reduction of the natural attitude
does not necessarily make the absolute unity of consciousness the basis of the real
existence of the world. On the contrary, the world is revealed as a complex and often
contradictory place, whose meanings we construct and attempt to describe in open-
ended, trial and error ways. This, he believes, opens up the possibility of recognising
the historicity of the human situation in general, and of humanistic disciplines in
HUMAN AGENCY AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 189
particular, so that problems of apodicticity and phenomenological evidence can be

pursued by investigating transcendental subjectivity considered as intersubjectivity. 7
Merleau-Ponty thinks that it follows that if problems of the social sciences are seen as
transcendental ones in this sense, then they are not confined inevitably to a crude
naturalism or positivism. On the contrary, they may offer descriptions and make claims
compatible with a phenomenological account. Hence the naturalistic and the
phenomenological realms are not entirely separate from each other.
Merleau-Ponty's reconciliation of phenomenology and naturalism has major
implications for a phenomenological account of the social sciences, because now the
"naturalistic" social scientist and the phenomenologist can be seen as each determining
the meaning of phenomena. 8 He proposes that the phenomenological enterprise should
give priority to bodily desire and lived interaction with an environment over second-
order reflective activity. In other words, "operative intentionality," which for him
"produces the natural and antepredicative unity of the world and our life," should be
the primary focus of attention rather than "intentionality of act," which is that of our
constituted judgements. 9 Thus, when he claims that the unity of the world is lived rather
than posited in a specific act of identification, he means that the situated and temporal
meaning-giver should be viewed as an agent who constitutes meanings in her lived
environment and not as a fully constituted subject completely in control of her destiny.
On this basis, he believes that the social sciences are not to be viewed as supremely
privileged forms of knowledge, which can establish explanations of human activity in
terms of an overarching formal system, or under the control of a single abstract method.
This stands in sharp contrast to Husser! who separated the realms of psychological
and transcendental investigations. Husser! was led to the belief, therefore, that natural-
istic social sciences and naturalistic philosophy would inevitably seek the sources of
knowledge and meaning in excitations of sensory organs by external stimuli, reflexes
of various kinds, reactions of the organism, and sets of "inner states," regarded as
"psychic atoms." Merleau-Ponty claims, on the other hand, that it is possible to
reconcile social science and phenomenology by discovering what animates and
organises the facti city of human experience and its openness to the world. In this
respect, the genetic phenomenologist is like the social scientist insofar as she
investigates the "embodied dialectic" of human behaviour and the world, a world,
which is constituted through the meaning-giving agency of the body, and yet which
pre-exists such constituting activity.
This view has major implications for the philosophy of the social sciences, and for
empirical psychology in particular, in so far as investigators must search for what cons-
cious subjects draw from their own "proper resources" and project outside themselves.
If phenomenology as transcendental genesis presents the order in which objects of
experience depend on one another, it can establish that empirical psychology and trans-
cendental phenomenology offer descriptions of the genesis of the meaning of events. 10
This has at least two major consequences for a phenomenological account of the
social sciences. The social scientist is culturally and professionally shaped by the
underlying frameworks of meaning which produce and maintain the historical forms
of life in which she is involved. Her professional task, therefore, is one of undertaking,
on the basis of the methods of her particular discipline, critical analyses of the human
behaviour produced by such frameworks and of the frameworks themselves. In other
words, phenomenological evidence arises within social sciences as part of a particular
190 TONY O'CONNOR
way of life or professional practice. Such evidence is open to critical determination

on the basis of professional justification in terms of the practices of the particular
discipline, on the one hand, and the background of socio-cultural knowledge, on the
other hand, which the social scientist shares with other social scientists and with non-
scientists.
Here it is possible to discern a distinctly Heideggerian influence on Merleau-Ponty,
insofar as he agrees with Heidegger that apodicticity is not a feature of pure
consciousness, as the early Husserl thinks, but is to be identified in temporal terms.
Evidence, as a characteristic of intentionality, is a revelation by intentionality of its
intended correlate. Such evidence is regarded as both contextual and universal. It is
contextual insofar as each mode of intentionality - desires, thoughts, actions, etc. - is
directed toward its own particular end or goal, and displays evidence appropriate to
itself and its goal. It is universal because intentionality is a characteristic of all actions.
A central difficulty remains for Merleau-Ponty, however. In order to reconcile
phenomenological evidence with universal apodicticity, he must show how
temporalised and contextualised phenomenology is able to preserve a sense of
apodicticity as the universal and necessarily true evidence gained from an
understanding of essential states of affairs. As Heelan points out, this will lead to a
view of philosophy as a construction from the understanding generated by the actions
and interactions of embodied human agents in communication with each other and their
environments against a background of active cultural networks. 11 Embodied human
agents are contingently located in particular places and at particular times in history,
and reflectively discover themselves as so located. This leads Merleau-Ponty to claim
that history must also be viewed as a dynamic and open-ended movement, which does
not involve any kind of inevitable progression: the historical a priori "is constant only
for a given phase." So history is "the unique movement which creates stable forms and
breaks them up." 12
Herein lies the core of Merleau-Ponty's difficulty insofar as it implies that the
interpretation of history is not a matter of a single, linear and valid narrative. On the
contrary, it implies the possibility of a multiplicity of narratives and of individual
events, which may be validly described in various ways. 13 But this seems to make
Merleau-Ponty a contextualist, who gives undue weight to the contingencies oflived
experience over against the necessary and universal truth-claims of apodictic
philosophy. It seems to imply that because phenomenological evidence is influenced
by the complexities of socio-cultural life, a phenomenology of the social sciences can
offer only descriptions of lived meanings without the possibility of being able to
determine their absolutely eidetic invariance, or necessary limits.
HEIDEGGER'S PROBLEMATIC
Merleau-Ponty appears to find himself with a difficulty not dissimilar to Heidegger's
in Being and Time. Heidegger sets out to determine, among other things, the conditions
of the possibility of both the sciences and philosophy. As Dreyfus indicates, this under-
taking is important in at least three respects, insofar as it strives to give philosophy its
proper subject matter; it attempts to disentangle the regular crises in which normal
sciences find themselves; and it wishes to assist sciences to be clear about their proper
methods and subject matter, a problem that is particularly acute in the social sciences. 14
A central methodological difficulty arises here for Heidegger. How can the "genea-
logy of the different possible ways of Being" be reconciled with a fundamental onto-
logy, whose task is to identify universal and necessary links between Being and
history? This problem is both deep and acute, since fundamental ontology seeks to
identify the invariance of Being and time within the flux of changing history. The
genealogical task appears to be somewhat at odds with the ontological one, since it
implies that it may be impossible to establish invariance in a strong or unconditioned
way. Is
This is borne out in Being and Time when Heidegger reduces genealogy to funda-
mental ontology by identifying the basic philosophical task as one of raising anew "the
question ofthe meaning ofBeing. "Our aim in the following treatise is to work out the
question of the meaning of Being and to do so concretely. Our provisional aim is the
Interpretation of time as the possible horizon for any understanding whatsoever of
Being." 16 Here-emphasises the priority of this question near the end of the book when
he asks whether it is possible to provide "ontological grounds" for ontology, or if onto-
logy also requires an "ontical" foundation? 17 Here he justifies the overall strategy of
the book when he reminds his readers that his basic intention has been to determine the
"question of Being in general," which must be clarified before any regional or contex-
tual investigations are undertaken: "This holds particularly if we adhere to the principle
expressed above as one by which any philosophical investigation may be gauged: that
philosophy 'is universal phenomenological ontology, and takes its departure from the
hermeneutic of Dasein, which, as an analytic of existence, has made fast the guidingline
for all philosophical inquiry at the point where it arises and to which it returns. "' 18
This seems to make Being, the condition of human existence, dependent on human
existence. In other words, our historical interpretations of Being will be derived from
our experience of a world that is both material and historical. As interpreters, our
experiences and interpretations of Being, as "ground of our existence," are always
bound up with historical and cultural circumstances, and the presuppositions and
prejudices associated with them. Hence, ontological descriptions are always involved
with ontical circumstances.
As observed, however, Heidegger tries to avoid this difficulty by claiming that
Being, as the condition of human existence, must be postulated as existentially and
ontologically prior to the work of any particular interpretation or science. He considers
that such a move is necessary because the very presumption of a hermeneutic
relationship between an interpreter and the world is already a feature of Being as
"originating temporality." Hence, Being, as the condition of human existence, precedes
our hermeneutic practices, which include natural and social sciences.
The paradox with which Heidegger is faced here involves the apparent belief that
the structure ofBeing is simultaneously dependent on, and independent, of the structure
of our historicised understanding. In the first case, it is unclear how our finite and
fallible interpretations are sufficient to provide the universal necessity conditions for
apodictic judgements about the nature of Being. In the second case, it seems that
Heidegger must rely on some kind of hermeneutic privilege.
If, however, he wishes to avoid such an unjustified privilege, then it seems that he
must adopt some version of the first option, and accept that interpretations are strongly
dependent on background cultural factors of various kinds, and that they are never open
to complete interpretation. If, consequently, Being as history is to be seen as the
192 TONY O'CONNOR
totality of all that is in the historical process, then knowledge of it cannot be established
in an invariant way; nor can our interpretations of it be determined in terms of
progressive stages of its historical life. Heidegger appears to give at least tacit consent
to this view, insofar as he identifies "temporality" as the existential condition of
Dasein. This appears to oblige him to accept a radically open-ended framework of
interpretation, in the sense that the determination of the ontological structure of Dasein
may not legitimately rely on any a-temporal factors: "Our existential analytic of Dasein
... starts with the concretion of factically thrown existence itself in order to unveil
temporality as that which primordially makes such existence possible." 19
THE GENEALOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
Foucault helps to tease out some of the difficulties arising from the positions of both
Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. He shows that the a priori as historical is intelligible
only in terms of contextual meanings, which arise from socio-cultural history, and
which are shaped by the norms, institutions, values and practices of particular cultural
periods. Such contingent meanings involve general views of the character of the entire
cultural tradition in which such interpretations are made. In other words, whatever is
claimed to be necessary and universal in a particular cultural period, or established as
such, makes use of values and beliefs, which are contingently operative in particular
circumstances and as part of a particular interpretation of the cultural tradition itself.
This implies that descriptions and claims, and their justification, whether they are made
by philosophers or social scientists, about the interpretation of practices and
institutions, must rely on evidence that depends on particular interpretations of the
cultural tradition in which the descriptions and claims are generated.
In other words, if, as with Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, universal claims are made
on the basis of cognitive or embodied evidence, or in terms of the existential analysis
of Dasein, as with Heidegger, it must be recognised that such claims arise from, and
are intelligible only in terms of, a particular culture and as part of an interpreted
tradition.
When this point is applied to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty's problem of
distinguishing the phenomenological attitude from the natural attitude, it is clear that
they are obliged to hold that the natural attitude and the phenomenologically reduced
attitude are always bound up with hermeneutic presuppositions of one kind or another.
This means that both the philosopher and the social scientist make value-laden claims.
Their descriptions and claims, however, can be interpreted in general in terms of
traditions and cultures, and, in particular, as part of research strategies of various kinds,
some of which occasionally, but not always, mutually support each other, others of
which are occasionally, but not always, competitive.
Foucault's genealogical perspective heightens the historical perspectivism opened
up by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, so that we are led to pay special attention to his
claim that the presuppositions and norms which govern particular cultures and periods
are maintained by an amalgam of ideologies and strategic factors of various kinds,
which both impose limitations and generate possibilities of change:
in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and
redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and
its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality. 20
A major implication of this is that truth becomes a contextual product of the

conditions of the possibility of knowledge and power structures. It is entirely a
function of our cultural, that is, epistemological, moral and political, practices.
Foucault, like Merleau-Ponty, argues that the interaction of the human agent and the
social sciences involves a "quasi-transcendental process," which leads to the
determination of both the possibility conditions and the limits of descriptions and
claims as always occurring within particular cultural spaces. This admixture lays out
the cultural conditions, analytic procedures and, often, specific questions that lead to
the production of results which are considered to be valid. This is the point of
genealogical investigation, which involves the attempt to resolve problems within a
historical framework in such a way that questions about the constitution of knowledge,
discourses, disciplines, etc., are pursued without reference to an unchanging abstract
or formal transcendental ground independent of human affairs.
In this respect, Foucault takes up and develops a philosophical insight introduced
but not fully developed by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, i.e., the contingent character
of human inherence in the world cannot be determined on the basis of formal,
necessary and invariant features. On the contrary, contingency implies changes based
on shifting cultural regimes, and the institutions, disciplines and practices that
constitute them.
Foucault's position has further major implications for the question of the relation
between philosophy and the social sciences, because it leads to a modification of
Heidegger's view that philosophy, as fundamental ontology, should determine the
conditions of the possibility of human meaning and action in a universally invariant
way, and that the social sciences must be fitted within the reference frame determined
by such philosophy. For Foucault realises, in a way that Heidegger does not, that if the
social sciences actually constitute their objects and their domains of applicability, this
does not necessarily occur under the control of a foundationalist philosophy: "The
epistemological field traversed by the human sciences was not laid down in advance:
no philosophy, no political or moral opinion, no empirical science of any kind, no
observation of the human body, no analysis of sensation, imagination, or the passions,
has ever encountered, in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, anything like man; for
man did not exist..." 21
In The Order of Things, Foucault claims that attention must be paid to the historicity
of both philosophy and the social sciences, neither of which can establish findings,
which are completely independent of the historical and cultural circumstances within
which they arise. 22 This does not imply that historical findings are completely relative
to particular cultural spaces, but that it is impossible to identify absolutely neutral
universal norms, which are constant throughout the changing historical contexts.
Hence, philosophy and the social sciences, as historical constructs, arise within
particular cultural spaces, with presuppositions and attitudes, institutions and practices,
which provide the background within and against which the various disciplines,
emerge, function and develop.
Thus, Foucault more than Heidegger or Merleau-Ponty takes seriously the nature
and implications of contingency. In contrast to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, he ad-
dresses directly the question of the character and status of the social sciences in
expressly historical terms. This leads him to challenge and dispute the claim to
scientific status of a range of disciplines, including psychology and psychopathology,
194 TONY O'CONNOR
sociology, anthropology, etc. He claims that they have appropriated the term "science"
illegitimately from disciplines such as biology, economics, linguistics, etc. This
establishes them within a modernist cultural space, but it prevents them from having
the rigour and the universal norms they claim. Consequently, they are unable to
establish a universally normative view of human knowledge, institutions and actions,
which is based on a single indubitable system or method, and from which indubitable
prescriptions can be made regarding the legitimate developmental possibilities of
interpretation, institutions, and actions.
University College, Cork, Ireland
NOTES
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), 31.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 487.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), vii.
5 Ibid., ix.
6 Ibid., xiii.
7 Ibid., xii. See also, Edmund Husser!, The Crisis ofEuropean Science and Transcendental Philosophy.
Merleau-Ponty, "Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man'" in The Primacy of Perception and Other
Essays (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 43-95.
9 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology ofPerception, xviii.
10 Merleau-Ponty, "Phenomenology and the Sciences of Man," 64-78.
11 Patrick A. Heelan, "After Post-Modernism: The Scope of Hermeneutics in Natural Science," Conference
on After Pas/modernism, University of Chicago. <http:www.focusing.org/Heelan.htm1>.
12 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 88.
13 Ibid., 448-449.
14 Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World (Cambridge: MIT Press, !992), 16.
15 Heidegger, Being and Time, 192.

16 Ibid., 19.
17 Ibid., 487.
18 Ibid., 499, n.xii. See also, 252 ff.

19 Ibid., 486.
20 Michel Foucault, "Discourse on Language" in R. Kearney and M. Rainwater, eds., The Continental
Philosophy Reader (London: Routledge, 1996), 430.

21 Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970), 344.
22 Ibid., 371.
JOHN J. COMPTON
TOWARD A PHENOMENOLOGICAL
PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE
In our current philosophical culture, we well understand that the full meaning of the
natural sciences does not lie in their theoretical and experimental contents alone. We
readily admit (indeed insist) that what is conveyed by the concept of an "electron," for
example, or a "gene" or a "cognitive process," needs to be elucidated within the full
context of the historically developed, investigative practices - the theoretical and
experimental research programs, together with the logical and epistemological
assumptions - that lie behind their use. In short, we suppose that any putative scientific
knowledge must be interpreted within the ongoing project of a critical philosophy of
science.
We also tend to suppose, however, that this suffices to enable us to discharge our
full responsibility to the selfunderstanding and selfpossession of natural knowledge.
But does it? Need anything more be said? I believe so. I believe that we do not
sufficiently understand our scientific knowledge of nature through the philosophy of
science alone, even in the more historically and sociologically selfcritical way in which
we now practice it. This is because, in addition to the conditions placed upon our
knowledge of nature by the historically evolving logic and epistemology of science,
there are important conditions placed on it by our prescientific experience of the natural
world itself.
The crucial thesis here is this: The natural sciences do not tell us all we know about
the natural world. We find ourselves within the natural world, we engage it in all
manner of daily ways, we interact with others within it, long before we have ever heard
of science. To be sure, scientific knowledge enlarges and often revises our
prescientific view of things. The theoretical and experimental practices of scientific
knowing effectively reconstruct and redescribe the prescientifically known world in
selective - and often unusual- ways for systematic and predictive purposes. Still, the
world for the sciences is not a different world; it is the very same world we knew
before. Since this is so, I will argue that, beyond the philosophy of science, there is an
inquiry- which we may properly call the "philosophy of nature" - that aims to evoke
our prescientific understanding of nature and, in a continual dialectic with developing
scientific concepts and practices, to show how these concepts and practices may be
seen to refer back to the prescientifically known natural world and how they represent
195
196 JOHN J. COMPTON
the pre-scientific world in ways that may (indeed must) be seen, in the end, to be
coherent with fundamental features of that world.
It is demonstrable, I think, that such an on-going, interpretive task is essential for
any fully coherent understanding of science and, in the end, for any fully adequate
practice of it. Moreover, I believe that such a conception of the agenda for the
philosophy of nature captures the enduring concerns of the particular philosophies we
usually refer to by this name - those stemming from Aristotle, Hegel, Husser!,
Whitehead, or Dewey, for example- and also shows how essential phenomenological
reflection has been and can be to meeting these concerns.
Let me begin by recalling the central question that has again and again provoked philo-
sophical reflection on the natural world: Whatever is subjective consciousness doing
in the midst of objective physical processes? No one has ever given a fully satisfactory
answer to this question. Since Descartes, we have tended to espouse what Whitehead
called the "bifurcation of nature" into two distinct realms - conscious experience in
humans and animals, on the one hand, and purely physical processes on the other.
Even a generation ago, various forms of idealism and dualism were among the
credible approaches to this question. They no longer seem so. With advances in mole-
cular genetics and biochemistry, plants and animals have become firmly annexed to the
realm of evolutionarily constructed physical and chemical systems; and with the analo-
gous advances in physiology and neuroscience, human and animal mental life has also
come to be seen as inescapably and fully physical. The realm of conscious experience,
the subjective life of perception, feeling, thought, and action, appears more and more
"epiphenomenal," a marginal realm at best, destined to be reduced to, or eliminated in
favor of, physical explanations of behavior based on complex functions of brains- the
"society" of neuronal "agents" in the brain and the "society ofbrains." 1 Within the
sciences and much of philosophy, we now face a virtual hegemony of physicalism.
The obvious paradox is that the natural sciences which form the rational basis for
this physicalist vision of things depend for their very intelligibility upon the realm of
conscious experience, upon the directly given perceptions, feelings, thoughts and
actions of scientists which have no proper place within the physicalist vision. The
work of science - the creative, ethically disciplined pursuit of reliable knowledge
through speculative theorizing, explorative experimentation, and the judicious
assessment of observational evidence - is a process only definable and justifiable in
terms of the individual and social experiences of groups of scientific investigators. A
physicalism that fails to give meaning and efficacy to conscious experience seems to
refute itself.
2
This paradoxical situation suggests that we need to re-examine our premises. And this,
I take it, is what phenomenology is all about. It is the name for one modem variant of
a continuing and inclusive tradition, that of critical empiricism, which asks us to step
back and examine the credentials of any ontological vision from the standpoint of the
fundamental human experiences that make truth-claims on its behalf possible.
TOWARD A PHENOMENOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE 197
Thus the first text of a phenomenological philosophy of nature will be something

like Merleau-Ponty's (echoing Husser!):
The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to
subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and
scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the
second order expression. 2
Merleau-Ponty calls this the thesis of the "primacy of perception." And the task
then becomes one of carrying out the "reawakening" of this "basic experience."
Now, of course, a great deal depends upon how this pre-scientific experience of the
world is to be described. I see no prospect of absoluteness or completeness. In pre-
scientific life, we engage the natural world tacitly and in a manner inevitably structured
by cultural interpretations - precisely including scientific ones. So any attempt to
describe life-world experience is going to be a construction, limited and dependent on
our purposes. Nonetheless, if one is looking for the most elemental layers of
experience, ones that serve as a framework for inquiry in the sciences, I think it is
arguable that Husser! and Merleau-Ponty's account permits us to discern certain of
their cross-culturally shared features.
As they construe it, each of us finds in the life-world, an open, indefinitely
extensible, spatial-temporal field of reciprocal, perceptual and active interplay between
oneself as an embodied subject and other bodily beings. This sensuous and motor field
of"beings-in-the-world," in which we experience ourselves as situated and with which
we are constantly, practically engaged, gives us our primary sense of "world." Within
this world, we move among things, we explore and manipulate them, and we find them
disclosed through the variation and convergence of their changing perceptual
perspectives. Within this world, we also find ourselves disclosed, as sensuous and
motile bodies, engaged in distinctive ways with other animate and human beings and,
through our developing and on-going interplay with them, forming a sense of
participation in an interanimate and interhuman (or intersubjective) community. We
experience this manifold world of beings disclosed as "for us," open and accessible to
us, and at the same time we experience ourselves as "for them," conditioned by those
other bodily beings, open and vulnerable to them, and constantly surprised by them.
Now even this all-too-brief sketch can suggest, I think, how scientific practice
presupposes and constantly refers back to the natural world thus pre-scientifically
known. This becomes clear in so far as we can see that what scientists do within their
"worlds" of research - as they pursue their particular theoretical and experimental
demands- is, in important respects, continuous with the ways in which they (and we),
as embodied intersubjective beings, already and all along perceive and explore the
natural world in pre-scientific life. Let me mention several considerations which
support this thesis.
(I) First of all, it seems clear that the structures of the natural world as we encounter
it in pre-scientific life, motivate and provide the necessary warrant for the typical
criteria by which we validate explanatory theories in the sciences.
Theoretical conjectures in the mature physical sciences inevitably claim more than
to be reports of what is directly empirically verifiable. They posit regularities, together
with various micro- and macro-processes and structures which, in some sense, explain
198 JOHN J. COMPTON
those regularities. All such claims are at best indirectly and incompletely testable.
What justifies this kind of conjecture? Why do we, or should we, consider theories of
this sort appropriate or explanatory at all? We typically require our theories to be
internally consistent and, in some systematic sense, simple, as well as that they provide
successful predictions and be comprehensive and extensible in scope of application.
Why so? At bottom, as Kant and Husser! saw long ago, there seems to be one and only
one justification for such demands - namely, that the criteria of "good" theoretical
thinking are motivated by principles which are implicit in our direct perceptive and
active encounter with the world.
Now, of course, these principles become explicit in the sciences in a distinctive
form. They were not already "written" as such in the book of nature as perceived.
Nature, as livingly perceived, admits of manifold cultural construals, of the worlds of
the shaman and the alchemist as well as the world of Lavoisier's and Dalton's
chemistry. This being said, however, it remains the case that the normative principles
which have come to govern scientific work are genuinely founded in our primordial
experience of nature.
For consider: A perceived thing is disclosed for what it is precisely in so far as it
constitutes a "perspectival unity," a unity identifiable in and through implicitly
projected, and always contingently validated, perceptual perspectives. And, in an
analogous way, we require "simplicity" and ''unity of system" in theoretical
explanations coupled with fidelity and extensibility in the pursuit of their (again)
always contingent empirical implications. This conformality between pre-scientific and
scientific "objectivity" is no accident. On the contrary, it seems evident that it is only
to the extent that we can recognize the constructive and inductive methods of natural
science to be continuous in this way with our well-established practices of exploring,
manipulating, identifying and reidentifying perceived things, and just to that extent,
that we can reasonably assent to the explanatory conjectures of theoretical science that
postulate entities and processes going beyond pre-scientific experience.
(2) In the second place, if we follow out this point, I believe we are led to see how
our pre-scientific engagement with the world provides the necessary context within
which the persistent realism ofscience may be properly and faithfUlly explicated.
The problem is nothing less than that of finding the most adequate account of the
ontological import of theoretical understanding generally. There are, of course, many
stories about this. But what is chiefly needed is an account of reference in theoretical
thinking. "Scientific realism," as Galileo saw it, and as we find it today, takes this
reference as transparent. It is as if theoretical representation could, in principle,
directly and immediately disclose the natural world- as if it could provide, in Hilary
Putnam's words, a "God's eye view" ofthings. 3 The flaw in such a realism is just that
the sciences cannot provide such transparent access. They deliver the world in terms
of a developed cultural practice in which theoretical thinking is essentially constructive,
perspectival, and in interplay with what Patrick Heelan has nicely termed "readable
technologies," techniques of experimental control and measurement which give
intepretable outcomes. 4 When one emphasizes this context, as a phenomenological
standpoint must, quite another view of reference suggests itself. It will be taken to be
indirect. The thesis of the "primacy of perception" is precisely that all reference is
finally a lived relationship in and with the world, and only derivatively a relation of
thought. Theoretical construction can gain reference only when mediated to the lived
world because it is only there, in our living interaction with the world, that any sense
is given to the existence of a world at all.
If one takes this point of view, theoretical representation has to be viewed as an
abstract, partial, selective grasp of the very same objects as are presented to us in the
pre-theoretical, perceptual life-world. Theories, together with the appropriate technolo-
gies of observation, provide a means of representing the perceived world, of exploring
it, interrogating it, and disclosing further "deep structure" within it. In the process,
such theories-cum-technologies permit us both to enrich our perception, by rendering
observable certain aspects of the newly discovered structures, and to satisfy intellectual
demands for comprehensive and empirically faithful unification of experience implicit
in perception itself. Thus, the theoretically posited micro- or macro-structures of
things, while instituted in a way which is more risky than everyday perception and
dependent upon it, still have to be seen as being as "real" as the things of perception
with which science begins - no more real, but real nonetheless. Real not in the sense
of some other world "behind appearances," but in the sense of the refined and enriched
significance of the one world there is, when that world is manipulated experimentally
and its significance is expressed in theoretical and typically mathematical terms. 5
Now if the argument so far is valid, it points beyond itself. The "reference conditions"
for science cannot be just that; they must constitute what I earlier called "coherence
conditions" as well. What I mean is this: If there is this necessary reference of
theoretical and experimental practice back to the pre-scientific life-world, and if, as I
believe, we know in the tacit sense and are able to come to know in the reflective sense,
what that lived natural world is like, at least in certain measure, then any fully adequate
scientific account must do more than merely recognize its methodological dependence
on lived nature. It must, in its substantive content, in what it claims to be true of
nature, cohere with and extend, but not negate, the pre-scientifically known structures
of the natural world. And this implies that, in some sense, this pre-scientific knowledge
of nature properly provides an extra-scientific constraint upon the constructive and
intepretive freedom of natural science.
This is a dangerous doctrine. It conjures up spectres of all manner of superstition
and anti-scientific prejudice. I believe, though, that we have to take this doctrine
seriously. I see it as the inclusive theme for what has long been called philosophy of
nature and for the philosophy of nature as an on-going inquiry. It calls for a
continuing, critical, and constructive interplay beween philosophical reflection, on the
one hand, and concrete scientific theorizing on the other. The presupposition of this
interaction is that pre-scientific human experience contains genuine knowledge of
nature, and that this experience is coherent with, or, in ways we have yet to grasp, will
be found to be coherent with the best theoretical reconstructions natural science can
deliver. There is thus a dialectic of interpretation here. We both know and do not
know what nature is. We know its perceived forms, but we do not fully know what
these are or mean until scientific findings more fully explicate and extend and, in the
process, reinterpret them. Taking pre-scientific experience seriously may suggest that
science must eventually modify certain of its explanatory constructs which appear
incompatible with that experience. On the other hand, taking those constructs seriously
200 JOHN J. COMPTON
may lead to a revised and more adequate grasp of pre-scientific experience itself.
Usually, both things will happen. In the remainder of this essay, I would like at least
to illustrate this dialectic by briefly touching on several critical, if familiar junctures at
which scientific inquiry seems to threaten coherence with the pre-scientific experience
of nature.
( l) First an illustration from physics. In the twentieth century we have been forced
to change our models of physical reality radically. We now confront mathematical re-
presentations of the macro-structure of space-time and of the micro-world of quanta
which seem to defy realization in experience. Do these developments refute the view
that the marks of the "real" are parasitical on and must cohere with the experienced
structures of the life-world? I do not think so. But clearly the dialectic I mentioned has
been at work: as intepreters have confronted this seeming incoherence, the under-
standing of both physical reality and the structures oflived nature have been modified.
On the one hand, we have the fact that precisely as the newer theoretical models
have strained the norms oflived reality, physicists, as well as the rest of us, have been
led to wonder about the ontological significance of these models and to be tempted by
formalist and instrumentalist interpretations- thus showing the operative force of those
norms. On the other hand, we have come to recognize and to modify an overly narrow
construction of the meaning of the norms themselves. To say that natural science
ultimately refers to and coheres with pre-scientifically experienced nature is not at all
to say that its theoretical models must simply duplicate the everyday world; nor is it to
say that these models may not specify space-time curvatures, discontinuous trajectories,
causal indeterminacies, or contain other unusual features. It is only to say that such
"world-variations" must have some limits and that theoretical models must share some
structures with perceived realities if they are genuinely to be taken to specify aspects,
parts, or structures of the natural world. And this outcome in turn suggests that the
ontological norms implicit in lived experience may still be satisfied by the new models,
albeit in an attenuated sense. Thus, for example, it seems that quantum mechanical
state-functions do specify re-identifiable systems, although these are precisely not
corpuscles or waves in any classical sense, but are, rather, structured probability
distributions or potentialities for the realization of measured properties. These systems
of potentiality do interact among themselves and with our instruments, although in
unusual ways. And they do, in some respects, show lawful predictability over time, in
accord with the SchrOdinger equation. These are indeed still recognizable structural
features of perceived natural entities. And we can see that it is still true that, without
some such recognizable features, without some evident conformality between emerging
physical scientific reconstructions of the world and the world of pre-scientific
experience, we simply would not be able to tell the difference between "reality" and
"useful fiction." What seems to guide this on-going inquiry is the presupposition that,
in the end, there is some yet-to-be-understood convergence between scientific ontology
and the ontology of the pre-scientific world. 6
(2) Now a second example, this time from biology. I noted earlier the recent deep-
ening and extending of the reductive tendency in biological thought. So much so, that
it is now commonly held that physical and bio-chemical explanations, roughly in the
terms in which we currently understand them, are or will be sufficient to account for
all of the phenomena of life - including, in particular, the structured meanings in the
experienced life-worlds of animals- and that, ontologically speaking, these phenomena
are, or will be eliminable, or at best shown to be "epiphenomenal," within a

comprehensive science of the material world. But, from the phenomenological point
of view, as we've seen, this cannot be the truth of the matter. The immense amount of
philosophical energy - on every side - that has gone into reflection on the role and
limits of reductive strategies, on biological organization, animal consciousness and
social relations, and the like, is only understandable on the presumption that there is
some yet-to-be discovered coherence between the pre-scientific experience of animals
as living, perceiving, and acting beings, and the scientific reconstruction of these
phenomena. 7
Simply because we are alive and in the midst of life, if we reflect at all, we
experience ourselves as beings in a life-world engaged with the life-worlds of other
living beings. Of course, we do not know in advance the history or chemistry of life.
But we can justifiably believe that we know its forms and structures as lived through
by us and our kindred living beings. And in so far as this is so, we must hold to what
this pre-scientific knowledge implies. The force of the phenomenological account has
to be that a coherent biological theory capable of explaining and even broadly
predicting plant and animal behavior, and surely that of the higher animals, will not be
found to be possible unless that theory somehow construes behavior as a function, at
least in part, of experienced meanings intrinsic to the life-worlds of those animals. This
is already suggested in the work of a number of students of animal behavior. 8
(3) Finally, and all too briefly, from cognitive neuroscience. Here the ontological
issue arises in its most acute form. In the course of efforts to "domesticate" the
phenomena of human mental life within brain science, debate swirls among a variety
of reductive and quasi-reductive approaches, with no agreed upon understanding of
the intrinsic character, the physical basis or the (causal) function of consciousness in
perceiving, feeling, desiring, judging, and acting, or in our awareness of self and others,
of linguistic and other cultural meanings, and the like. How, ultimately, a coherent
theory of mental life will eventuate is anybody's guess, if it is even possible. But, from
a phenomenological standpoint, as I see it, this ongoing inquiry is precisely part of the
agenda of what I've been calling a "philosophy of nature." For its premise is that we
have genuine pre-scientific knowledge of fundamental features of these mental
activities and states - albeit always subject to further critical examination and
clarification - that must be "saved" somehow within any adequate theory of
mind/brain. The sense and validity of all scientific thinking depends on it. Conscious
experience must make a difference. And, it must follow that, at the close of the day,
no fully adequate explanation or prediction of human behavior will be possible in terms
ofbrain structure and function alone, without essential reference to our self-experience
as conscious, perceptive and active, historical and social agents. Some neuroscientists9
and philosophers ofmind 10 seem to agree.
In insisting on this, I am simply "reawakening" and affirming the centrality of our
primordial experience of situatedness within the natural world. I have argued that this
pre-scientific experience of being an embodied subject engaged, perceptively and
actively, with other bodily beings is fundamental to interpreting the significance of
natural science. Our experience of engagement with nature is at once an experience of
nature as for human life and of human life as firmly in nature. We are a constant and
reciprocal interdependence with the natural world. We experience ourselves as
constituted by as well as constituting it, as being, at some ultimate depth, at one with
202 JOHN J. COMPTON
this world. We find ourselves as an expression of its primordial productivity. It is this

full experience of situatedness, I believe, which nourishes and sustains the conviction
of coherence between human reality and the reality of nature, and which has its
philosophical expression in the philosophy of nature itself.
Vanderbilt University
NOTES
From, respectively, Marvin Minsky, The Society of Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986) and
Walter J. Freeman, Societies ofBrains (Hillsdale: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1995).
2 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology ofPerception, tr. by Colin Smith (New York: Humanities
Press, I 962), viii.
3 Hilary Putnam, "Two Philosophical Perspectives," in Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1981), Ch. 3.
4 Patrick H. Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley and Los Angeles,:
University of California Press, 1983), 197-200. And also see his "Nature and its Transformations,"
Theological Studies, Vol. 33 (1972): 486-502.
5 For a more extended discussion of this point, see my "Some Contributions of Existential Phenomenology
to the Philosophy of Natural Science," American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 25, No.2, April 1988,99-113
(reprinted in Lawrence Hass and Dorothea Olkowsky, eds., Rereading Merleau-Ponty (Amherst, NY:
Humanity Books, 2000).
6 See my "Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Nature," Man and World (now Review of Continental
Philosophy), Vol. 21 (1988): 65-89, and "Reinventing the Philosophy ofNature," The Review ofMetaphysics,
Vol. 23, No. I (September, 1979).
7 See Marjorie Grene, The Understanding ofNature (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Co., I 974) and my "Marjorie
Grene and the Phenomenon of Life," in Peter Asquith and Philip Kitcher, eds., Proceedings ofthe Philosophy
of Science Association (East Lansing: Philosophy of Science Association, 1985), 354-64.
8 For example, James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,
1979), Adolph Portrnann,Animals as Social Beings, tr. 0. Coburn (London: Hutchinson, 1961), and Marian
Stamp Dawkins, Through Our Eyes Only? (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
9 For example, Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error (New York: Avon Books, 1994); David LaBerge,
Attentional Processing (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, I 995); and Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson,
and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991).
10 To my knowledge, the clearest philosophical exposition of a methodology for inquiry that combines
insistence on respect for the phenomenology of consciousness as well as on the perspectives of cognitive
science and neuro-physiology is by Owen Flanagan, in his Consciousness Reconsidered (Cambridge: MIT
Press, I 992).
JOHNZIMAN
NO MAN IS AN ISLAND
THE AXIOM OF SUBJECTIVITY
Western thought since the Seventeenth Century has been dominated by methodological
solipsism. 1 The famous sound-bite of Rene Descartes' cogito, ergo sum: "I think,
therefore I am," became the starting point for most discourse on the nature of things.
It assumes that the world is surveyed and interpreted from the point of view of a single
individual. Nowhere is this stance more entrenched than in the philosophy of science.
To a remarkable degree the scientist is represented as studying the natural world as if
alone in it, served only by mindless assistants who might as well be replaced by
machines. Scientific theories are presented as systems of thought conjured up and
tested by that same individual. Research results are presented as the independent
findings oflone explorers, each reporting the evidence of their own eyes and their own
rational inferences. Our epistemological role models are Robinson Crusoe and Sherlock
Holmes, self-sufficient intellectuals to whom their human companions, Friday and
Watson, are mere stooges.
In recent years the operational individualism implicit in this philosophical stance
has given way to a perspective that includes the communal aspects of research activity. 2
Attention is now focussed on the way that scientists are obliged to communicate their
findings to each other, and to subject them systematically to critical analysis by their
research communities. This emphasis on science as a social institution has important
epistemological implications which I have discussed at length elsewhere. 3
Sociological metascientists who insist that scientific knowledge is fundamentally
"social,"4 have not really escaped from the cartesian cage. Their only revision of the
orthodox stance is to characterise the solitary observer/thinker as the product and
puppet of general social influences and interests, rather than as a disembodied intellect
without a God-given soul.
The trouble is that the basic solipsist methodology is so constricted and unnatural
that it cannot stand up to close scrutiny. One must eventually account for and interpret
the existence of "Ego," the thinking individual, as a typical entity amongst the many
other life-world entities of which he or she also becomes aware. But that reflexive
closure, whenever it is attempted, proves almost impossible to complete. As Descartes
surmised, a philosopher usually finds that his own status is best accepted as an
unstated, undemonstrable primitive, even in the most carefully argued ontology.
203
204 JOHNZIMAN
This axiom ofsubjectivity, as one might call it, seems to give room enough for most
of the conventional philosophies of science. In effect, as Patrick Heelan neatly put it,
they try to make do with a "first-person" view of the world. 5 Some scientistic
epistemologists, of course, renounce the cartesian programme, and adopt a reductionist
programme, where human consciousness (if such a thing can be said to exist) has to be
supposed to have emerged as an epiphenomenon associated with a strange attractor in
a self-organising complex system of interacting particles. But this metaphysical
enterprise depends on a strong axiom ofobjectivity which derives, as we shall see, from
the shared subjectivity of scientific knowledge.
THE PROBLEM OF OTHER MINDS
The axiom of subjectivity allows very little scope for the social features to which I have
just referred. Sooner or later - depending on the degree of "conviviality"6 that one
wants to include in ones epistemology- one has to posit the existence of other minds.
In the life-world, Dr. Watson and Man Friday are cognitive beings on an equal
ontological footing with the Holmes/Crusoe hero, and play essential roles in
validitating his story.
For a card-carrying methodological solipsist this is a real problem. The most
consistent attitude is to treat it quasi-empirically by trying to demonstrate that other
minds are entities observed in ones natural environment, with interesting, perhaps
explicable properties such as consciousness. By a series of rationally justifiable
inferences, Ego is supposed to discover scientifically that these properties are precisely
similar to his own - that Alter is in many ways an equivalent individual, typically
engaged in a similar exploration of her environment and therefore a potentially
valuable ally and/or critic.
Unfortunately, this inference is logically very dicey. Yet its conclusion is so
essential for any further epistemological progress that its proof has to be taken as
already achieved, and henceforth to be bracketed out. With one leap, the metascientist
then feels free to talk about communication, community and other many-personed
games, just as ifhis- and every thoughtful person's- childish concern about what it
might be like to be another person and see the world through other eyes ("What about
colours, Mummy: perhaps you see green as red?") were indeed an infantile disorder,
cured without mental therapy by the natural growth of the body and the mind.
This seems to be the attitude of most metascientists towards any detailed
sociological elements in their accounts of science. It just seems too much intellectual
effort to enlarge the cartesian perspective into a systematic model of society. They
tacitly adopt a "third-person" view 7 which includes a general axiom of sociability that
covers all such theoretical difficulties with a blanket clause asserting that human beings
have the innate ability and disposition to form interactive social groups. Devotees of
Science and Technology Studies can then get on with the important business of finding
out how such beings do actually interact socially, whether as scientists or otherwise.
SOCIABILITY IS NOT ENOUGH

But this approach is just objectivist wishful thinking. The notion that the existence of
other minds could, in principle, be cerebrated simply from the observed behaviour of
NO MAN IS AN ISLAND 205
entities of a certain kind is not only completely unproven: it also discounts the
knowledge of each other that all humans acquire as they grow up, long before they
begin to cogitate on, say, Descartes' dictum. It is mere philosophical affectation to
pretend that we deduce the existence of something called social action by quasi-
objective observation, when we have been shaped by it and have actually experienced
it for years at full strength.
Again the concept of sociability implicit in this axiom is disconnected from
subjectivity as such. It almost seems as if the "other people" thus discovered need not
have the same subjective characteristics, the same cognitive and affective propensities,
as Ego. They might be supposed, for example, to belong to the fictitious species homo
economicus - repulsive creatures motivated completely by rational calculations of
material self interest8 - or homo sociologicus - amiable puppets pulled hither and
thither by immutable social norms. 9 Contra-subjective assumptions of this kind
befuddle the human sciences.
The scientist is thus often presented as being privileged cognitively over the people
he observes. But even when this asymmetry is corrected, the form in which the
sociability axiom is usually stated implies little more than that each has a reciprocal
one-way solipsist relationship to the other- that Ego correctly perceives Alter to be a
similar human being, and vice versa. Nothing is said about the two-way, interactive
character of such relationships, which is of the very essence of the human condition.
Take, for example, the role of communication in science and other human affairs.
In normal parlance, "to communicate" means more than "to inform." It is not just a
matter of sending a message in some way, for some reason, from one person to another.
For Ego to communicate with Alter requires two-way transfers and transactions, where
each party reacts back to the other as they take in what they receive. The few scholars
who have discussed interpersonal communication 10 have pointed to this intrinsic
reflexivity, as well as to the necessity of a mutually comprehensible medium and a
framework of shared meanings. It seems extraordinarily difficult to apply the solipsist
methodology to such a relationship - and to my knowledge no philosopher has
seriously attempted it.
In effect, the axiom of sociability must also postulate empathy. Indeed, a general
capacity to understand the thought processes of others, and thus make sense of their
actions, is tequired much more widely than for meaningful communication. The human
sciences are only just recovering from behaviourism, which purported to be able to
account for all human behaviour without reference to "mental" phenomena. Empathy
is not just an affective trait. It also applies to perceptive and cognitive thought
processes, such as recognition and reasoning, and is thus exercised in the social
production of all forms ofknowledge. As Heelan has shown at length, 11 all science is
essentially hermeneutical. Even physics depends upon intersubjectively validated
processes of interpretation.
In sum, my argument is that the solipsist stance, even when reinforced by strong
postulates of subjectivity and sociability, does not provide an all round perspective on
the world about us. The bias towards atomic individualism not only bedevils the human
and social sciences: it also distorts the whole philosophy of nature. The "science of
science" itself has deep-rooted social foundations, 12 which cannot be reduced to the
cartesian dictum. So I propose now to show the need for a wider view, where those
206 JOHNZIMAN
tiresome "other" people are just as much in our thoughts as we are ourselves, and just
as much in existence.
Obviously, in this short paper I cannot present more than a rough sketch of the rich
and extensive intellectual landscape thus opened up for further exploration. Despite its
absence from most subject indexes, this is a theme that has appeared spontaneously in
the writings of a number of scholars, great and small, over at least the past century. In
particular - and quite exceptionally - it lay at the heart of the philosophical work of
G.H. Mead. Indeed, Practische Intersubjectiti:it was the original German title of the
book by Hans Joas, 13 which explores and effectively indexes Mead's voluminous
writings on this very subject. Nevertheless, it is only in the last twenty years or so that
the concept of intersubjectivity has begun to surface noticeably in the academic
literature- typically, as in the work of Patrick Heelan, as such an elementary feature
of the life-world that it requires no further analysis.
INTERSUBJECTIVITY AS A LIFE-WORLD PRIMITIVE

Suppose, then, that Descartes had written "Cogitamus, ergo sumus": "We think,
therefore we are." Suppose that the solipsist constraint is dropped, and that
intersubjer:tivity is taken as a primitive postulate, on a par with individual subjectivity.
Suppose that philosophers simply assume, as an indisputable fact, that normal adult
human beings are aware both of themselves and of other people, and that they all have
similar mental worlds with many features in common. In other words, suppose that the
mutual recognition and understanding required for interpersonal communication and
sociability is treated as a basic life-world characteristic that does not have to be
conjured like a genie out of a tiny individualistic bottle.
This does not preclude attempts to study intersubjectivity as a fact of nature, and to
link it to other aspects of the human condition. All that I am suggesting is that what
Heelan might call a "second-person" account should not be regarded as somehow less
basic than the "first-person" or "third-person" accounts of the world, and that inter-
subjectivity should not always be labelled as an intermediate-level concept, useful in
a preliminary mapping of epistemological questions but reserved for later explication
in more "fundamental"- i. e., solipsist- terms. I am not, of course, hinting that there
might be "psychic" linkages between individual human brains and/or minds. The
naturalistic epistemological postulate is mutual awareness of the intentionality
immanent in normal symbolic communication -that is, that signals are generated with
meanings that are designed to be understood. 14
The evolutionary and epigenetic unfolding of intersubjectivity, like that of
individual consciousness, is obviously of scientific interest. Is there any evidence that
it develops - in the species or in the phenotypical modem individual - after its
subjective copartner? Can we say for sure that a young child becomes aware of
"herself' before becoming aware of the other "selves" that surround her in early life?
It could be that as supremely social animals we each acquire these two modes of
consciousness simultaneously, interactively, reflexively, along with the language in
which we talk to ourselves as well as to others.
Indeed, the fact that people have great difficulty in maturing the one without experi-
ence ofthe other suggests that subjectivity and intersubjectivity have evolved together
as innate human capabilities. 15 It is now thought that autism is associated with a
congenital inability to develop a "theory of mind" - that is, a lack of the normal
capacity for becoming aware of others as thinking beings like oneself. 16 It seems that
a mildly autistic person has to undertake the laborious mental task of rehearsing
personally the supposed logical steps out of solipsism into sociability, rather than
having this development triggered in a pre-adapted brain by ordinary life-world
circumstances as they grow up.
LIVING IN THE SAME WORLD
What I am arguing for, then, is a phenomenology of intersubjectivity. What are its

characteristics, as experienced or observed? What is its place in nature? How does it
fit into larger accounts of the life-world? How do we use it in our understanding of
people and things? This cannot be a formally rigorous investigation, since it necessarily
assumes and uses the very phenomena it purports to be analysing. But the same
fundamental objection can be made to the phenomenology of subjectivity itself. To the
Mind of God, all philosophical discourse is a bootstrap operation.
The most elementary manifestation of intersubjectivity is equivalence of perception.
That is, if Alter stands in (approximately) the same position as Ego, and looks in the
same direction, then she will report having seen (very nearly) the same scene. In prac-
tice, this equivalence involves a certain amount of unconscious mental reconstruction
by deep-seated neurophysiological mechanisms- for example, the transformation of
our individual non-Euclidean perceptive geometries into an "invariant" Euclidean
(local) space-time framework that all can share. 17 But the sharing of percepts is clearly
a natural human faculty which is also possessed by many other higher organisms.
What is more, these percepts are not just equivalent at the level of "primary sense
data": they are typically structured and abstracted mentally in effectively the same way
by different individuals. I share with my four year old granddaughter much more than
the perception of a moving complex of brown and white patches: we say to each other
"Look, there's a horse!" Humans evidently have a common facility for detecting
certain types of pattern- visual, tactile, auditory, time sequential etc. -and reporting
to one another similarities and differences. This facility, again, seems to be shared with
many other animals.
These elementary features of intersubjectivity are so commonplace that they are
often overlooked by philosophers. Research on artificial perception and cognition has
shown how extraordinarily complex these mental faculties are, and how difficult it is
to simulate them computationally. Perceptive intersubjectivity is a universal phenome-
non that should not be ignored because it is so ordinary, or talked out of existence just
because we hope that it will quite soon be explicated in terms of more "basic" entities.
The only rational interpretation of the extreme coherence and consistency of
perceptive intersubjectivity is, of course, that it arises out of parallel perception of a
single unitary and persistent "life-world." As Mead pointed out, we live together in a
common world of people linked through signals. 18 What is more, since Ego perceives
the entities in this world to be physically distinct from the entity that he recognises as
Alter, and vice versa, this must be an external world. Further exchanges of perceptual
information with others indicates that the life-world is ubiquitous: all sentient beings
on earth perceive themselves and each other as living in it together. In its simplest
208 JOHNZIMAN
terms, "'sensed-red' has the kind of objectivity of being intersubjectively testable by

normal adults who share a World." 19
This knowledge that "even if life is but a dream we are all in the same boat" is the
bedrock of realism. I present this much debated concept here in its most naive, common
sense form because I believe that this is where this debate should start- and where it
is bound to end. The concept of"reality" cannot be separated from the phenomenon of
perceptive intersubjectivity, of which it is, in effect, no more nor less than the total
logical predicate.
Needless to say, much effort has gone into trying to derive the existence of an
external world from premises that do not depend on our perceptions of it. But it seems
hard to contrive a strictly solipsist account of a domain of being differentiated from
Ego without the hypothesis that this domain is inhabited by other beings, such as Alter,
to whom it is also external. Otherwise, as Mead clearly understood, 20 my thinking about
"I" must surely include everything that I am aware of, and never gets to the outside of
"Me." Thus, a formal demonstration of existential realism would first require a proof
of the postulate of intersubjectivity, which seems far out of reach. By taking perceptive
intersubjectivity as an irreducible natural phenomenon, we cut through the knotty
problem of realism that has traditionally entangled epistemologists of science and of
the life-world. 21
SHARING MEANING
Perceptive intersubjectivity is one of the foundation stones of science. Scientific "facts"

are essentially percepts on which all observers can come to agree. 22 But that process of
coming to agreement involves a great deal of social interaction. 23 It requires a common
basis of communication, argument and understanding. That is, as Mead showed, 24 it
requires a much wider measure of cognitive intersubjectivity than shared perception of
an external world.
The outward sign of this is a common language. "According to the solipsist
tradition, language is the means of communication that facilitates and generates inter-
subjective understanding. Ego and Alter know that they have the same thoughts
because they tell them to each other. In the course of this conversation, they discover
that they can share thoughts on much more than their immediate perceptions, and learn
to discuss together a large part, if not usually the whole range, of cognition -the ideas,
memories, prospects, images, dreams, etc. that buzz around in the individual human
mind.
But this Just So story may well be back to front. Some creatures without language,
such as domestic animals and human babies, seem capable of some awareness of the
mentalities of others. So it might be said that cognitive intersubjectivity is a prerequisite
oflinguistic communication, and that cogitation develops in depth and strength through
such communication. It could be that "humans do not converse because they have inner
thoughts to express, but they have thoughts because they are able to converse. " 25
Science - indeed all mature social participation 26 - requires more than the
communication of putative "facts": it depends upon argumentation. That is, it requires
a shared appreciation of the force of logic. Again, the orthodox view is that this is an
adjunct of language. But logical necessity can often be demonstrated without the use
of words by the physical manipulation of material objects - manipulations which can
be simulated by mental operations with quasi-visual "models" and "maps.'m For

example, I can determine by inspection that a particular key will not fit a particular lock
without having to try it directly. This ability to "solve puzzles" is a strongly
intersubjective cognitive faculty that humans share with certain higher mammals.
The same applies to what might be called the intrinsic logic of the life-world,
including, as Mead pointed out/8 the primary categories of space, time and causality.
What is more, our shared perception and common acknowledgement of various natural
kinds 29 extend to their observed behaviour. Similarities of response to similarities of
circumstances- cocks always crow at dawn- are recognised intersubjectively as stable
patterns in time as well as in space. Philosophers call this "induction," but it is a shared
mode of cognition with deep evolutionary roots. 30
Language formalises the tacit logic of things and makes it conscious and
communicable. In a spoken, written or signed language/ 1 the patterns to be perceived
and (re)cognised intersubjectively are artificial and symbolic. Having been brought up
in the same community, Ego and Alter have learnt to interpret them as representing the
life-world percepts and mental concepts that they have consciously or unconconscious-
ly shared from childhood. 32
Again, science is very dependent on logic, mathematics, classification schemes and
other precision instruments for exact formal reasoning. The immense power of these
lies in their unmistakable meanings-that is, in the unequivocal intersubjectivity of their
representations of entities and relationships. 33 The intersubjectivity of meaning in a map
or diagram can be so clear and distinct that it can be used to convey rigorous scientific
thought. 34 The force of scientific reasoning is actually rhetorical, not mechanical. In
the end, it always operates intersubjectively, through the normal channels of human
communication.
OBSERVING THIRD PERSONS

The shared life-world includes people. That is to say, Ego and Alter are not only aware
of one another, and in communication concerning the "external" world that they have
in common. They also both note that this world contains third persons, whom they
observe in the same spirit of curiosity as they observe the inanimate objects and
"dumb" animals around them. What is more, they often find that they can each interpret
the behaviour of such persons in the light of their understanding of their own mental
world - and that their separate interpretations are essentially the same.
As Mead continually insisted, the possibility of creating any sort of human science
rests upon intersubjective praxis. It is not just a matter of individual scientists each
having some degree of intersubjective understanding of what is in the mind of the
object of their observations. The human sciences depend, ultimately, on an empathic
intersubjectivity that extends the role of hermeneutics 35 to include explicitly the
"second-person" standpoint. It is a matter of Professor Ego and Dr. Alter- and thus,
potentially, a whole community of scientific observers - making so nearly the same
inferences concerning the inner thoughts of Mrs. Observanda that they are able to
discuss and agree on an interpretation of her behaviour in terms of just such thoughts.
But the "behaviour" to be scientifically observed, interpreted and discussed
necessarily includes what the actors say about what they are doing. That is why
unscripted interviews play such a vital role in the human sciences. In effect, these are
210 JOHNZIMAN
two-way interactive conversations providing the researcher with an empathic

understanding of what the actors think is going on. The tapes or transcripts that record
such conversations are nothing other than .frozen records ofintersubjectivity in action.
This reminds us, however, of the limitations of even the most empathic
interpersonal communication. Compared with their subjective knowledge of their own
thoughts, Ego and Alter have only miniscule access to each other's mental worlds. This
access would be yet more restricted if they did not have a natural language and cultural
background in common. Indeed, as many human scientists have argued, 36 cultural
groups and other social institutions can never be fully understood scientifically by
"outsiders," essentially because they cannot achieve sufficient empathic
intersubjectivity with card-carrying "insiders."
The scope of research in the human sciences is thus severely restricted. Conscious
adults are alive to other dimensions of meaning, such as aesthetic, moral, spiritual and
emotional influences, that cannot be analysed formally. Fortunately, empathic intersub-
jectivity is fully cognisant of many of these affects. People are well able to appreciate
the feelings of others, even when, like bodily pain, these cannot be expressed in words.
As Mead saw, people become remarkably adept at making the transformation of
perspective required to take on the role of another. 37 Researchers in sociology, for
example, have no real difficulty in understanding the life-world meaning of such
"irrational" actions as laying down ones life for ones friends, or giving up all one's
fortune for "one pearl of great price." It is a categorial mistake to suppose that
"science" must necessarily exclude all the affective aspects of the human condition. 38
In the end, however, research in the human sciences is frustrated by the
inaccessibility, indeterminacy, complexity and reflexivity of the conscious thoughts-
not to mention unconscious psychological factors - underlying even quite ordinary
behaviour. The academic enterprise then crosses the unmarked frontier into humanistic
studies of a more speculative kind. These are vitally dependent on the intersubjective
links between scholars and their audiences. This multiplicity of empathic understanding
is what can make history - and much sociology and anthropology - a peculiar
balancing act between science and art.
PERSONS AS NODES -INCLUDING SELYES

What then are we to make of the cartesian solipsist? Does this emphasis on and
enlargement of the role ofintersubjectivity deny subjectivity itself? In trying to repre-
sent social existence as a network of interpersonal relationships, am I putting too much
stress on the linkages, and shrinking the persons at the nodes into mere black boxes?
Far from it. To function efficiently in the Lego game of social life, the subjectivity
of individuals has to be as complex and subtle as the intersubjectivity of their mutual
connections. What is more, subjectivity and intersubjectivity interact, each playing a
part in constructing the other. In the cartesian scheme, interpersonal relationships and
their larger social creations are deemed to be the collective products of preexistent
persons, who communicate and interact with one another at a distance, like sovereign
states. Having cast out the "solipsist spook," Mead argued/ 9 that each "person," each
"self," is shaped by and is adapted to their linkages with others, from infancy onwards,
by language and social experience.
This is not to say that each of us is individuated by our genetic makeup or

collectivised by our shared social experience. The essential point is that nature and
nurture, genes and social experience, work together to produce persons who are
individually different in many ways but are sufficiently alike to acquire naturally, by
biological and/or social evolution, intersubjective, empathic understanding of each
other's condition.
Anthropologists and sociologists debate whether a significant degree of empathy
is ever attainable between people brought up in almost disconnected cultural
environments. To my mind, the evidence is that we humans are in many respects
psychically homogeneous, and not hermeneutically hermetic in our tribal divisions.
Nevertheless, the solipsist Ego cannot be separated from his or her social milieu. The
language required for conscious inner monologue can only be acquired by
communication with Alter. Thus, a primary intersubjective experience is necessary to
achieve subjective awareness of oneself and of the world. What we call the "self' is in
many ways merely a compendium of a multitude of such experiences. 40
Indeed, the external network of conversations that generates and sustains our mental
world extends into its interior. In quiet moments of introspection, we become aware of
a raucous assembly of inner voices, as if from a variety of sub-selves contending for
attention. 41 Self-reflexive phrases such as "understanding oneself' and "seeking ones
identity" hint at a mode of "intrasubjectivity" that presents itself as intersubjective
discourse, this being the only form in which we can "gather together" our own thoughts
and allow unexpectedly "creative" thoughts to emerge from amongst the babble. 42
RELATIONSHIPS
In so far as life-world reality is constructed subjectively out of networks of
intersubjective links, these need to be considered in their own right. Since inter-
subjectivity is an individual capability, it is through interpersonal relationships that it
actually operates. These relationships have important features which influence but are
not directly apparent in the larger collective structures of which they are vital elements.
Apart from overt hostility, the minimal mode of interpersonal relationship would
seem to be barter. The exchange of valued goods - tangible or intangible - is
fundamental to all economic activity. But although cognitively reflexive, it does not
necessitate communication. The barest minimum of intersubjective calculation of each
other's needs transforms egocentric individuals into social beings.
Even economic theorists know in their hearts that the calculative barter model is
entirely inadequate to explain a wider range of social activities. But the notion of a "fair
exchange" between independent equals is inherent in many interpersonal interactions,
and may well be essential for a satisfactory intersubjective relationship of a more
intimate kind, where much more is usually known, on both sides, of the circumstances
and motives of the other.
A fair exchange can be a timeless interpersonal transaction. It is like one of those
conversations between strangers seated together on a plane, where there may be a
reciprocally gratifying exchange of personal information - even secrets - without a past
or a future. 43 But an exchange relationship changes its nature and force if it is
systematically repeated. Trade involves anticipatory action by each party, and thus an
intersubjective fabric of mutual expectations. In effect, the transactions become part of
212 JOHNZIMAN
larger action schemas, where reasonably reliable "if we do A then they will do B"
imputations are developed. Such networks of intersubjective expectation carry the
model of pseudo-economic man beyond that of the solipsist Prisoner caught in a
Dilemma, and are the scaffolding of orderly social life.
As Mead saw, 44 reciprocal expectations operate even in the most elementary acts
of interpersonal communication. In ordinary conversation Ego and Alter expect from
each other culturally conventional signs of reflexive comprehension, affective response,
triggered activity, etc. How disconcerting it is, in trying to communicate with a foreign-
er, to receive a scowl in place of the expected smile, or vice versa! Sustained interper-
sonal communication is necessarily a trading relationship, even if empathically shallow.
The higher level intersubjectivity of trust involves partnership in action, derived
from shared life-world understanding and values. Trust thus has epistemological
significance, as an indispensable feature ofthe community of science. Scientists need
to be able to trust the published research findings of their fellows, even when they do
not know them personally. Correspondingly, in her own research, Professor Ego has
to temper her own subjectivity with the intersubjective mentality of an imagined Dr.
Alter, who is going to rely on her findings in his research.
Needless to say, interpersonal trustworthiness is a vital structural element in all
social institutions. In economic systems, this trust is objectified into money. The
temporally and geographically localised intersubjectivity of barter, having been
enlarged into a regular trading relationship, is thus generalised into a market. A regular
medium of exchange constitutes a collective pledge of the expectation of future
transactions, not merely between the same pair of actors but amongst the members of
a whole commercial community.
Life-world experience provides us with a whole range of person-to-person relation-
ships of increasing intersubjective intensity. 45 Beyond empathy, for example, lies sym-
pathy, where Ego not only understands Alter's thoughts and emotions, but also actually
feels some of them herself. The pair bonding thus created or recognised is typical of
friendship and love - psychological phenomena which have always eluded solipsist
interpretations because these have no concept of "we" as distinct from "me and you."
Sympathy shades into altruism, where Ego acts for the benefit of one or more others
at the expense of herself. Altruism is inexplicable in economic terms. 46 And yet it can
easily be understood as a generalised mode of intersubjectivity, where the closely
affective mother-child relationship is enlarged, through family and local life amidst
loved ones and friends, until in some people it embraces all human kind. 47 By its
ubiquity, altruism demonstrates Mead's insight48 that practical intersubjectivity is
central to the ethical universality that is a major constituent of "human nature."
An interesting question, is whether religious belief requires the presumption of an
intersubjective relationship between individual believers and their God. Religious
writings often report conversations with quasi-material sacred beings. Perhaps a purely
solipsist, subjectivist theology may not be enough to satisfy the average person's
spiritual needs. 49
COMMUNING WITH ABSENT PERSONS

Intersubjectivity begins and takes its normal form in conversations between people who
are physically present, here and now, to one another. But through the medium of
wntmg, and nowadays by telecommunication, this linkage can be extended to

individuals elsewhere in space and time. Whether the tum-taking is immediate, as with
the telephone, or delayed, as in exchanges of correspondence or email, the
intersubjective relationship can be established and maintained on the same general
terms as if it were face to face.
Needless to say, the possibility of exosomatic transmission and storage of discourse
is vital to the workings of civilised social systems. For example, the published "ar-
chives" of science- its journals, books, libraries and databases- are its central collec-
tive institution. 50 What one might call "virtual intersubjectivity" is one of the most im-
portant types of linkage in any society larger than a village - and even there it may be
achieved laboriously by the memorization and oral retransmission of stories and poems.
Nevertheless there is something peculiar about the relationship between the author,
actor, radio broadcaster or political speaker and the typically unknown, usually
physically absent, and maybe even as yet unborn reader, watcher or listener. Although
this relationship is necessarily one-way, non-reflexive, and often hermeneutically
challenging,S 1 it sometimes operates psychologically as if it were truly intersubjective.
Television audiences notoriously become emotionally attached to the characters in
soap operas. The reader of a classic work such as the Conftssions of St. Augustine may
come to empathise, even sympathise, with the writer through vast but transparent
barriers oflanguage, culture and mortality, almost as if he were telling his story over
a shared bottle of wine.
ACTOR NETWORKS AND OTHER INSTITUTIONS

Science is a social institution, At the beginning of this paper, I suggested that
intersubjectivity might be a more natural empirical foundation for social theory than
general "sociability." In effect, people relate themselves more directly to specific other
people than they do to general social groups. This is not to doubt the reality or symbolic
influence of organisations, institutions, tribes, corporations, associations, and other
social entities. 52 But it does suggest that a social entity should be seen primarily as an
interpersonal structure rather than as a linked assembly of people.
Of course all social entities are "actor networks," and a network is the same thing
whether it is described as a whole lot of knots connected by strings or a whole lot of
strings tied together with knots. What I am getting at is that social action stems less
from the actors than from their interactions. The solipsist account of society
concentrates on how people think and act individually, treating their interconnections
as relatively passive communication linkages. In reality, people's subjective domains
are largely activated through their intersubjective relationships. Many historical events
and political phenomena acquire new meanings in this perspective.
In mathematical language, this is rather like using the dual graph to prove proposi-
tions that are not so obvious in the original representation. Thus, the analysis of a social
system into sub-sets of its members- e.g., social classes- is usually very arbitrary and
tends to overemphasise socially constructed boundaries that may have limited
operational significance. On the other hand, circuits B, that is, topologically closed sub-
sets of links -can energise the system by their natural capacity for reflexive self-exci-
tation.53 Again, short-range intersubjective relationships- e.g., gossip- may connect
up into a percolation structure that transmits local influences right through the society.
214 JOHNZIMAN
At a higher level of generality, statistical thermodynamics is sometimes invoked as

a potential mathematical model for a theory of "sociodynarnics." But this model is
based on the concept of a gas, which is a homogeneous assembly of weakly interacting
molecules. Even in physics, this often involves a number of additional simplifying
assumptions which are not necessarily found in the natural world. 54 Thus a
sociodynamic theory based primarily on quasi-independent individuals is unlikely to
be able to account formally for the variety of social entities and sub-entities that span
and structure everyone's life-world. An entirely different mathematical formalism, such
as the theory ofcomplex systems, 55 is required to indicate and analyse the potentialities
for self-organised phenomena such as cyclic sub-systems, trapped stasis, evolutionary
change, or chaos in a dynamically linked network.
One of the metaphors for scientific activity is that it operates as a market. 56
According to economists, this consists of mutually trusting individuals motivated solely
by the desire for profit in each of a sequence of independent transactions. But
intersubjectivity is a natural human impulse which is not easily suppressed. If more
normal interpersonal relations are allowed to develop, and to link together into self-
organising circuits, the market can become unstable and break up into specialised sub-
markets or even cartels. This differentiation into innumerable research specialties and
academic disciplines is, of course, typical of"the scientific marketplace."
However, when the growth of closer links between individual traders is forbidden
in the name of competition, "the market" itself is often credited with a personality to
which people address their cognitive and affective capabilities. I suppose that is what
the champions of"science" have in mind when they unconsciously treat it as a univer-
sal mother figure dispensing perfect rationality and material benefit. 57 But this reifi-
cation and personalisation of actor networks is characteristic of all social institutions.
Typically, these can be dissected into relatively closed circuits of interpersonal
linkages. In principle, anybody could occupy the nodal roles. In reality, however,
subjective and intersubjective factors are vital to the working of all human institutions.
Many modem scientists are caught up in bureaucratic organisations. But in reading
an organisational chart, one should not only observe who does what inside each box
but also attend to the arrows from box to box, interrelating person with person in the
system as a whole. Even in the most elaborate social organisation, the intersubjectivity
of the ordinary life-world underpins the "interentitivity" ofthe network of symbolic
relationships between its formally depersonalised modules. We may know little about
the actual personalities involved, but lacking an abstract language in which to describe
interentity relationships as such, we are forced to "psychologise" them as if they were
actual persons interacting in more elementary social situations.
Of course social systems involve more than people. They interact strongly with
objective cultural entities,58 such as technological artefacts and scientific theories.
Nevertheless, the notion of a heterogeneous actor networ~9 is not really very helpful.
As Mead observed,60 inanimate objects and cognitive entities can arouse empathic
responses, but they lack the subjective intentionality implicit in the very notion of
action and are thus unable to enter into the reciprocal intersubjective relationships that
define the links in a social system. It is true that objective cultural entities are often
strongly related to one another, and to their human makers, 61 but in quite other
dimensions than those of shared perception, cognition and affection.
SO WHAT?
Information is the intellectual buzz-word of our day. But who informs whom? How do
they communicate? Ever since we first began to write, quite independently, about
scientific knowledge, Patrick Heelan and I, 62 have found ourselves having to think
about interpersonal communication and mutual comprehension. At the end of every
exploratory path into the meaning of scientific knowledge we encountered the
mysterious phenomenon of intersubjectivity. It was an everyday fact oflife, recognised
as such by at least a few philosophers, psychologists and sociologists, but seldom
discussed explicitly.
At first it may seem that I have just wandered into as many academic fields as I
could think of - epistemology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, anthropology,
economics, organisational sociology, and so on- looking out for anything that might
be interpreted loosely as "intersubjectivity." But these are all fields that Patrick and I
have found to be relevant to our original question: what are the grounds for belief in
science? If you think that I have got it all wrong in your particular specialty, please do
weigh in and tell us all how things really are over there.
I may also have given the impression that I am rooting for intersubjectivity as if it
were the ineffable force at the heart of all human affairs. In truth, all I am saying is that
the old saw "two's company; three's a crowd" suggests openings for research in the
human sciences which are not immediately obvious if one focusses either on
individuals, or on collectives. There are certain protean words, such as "concept,"
"person," "society," "freedom," and "love," which have more philosophical force in
a state of nature than when domesticated in an even more questionable formula. Like
its Siamese twin, "hermeneutics," intersubjectivity is a kaleidoscopic phenomenon
which displays diverse aspects and attributes, according to the context in which it
operates and the perspective from which it is viewed. That, surely, is why it is so
interesting.
University ofBristol, United Kingdom
NOTES
D. J. Krieger, The New Universalism: Foundations for a Global Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books,
1991).
2 J. M. Ziman, "Science is Social." In J. Ziman, ed., Puzzles, Problems and Enigmas (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press 1981 [1960]), 27-33. Ziman, Public Knowledge: The Social Dimension of
Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).
3 Ziman, Real Science: What It Is and What It Means (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000);
Reliable Knowledge: An Exploration ofthe Grounds for Beliefin Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1978).
4 For example, S. Jasanoff, G. E. Markle, J. C. Petersen, & T. J. Pinch, eds. Handbook of Science and
Technology Studies (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1995) and S. Fuller, Social Epistemology (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1988).
5 P. A. Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy ofScience (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1983).
6 M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958).
7 Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science.
8 A. Etzioni, The Moral Dimension: Towards a New Economics (New York: The Free Press, 1988).
9 J. Elster, The Cement ofSociety: A Study ofSocial Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
216 JOHNZIMAN
10 R. Millikan, Language, Thought and other Biological Categories (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984).
11 Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science; "The Scope of Hermeneutics in Natural
Science." Studies in the History and Philosophy ofScience, 29 (1998): 273-98; "Nietzsche's Perspectivalism:
A Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science" in B. Babich, ed., Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of
Science: Nietzsche and the Sciences II (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 203-20; Heelan & J. Schulkin,
"Hermeneutical Philosophy and Pragmatism: A Philosophy of Science," Synthese, 115 (1998): 269-302.
12 Ziman, Real Science.
13 H. Joas, G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of his Thought (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1985
[1980]).
14 Heelan, "The Scope of Hermeneutics in Natural Science."
15 W. Singer, "Consciousness From a Neurobiological Perspective" in S. Rose, ed., From Brains to
Consciousness: Essays on the New Sciences of the Mind (London: Penguin, 1998), pp. 228-45.
16 S. Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory ofMind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995);
0. Sacks, Seeing Voices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); C. D. Frith & U. Frith, "Interacting
Minds- A Biological Basis," Science, 286 (1999): I 692-5.
18 Joas, G. H. Mead, p. 188.

20 Joas, G. H. Mead, 109, 161.

22 Ziman, Public Knowledge; Reliable Knowledge; Real Science.
24 Joas, G. H. Mead, 146.
25 M. Billig, Arguing and Thinking: A Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987).

27 P. Johnson-Laird, Mental Models (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
28 Joas, G. H. Mead, chaps. 7 and 8.

29 S. Atran, Cognitive Foundations ofNatural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, I 990).

30 A. Kantorovich, Scientific Discovery: Logic and Tinkering (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1993); P. Munz, Philosophical Darwinism: On the Origin of Knowledge by Means of Natural Selection
(London: Routledge, 1993); H. C. Plotkin, The Nature ofKnowledge: Concerning Adaptations, Instinct and
the Evolution ofIntelligence (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994 ).
31 Sacks, Seeing Voices.
34 Ziman, Reliable Knowledge.
35 Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy ofScience.

36 R. K. Merton, The Sociology ofScience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); 99-136; C. Geertz,
The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

39 Joas, G. H. Mead, 105-108.

40 R. Harre, The Singular Self: An Introduction to the Psychology of Personhood ( London: Sage, 1998).
41 D. C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (London: Penguin, 1991 ).

42 Harre, The Singular Self
43 G. Simmel, Papers on Culture. In D. Frisby & M. Featherstone, eds., Simmel on Culture (London: Sage,
1997 [1894]).
44 Joas, G. H. Mead, I 15.
45 Simmel, Papers on Culture.
46 Etzioni, The Moral Dimension.
47 K. R. Monroe, The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, I 996).
49 J. Habgood, Being a Person: Where Faith and Science Meet (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1998).
50 Ziman, Public Knowledge.
51 Heelan & J. Schulkin, "Hermeneutical Philosophy and Pragmatism: A Philosophy of Science."
52 J. R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality (London: Penguin, 1995).

53 N. Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. J. Bednarz, with D. Baecker (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1995 [1984]).
54 See, for example, Ziman, Models of Disorder: The Theoretical Physics ofHomogeneously Disordered
Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
55 S. A. Kauffman, The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1993); Kauffmann, At Home in the Universe; J. Cohen & I. Stewart, The Collapse of
Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994).
56 Ziman, "Academic Science as a System of Markets," Higher Education Quarterly, 41 (1991): 41-61 and
Ziman, Of One Mind: The Collectivization ofScience (Woodbury, NY: AlP Press, 1995).
57 P. Gross & N. Levitt, Higher Superstition: The Academic Left and its Quarrels with Science (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) and Gross, Levitt, & M. W. Lewis, eds., The Flight from Reason
(New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1996).
58 Simmel, Papers on Culture.
59 M. Calion, J. Law & A. Rip, eds., Mapping the Dynamics of Science and Technology (London:
Macmillan, 1986).
60 Joas, G.H. Mead, p. 156.
61 Ziman, Of One Mind; Ziman, "Darwin and/or Lamarck: Selection and/or Design: Technological
Innovation as an Evolutionary Process," Times Higher Education Supplement June 14, 1996, p. 18; Ziman,
ed., Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
62 Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science and Ziman, Reliable Knowledge.
ROM HARRE
SCIENCE AS THE WORK OF A COMMUNITY
The bare bones logicism that dominated philosophy of science in the fifties and sixties
has given way to a much richer conception of the way science is created as a cognitive
enterprise. Patrick Heelan has been one of the contributors to this enrichment by
drawing in to the discussion philosophical traditions other than the orthodox Russellian
logicism. Enrichment has come from other sources too. The humanity of scientists is
also revealed in the fact that they are social beings, like the rest of humanity. Science
is not the work of automata, programmed with something called "scientific method."
Some, having realized the essential role of concepts and linguistic conventions in how
we see the world have moved to the other extreme, treating both the world and our
knowledge of it as social constructions. We will try to find a point of view which
acknowledges the disciple of logic without falling into the paradoxes of logicism and
which acknowledges the constructive role of concepts and the influence of the
scientific community both on their origins and how they are employed without slipping
in the nihilism of post-modernism.
SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENCE AS A CONTRIBUTION TO PHILOSOPHY

The sociology of communities of scientists has become of great interest recently
because of the importance of two recent insights into the way communities of scientists
decide whether to accept or reject some piece of scientific work, to include it or to
reject it from the canon of established knowledge. The first insight is the failure of
logicist philosophies of science to provide a convincing account of how the methods
of science could justify the beliefs that scientists seem to entertain about the world.
This supposed gap between good reasons and degree of belief has been filled by
explanations based on social forces and social relations among the members of
scientific communities. One tends to believe what those in one's research team believe.
This phenomenon is one of the few results of experimental social psychology in which
one can place much credence. 1 The second insight is that the concepts with which we
construct our descriptions and explanations of the phenomena of nature are not derived
from nature, but applied to nature. What science reveals is partly a function of the
concepts with which we approach the world. If this is so, what is the source of our
concepts? Could it not be those very social forces and social relations that fill the gap
between the criteria of the "official" scientific method and the knowledge claims
219
220 ROM HARRE
accepted by members of the scientific community? In its most extreme form this insight
slips over into post-modernism. According to that philosophical position nature is not
an independent realm to be explored by scientists but a social construction that has
been created by the very people who take themselves to be investigating it.
The growth of science as a major activity among the most gifted of the educated
elite of Western Europe involved two striking presumptions. For many scientists of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries scientific research was not so much dedicated to
the practical interests of human kind but to making the ways of God intelligible to his
creatures. Newton and Boyle explicitly declared their scientific pursuits to be driven
by theological problems. The other presumption, linked in complex ways with the dedi-
cation to the support of religion, was the ideal of the disinterested individual pursuing
truth alone and pursuing it in the ordinary circumstances of life. Sometime during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the myth of the disinterested scientist, of the pur-
suit of knowledge as a solitary and dedicated scholar, dissolved. Gradually, during that
time, the style of scientific writing changed. In the later sixteenth and early seventeenth
century, scientists wrote in the first person, detailing the daily vicissitudes of their re-
search programs. Kepler tells us what he had for lunch on the day he realized that the
orbit of Mars was an ellipse. It was egg salad. Gilbert remarks on the state of the weath-
er, a relevant comment for one studying the behavior of electrically charged bodies.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, scientific writing had taken on much
of its modem form. It appears as an impersonal report from which all particular
circumstances of composition, of the author, and ofthe research procedure itself had
been excluded or deleted. Gooding has traced in detail the transformation of Faraday's
account of the electromotor effect written down in the laboratory into a publishable
description of a procedure that has lost all the marks of its personal origin. 2 Along with
this convention went a reluctance to admit to the passionate driving forces that
animated the research. Faraday's Sandemanian convictions as to the unity of the
universe appear nowhere in his scientific writings. In recent decades attention has
turned to those excluded and deleted marks of origin, and to the personal convictions
that animated the work, if any. Who wrote this? What was the author's life situation
at the time? With whom was he or she working? In what laboratory? What were its
traditions? And so on.
SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE
What is the ultimate product of scientific work, the manipulations of equipment in the
laboratory and the careful attention and scrupulous efforts to eliminate or neutralize
error that we see in people's observational activities? Certainly we can say loosely that
it is items of knowledge, but of several kinds. To pay attention only to prepositionally
expressed knowledge tends to have been the vice of those philosophers who have
gained their conception of science by consulting written and finished scientific texts
as their sources. Authors who have worked in laboratories attach greater importance
to practical or procedural knowledge, know-how, what is it proper or fruitful to do. 3
Know-how, methodology, can look propositional too, when it is expressed in
instructions and rules for the use of the tools of experimental research. But the
propositions describing and enjoining procedures are in the imperative mood.
SCIENCE AS THE WORK OF A COMMUNITY 221
Polanyi made a good case for the general principle that discursive presentations of
knowledge always depend for their intelligibility on a background of tacit knowledge.
This background is often procedural knowledge. He argued that even if we make some
of the tacit explicit, that in its tum will depend for its intelligibility on further levels of
tacit knowledge, and so on. This is not a linear infinite regress but an ever evolving
cycle, from which we can never wholly escape into an entirely explicit corpus of
unrevisable and final knowledge of the natural world.
Propositionally expressed it is not only incomplete in the sense that not everything
needed to make it intelligible is expressible propositionally, but it is also incomplete
in another way. Real scientific thinking is very often carried through by the
manipulation of representations of relevant realities, analogues and models. Some
manipulations are on the laboratory bench. Others are in the mind, and some even
accomplished by the development of mathematical representations of pictorial or iconic
models of hidden causal mechanisms and processes. A great deal of scientific
knowledge is incorporated in models, a good deal of which can be presented
discursively, but perhaps not all. Logicism in philosophy of science not only denies the
living reality of scientific thinking but in the neglect of the role of the community it
also denies the reality of our criteria for accepting and rejecting putative additions to
the stock of authentic scientific knowledge.
CONDITIONS FOR ANY COMMUNITY TO ACIDEVE ITS PURPOSES

Turning to the human relations that sustain science we must first distinguish them from
the material and practical conditions. One must have adequate equipment, and
appropriate (pure) substances to work with, and so on. Of course there are often
economic constraints on providing these material necessities, and sometimes there are
social and psychological constraints. The project leader is a poor politician. The human
conditions are more complex. There must be a work force of skilled members to carry
out the tasks required, and the time to do them properly. And there must also be
sustained social conditions, under which the loyalty of the members to the ideals and
projects of the community can be ensured. The complications arise when we ask how
the members were recruited and how their loyalty to the ideals and even to the persons
of the senior ranks of scientists is achieved and maintained.
Contemporary discussions of the nature of the cognitive and material tools needed
for scientific work have already undermined one of the main motives for philosophical
attention to the social forms of scientific communities. It has been clear for decades that
the logicist account of scientific work is very far from the heart of the matter. Only if
that were to be taken as an adequate and complete account of scientific rationality
would there be a yawning gap between grounds and conclusions. However, when we
look at how the work of science is actually done, we fmd no great gap between
methods and claims. Scientists do not reason inductively using the Aristotelian Square
of Opposition. They build or imagine working models of natural processes and see how
they run. The questions of epistemology are reduced to questions of the degree to
which models and other iconic devices resemble that which they are constructed to
represent. The expression of scientific knowledge discursively, the form of expression
to which logic applies is more or less a matter of the writing of books and the publish-
ing of articles. What then is left of the thrust to interest ourselves in the sociological
222 ROM HARRE
issues after we have escaped from the constraints oflogicism? Attention to the nature
of scientific communities may not be needed to account for knowledge claims, but it
has been shown that these communities display a characteristic morality. There are
moral conditions under which the cognitive and material tools of real scientific research
are most effectively put to work to accomplish the tasks set by the community.
Until recently it has been taken for granted that moral and political philosophy are
relevant to the natural sciences only in so far as it is applications of scientific
knowledge and techniques that are at issue. The methods of acquisition and the content
of the knowledge thus acquired were taken to be morally and politically neutral. There
were some doubts expressed about the morality of certain ways of treating animals in
biological research, but these issues were generally marginal in philosophy of science.
Nuclear physics was assumed to be morally and politically neutral, while nuclear
technology became the focus of intense moral and political scrutiny. This has changed.
The change has come about by bringing the nature of the scientific community into
focus, since it has come to be realized that the possibility of the pursuit of scientific
knowledge depends in part on the way that the research communities function and how
they are structured. In tum this insight has come from the evident failure to account for
belief in the outcome of scientific research wholly in terms of logical relations within
the discourse of science itself. Oppenheimer was ready to take on some of the moral
burden of the use of nuclear weapons but the majority of scientists in the field did not
follow his lead. They preferred to shift the burden to politicians and the military.
Concepts, categories, explanations and interpretations are all brought into being in
the course of the social and particularly linguistic interactions of people of the scientific
community. We could use the metaphor of 'social construction' to capture the feel of
the social processes by which stable forms of these foundational aspects of a science
are forged. There are conferences, debates, writings of many kinds and personal
interactions. As I have remarked, the role of scientific discourse is almost wholly
expository, while the cognitive psychology of the research process is very much that
of representations of other kinds, especially models. It is to the expository discourses
of scientists that the concept of social construction applies most convincingly, because
it is in these activities that the common and socially created and sustained instruments
of language are put to use. It is only too easy to take the forms of the expression of
scientific knowledge for expository purposes as the authentic form of what is known.
If scientific knowledge is identical with its forms of exposition and socially
constructed in that sense what role would the world play? Perhaps what we are inclined
to take as the world is also socially constructed. There is a conceptual element in
perception just as there is in the interpretation of perceptions as matters of fact. If we
must abandon the idea that experiments and disciplined observations are like a
transparent window on to an independent reality both in its existence and in its
attributes, surely there must be as many truths as there are points of view, and none can
claim hegemony. There may be no common core of which each slant discloses an
aspect. Finally the very distinctions between illusion and reality, between objectivity
and subjectivity, between truth and falsity, fact and fiction, are themselves the products
of certain cultural prejudices in favor of all things binary, a characteristic doctrine not
only of structuralism but of modernism generally.
We must acknowledge the power of the "postmodem" thrill for many people
ignorant of science or outside any of its communities. The thrill is occasioned by the
thought that scientists do not really know more about the world than anyone else. The
deliverances of the scientific community making use of its fabled "method" are just one
among many 'takes' on the world and have no specially privileged status that survives
after the deletion of the social forces that favored scientific rationality have been
identified and so nullified. In this essay I am not concerned to demonstrate the
meretricious character of that thrill. The sciences can be re-established as the best
account we have, and indeed could have, of the nature of the world we live in. 4 This
cannot be done by attending only to the expository discourses of the scientific
community. It must be based on a study of the real work of the laboratory. The question
of knowing our own natures is another matter.
Science is a collective activity, both in the manipulation of models and in the
exposition of what is learned from them. It is the work of a community. The question
I want to explore is how far the nature of that community is a factor in our assessment
of the quality and nature of scientific knowledge.
ESTABLISHING AND MAINTAINING NORMS OF CORRECTNESS

The emphasis that I have been placing on science as a practice draws our attention to
the degree to which the successful pursuit of the scientific enterprise depends on there
being ways that the community of scientists can ensure that the practices that constitute
their repertoire of methods are carried out correctly. If scientific discourse must be read
as a set of instructions for building conceptual, iconic and material models of aspects
and regions of Nature, whatever other readings it can sustain, then we must ensure that
the relevant instructions are carried out correctly. Only thus can one have faith in the
outcomes of following them.
Since it would be impossible to check everything that any scientists did and said
there must be a way or ways by which the community ensures compliance with its
norms without every action being checked and rechecked. At least two conditions must
be met: I) There must be some way of ensuring that the practitioners are competent
according to local and current standards. 2) There must be interpersonal trust between
the members of the community. The means by which such norms are maintained is not
through individuals checking up on individuals, a kind of Stasi for the laboratory.
Instead it is maintained through the setting up of institutions within the structure of
which the norms of good work are embedded. Compliance with the norms of good
work is achieved through the obligations that come from membership, and the
commitment to the institution that becoming a member involves. Institutions that can
create obligations and commitments are characterized by several striking attributes.
Some of these could be seen as a moral codes and others as political practices. I shall
emphasize three such attributes in what follows though there may well be others.
In the absence of continual testing of the quality of work performed by members
of the community, the enterprise must depend on the trust that members have in each
other, both to do their part of the work well and to report their findings honestly. How
does a morality of trust work? To understand what is involved one must take account
of the way the concept of 'trust' works. To trust someone (or something) is to believe
in the reliability of that other with respect to the issue in question. I might trust you
with my money but not with my car. What grounds do people have for beliefs of that
sort?
224 ROM HARRE
There are two rather different cases. In the one, and it is the commonest, A believes
in the reliability of B because B occupies a certain role in relation to A. Thus children
trust their parents, and students trust their teachers, without any necessity to carry out
elaborate tests of the honesty and reliability of the one who is trusted. The reciprocal
relation between B and A, is that B, in occupying that role, has certain duties with
respect to A. For example in the role of teacher one has a duty not knowingly to
deceive one's pupils. In a similar way members of the scientific community tend to
trust one another in the role of scientist. In a useful metaphor we can extend the notion
to the apparatus that is commonly used by people doing research in the same area,
without undertaking endless tests and checks as to its reliability. In a certain branch of
organic chemistry the apparatus might be of traditional design and manufactured by a
reliable (trustworthy) instrument maker, and so on. In both the human and material
cases the sources of trust are a priori.
The other source of trust is a posteriori, derived from a growing experience of the
reliability of someone or something. This is the way that trusting relations between
acquaintances are built up and grow into friendships. This way of bringing trust into
being is not common in scientific circles. Though the practical upshot is the same
however the trust is established, a priori or a posteriori, it seems appropriate to treat
the relations of trust so estabiished as different in kind. However when we reflect on
how trust is lost, the two kinds of trusting relations are destroyed in the same way, by
discovering the unreliability of the person or thing that is trusted. A student finds out
that the graduate supervisor is plagiarizing his or her work. 5 A workman notices that
the ladder to the upper part of the building has a rotten rung, and so on. In general trust
of the first sort, once lost cannot be recovered, while that of the second sort may be
restored. Further experience may show that the other does tum out to be reliable most
of the time, and that the failure was an aberration. This asymmetry does suggest that
we should treat the trusting relations as having a different character even though they
are functionally equivalent when established.
In respect of each aspect of the moral and political underpinnings of the scientific
community we must ask: what form does corruption take in the context? With respect
to trust, corruption could involve either deliberately lying to those who trust one,
relying on their trust not to query one's self-serving behavior, or manipulating
apparatus that everyone trusts to give the results one needs for some private and corrupt
purpose. Both forms of corruption turn up from time to time in the scientific
community. And there are many borderline cases.
When Millikan suppressed the many cases which did not support his claim that the
charge on the electron was unity, 6 was that a lie by default? Millikan carried out about
one hundred and twenty experiments in all, only about half of which showed the charge
on the electron to be unity. The remainder suggested other values. In each of the
rejected cases he thought he had reason to suspect that the apparatus was not working
properly. No one would seriously suggest posthumously depriving him of his Nobel
Laureate. Tidying up the results that way is a respectable part of scientific method.
When Sir Cyril Burtt seems to have fabricated evidence that intelligence was inherited
was this inadvertent or deliberate? The records of his earlier studies were destroyed in
the London Blitz of 1940 and he reconstructed them from memory. Was the
reconstruction dishonest, that is knowingly directed to a result he knew he had not
actually obtained but wished he had? Or was he an honest man with a fallible memory
and driven by a prior conviction as to how his studies would have turned out? Who can
say now?
MAINTAINING A TRUSTING COMMUNITY
Rituals ofInitiation. How can a community ensure that adequate interpersonal relations
of trust are created and maintained? Michael Polanyi, in his study of the conditions for
the production of scientific knowledge, was among the first philosophers to analyze
these conditions closely. Among the various conditions he drew attention to there are
two that seem to me of major importance. 1) There must be a mutual commitment of
the members to a common code or tradition, a tradition that does not need to be
established and reestablished generation by generation. For the most part the tradition
is taken for granted, and rarely voiced or queried. 2) There must be means by which
entry to the community is controlled. These means must serve to commit the apprentice
to the code or tradition. There are initiation rites by which new members are inducted
into the community. On the one hand the community recognizes them as proper
members and on the other the new intake commit themselves to the ideals and
standards of the community.
In the case of the scientific community there is an elaborate sequence of
examinations to test competence, coupled with the award of degrees as rites de passage
which we can see as creating or conforming commitment. It is almost impossible for
someone to enter the scientific community as a trusted and trusting member without
passing through this system. Clearly this is not just a system of training, but, as Polanyi
points out, it is also, and perhaps more importantly, a sequence of acts of commitment.
The combination of tests of competence and rituals of initiation ensures that new
members can be trusted in the first sense above. That is, they have established them-
selves in a recognized role. That is why the community of scientists is so hard to pene-
trate from the outside. Why should anyone be trusted who has not passed through these
rites de passage? If the person cannot be trusted, the work they do remains in limbo.
The Rise and Fall ofResearch Centers. These aspects of the creation and maintenance
of scientific communities have been studied by many philosophers and sociologists
since Polanyi's pioneering work. One interesting observation was made by Feuer in his
historical studies of the conditions under which a scientific community prospered. 7 He
noticed that scientific communities flourish for about eighty years and then often
simply disappear. The explanation, he thought, was to be found in the quality of the
people who came forward to join the community during that period. A new scientific
community comes into being by the unorthodox efforts of a small number of
individuals, sometimes only one. They are shunned by the established community as
eccentrics. But by doing work of exceptional originality and power they eventually
attract very talented people who join the community and commit themselves to its point
of view and adopt its techniques. A third generation enters the institution capable only
of repeating the now routinized practices created by the second generation as they gave
order and coherence to the insights of the generation of innovators. Why are there no
innovators among the recruits to the third generation? People of superior talent turn
towards the new centers of creative work that new maverick gurus have set up. And if
226 ROM HARRE
they did try to enter the institutionalized remnants of the old centers they would almost
certainly be turned away, and their innovations rejected.
Most of mainstream academic psychology has reached the 'third generation' stage
in our time. 8 It cannot develop, only proliferate. New approaches must find new
institutional settings, often in other departments of the university. The Feuer cycle takes
about eighty years to run its course. A rather similar conception of the structure of
societies in general was proposed by Pareto, in his theory of elites. 9
Corruption. What forms of corruption would we expect to find in scientific

communities that depend upon and create commitment? Two stand out, when one looks
at the history of scientific institutions.
There is the vice of deliberate exploitation. Some members cynically exploit the
commitment of others to the honor code of the community, a code which makes it
possible at all as a working institution. For example, most experimental results are
taken-for-granted, and this fact can be exploited. Only in rare cases, where the results
are truly novel, is there much vigorous checking and retesting. And example of a
'discovery' that led to a furore of attempts at replication was the alleged phenomenon
of cold fusion. In that case there was no suggestion that the originators had set about
a deliberate fraud. They were maverick gurus whose bid for the role of the founders of
a new research community failed.
Who are the people who exploit the inertia of the scientific community? They are
members of the third Feuer generation. Their interest is only in the institution as the
setting for a career that could equally have been pursued in any of the institutions of
modem society, such as banking or government.
Then there is the decay of the institution itself into a vacuous tradition. This is more
destructive in the long run. It comes about through the survival of a scientific
community in the last stage of the Feuer cycle. The third generation can persist for
many years, simply routinely repeating existing methods of research with a frame work
of models and a "grammar" or repertoire of concepts that has become an unproductive
because empty tradition. Again contemporary mainstream academic psychology
exemplifies this stage of the Feuer cycle.
DIVISION OF SCIENTIFIC LABOR
It has been suggested by several authors, 10 that functional divisions in the work of
science engender social divisions among the personnel. A model for the stratification
of scientific institutions with three social classes seems quite plausible for a broad
range of research centers, including Universities.
The "upper class" consists of such persons as Directors of research institutions,
senior professors and the like. These people often propose research programs,
sometimes as extensions of work they were engaged in when at a lesser level in the
hierarchy. An important part of their role is the obtaining of the resources to carry on
research projects, providing work for others. Writing a grant proposal in the natural
sciences and psychology is rarely aimed at finding resources for the support of the
author alone. There is almost always a "space" allotted to funds for graduate students
and post-docs, who will do the bulk of the experimental work. Another important part
of the role of members of the upper class is the authentication of the quality of the work
by the inclusion of their names in the list of authors that heads a scientific paper. This
is rather like the inclusion of the names of famous persons in the literature that
promotes charity appeals. There is a "middle class" consisting of people who work on
the details of the implementation of the overall program, usually on tasks assigned by
the director. Their jobs are mostly cognitive and supervisory, not doing much of the
work which involves physical contact with apparatus or its construction. The "lower
class" is made up of all those people who manipulate "things," who do experiments,
who gather data on field trips and so on. Only recently has it become customary to
include their names on the authorial roll.
The marks of one's social class are realized in such matters as rights to have one's
name on a published paper, and more especially where in the list \)fnames one's own
name comes. The question of"senior authorship" is an important one, and may be an
occasion of some bitterness. Why? Because the dynamics of the system, as a political
institution, is the gain and loss of credit. Credit takes the form of symbolic capital, or
reputation. The lower class traditionally are not entitled to have their names on the
paper despite the importance of their role in obtaining data, though that convention is
now changing. The director usually has his or her name first or last, but almost never
in the middle of the credit array. Others jockey for position. But the final list of authors
can be read, by those who are familiar with these institutional arrangements, as an icon
of the social standing of the members of the research team.
Credit, in the sense of reputation as symbolic capital, is of enormous importance be-
cause it is the means by which resources to create more credit are obtained. Grants are
forthcoming to those who have already successfully obtained and exploited them,
though that tradition too is changing. Just occasionally a project is funded because of
its originality and promise. In some respects symbolic capital behaves rather like
financial capital in an industrial system. The point of the enterprise is the multiplication
of capital worth. The products of the enterprise, such as published papers, are incidental
to the dynamic, social core of the institution. It does not matter whether GM makes cars
or dockland cranes so long as the shareholders are happy. The three social classes are
to some extent in a dynamic disequilibrium as each attempts to maximize the credit
each gets while minimizing increments to the credit of the others that is drawn from the
common stock.
What would count as political corruption in this picture of scientific communities?
Undeserved accumulation of credit by some sort of fraudulent claim to reputation
obtained at the expense of others would corrupt the system as a suitable matrix for
science. Furthermore, preventing the lower class from obtaining any credit by refusing
their names any place in the published text of a scientific project is a kind of
oppression. As such it is counterproductive. At most it might lead to a short term
increment in reputation at the cost of a loss of the loyal support of those at the work
bench itself, upon whose continued efforts the fate of a project depends. Clearly the
political structure of scientific communities is intimately bound up with their moral
orders in so far as political loyalty is created in the institution so trust can be relied on
amongst the members. It would be unwise to trust the results of work undertaken by
a disloyal employee, or a disenchanted graduate student. It seems to me that the less
hierarchical such a political structure is the more trust is distributed amongst its
members. So the political and the moral aspects fit together. Scientific communities
were once sheltered in and dependent on Universities, manufacturing businesses and
228 ROM HARRE
so on. The management of a science department would be assumed to be the exclusive

responsibility of its members. In recent times this has changed in two ways. The need
for the University to compete for funds on the basis of its research achievements has
led to administrators attempting the micro-management of research. Inevitably this has
led to the favoring of mainstream sureties, however routine, over innovation.
Supporting new ideas is, of necessity, risky and has no guarantee of success. The
growth of academic litigation, for instance over promotions and "merit raises,"
purportedly deserved on the grounds of the research that has been done, has
encouraged administrative interference in the scientific work of departments in
unprecedented ways. Again this leads to the favoring of routine over innovation.
Ironically, because of the inevitability of the Feuer cycle, the rationality of
administrative interference leads to the opposite result from what was intended. The
results of the micro-management of research by administrators leads to the
establishment of a vacuous tradition, an endless repetition of the third phase of the
Feuer cycle. The rationality of the long-run success of science, if it were understood,
would lead to rewards for the innovators.
CONCLUSIONS
Starting as we have with the insight that science is a matter of skilled practices and
public demonstrations of a mastery of experimental techniques in the management of
apparatus, as models of aspects of the extra-laboratory world, rather than a matter of
stocking a library with truths, our attention is drawn to the way that repertoires of prac-
tices might be maintained in a community. What moral and political characteristics
does such a community need so that this will be achieved? In the case of the practices
of science, and the effectiveness of any one of these to amount to a 'bringing forth' of
a phenomenon to order, experiments, demonstrations and so on, there is no disciplinary
institution with its inspectors making random checks on people at work. Doing science
is not like doing one's income tax return. It follows that the moral character of the insti-
tution on which the reliability of its offerings depends is a network of interpersonal
trust, that in some measure extends, metaphorically, even to the instruments with which
the community works. Trust cannot be ensured by threats of force, but only by willing
commitment. It is for that reason that the rituals by which membership is conferred on
someone are of such importance, and that the traditions into which one enters have the
force to bind. It is also this that accounts for the catastrophic effect of scientific fraud,
since it undermines a network of moral relations which has no other sanction than
expulsion from the community. Nevertheless it could not work simply by the holding
out of the threat of exile for the non-conformist. Commitment must have an
overwhelmingly positive force on the standards of behavior of the members of the
community.
Oxford University/Georgetown University
NOTES
1 M. Sherif, Attitude and Attitude Change (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1965).
2 D. G. Gooding, Experiment and the Making ofMeaning: Human Agency in Scientific Observation and
Experiment (Dordrecht: Kluwer, I 990).
3 M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Postcritical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1958).
4 For one recent attempt, seeR. Harre, "Recovering theExperiment" Philosophy 73 (1998): 353-377.
The safest way to plagiarize a student's work is to suggest a joint paper with the student as first author.
One knows very well that the community knows who is who!
6 G. J. Holton, Thematic Origins ofScientific Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).
7 L. Feuer, The Scientific Intellectual: The Psychological and Sociological Origins ofModern Science (New
York: Basic Books, 1963).
8 F. M. Moghaddam, The Specialized Society (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1988).
V. Pareto, The Rise and Fall ofElites (Totowa, N.J: Bedminster Press, 1968).
1 For example, B. Latour and S. Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Construction ofScientific Facts (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1986) and K. Knorr-Cetina, The Manufacture ofKnowledge: An Essay on the
Constructivist and Contextualist Nature ofScience (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1981) have pointed more or
less directly to the political structure of a scientific community in terms of a hierarchy of social classes.
SECTION SUMMARIES
PART TWO
Truth in Art, Visual Space, and the Pragmatic Phenomenology of Perception
In the first contribution in this section, "Patrick Heelan's Interpretation of van Gogh's
'Bedroom at Aries,"' Joseph Margolis discusses Patrick Heelan's account of Van
Gogh's use of a phenomenological model of pictorial perspective. For Margolis, what
is in question is the nature of the relationship between scientific perspective and the
requirements of two-dimensional representation in the aesthetic context of paintings.
Stephen Crowell employs John Ruskin's conceptually charming notion of the
"innocent eye" to pose the question concerning a phenomenologically recoverable
dimension of vision beneath the level of interpretation, where interpretation is
understood as the reading of conventional cultural codes in his essay, "Patrick Heelan's
Innocent Eye." By highlighting the distinctiveness of Patrick Heelan's hermeneutic
theory of perception, Crowell, while quite incidentally resolving some of the questions
raised in Margolis's essay above, can argue that Heelan's hermeneutic reconstruction
of "archaic perception"- as here illuminated through his analysis of Van Gogh's
painti~g - would amount to a recovery of the innocent eye.
Jacques Taminiaux, "Merleau-Ponty's Reading ofHeidegger," traces Heidegger's
reception of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological aesthetics by a reading of Hannah
Arendt's correspondence with Heidegger. This reflection begins with Arendt's reading
of Paul Valery's expression of the opposition of thought and being: "At times I think,
at times I am." Taminiaux contrasts Heidegger's contentious claim relegating Merleau-
Ponty to the "Cartesianism" that for Heidegger characterized the French by returning
to a course given by Merleau-Ponty at the College de France in 1958-59 on Heidegger
in the context ofHusserlian phenomenology.
In "Heidegger's Truth and the Question of Aesthetics," Babette E. Babich argues
that Meyer Shapiro's notoriously cavalier claim discrediting Heidegger's essay on the
origin of the work of art is not merely philosophically irrelevant with regard to
Heidegger's account of the working of art but strangely lacks art historical rigor.
Challenging the fetishistic image of art deriving from the domination of the museum
as privileged locus and the culture of the expert, this essay offers a hermeneutic defense
of Heidegger' s attention to the work of art as the locus of truth as an encounter with the
work of art apart from museum conventions and the power discourse of the art expert
in terms of the energeia of the work of art as the grounded locality of a world entire.
In "Virtue and Virtual Reality in John Trumbull's Pantheon," the art historian Irma
B. Jaffe details John Trumbull's four paintings in the Capitol Rotunda, depicting the
four most decisive moments in the American War oflndependence. Jaffe notes that
231
they purport to show the viewer what actually happened at those events, representing
the actions of men motivated by the virtue of patriotism. For Jaffe, the paintings are
to be seen both in the context of the aesthetic evolution from schematic depictions to
present day visual realism and in the context of the social evolution reflecting the
historical progression from aristocratic to democratic conceptions of the meaning of
virtue.
Leo J. O'Donovan, S.J., offers an art-critical account of the American artist,
Ellsworth Kelly in "Getting at the Rapture of Seeing: Ellsworth Kelly and Visual
Experience." Providing a comprehensive overview of Kelly's artistic career,
O'Donovan documents the wide versatility ofKelly's work, not only recalling the rich
historical scope of art but also in terms of its non-presentative and yet still evocative
character, a vibrant complexity as O'Donovan represents the achievement of Kelly's
work as defying ordinary categorization. This is an "effort" in Kelly's words that
O'Donovan names both a "pilgrimage" and a "promise" observed, the very "rapture of
seeing."
In his review, "Phenomenology and 20th Century Artistic Revolutions," D. Cyril
Barrett, S.J., explores the ways in which aesthetic philosophies and artistic theories (in
all their differences one from another) have sought to respond to the challenge of
artistic revolutions. For Barrett, it turns out to be the phenomenological approach that
best copes with the complexities of understanding artistic revolutions. Barrett's main
references are the visual arts, primarily painting and sculpture, although he briefly
notes the range of artistic revolutions throughout the wider spheres of art.
In her "Grammar(s) of Perception," Barbara Saunders takes up Patrick Heelan's
account of visual perception as "hermeneutic." Of particular significance to Saunders'
are the implications of Heelan's claim that visual perception is the capacity to "read"
appropriate structures of the world and to form perceptual judgments about which these
structures "speak." Offering brief historiographic accounts illustrating the nature of
such structures, Saunders reviews the notion of "reciprocal perception" drawn from
Aristotle's example of the power of the "look" of the menstruating woman, to argue
that both Aristotle's reciprocal perception and Heelan's hermeneutical perception are
"grammars" with similarity to, if not identity with, Wittgensteinian grammar.
Jay Schulkin's account of the "Cognitive Neuroscience of Social Sensibility,"
remarks upon the relevance of Patrick Heelan's work on perception and the philosophy
of science for modem cognitive neuroscience. For Schulkin, Heelan's work in the
philosophy of science emphasized embodied action: perception amidst human practices
orchestrated by the brain. Following recent developments in cognitive neuroscience and
tracing important connections between hermeneutic phenomenology and pragmatism,
Schulkin speculates that we are now more able to appreciate Heelan's work.
In his contribution, "Phenomenology and Pragmatism," Robert Neville contends
that phenomenologists ought regard pragmatism as as "deep" a philosophy as
phenomenology. To the extent that phenomenological philosophy is modernist, it is
for Neville needlessly restrictive, while he argues that pragmatism offers an alternative.
Thus, where phenomenology ambitions to be a science, especially of the facts of
values, pragmatism builds critical evaluation into the very process of philosophical
interpretation, and in this sense is the more humanistic of the approaches. In addition,
pragmatism directly addresses the ontological question and offers hypotheses to answer
it, aided by a philosophy of nature.
JOSEPH MARGOLIS
PATRICK HEELAN'S INTERPRETATION OF

VAN GOGH'S "BEDROOM AT ARLES"
I am intrigued and greatly impressed by Patrick Heelan's analyses of van Gogh's

"Bedroom at Aries" (1888: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, de la Faille 482). 1 Heelan has
surely unearthed a most important finding. The questions that occurred to me in reading
his account arose in the spirit of wanting a fuller statement of his analysis of pictorial
perspective. The paramount issue for me was this: Is the analysis meant to provide a
correct "reading" of this particular painting (possibly, of others very much like it, the
Chicago Art Institute's version for instance); or is it meant to sketch a paradigm of
"task-oriented" (phenomenological) space, hence normative constraints drawn from the
lived-world that govern (or should guide) its "correct" pictorial representation?
I prefer the second question: I find Heelan's argument on the first not implausible;
but I really do doubt that van Gogh could be said to have represented the lived-space
of his bedroom accurately in the perspectival sense. The painting does indeed capture
the general lines of phenomenological perspective: that alone I find extremely
interesting. But the second obviously bears the best reading of the first, and in any case
we do not have enough of Heelan's argument (on the facts about the actual bedroom)
to settle either question. I find it useful, therefore, to pose some pointed questions
about the Bedroom in order to get clearer about pictorial perspective and van Gogh's
sense of the newly discerned "modem" perspective he is said to have captured in the
representation of his life-world. I am not altogether clear about what it means to view
the Bedroom at Aries along the lines Heelan proposes. Perhaps I misunderstand him.
When we think of the beginnings of "scientific" perspective in the context of
painting, which is a very different matter from the beginnings of the science of
"natural" perspective in the context of moving freely about in the world, I think we
should agree that we must begin with attempts at reconstructing Brunelleschi's trials
with his ingenious peephole experiment in viewing the Florentine Baptistry, known as
the Church of Santo Giovanni and the palace of the Signori, the Palazzo Vecchio. The
principal point about Brunelleschi's experiment is that its remarkable effect is produced
only at a single, fixed viewing-point and that no distortions or perspectival changes that
would have occurred in allowing alternative viewing-points were permitted within the
pictorial representation itself. There, with one's eye pressed to the peephole drilled into
the painting (the painted surface facing away from the eye) and holding a mirror so that
233
234 JOSEPH MARGOLIS
one saw the reflection of the painting in a wooden square panel less than a foot in
length - and of course standing at the appropriate point directly across from the
Baptistery, about three braccia inside the middle door of the Santa Maria del Fiore
(according to the well-known account of Antonio Manetti)- when one removed the
mirror, one had the illusion of continuing to see the painting unchanged (because of the
placement of the peephole and the cleverness ofBrunelleschi's use of the color of the
original). 2
Here, the most important consideration, which of course distinguishes very sharply
between Brunelleschi's achievement and Alberti's written instructions about how to
construct a pictorial representation of natural perspective, is that Brunelleschi had
isolated the unique circumstance in which the artificial perspective of two-dimensional
representations of natural space coincides with natural perspective. It is impossible to
capture this coincidence under any other circumstances, which of course generates the
famous problem of what we should mean by the scientific perspective of two-
dimensional representation (departing from Brunelleschi's unique case). Every
solution involves a compromise between our interest in accurately depicting the
perceptible structure of the physical perspective of natural space, or the accurate
depiction of the phenomenological perception of natural space within the further
constraints (according to Heelan's account) of a viewer's perception of his own lived-
world. (Van Gogh's world, for instance, in the Bedroom at Aries.)
The artist is always obliged to reconcile, wherever he has an interest in perspectival
realism, the demands of realism (as they are understood in his own age) and the
demands of the visual coherence of its pictorial representation viewed as a picture. The
decisive factor is this: the normal viewer of a painting changes his point of view while
scanning the piece before him; he is not confined to anything like a Brunelleschian
peephole, or indeed a determinate viewpoint internal to the depicted space. To be sure,
this does not change the depicted perspective of depicted objects, as is the case with
objects seen in nature. The only sense in which depicted objects exhibit perspectival
properties is the sense in which they have the perspectival properties they are depicted
as having.
So it is reasonable to suppose that a painter could intend a fixed "point of view"
from which the natural perspective of the original objects (now depicted) may be
recovered from what is pictorially represented. Still, the actual freedom with which a
viewer views a painting imposes altogether different visual constraints than those of
any merely "scientific" depiction of natural perspective: constraints of pictorial
coherence for instance that nearly always oblige painters to compromise with their
sense of the "science" of pictorial representation. Here, Brunelleschi's experiments are
on the whole unhelpful, for they preclude the normal circumstances in which the
problem of compromising between perspectival accuracy and pictorial interest and
coherence first arises.
Now, it also happens that even a fixed point of view that correctly complements a
given pictorial space may not be a point of view any actual viewer could normally take
up, or take up in the specifically phenomenological sense Heelan favors in his analysis
of the Aries Bedroom. I'm not sure, for instance, whether it would have been possible
for van Gogh to have stood in his own bedroom, looking toward its far end, and to have
seen what he depicts as its perspectived appearance. This depends partly on the scale
of the actual room (which we are not really sure of), which (I'm guessing) would affect
HEELAN'S INTERPRETATION OF VAN GOGH'S BEDROOM 235
the phenomenological relationship between, and the focal features of, the "near,"
"middle," and "far" parts of the room; but it also depends on how, standing on the same
floor on which the bed and chairs rest, a viewer would see the slope of the floor itself.
Consider that, in a relatively short room, the phenomenologically motivated upward

curve of the far end of the floor would not be as marked as it would be in a more
extended floor; and the upward curve of the floor under the viewer's feet would be
relatively indifferent to the curve of the other. It looks to me as if van Gogh probably
strengthened the effect at both ends for pictorial reasons (as in the treatment of the
bed). I cannot see how else to explain the discrepancy between the near end of the bed
and the downward slope of the near part of the floor. To put the point a little too
neatly: the effect of the far floor may be due to the viewer's raising his head and eyes
in order to see the distant floor; and the effect of the near floor may be due to the
viewer's looking down at the floor near his feet, so that the rays of light there are
simply shorter than the (Euclidean) rays at the far end of the room or even in the floor's
middle span. I won't vouch for this. (I am not an expert in these matters.) But it
suggests to me why the two effects may be somewhat independent of one another. It
would be difficult (perhaps impossible) to see the far end of the room distinctly at the
same time one saw the floor beneath one's feet distinctly; van Gogh conveys a sense
of both the near and the far within one continuous pictorial space. He allows the near
floor to slope down (I suspect) in order to offset the possibility that the pictured
bedroom might otherwise appear too small or filled with furniture in an unnatural way
or odd for some other reason.
Unless I'm badly mistaken (it is possible!), the floor should appear to curve up a
little rather than to slope down, in the direction going from the far end of the room to
those parts of the floor that are under the viewer's feet. But if that is so, then the
Bedroom at Arles couldn't be a strictly accurate ("scientific") representation of the
phenomenological perspective of van Gogh's bedroom. Though, to be sure, it could
be (and undoubtedly is) pictorially informed by, guided by, some such consideration.
I hope I am not completely mistaken here, but I cannot see how anyone could stand
in the Bedroom itself and see what is depicted as its phenomenological perspective.
Close studies of Giotto's frescoes apparently - those, for instance, of the Arena
Chapel, more than a century before Brunelleschi's experiments- show how Giotto
very subtly adjusted his devices for confirming the developing realist import of his
interiors and the pictorial "naturalness" of the scenes represented (The Last Supper and
The Wedding Feast at Cana), 3 even though "rules" like those favored by Alberti (actual
mechanical projections from a perspectival grid) or those more informally derived from
Brunelleschi's experiments were clearly not yet at hand. Pictorial or perspectival
realism in paintings simply does not require a scientific representation of physical
perspective. It needs only to be guided by some sense of it, however informally.
Now, the point of all this is that, apart from a Brunelleschian solution, there cannot
be a scientific rule for the pictorial representation ofnatural space if, by that, is meant
a rule that correctly maps the perspectival uniformities of physical space applied
without distortion to the two-dimensional representation of that same space; or, alterna-
tively, if, by that, is meant a rule that correctly maps the perspectival uniformities of
phenomenological perception within one's lived-world- which Heelan supposes
236 JOSEPH MARGOLIS
exhibits the features of the kind of hyperbolic space he fmds in the Aries piece applied,
without distortion, to the pictorial representation of the actual physical space. In short,
there is no natural science of perspectiva artificialis!
But that's not to say that van Gogh did not invent (if indeed he did) a way of
employing the verifiable regularities of phenomenological perception, which depart
from the Euclidean analysis of perceptible physical space, as in the Aries Bedroom.
(In one of his unpublished papers on the painting, Heelan characterizes this space as
collecting a set of "closed finite negatively curved Riemannian spaces.")
I find myself favorably disposed to Heelan's account of van Gogh's general
treatment of the space of his lived-world, even if the perspective depicted in the
Bedroom is not "scientifically" accurate. Certainly, in applying his discovery to the
pictorial space of the painting (which, Heelan explains, can in a way be reconciled with
a Euclidean representation), the Euclidean representation would still be false to van
Gogh's phenomenological world. But it is also obvious that van Gogh could not have
been governed by the "rules" of phenomenological perception in painting the Bedroom.
For example, the space of the Bedroom at Aries is not closed in whatever sense the
life-world of the original may have been "closed"! It's cropped, in order not to
generate perspectival difficulties that might have been troublesome (perhaps
impossible) to solve within the spirit of the visual representation intended. It is entirely
possible for instance that the special pathos of the depicted bed is achieved by its
pictorial placement in the represented space and that that artistic decision may have
dictated the treatment of the sloping floor, which then needed to be cropped in order
not to subvert the general impression of a "task-oriented" space! Obviously, this
interpretation presupposes the reasonableness of arguing that the floor under one's feet
would have appeared to tip up slightly as the floor approached the place at which the
absent viewer stands.
It's entirely possible that, in the Bedroom at Aries, van Gogh found it possible to
paint a scene that would accord with the kind of Riemannian transformation of
Euclidean space Heelan envisages without its being an accurate representation of van
Gogh's actual phenomenological space. There's a very clever possibility there. It
might have permitted us to map the counterpart of a Brunelleschian fixed-view viewing
(on the phenomenological model), ingeniously chosen so as to serve the interests ofthe
pictorial space.
I cannot confirm the reading, but it sounds very reasonable to me. Might it,
however, be the case that the version of the "Bedroom" (F483) in the Musee d'Orsay
(Paris) actually increases the pathos of the bedroom by virtue of a more extreme tipping
of the seats of the two chairs up toward the plane of the canvas itself? That, I admit,
is how F483 strikes my eye in comparison with F482. We're not entirely sure of
course of the actual dimensions of the bedroom, and Heelan shows very convincingly
how even small changes may affect the apparent space of the pictured world.
Of course, we lack a completely satisfactory sense of all the parts of the original
room relative to its length, which might conceivably alter the phenomenological affect
of viewing the room itself- hence, might affect the "scientific" representation of the
"near, middle, and far zones" of the room. If, as I say, the room had been quite small,
would the zonal differences have been pertinent at all or have been as pronounced as
Heelan supposes? If not, then van Gogh may have been guided by his understanding
ofhow larger spaces might appear, which he (then) inventively exploited, pictorially,
HEELAN'S INTERPRETATION OF VAN GOGH'S BEDROOM 237
in the Bedroom at Aries. I don't think that would disturb Heelan's more fundamental
claim, but it would oblige us to adopt a more constructivist reading of the Bedroom at
Aries. The special pathos of the scene might be due more to well-perceived
associations with phenomenological perception than to a scientifically accurate
representation of the phenomenological perspective of van Gogh's actual room viewed
from some assignable position in the room itself.
My point is that it would not detract at all from van Gogh's "discovery" if, in
judging, as a painter, what was needed to make the pictorial scene compelling, van
Gogh adjusted the would-be rules of phenomenological viewing to serve his
representational purpose. This is already, of course, the lesson of Giotto's Arena
frescoes even before the advent of scientific perspective. And certainly, both in Italian
and Flemish painting during the time of Brunelleschi and Alberti, compromises were
always felt to be likely - even necessary. Hence, even if the "Bedroom" were
exceptional in the regard Heelan features, its rigor could not possibly hold in general.
Hubert Damisch, for instance, finds in van Eyck's Amolfini portrait, two vanishing
points within the circle of the mirror and Erwin Panofsky finds four vanishing points
in the entire composition. 4 And, of course, the Amolfini looks entirely "natural."
Furthermore, a painting like Masaccio's Tribute Money (in the Brancacci Chapel, Santa
Maria della Carmine, in Florence), painted shortly after Brunelleschi's experiment,
though it makes its obeisance to Brunelleschi's conception, really features the peculiar
strength of what has been called "horizon line isocephaly" (that is, the mechanical
lining up of heads horizontally in a space that might otherwise have exhibited some
marked perspectival foreshortening from foreground to receding distance. 5
It's possible that, as Heelan suggests, the confirmation of van Gogh's scientific
discovery prepares the way for even more interesting inquiries into the workings of the
human brain. I agree that such questions must be managed "top-down." But I frankly
see no clear way by which to segregate biological and cultural elements in this regard;
certainly not in the perception of paintings (and, I daresay, not in the phenomenology
of human perception generally). Heelan, I believe, is far more sanguine here than I am.
I shall have to wait to see. I am reminded that J. J. Gibson found himself utterly baffled
by the difficulty of decoding the "information" in two-dimensional paintings. 6 I believe
the problem is deeper than it may appear: there's a pictorial tertium to conjure with.
But I'm willing to wait for further evidence supporting Heelan's intuitions. He's led
me to think more carefully about the matter than I would otherwise.
Temple University
NOTES
1 I have seen drafts of two closely-related papers of Heelan's: one titled "Visual Space as Variable and
Task-Oriented: A Study of Van Gogh's 'Modern' Use of Scientific Perspective"; the other, "Van Gogh's
'Modern' Use of Perspective." Both are as yet unpublished. The second emphasizes van Gogh's discovery
of a scientific, non-Euclidean "task-oriented" perception of physical space (which is usually characterized
in terms of Euclidean perspective); hence, Heelan's purpose is primarily to correct the record about van
Gogh's representational intention. He is bent on exploring the possibility of a general theory of phenomeno-
logical perception in task-oriented space, perhaps also on certain normative constraints on the right depiction
of such a space. What Heelan offers in this regard accords with the general lines of the argument in Patrick
Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
238 JOSEPH MARGOLIS
See John White, The Birth and Rebirth ofPictorial Space, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1987), Ch. 8.
3 See White, The Birth and Rebirth ofPictorial Space, Ch. 2.
See Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995),
130-131; and Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting: Its Origins and Character, vol. I (New York:
HarperandRow, 1971), 7.
5 See Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., The Renaissance Recovery ofLinear Perspective (New York: Harper and
Row, 1976), 26-29.
6 See J. J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), Pt.
IV.
STEVEN CROWELL
PATRICK HEELAN'S INNOCENT EYE
In 1816 William Hazlitt concluded a review of Frederick Turner's painting with the
remark that "All is without form and void. Someone said of his landscapes that they
were pictures ofnothing, and very like." 1 It is doubtless in response to such jibes that
John Ruskin wrote, in defense of Turner, that "the whole technical power of painting
depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence ofthe eye; that is to say,
of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without
consciousness of what they signify, - as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted
with sight."2 In light of Western art's ancient aspiration to make a representation that
could fool the eye into taking it for the thing itself, the conceit of the "innocent eye"
denotes something of a departure. Basing himself on the sense-data psychology of the
19th century, Ruskin is asking what it is that belongs to vision as such, to what is "seen"
prior to being interpreted in terms of what we "know." On this view, Turner would
show us what the eye sees, unencumbered by the "prejudices of tradition." 3 What
makes this a departure from the classical ambition is that visual truth is no longer
measured against the ideal of illusion; indeed, it is against the kind of illusionistic
image mastered by painters in the Western tradition since the Renaissance that Turner's
works must be defended. The painter's allegiance is not to the culturally and
traditionally determined motif, but to something deeper that can be brought to light
only with the help of art. As the poet Wallace Stevens phrased it, "The eye's plain
version is a thing apart I The Vulgate of experience."4
As the author of a theory of perception that emphasizes the interpretive character
of vision and rejects the neo-Kantian idea of neutral visual "givens" that subsequently
come to be "formed" by cultural codes and conventions, Patrick Heelan would seem
to be an unlikely ally for Ruskin. And indeed, in Heelan's Space-Perception and the
Philosophy ofScience we read that "what is given to vision in any epoch is a function
of what is regarded as visually significant at that epoch and therefore of the
expectations and anticipations ofhuman perceivers."5 If what is visualiy given is thus
imbricated in history, and so in the changing cultural practices that govern the expecta-
tions and interests of perceivers, there would seem to be little room for "the eye's plain
version." Instead, Heelan would seem to belong among those cultural studies
conventionalists for whom "nature" is a construct and perception - which in all its
modalities purports to be our opening onto the world - merely a reflection of ideology.
A closer look at Heelan's position tells a different story, however. For it is not a theory
239
240 STEVEN CROWELL
that simply incorporates perception into a general semiotics or hermeneutics (as is

typical of cultural studies), but a hermeneutic theory of perception itself. And this
difference- as I argue in what follows- entails a version of the innocent eye in which
both the idea that perception has a history and that how things look is a function of
their (and our) nature are preserved.
1. THE INNOCENT EYE DEBATE
The virtues of Heelan's position come to light when we reflect on how Ruskin's
concept was taken up by Ernst Gombrich and his critics. In his highly influential essay
on visual imagery, Art and Illusion, Gombrich set the stage for the later wholesale
rejection of the innocent eye by undermining the idea that the artistic image is
particularly a function of what is "seen" at all. Arguing that the image an artist
produces is as much a function of the "schema" she has inherited from the history of
painting as it is a function of anything she simply sees, Gombrich suggested that art
history be pursued as a study precisely of the transformation of these painterly
conventions, types, and stereotypes- that is, as "iconology" or the "linguistics of the
visual image. " 6 Art history could study the history of representation at a syntactic level,
so to speak, while bracketing the traditional semantic (and teleological) question of
adequacy to the referent. In Gombrich, this proto-semiotic approach to the visual image
is tied up with a similar account of perception. If the artist paints more in accord with
received schemata, or visual codes, than with what is given to the eye, it is because the
eye itself operates according to a similar conventionalism. If the paintings of Giotto
were admired for their naturalism by his contemporaries, while to us they appear
obviously coded, is this not because Giotto's contemporaries did not perceive the world
as we do? Mustn't there be a history of perception and not just of visual representation?
Influenced by Karl Popper's philosophy of science, Gombrich proposed just such
a theory of perception as a kind of "trial and error." 7 Perceiving is an experimental
process that aims to make sense of its surroundings; as such, it is always conceptually
informed, guided by what might broadly be called "theory." The fit between theory
(Gombrich's perceptual "schemata") and data (still, for Gombrich, the mentalistically
conceived data of sense) is a Kantian one: the two cannot be separated but together
constitute visual truth. What we see, the perceptually given, is a Gestalt that changes
historically as schemata arise and are abandoned. On such a view it makes no sense to
speak of what things look like prior to theory. To attempt to suppress what we know
in favor of what we merely see is to attempt to suppress vision altogether. There is no
unmediated contact between the mind and the visual world, so there is no room for an
innocent eye in Ruskin's sense: "the innocent eye is a myth." 8
Gombrich's view that perception is always mediated- the view that visual truth is
always a function of both concept and sense- also entails for him that it never gives
us direct access to the world. By embracing the mentalistic conception according to
which both elements of perception - sense and concept - are psychological, Gombrich
treats the data of sense as integral parts of the (immanent) perceptual field. Such a view
leads to insoluble problems, but they can be avoided, as Heelan demonstrates, if
perception is understood as both mediated and direct; that is, in contrast to the Kantian
view, if mediation is not the constitution of mental representations but the means
whereby the world is revealed.
PATRICK HEELAN'S INNOCENT EYE 241
The price Gombrich pays for his mentalistic view of mediation shows up in his
ambivalence about Western naturalistic representation. For while his rejection of the
innocent eye might appear complete, and his historicizing of the visual image
thoroughgoing, the Popperian model of vision as experiment is at odds with the purely
syntactic or iconological theory of representation. It calls for a semantic account that
contests conventionalism. 9 Thus Gombrich writes that ''the history of naturalism in art"
is the "history of a most successful experiment, the real discovery of appearances." But
because perception itself is never a direct opening onto the world, he must immediately
"place a question mark" after the term "discovery." One can only discover ''what was
already there," and this, in tum, "implies the idea of the innocent eye, the idea, that is,
that we really 'ought' to see those colored patches" that are the supposedly unmediated
deliverances of pure vision. Still, "we cannot speak of experiments without some
standard by which to judge their success or failure," and nothing can serve this function
in relation to the naturalistic image but what we see: "visual truth." 10
As Norman Bryson argues in his deconstruction of this moment in Gombrich's
theory, the latter is here forced to embrace a non-Ruskinian version of the innocent eye
that leads him back to the oldest guiding idea of art history in the West - the idea,
namely, of the Essential Copy. According to that view, the goal of painting is to
reproduce ''universal visual experience," a term Bryson glosses by appeal to Husserl's
concept of the natural attitude. 11 In the natural attitude, we take for granted that there
is an ahistorical, culturally immutable substrate of "optical truth" - not the colored
patches that Gombrich and Ruskin attribute to the innocent eye, but the perceived
world itself The history of naturalistic painting in the West would thus be the story of
a continual approximation to the Essential Copy of this visual experience. Deviations
from it are explained as distortions brought about by incompetence or by a willful
"withdrawal into privacy" that Bryson terms "style." 12 The ideal painting, then, would
be one in which there were no stylistic features, indicative of the individual hand, at all.
To undermine this ideal it is not enough to argue that perception is historically and
culturally relative, since as long as one views perception as direct (even if mediated)
one might still hold that within each cultural formation (or lifeworld) a visual
representation "adequate" to its "natural" perception might be produced. 13 In denying
that perception is direct - since what we see is not the world but a mental image
produced by the working of the schema- Gombrich, on Bryson's reading, wants to go
further: "The world reflected by the painting exists within the consciousness of the
painter" -no longer as "retinal image" or stimulus but as "mental image processed by
the brain out of the neural messages arriving from the retinal membrane." Hence there
can be no "direct access between consciousness and the outer world." 14 But then there
can be no talk of progress in the history of the naturalistic image either, and, as Bryson
argues, Gombrich's view is "in open contradiction with itself" In order for
"falsification" to occur (hence for progress to be recognized), it must be possible to
bypass the operation of the schema. To falsify my perceptual "theory" in light of
"observations that contradict them," I must be capable of just the sort of "dyadic
encounter between self and world with all the qualities of directness and absence of
mediation familiar from innocent ... vision." 15 In its progressivist aspect, then,
Gombrich's view remains beholden to the idea of the Essential Copy, and so to the
innocent eye, conceived as the ahistorical "universal visual experience" of the natural
attitude.
242 STEVEN CROWELL
Given the ambiguities ofGombrich's position, it is tempting to adopt the kind of

thoroughgoing conventionalism characteristic of recent cultural studies. An influential
example of this is W. J. T. Mitchell's book, lconology, which attacks the traditional
idea that there is a radical distinction between linguistic and visual images. Supposed
phenomenological differences are not sufficient to establish an essential distinction
between these two sorts of "sign," and failure to note this causes Gombrich to go
astray. For it leads him, on Mitchell's reading, to draw an erroneous distinction
between "natural" and "artificial" signs: No one imagines that there is any important
resemblance between the linguistic sign and that which it represents, but the idea of
resemblance seems to present itself naturally with regard to visual images. Hence,
despite his insight into the constructed character of perception, Gombrich inconsistently
entertains the thesis that Western naturalistic representation is a progressive
development toward what is finally beyond convention, namely, "natural human vision
and objective external space." 16 But if there is no essential difference between linguistic
and visual signs- if both are equally conventional- then the progressivist thesis cannot
get off the ground.
In borrowing his title from Gombrich, Mitchell signals his intention to take the
latter's idea of a "linguistics of the visual image" seriously. Adopting Nelson
Goodman's argument that "resemblance" by itself can do little work- since anything
can resemble anything else in some respect or other- Mitchell treats the visual image
as a code every bit as conventional as, on Saussurre's view, the linguistic sign is. This
has implications not only for the visual image but for vision itself, since it rests on the
denial that "looks like" is an informative explanation of how the visual image
resembles its referent. 17 If it is not informative to say that my portrait looks like me
(since the supposed resemblance is a function of a culturally specific "grammar" of
visual differences), it is for the same reason uninformative to say that I look like my
brother. That, too, is based upon wholly conventional "codes" that establish what is to
count as resemblance. According to Mitchell, then, the distinction between the natural
and the conventional reduces to the difference between what is easily learned and what
is learned only with difficulty. Once again, there can be no innocent eye, that is, no
visual experience that would be independent of the thoroughly cultural and
conventional "linguistics of the visual image." Seeing, on this view, is no more natural
than is reading.
For Arthur Danto, this shows that the point has been pushed too far. Since reading
is something that no animal and only some human beings manage to accomplish, while
seeing is something that they all do more or less well, Danto argues that there are
indeed "innocent pictorial eyes." 18 The key here is to re-establish a natural connection
between (some) visual representation and visual experience. This cannot be done by
reviving Gombrich's claim that visual images are natural signs, since the notion of
"sign" precludes naturalization: signs must be interpreted and so, as Mitchell would
say, "learned." Thus Danto rejects the idea that visual data (Ruskin's "flat stains of
color") are signs at all. In a painting we see things and not ("or not just") the flat stains
of color. And the latter "do not even stand to these things as words do to letters, so that
we learn to read colors as forms. We do not learn to read the flat stained alphabet,
either of the world or of pictures." 19 If interpretation is understood on the model of
reading, as learning our way about in a thoroughly conventional code like the written
word, then perception - and the pictorial competence that goes with it - is not a matter
of interpretation.
Danto is not impressed by the argument from philosophy of science that all
observation is "theory-laden." There is a sense in which this is right, but it cannot
undermine the idea of an innocent pictorial eye. On the one hand, if we take "theory"
fairly strictly (as it appears in debates within the philosophy of science), then whatever
might be said about observation, it is not the case that perception is theory-laden.
"Visual perception is too vital to animal survival for the visual system to be deeply
penetrable, or penetrable at all, to theory" in that sense. 20 If we adopt a more generous
interpretation of"interpretation" (or theory) as any form of conceptuality, it becomes
more difficult to claim that human visual perception is not interpretive. Seeing
something as something is always informed by some socio-historical, cultural content
or other. Yet even here, Danto marshals experimental evidence from animal
psychology to suggest that visual competence is independent of the context of
interpretation. Pigeons, it seems, exhibit "pictorial competence"- an ability to respond
to pictures of things as if they were the things they were pictures of. And if that is so,
it seems reasonable to conclude that "pictorial competence is not in any obvious way
affected by historical or cultural differences."21 Further, if we can explain this ability
only by assuming certain "parities" between "perception and pictorial perception," then
"neither do cultural and historical differences penetrate perception." Though such
differences do of course affect the way we interpret what we perceive, "a great many
of our pictorial responses must then take place beneath the threshold of
interpretation.'m There is, therefore, an innocent eye, a pre-interpretive seeing. The
question is, what does it see?
Here Danto's anti-interpretive stance betrays its constructive- and indeed slightly
speculative - character. Third-person evidence from animal psychology is vulnerable
to the first-person phenomenological challenge to say what, in fact, is seen. Any answer
that can be articulated will avail itself of some specific context of intelligibility and
will thus appear to be a matter of interpretive convention, and not nature, after all. 23 If
one hopes to block the implausibly thoroughgoing conventionalism espoused by
Mitchell, then, it would be desirable to have an account of perception that could
establish the "innocence" of the eye phenomenologically, rather than by third-person
inferences to what "must be" the case. Just this is accomplished in Patrick Heelan's
theory of perception. For he shows that to say that pictorial competence is natural, and
that perception does not depend on mastering arbitrary cultural codes, is not to say that
it is not hermeneutic. Heelan's theory of space perception allows us to preserve the
grain of truth on each side of the innocent eye debate.
2. HERMENEUTIC PERCEPTION
At first it appears that Heelan simply rejects the innocent eye. Like Bryson, he
associates it with the natural attitude, "the attitude that supposes that we can gaze on
the world with an 'innocent eye,' and that what we find unexamined in this way is real
and as such privileged.''24 For Heelan, the innocence of the natural attitude is merely
the forgotten residue of interpretation: "All intentionality, even that operative in
perception, is essentially hermeneutical, since it is concerned with making sense of our
experience" - where "making sense" is to be contrasted with simply "taking in. " 25
244 STEVEN CROWELL
Furthermore, Heelan explicitly likens perception to reading: perception is not only

"causal" but also "has the capacity to 'read' the appropriate structures in the world,"
and what it reads are "texts" in an appropriately extended sense of the word. 26 If there
is nothing that is "beneath the level of interpretation" in perception, how can we avoid
the conclusion that the innocent eye is a myth?
A closer look, however, shows that Heelan's theory involves a set of distinctions
that transform this conclusion into its opposite. The key is Heelan's commitment to the
phenomenological approach. As formulated by Merleau-Ponty, whom Heelan follows,
a descriptive phenomenology of perception must acknowledge perception's claim to
be a direct opening onto the world, since the absence of mediating acts such as
"deductive or inductive inferences from more elementary or primitive prior knowns
presented in experience" is part of its descriptive character. 27 But if the absence of such
acts signifies the directness of perception, this does not phenomenologically preclude
other forms of mediation. In particular, according to Heelan, "perceptual information
is embodied in the world analogously to the way a meaning is embodied in a book;" it
has a "textual" structure. 28 In examining this structure it is important to remember that
the reference to texts and books is precisely an analogy. For while the similarities
between perception and reading clarify how perception can have a history, it is the
dissimilarities that explain why this history is not exclusively a matter of decoding
conventional signs.
Heelan distinguishes between two senses of perceptual information. In the first
sense - dubbed "information 1" - information is what is "picked up" from the world,
roughly in a causal sense. Perception is, however, not simply a causal response to
information 1 Rather, the latter is analogous to a text; it is a "structure of related
differences within a larger and complex structure of differentiable states that function
like a language." 29 These states are, like words, "signs" that can be "read" by
appropriately skilled perceivers in such a way that information in the second sense
("information2") is gained through them: the "meaning" of the text. In the case of
perception this meaning is a "state of the world. " 30 Just as skilled readers do not grasp
information 1 - i.e., signs in the sense of words, letters, and so on - as objects in the
world but allow them to function like windows opening directly on to information2, the
meaning, so, for Heelan, perceptual information 1 is a sign that functions like a window
on the world. 31 Yet what is seen from this window is not simply of one character (as it
would be on the neo-Kantian model of the mind imposing order through a single set of
categories), since the relation between any information 1 system and the yield in
information2 is to a certain extent indeterminate: "There is no necessary unique one-to-
one mapping between states of information 1 and states of information2, only affinities
between them," and the particular affinities emphasized will be a function of "the
context chosen for its interpretation" and "the human interests of those who use it." 32
Heelan's Space-Perception and the Philosophy ofScience elaborates this thesis through
analyses of perceived space that are meant to establish how the "readable technologies"
of scientific instrumentation can function as information 1 for the direct perception of
the "theoretical entities" of science. As provocative as this aspect of Heelan's theory
is, however, we shall ignore it and explore how what he calls "archaic" or "unaided"
perception yields a hermeneutic version of the innocent eye.
It might well seem that we are already precluded from talking about an innocent eye
or ''unaided perception" if, with Heelan, we liken perceptual information1 to a text and
perception to the reading of signs. Are not signs always conventional codes that, as
Mitchell insisted against Gombrich's notion of natural signs, one must always learn
how to read? Here lies the importance of the disanalogy in Heelan's appeal to the
metaphor of reading, for it underwrites a version of the distinction between natural and
conventional signs- between "texts" that are "either natural or artificial states of the
world"33 -that renders the concept of sign itself somewhat inappropriate. First, though
the literary sign (word, text) serves as a window and is not itself an object attended to
in reading, it can become such an object; that is, the information 1 of reading can be
identified "by the perceiver with a given worldly structure [the word or text] simply by
a redirection of attention in the perceptual field." 34 Similarly, some "texts" of
perception are of this sort: those perceptual information 1 systems that consist of
"readable technologies" (scientific instrumentation) or the "carpentered environment"
of modern life are themselves evident perceptually and can be grasped as such by
perceivers through a suitable change in attention. However, not all information 1
systems are in evidence in this way. The "natural" text of perception involves "signs"
comprised of"those optical structures incident on the eye which function as perceptual
stimuli, that is, as evocative of perceptual acts."35 Such a text can be "uncovered in its
structure and analyzed by psychophysical studies," but not from the first-person point
of view of ordinary perceivers. 36 Thus, if this is a code, it is not one that needs to be
learned; and if these stimuli need to be interpreted or read in order to yield perceptual
meaning (information 2), the interpretation is based on a core of"'deep' or 'primordial'
structures that function as conditions of possibility of all human subjectivity and all
perceptual worlds." 37 Finally, if perception has a history, this does not mean that the
category of the natural must itself be historicized. In uncovering what he calls "the
shape of archaic perception" - a perception whose "text" is "written in the optical
vocabulary of angular orientation and elementary binocular and monocular parallax"38
- Heelan himself suggests the persistence of an innocent eye, one whose deliverances
are independent of the culturally variable, because conventional, texts of the visual
environment.
But given that the text interpreted by archaic perception is not such as can become
evident from the first-person point of view, and that the innocence of the eye has
always already been "corrupted" by its entanglement in the artificial sign-systems that
make up the historico-cultural lifeworld, how can the very existence, let alone the
character, of archaic perception be established phenomenologically? What is the
evidence that there is such a thing?
Here Heelan introduces the paired notions of"visual space" and "pictorial vision."
Visual space is the "real life visual environment," as opposed to "physical space" that
is established geometrically by a "rule according to which distances are assigned to
intervals by comparing them with a standard unit interval."39 In visual space, distance
and other spatial relations between things are not eo ipso standardized according to a
metric imposed on them. If they obey any rule, it is one that belongs to perception
itself. If, as Heelan assumes for the sake of argument, 40 physical space is essentially
Euclidean, can the same be said of visual space and the relations of things within it?
How can we determine what visual space is like? We can do so, Heelan argues,
because we possess the concept of "pictorial vision." Pictorial vision is "the art of
seeing objects as pictorial, that is, as constructed according to rational (i.e., in this case
geometrical) principles out of basic visual pictorial elements such as points, segments
246 STEVEN CROWELL
of lines, patches of plane surfaces, and the color and light on these patches. "41 Pictorial
vision does not primarily have to do with making artistic representations, but with "the
pictorial aspects of perceptual objects themselves."42 It is a way of attending to the
perceptual field so that the properties of visual space become evident. Nevertheless,
with the concept of pictorial vision in place Heelan can tum to works of art as evidence
for the structure of visual space, since it is at least possible that the production of
artistic images says something about the pictorial vision of the artist. Some works of
art can be treated as phenomenological "reports" on the constitution of the visual
field. 43
For instance, the "artificial perspective" developed in the Renaissance was,
according to Heelan, just such a practice that sought the rules for arranging "images"
- that is, a "set of marks" arranged in "real space," which is not itself a part of the
visual space44 - in such a way that a "pictorial space" is constituted that "pictures some
object as it is perceived to be."45 Central to this practice is its inclusion of the Euclidean
notion of an "infinite." Pictorial vision is construed as operating within a Euclidean
visual space; that is, things visualized in space are understood as subject to regular
Euclidean transformations as they recede from the perceptually near zone to an infinite
vanishing point. For this artistic practice to yield a successful rule for the representation
of visual space, that space must exhibit a visual correlate of the mathematical infinite.
So does it?
It is certainly the case that the technique was widely accepted as successfully
rendering visual space, but is this to be explained by saying, with Danto and Gombrich,
that pictorial reality is just timelessly like that? Does such an artistic practice yield a
reliable phenomenological "report" on the visual field? W. J. T. Mitchell, speaking for
the strong conventionalists, denies that such success had anything to do with how
things look. Rather "an entire civilization" could be convinced that "it possessed an
infallible method of representation" only because such pictorial construction followed
codes that reflected "a particular historical formation, an ideology associated with the
rise of modem science and the emergence of capitalist economies" and could thus be
read as "the figure of strategic, predatory perception itself."46 Classical perspective
could be taken as reproducing some natural and universal way of seeing only because
it operated with easily read visual conventions originating in the culture's interest in
controlling, consuming, and predicting the things depicted. Since these interests remain
ours, it is hard for us to discern the conventionality of artificial perspective - to see the
codes as codes. The great significance of Patrick Heelan's account of this success lies
in its showing how Mitchell can be right in what he denies - that Western naturalism
reflects the ahistorical and culturally universal character of visual reality- while being
wrong in what he affirms - that visual space and pictorial reality are conventional
through and through. And it is in following out Heelan's explanation that we can find
evidence for archaic perception, the deliverances of an innocent eye.
3. LOOKING UPON ORIGINS
On Heelan's view, the seeming naturalness of the Euclidean pictorial space constructed
in artificial perspective cannot be explained by saying that "the stimulus produced by
the image surface is in all relevant aspects identical with that produced by the object
itself."47 As we have seen, any stimulus ("information 1") underdetermines what is seen
("information2"}: the latter must be mediated in various ways. For instance, one must
possess "subjectively the embodied intentionality structure necessary to perform the
expected hermeneutic of experience" in which a particular sort of object can be given;
and, further, one must have "some prior acquaintance with the kind of thing that is
being represented."48 Nevertheless, Heelan rejects the inference that these mediations
must be entirely conventional. "Conventions are rules adopted by public agreement,"
while perceptual intentions (as the persistence of visual illusion shows) can override
conventions, indeed, can override what we "know" altogether. 49 But if the seeming
naturalness of Euclidean representation is neither a function of "immaculate
perception" (the stimulus theory) nor of convention in the sense of public agreement,
what is its origin?
Here Heelan's hermeneutic theory comes close to the historical thesis of Mitchell.
Noting that "Euclidean perception ... is linked to a set of psychophysical parameters
that are more appropriate to a universal 'godlike' observer than to one whose natural
and experienced setting is to be at the center of a World," Heelan asks how we could
have come to have "such native ability to respond like 'godlike' observers in ordinary
life. " 50 The seeming naturalness of painting in the manner of artificial perspective is a
function of this puzzling "native ability" and provides the clue to the latter. For
consider what the perspective system accomplishes. In it the transformations of objects
represented in the visual field (that is, the variations on their physical shape dictated by
the system of perspective) are mathematically regular or uniform, whether they are
represented in the perceptually near or the perceptually distant zones. 51 Just this
mathematical uniformity of the projection characterizes a "godlike" view in Heelan's
sense: it is not a way of tracking how things look from "here" (i.e., from the embodied
placement of a permanently "centered" perceiver}, but rather how the physical shape
(the shape grasped by a godlike view from nowhere) of the thing would be altered
according to a uniform rule of transformation. 52 If such representations look natural to
us, as non-godlike embodied perceivers, this can only be because something in our
perceptual environment serves the function that the mathematical rule of projection
serves in the representation - the function, namely, of rendering the expected
transformations of the visual shape of objects in the perceptual field uniform across
near and distant zones. And like Mitchell, Heelan argues that such a mode of
perception is historically specific and learned. What he calls "Euclidean vision" is
made possible by the codes embedded in the specific artificial environment that became
predominant in the "early fourteen hundreds." 53 Playing the role ofthe mathematical
rule employed in perspectival representation are "the artefacts of the carpentered
environment, such as the architectural modules that spell out the units of length, width,
and depth, and so make visible the spatial frame of reference. Vision interprets these
codes. They play the role not of causes of vision but of systems of signs or 'texts' to
be interpreted or 'read' by vision."54 Thus we effortlessly see things as a godlike
observer would, though we are anything but. The "eye's plain version" is not innocent;
it is the very image of hubris, the product of a history that usurps divine prerogatives.
Yet Heelan's story, unlike Mitchell's, does not end there. For even if the seeming
naturalness of Euclidean vision is explained as an historical product, not all vision is
in this sense equally an historical product. Even in our fallen state, there are, for
Heelan, traces of an innocent eye, "residues of a visual world that our culture has
1ost."55 And there are artists- van Gogh premier among them- whose work provides
248 STEVEN CROWELL
access to that "Vulgate of experience." Of van Gogh, Heelan writes that "his
projections [in paintings such as "Bedroom at Aries"] differ in what appear to be
significant and systematic ways from what would be expected of a classical projection
in Euclidean space."56 On Heelan's account, however, these differences are neither a
departure from some Euclidean visual truth (a matter of"style" in Bryson's sense of
a departure from the Essential Copy) nor merely a new convention or set of painterly
codes. Rather, van Gogh "experienced the forms of everyday things in a different and
(to him) 'truer' space, and [ ... ] his schema of marks on the canvas was intended to
make manifest the forms of objects as experienced in this 'truer' way, in this 'truer'
space." 57 The result of Heelan's analysis of this "schema of marks on canvas" is
precisely to remove the scare-quotes from "truer." Van Gogh's painting is a clue to van
Gogh's vision, a vision that looks upon the world with an innocent eye, that is, which
looks upon origins, the sedimented world of archaic vision.
Not even the outline of Heelan's argument can be given here, but the crux lies in
his claim that the departures from Euclidean expectations found in van Gogh's
depiction of objects in his bedroom follow the rule of a projection in Riemannian or
"hyperbolic" space, and that such painting is a clue to van Gogh's "anomalous visual
World."58 Hyperbolic space can be modeled, roughly, as mapping "the infinity of the
Euclidean model ... on the inside of a finite sphere having the observer as its center."59
In a depiction following hyperbolic rather than Euclidean projection, the transformation
of the physical shape of objects will be irregular depending on whether they occupy
the near perceptual zone, where they tend to obey Euclidean expectations, or the distant
zone, where they do not. To a perceiver occupying such a world, any transformation
of the physical shape of things that followed the Euclidean projection in regular fashion
from near to distant zones would yield the experience of an "illusion" - that is, the
identity of the object would become subject to doubt on perceptual grounds. For us, in
contrast, it is the emergence of hyperbolic, irregular transformations (for instance, the
apparently great size of the moon at the horizon) that gives rise to the experience of
"illusion" and calls for explanation.
But even if it is legitimate to infer from van Gogh's painting to a visual reality that
obeys rules of hyperbolic transformation, it is admittedly an "anomalous" one. Why
should we think that that visual reality is any less an artefact than the carpentered
Euclidean one that we effortlessly and normally occupy? Is Heelan really committed
to the claim that van Gogh's eye is innocent, that his painting gives us something like
the Essential Copy of"the eye's plain version ... the Vulgate of experience"?
I believe he is committed to such a view, the consequence of a hermeneutic theory
of perception that grasps vision as interpretive while also attending to the
phenomenologically decisive fact that it claims to give us the object directly. For the
history of perception turns out to be anything but the story of shifting and arbitrary
conventions. Instead, van Gogh uncovers for us the persistence of an "archaic"
perception, the visual reality that belongs to us as centered, embodied perceivers as
such. Van Gogh's visual reality is anomalous not because it is a pathological distortion
of visual truth, but because visual truth has been buried - phenomenologically
sedimented - in the course of human history to such an extent that its "text" is barely
legible. "Hyperbolic perception" - that is, the pictorial reality of a visual world whose
space is modeled by Riemannian or hyperbolic geometry - does not depend on any
historically contingent "clues" in the visual environment - such as the "engineered
forms" that make Euclidean perception possible- but only "on natural structures in the
unaided Body and in the untransformed environment."60 The eye, in its innocence,
gives rise to a "primitive Manifest Image" in which the entities "are just those
invariants definable by human action in such hyperbolic spaces." 61 Even at this level
perception remains hermeneutic: invariance is not a matter of simple regularity of
stimuli but a function of a perceiver-in-the-world who is both centered (not everywhere
and nowhere) and embodied (that is, practically engaged). Nevertheless, as the case of
van Gogh demonstrates, this perceptual reality is neither a mere hypothesis nor a matter
of human hubris and its changing fashions, conventions, and codes. It is our natural
state, our world "unaided," innocent. This is not Ruskin's world of color patches but
already a meaningful world of things, and the body that dwells perceptually in it dwells
in paradise, "all of paradise that we shall know." 62
Rice University
NOTES
Cited in Hugh Honour, Romanticism (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), 337.
Cited in E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960), 296. The original
is from Ruskin's The Elements ofDrawing ( 1856).
3 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 14.
Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," in The Palm at the End of the Mind, ed. Holly
Stevens (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 331.
5 Patrick A. Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1988), 98.
6 Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 9.
7 Ibid., 29.
8 Ibid., 28.
Compare Gombrich, 89: "Need we infer ... that there is no such thing as an objective likeness? ... It is
a tempting conclusion," but it is "all the more important to clarify how far this relativism will take us."
10 Ibid., 326.
11 Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic ofthe Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).4.
12 Ibid., 11-12.
13 Ibid., 15.
14 Ibid., 24, 27.
15 Ibid., 34.
16 W. J. T. Mitchell, Jconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 37.
17 Ibid., 86-87.
18 Arthur Danto, "Animals as Art Historians: Reflections on the Innocent Eye," in Beyond the Brillo Box:
The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992), 17.
19 Ibid., 19.
20 Ibid., 20.
21 Ibid., 25.
22 Ibid., 25. Compare 26: "Picture making has a history without it following that picture seeing does."
23 Just this objection was.J)rged against the intelligibility ofDanto's method of"indiscemable counterparts"
by Joseph Margolis, "Farewell to Danto and Goodman," British Journal ofAesthetics 38 (1998): 353-374.
Though I do not think that Margolis's objection works against Danto 's appeal to such counterparts, it does
point to a difficulty that a phenomenological theory like Heelan's is in a position to remove. For the demand
that what is seen be articulable from the first-person point of view drives Danto's anti-interpretivism finally
to a qual i tied embrace of the very "sense datum theory" that the account of pictorial competence had
supposedly overcome. See Arthur Danto, "Indiscemibility and Perception: A Reply to Joseph Margolis,"
British Journal of Aesthetics 39, no. 4 (1999), 327. But unlike Margolis's, Heelan's phenomenology of
interpretation does not lead to relativism.
24 Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science, 9.
250 STEVEN CROWELL
25 Ibid., 12.
26 Patrick Heelan, "Perception as a Hermeneutical Act," in Hermeneutics and Deconstruction, ed. Hugh
Silverman and Don Ihde (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 43-44.
27 Ibid., 45.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid., 49.
32 Ibid., 46.
33 Ibid., 51 (emphasis added).

34 Ibid., 52.
36 Heelan, "Perception as a Hermeneutical Act," 52.
38 Patrick Heelan, "Interpretation and the Structure of Space in Scientific Theory and Perception," Research
in Phenomenology XVI (1986): 196.

40 Patrick Heelan, "Perceived Worlds are Interpreted Worlds," in Essays in Metaphysics, ed. Robert C.
Neville (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 62.

42 Ibid., 43.
43 But see ibid., l04f, for certain caveats. Heelan does not, of course, limit his evidence to works of art, but
provides analyses of optical phenomena such as the Miiller-Lyer and other "illusions," the appearance of the
Gateway Arch in St. Louis, astronomical perceptual anomalies, and so on.
44 Ibid., 100.
45 Ibid., 105.
46 Mitchell, Iconology, 37, 90.

47 Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science, !05. In contrast, Danto ("Animals as Art
Historians," 24), defends his version of the innocent eye in just these terms: "In my view ... much the same
neural pathways are activated by pictures of things as by the things they are pictures of ... "
48 Ibid., !05.
49 Ibid., I 06.
50 Ibid., 172.
51 On the "near" and "distant" zones, ibid., 28-29.
52 Compare Merleau-Ponty's discussion of Descartes' optics in "Eye and Mind," trans. Carleton Dallery,
in The Primacy of Perception, ed. James Edie (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 172-75.
53 Patrick Heelan, "Perceived Worlds are Interpreted Worlds," 63.
54 Ibid., 65. See Heelan, Space Perception and the Philosophy of Science, 172: "our mode of spatial
perception has been transformed by the fact that the environments we grow up with are to a great extent
'carpentered environments,' in which simple engineered forms paradigmatically Euclidean by physical
construction are endlessly repeated." We thereby "learn to compare unknown depth and distance relationships
with these 'carpentered' standards."
55 Heelan, "Perceived Worlds are Interpreted Worlds," 63.
56 Heelan, Space Perception and the Philosophy ofScience, 124.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., 123.
60 Heelan, Space Perception and the Philosophy ofScience, Ill. Compare Heelan, "Perceived Worlds are
Interpreted Worlds," 73: "Natural (that is, unaided) perception" also "uses standard instruments," but they
are "not artefacts, they are the sensory organs given to it through the developmental processes of evolution
and ontogeny ... "
62 Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning," in The Palm at the End of the Mind, 6: "Shall our blood fail? Or
Shall it come to be I The blood of paradise? And shall the earth I Seem all of paradise that we shall know?"
JACQUES T AMINIAUX
MERLEAU-PONTY'S READING OF HEIDEGGER
In a letter dated February 2, 1972, Hannah Arendt confided, in passing, to Heidegger:

"In the course of the last weeks, I took a break and read Merleau-Ponty, whom you
know well, for the first time. To me, he seems to be much better and more interesting
than Sartre. Don't you think so, too?"
On February 15th, Heidegger responded to Arendt's question as follows: "Merleau-
Ponty was underway from Husserl to Heidegger. 1 He died too soon, eight days before
the trip he had planned to make to Freiburg. But I do not have sufficient knowledge
ofhis work: there was the publication of a posthumous work. The French are loath to
renounce their innate Cartesianism."
"Merleau-Ponty war auf dem Weg von Husser! zu Heidegger." The expression is
hardly humble- Heidegger expresses his thoughts, somewhat pompously, in the third
person. And although he also admits to have read very little of Merleau-Ponty, he
bemoans the fact that, alas, the French philosopher died before being able to have a live
conversation with the sage of Freiburg, and, thanks to this conversation, perhaps to
have come around from the inveterate Cartesianism which afflicted him, like all the
French.
Appended as postscript to the same letter are several verses drafted for his
correspondent and doubtless meant to clarifY the meaning of the words "zu Heidegger."
Here is a possible translation:
Thanks
Serene belonging to the summoning ownness,
Invoking the path before the site
of thought observant
against itself-
reserved re-servation.
Impoverished a little saves

unspoken heritage
to say 'AA.t16eux
to name the clearing
to unconceal the withholding
of age-old licence
from enduring in-ception. 2
251
252 JACQUES TAMINIAUX
Here assembled, in a bouquet or cluster, are all the themes of Heidegger's later
thought: Denken ist Danken, Gelassenheit, Ereignis, Lichtung, Befugnis, Anfang.
Arendt responds on March 27, stating directly that she was greatly interested in the
observations on Merleau-Ponty, but that she was perplexed regarding the meaning of
the poem. "I would like," she wrote, "to follow up a little on the poem. For me the
verses in the middle gegen sich selber I verhaltenes Verhiiltnis 3 are the crucial verses,
and it is precisely these verses that I do not understand fully, or that I am not sure that
I understand correctly. And then the 'site of thought' ... It just so happens that I have
wracked my brain over this question lately- where are we exactly when we think?: the
topos of the philosopher in the Sophist. Do you know that line from Valery: 'At times
I think, at times I am'? There is something quite true in this."
Heidegger's response follows on April 19, 1972. He does not respond to the
question about Valery; instead, he dwells at length and rather didactically on the
meaning of his poem. He writes: "In regard to 'site,' it is a matter of the site of
'Being,' which, once thought in relation to Ereignis, includes man's belonging to
Being. 4 "Verhaltenes Ver-Hiiltnis" must be understood on the basis of the preceding
verses: "gelassen gehoren," that is to say, a reserved or guarded awaiting of the call;
this thinking knows no con-cept, no "grasp" (Eingriffe), no conceptus, which is a
distortion of the meaning of'opta).l6c;. The Greeks did not know "concepts;" but with
this heresy "thinking" today is not in the least a friend of"models." "To think against
oneself' means to think against the supremacy of metaphysics, which, according to
Kant, belongs to the "nature of man."
"Re-servation" (Ver-Hiiltnis), is to hold, in the sense of to preserve, to shelter; "Re-
lation" not as a simple relation, but instead in the sense of"Bezug" (to give oneselfto). 5
In Ver-Hiiltnis speaks the "obedient."
"Uncovering the concealed" is only possible in a reserved-letting-oneself-be-said."
"Thanks," is the fundamental disposition of both poetizing and thinking, the latter
however is understood as to think 'o:A.r18Etcx. 6 The "other beginning" is not a second,
but the one and only, under another guise.
All of this being a preliminary attempt at a thought which might need to "come on
doves' wings and consequently must necessarily remain inaudible in the current racket
of the world."
1.
By no means unrelated to our topic, this long, epistolary preamble already sets its
contours.
What interests Hannah Arendt in her first reading ofMerleau-Ponty is not unrelated
to the question of the site of thought, which obsessed her at that time, a question whose
leitmotif, to her mind, was expressed correctly by Valery's expression "At times I
think, at times I am." This question will preside over the first part of her Gifford
lectures on the life of the mind given at the University of Aberdeen. In reading her
observations on Merleau-Ponty in the first volume of the work that was issued from
these lectures, we see that Arendt gives him credit - with minor reservations - for
having given equal weight to both sides of the alternative expressed by Valery. In fact,
MERLEAU-PONTY'S READING OF HEIDEGGER 253
we could say that the phrase "at times I am" is precisely what governs Merleau-Ponty's
discussion of themes which Arendt emphasizes for their pertinence to her own work.
First there is the belonging of humans to the world of appearances: Arendt thinks
ofMerleau-Ponty when she emphasizes that "we are of the world and not merely in
it."7 From this belonging- which implies a plurality of spectators- derives our first
sense of reality, whether our own reality or the reality of the world. On this point
Arendt is in complete agreement with the Merleau-Pontyian analysis of "perceptual
faith" in The Visible and the Invisible, which she comments upon in these terms: "our
certainty that what we perceive has an existence independently of the act of perceiving
depends entirely on the object's also appearing as such to others and being
acknowledged by them." 8 Far from considering, as Heidegger did, that Merleau-Ponty
remains ensnared by Cartesianism, Arendt emphasizes that what Merleau-Ponty writes
against Descartes in the posthumous work is "brilliantly right" and she cites it in
complete agreement: "To reduce perception to the thought of perceiving, under the
pretext that immanence alone is sure, is to take out an insurance against doubt whose
premiums are more onerous than the loss for which it is to indemnify us: for it is to
forego comprehending the effective world and move to a type of certitude that will
never restore to us the 'there is' of the world." 9
Moreoever, it is Merleau-Ponty who inspires the Arendtian analysis of scientific
knowledge as a greatly refined version of perceptual apprehension, therefore as an
approach that remains in the grip of the world of appearances. The criterion in both
cases is evidence, writes Arendt, still relying on The Visible and the Invisible. "And
since it is in the very nature of appearances to reveal and to conceal, every correction
and every disillusion 'is the loss of one evidence only because it is the acquisition of
another evidence,' in the words ofMerleau-Ponty." 10
With regard to the other branch of the alternative, it is significant that Arendt cites
a phrase from Valery, who speaks, she says, "as if reality and thinking were opposites"
together with a remark from Merleau-Ponty in "The Philosopher and his Shadow":
"We are truly alone only on the condition that we do not know we are; it is this very
ignorance that is our solitude." 11 Here is her commentary: "And it is true that the
thinking ego, whatever it may achieve, will never be able to reach reality qua reality
or convince itself that anything actually exists ... " 12 If she expresses some reservation
towards Merleau-Ponty it is only because from time to time he conflated what Aristotle
kept distinct, nous and psyche. For example, Merleau-Ponty concludes from a few
incontestable chiasms- in particular the overlapping oflanguage, and all the metaphors
that it draws from the perceived world upon the activity of thinking- that the mind, just
like the soul, is the "other side of the body." Yet, in another context, he recognized that
"meditative thinking" is '"fundamental' because it is borne by nothing, but not
fundamental in the sense of a ground upon which one would have to base oneself and
settle. As a matter of principle, fundamental thought is bottomless. It is, if you wish,
an abyss." 13
If it is true that Merleau-Ponty gives equal attention to the two options in the choice
formulated by Valery, that is, ifMerleau-Ponty insists equally on the bodily belonging
to the plural world of appearances and on the abysmal solitude that threatens meditative
thinking, and if, on the other hand, by his very silence on this subject Heidegger
seemed to tum a deaf ear to Valery's proposition (for the obvious reason- as attested
by the poem to Arendt- that only the side of thinking mattered to him to the point of
absorbing the other side), then we are right to suggest that it is far from clear, contrary
to the claims of the poem's author, that, "Mer/eau-Ponty war aufdem Weg von Husser/
zu Heidegger." More precisely, we are entitled to presume that Merleau-Ponty's
reading of Heidegger did not result in a pure and simple absorption into thought of the
common world of appearances. Let us confirm this by looking at the course given by
Merleau-Ponty at the College de France during the academic year of 1958-1959, a
course which, in effect, dedicated many lectures to Heidegger after having questioned
the itinerary of Husserl.
Heidegger's concise expression would appear to imply that, during the last stage
of his path of thinking, Merleau-Ponty had moved away from Husserl in order to come
closer to the thinking of Being, understood as Ereignis. A distancing, on the one hand,
and a coming near, on the other. Now it is sufficient to refer to the summary of the
course, compiled by Merleau-Ponty for the administration of the College, in order to
see that the Heideggerian expression does not stand up under scrutiny. He does not
attempt in these lectures to break from Husserl in order to align himself with
Heidegger, but rather he gives equal attention to both, in light of what was then his one
and only question: the possibility of philosophy in a general atmosphere of non-
philosophy, or philosophical emptiness. Far from opposing the thinker of Being to the
thinker of intentional life, Merleau-Ponty attempts to identify in both the specific ways
in which philosophy had become a problem for each of them, and then draw from their
paths for his own approach.
With respect to Husserl, the summary indicates that the lectures devoted to him
"have attempted to retrace the path by which Husserl passed from 'philosophy as a
rigorous science' to philosophy as a pure interrogation ... " 14 And, as if to emphasize
that what interests him in the itinerary of the founder of phenomenology is the
combination of the two branches of Valery's choice, a choice which is the object of
Arendt's discussion in the Life ofthe Mind, Merleau-Ponty clarifies that: "In Husserl
it is clear that the pure interrogation is not a residue from metaphysics, not its last
breath nor a yearning for its lost empire. It is the proper means of opening us to the
world, to time, to nature, to contemporary and living history ... " 15 Everything takes
place as if it were in order to clarify the combination of the belonging to the common
world of appearances and the withdrawal from it, required by the questioning inherent
to thought, that Merleau-Ponty dubs each of the stages of Husserlian phenomenology
"paradoxical."
The philosophy of the Logical Investigations, which was conceived as an inventory
of "essences," is already paradoxical. In its quest of invariants, it seemed "to
generalize the mode of knowing characterized by mathematical sciences" 16 and thus it
aims at a Platonic intelligible world beyond-of-this-world; yet, on the other hand, it
took care to emphasize that "the research of Wesen ( ... ) is the explication of an
experience," the experience of intentional life, and that it is "a matter of a
'phenomenology,' i.e. of expressing being such as it is factually encountered." 17
Merleau-Ponty highlights yet another paradox in what he calls the "middle period"
of Husserl's thought, where Husserl formulates the method of the "reduction" and
"phenomenological idealism." 18 Indeed, under scrutiny, the reduction "appears to
involve a paradox," in the sense that "what it teaches us is already known to us in the
natural attitude, through the 'thesis of the world. "' 19 It also proves paradoxical in the
sense that constitutive phenomenology, to which the reduction is supposed to lead,
encounters resistance in that very thing it brings to light, specifically "the bodily
infrastructure of our relation with things and with others" that "it appears difficult 'to
constitute'( ... ) out of the attitudes and operations of consciousness," that is, the order
"of theoria and of ideation."20 The very practice of reduction reveals not only that it
appears as "less a definite method than the index of a multitude of problems," but also
that, paradoxically, it constantly affects the ultimate, constituting subject with a "nai've
faith" borrowed from the intersubjective universe to which the transcendental
philosopher belongs first as an empirical man. 21
Merleau-Ponty credits Husser! for having explicitly assumed in his last works-
which describe the "initial phase of the research" as a return to the Lebenswelt- these
paradoxes, which had remained implicit and latent in the first two periods ofHusserl's
thought. He writes: "When translated in terms oftheLebenswelt, the antinomies of the
constitution of the other or of the thesis of the world cease to be hopeless." 22 He
clarifies further: "We no longer have to try to understand how a for-itself can think of
another from the ground of its absolute solitude or how it could think of a pre-
constituted world in the very moment that it constitutes the world: the inherence of the
self-in-the-world or of the world-in-the-self, what Husser! calls the Ineinander, is
silently inscribed in all embracing experience which composes these incompatibles, and
philosophy becomes the enterprise of describing, outside of the logic and vocabulary
at hand, the universe ofliving paradoxes.'m The reduction is no longer a return to ideal
being; "it brings us back to the spirit of Heraclitus, to an interweaving of horizons, to
an open Being. " 24 The allusion made here to Heraclitus refers to a late fragment from
the Krisis where Husser! writes, regarding constituting subjectivity as he understood
it then: "In fact, it is the whole world. If we were able to identify the WUXTJ of
Heraclitus with this subjectivity, in reference to Heraclitus' saying we could say about
it: 'You will not find the limits of the soul, whatever path that you take, so deep is its
foundation.' Every Grund that one reaches refers back in fact to the multiple Grilnde,
each open horizon opens new horizons and yet the infinite whole in its infinite move-
ment and flux is oriented on the unity of meaning."25 Merleau-Ponty does not hesitate
to add, in relation to this last Husserlian thematic of the intentionales Ineinander of the
whole: "It is this philosophy of interconnection of all that we try to do. " 26
One could not say more clearly, regardless of what Heidegger might have thought,
that Merleau-Ponty saw no reason to part from Husser!.
2.
As we said above, it is under the same title - "Philosophy as a problem" - that

Merleau-Ponty approaches the path of thinking of the two founders of phenomenology.
With respect to the second, the summary of the course recalls that it was a matter of
retracing "the same path which led Heidegger from the negativist and anthropological
themes to which the public reduced his early writings, to a conception of Being which
he no longer calls philosophy- but which, as it has been well remarked [J. Beaufret],
is certainly not extra-philosophical.'' 27 It is clearly thanks to the friendship that he
maintained with the recipient of the celebrated Letter on Humanism that Merleau-Ponty
was led to involve himself closely with Heidegger's path of thinking. This Letter,
moreover, was the first testimony in France after the war of the famous Kehre, which
influenced Merleau-Ponty in interpreting this path of thinking. Since for him it was not
a matter, as he says in the Course Notes, "to expose Heidegger, the old and the new,
but to reveal in the new what concerns my question: the possibility ofphilosophy,"28
we should not hold it against him that he restricted himself to the self-interpretation
that, ever since the Letter on Humanism, Heidegger gave of the Kehre. Hence Merleau-
Ponty overlooked the fact that the Kehre that emerged in the second half of the thirties
was accompanied by a strong Promethean decisionism quite foreign to the Gelassenheit
which was emphasized in the texts after the war. We can wonder, however, why
Merleau-Ponty thought he could read side by side the texts from after the war and the
recently translated Introduction to Metaphysics, which should have alerted him to this
Prometheanism. But clearly this confusion was the dominant characteristic of the
French reception ofHeidegger at that time. Furthermore, with the exception of Intro-
duction to Metaphysics, the lectures given by Heidegger after 1933 that display this
Prometheanism had not yet been published: the course on Nietzsche only appeared in
1961, after the death ofMerleau-Ponty. As for the Introduction to Metaphysics, we
know that Heidegger himself had muddled access to the original content of the text by
inserting in his public version a number of additional clauses from a much later epoch.
Be that as it may, since, in Merleau-Ponty's attempt to retrace Heidegger's itinerary,
it was a matter of retrieving what he could use for his own question on the possibility
of philosophy, it is important to determine in that reading the extent to which he may
have been seduced by the "new Heidegger."
Right away we will note that this reading, far from opposing Husserl's to Heidegger's
path, considers them both from the perspective of one and the same difficulty. The
summary of the course is very clear in this regard: "Heidegger's path, no less than
Husserl's, is difficult to trace, and for the same reasons- namely, that commentators
have fixed upon what was familiar to them from philosophy's past. Hardly any of them
have followed the authors in what was nevertheless their main effort: to recover,
through an absolutely new way of thinking Being, the experience which underlies
metaphysics."29 What then, to Merleau-Ponty's mind, was "the experience of Being"
which Heidegger wanted to retrieve, and what did he hope to gain from this retrieval?
Merleau-Ponty emphasizes that in order to approach this experience it is important
first to give up a "popular interpretation" of Being and Time which takes only the
negative themes - death, angst, nothingness - from the book, and which makes an
anthropology of it, functioning like an "humanistic substitute for metaphysics."30 This
popular interpretation neglects the fact that, in the preface, Heidegger expressly
declared that his goal was not to describe existence as an "autonomous sphere - but,
through Da-sein, to get at Being."31 As soon as one pierces the screen of this popular
interpretation, one can see, in Merleau-Ponty's terms, that the development of
Heidegger's thought "is not [a] reversal of anthropology into a mystique of Being," and
that there is in this path of thinking "a change which is not a reversal- but a deepening
of the same search, with a shift of emphasis, and an experience of its impossibility."32
While this is the same search, since it is through and through ruled by the Seinsfrage;
it announces a shift of emphasis since from the language of Dasein, its freedom and
transcendence, we move to a language of 0./Jenheit, of atetheia understood as a "gift"
of Being but also as a "withdrawal."33 But in what sense is the Heideggerian research,
as Merleau-Ponty describes it, supposed to undergo the "experience of its impossi-
bility?" Does this experience concern only, to his mind, the path on which Being and
Time was engaged? Does it also concern the thought that is borne out in the last
writings? And if there is in the two cases an experience of impossibility, does it come
from the same ground?
First, let us consider in what sense, according to Merleau-Ponty, the path opened
by Being and Time leads to an experience of an impossibility. Let us simply mention
the passage most explicit on this subject in the notes. Merleau-Ponty writes: "There
was [a] direct philosophy in Being and Time; one described Dasein, stated what it was,
i.e. an abyss in opposition to beings. Then one perceived that this direct description is
not radical, because it dogmatically uses Wesen, it says what Dasein is, namely non-
Being." Because it uses "unscrupulously" the notion of essence, the description found
in Being and Time encloses itself in an alternative which is not far, according to
Merleau-Ponty, from resembling the alternative which strains the thought of Sartre:
there is on the one hand the positivity of the intra-worldly, of Seiend, of the ontic, and
on the other hand the negativity of an "abysmal Dasein, who, as abyss, is its possibi-
lities, who isje meinig." This dogmatism of essence which resulted from the search
initiated in Being and Time moved away from the very thing it wanted to get at, namely
Being. Heidegger himself saw this after the publication of the first book in meditating
on the essence of truth. Merleau-Ponty writes concerning this reflection: "By
questioning the medium of Wesen, one is led to think that the question of the Wesen der
Wahrheit supposes settled the question of Wahrheit des Wesens. It is not sufficient, in
order to have truth, to speak of essence. It is necessary to consider that it is truth
restricted to its What. The full essence is not that: it is the verbal Wesen, indistinct
from existence. This reflection on the truth of essence (which was supposed to follow
Wesen der Wahrheit) represents [a] turning towards an analysis that is no longer
direct."34 Thus the experience of impossibility undergone by the research of Being and
Time would be due to an uninterrogated existentialism, focused more on the neutrality
of ousia, of the Was, of the ensemble of characteristics, than on the concrete and living
modality of Being in the verbal sense.
Does this mean that Merleau-Ponty no longer sees any problem in Heidegger's
approach, after it accomplished a turning towards an analysis which is "no longer
direct?" Moreover, since his reading was guided by a question that was his own - the
possibility of philosophy today - does this mean that in regard to this question he saw
a way opened in the writings of one who he called "the new Heidegger" towards the
road that he wanted to follow? We will guard ourselves well from responding right
away in the affirmative.
We recall that, according to Merleau-Ponty himself, this investigation on the path
of thinking of the two founders of phenomenology constituted a reflexive pause in his
quest for an ontology of nature not based in the traditional metaphysical categories of
"substance, accident, potentiality, act, object, subject, in-itself, for-itself." 35 What
Merleau-Ponty applauded in Heidegger's work after Vom Wesen der Wahrheit is pre-
cisely a deconstruction of those categories and an opening towards a natura naturans
inaccessible to Vorstellung.
A good example is what he draws from the Heideggerian interpretation of the word
of Heraclitus, q>uatc; KpU1tl'Eo6a:t q>tA.et. From this thematic that erupted in Introduc-
tion to Metaphysics and that occupied an important place in so many writings after the
war, notably The Principle ofReason, and by way of a uniform reading of these texts,
one that deliberately omits inquiring after the successive metamorphoses of the
Heideggerian reading of Heraclitus, Merleau-Ponty retrieves the notion of what he calls

a "preobjective Being"36 or further "a pure a-causal principle. 37 And since the bodily
belonging to the world of appearances remains a major concern for his own research,
it is to the level of perception -marginal in the Heideggerian analyses - that he refers
the Heraclitean proposition dear to Heidegger, so that the withdrawal at the heart of
unconcealment signifies first for him the invisible lining in the visible.
Another example: at the beginning of Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger
attempts to demonstrate that the fundamental question of metaphysics, "Why are there
beings at all instead of nothing?" forces the prior question: "How does it stand with
Being?" 38 and he urges his audience "Here it is important above all to impress on our
experience again and again the fact that we are not able to lay hold of the Being of
beings directly and expressly, either by way of beings, nor in beings- nor anywhere
else at all." 39 He clarifies this point with a few examples, asking: where is the Being
of the high school, of the piece a chalk, of the Van Gogh painting, of silk and velvet,
of the mountain range, etc.? In the context ofHeidegger's lecture course, the question
of knowing how does it stand with Being in each of these cases has a manifestly
propredeutic function. As in each example, Being remains nowhere to be found, the
question for Heidegger aims at making apparent to these auditors that for the modems
Being (as Nietzsche said) at the end of a long history is but a vapor, and in contrasting
this state of affairs with the Greek beginning ofthis history, so as to convince them of
the historical necessity of a repetition [recommencement40 ] of this beginning. This is
why Heidegger emphasizes: the questioning of this question [the prior question: "How
does it stand with Being?"] is historical through and through."41 It is striking that
Merleau-Ponty neglected this context and oriented the question of the site of Being not
towards the call to the historical decision of the creators of a destiny of a missionary
people, but rather towards a renewed attention to the belonging to the world of appear-
ances. This is why to the question "where is Being?" in each of the examples cited by
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty responds right away that it "is in everything that we see and
beyond:" "Its site is of a special type (as body-soul). Now this may be applied to all
sensible things: the thing is always between qualities and this is why it is neither the
spatio-temporal individual nor the ousia or the ensemble of characteristics."42 It is in
the articulations of this world of appearances - a was indissociable from a daft, or, as
he says, "what makes a thing what it is, and other than another"43 - that Merleau-Ponty
inscribes the Heideggerian notion of Wesen in the active and verbal sense.
Similarly, when Heidegger writes in The Principle ofReason: "Only a being 'is';
the 'is' itself- Being- 'is' not. This wall in front of you and behind me is. It
immediately shows itself to us as something present. But where is its 'is'? Where
should we seek the presencing of the wall? Probably these questions already run awry.
Nevertheless the wall 'is."'44 It is without doubt an indication ofhis attachment to the
world of appearances that Merleau-Ponty translates das Anwesen der Wand as "the
appearing [paraitre] of the wall. "45 While this passage from Heidegger announces the
statements: "Being and Grund: The Same; Being: Abgrund," Merleau-Ponty concludes
that "the example is chosen to detach Sein from objective place" and he comments
upon it in the following terms: "there is a pre-spatial being which founds appearances
in space, the Being of the horizon. One cannot say that the being [of the wall] is in
objective space, that its presence is in [a] place in itself. The analysis of all things
perceived only confirms that Being is pre-ybjective."46
When Merleau-Ponty confronts the new Heidegger with Being and Time, he
applauds the overcoming of the alternative of the in-itself and the for-itselfthat marked
the 1927 work, in reference to which he notes that "negativism always supposes
implicitly the pure positive."47 However, with respect to the writings after the war, he
asks "how can one reconcile the texts where man appears positive with the refusal of
the exteriority of Being" emphasized by Heidegger's insistence on the call of Being,
on the idea that Being uses the essence of man and needs him? He responds: "It is not
by compromise that [these texts] are reconciled. This is Heidegger's essential thought:
The thought of Being as 'a-A.t18eux, as emerging from lethe, therefore as never
Unverborgen, and in this sense as "mystery" - this thought is never evocative of a
being in-itself. It is precisely the contrary." 48 But here once again it is the belonging
to the world of appearances that guides this reading. This is why Merleau-Ponty writes,
in the same context: "Being is selbst-gegeben precisely as inexhaustible, the thing dingt
[things]. The world factually weltet, and yet always beyond what we have of it
thematically and objectively. Being is Sichtbarkeit eminently, although it is not a mere
possibility of perception. " 49
It is this same orientation toward the inexhaustible character of what he called the
"preobjective Being" to which we belong- inexhaustible because naturing [naturans]
rather than positively determined- that governs Merleau-Ponty's remarks concerning
the Heideggerian thematic oflanguage.
The very way in which he formulates the plan for examining this thematic - a
thematic that is extensively dealt with in the 1958-59 course - is particularly
significant.
First, it is significant to us that this plan, treating of the theme of "Being and
speech" in Heidegger, deliberately neglects the motif of the call- "call of the proper"
as is said in the poem dedicated to Arendt- a motif, however, that is central both in
Being and Time and in the writings that no longer focus on Dasein but on Being,
regardless of the fact that this call is understood existentially in the first case and his-
torically in the second. This neglect allows Merleau-Ponty to avoid the dualism carried
by this motif, in the first case, in the form of the opposition between everydayness and
authenticity, and, in the second, in the form of the antithesis offaithful thought and the
unleashing of technology. And to avoid, in the same stroke, all nostalgia of a clear
morning of thought, to which is opposed the night of modernity.
When he does agree with Heidegger in recognizing that speech is a major problem
of philosophy- insofar as "the essence ofbeing is 'intertwined' with the essence of
speech"50 - it is in order to undo the traditional duality between the positivity of beings
and consciousness as constitutive of meaning. This is a duality that governs the
defmitions of the analogon, the image, and the symbol in the first Husser! and in
Sartre's L 'imaginaire. It is also in order to substitute the notion of a reversibility of the
proper and of the figurative for this classic duality, a reversibility that animates the very
operation of linguistic signification to the extent that this operation moves "between
created speech and received speech."51
Therefore, what inspires Merleau-Ponty in this Heideggerian meditation on
language is what he believes to be an effort to rediscover what he calls "the power of
speech," which comes before the traditional oppositions of the real and the imaginary,
nature and convention, and signified and signifier. But precisely because his reading
does not indulge in any nostalgia for the Greek morning, he in no way relegates the
proper power of speech to a distant past of which alone the thinker of Being and a few
rare poets become the actual guardians in an age of increased distress. This is why
Merleau-Ponty writes, "Language presupposes itself; i.e. when it seeks to think its own
origin, it can only do so as Gewalt-tat, an instituting act with unlimited creative power,
as myth (mythic time is the present past). Now, if it is so at the outset, it is so each time
-enjambement or encroachment."52 This is why, at once, he is able to associate the
inspiration that he draws from Heidegger to the inspiration that he draws from the
Husserlian reflection of the Krisis, a reflection that no longer conceives the Sinngebung
as pure purveyor of meaning by a sovereign consciousness, but as a production
indistinguishable from a sedimentation, therefore a re-production. 53 It is why also,
since speakers are always already inscribed in a world of appearances that precedes
them and in which they receive themselves from each other in their concrete
embodiment, he is able to clarifY what he means in this proposition: "We use language
as we use our body" 54 a claim for which we do not find an equivalent in Heidegger.
The response that Merleau-Ponty gives to the question of knowing what is the
meaning of Sage (of myth) -to which Heidegger gives an originary status - is no less
significant with respect to the theme of a belonging to the world of the appearances.
After excluding that this meaning would consist in a reference to beings, to quiddities,
or to categories, Merleau-Ponty writes, "Therefore it is not for 'logic' to provide an
answer to the question of the meaning of Sage. It must be asked from our own experi-
ence of Being." This experience is defined as follows, again combining Husserl and
Heidegger's terminologies. "Being is Gegend, it is 'that in which there is an opening,'
that to which the intentionality of acts enfolds. Being's self-relation, i.e. the relation of
(derived) Being as Seiend, to Being as Sein, estant, becomes the definition of Sinn." 55
Also, just as indicative of the presence of the common belonging to the same
Lebenswelt is the fact that the last part of his expose on language, when (unlike the
projected outline, which is silent on this point), it introduces the motif of the call, does
not understand it as a claim only heard by the thinker alone against all others - let us
recall the poem to Arendt: "impoverished a little saves I unspoken heritage I Saying
'AA118eta"- rather, it is to each of us that Merleau-Ponty gives the privilege of being
called by the language of Being, and this in the spontaneous play of the most everyday
language. He writes: "What a striking fact that( ... ) in decisive deeds or words, those
words are drawn out of us by things or by others, and yet they are so profoundly our
own." And to this surprising play of words in the everyday life of language he applies
without any hesitation Heidegger's proposition in Was heij3t Denken?: das Wesen der
Sprache spielt mit uns (op. cit., 83): "The life oflanguage gives us a depth( ... ) And
hence, the appearance of passivity, of a language that seems to know more than we do;
and yet this 'unconscious' play is our ownmost: no other could have effected that play
on words. Some essential characteristics of Being are, therefore, preserved by language
in our life. " 56 The result is that the preservation of Being and Gelassenheit, far from
opposing the thinker to the polloi, are given to the human plurality: "The ambiguity of
language is the pluralism of Being, not the confused thought of a subject. It is given
to us by Being through language, through language we are therefore called by Being,
claimed by Being, we can only Seinlassen language. " 57
One last theme: the history of Being. Though Merleau-Ponty's remarks on this subject
are elliptical, they seem to reveal both consent and suspicion. Consent in so far as this
Heideggerian thematic can be verified in terms of experience, that is to say in terms of

the world of appearances. Yet suspicion in so far as it generates a new variation of
absolute knowing in the Hegelian sense. And it is to Heidegger himself that Merleau-
Ponty first applies the double gesture that will, one or two years later, structure his
reading of the introduction of Hegel's Phenomenology ofSpirit, a reading that actually
operates with the commentaries of the Ho/zwege.
Merleau-Ponty endorses the notion of a Seinsgeschichte, insofar as it pertains to
withdrawals of Being, which, he says, "can be noticed in our experience of Being and
in our very being," which therefore are not "constructive explanations by an in-itself'
but simply signify that "all perception is imperception."58 Precisely because those
withdrawals are noticed in an experience of Being, the Seinsgeschichte is sustained
thanks to a profound unity of history- the successive gifts of being and their invisible
doubles -and thanks to philosophy- which is the experience of such gifts. However,
Merleau-Ponty points to an equivocation in the Heideggerian philosophy of history.
On the one hand, if it is true that the ontological difference between Being and being
defines each epoch, each are "variations on the relationship of Being-being that cannot
be put into a hierarchy, classified objectively" and in their succession "there is neither
'progression' nor 'regression. "'59 On the other hand, Merleau-Ponty points out in
Heidegger a "tendency towards a pre-technical, preplanetary, pagan-rural past" which
he suspects "to be an extreme pessimism."60
Since Heidegger draws a parallel between the history of Being and the history of
philosophy, because he describes the movement going from Plato to Hegel then to the
contemporary leveling as a progression towards an end of philosophy and a
transfiguration, Merleau-Ponty points out that "all this (relative) justification of history
implies an absolute knowing or not-knowing, an access to Being in the light of which
everything else is destroyed and realized ... ". From which comes his suspicious
question: "What of this absolute knowing, in which all philosophy dies and is
transfigured?"61 As this absolute knowing or not-knowing presupposes on the part of
the thinker an access to Being, Merleau-Ponty's suspicion concerns "the essential
malaise of this thought": "Heidegger," he writes, "searches for a direct expression of
Being which he says elsewhere has no direct expression."62 While discussing the same
malaise, the summary of the course will regret that Heidegger "denied [himself] all the
mirrors ofBeing."63
Contrary to which Merleau-Ponty gives himself the task "to attempt indirect
expression, i.e., to make Being visible through the Winke of life, of science, etc."64
And in the perspective of this indirect ontology, he intentionally refers one more time
to Husser! and his later thematic of the Ineinander.
Let us conclude that the passage from Husser! to Heidegger was not for Merleau-
Ponty a one way, but a return trip.
Boston College
- Translated by Jennifer Hansen and Franr;ois Raffoul

NOTES
The German sentence reads "Merleau-Ponty war auf dem Weg von Husser/ zu Heidegger."
The original poem reads: Dank I Gelassen gehoren der rufenden Eignis,/ rufend den Weg vor die
Ortschafl! des fugsamen Denkens/ gegen sich seiher- I verhaltenes Ver-Hiiltnis./1 Armselig verwahrt ein
Geringes/ ungesprochen Vermiichtnis:/ Sagen 'Al1]81al Nennen die Lichtung:/Entbergen den Vorenhalt
/alter Befugnisl aus wiihrendem An-Fang. Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Briefe 1925 bis 1975: und
andere Zeugnisse. Ursula Ludz., ed., (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1999), 227. [Translation by
translators and the volume editor.- Ed.]
3 [Against itself, restrained Re-lation. - Trans.]
Cf. "Topology of Being," in Martin Heidegger, Aus der Eifahrung des Denkens (Pfullingen: G. Neske,
1954), 23; Heidegger, Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1967), 240.
5 Heidegger, Wegmarken, 213.
Ibid., 272.
Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1971), 22.
Ibid., 46.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 1968), 36; cited in Arendt, 49.
10 Arendt, 54.
11 Merleau-Ponty, Signs, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, I 964), I 74.
12 Arendt, I 98.
13 Merleau-Ponty, Signs, 21; cited in Arendt, 33; translation modified.
14 Merleau-Ponty, Themes from the Lectures at the College de France 1952-1960, trans. John O'Neill
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 105; translation modified.
15 Ibid.
16 Merleau-Ponty, Notes des Cours 1959-1961. Preface de Claude Lefort (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 67. All
translations of this text are by the translators.
17 Ibid.
18
Merleau-Ponty, Themes from the Lectures at the College de France 1952-1960, 106.
19
Ibid.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid., 107.
22
Ibid., 108; translation modified.
23
Ibid.
24
Ibid.
25 Edmund Husser!, Krisis III, 173; cited in Merleau-Ponty, Notes des Cours 1959-1961,81.
26 Merleau-Ponty, Themes from the Lectures at the College de France 1952-1960, 85.
27 Ibid., 105.
28 Merleau-Ponty, Notes des Cours 1959-1961, 91.
29 Merleau-Ponty, Themes from the Lectures at the College de France 1952-1960, 109, translation
modified.
30 Merleau-Ponty, Notes des Cours 1959-1961, 92; Themes from the Lectures at the College de France
1952-1960, 109.
31 Merleau-Ponty, Themes from the Lectures at the College de France 1952-1960, 109.
32 Merleau-Ponty, Notes des Cours 1959-1961,93.
33 Ibid., 100.
34 Ibid., 94-95.
35 Ibid., 99.
36 Ibid., 110.
37 Ibidd., 109.
38 Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Poll (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2000), 35.
39 Ibid.
40
[Literally, a "re-beginning."- Trans.]
41
Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 46.
42
Merleau-Ponty, Notes des Cours 1959-1961, 106.
43
Ibid., 107.
44
Heidegger, The Principle ofReason, trans. R. Lilly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991 ), 5 I.
45
Merleau-Ponty, Notes des Cours 1959-1961, I 10.
46 Ibid., Ill.
47 Ibid., 118.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid., 120.
50 Ibid., 123.
51 Ibid.
52 Ibid., 127.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., 122.
55 Ibid., 132.
56 Ibid., 134.
57 Ibid., 135.
58 Ibid., 137.
59 Ibid., 138.
60 Ibid., 139.
61 Ibid., 142.
62 Ibid., 147-148.
63 Ibid., 156.
64 Ibid., 148.
BABETTE E. BABICH
HEIDEGGER'S TRUTH OF ART

AND THE QUESTION OF AESTHETICS
In the wake of the vanity of the postmodem aesthetic in architecture and the vain
quality or failure of the postmodem in theory, philosophers have discovered a new
preoccupation with the ethics of the scholar. And by thus elevating ethics to the
position of first philosophy, we also recuperate the history of metaphysics for the future
and effect a return to the phenomenology of the question- not only to phenomenology
as problem solving but also to the technical and information and even the natural
sciences. Perhaps in the process, the question of art might likewise be restored to the
experts- a reasonable strategy for philosophy in the tired wake of Meyer Schapiro's
critical engagement with Martin Heidegger's hermeneutically informed but art-
historically faint reading of a pair of shoes in a famous painting by Van Gogh.
In the case ofHeidegger's ethics, the judgment to be rendered is automatic. He is
practically guilty by association with Nazism and he is theoretically convicted as
having no ethics that philosophers will speak of as such. And in a parallel worthy of
remark, his judgment on art has been condemned as guilty of every philistine error-
particularly as Heidegger talks of greatness, speaking of the greatness of"great works
of art" - in the same voice that may be heard in his lamentable language endorsing the
"inner truth and greatness" of National Socialism. 1
Thus Heidegger's essay on the "Origin of the Work of Art" challenges traditional
philosophic and art historical categories; it has, as noted above, duly been the object
of a decisive attack by a leading art historian. In what follows, I argue that this critique
turns upon a fetishistic conception of art and the dominion of the museum as the privi-
leged locus of art together with the philosophical tradition of resentment against art -
Dan to's philosophical disenfranchisement of art. To address this I offer a hermeneutic
and phenomenological defense ofHeidegger's account ofVan Gogh's painting as well
as a discussion of the world and the earth with reference to Heidegger's temple in its
geographical and historical context in terms of energeia and truth.
It is well known that Heidegger's essay "The Origin of the Work of Art" does not
offer a discussion of art as such. 2 And Heidegger would contend that his question with
regard to art was a singular question for thought: the question not of art but being.
Accordingly Heidegger's reference to and his analysis of a painting by no artist less
famous than Van Gogh is not properly referred to in the context of Heidegger' s essay
265
as "art" at all, much less art qua art. Instead, and curiously, Heidegger chooses the
painting as an illustration not of painting but of the kind of thing that the artwork is qua
manufactured or poietic thing. And not only does Heidegger discuss the painting as a
kind of techne, he considers the work of art as liable to be stocked as things can be-
as Beethoven's musical scores are stored in the same way potatoes in a cellar might be
preserved for future use, just as the greater part of a museum collection can be on
reserve in the same way. And for Heidegger, the virtue of Van Gogh's painting in
particular is that it is not a work by Malevich or Pollock but a post-impressionist work
of nicely representative art. Van Gogh's Shoes (Fig. 1) depicts things of an everyday
kind, as Heidegger expresses it: a pair of shoes as the artist had seen them, which
Heidegger proceeds to read from an hermeneutic perspective as a revelation of things
exactly in terms of their thingness as such and in the view of the artist.
Heidegger thus overleaps the privilege of the museum definition, that is, the art-
historical definition and description of art. But it is the museum today that serves and
has always served as the de facto locus of art, whatever "art" may be. And this is the
reason we are not presented with "things" (as Heidegger or as anyone else might name
them) in a museum but rather with exactly certified works of art. And if Heidegger
differs from many professional, particularly, analytically inclined philosophers of art
or aesthetics in failing to define art (or even to say "when" art might "be"), it is clear
enough for most of us just "where" art can be found at will. Even Christo makes of his
installations a movable museum, employing the signifier of the gallery as museum, as
exhibit, as display. In Christo's case this will be a draped and temporary easel-cum-
gallery space, 3 complete with the blocked access to the work that focuses an ecstatic
exhibit by excluding access, incidentally installing desire not for the object or the work
of art but for the space of- and the space beyond- the exhibition.
Whereas the work of art Heidegger invokes is one that can lose its locus or place
in a sustaining world or as situated upon earth, the museum or art historian's artwork
is not one that can be deprived of or taken out of its world. In the museum, art is
eminently movable, without auratic fade; this resilience is also the sign of its restriction
within the museum context. Art out of place in a museum may have been stolen or lost
to a natural disaster, or might be on loan, as a marker in its former locus will indicate.
In every case, art moves from one fetishized locus to another, remaining within the
museum even in its absence.
Defining the museum as the place of art is not a practical, Wittgensteinian definition
but an effective or pragmatic one: i. e., a stipulative definition. Art is thus whatever
appears in a museum or a gallery or else in a public square when defined as an
"installation"4 with a word borrowed from the same aesthetically fetishized locus and
not as a monument (although monuments can be designated art - one thinks of the
Vietnam Memorial in Washington- they are not always art but retain the quality of the
calculated production and craft that is not pure but merely applied and that is to say, not
art at all, not even bad art). Yet like art, and this would matter for Heidegger,
monuments are things. And it is to explore the nature of things, the choseite de la
chose, the thinghood of things that Heidegger speaks of Van Gogh's painting of a pair
of shoes. For Heidegger, this painting serves as an example of the kind of thing
painting is meant to be. The painting in question - and it is this revelation that takes
us to the fetishistic dimension proper to art history and to aesthetic theory - is the one
Heidegger tells us he had seen in Amsterdam in 1930. 5
HEIDEGGER'S TRUTH OF ART AND AESTHETICS 267
Figure I. A Pair of Shoes. Paris, 1886. Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum.
As related in conversation with the hermeneutic eschatologist, Jacob Taubes- who

was at Columbia in the 'sixties- the impact of Schapiro's critique was considerable.
Tainting it with the charge of expert incompetence, Schapiro debunked Heidegger's
essay. Yet Schapiro's "devastating proof," in Taubes's words, turns out to be nothing
more than his assertion that "Heidegger had got the shoes wrong." And the odd thing
about the dramatically conclusive success of Schapiro's critique is that in fact he offers
neither demonstration nor argument. There is nothing but surmise and subjective
preference on Schapiro's own part in the claims Schapiro presented against Heidegger
- quite apart from the critical detail that these claims were never of relevance to the
concern of Heidegger's essay in the first place. The contentiousness of Schapiro's
1968 text is impatiently colloquial, and at least this reader misses the art historian's
otherwise careful rigor. 6 Indeed, it may be supposed that Schapiro's 1994 essay,
"Further Notes on Heidegger and van Gogh," betrays an awareness of this deficiency
on his own part. 7
To prove, as Schapiro claims, that Van Gogh purchased the shoes likely to have
been painted in the painting to which Heidegger refers is not to prove Van Gogh's
personal ownership of the shoes. The only way anyone can "own" shoes is by wearing
them- not once only- this even Schapiro explains: "to be in someone's shoes is to be
in his predicament"8 - or even for the duration of the American Indian 's aphoristic mile
of life understanding, but everyday, as a habitual matter of course. The owner of a pair
of shoes is the one whose wearing wears them, so that the shoes make or "wear" that
same wearer- and this is what Heidegger's phenomenological account of the work of
art in Van Gogh's case makes movingly clear. 9
To contrast the philosopher's account of the work of art in its origin with that of the
art-historian's account, we recall Heidegger's claim that Van Gogh's painting depicts
a pair of peasant shoes- to be exact, and to specify the precise words that so irritated
Schapiro- the shoes of a peasant woman. Contra Heidegger, Schapiro claims that in
this case Van Gogh depicts not a peasant's shoes but the artist's own shoes, as Van
Gogh had purchased them for his own use at a flea market in Paris. Heidegger, for
Schapiro, projects nothing but his own art-historical ignorance - his lack of expert
knowledge - into his account of the painting.
But where Schapiro errs here in the case of Van Gogh is only in the question of the
function of the shoes Van Gogh in fact purchased. I contend that the shoes (and by
saying this I mean to submit only a more plausible suggestion than Schapiro's vision
of the same) were likely purchased from the start not for the artist's personal use or
wearing (as Schapiro rather uncritically assumes) but precisely as an object: an
accoutrement to be painted, an exemplar or thing acquired precisely for the purpose of
painting it- and Van Gogh's Three Pairs of Shoes, painted in Paris in 1886, would
seem to confirm this function. Artists in general, and here I am not revealing anything
Schapiro would not have known very well, hire women they do not necessarily seduce,
likewise, artists do not necessarily acquire the fruits depicted in a still life to consume
them themselves - they may even, as Cezanne famously did to excess, record the
specific superfluity of doom: letting apples and other fruit go uneaten- and, again, in
general, artists select likely objects for the sake of drawing or painting them. The plain
fact that Van Gogh purchased the shoes does not justify the conclusion that he bought
them as his own shoes, that is: to wear them.
Figure 2. A Pair of Boots. Paris, 1887. The Baltimore Museum of Art.
To raise the question we need to begin by asking not, as Derrida does, about the
shoes of peasant women, be they from the South of France or Germany, or even
Holland, but only, because Schapiro 's contention only concerns, about Van Gogh.
Thus we might ask what shoes Van Gogh wore, as the element of biography important
for the critical sake of being sure what shoes, qua painted, we are indeed talking about.
We know, from a fellow student's report, that Van Gogh purchased just a such a pair
of leather shoes in Paris (for specific use in a still-life) and we know that he painted,
as Heidegger underlined, several of these still-lives. We also know from a letter Van
Gogh wrote from Aries in 1888 to his brother- as Schapiro's source, apart from and
in unnoted conflict with the letter he himself had from Heidegger- that he had in his
possession a pair of old shoes, "une paire de vieux souliers," 10 and we know too from
Gauguin's powerful account that in his "studio was a pair of big hob-nailed boots, all
worn and spotted with mud; he had made of it a remarkable still-life painting ... " 11
Schapiro quotes this report at great length because of its association with his claim that
the shoes were the artist's own, revealing in Knut Hamsun's words as Schapiro quotes
them: "a portion of the self. " 12 To these heavy, hob-nailed shoes, 13 which Van Gogh
had worn and which he described as "caked with mud" there corresponds a painting
that can be matched to such a pair of boots (Fig. 2), and this would seem indeed to be
the painting Gauguin admires as the "remarkable still-life" in question. But this is not
the painting Heidegger describes, nor does Schapiro say that it is, who, for his part
identifies the same shoes that can be found in most accounts of Heidegger's essay. 14
Still another painting (Fig. 3) is instructive by contrast with Heidegger's example.
Schapiro's description of this painting betrays his disciplinary limitations, the artist,
Schapiro writes, "has turned them with their backs to the viewer." 15
Figure 3. A Pair ofShoes. Aries, 1888. Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum.
Invoking only an observer's description, Schapiro tellingly misconstrues this last

painting. For Van Gogh places the shoes not against the viewer, but as a wearer would
find them. It is a painting of shoes waiting to be worn, regarded here from a
phenomenologically interpretive perspective. And one could here make or take
Schapiro's point against him, to say that these indeed could have been Van Gogh's (or
the viewer's or any subject's) own shoes. These shoes, open to and facing the wearer,
are a pair of clogs and they too, like the painting of yellow, hobnailed, encrusted boots,
fail to match the description Heidegger gives of a worn pair of leather shoes, not
sabots, not hobnailed or caked with mud. To identify the painting in question, of the
shoes in question, given the variety of similar shoes Van Gogh painted, we further need
to attend to Van Gogh's paintings and to do that we need to return to the question of
the sort of"things" (in Heidegger's sense of the word) Van Gogh painted. 16
Heidegger's account of the painting not only refers to an identifiable painting by

a famous artist but was specifically invoked due to the representative and
representational character of the shoes in question as Heidegger describes them. This
character conforms with Van Gogh's aesthetic, as an aesthetic some scholars regard as
consecrational, which sacral character is unmitigated by naming this aesthetic that of
the extraordinarily ordinary kind: the preternaturally ordinary. Such an aesthetic,
representing the ordinary in extremis, does not mean that the ordinary is made banal but
rather that it is made strange, unfamiliar, and so given to be seen for the first time as
such as the only way everyday things, as Heidegger reminds us of their invisibility or
withdrawal in use, can be given to be seen. Estranged in angle and dimension or in
perspective, and in the thick dissonances of the painter's medium, and in the choice of
painted colour- this ordinary character is obvious in the choice of things to be painted
as in The Night Cafe, The Potato Eaters, as well as Crows Over a Wheat Field and his
Self-Portrait(s) as well as his Bedroom at Arles. In other paintings, the preternatural
aspect appears in the force of their presentation such as in the Cypresses, Starry Night,
Irises, and Sunflowers. The difference between human subjects and the traditional
scenes of nature (still-life and landscapes) adumbrates this same focus. None of these
paintings shows the perfection or extraordinary precision of everyday things such as
the earlier tradition of Dutch painters exemplified by Vermeer and the difference is
more than an encounter between the north and the light and mores of the south in the
eyes of a perfectly immortal Dutch master. Emblematic of this representational
everyday-ness, Van Gogh's Shoes are extraordinarily ordinary, without the sharp
divinity of detail: they are redolent of the earth which swirls duskily around them, the
dullness of worn leather glowing and highlighted against the dark echo and damp of
fatigue. The shoes are as plain and as forcefully centered as Durer's more rustic
drawings that work in the same way to site, situate, institute or found a world as
Heidegger describes the standing efficacy of the temple work: opening a world and
simultaneously setting "this world back again on earth, which itself only thus emerges
as native ground." 17 Van Gogh's shoes are as morosely frozen as the sepia tone of the
photographic image and infinite reproducibility that was already at work in forever
altering the face of the working of art.
It is in order to discover the equipmental character of equipment, the nature of
equipment, in truth, that Heidegger undertakes what must then be regarded as a
properly, if irrecusably hermeneutic, phenomenological analysis of Van Gogh's
painting. The point of departure is one of convenience for Heidegger who had declared
his project from the start in settling upon a pair of shoes as an example for the sake of
its very redundancy. In the context of the lecture course on the origin of the work of
art, the advantage was patently didactic: just as everyone knows the painting, everyone
knows what shoes are, "everyone is acquainted with them." (32) But we know
Heidegger too well simply to trust his didactic preludes or concession of familiarity,
particularly where Heidegger goes on to suggest the fateful "pictorial representation"
of a pair of shoes found in a "well-known painting by Van Gogh who painted such
shoes several times" (33) to present the reader with a familiar painting of familiar
objects: thus Heidegger turns cliche upon cliche. For Heidegger, the cliche corres-
sponds to the representational equivalent of the obviousness and intimacy of the
example. "Everyone knows what shoes consist of." (33)
The phenomenological continuity ofHeidegger's analysis of the equipmentality of

the shoes qua equipment turns upon and into the same evidential quality of the obvious
- what is made manifest not here by way of cliche but via Heidegger's earlier
phenomenological analysis of things in use in Being and Time. Equipment re-cedes,
disappears, withdraws, vanishes from conscious intrusion in use: this is the intentional
utility of equipment as such (one cannot use a hammer in construction and contemplate
the hammer qua hammer as philosophers seem wont to like to do: the preoccupation
with hammerness as such would get in the way. And as Wittgenstein reminds us in this
same context, not only philosophical contemplation but even full grammatical
sentences and reports seem equally intrusive). Only when the peasant wears them
(whether woman or not, whether the shoes were the shoes of the artist- or philosopher
-as aspiring peasant) "are they what they are." That is shoes "actually serve" or work
only when they are in use, and when in wearing they are beneath notice, when they do
not intrude as such- when they are worn and when they are wearable - and not when
they are contemplated, regarded, or noticed. Until, and of course, the artist represents
them and this very use for the artist does matter, as utensil, like the rough beer steins
Van Gogh also collected and also painted, in painting the work of art.
Plainly, given this interpretive phenomenological context, the painting as such and
on Heidegger's account and in the context ofHeidegger's own early equipmental or
tool or use analysis, can be read as yielding manifest access to the equipmental charac-
ter of a pair of shoes as such. By regarding the painting, Heidegger is thus able to trace
every aspect of the wearer of the shoe, in the character of wear, in the painting of the
leather of the shoe, its look and character, thus retracing the lost person of the wearer,
herself, as Heidegger pretends to know her through Van Gogh's painting. The
phenomenological analysis does not proceed as a detective works or as the art historian
might do. Anti-Platonic, quintessentially non-theoretical, the phenomenologist adverts
to the use character of a tool, an item of equipment for beings like ourselves who have
to be, who need to be, shod. For Heidegger the work of art is in the place where truth
comes to stand. This perspective on art is opposed to the traditional aesthetic view of
art and hence opposed to the philosophy of art from Plato onward. On the traditional
view, philosophy does not find "truth" in the work of art or in any way coincident with
art. Philosophical aesthetics does not dispute this perspective, it simply assumes it and
drops the focus to that of the task or rule of judgment. Art and truth are related as
negative (art) and positive affirmation (truth). Plato, as a lover of truth condemns art,
as illusion thereby opposed to truth. And the philosopher of art follows suit, even
going as far, as seems patent in Nietzsche's case, to condemn truth itself for art's sake.
As he reads the painting, the story Heidegger tells reflects the rustic or country-
dweller's character of the shoes in question. And this holds as the earth or matter of
the work of art speaks in the duskily enshrined leather of the shoes themselves. This
holds no matter, I maintain, whether Van Gogh himself painted them, as Schapiro
thinks, after wearing them himself, or whether, as Heidegger seems content to think,
they were worn by the field workers Van Gogh celebrated so often. Heidegger sees
the "toilsome tread of the worker" (34) in the dark interior of the painted shoes
precisely because "from Van Gogh's painting we cannot even tell where these shoes
stand" (33) and Heidegger descries the honesty and the rigours of peasant life in the
darkness of the shoes revealing an entire world and the wholeness of a human lifetime:
"Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes
vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of ripening grain and its unexplained
self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field." (34)
It is by wearing them that Heidegger's farmer relates to the shoes and it is the way
shoes serve throughout such a lifetime: "the peasant woman is made privy to the silent
call of the earth; by virtue of the reliability of the equipment she is sure of her world."
(34) What is significant here is that to be affected by the description of such a life and
the vibrant call of the earth, no Black Forest sentimentality is needed. Not nostalgic
recollection as Schapiro and, differently, as Derrida would claim, not via a
phenomenological bracketing of an actual pair of shoes, but "only by bringing
ourselves before Van Gogh's painting" can we "read" a life in this way. For- and this
is the reason Heidegger's approach to the work of art is an ineliminably hermeneutic
aesthetics, unlike Merleau-Ponty's more classically phenomenological aesthetics- as
Heidegger calls us to attend to what we thereby encounter in the presence of the work:
"This painting spoke." And what it says tells us "what shoes are in truth." (35)
Heidegger talks about the world of use and serviceability thereby depicted and
declares that via Van Gogh's painting we encounter what is as such, i.e., "Van Gogh's
painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes is in truth."
Thus he can define the nature of art as "the truth of beings setting itself to work." (36)
This is Heidegger's dynamite of a completely art-philosophical kind, where
philosophy since Plato and through to Nietzsche has always set art in opposition to
truth. For Heidegger: "Truth happens in Van Gogh's painting. This does not mean
that something is correctly portrayed, but rather that in the revelation of the equip-
mental being of the shoes, that which is as a whole - world and earth in their
counterplay- attains to unconcealedness." (56)
The dynamite or difficulty ofHeidegger' s gambit contra the philosophical tradition
is compounded by an ambiguity. For us, which is why we wait for the expert
judgment, in order to have "value," the work of art must be a genuine or true work of
art. This truth of art has to do with its authenticity as art, its authentic identity as a
genuine work of art. To use Heideggerian terms to speak of a non-Heideggerian
problem, such a "free occasioning" of a genuine work of art would be its true (i.e.,
authenticable) derivation from an original (authentic) artist. The modem tradition
determining true art is preoccupied with authenticity and authenticity (and correlative
value) is determined with reference to authority, accurate representation, and the proper
reception of aesthetic value-attributions. The art expert assumes the truth or untruth
of the work of art as corresponding to its genuine character, its authenticity or
inauthenticity. Yet, like the logical truth of science, the aesthetic truth of modernity is
not Heidegger's truth, the aletheic occasioning of truth, which Heidegger names the
origin of the work of art.
Heidegger's challenge to this expert tradition adverts to the mastery of the art-work
precisely as it is able of itself to elide factitious detail, precisely as its presence remains
"as the happening of truth." In this way, Heidegger's anti-orpostaesthetic perspective
offers a hermeneutic phenomenology of art in truth, and may yet yield a more vital
experience of art as the working of the work upon us. Thus Heidegger declares the
working of the work of art against the fetishizing ethos of the museum itself, as against
the preoccupations proper to art history. For Heidegger, just as the poem in its own
voice can "deny" its author, who the artist "is remains unimportant," the work of art can
deny the artist's "person and name." 18
What Heidegger restores to art as its proper and ownmost state, that is: its truth, is
nothing but what Plato sought to withhold in his charge that art trades in illusion, in
deception, not truth. Even Nietzsche, for whom, and famously for Heidegger, "art is
higher than truth," remains, just as Heidegger asserts that he remains, within the
Western philosophic perspective on the relation between art and truth.
Heidegger is the first philosopher to attempt a reversal of the refusal of art's truth
(which is for the expert nothing but the erring truth and which for the philosopher is
what aletheia means) from the inception of philosophy. This attempt at restitution does
not prevent critics from charging that Heidegger falls within the scope of the
ressentiment-driven movement of philosophy against art, disenfranchising art, to repeat
Arthur Danto's provocative formula: a fantastic denial of art, thought to be poised
against its ownmost scope as a realm over and above, but certainly a world beyond
philosophy. Here there is more than a disciplinary dispute, or battle of the faculties, but
an expert crisis in today's terms, as these last battles are all that remain to us.
For critics, art historians, connoisseurs, it is essential that art be worth more than
philosophy. On Danto's terms, on the terms ofthe all-too-routine artworld, especially
as this is characteristic ofNew York's intellectual art-scene, the philosophical disen-
franchisement of art takes place whenever it is imagined that philosophy seeks to deny
this privilege either by censoring the claims of art and denying its value beyond the
aesthetic domain of culture or else by converting art to philosophy, whereby art reveals
its own (same) concern with being and with truth.
The first assertion vis-a-vis the superior and special difference of art is patent. Thus,
as Otto Poggeler claims, the artistic valence of a Celan exceeds Heidegger's ken, even
if the problem for Poggeler and for many interested in the question ofCelan is always
to answer the question of the very appeal Heidegger himself would maintain for the
poet. The same question may be posed with regard to Paul Klee's paintings for
Heidegger who makes reference to two such paintings, painted in the year ofKlee's
death, to introduce his 1962 lecture on Time and Being. 19
For Heidegger contends that "art lets truth originate. Art, founding preserving, is
the sprit that leaps to the truth of what is, in the work." (77) Thus art "by nature [is]
an origin," i.e., art is "a distinctive way in which truth comes into being," that is to say,
"becomes historical." Thus the place of art will be the locus of the composition of the
true wherever a work comes to be, wherever creators find their way, and preservers
find their own place. As much as the artist, qua creator of art, the preserver is
co important, for Heidegger, even the co-originator of the dynamic working of art as
such. Heidegger regards "founding preserving" as the veritable origin of the work of
art, not only as a correlative counterpart and rather than the part of spectator's or public
educed by any one informed with the right/wrong way of "appreciating" a work, i.e.,
not via a program of art education or the training of connoisseur or art historical experts
but rather "To each mode of founding there corresponds a mode of preserving." (75)
The preserving openness to the work as its co-creative compositional reception is
essential to the working manifestation of the work of art. The preserver is not a
conservative element but a veritable pre-requisite needed in advance and before the
work of art can come into being at all.
Here again the reference goes beyond the aletheic space of truth opened up by Van
Gogh's shoes. Beyond painting as a locus of truth, for Heidegger the expertly named
and certified "Aegina sculptures in the Munich collection, Sophocles' Antigone in the
best critical edition" (40) also offer us remnants or traces of art. But for Heidegger,
although the truth of art can hold true in an historical context, the art work can only
work as such in an unvanished, still real and present world. And to invoke the need for
this real presence, we see that to note the passing of a world will also be to admit the
eclipse of the working power of art otherwise than as a trace. And in our own time,
even if we ourselves undertake to journey to the site of the work itself, to meet, as
Heidegger did, "the temple in Paestum or the Bamberg cathedral on its own square,"
what we find and what that same encounter cannot retrieve is a vanished world,
emptied out or lost:"- the world of the work that stands there has perished." (40)
In what is at stake, in what works in the working of art, the loss of world can never
be undone. Bereft of preservers, the works '"themselves are gone by."'(41) This does
not mean that we cannot come to an encounter with works oflong past times, but rather
that if we do come to engage them, we encounter them as antique, as eclipsed and
closed, abandoned and desolate. The phenomenological description of the Greek
temple so important for the dramatic expression of the strife between earth and world
shows the force of such an eclipsed or vanished world by contrast with the origin of the
work of art. It is the working of the temple that "first fits together and at the same time
gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death,
disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of
destiny for human being." The resplendent litany of the lived, working temple relates
the same conflict between earth and world first heard as the truth of Van Gogh' s shoes
as an exhibition of the life of the peasant woman dwelling in the overtness of things by
means of the reliability of the equipment of her life that grants her world necessity and
nearness. The working of the work of art is exactly manifest in the importantly
different way that we today come to see temples.
Figure 4. External Approach: Temple at Bassae. Author's photograph, 1998.
For Heidegger, as he could later in his life have had the chance to see it, as so many
others have also done until very recently, the extraordinary temple at Bassae was able
to reveal the very crossed locus of earth and sky: the appointed site of an encounter
between the mortal and the divine. At Bassae, in the severe landscape of Greek
Arcadia, the temple as built where it is built and how it is set upon the heights, as so
many temples stand on the heights, as in their proper domain, reveals the massive
presence of the mountain itself in a high country of its own stark regionality: "Standing
there, the building rests on the rocky ground" and this standing "draws up out of the
rock the mystery of the rock's clumsy yet spontaneous support." (42)
The temple stone, the aspected substance of what stands above and before us, is
what calls forth the elements as such: "the lustre and gleam of the stone, though itself
apparently glowing only by grace of the sun, yet first brings to light the light of day,
the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night. ... The Greeks early called this
emerging and rising in itself and in all things physis. It clears and illuminates, also, that
on which and in which man bases his dwelling. We call this ground the earth." Thus
"the temple-work, standing there, opens up a world and at the same time, sets this
world back again on earth which only thus emerges as native ground." (42) Recent
readings that tease out the violence of strife (polemos) and ground (autochthony) in
Heidegger find themselves condemned to mistake this encounter between earth and
world and to what is needed for a world and for dwelling.20
For today, the working of truth of the temple as art reveals a vanished world: what
remains is a site for travelers and the increasingly destined locus of a museum. This is
not merely so in the tacit wake of forgotten cults (mourned in Nietzsche's cry: "2000
years!- and not a single new god!") but in the new world cast by the temple rebuilt,
reworked under the aegis of preservation. Today's temple at Bassae, huge and looming
but hidden by the mountain approach of the road one must follow to find it, is both
temporarily and in utter perpetuity completely covered over and blocked with a huge
tenting structure (Figs. 4 and 5), the steel struts of which vie with the mountain top
against the sky, eliding in an ever more dramatic way the world of truth as the world
of the temple in truth that Heidegger could invoke.
Figure 5. Interior/External View: Temple at Bassae. Author's photograph , 1998.

The tenting over of the temple at Bassae is not without precisely working power:
it outlines the world of today' s preservers, the world of the archaeological expert of
modem Greece, where the prime natural resources of this land, however conflictedly
regarded in this same modem world, are the remaining structures and objects of Greek
antiquity. This is the world of the modem exhibit and this is the world come to
distinctive presence on the Arcadian mountaintop where once one found a temple.
Tented by a weirdly circus-like structure of ungainly proportions in a strange land-
scape, the covering tent builds the closed space of modem vanity- a permanent tem-
porary scaffolding- around the temple: a mindless gesture of affected protection from
the elements secluding and so refusing them as the elements the temple was first set up
to meet and to greet. For prior to such a conservative blockage, occlusive beyond the
passing of the antique world itself, the work of the temple had ever been the work of
exposure- set up into the elements of the world itself, a place of wrought encounter
between earth and sky, that is the mortal and the divine. After so much antiquity, the
tented gesture at Bassae intends to keep the temple safe from the ravages of the light
and the air of the industrial world, calculatedly foreclosing the very elemental exposure
that the temple builders put all their energy and all their resources to assure.
The brute example of the temple at Bassae, tented over and shaded from the sky
(Fig. 5)- and the Athenian conservers of the Parthenon show every sign of an ambition
to erect a similar preservational shield upon the heights of the Acropolis itself- proves
the conservative force of the modem isolation of art in the locus of the museum or the
tourist exhibition, duly labeled, properly "illuminated,"- not so that it may be seen as
what it is, but like an old parlor, in an old fashioned style, so that it may not "fade."
The museum as such, the conserver's impetus, secures and in so doing seals off
whatever trace of the temple world had yet remained on earth in the very place and the
look itself of the temple beneath the sky.
The temple, for Heidegger- and as Heidegger saw it unguarded by preservative
scaffolding or the interventions of modern self-assertion - is not incidentally but
essentially the site of world-withdrawal and decay, as a world in abeyance or retreat
that only thus can show itself to us in a world without the temple's cult and thus
without temples. 21 The withdrawal alone shows us what has been lost. "The temple
in its standing there, first gives to things their look and to men their outlook on
themselves." And even where the temple still stands in "perfectly preserved" glory,
under the open sky, this look of things and this human outlook are foreclosed. The view
of the temple only "remains open as long as the work is a work"- that is, as long as the
temple is a working or real temple for a real people, only as long as the cult and the life
of the cult remains real: that is, and only, "as long as the god has not fled from it."
Heidegger's concern, he explains in his own Addendum, is not to provide a
philosophy of art- despite his own Epilogue in which he invokes the riddle of art, in
associative connection with objective aesthetics, subjective experience, and the death
of art- but to use or to employ or to set to work a phenomenology of the artwork itself
in order to explore the occasioning of the "setting-into-work" that is the Heideggerian
reading of the Latin ponere, the Greek thesis. (82) The setting of a statue, as the Greek
thesis, "means" as Heidegger recalls "a setting up in the unconcealed" (61/82). This
institution or setting up is what first yields what stands before us, what faces us in a
Greek statue. "The standing of the statue (i.e., the presence of the radiance facing us)
is different from" the object as object, standing over against us. "Standing" for
contrastive outline is the meaning ofHeidegger's Riss 22 - traditionally translated as rift

-not as "a mere cleft is ripped open," as Heidegger emphasizes: but as the limit of the
design, outline, border that sketches "the basic features of the rise of the lighting of
beings" (63) or "boundary in the Greek sense does not block off; rather, being itself
brought forth, it first brings into radiance what is present." (83)
The painted sketch of shoes set within, delimited by or outlined against a back-
ground of"nothing," sheer mereness, what we could call a context of"repose"- setting
the shoes into a "still-life" - places them "in the fullness of motion." And for
Heidegger "all this holds of the work in the Greek sense of ergon; this work's 'being'
is energeia, which gathers infinitely more movement within itself than do the modem
energies." (83)
This energeia is more important than the "essential" ambiguity Heidegger calls to
our attention: art is defined, Heidegger notes as "the setting-into-work of truth" where
truth is "'subject' on the one hand and 'object' on the other." (86) But both fail, for art
is to be "conceived in terms of disclosive appropriation." Thus art is "the setting-into-
work of truth where truth is now object and art is human creating and preserving." (86)
It is this second ambiguity that bears upon the human artist as creator and preserver.
And, for Heidegger, this too is resolved in terms of the correspondence between Being
and human being: Being "is a call to the human and is not without the human." (71)
NOTES
' This notoriously checkered reference is offered in the context ofHeidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics
trans. R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 199. See Otto Poggeler, "Heidegger on Art"
in Karsten Harries and Christoph Jamme, eds., Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art, and Technology (New York:
Holmes & Meier, 1994), I 06-153. Poggeler emphasizes Heidegger's attention to Van Gogh's letters, as well
as to the paintings of Klee and Cezanne (see here note 18 below). Beyond Poggeler, Dieter Jiihnig has
underscored Heidegger's affinity for the modem sculptural art of Giaocometti and offers a particularly
compelling account of Brancusi's Bird in Flight. See Hihnig, "Die Kunst und der Raum" in G. Neske, ed.,
Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger (Pfullingen: Neske, 1977), 131-148.
2 Martin Heidegger, Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1960), and in: Holzwege (Frankfurt am
Main: Klostermann). "The Origin of the Work of Art," trans. Albert Hofstadter, Poetry, Language, Thought
(New York: Harper & Row: 1971 ), 17-81.
3 Thomas Puttfarken at the beginning of his wonderful art-scholar's reading of The Invention ofPictorial
Composition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000) muses that the age of easel art is said to be at an end
- a judgment he offers only facetiously, and would mean even less if the circumspection of his scholarly
vision had been extended to the museum itself beyond its contents.
4 Duchamp did not invent this but made it permanently plain to the art theorist's mind as he gave it a name
and associated a conceptual catenna to what was already the reigning convention of the thing that is not only
art but the artworld (which has, patently, nothing to do with the world-abundance or world-emptiness of what
Heidegger speaks of as the work of art.)
5 Meyer Schapiro has determined this historical detail not by researching possible candidates for the
painting Heidegger could have seen but by the direct expedient of writing to Heidegger and receiving his
reply. See Schapiro, "The Still-Life as a Personal Object: A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh" in M. L.
Simmel, ed., The Reach of Mind: Essays in Memory of Kurt Goldstein (New York: Springer Publishing,
1968), 203-209. Reprinted with an additional essay written in 1994, "Further Notes on Heidegger and Van
Gogh" in Schapiro, Theory and Philosophy ofArt: Style, Artist, and Society (New York: Braziller, 1994),
135-141 and 142-151 respectively. Further references below note this later collection.
Schapiro writes, "They are clearly pictures of the artist's own shoes, not the shoes of a peasant." The
Reach of the Mind, 205. Schapiro modifies the passage in re-printing this essay in 1994. Here he qualifies
his claim; "They are more likely pictures of the artist's own shoes, not the shoes of a peasant." 136.
7 This is less a matter of Schapiro's contention than belied by the mere fact of offering such "Further Notes
on Heidegger and van Gogh." Although Schapiro notes defenses from such sources as Hans-Georg Gadamer
(who wrote the preface to the Reclam edition of Heidegger's essay) and Heidegger's own marginal
corrections, Schapiro re-asserts his original interpretation. To say that he could not however have regarded
his first interpretation as his last word on the issue is only to advert to his need to offer a further essay.
8 "The Still-Life as a Personal Object A Note on Heidegger and van Gogh," 208.
Schapiro reacted powerfully and negatively to precisely this moving account. But it is significant that he
was inspired to forget the detail that only fairly recently have shoes come to be purchased ready to wear,
whether new or used. Until fairly recently, shoes, like clothes were made for one; that is what cobblers did,
even for indigent but still bourgeois artists like Van Gogh.
10 Vincent van Gogh, letter no. 529, cited in Schapiro, 136.
11 J. de Rotonchamp, Paul Gauguin 1898-1903 (Paris; C. Cres, 1925), 33 and Paul Gaugin, "Natures
mortes," Essais d'art fibre, 1894,4, 273-275. Cited in Schapiro, 140.

12 Schapiro, 140.
13 These are the shoes Fran~ois Gauzi evidently refers to, in a letter Schapiro translates in his "Further Notes
on Heidegger and Van Gogh" 146, and which Schapiro confidently maintains as confirming his original view.
14 Although, and to be sure, Walter Biemel's introductory study of Heidegger (Hamburg; Rowohlt, 1973),
depicts (but offers no commentary directly regarding) another painting of a pair of shoes- currently in the
collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
15 Schapiro, 139.
16 For an illuminating array of the same, it is useful to visit the least visited level of the new Vincent van
Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, where the basement and the research materials of curators and art historians
have been brought together to offer a valuable and informative display not only of Van Gogh's paintings but
many of his models and associated tools for the same, including the perspective frame that Patrick Heelan
adverts to in his phenomenological analysis of the painted or pictorial space of the artist's Bedroom at Aries.
See also Margolis and Heelan in this same volume.
17 Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" in Poetry. Language. Thought, 42. Further references are
given in the body of the text. See Robert Bernasconi's very fine discussion of DUrer (and Heidegger and
Schapiro) in "' Ne sutor ultra crepidam;' DUrer and Erasmus at the Hands of Panofsky and Heidegger" in
Heidegger in Question: The Art ofExisting (Atlantic Highlands; Humanities Press, 1993), 117-134.
18 Heidegger, "Language," in Poetry, Language, Thought, 135.
19 In this context, Heidegger writes, as a prelude to his life-long claim regarding the nuance and complexity
proper to philosophy- critics will say, particularly his own, but apologists will say, particularly his own-
and in the process underwriting our ordinary respect for expert judgment, "If we were to be shown ... two
pictures by Paul Klee, in the original, which he painted in the year of his death -the watercolor, Saints from
a Window and Death and Fire, tempera on burlap- we should want to stand before them for a long while -
and should abandon any claim that they be immediately intelligible." Heidegger then adduces the examples
ofTrakl's poetry and Heisenberg's theoretical physics as similar, to make the point that by contrast we tend
to expect that philosophy be exactly- and- "immediately intelligible." Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans.
Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).
20 This is the more regrettable of the several problems besetting books like Gregory Fried, Heidegger 's
Polemos: From Being to Politics (Hew Haven; Yale University Press, 2001), a book showing how analytic
philosophy unecumbered by the hermeneutic inconvenience of rigor can add new fits to the political anxieties
of the kind (re)inaugurated by Farias and spat out with different degrees of foaming violence by Tom
Rockmore and, with somewhat more grace, by Richard Wolin and Co., or of Robert Bambach's new book,
currently still in manuscript but forthcoming on Heidegger's Greco-German "autochthony."
21 I discuss this ineliminable indigence in Babich, "On Malls, Museums, and the Art World; Postmodemism
and the Vicissitudes of Consumer Culture." Art Criticism. IX/I (Fall 1993); 1-16 and, more specifically with
respect to Heidegger, "From Nietzsche's Artist to Heidegger's World; The Post-Aesthetic Perspective." Man
and World. 22 (1989); 3-23.
22 The translation of der Riss as rift accords with the conjunction in Heidegger's text with the Open, but this
term, Lichtung is better translated as clearing, and can even be rendered here to good effect as illumination
or lighting. I owe a note of thanks to Holger Schmid for constantly reminding me of the dangerous ambiguity
of the English "rift," an ambiguity adding Pythian dimensions to the strife between earth and world.
D. CYRIL BARRETT, S.J.
PHENOMENOLOGY AND
20TH CENTURYARTISTIC REVOLUTIONS
As we enter a new century, to say nothing of a new millenium, there is an urge to

review and assess the previous one. In the case of art and literature at the end of the
19th and beginning of the 20th centuries that seems almost an imperative. The tum of
the 15th, 16th and 18th centuries had seen revolutions in literature and the arts.
Whether these were stimulated by the approach of a new century is hard to say and
need not detain us. Suffice it to say, the end of the 19th century- they even thought
up a name for it (jin de siecle)- saw revolutions in the arts and literature the likes and
scope of which had never been seen before. These revolutionary changes threatened
the very notion of art itself, to say nothing of the individual arts and artistic literature.
It baffled the general public, even the artistically educated public; academicians were
contemptuous and dismissive; and, for the most part, the critics were as baffled as the
public. This state of affairs persisted to some degree until the 1960's when the mid-
century American artistic revolutions overshadowed the now extenuated earlier ones.
The purpose of this paper is to examine how aesthetic philosophies and artistic
theories, both of the time and of earlier times, coped with these revolutions; and I shall
contend that Phenomenology copes best. If space permitted, I would like to pursue this
investigation in relation to all the major arts and major aspects ofliterature. But that is
not possible, so I shall confine myself to the visual arts, and, within these, primarily
painting and sculpture. However, since aesthetics, as distinct from artistic theory, is not
constrained in this way, I shall first indicate briefly the major aspects of the other arts.
At the end of the paper, I hope to give a no less brief indication of how pheno-
menological aesthetics can cope with these other artistic revolutions.
The revolution in music was possibly the most radical. It started in 1906 with
Arnold Schoenberg's atonal piece Chamber Symphony. This gave rise to serial music
in which the major and minor system is abandoned and the notes are arranged in a
series that has to be adhered to throughout the work. The best known example is the
twelve-note technique in which all the notes within the octave (the seven white and five
black notes on a piano) are used in series. Although few composers have adhered to a
series, the average or more than average listener finds it hard to accept. Whether tonic
music is natural to the ear and hence the only true music, and the rest just noise is
something that we cannot discuss here.
279
280 D. CYRIL BARRETT, S.J.
Literature underwent many revolutions the chief of which were in poetry and the
novel. In poetry we had "pure poetry" which despensed with meaning unless it was
random, and regarded the sound, or even the sight, of printed words as the essence of
poetry. This notion prospered among the Italian Futurists and the Russian Formalists,
and it was to reappear in the 1950's under the name "concrete poetry."
Between 1913 and 1922 Marcel Proust produced a so-called novel which was not
like any novel hitherto. It did not seem to have a plot or beginning, middle and end. It
was called: Remembrance of Times Past [A Ia recherche de temps perdu] and dealt
more with a "stream of consciousness" than with narrative as traditionally understood.
It has not ceased to bamboozle, as do the novels of Virginia Woolf. But Proust was
soon outdone by James Joyce's Ulysses of 1922, coinciding with Proust's last volume.
In it he introduces a new use of language. By 1928 he had published the prelude to
Finnegans Wake, Anna Livia Plurabella, which was hardly written in language at all.
Drama had to wait half a century until it came in line with music, painting or poetic
and narrative literature. Checkhov's tragedy comedy was the best it could do until
Beckett and lonesco came along with their theatre of the absurd.
The dance, on the other hand, underwent a profound revolution in 1913 when
Diaghilev put on The Rite of Spring, choreographed by Nijinsky, music by Stravinsky
and performed by the Ballets Russes. It flouted traditional ballet with its lack of
pirouettes and pas de deux. The reaction against it was so violent that riot police had
to be called in. From then on, though classical ballet survives, the notion of what counts
as ballet, or, at least dance, had been irrevocably altered.
All this concerns what I am writing about, but further discussion of it is not possible
here, so I shall tum to an equally inadequate account of the revolution in the visual arts.
Impressionism posed a problem for the public, academicians and critics in the mid-
19th century. Neo-lmpressionism (Seurat and Signac) and the Post-Impressionists
(Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin) were no less problematical. However, it was not
these revolutions that affected the public so much as the ones that occurred at the
beginning of the 20th century. First, there was the exhibition of 1904 at which Matisse,
Derain, Rouault and Vlaminck exhibited.
They were dubbed "wild beasts" - fauves - because of the shock they gave to the
public and critics. But that was as nothing compared to the shock delivered by Pablo
Picasso three years later when his "great canvas," Les Demoiselles d'Avignon appeared.
Though the street Avignon was in the red light district of Barcelona, the demoiselles
were hardly seductive. They looked like figures in solid geometry in the Egyptian,
Catalan, and negroid styles of nude. Not surprisingly the movement started by Picasso,
followed by Braque and Gris, was called Cubism.
The Cubists carried on the distortion of the human and other forms, and natural
colours begun by the Fauves. They distorted perspective as well. But in the view ofPiet
Mondrian they did not go far enough in distancing themselves from visual reality and
reaching towards a more fundamental expression of physical reality. This drove him
to ever more geometncally abstract compositions culminating in his characteristic grids
filled with primary colours.
Kasimir Malevich in pursuit of the feeling of non-objectivity went a step further by
painting a black square on a white ground in 1913 and outdid himself with a white
square on a white ground in 1918. (He was later to be outdone by Yves Klein who, in
1950, exhibited a purely blue canvas.)
PHENOMENOLOGY AND 20TH C. ARTISTIC REVOLUTIONS 281
However, the most radical revolution in the visual arts was inaugurated by Marcel
Duchamp in 1917 when he submitted for exhibition at the Society oflndependent
Artists a French-type urinal signed R. Mutt and called Fountain. It was rejected from
the exhibition as offensive. In its defence Duchamp claimed that it was a work of art
for the following reason:
Whether Mr Mutt made the fountain with his own hands or not is of no importance. He CHOSE
it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its significance disappeared under the new
title and point of view- created new thought for that object.'
What new thoughts the urinal was expected to create we are not told, but three
points were made. (1) For something to be a work of art it does not have to be made by
the "artist" himself. It is sufficient that he has chosen it and put it on display. (2) 1t
should be given a new title. And, (3), as a result of giving it a new title and displaying
it in circumstances out of those ordinarily associated with it it takes on a new
significance. (Ironically in defence of his Fountain, Duchamp appealed to the fact that
urinals are regularly displayed in plumbers' showroom windows, thus contradicting
himself, since in that circumstance, if not the circumstance, with which they are
ordinarily associated, it is hardly a work of art.)
Thus in the first quarter of the 20th century the ground was laid for the revolutions
to follow. These followed the two world wars. The first: Dadaism which merged into
Surrealism. The second, initially derivative from Surrealism via Jackson Pollock. It
includes action painting, then, possibly, though it may have had a different origin, pop
and op, minimal, happenings and installations and so on. One can ask whether a war
on the scale of the first and second world wars is potent in causing artistic and literary
revolutions. Again, this question must be left in abeyence.
So now we must ask what artistic theory and aesthetic philosophy best copes with
these artistic revolutions.
What, you may ask, is there with which to cope?
Well, in the first place there was the classical, Platonico-Aristotelian notion of
mimesis, which regarded a work of art as an imitation of the actual world in some
sense. Now, clearly this could not cope with a white square on a white ground as it
stood. Such a picture (if so it can be called) does not represent anything, since,
according to Malevich, it is not even a symbol but just what it is seen to be: a white
square on a white ground (given that there are various tones of white as of other
colours).
It may be unfair to treat Aristotle in this way since in the Poetics he is ready to
admit that if one does not recognize the appearance of something in a picture one can
still get aesthetic pleasure from the "execution or colouring or some other cause"
(Poetics, 1448b 19). Were Aristotle alive today, I doubt if he would have much
difficulty in dealing with contemporary art. But, alas, he is not.
Kant made a bold effort to deal with aesthetics in general but he fell short on
philosophy on art. However, he did set in motion a movement that would eventually
spawn a theory that to some extent accounts for part of the revolutions in the visual
arts. With his notion of the aesthetic judgment as one concerned with purposefulness
without an extrinsic purpose he established the autonomy of natural beauty at least. It
is not to be judged in the final analysis by cognitive (truth-value), moral, ideological
or utilitarian standards. This gave rise, directly or indirectly, to the phrase "art for art's
sake." The phrase /'art pour /'art seems to have been coined by Benjamin Constant in
his Journaux intimes early in the 19th century or by Victor Cousin in a lecture at the
Sorbonne in 1818. DeQuincey satirized it as early as 1827 with his essay "On Murder
considered as one of the Fine Arts," anticipating Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience by
over half a century. The movement it engendered, which came to be known as
Aestheticism was subscribed to by such prominent writers as Baudelaire, Gautier and
Oscar Wilde. However they gave it a moral twist that earned it a bad name in the minds
of moralists and ecclesiastical authorities. Not content with holding that ordinary moral
or theological values and beliefs were irrelevant to the aesthetic judgment of a work of
art, they went on to hold that art is above ordinary morality and obeys only a morality
of its own. This aspect of Aestheticism does not concern us. But the theory, known as
Formalism, that was spawned from aestheticism, does.
Formalism comes in various forms. In Stalinist Russia it became a dirty word
applied to any artist who did not conform to Marx-Leninist ideology. As regards the
visual arts no one has summed up what might be called moderate formalism better than
the Symbolist painter Maurice Denis. In his curiously titled "Definition of Neo-
Traditionalism" he says: "Remember that a picture, before it is a war horse, a naxed
woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours arranged
in a certain order." 2 This version of formalism received its best expression in Roger
Fry's Vision and Design of 1920. 3 A decade earlier he had mounted two exhibitions,
one of Post-Impressionists (Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin), in 1910, and another
that included the Fauves and Cubists (including Matisse and Picasso), of which Sir
Kenneth Clark, the eminent art historian, said: "In so far as taste can be changed by one
man, it was changed by Roger Fry. But, alas, another Formalist had got in before him.
In 1914, Clive Bell had published his sensational defense of the recent innovations in
a book called simply, and agressively, Art."4
Bell explained art in terms of "significant form." As applied to the visual arts his
description is similar to Denis's except in two respects. He says that a picture is "a
combination oflines and colours (counting white and black as colours) that moves me
aesthetically." 5 This account differs from Denis's, first, because of the reference to
"aesthetic emotion" as a criterion. Unfortunately Bell's account of this emotion is semi-
circular. Ostensibly what he is saying is that significant form is form that produces an
aesthetic emotion and that an aesthetic emotion is what is produced by significant form.
This is clearly circular. But if, as we should, we ignore the aesthetic emotion as
irrelevant or, at most, secondary, we have a definition of sorts, though one inferior to
Denis's. The second, and far more important, respect in which he differs from Denis
is in omitting the war horse, the naked woman and the anecdote. And this is not an
accidental omission: it is ideological, since Bell says explicitly: "The representative
element in a work of art may or may not be harmful; always it is irrelevant." 6 If this
were to be taken seriously, it would be absurd. It would mean that it was irrelevant to
our appreciation of Michelangelo's Creation ofAdam that it had anything whatsoever
to do with a biblical narrative, any more than Piero della Francesca's Resurrection in
Sansepolcro has anything to do with the Gospel story; that all they are are just
combinations of line and colour. Ironically, Bell did not take his theory to its logical
conclusion. He had no time for abstract art as practiced by Mondrian and Malevich.
Indeed, he admits in the preface to his 1949 edition of the book that until he had seen
a number ofSeurat's pictures, he did not take him seriously as an artist because of his
semi-abstract pointillism.
Formalism, particularly as propounded by Bell was hardly philosophical aesthetics,

although he has the gall to head one of his chapters "The Metaphysical Hypothesis"
(sic). But there was a contemporary version ofldealism favoured by Benedetto Croce
that had some claim to cope with the new developments in art philosophically. Croce,
in the Idealist tradition, detached the work of art from its physical base, just as he
detached language from its practical exchanges in ordinary life. (At least he had that
in common with Logical Positivist and others of their ilk.) Art for Croce was primarily
in the mind. Taken physically, pictures, statues, musical sounds, poetic, narrative or
dramatic words, spoken or written, are of no importance aesthetically. They are merely
the conveyers of aesthetic intuition: its means of expression. Art proper, the
intuition/expression, has little to do with physical instances.
This, in a sense, was an improvement on Formalism. At least it made a place for
representation and emotional expression insofar as they are internal rather than
physical. But it would hardly be capable of dealing with the physicality of Fauvism and
Cubism, much less abstract art. However, it might be applicable to Dada and
Surrealism, particularly Duchamp's version of what came to be called "Conceptual
Art." But to deny the physicality of a work of art be it a painting, a piece of sculpture
or a building is like looking at them in illustrations. The physicality of art is integral to
it. Perhaps not all literature need be read aloud or printed, but certain poetry is as much
a matter of visual perception as of thought and imagination.
It is within this context that I wish to introduce phenomenological aesthetics as the
one most competent to cope with the artistic revolutions, not only at the beginning of
the 20th century but throughout it.
Phenomenology is not so much a philosophy (pace Husser!) as a philosophical
method. As its name implies, it is concerned with appearances. Not with what appears
to be -like an optical illusion or an hallucination- but with the appearance of what is,
what is real and actual. It is not concerned with proving its existence and actuality, as
Empiricists are preoccupied in doing, but with investigating how it appears and what
we are to make of its appearance. Though it concentrates on appearances, it does not
question the physical nature of material objects nor their existence in space and time.
Indeed, the solidity, weight and impenetrability of statues and buildings is an aspect of
their appearance or phenomenology. Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his Phenomenology
of Perception insists that even the highest and most abstract thinking must have a
material base since it is a temporal activity and time presupposes motion, and motion
presupposes something material that moves or changes, if only a brain cell.
The advantage of this method of philosophical investigation is as follows.
As against the Formalists, the Phenomenologist does not have to restrict his
investigation to the formal aspects of a work of art- line and colour, sound, movement,
proportion and use of space, etc. That a picture depicts a horse, a naked woman or an
anecdote is as much part of its appearance as its colours and lines. On the other hand,
if a picture of five women or one woman, say, Gertrude Stein, can hardly be said to
depict ordinary women nor be a realistic portrait, they still are appearances and can be
judged as such according to the best Kantian principles of aesthetic autonomy.
On the other hand, this is not like the Idealist move of detaching the work of art
entirely from its physical base ofline and colour and making it a purely mental activity
in which the physical aspect fulfills the function of merely conveying a mental intuition
to the general public, in the way in which the letters r-a-i-n convey the idea that rain
is present or imminent. The physical aspect of a work of art - even of a poem or

narrative - depends on its physical appearance on a printed page or in recital, where it
all began.
Having said this, I shall now proceed to a positive account of phenomenological
aesthetics and how it can cope with the 20th century artistic revolution.
It is hardly coincidental that almost every Phenomenologist, with the possible
exception of its founder, Edmund Husser!, has written on aesthetics. Some- Roman
Ingarden and Mikel Dufrenne- devoted their lives to phenomenological aesthetics. A
cynic might say that aesthetics is about all that phenomenology can be applied to. Be
that as may be, it can certainly be applied to art and literature profitably.
The key to phenomenological aesthetics is the notion of the aesthetic object. An
aesthetic object is not a special kind of object. It is just anything treated as an object of
aesthetic consideration. It may be a thought or an image or a landscape or a building
or a piece of sculpture: in other words, anything that we perceive, think about or
imagine. Moreover, it does not have to be what we normally designate as a work of art.
Anything - a pair of old boots, a wickerwork chair or a cramped old bedroom- could
be an aesthetic object. So can something that one dislikes aesthetically be an aesthetic
object: a block of pretentious flats, a pointlessly flamboyant dress, a cliche-ridden
speech or advertisement. These are not offered as works of art. They are not offered for
our aesthetic admiration. Nevertheless, we can regard them aesthetically. They can
become, momentarly, aesthetic objects; and we can pass an adverse verdict on their
aesthetic merit. In other words, to say of something that it is kitsch, schmaltz, or
downright ugly is to pass an aesthetic judgment on it, and this implies treating it as an
aesthetic object as a Phenomenologist would understand the term. "Aesthetic object"
is not a laudatory or honorific term: it refers merely to the way the object, be it what
it may, is being regarded. Having said that, I have to add that in my own, if not the
phenomenologists', position, I would want to say that a work of art is something- a
poem, novel, play, picture, sonata, or whatever - that is being exhibited, published,
played or otherwise presented to the public in order to be admired for some reason,
however perverse. This is why I take issue with Duchamp about the urinals in the
plumber's showroom. They were on display, certainly, but primarily for their utilitarian
and economic values and not for their aesthetic merits or aesthetic demerits - I dare say
an amusing exhibition of what critics or artists regarded as the ugliest things on earth
could be arranged and presented as works ofbad art, but, if they were not intended as
works of art, that might seem a bit unfair.
No one in my opinion has explained the phenomenological position on aesthetics
so well or so succinctly as Wittgenstein, who, whatever his followers may think,
regarded himself as a phenomenologist. He asserted this numerous times. He describes
aesthetic contemplation as follows: "Ifl have been contemplating the stove, and then
am told: but now all you know is the stove, my result does indeed seem trivial. For this
represents the matter as ifl studied the stove as one among many things in the world.
But if I was studying the stove it was my world, and everything else colourless by
contrast with it." He also observes: "it is equally possible to take he bare image as the
worthless picture in a whole temporal world, and as the true world among shadows ...
Is this it perhaps," he adds, "in this view the object is seen together with space and time
instead of in space and time? ... As a thing among things, each thing is equally
insignificant; as a world each one is equally significant. " 7
In literature and the arts, as distinct from natural or artificial beauty and uglinees,
and everything in between, the artist, composer, writer does the work of taking the
object out of space and time, setting it against space and time, and making it,
momentarily at least, the viewer's, listener's or reader's whole world. One might call
this the "Grecian Urn" syndrome where the boy eternally pursues the girl and will
never catch her, and yet they can be happy in this artistic suspension of time and space:
"Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair." And this suspension of time and space need
not be confined to the natural beauties of youth or gorgeous landscapes and seascapes:
Van Gogh presents us with a pair of old boots, a humble bedroom and a plain, simple
chair and transforms them with his use of colour and handling of paint. But all is not
in the hands of the artist or writer. The viewer, listener, reader has to see the work of
art or literature against space and time, not as an object among other objects (at least
not for the moment), whether they be useful or informative or moral. They must be
seen as aesthetic objects and not just part of the furniture or natural sounds, including
verbal ones.
Phenomenological aesthetics, therefore, gives a better account of literature and the
arts than either Formalism or Crocean Idealism which were the alternative aesthetical
philosophies or theories at the time of the 20th century artistic revolutions.
As regards Neo-lmpressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism and Cubism pheno-
menological aesthetics would not have fared much better than Formalism insofar as
both regard a picture or piece of sculpture or building as organizations of lines, colours,
solid form in space, etc. But as regards the representative and symbolic significance of,
say, a Seurat, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso or Braque it would not consider
them irrelevant, however distorted it might be, since the understanding of the formal
composition might depend on seeing a familar object as distorted.
When it comes to the abstract painting of Mondrian and Malevich and to abstract
sculpture of, say, Gabo, Pevsner, Nicholson or Hepburn, Formalism and phenomeno-
logical aesthetics would still be ex equo, but Crocean Idealism would be at a loss, since
this art appeals directly to perception of the physical and, in the case of sculpture, both
truth to material and the ability to move about the art object in space is essential.
Duchamp (and his derivatives), with his notion of anti-art, his rejection of aesthetic
value and his insistence that what someone calls a work of art thereby becomes a work
of art, poses a problem for aesthetics of every hue. But I think phenomenological
aesthetics can cope with it. As I argued above, regarding something as an aesthetic
object does not imply that it is beautiful, significant or even remotely interesting. And
as for taking something from its ordinary environment and choosing to call it a work
of art, this poses no problem for phenomenological aesthetics. It would thereby become
an aesthetic object. Whether this would make it a work of art or an objet d'art in the
honorific sense is another matter, but not a matter of that great importance.
With Duchamp taken care of, nothing revolutionary that followed- Dada, Surreal-
ism, Action Painting, Minimalism, Op and Pop, installations, monochrome canvases,
sharks in formaldehyde, scruffy beds, videos or whatever - presents a problem for
phenomenological aesthetics, with the possible exception of Conceptual art. Conceptual
art and its close relative art language, for what they are worth, would seem to fall
within the territory of Crocean Idealism, but this does exclude them from being within
the domain of phenomenological aesthetics since poetry and other forms of literature,
if not precisely conceptual in the way in which Joseph Kosuth's One and Three Chairs
(1965)- a real chair, a photograph of it and a dictionary definition of"chair"- do not

exclude even mathematical proofs beautifully presented. This, perhaps, is a question
to be tackled on another occasion. However, I cannot forebear from quoting something
Duchamp said in an interview with the American critic, James Johnson Sweeney, in
1946. He said: ''until the last hundred years all painting had been literary or religious:
it had all been in the service of the mind. This characteristic was lost little by little
during the last century... Dada was an extreme protest against the physical side of
painting. It was a metaphysical attitude." 8 There is the text for a sequel!
Space does not allow me to do more than suggest how the notion of the aesthetic
object might apply to atonal music and the theatre of the absurd. In the one case the
composer is doing unusual things with sounds and they should be listened to as sounds.
In the other case, the playwright is doing unusual things with words and human
behaviour. But even classical, gothic or baroque architecture has to be looked at as an
aesthetic object and not from the point of view of its structural reliability, cost,
draughtiness or usefulness. In a way, the spectator makes it a work of art. But enough.
Oxford University
NOTES
1 Marcel Duchamp, quoted by Calvin Tomkins in Ahead ofthe Game (Middlesex UK, 1968), 42-43. First
published in the US under the title The Bride and the Bachelors.
2 Maurice Denis, "Definition of Neo-Traditionalism" Theoris ( 1890-191 0), 1-13 in the 1912 edition.
Quoted from the E. G. Holt, ed., Classicists to the Impressionists ((New York: Doubleday, 1966), 509.
3 Roger Fry's Vision and Design (London: Chatto and Windus, 1920).
4 Sir Kenneth Clark, quoted in The Oxford Dictionary ofArt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 189.
5 Clive Bell, Art (London: Arrow, 1961), 26.
6 Op. cit., 36. My italics.
7 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916 (Oxford: Blackwells, 1961), 83.
8 James Johnson Sweeney, in 1946. Quoted in H. B. Chipp, Theories ofModern Art (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1968), 340.
IRMA B. JAFFE
VIRTUE AND VIRTUAL REALITY IN

JOHN TRUMBULL'S PANTHEON
The four paintings by John Trumbull (1756-1843) that hang in the great Capitol
Rotunda - The Declaration ofIndependence, The Surrender of General Burgoyne at
Saratoga, The Surrender ofLord Cornwallis at Yorktown, The Resignation of General
Washington (Figs. 1, 2, 3, 4)- depict the four most decisive moments in the American
War of Independence and represent the artist's solution to his moral conflict arising
from, on the one hand, the claims of virtue, directing his energies to a serious pursuit
for the public good, and on the other, the need to earn his living by making portraits,
which he considered frivolous, simply satisfying his selfish pride. 1
Trumbull's paintings respond to one of the traditional functions of visual art: to
satisfy human curiosity about the world by showing what things or events there are or
were or could be in it. Ever since Giotto, Western art has been engaged in deepening
this innocent and creative deception so that gradually, by stages, the imitation of
sensual reality became increasingly more like the actual sense experience. The aim all
along has been to persuade viewers that they were virtual witnesses - witnesses in
essence and effect although not in fact.
Photography took over this service when art moved to abstraction and
nonrepresentation, and today, with television, the print media; and virtual reality
projectors, our curiosity about wonderful and terrible events and people can be satisfied
more than ever as if we were actually in their space. The reality of the physical world
is virtually brought into our homes where we see hurricanes, soldiers in combat -
anything happening anywhere in the world while it is happening. Photography has
advanced far beyond painting in picturing the world beyond our personal purview. I
want to locate John Trumbull's paintings in the United States Rotunda in this technical
evolution of virtual reality.
But the idea of virtue has also undergone a parallel cultural evolution. Where art
once followed society in perceiving and depicting virtues as attributes possible only in
those belonging to the upper classes, modem representational art, particularly in
fictional films, reflects the social changes which have created the perception that all
individuals have the capacity to be virtuous, by virtue of being human. Since World
War II, the fictional battlefield of the movies has increasingly centered on the soldier
rather than the officer, in considering the virtue of courage, as in the film Saving
287
288 IRMA B. JAFFE
Private Ryan in which a detail of soldiers is sent on what results in a selfsacrificing

mission to save the eponymous private. I therefore want to locate Trumbull's paintings
in the social evolution of virtue alongside the technical evolution of virtual reality.
In the eighteenth century, the nation as a political entity emerged as a coherent
unifying power within certain geographic boundaries, supplanting the universal
Church, and national patriotism began to supplant religious faith as a requisite attribute
of virtue, with moralizing fervor providing the emotional experience formerly given to
religion. The fastdeveloping scientific spirit had awakened curiosity not only about the
facts of the perceived world but the events of the past, and by the eighteenth century
historicism won major intellectual and aesthetic attention. Classical history centered on
"the grandeur that was Rome," Roman heroes became the ideal subject in the art
academies, and the realism of Roman art such as the relief sculptures of the Column of
Trajan (Fig. 5) were favorite sources for heroic compositions. In 1785, Trumbull, while
working on The Battle ofBunker's Hill (Fig. 6) visited a private library where he was
able to study engravings after those sculptural reliefs. The motif of the dying warrior
in the arms of his comrades was adopted by many artists. Awakened interest in the past
helped furthermore to direct attention to the importance of preserving the present for
posterity. As a consequence of these ontological and epistemological changes in
Western thought, accelerating as the century unfolded, secular and religious values
were joined in governing the social view of character. The recently dead national hero
replaced the ancient Roman Christian saint as the emblem of virtue. Artists responded
to the challenge of the new cultural reality with images that fused Christ who died for
humankind with the fallen patriot who died for his country in paintings that were ever
more realistic and vivid, as seen in Giotto's Lamentation (1305) and Benjamin West's
Death ofGeneral Wolfe (1770) (Figs. 7, 8).
But one man's virtue can be another man's vice: Marat, a regicide and Jacobin who
during the Terror had called for "heads to roll," was seen as the epitome of a virtuous
national martyr, depicted as such by Jacques Louis David. When John Trumbull was
in Paris in 1797 on a diplomatic mission he had occasion to meet David, whom he
knew from previous trips to Paris. In the course of their conversation, the talk turned
to the French Revolution. Trumbull recalled later in his autobiography how he shud-
dered when David, acknowledging that "much blood had been shed," echoed and
outdid his hero Marat, adding that "it would have been well for the republic, if five
hundred thousand more heads had passed under the guillotine." 2 Alas when the ideo-
logically zealous pass for the rationally virtuous! Considering virtue in the eighteenth
century one cannot neglect invoking the name of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who turned
virtue outsidein, believing he, and others like him, were virtuous because subjectively
they knew themselves to have good, moral feelings, Rousseau, who was the ideological
fountainhead for Robespierre's conception of virtue that was fulfilled in the Terror: le
peuple, the people all collectively, were virtuous, the nobility all vicious.
John Trumbull was twentynine years old when he began the first of what would be
finally a series of eight paintings on the subject of the American Revolution. The idea
for the series that would bring him lasting fame and produce an icon of American art
had several sources, including, probably, the plan of his father, Jonathan Trumbull, to
write the history of the Revolution. There is a certain irony in this since his father, who
had been opposed to his desire to become an artist, seeing no practical or moral virtue
in such a profession, never completed his history, while Trumbull achieved lasting
VIRTUE AND VIRTUAL REALITY IN TRUMBULL'S PANTHEON 289
Figure 1. John Trumbull. The Declaration of Independence. 1818. United States Capitol Rotunda.
Courtesy of the U.S. Capitol Historical Society.
Figure 2. John Trumbull. The Surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga. 1821.

290 IRMA B. JAFFE
Figure 3. John Trumbull. The Surrender ofLord Cornwallis at Yorktown. I 820.

Figure 4. John Trumbull. The Resignation of General Washington. 1824.

United States Capitol Rotunda. Courtesy of the U.S . Historical Society.
VIRTUE AND VIRTUAL REALITY IN TRUMBULL'S PANTHEON 29!
Figure 5. Pietro Santi Bartoli. (Engraving). Detail from the Column oJTrajan. Rome, Italy.
Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Figure 6. Benjamin West. The Death of General Wolfe. 1770. The National Gallery of Canada.
Courtesy of The National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa.
292 IRMA B. JAFFE
Figure 7. Giotto. Lamentation Over the Body of Christ. 1305-06. Arena Chapel, Padua, Italy.
Courtesy of Alisart/ Art Resource, NY.
Figure 8. John Trumbull. The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunkers Hill. 1786.
Yale University Art Gallery. Courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery.
honor with his. His father refused to allow him to go to Boston, as he pleaded, to study
art with John Singleton Copley; he must go to Cambridge, to Harvard College, to gain
the kind of knowledge that would prepare him for a useful profession worthy of his
family's social standing such as the ministry or law. Furthermore, the virtue of an
honorable profession would be enhanced by the further virtue of being selfsupporting.
Jonathan's argument illuminates the broadened definition of virtue as it reflected the
growing impact ofmiddleclass values on society's views of the good and worthwhile,
adding to strength, courage, and moral righteousness, the virtue of financial
independence. It is useful to compare the aristocratic view of the virtuous man, still
prevalent earlier in the century. Jonathan Richardson wrote in 1715:
It was never thought unworthy of a Gentleman to be master of the theory ofpainting or for a
Gentleman to paint for his pleasure, without reward, but to take money for this Labour of the Head
and Hand is dishonorable, this being a sort ofletting himself to hire to whosoever will pay him ... 3
Aristocratic virtues clearly could never have included self support.
Trumbull arrived in London to study with Benjamin West in November of 1783 and
a year later he began to think about the great work that led to his paintings on the
Rotunda walls. He wrote his father that West had invited him to make a copy of one
of his modem history paintings, which he was eager to do since, he explained, "West's
pictures are almost the only examples in Art of that particular style which is necessary
to me - pictures of modem times and manners. In almost every other instance the art
has been confined to the History, Dresses, Customs, &c. of antiquity ... It would be of
infinite use if I should live to execute the plan I have in view ... painting a Series of
pictures of our Country, particularly the great Events of the revolution ... If I do
succeed," he continued, "it makes me master of my time & disengages me from all the
trumpery & caprice & nonsense of mere copying faces & places me the servant not of
Vanity but ofVirtue." 4
Probably because he had been stationed near Roxbury, Massachusetts, about four
miles from Bunker's Hill, and had heard the sounds of the battle "as the day advanced,
the firing increased," he recalled in his autobiography, he undertook this event as the
first of his series. The painting owes its iconography to Benjamin West's The Death of
General Wolfe (Fig. 6) which, in tum, owes its iconography to Death of Christ
compositions such as the Giotto Lamentation (Fig. 7) and its many progeny. West's
General Wolfe, the first eighteenth century painting of a modem hero in contemporary
dress, was a stunning innovation after almost half a century of obsession with Classical
heroes and ancient costume, testifing to the heightened desire for virtual reality in
painting.
Bunker's Hill with its iconographic dependence is thus not an eyewitness account,
but three of the portraits were from life, and it is evident that Trumbull examined the
site in order to enhance the realism of the scene: the general lay of the land is correct,
showing Boston Harbor in the background. The hand to hand combat, and the face of
General Warren, bloody from the shot that killed him, represents an advance over its
prototype in the depiction of virtual reality and shows that Trumbull did research for
the purpose of making his scene conform with the historical facts. However, the
dramatic detail of the British General Small arresting the arm of the unnamed officer
about to bayonet the fallen General Warren was an invention, Trumbull wrote, "to
afford an opportunity to do honor to Major Small who ... was distinguished for his
humanity and kindness to prisoners." 5 Of particular interest to us in the present context
is how Trumbull handled the issue of virtue. Trumbull depicts General Small in this
294 IRMA B. JAFFE
noble act because a noble hero, such as Dr. Warren, requires a noble adversary- there
was no virtue in fighting against an inferior enemy. Trumbull asssumed an officer in
the British army must be an aristocrat, and thus endowed by his noble birth, could be
assumed to be virtuous until proved otherwise. Nevertheless, although Trumbull
related personal morality to high social rank, as a Connecticut Yankee he shared his
culture's perception that success in middle class endeavors was a warrant of the favor
of Providence and a promise of heavenly salvation, and as such could also make a man
a gentleman. The gentlemanly Trumbull himself was the son of a merchant. Dr. Joseph
Warren was a very successful Boston doctor and his death in battle made him a hero
worthy of the immortality that art could give him. From the sketch for the key that
Trumbull had made, with figures numbered to identify them, as was the custom in
eighteenth century group paintings, we find that are all officers. None of the yeomen
are represented in the scene although more than one hundred were killed, equally
heroic, equally virtuous. As already observed, in today's art form, the lowly private has
made it into heroism in the fictionalized virtual reality of the movies.
Trumbull continued to work on his "great project," as he called it, and by 1789
when he returned to the United States he had finished The Battle ofBunker's Hill, The
Death of General Montgomery at Quebec, and had almost completed The Declaration
of Independence. 6 Personal and public events forced him to interrupt his work and
1793 found him back in London not as an artist but as a member of the Jay Treaty
Commission, charged with making a treaty that would settle dangerous frontier and
commercial issues between the United States and Britain. It was in this capacity that
he traveled several times to Paris in the 1790s. Trumbull had already visited what was
then the newly completed Church of Ste. Genevieve when he was in Paris in 1786, but
in the wake of the revolution, the church had become the Pantheon, burial place of the
revolution's heroes. The great domed building might have stirred his imagination so
far as to conceive his idea of a Hall of the Revolution for America's heroes, not as their
burial place, but where they would be represented forever alive through his paintings.
There was as yet no building in the United States that could house such a grand
undertaking, but Trumbull knew the plans for the Capitol building in Washington, then
under construction; William Thornton had shown Trumbull his drawings for the
competition for designing the United States Capitol and had asked the artist to show
and recommend them to Washington, which he did. The design included a central
rotunda which Trumbull of course saw would provide space to hang paintings. His
Revolutionary War pictures would be exactly what the nation needed to preserve
forever the memory of its painful birth and since there was no other artist in America
who could match him in artistic skill and knowledge, he could have been justifiably
confident that the time would come when he would be called upon to contribute to the
historical and esthetic needs of the United States, to enshrine its heroes, and also to
achieve the immortality he craved. As it happened, he had a rather long time to wait.
It was not until 1815 that the building for which he had been waiting began to be
realized. Benjamin Latrobe was commissioned to repair the two wings of the Capitol,
which had been damaged by British fire during the War of 1812, and to construct the
central section. Trumbull set out to submit to the Government of the United States a
proposal to memorialize the Revolution and its heroes with paintings that would
forever remind Americans of what they owed to the virtue of those heroes. But first
there was some pride to be swallowed: President James Madison and Secretary of State
James Monroe had both been the object of his blunt criticism, and Monroe was a
follower of Jefferson with whom, after a close friendship, he had had a painful falling
out. Their relationship had become "cold and distant." Now, however, he needed
Jefferson's help, and accordingly wrote, describing his plan and asking for his support
which Jefferson gave him, writing to Sen. James Barbour:
The subjects on which Col. Trumbull has employed his pencil are honorable to us, and it would
be extremely desirable that they should be retained in this country as monuments of taste as well
as of the great revolutionary scenes of our country. 7
Trumbull also wrote to his old friend John Adams, whose letter in reply is a model
of the contemporary American Establishment mind with regard to art:
Your design has my cordial approbation and best wishes. But you will please to remember that
the Burin and the Pencil, the Chisel and the Trowell, have in all ages and countriesoo.been enlisted
on the side of Despotism and Superstition Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, and Poetry have
000
conspir'd against the Rights of Mankind; and the Protestant religion is now unpopular and Odious
because it is not friendly to the Fine arts. I am not, however, a Disciple of Rousseau. Your
country ought to acknowledge itself more indebted to you than to any Artist who ever existed 8 000
Despite his disclaimer, however, Adams did share with Rousseau the conviction that
art's only justification could be in contributing to public virtue.
On February 6, 1817, Congress approved a resolution to commission Trumbull to
execute four paintings on the subject of the Revolution, the first great commission
awarded to an American artist. His first step was to consult President Madison as to
the size of the paintings, and to decide which subjects should be chosen for this
commission. The artist had planned paintings of six by nine feet but the President
realized better than the artist that they would be lost in the vast space of the Rotunda.
Madison insisted that they be painted on canvases of such a size as to permit the
representation of figures at life-size. As for the subjects, the President first mentioned
The Battle of Bunker's Hill. Trumbull agreed that if the commission were for eight
works, as he had proposed, that would have been his first choice. With only four
subjects, he thought otherwise, and proposed two military and two civil scenes. One
was the surrender of General Burgoyne at Saratoga, a stunning victory which took an
entire army prisoner and persuaded the French to enter the war on the side of the
Americans who now looked like winners. Historians have concurred with Trumbull's
perception of the importance of this battle, calling it one of the most decisive battles in
world history. There are a number of virtual and virtuous issues to interest us here.
Trumbull represents the surrender ceremony at the moment when General Burgoyne
tenders his sword and General Horatio Gates, instead of taking it, gestures toward the
tent where dinner will be served. This was quite close to the way the real surrender
took place: Burgoyne rode out in a splendid uniform to meet Gates, and greeted him
saying, "The fortune of war, General Gates, has made me your prisoner." Gates replied
with virtuous magnanimity, "I shall always be ready to testify that it has not been
through any fault of your Excellency."9 The senior officers ofboth sides then went into
dinner. Burgoyne's disarmed men marched past the tent and the two Generals emerged
and by prearrangement Burgoyne handed Gates his sword which the American
returned. Trumbull altered the facts by compressing these events, and, more
significantly, by altering the image of Gates. Not only does he make the General, who
was small, appear tall, but he has dramatically changed his costume, giving him an
elegant officer's uniform rather than showing him as he appeared at the surrender,
plainly clad. Obviously, a hero, according to Trumbull, had to look the part- and act
296 IRMA B. JAFFE
the part: Gates' gestures, refusing the proffered sword with his right hand and
indicating the tent with his left expresses his virtuous magnanimity toward his defeated
adversary. However, there was another hero of Saratoga who did not make it into
Trumbull's painting: during the battle Benedict Arnold, not yet a traitor, pointed out
to Col. Daniel Morgan that a British officer on a gray horse was, as he said, "a host in
himself and must be eliminated." An American sharpshooter, Tim Murphy, hit and
mortally wounded this man, General Simon Frazier, bringing the battle to a victorious
end for the Americans. It is possible, of course, that Trumbull had not heard that story;
more likely the artist omitted Tim Murphy from a place in the scene because he was not
an officer and it did not occur to the artist to consider the virtue of a common soldier.
It should also be noted that General Benedict Arnold had acted with outstanding
courage in the battles at Saratoga. Although seriously wounded in the leg he was
probably present at the surrender but his later treason canceled his virtue, and
eliminated his place in the painting.
The second military scene of course had to be the surrender of General Cornwallis
at Yorktown, which effectively ended the war. There is more drama in the scene than
at first appears: The victorious French and American armies formed along the Hampton
road along which the defeated British marched. Washington watches as his aide, Maj.
Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, is supposedly receiving the surrender. Cornwallis had claimed
illness and had delegated his aide, Gen. O'Hara, to appear in his place. Mounted, in
three-quarters view, at the center of the scene, Lincoln extends his right arm, his hand
open to receive the sword which would be handed over, according to custom.
Cornwallis, however, seems not to have given O'Hara his sword to tender, and the aide,
looking rather defiant, stands with his right hand hanging loosely at his side, not even
having removed his hat. In one of the sketches for the painting, in which Lincoln is
shown mounted from the rear, with O'Hara standing in front of him, O'Hara has
removed his hat as a symbol of surrender, a motif that Trumbull had almost certainly
noticed at Versailles in one of the Le Brun-Meulen paintings of the Conquests ofLouis
XIV in which the King is seen, mounted, viewed three-quarters from the rear, with his
adversary hatless. In another sketch Lincoln is holding a sword, presumably
Cornwallis', pointing towards Washington. 10 In the fmal work, O'Hara has no sword,
and his hat is on his head: Trumbull apparently decided to dramatize the British defeat
by showing how bitterly they accepted it. The actual facts with regard to the sword are
still a matter of controversy.
For the two civil scenes, one of course would be The Declaration ofIndependence.
"What would you have for the fourth," Madison asked him. "Sir, I replied, I have
thought that one of the highest moral lessons ever given to the world was that presented
by the conduct of the commander-in-chief, in resigning his power and commssion as
he did .... 11 There had been in fact a serious effort to persuade Washington to become
King of the United States. When in May 1782 he received from one of his officers,
Lewis Nicola, a letter urging him to take this course, Washington replied, "No
occurrence in the course of the war has given me more painful sensations than your
information of there being such ideas existing in the army ... " 12 Alexander Hamilton
was a leader in the plan to establish a monarchy with Washington as King.
The Resignation was begun in 1822, finished in 1824. In an effort to make his
representation as realistic as possible Trumbull wrote to congressmen and others asking
for information about who was present, since most of those actually present when
Washington resigned in 1783 were now dead. In the end, only three portraits, James
Monroe (15), Benjamin Walker (23), and Jeremiah Chase (19), were painted from life.
For the others he used portrait miniatures that he had painted himself or portraits by
other artists, as for example, that of James Madison who was not in fact present but
who Trumbull wanted to include so that he could represent all four presidents from
Washington's home state of Virginia- Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.
Washington, who was dead, of course, when Trumbull painted the scene, is copied with
a slight change of pose from Trumbull's portrait of the General at Verplanck's Point,
which he painted in 1790.
The Resignation is an image of lofty-minded dedication to republican principles.
"The Caesars, the Cromwells, the Napoleons," Trumbull wrote, "yielded to the charm
of earthly ambition ... Washington alone aspired to ... that imperishable glory, to that
glory which virtue alone can give." 13
The Declaration ofIndependence is Trumbull's most significant painting. Trumbull

correctly saw the vote for declaring independence as representing an epic moment in
world history and the participants as epic heroes. They were in reality men of singular
virtue, for, whatever human flaws doubtless blemished the character of each one, from
whatever mixed motives they might have acted, those who voted for independence
knowingly risked their lives for the ideals specified in the document drafted by Thomas
Jefferson, with revisions by Adams and Franklin. In voting for the resolution to declare
independence they proved their moral strength and physical courage, for if the
declaration led to war, which seemed inevitable, and if they lost, they would surely be
hung for treason. With their vote they had, as the declaration stated, pledged their lives,
their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Of this Trumbull was deeply aware.
The challenge of composing a scene on canvases of such size -12 x 18 feet - with
such a large number of heroes was great indeed and the artist's accomplishment is a
triumph equal to the challenge. In the interest of virtual realism he applied to Jefferson
for help in depicting the room, and of the forty-eight men portrayed (there were fifty-
six Signers), he himself painted thirty-six from life; some others he did from memory,
or description, or, in the case of Stephen Hopkins, from Hopkins' son, while the
likeness of the others was provided by pictures done by other artists. 14 As for virtue, no
insight into the meaning of that word held by Jefferson and Adams, and probably by
most of the others, can be clearer than that afforded by those men in agreeing with the
artist to include the non-Signer John Dickinson in his painting. Dickinson had been
tireless in the struggle against England's oppressive measures that led to the
Declaration, but he became "the most eloquent and powerful opponent of the
[declaration], not indeed of its principle, but of the fitness of the act at that time which
he considered premature." 15 They perceived Dickinson as a man who had the virtue
of maintaining his beliefs against the majority and they respected his probity.
Trumbull's The Declaration of Independence -although, like the Declaration
itself, American to the core - may be said to be an ultimate statement of European
Enlightenment. Without a flourish, without heroic gesture, with the associations of
power and elegance transformed into sobriety and determination, Trumbull's
masterpiece is not grand yet it achieves grandeur. There is not another like it in the
world. Planned in company with Adams and Jefferson, it expresses in visual form the
298 IRMA B. JAFFE
clear, direct rhetoric of the document those men laid on the desk of John Hancock on
4 July 1776, and must be accounted one of the most extraordinary collaborations of its
kind in the history of civilization.
Emeritus, Fordham University
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
I wish to acknowledge with much more than conventional gratitude the constant encouragement and insights
of Patrick Heelan that have enriched my scholarly work over years that extend back even before the
publication of my John Trumbull: Patriot-Artist ofthe American Revolution (1975).
NOTES
For identification of the figures represented in the paintings, see the "Key" drawings in Irma B. Jaffe,
John Trumbull: Patriot-Artist of the American Revolution (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1975)
2 John Trumbull, Autobiography, Reminiscences, Letters ofJohn Trumbull. Quoted in Irma B. Jaffe, John
Trumbull, 180.
3 Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory ofPainting. (London, 1715), 2930.
JTJonathan T. Sr., 3 Nov. 1784; Trumbull Papers, Connecticut Historical Society; JTJonathan T, 15 Nov.
1784 and 18 Jan. 1785, Trumbull Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University Libraries.
Benjamin Silliman, Notebook. Unpublished Biographical Sketch of Trumbull, 1857. Yale University
Library, Trumbull Papers. Cited in Jaffe, John Trumbull.
6 These are the original, small paintings now in the Collection of the Yale University Art Gallery. They are
illustrated in color in Jaffe, 18.
7 Jefferson to Barbour, 19 January 1817, New York public library, Manuscripts and Archives Division.
Also quoted in Jaffe, 235.

8 Adams to Trumbull, I January 1817, in Trumbull's interleaved Autobiography. Yale University Library,
Manuscripts Division, Franklin Collection, vol I. Also quoted in Jaffe, 251
9 Mark Boatner III, Encyclopedia ofthe American Revolution (New York: David McKay Company, Inc.,
10 1976), 979.
11 The sketches for Yorktown are illustrated in Jaffe, John Trumbull, Figs. 102, 104.
12 Trumbull, Autobiography. Also Jaffe, John Trumbull, 236.
James Thomas Flexner, Washington, The Indispensable Man. (Boston/Toronto:Little/Brown, 1974), 170.
13 Trumbull, "Description of the Four Pictures" in Subjects ofthe Revolution (New York, 1827). Also Jaffe,
263.
14 Jaffe, 114-117. Also Irma B. Jaffe, Trumbull: The Declaration of Independence (London: Allen Lane
Penguin Books, Ltd., 1976), and Jaffe, The American Art Journal, Vol. III, No. I (Spring 1971): 5-15. The
mistaken image of Stephen Hopkins, Governor of Rhode Island, was used for the portrait of Hopkins that
hung in the Office of the Governor of Rhode Island until 1990 when a commission, having investigated and
confirmed my discovery, commisioned a young Rhode Island artist, John Hagen, to paint a new portrait based
on the correct image: the eighth seated man from the left.
15 Jafffe, John Trumbull, 8.
LEO J. O'DONOVAN, S.J.
GETTING AT THE RAPTURE OF SEEING:

Ellsworth Kelly and Visual Experience
I propose that any depiction ... invites the eye to exercise a certain practical "interpretive"
capability. The eye "interprets" the task set to it by the painting. The task is a lifeworld
task, not a theoretical one; it is meaningful to the viewer in practical, descriptive, and human
narrative terms. - Patrick Heelan, S.J., Van Gogh's 'Modern' Use ofPerspective
It may be exaggerated to call Ellsworth Kelly "the most profoundly classical of all
American artists," as one London critic put it, but I am persuaded that his singular
vision and achievement deserves even higher ranking than it has until recently received
in the annals of 20th century American art. 1 A series of recent exhibitions, and in
particular, the great international retrospective of 1996-1997 have added new luster to
his reputation (whereas the Museum of Modern Art's equally ambitious 1996 retro-
spective of Jasper Johns had just the opposite effect). 2 After more than 50 years of
artistry, Kelly has proven himself remarkably consistent, independent, and, yes, even
morally inspiring.
If abstract art has been the distinctive contribution of the 20th century, Kelly's
approach to it is unique. With an oeuvre that has always combined austerity of means
and sensuous delight, he is famous for distilling fragments of visual perception. But
he has also reached back to Romanesque churches and Byzantine frescoes in search of
essential forms. And he responded intuitively to the use of panels by expressive artists
as seemingly different as Grunewald and Max Beckmann. The longer one looks at his
work, the more mysteriously it reveals itself as non-referential and yet rooted, as
objects existing in their own right yet ineluctably evoking endless associations.
Born in 1923 in Newburgh, New York, Kelly lived with his family in Oradell, New
Jersey, and following graduation from high school moved to Brooklyn, where he
briefly studied applied arts at the Pratt Institute. After serving with the United States
Army during World War II and spending time in England, France, and Germany, he
enrolled for two years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. In 1948,
the G.I. Bill allowed him to return to France and to settle in Paris, where he remained
for the next six years.
An elegant draftsman, as his famous drawings of plants and flowers attest, Kelly
also had a flair for expressionism, particularly evident in an early Picassoesque self-
portrait from 1949. But in Paris, stimulated by conversations with Jean Arp and his
299
300 LEO J. O'DONOVAN, S.J.
wife Sophie, by modernists as different as Brancusi and Mondrian, and by the late
cut-outs of Matisse, he found his own artistic identity- and a life-long artistic practice.
His vocabulary became one of strongly defined forms or panels, juxtaposed one next
to another, in unmodulated color (which he speaks of"achieving"). Within his work
the distinction between figure and ground generally disappears, while the object itself
is presented without any frame, directly on a wall that becomes, if one will, itself a
ground. Often the artist made collages of colored paper, using chance as a composi-
tional principle, and then refined the results intuitively with pencil drawings.
The monumental retrospective in 1996-1997 offered a survey of Kelly's 50-year
career and a memorable opportunity to chart his development and to appreciate his
wide artistic range. Among his unforgettable early works is "Meschers" (1951 ), a
blue-green evocation of seaside experience which can be analyzed into five tall vertical
panels, similar to the nine implicit panels in "La Combe I" ( 1950), itself inspired by a
photograph Kelly took of shadows on a staircase. The small rectangular panel of
"Seine" (1951) even more vitally conveys the dance oflight on water, the title alone
giving us the small clue we need to connect our visual pleasure with the artist's original
inspiration. Before this painting, one sees how Kelly would work forever after.
Abstracting an element of visual experience, he gives it pure form and separate,
independent presence. One may be tempted to read the black or the white, alternately,
as figure and ground. But in fact the distinction simply no longer holds and in this
respect "Seine" is a homage to, and indeed rivals, Mondrian's "Composition in Line"
of 1916-1917.
The perfect square of"Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance" (1951-1953) is a
larger statement of Kelly's style, and "Colors for a Large Wall" (1951), now in the
collection of the Museum of Modem Art, more ambitious still. Coming less than a
decade after "Broadway Boogie-Woogie," these paintings have great affinity with
Mondrian but also an entirely different sensibility, feeling somehow closer to us,
visually even more demanding but also less sovereign. They have the purity of color
and dynamism of Mondrian, but they are somehow more expansive and less self-
contained.
The blur of a spring landscape or the heat of the desert may have suggested "Train
Landscape" (1952-1953) and "Gaza" (1952-1956), but each of these vibrant works
commands one's attention on its own terms as a magical interaction of colored form-
or, one might equally say, formed color. Still, recalling the fragment of visual
experience behind each work can redirect one to it with a new alertness to its visual
subtlety.
On seeing a reproduction of a geometric painting by Ad Reinhardt, Kelly decided
New York might be a more welcoming environment and returned there in 1954. Two
years later he had his first solo exhibition at the Betty Parsons Gallery, and also moved
that year to a loft in a Lower East Side neighborhood called Coenties Slip, where a
number of other younger artists, including Jack Youngerman, Agnes Martin, Robert
Indiana, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, had also settled.
If Kelly had discovered himself in Paris, he flourished in these early New York
years. To the lyric of his geometric vision he now added experiments in biomorphic
form, with reverberating results such as "Black Ripe" (1955) and "Rebound" ( 1959).
In the latter, the viewer is drawn into ongoing visual interpretation: two ovoid forms
are bounding against each other- or else, two pointed black forms are reaching out
ELLSWORTH KELLY AND VISUAL EXPERIENCE 301
from the top and the bottom of the canvas to meet. The painting is remarkable for its
optical effect and yet also retains a remarkably sensuous surface, pairing abstract
simplicity with visual pleasure. It also returns to figure-ground tensions, as does
"Broadway" (1958), a wayward, red almost-square on a white ground that teases out
meaningful form depending on the angle from which one views it.
"Jersey" (1958), in brisk green and white, would make a fine new logo for the
Garden State (and its shabby turnpike). But my own favorite from these early years is
"Block Island II" (1960) from the Nasher collection. Here a lime green form,
abstracted from the shape of the island, has been surrounded by matte black and lifted
over an uninflected sea of blue, so that sea and island and the sails that first made it
accessible are all magically evoked, even while the primary pleasure of abstract color
and form predominates. Visual experiences of landscape and cartography have been
transformed, and resonate, in an object on its own that is all the richer for the occasion
of its creation.
Recalling one of his earliest works in Paris, an abstract relief of a window that
fascinated him there in the Museum of Modem Art, Kelly began to produce paintings
in New York that work as reliefs, as in "Orange Red Relief' (1959). He also made his
first free-standing sculptures, the wittiest early example of which is "Pony" (1959). For
the latter, at Agnes Martin's suggestion, he copied a crinkled tin can top into the
suggestion of a child's rocking horse, painted bright yellow above and bright red
beneath. All in all, nevertheless, rectilinear form remained his most frequent syntax,
but varied now beyond the square and rectangle.
Moving in 1963 to the Hotel des Artistes on the Upper West Side, Kelly moved
away from the use of organic forms towards a stricter geometry, investigating subtle
color relationships and emphasizing the distinction yet interrelationship of the panels
that comprised his paintings. "Green Red Yellow Blue" (1965) is a remarkable
example, with its four vertical rectangles in those colors hung at 9-inch intervals. No
reproduction can remotely convey the exhilarating effect of this work as one views it
first from a distance, then close up, then walking past it in either direction. (The flat
white wall on which it was mounted at the Tate worked especially well.) In "Yellow
Piece" a year later, the shaped canvas "composes" the color, so that formed color (or
colored form) asserts an identity of its own. So too in "Blue Red" (1966), in which an
upright blue panel is right-angled to a red panel lying on the floor, blurring the
distinction between painting and sculpture.
Kelly had been at pains to resist the popularity of Abstract Expressionism. "I didn't
want an art that was so subjective," he has said. "I wanted to get away from the cult
of the personality."3 His own intuitive and highly creative calculation is evident in
"Green White" (1968), an inverted triangle composed of a green trapezoid above a
smaller white triangle. (The effect was originally suggested to him by the glimpse of
a woman's scarf in Central Park.) "Yellow Black" of the same year is again a triangle,
but this time tilted sideways and composed of a yellow trapezoid abutting a sharp black
triangle. Daring in scale and yet strangely weightless, it seems about to lift off from
the wall and into space.
In these years, Kelly was often linked and in fact confused with representatives of
Hard Edge and Color Field painting, Op as well as Minimalism. That his journey had
predated most of them and had another destination became even more clear when he
moved in 1970 to Spencertown in upstate New York. There he rented an old theater
in the nearby town of Chatham, which enabled him to expand his scale both vertically
and horizontally. "Green Angle" (1970), for example, from the Broad collection in Los
Angeles is more than 19 feet wide. In the early seventies, he also began a series of 14
paintings in the form of an inverted L formed by two panels, in each case varying the
size, proportion, and colors of the panels. "Chatham IX: Black Green" (1971) stands
out in this series, perfectly balanced, teasingly proportioned, dramatic in its opulent
color contrast.
And then there is "Blue Curve III" (1972), a marvelous rotated parallelogram in the
form of a broadened diamond, in which a blue curve seems to grow as one looks at it,
disengaging from a smaller white triangular shape above it and yet lending the white
a magical shimmer. Kelly has wrought variations on this poetry ever since, re-
imagining it in cool polished aluminum or as a blazing fan-shaped red curve of oil on
canvas. The effect of these calm majestic presences is sculptural, and indeed, since his
move to Spencertown, the artist has become increasingly interested in the use of
materials such as wood, bronze, and weathering steel. From each he has crafted slender
totemic pieces which at once recall Brancusi and take a stand of their own. Still more
compelling and mysterious are several folded bronze wall pieces from the late 1980s,
the most beautiful of which, "Untitled (Mandorla)" (1988), evokes fruit and welcome
and womb - and ultimately the Romanesque tympanum in which the risen Christ reigns
supreme (as in a chaste early oil of 1949).
Since 1979, Kelly has worked in a studio that he built near his home. Increasingly
he has sought effects in movement and space with more or less irregularly-shaped
panels. In the gleaming white "Diagonal with Curve I" (1978) he plays with issues of
similarity and contrast, balance and imbalance, as well as with the relation between the
floating form and its fixed wall background. "Diagonal with Curve XIV" (1982), on
the other hand, in weathering steel, with its lower left corner resting on the ground,
works as both painting and sculpture. It rises and falls, soars and is grounded, lifts and
leans all at the same time. And since no version of the 1997 retrospective was hung
without the artist's participation, we know that it was he who exactly intended the 1986
dance of the three large panels in orange, dark gray, and green. Hung with other
intensely hued panels of the period, they turned the gallery space into a monumental
collage with which Matisse would surely have been delighted.
Late in the '80s Kelly returned to the joined, multi-panel works of earlier years.
But now the colors are even more intense and the kinetic tensions more thrilling, as in
"Yellow Black" (1988) and "Purple Panel with Blue Curve" (1989). Perhaps the
supreme example, and surely one of the artist's masterpieces, is "Orange Red Relief
(For Delphine Seyrig)" (1990) from the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia in
Madrid. The earlier "Orange Red Relief' had used almost the identical color scheme
and the two-panel relief format. But the later work is more luminous by far, with a
glorious precarious balance. It creates a remarkable effect of falling and floating at one
and the same time, its closely related colors simultaneously attracting and repulsing
each other, while the overlap of canvasses evokes both resolution and dissolution.
With the utmost economy of means, the artist delights our vision- and teaches it to see
color and form and movement as if for the first time. Seldom has such purity seemed
so sensuous.
That the range Kelly has set for himself can be limited is apparent in some works
from the last decade such as "Yellow Relief with Blue" (1991), which appears
ELLSWORTH KELLY AND VISUAL EXPERIENCE 303
formulaic and forced. 4 But these instances are rare. And the five great panel variations
on the theme of the curve in brilliant green, black, red, blue and yellow, which held
court in the High Gallery of the Guggenheim off its first ramp and climaxed the show
at the Tate, attest to the extraordinary range of Kelly's art. Observing the panels,
Simon Schama noted aptly in his now-famous review in The New Yorker, "Together,
they appear about ready to lose their moorings from the Guggenheim walls and drift
off out of the museum and over Central Park- great weightless monuments turning,
rotating, and shifting like the dimly seen planetary bodies whose celestial music they
seem, mysteriously, to echo." 5
At the time, much was made of the stark simplicity and more chronological hanging
of the artist's work at the Tate than at the Guggenheim, where Frank Lloyd Wright's
architecture regularly upstages the art exhibited in it. But for this show the
Guggenheim did, blessedly, straighten the sloping walls of the tight bays on its ramps
and also allowed the artist's work to be seen, and compared, at distances never
previously experienced. It likewise offered the full range of the Paris years and the
indispensable exhibition within an exhibition of the works on paper (including the
deeply affecting pencil sketch of his deceased father in 1982).
All in all, the exhibition in its four different venues provided the opportunity to see
the artist interpreted by multiple presentations and, in my view, established his place
as a major figure in the history of 20th century abstraction. The founder not of any
school or movement, he was shown to be inimitable but also irreplaceable.
Kelly's work abstracts from visual experience only to return us to it. His work has
always sought an objectivity which can capture our attention on its own terms, but the
circumstances of his life have influenced each of his innovations, from his choice of
form and color to his experiments in scale to his austere and imposing series of
sculptures. The 20th century artists he most admires, Brancusi and Mondrian, Matisse
and Picasso, also tell us much about his artistic ideals. For if the former became
distinctively and rigorously abstractionist, the latter never crossed that line. He also
admits now that earlier in his life, in order to distinguish himself from other emerging
movements, he probably emphasized the role of nature in his work too much. But
throughout, the works which he insists are objects in their own right continue to echo
forms we have all glimpsed less searchingly: sweeping fans and swelling hillsides,
signs and semaphores and sails, totems and towers. In a way that recalls Georges
Braque, he is as classical and indebted to tradition as he is contemporary and
innovative, joining the illusionism of Renaissance perspective with the fragmented
fields of modem experience.
"I think what we all want from art is a sense of fixity, " Kelly has said, "a sense of
opposing the chaos of daily living."6 But for that, one must risk contemplation, finding
the time and space to share his clear vision. And if one does? Kelly's pilgrimage
amounts to a promise. "In a sense, what I've tried to capture is the reality of flux, to
keep art an open, incomplete situation, to get at the rapture of seeing."
And so he does.
Georgetown University
NOTES
Richard Dorment, "Like a Breath of Pure Oxygen,'' The Daily Telegraph, June 25, 1997, 23.
Kelly was recognized, for example, with a monumental retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum
(October 18, 1996- January 15, 1997) that traveled, in various (and necessarily reduced) forms, first to the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (February 16- May 18, 1997) and then to the Tate Gallery in
London (June 12- September 7, 1997), finally showing at the Haus der Kunst in Munich (November-
January 1998). A handsome catalogue (Guggenheim Museum, 1996) was edited by the show's organizer,
Diane Waldman. In the course of the same year of the retrospective, Kelly was awarded the Boston Museum
School's first Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts, an honorary doctorate of fine arts from Bard
College, and sculpture commissions for Rafael Vifioly's Tokyo International Forum and the Peter B. Lewis
Theater at the Guggenheim. He was also elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
and, on the day I happened to see the Tate installation of the retrospective, was made an Honorary Doctor of
London's Royal College of Art.
3 Holland Cotter, "A Giant of the New Surveys His Rich Past," New York Times, Oct. 13, 1996, H43.
4 Works like these may account for the criticism of Roberta Smith (who knows contemporary art as well
as any observer on the scene) that Kelly sets overly narrow perimeters for his work and mistakenly distances
himself from the physical possibilities of his materials.
5 Simon Schama, "Dangerous Curves. Purity and Sensuousness: Understanding the Real Ellsworth Kelly."
The New Yorker. v. 72, Nov. 4, 1996, 112-116.
6 Cotter, "A Giant of the New Surveys His Rich Past," New York Times, Oct. 13, 1996, H43.
BARBARA SAUNDERS
GRAMMAR(S) OF PERCEPTION
In this essay, I take up Patrick A. Heelan's proposal that visual perception is

"hermeneutic." 1 For Heelan, visual perception is the capacity to "read" (select, abstract)
the appropriate structures of the world and form perceptual judgments about which
these structures "speak."2 For example, visual space only has a Euclidean geometrical
structure when the environment is filled with a repetitive pattern of regularly facetted
objects that exhibit standard Euclidean shapes. Vernacular visual space in contrast is
non-Euclidean, while a digital environment produces perception appropriate to the
information age. 3 Such structures- vernacular, Euclidean, digital- cannot be translated
into one another. Heelan terms these structures "grammars"4 (which later I will take to
be similar to, though not quite the same as, Wittgensteinian grammar(s)). Non-
Euclidean grammar is used for local, vernacular Lifeworld spaces; Euclidean grammar
for the space of classically measured physical entitities, and digital grammar of pixels,
nanometers and space-time compressions for information processing. 5 Euclidean
perception resulted from the invention of technological "prostheses" or "readable
technologies" which helped cope with changed circumstances, substituting for what
inherited capacities did not supply. Digital perception destabilised and desubstantialised
Euclidean perception to cope with the changed circumstances of the information age. 6
Thus the red ochre of the landscape, the red of the Munsell colour chart, and the red of
a computer screen's "contrast colour" belong to three different grammars: they are
quite simply not the same "red."7
Heelan also discusses perception as the historical way in which Dasein's
understanding of Being is articulated by the interpretation of "texts" in the world. 8
These texts can be read as states of the world. They are known as the content of a
perceptual judgment which is formulated in a common descriptive language of a
linguistic community. Such content is picked-up from, and is in some sense present or
embodied in the way the world shows itself. There is no juxtaposition and
contraposition between subjective and objective involved; rather embodied texts exhibit
meanings which are read as states of the world - their very visibility being an image
of intelligibility. 9
In this essay, I first offer three brief historiographic sketches as case studies or
exemplary narratives concerning the "conundrum" of form and colour terminologies,
the relation of historical modes of production to norms of perception, and the ethics of
the gaze. Secondly, I offer an account of"reciprocal perception"- the way the world
305
306 BARBARA SAUNDERS
"speaks" - drawn from Aristotle. I suggest that both Aristotle and Heelan present
kindred "grammars of perception."
Michael Baxandall, in a section entitled "The Period Eye" in The Limewood Sculptures
of Renaissance Germany, 10 explores how the politics of word and image might be
understood in the empiricist tradition. This tradition provides no account of the way
that cultures or traditions differ in the ways they discuss and categorise its key notion
of"sense experience." Cultures or traditions that do not share 'our' empirical, scientific
notion of sense experience are "undeveloped" or "primitive." In 'lacking' what 'we'
possess, others become Other. This "fact" is not regarded as a failure or inadequacy of
empiricist theory, but as a description of the way the world is. Baxandall offers as a
counterexample the imprecision of twentieth century culture in its enumeration and
categorisation of seen texture. Even our best developed art, he points out, tends to
handle texture coarsely. This is because texture has not been considered a separate
"domain" in the Euclidean tradition. Baxandall then shows the inadequacy of any
analysis based on the notion of separate domains in which passive receivers are attuned
to receive physical information. He discusses the sixteenth century High German skill
and habit of apprehending a body as a pattern of edges or extreme lines, rather than as
an arrangement of surfaces delimiting a volume. While the empiricist story would hold
a pre-scientific ethos accountable for such a habitus, Baxandall suggests rather that it
is related to the absence of vernacular terms for differentiating varieties of solid form
or volume - that is, for distinguishing a space of Euclidean forms (or "primary
qualities"). Such a space was not self-evident even to major sculptors such as Veit
Stoss or Tilman Riemenschneider, or to painters like Durer. The absence of a stable
vernacular vocabulary for even the most elementary Euclidean forms enabled Diirer to
coin his own terms. 11 Baxandall gestures here to the great shibbolith of empiricism: its
suppressed (and so forgotten) transcendental, mathematical foundation- its Euclidean
space of perception and naturalisation by K.ant. 12 Baxandall's points extend to colour.
Considering Alberti's remarks on colour-combination to be the most distinguished one
finds in fifteenth century Italian writing, Baxandall suggests they contain a warning:
it is difficult to recover- let alone understand- what they could mean. 13 They have no
Euclidean element and so cannot be translated into the axioms of colour science. The
Albertian vernacular, Baxandall concludes, was not a medium in which fifteenth-
century men, or anyone else, could register the grammar of Euclidean vision.
In "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility," Walter Benjamin
argues that Euclidean vision cannot be natural perception. He suggests that in any given
historical period, vision cannot be fixed, universal and eternal. Rather a certain kind of
visual perception will be regarded as normal and unaided which no account of the
structure of the eye and nervous system, the bio- or electro-chemistry of visual
processes or of forms of immediate stimulation can explain. Perceptual standards, he
argues, are mobilized by different modes of exchange (technology, society) that
permeate all spheres of activity. A truly exhaustive account of perception can only be
given within a historical context that provides a description and explanation of the
manner of production of "normal" vision in a given society. 14 New methods of
GRAMMAR(S) OF PERCEPTION 307
production engender new technologies and means of depiction bringing about

specifiable changes in the perception of the world. Technical production brings about
technically informed perception that engenders technical depiction or reproduction.
Standards for judging technically produced art cannot be the same standards used to
judge manually produced art. We are just not equipped with any kind of "natural" or
Euclidean standard for this kind of judgment. 15
Although Xenophon's discussion of the ethics of the gaze is not usually considered
in a pedagogical context, nonetheless I offer it as a supplement to Benjamin's account.
By "the interpretation of texts in the world," Heelan suggests that the capacity of
perception is acquired in learning, with acts of perception having distinguishing
phenomenological characteristics. This too is Xenophon's concern: the way that seeing
and looking are shaped not only by contemporary culture and technology but more
specifically by personal training (askesis). 16 In Xenophon's Memorabilia Socrates
shows how to redefine the relation between erotic engagement and philosophical worth
through a discussion of the nature of the gaze. 17 In dialogue with Theodote, a beautiful
woman who is being painted by an artist, he explores different modes of exchange at
work in the construction of a subject, specifically in the gaze of the citizen. In this
dialogue, the dialectics of vision and knowledge, subject and object, beauty and
ugliness, shift their emphases until Socrates, renowned for his physical ugliness 18 but
spiritual grandeur, emerges as the object of desire. Setting out to explore the economics
of visual exchange, he asks: Ought we to be more grateful to Theodote for letting us
see her beauty, or she to us for looking at her? It will depend on who benefits more
from this act of looking, he muses. Theodote wins admiration now and praise in the
future, while the viewers remain titillated but unsatisfied. When Socrates discovers that
she relies on admirers for a livelihood he compares her body to "a hunting net that lures
the gaze of men ... who she will gratifY in retum." 19 It is her role of gratifying (charis)
that guarantees her role in this exchange. Socrates impresses Theodote so much that she
invites him to "hone her skills of entrapment. " 20 But Socrates makes excuses: he avoids
public life; he has little time; he has much business; there are "girlfriends"
(philosophical companions, pupils) who won't allow it. Theodote, noting that Socrates'
girlfriends won't let him out, asks to borrow his love charms. Socrates refuses,
declaring that he doesn't want to be drawn to her; rather she should come to him. In
this seduction he performs a power game: she must submit to him rather than he to her.
Theodote should feel gratitude for being looked at, and to desire her observer. 21 Like
Plato, Xenophon uses Socrates as a mask to mediate the delicate nuances between the
ideal of wisdom and concrete human reality. 22 Socrates, with "crab-like eyes, puffed-up
lips, and hanging belly" 23 is erotic irony itself. He pulls off his reversal of erotic desire
by inducing the beautiful Theodote to desire him. He uses words, eros and vision to
mobilize complex processes or "regimes of exchange" in an uneasy, shifting,
negotiated psychological reversal between beautiful, visible sights and invisible, ethical
ones. For Socrates to renegotiate the politics and ethics of eros, is to be concerned with
the appropriate shaping of existential-hermeneutical acts of perception in the ascent of
eros to the transcendent realm. In the next section I want to suggest that Aristotle
worked hard to provide an existential hermeneutics not of the transcendent but of the
earthly realm.
A recurrent criticism of Aristotle concerns his method of inquiry: he approaches a

problem or group of problems again and again from different angles, and arrives at
different answers. His discussion of the soul for example is shot through with
inconsistencies. 24 Similarly his account of colour and perception vitalises apparently
dead things and allows them reciprocal action. In view of the current revival of
Aristotelian studies, the passage in Parva Naturalia on the bloodshot gaze of the
menstruating woman turning the mirror red, requires special pleading. Here is what
Aristotle says: 25
... it is clear ... that the organ of sight is not only affected by, but also acts upon, its object. For
in extremely clean mirrors, when women look into them during their menstrual period, the mirror
surface takes on a sort of blood-red cloud. In fact, if the mirror is a new one, it is not easy to get
the stain out, although it is easier with an old one. The reason is, as we have said, that the organ
of sight is not only affected by the air, but is also active and imparts movement, just as shining
objects do. In fact the organ of sight is just such an object and one that possesses color. One may
reasonably suppose, then, that during menstrual periods the eyes are in the same state as any other
part of the body. Furthermore they are full ofblood-vessels by nature. Hence, when menstruation
occurs, owing to disorder and turbulence of the blood, the difference in the eyes is invisible to us,
and yet it is present (for the nature of semen and menses is the same). The air is moved by the eyes,
and makes the air extending over the mirror's surface to be of a certain quality, i.e. that by which
it is affected itself. And this air in tum affects the surface of the mirror. Now just as with clothes,
the cleanest are the quickest stained; for anything clean shows up distinctly whatever it receives,
the most clean showing the smallest blemishes. Likewise the bronze, owing to its smoothness, is
highly sensitive to any sort of impact (and one should recognize the impact of air as a form of
friction, a wiping, as it were, or washing on). And because of its cleanness, any impact whatever
shows up on it. The reason why the stain will not readily come off new mirrors is that the surface
is clean and smooth. For it has permeated such mirrors in depth and all over- in depth because the
surface is clean, and all over because it is smooth; whereas in old mirrors it does not persist,
because the stain does not penetrate to the same extent, but is more superficial. 26
True, say his apologists, Aristotle was a genius, but said stupid things without
looking, failed to argue or apply his methods well, and relied on earlier thinkers for his
starting point. 27 At worst the passage is corrupt; at best, anachronistic proto-science,
misogynist and silly. 28 Or more charitably, disturbed by the way the mirror "is sensitive
to" the impact of the menstrual gaze, translators have tried to make it illustrative of the
workings of the eye. The mirror really "stands for" the eye, and the eye for the object
perceived. 29 The mirror becomes red by "looking" at a red object, in this case, the
abnormally red eye of the menstruating woman. Aristotle can thus shift back and forth
between metaphorical agents to illustrate psychic phenomena by occurences in such
dead things as mirrors. For all its sensitivity, this interpretation, as Johansen says, is
quite alien. 30
Regarding such two-tiered play as part and parcel of Euclidean grammar, I want
instead to take Aristotle at his word. My aim is to recover from this passage a different
hermeneutic account of perception. I want to argue that the episode of the bloodshot
eye which turns the mirror red concerns the soul - the principle of action - which
renders itself present to something through the body and occasions reciprocity. My
account follows from Aristotle's discussion of the animal, and from the intrinsic links
of perception with the sentient, nutritive and generative souls. My reading suggests that
to characterise Aristotle as hopelessly anachronistic, or as proto-functionalist, is to
engage in "normal science"- to make him consistent- or rather inconsistent- with the
res-extensa and -cogitans, with primary-and-secondary qualities, with the mathesis of
mind and with their appropriation by Kant. Normal science compares Aristotle's
existential hermeneutics to the Euclidean structure of perception and finds him absurd.
I want to say that it is not Aristotle who is absurd, but rather the pretensions of the Eu-
clidean- Kantian We/tbild- to which we are heir- through which we tend to read him.
I want to suggest, as Merleau-Ponty3 1 has done, that we return to Aristotle to unify
soul and body, and move beyond Euclidean vision to intentional vision in action, to
emphasise the intercorporeality and reciprocity of everything. In this way we can grasp
that Euclidean grammar is not the one true grammar, but merely one among others. The
positive part of my suggestion puts Aristotle's gender hierarchy on one side, and
recovers from eudaemonia a flourishing for all. I want to take Aristotle as implying an
ontology in which all beings have capacities to bring things to life, as they exist in
transformative relation, where things and social relations constitute a "non-disjunctive
division" -not in opposition to one another, but as the humanised or ensouled nature
of what nature has become. 32
In De anima 33 Aristotle claims that the object of sight is the visible 34 and what is
visible is colour, though not without light. Sight and the visible are the proper sensibles
instantiating the Actuality Principle. The Actuality Principle says that the perceptual
faculty is potentially what its object is in actuality, and in perceiving, becomes such as
its object is. Thus whatever is visible, is colour, and colour is visible precisely because
it has in itself the cause of its own visibility, which is its nature. Thus colour shows
itself to sight.
In the Categories Aristotle proposes that all relativities be spoken of in relation to
correlatives that reciprocate. 35 By this he invokes interacting dual principles embodied
by correlative partners. While the sense organs and their objects are such correlatives,
their relativity, or mutual attunement, may appear a definitional circularity. In the
seventeenth century such circularity was regarded as empty, ambiguous, lacking
"settled constant signification." Aristotle was likened to a cuttlefish, a squid, the ink he
discharged casting everything into obscurity. 36 But Aristotle escapes the charge of
definitional circularity. On his account, the proper sensibles are only part of sight- and
a deficient part at that. To the relativities of the proper sensibles (for example,
whiteness), he adds the common qualities (koina), perceptible by more than one sense:
movement, rest, shape, extension, number, and unity. In perception the two are unified.
Perception is always predicated, fleshed out, dressed. In a word it is "intentional."
Seeing colour involves seeing that something is the case: that the white thing is this or
that, or here or there, or moving up and down, or even good or bad. 37 It includes
experience and memory, with "appearance" always already conceptualised. 38
For Aristotle, perception is neither Plato's rudimentary reaction nor the work of
reason and thought (dianoia, noein, nous). It is a half-way house between them,
distinguishing animals from plants. Without the perceptual capacity an animal would
die. But a line between animals and humans must be drawn. Reasoning and belief,
qualities of soul, are denied to animals. Nonetheless as a dog perceives scent coming
from that direction, or from there, the content of its perception must go beyond the
rudiment. If animals lack reason and belief, predications such as here and there or this
scent or that, must be carried by intentional perception - no smell here, so go there -
is something a dog does well. For Aristotle perception consists of discriminating
(krinein, kritike)39 activities, covering many activities, just short of belief- the kind of
activity in which a bird engages when building its nest - selecting this feather and
discarding that. 40
Aristotle's acount of the causes of perception is usually explained in physical terms
and there are two main rival accounts - "coded ratios" and "literalism." Both
concentrate on the proper sensibles. Either the eye-jelly (kore) literally becomes
coloured, or abstract ratios move between object and sense organ. On the literalist
account, the sense-organ becomes like the thing perceived: the eye-jelly simply taking
on coloured patches- the proper sensibles- to match the object. 41 Coded ratios on the
other hand, are movements of the air, caused by the object, which move the sense-
organ.42 Directed to the proper sensibles, neither account explains the half-way house
-the half-way house of red here or there or nice or not.
The menstrual eye disturbs the picture of the eye as a passive receiver. Rather it
becomes an "agent" itself. 43 It causes brute staining in shiny clean mirrors that are
especially sensitive to the menstrual gaze. For a modem empiricist, no physical,
instrumental or functional terms have the capacity to explain it. So I'll suggest a
different account, drawing on Aristotle's definition of the human animal- a being with
movement, perception, and sex. 44 The correlative principles of the proper sensibles
ensure that whatever state the animal is in, its "inner" states are about "external" states
from which it cannot be neatly segregated. For example when an animal desires to eat
some meat which presents itself nearby, that desire has as the condition of its
satisfaction that the animal eat the meat in question. 45 Or to put it in Heelan's terms, the
animal "reads" (selects, abstracts) the appropriate structures of the world and forms
perceptual judgments (intentions) about which these structures "speak" in order to
satisfy its desires.
I want to propose that for Aristotle this intelligibility or "aboutness" is a
coordination of various correlative principles governed by the nutritive, sentient, and
generative souls. Thus Aristotle, following his usual method by stating "the obvious"
says: "the distinction of sex is first principle."46 Sex is differently embodied correlative
bundles - the difference lying in the proportionality of things. But the first, efficient or
moving cause (the male principle) is better and more divine than the material cause-
which is the female principle- on which it works. 47 In the dialectic of reciprocities,
men play the "upward role"- the priapic role- in the primary bundle of principles (hot,
active, form-making, dominant, with plenty of nous). This makes men "male."48 The
female in contrast occupies the downward role and is cold, passive, material and
subordinate, with only a relative degree of usable nous.
However in various places Aristotle mentions that semen and menses are the same
kind ofthing49 - albeit differently proportioned- both being derived from the nutriment
that turns to blood. Male semen is refined, concocted blood, potent, small in quantity,
frothy and white. Located in the male genitals, vital heat is generated by friction from
pleasure in sexual intercourse. The great power of vital heat- the principle of motion
-is seen by the vehement sensation and exhaustion that accompanies emission. Female
semen, the catemania, is also concocted blood, but less refined and pure, and naturally
sanguineous. So male semen is the first efficient cause or form, the catamenia mere
matter. But vital heat, along with nous, is also- to a degree- generated by the female. 5
It causes infants to resemble their mother, as well as the turbulence of menses.
In the menstrual state the female eye is charged with turbulence by greatly
concocted blood, which, like male semen, now has form-giving efficacy. The gaze of
the eye, like the emission of semen, strikes the mirror's surface and generates, in its
"matter" what concocted blood, by nature, can generate. The form of the proper
sensibles - the colour of emission -producing the red and cloudy patch- shows up
there on the sensitive, reflective, surface. So as Nature uses semen as the tool of
generation, so Aristotle uses the menstrual gaze to show the "aboutness" of perception,
and the resonating intercorporealities of everything.
On my "intentional" or hermeneutic account the sense organs are not only affected
by their objects, but may also act back upon them. The menstrual gaze coalesces dis-
tance and touch, as active, tactual perception, imprinting the sensitive mirror, to realise
a sort of coupling. Being no dead thing, the mirror becomes an agent, an animated bod-
y, reciprocally shaped, and coupled to the ensouled and ensouling gaze. The sentient
soul extends from its primary here, finding itself externally linked, so that beings that
are apparently different, exterior, and foreign, are drawn into interacting togetherness,
the space between them, a natural pact uniting them. 5 1 So it's not too far-fetched to say
that for Aristotle things and social relations are mutually constitutive, not in opposition
to one another, but as the humanised or ensouled nature of what nature has become. 52
Whatever one might think of Aristotle's social-political gendering and amalgam of
sex and perception, he nonetheless offers an account of interactive, intentional
perception in a world of evaluative states of affairs. He formulates the embodiment of
soul (psuche), and offers intrinsic connectedness in a universe woven together by
colour and concocted blood.
3
The Aristotelian account of the reciprocity and intentionality of perception that I have
sketched is totally at odds with the "world representation" which empiricist science or
Euclidean grammar has achieved. Its assumption is that the real is a methexis in the
ideal affording the possibility to idealise it into a mathematical manifold. Then the "sur-
reptitious substitution" takes place "of the mathematically substructed world of ideali-
ties for the only real world ... our everyday life-world." 53 A science of pure idealities
applied in a practical way to the Lifeworld obscures internal shifts between a priori
theory and "guileless" empirical inquiry and idealised, geometricised "colour" becomes
its only register. Thus chromatic data-sets come to define the world which, as Heelan
says, is like a computer playing Bach's B-Minor Mass and claiming it to be the one true
rendition for a single audience with a single score and set of production values. 54
Aristotle's account of colour perception is not like this. It does not propose a hidden
realm as a defining essence producing what is observed. It is not an analogic model or
explanatory discourse concerning a possible generative mechanism replete with prag-
matic potentiality. Rather it offers interrelations of generation, motility, nutrience, and
sentience in an interactive world. Aristotle's is an open-textured account, allowing
other interpretations, and thus too the "inconsistencies" noted above. Just as Wittgen-
stein was later to do, Aristotle clears the ground of "mistaken" models which had led
others to assume the existence of objects offered as the ontological basis of explana-
tion. In the way that Wittgenstein uses the word "grammar," it would not be too far-
fetched to call Aristotle's account a "grammar of perception" much akin to Heelan's.
University ofLeuven, Belgium

NOTES
Patrick A. Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy ofScience (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1983). Heelan, "Perception as a Hermeneutical Act," Review ofMetaphysics 37 (1983): 61-75.
2 "Reading a text is a paradigm case of a hermeneutical activity. Reading is, or aims at the direct, self-
evident, reception of the meaning of a text. Perceiving, likewise, is or aims at the direct, self-evident,
reception of the meaning of a "text" ... Both reading and perceiving share the same set of hermeneutical pre-
conditions, subjective and objective." Heelan, "Perception as a Hermeneutical Act," 7 1. See too, Ivan Illich,
"Guarding the Eye in the Age of Show," trans. B. Duden, Forthcoming, 2001. [Die Askese des Blicks im
Zeitalter der Show-INTERFACE, in: Klaus Peter Dencker, ed., Weltbilder, Bildwelten. Computergestiitzte
Visionen (Hamburg: Verlag Hans Bredow Institut, 1995), 206-222.
3 M. Castell, The Rise ofthe Network Society, Vol. I: The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
4 Heelan, "Why a Hermeneutical Philosophy of the Natural Sciences?"Man and World 30 (1997): 271-298.
Heelan, "Response to P. Whittle, 'Contrast Colours: A Powerful and Disturbing Phenomenon"' in B.
Saunders and J. van Brake!, eds., Theories, Technologies and Instrumentalities of Colour, Anthropological
and Historiographic Perspectives. Forthcoming, 200 l.
6 Ibid.
See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology ofPerception (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962),
4-5: "this red would literally not be the same red if it were the 'woolly' red of a carpet"- cited in A. Costal!,
"Getting Seriously Vague: Comments on Donald Borrett, Sean Kelly and Hon Kwan's 'Modelling of the
Primordial,"' Philosophical Psychology, 13/2 (2000): 229-232.
8 By Dasein, Heelan means the human inquirer, historically "thrown" into the world at a certain time and
place, yet sharing in the destiny of the human community's involvement with Being. See his "Perception as
a Hermeneutical Act."
Following Husser!, Merleau-Ponty uses the term "flesh" to speak ofthings revealed by perception through
the forms of embodied human life as well as to convey the deep tensions - inherited from Husser! - between
transcendental and empirical modes of knowing. Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind" in The Primacy of
Perception, trans. C. Dallery (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 159-190. Heelan, drawing
on Heideggcr, uses the term "dressing."
10 Michael Baxandall, The Limewood Sculptures of Renaissance Germany (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1961).
II Ibid., 145
12 Edmund Husser!, The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Philosophy, trans. D. Carr
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970); Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
13 Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974),
85.
14 J. Snyder, "Benjamin on Reproducibility and Aura: A Reading of 'The Work of Art in the Age of its
Technical Reproducibility,"' The Philosophical Forum, XV ( l-2), Fall-Winter (1983): 130-145.

15 Ibid., 132. Mainstream perceptologists would say this was true of judgement but not of a" sensory core"
which, though an article of faith, is deeply problematic. See Costall, "Innocence and Corruption: Conflicting
Images of Child Art," Human Development 40 ( 1997): 133-144.
16 See too Illich, "Die Askese des Blicks im Zeitalter der Show."
17 S. Goldhill "Refracting Classical Vision: Changing Cultures of Viewing" in T. Brennan and M. Jay, eds.,
Vision in Context. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Sight (London: Routledge, 1996), 15-28.
18 "It is significant that Socrates was the first great Hellene to be ugly," NachlajJ, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Kritische Studienausgabe, G. Colli and M. Montinari, eds., (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), Vol!, 545.
19 Goldhill, "Refracting Classical Vision," 21.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., 25.
22 Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 147.
23 Nietzsche, KSA l, 544.
24 Hadot, Philosophy as a Way ofLife, I 04.
25 Parva Naturalia II 459b23-460a23. D. Gallup, Aristotle on Sleep and Dreams (Peterborough, Ontario:
Broadview Press, 1990), 89-91.

26 Ibid. ( 459b27-460a23).
27 J. Green "Aristotle on Necessary Verticality, Body Heat, and Gendered Proper Places in the Polis: A
Feminist Critique," Hypatia 7/l (1992): 70-96.

28 Martha Nussbaum, "Aristotle, Feminism and Needs for Functioning" in C. Freeland, ed., Feminist
Interpretations of Aristotle (College Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998), 248-259.
29 R. Sprague, "Aristotle on Red Mirrors (On Dreams 459b24-460a23), Phronesis 3013 (1985):323-325;
Gallup, Aristotle on Sleep and Dreams; T. Johansen, "Why Menstruating Women Make Mirrors Go Red.
Aristotle on Colour and Colour Vision," unpubl. talk presented at "Theories, Technologies, Instrumentalities
of Colour. Anthropological and Historiographic Perspectives," Workshop University ofLeuven, Belgium,
May 2000. Forthcoming.
30 Johansen, ibid.
31 Merleau-Ponty, "Eye and Mind" in The Primacy ofPerception, 159-190.

32 Costall, "Socializing Affordances," Theory and Psychology, 513 (1995): 467-482.
33 De anima 418a26-419a22 in M. Durrant, Aristotle's De anima in Focus (London: Routledge, 1993).
34 Ibid. "The visible then is colour" (418a29).
35 Aristotle, Categories, trans., E. M. Edghill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, I 97 I), "all correlatives are
interdependent," 7b 13- I 4.
36 Nancy Cartwright, "Aristotelian Natures and the Modern Experimental Method" in J. Earman, ed.,
Inference, Explanation and Other Frustrations. Essays in the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1992), 44-7 I.
37 R. Sorabji, "Intentionality and Physiological Processes: Aristotle's Theory of Sense-Perception" in M.
Nussbaum and A. Rorty, eds., Essays on Aristotle's De Anima (Oxford: Clarendon, I 992), I 95-226, see
197n15.
38 Ibid., "This already involves perceiving intentionally" ... that something is the case- that the qualities
differ ... It would be wrong to suppose that this propositional perception really involves an inference to
reason merely on the ground that sense-qualities, like colour, are said to be essential (kath 'hauto) objects of
perception, whereas [those things that] enter into propositions are said to be coincidental sense-objects (kata
sumbebekos). Coincidental does not mean inferential. ... There is not merely an appearance of whiteness, but
of whiteness as belonging to something or as being located somewhere," 197-8.
39 Aristotle's distinction between perceptual content and the content of reason and belief is as hard to map
onto the modern distinction between the conceptual and pre- or non-conceptual as it is to find a use for
"consciousness" in his account.
40 Sorabji, "Intentionality and Physiological Processes."
41 Ibid.
42 A. Silverman, "Color and Color-Perception in Aristotle's De anima," Ancient Philosophy, 9 (1989): 271-
292.
43 Gallop, Aristotle on Sleep and Dreams, 459b28, 89.
44 See Illich, Gender (New York: Pantheon, 1982) for the shift from the grammar of "gender" to "sex."
Aristotle's discussion of generation is sufficiently close to modern notions of"economic sex" for Freud and
others to be able to naturalise it- its socio-political vectors included.
45 T. W. Bynum, "A New Look at Aristotle's Theory of Perception" in Durrant, ed., Aristotle's De Anima
in Focus, 90-109.
46 De Generatione Animalium 716bl0, trans. A. Platt, in J. A. Smith and W.D. Ross, eds., The Works of
Aristotle (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912).

47 Ibid., 732a6.
48 Ibid. 729a.5-35.
49 For example On Dreams, 460a9. In Gallop, 89.
50 A. Coles, "Biomedical Models of Reproduction in the Fifth Century BC and Aristotle's Generation of
Animals," Phronesis, XLII (1995): 48-88.

51 See too C. Freeland, "Aristotle on the Sense ofTouch" in Nussbaum and Rorty eds., Essays on Aristotle's
De Anima, 227-248.
52 It might be wiser to talk about psuche rather than "soul" at this point. See K.V.Wilkes, "Psuche versus
the Mind," in M. Nussbaum and A. Rorty, eds., Essays on Aristotle's De Anima, 109-127.
53 Husser!, The Crisis ofEuropean Science and Transcendental Philosophy.
54 Heelan, "The New Relevance of Experiment: A Postmodern Problem," in L. Hardy, and L. Embree, eds.,
Phenomenology of Natural Science (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992), 197-213.
JAY SCHULKIN
COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF SOCIAL

SENSIBILITY
The perception of beliefs and desires to others is a piece of cognitive and personal
adaptation and a bodily event. 1 We explore the world, replete with intentional
cognition 2 through bodily sensibility anchored to an external world of well-established
practices. 3 As Merleau-Ponty stated, "our body is not in space like things, it inhabits
or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument ... "4 Moreover,
in the everyday world of sensibility, cognition is not necessarily an alienating event.
Theories pervade our interactions thereby facilitating interpersonal exchange. 5 But the
mind is only one part of the story; the other is the pervasive social structure. Both
function in the context of the perception of each other. 6
In this essay, I will provide a cognitive neuroscience perspective on the social
hermeneutics of human perception and action. The background materials are some of
the insights of Patrick Heelan's work in both the theory of perception and the
philosophy of science. 7 In particular, the focus is on how people perceive and interpret
the experiences embodied in the action of others. Let's turn first to the social world and
intentionality, a consideration of the role of theory in social context and the
organization of human action, then to a neuroscience perspective that underlies the
perception of action and then Heelan's philosophy of perception.
COGNITION AND SOCIAL SENSIBILITY
One precondition for social knowledge is our ability to interpret the behavior of
those around us. This ability is linked to intentionality; namely the ability to attribute
and see others as having beliefs and desires in their actions; that is, to link the
subject/object in action and come to recognize their presence in others. 8 The earlier
pragmatists (e.g., Peirce, James, Dewey)9 understood that cognition is central to
problem-solving of any sort of our inquiry. Their attacks on the myth of sensory givens
and the fallacy of Cartesian starting points about doubt have been borne out in this
century. 10 As Peirce argued, all sensations are embodied in thought. 11 In this regard,
note that the notion of theory needs to be separated from the notion of abstraction and
divorcement. There is more than one meaning of"theory." But in the sense that I am
using it here, it simply entails what Popper12 had in mind - namely a lens for seeing.
315
316 JAY SCHULKIN
It is what Hanson called "theory laden" 13 (see also Sellars' discussion of the "myth of
the given"). 14 Hanson, for example, defended the thesis that scientific inquiry, all
"seeing" is replete with cognition and meaning. Everything seen is from a background
theory laden perspective. Thought embodied in human action is anchored to social
structure. 15
The mechanisms, both cognitive and neural and perhaps even the every-day
practices, may be unconscious. The functionalist sense of theory is quite different from
what most investigators would construe as theory. 16 Again "theory" construed here
guides human action.
Such theory or knowledge is shared in contrast to an epistemology of isolated
individualism in which experience is private. Social practice and knowledge are
fundamental to any theory of mind. 17 One feature in the socialization process of reason
is through the discernment of the beliefs and desires of others. This process limits
social or psychological isolation. The "life world" 18 are the everyday social inter-
actions of meaning that we share, that we communicate, that we embody in practices,
many of which we are not conscious as such.
INTENTIONALITY AND MEANING
We often learn by looking out on the world and interacting with others, in addition to
reflecting on our own beliefs and desires. 19 Social knowledge is bound to communities
(as in Wittgenstein and Peirce), and not simply isolated within individuals. Knowledge
is not a spectator sport, in Dewey's terms, but an active form of engagement. Social
hermeneutics is oriented to the world first and foremost (as in Mead and Gadamer). 20
Meanings are embodied in the practices of everyday life and our linguistic
utterances. 21 Meaning is determined in the interaction of mind adapting to
environments. Sometimes it has to do with minds discerning other minds, and
predicting and understanding events as a function of this. Meaning is thus neither in the
head nor strictly in the environment; it is in the interaction between the two. 22 Social
knowledge often requires interpreting the intentional meaning of others; often what is
at stake is what one thinks the other intends to do. 23 What is at stake in social discourse
is to capture meaning of the other's utterances and their actions. This requires the
attribution of beliefs and desires, and meaning pervades this activity. There is nothing
mystical about this; there is a question whether one can imagine that our brain
computes this sort of thing without recourse to folk psychology and the theory of
speakers' intentions and meaning. 24
Intentional attribution affirms meaning in social relationships. 25 Our everyday life
world/6 so rich in meaning, grounded in practice is replete with human intentionality, 27
and is represented in a rich set of cognitive structures in the brain. 28 Existentially
"meaningful connection," as Jaspers would say, is making sense of the world and each
other. Thrown out into the practices that surround us/9 we are driven to varying
degrees to make sense of what we experience. This is a fact about the human existential
condition which is facilitated or not by the embodied social practices.
Perhaps the ability to perceive others as intentional is both a biologicaVcognitive
adaptation and a core concept in our sense of ourselves/ 0 that is fundamental to a
theory of human action. 31 In addition, the concept of intentionality functions as a
theoretical concept in our folklore, our folk symbolic sense of ourselves. Intentional
COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE OF SOCIAL SENSIBILITY 317
discourse is a predictive tool and functions in the language games of our communities.
The concept is part of our everyday folk psychology. 32 Accounts of intentional agents
are one important way in which we account for other experiences.
Consider the range of intentional judgments in playing basketball. The genius of
Michael Jordan is both his great athletic prowess, but also his ability to predict where
his teammates would be. His ability to "see" what is going on traverses the playing
field. The sensory-motor responses are inherently cognitive, intentional, anticipatory,
responsive to others. The game, when played with great excellence, is social and
cooperative for those playing on the same side, and deceptive to those on the other. It
is inherently replete with intentionality both in behavior and in the attribution to others.
Intentional states are not isolated events, they are set in the context of action and
perception. 33 Intentional discourse occurs amidst a background. The background, I
would suggest, in part, are the social practices, the external order that is all pervasive34
and the frames of references (biological/cognitive/social) that we presuppose. We are
anchored existentially to social structure; we also unload the contents of what we think
back out onto the structure of our world. Intentional explanations are functional, and
are part of information processing systems35 whose psychological necessity is within
a biological evolutionary context. They facilitate social understanding, prediction,
deception and understanding. Intentionality functions within interpretative context16 -
with "meaning" inherently social, amidst our participation in the community. But
intentionality is much more than capturing "the hidden structure" of the physical
world. 37 And theory is not just about the things far away, small, distant and abstract.
Theory is at the heart of interpretation of one another in our transactions with one
another. Indeed, knowledge is participation of objects and people. 38
PERCEPTION AND MEANING
Intentional action is often in the context of others: potential others, imagined others
(deceiving others, helping others). Even the most reclusive of us imagines others, lives
with others, at least to the extent in which perhaps they are still intentional and have a
background of socialized ambiance-rejected or not. The worlds we inhabit, adapt to,
already contain well-worked practices that pervade us into a world we embody. 39 In
other words, while we interpret the world relative to a background framework
sometimes there need not be a lot of interpreting, because the world is handed to us
prepackaged with meaning. 40 In Being There, Andy Clark has nicely described this
common event as the mind/body and world contributing as "equal partners." The world
is already quite ordered. But we still need a background framework in which to code
the coherence. 41
To simplify our cognitive abilities, we learned to tap into the meanings of stable
objects and practice kinds. 42 Therefore, there need not always be a lot of new
information processing. In this sense, meaning comes in the prepared reception (e.g.,
Gibson). In Heidegger's "preconceptual union" that is the heart of everyday activity
and practice, the world is already coherent, inherent regularity, clusters of regular
patterns that provide coherence for which the brain is already prepared to receive
information about the world. The same holds for social kinds. Stable entities are
pervasive. The meaning is "out there" in the stable entities because the knower is
prepared to receive the information. There is less need for processing.
318 JAY SCHULKIN
A light change in the physical makeup of an environment can often dramatically

alter the perception of an object. For example, as Patrick A. Heelan has shown, visual
space is linked to task orientation of function embodied in human practices. 43 The
events are existential- real people embodied in action. The change in the life world
or meaning of the painter is reflected in the visual depiction of the surrounding world.
Perspective figures importantly in visual construction. Stated differently visual space
is an active process of visual construction, embodied practices, experimentation and
physical interactions. In the context of van Gogh's painting "Bedroom at Aries,"
Heelan points out that the visual experiences when the shutters of the window are open
are markedly different from when they are closed. The visual sensibility and spatial
construction are very different in the two contexts.
Put differently, the social and physical contours presented by the world are received
in active cognitive systems prepared to use them in functional ways. Clark calls this
"adaptive hookup."44 The point is that perception and action are embodied in its visual
construction of object space by the knower. The visual knowledge is coded in
meaningful coherent functional clusters ofmeaning. 45
SOCIAL PARSING AND ACTION
The idea that there is a mind and that it is detached from the body is modem, and took
on epistemological flair after the 16th century. 46 In some respects it was liberating, in
other respects it was a bad abstraction from a concrete fact. 47 While the notion of a
disembodied mind evolved from the fact that thought can be and often is expressed
without acting, the evolution of the human mind took place in action or imagining
action or anticipation of it. The two are linked in life, and while they can obviously be
separated they are joined at the hip in reality.
Perception and sensory-motor (bodily) responses are organized by regions of the
brain that are essentially information processing systems. 48 In other words, information
processing systems in the brain pervade the traditional characterization of the sensory,
the body or action; cognition pervades every level of the neural axis. There is nomind/
body split on this view; no Cartesian mythology to be overcome, which has been
suggested by a number ofinvestigators. 49 Indeed, results from cognitive neuroscience
suggests the possibility that perception of intentional action and intentional action
recruit many of the same underlying information processing neural systems. 5
BRAIN FUNCTION, THE BODY, AND MEANING
From a cognitive neuroscience point of view, representations of object knowledge, like

most functions in the brain, are not simply localized in one part of the brain, but are
distributed across the neural axis.
Experiments by Roger Shepard and his colleagues demonstrated51 that whether
imagining a visual rotation, or actually looking at an object, the time period needed
reflected the size of the object. Moreover, we now know that similar neural circuits are
also activated when the object is imagined or viewed. 52 Imagining is the process of
creating similar brain stimulation internally to what would happen from external
stimulation. In other words, the neural structures active in imagining objects appear
similar to those when looking at them.
Moreover, as I have indicated, action and perception categories can be separated

functionally, but often run together in terms of neural processing. A point that Heelan
has made over the years is to envision the perception system in the context of action
categories. Again, in fact, a wide variety of evidence suggests that imagining an event
and actually seeing or hearing an event recruits many of the same neural systems. For
example, in macaque monkeys a neuronal population in the caudal region of the ventral
premotor cortex was shown to be responsive both when the monkeys performed a
particular hand mouth movement and when they observed the experimenter doing the
same. 53 Motor systems are replete with motor images, information- processing systems.
In other words, the representation of possible movement is intertwined with thought.
In studies, measuring blood flow for neural activation, subjects were asked to
imagine grasping objects. 54 Significant activation of regions of the brain concerned
with movement was apparent. For example, Brodmann area 6 in the inferior part of the
frontal gyrus of both cortical hemispheres was active when subjects were asked to
imagine grasping an object. The anterior cingulate and the parietal cortex were also
activated. In addition, both the caudate nucleus of the basal ganglia and the cerebellum
were also activated. In further studies using neuromagnetic methods to measure cortical
activity, primary motor cortex was active both when subjects were observing simple
movements and when the subjects performed them.
The mind is not divorced from the contours of action. Symbols are inherent in
movement and our perceptual action. 55 Again, bodies are not one side and minds on the
other, despite Cartesian protestations to the contrary. That does not mean that all
thought is in action. But all action presupposes two things. First, the structure of
meaning, and two the structure of physical performance. Both for us are embodied in
the cultural milieu.
Regions of the brain are active in identifying specific classes of objects. 56 Specific
regions of the brain are activated when subjects were asked about their knowledge of
color words versus their knowledge of action words. Words generated greater activity
in the left middle temporal gyrus. This region of the brain, interestingly, is just anterior
to a region linked to the perception of motion. 57
In studies measuring regional cerebral blood flow, subjects were asked to identify
drawings of animals and tools. The researchers chose these classes because the distinc-
tions we make among four-legged animals usually rest on their physical differences
(size, color, etc.), while our distinctions among tools are based on their functions. 58
Naming animals (but not tools) activated the medial aspect of the occipital lobe.
Perhaps this reflected the fact that the task made demands on early visual processing.
The activation of the occipital cortex reflects a reactivating of primary visual areas,
which may arise from the need to identify an object using the relatively subtle
distinctions of physical features.
Naming tools (but not animals) activated the left middle temporal gyrus. This is the
same region that is activated in generating action words associated with objects. The
authors suggest that this area may organize stored knowledge of visual motion and their
use. In other words, identifying tools may be partly mediated by the areas of the brain
that mediate knowledge of object motion and use, and are close to sites active in
perceiving motion and when using objects. Interestingly, when subjects were presented
with a script of a social scene and that of a mechanical sequence, the social scene
320 JAY SCHULKIN
activated regions associated with faces and animals, the mechanical script activated
regions associated with tools. 59
The important functional point about the brain is that viewing the features of an
object reflects the activation of both visual and motor regions within the brain. One
reflects sight, the other action or movement. Both are part of the semantic neural
mechanisms. Both can be active whether looking at movements and perhaps when we
move ourselves through space. There appears to be a predilection to discern motion,
action categories (e. g., animate or inanimate) and functional relationships (use of an
object) may figure importantly in discerning motion and causation.
An emphasis is on the body's appropriation of objects and their use. The body is
a vehicle of knowledge, replete with cognitive structure for knowing what is around
and what to attend to and learn from and respond to. This sense of body knowledge is
well represented in the brain, and is part of the organization of intelligent action. The
sensory-motor organization is also replete with representations that are cognitive.
There are no bare bodily events. The classes of representations are larger than simply
propositional ones. Cognitive structure is pervasive in human perception and action.
CONCLUSION
Patrick Heelan and I co-wrote an article titled "Hermeneutical philosophy and

pragmatism: a philosophy of science." We both were struck by the common elements
in both traditions: the perspectival conception of perception and human action, the
transaction model of engagement, human knowing and Being.
Merleau-Ponty, a major influence in Heelan's philosophy, understood that the body
figures preeminently in our sensibility to our social surroundings. The body is not
"other." And it is our bodies that are grounded in everyday connections. The body
permeates the mind, as the mind permeates the body.
Heelan's philosophy of perception emerged from his work as a physicist and his
understanding of visual space. His understanding of physical space led to a
constructivst view of visual experience and its historicity. Visual space perception is
more elastic because of functional requirements in real live adaptation, and less rigid
than philosophers of science had understood it to be. Patrick Heelan's 1983 book,
Space-Perception and the Philosophy ofScience, is a beautiful work about living visual
sensibility and action.
While lonely as both a continental philosopher and a philosopher of science he has
forged a conception of science and philosophy that has now reached into the neural
sciences. His prescient philosophy of science was task oriented. It featured perception
as knowing amidst bodily sensibility and social practices. These views are just begin-
ning to be part of the cognitive and neural sciences as we realize that the perception of
action and imagining action recruits many of the same regions of the brain.
NOTES
D. Premack, "The Codes of Man and Beast, "Behavioral and Brain Sciences 6 (1986): 125-167, S.
Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). M. Merleau-Ponty, The Structure ofBehavior,
trans. A. L. Fischer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967 [1941]), M. Johnson, The Body on the Mind (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987).
2 A. Damasio, Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason. and the Human Brain (New York: Putnam, 1996).
A. Clark, Being There (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997). P. A. Heelan, Space-Perception and the
Philosophy of Science (Berkeley: The University ofCalifomia Press, 1983).
4 M. Merleau-Ponty, an unpublished text in J. M. Edie, ed., The Primacy of Perception (Chicago:
Northwestern University Press, 1964), 5.
5 J. Dewey, Experience and Nature (LaSalle, II: Open Court Press, 1989 [1925]).
M Lakoff and G. Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh (New York: Basic Books, 1999).
Heelan, "Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity" in E. A. MacKinnon, ed., The Problem of Scientific
Realism (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1972), 260-264; Space-Perception and the Philosophy of
Science, "Machine Perception" in C. Mitchum and A. Huning, eds., Philosophy and Technology, II ( 1986):
131-156.
80 Unlike D. Dennett, e. g., The Intentional Instance (Cambridge: MIT Press. 1987), I take this ability to be
a real feature of the information processing system in the brain, in addition to being a useful cognitive tool
in the prediction of behavior.
9 C. S. Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic (){Things (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992 [1898]).
10 L. Wittgenstein, The Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1953); M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans.,
J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962 [ 1927]).
11 Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of Things, 187.
12 K. R. Popper, Objective Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).
13 N. R. Hanson, The Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958).
14 W. Sellars, Science Perception and Reality (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press, 1963), Science and
Metaphysics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968) and Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
15 See Clark; Heelan & J. Schulkin, "Hermeneutical Philosophy and Pragmatism: A Philosophy of Science,"
Synthese, 115 (1998): 269-302.
16 See Heelan & Schulkin, "Hermeneutical Philosophy and Pragmatism."
17 For example, Wittgenstein, The Investigations; G. H. Mead, Mind, Selfand Society ed., Charles W. Morris
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936).

18 A. Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1967).

19 See Wittgenstein, The Investigations, Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of Things; H.G. Gadamer, Truth
and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1975).
20 See, for example, Mead, Mind, Self and Society and Gadamer, Truth and Method.
21 J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), J. R. Searle, Intentionality
22 Dewey, Experience and Nature.
23 H. P. Grice, "Meaning," Philosophical Review, 66 (2957): 377-388.
24 P. Churchland & P. Churchland, On the Contrary (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998).
25 K. Jaspers, General Psychopathology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997 [1913]).
26 See, for example, Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Life World,; Mead, Mind, Self, and Society; and
Johnson, The Body in the Mind.

27 F. Brentano, Sensory and Noetic Consciousness, ed., 0. Kraus, trans., M. Schattie & L.L. McAlister (New
York: Humanities Press, 1929 [1874]); E. Husser!, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology,
trans. W. P. Boyce Gibson (London: George Allen & Unwin 1931).
28 S. Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness; L. Brothers, Friday's Footprint (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1997); J. Schul kin, Roots of Social Sensibility (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).
29 Heidegger, Being and Time.
30 S. Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997).
31 Schulkin, Roots ofSocial Sensibility.
32 M.A. Boden, "Intentionality and Physical Systems." Philosophy of Science 37 (1978): 200-214; R.J.
Bogdan, Interpreting Minds (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997).

33 Searle, Intentionality.
322 JAY SCHULKIN
34 See, for example, Clark, Being There.

35 F.I. Dretske, Naturalizing the Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).
36 Searle, Intentionality.
37 Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity
38 Heelan Space-Perception and the Philosophy ofScience.

39 See, for example, Peirce, Reasoning and the Logic of Things.
40 J. J. Gibson, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982).
41 Bogdan, Interpreting Minds.

42 H. Komblith Inductive Inference and its Natural Ground (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).
43 Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy ofScience.

44 Clark, Being There, 147.
46 R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
47 A. N. Whitehead, Symbolism (New York: MacMillan Co., 1953 [1927]).

48 See, for example, M. Jeannerod, The Cognitive Neuroscience ofAction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997).
49 See Damasio, Descartes' Error and Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh.
50 E. T. Rolls and A. Treves, Neural Networks and Brain Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
G. Rizzolatti and M.A. Arbib, "Language within our grasp," Trends in Neuroscience 21 (1998): 188-194.
51 R. N. Shepard and L. A. Cooper, Mental Images and their Transformation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1982).
52 S.M. Kooslyn, Image and Brain (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994).
53 J. Decety, M. Perani, M. Jeannerod, "Mapping Motor Representations with Positron Emission
Tomography," Nature 371 (1994): 600-602.

54 J. Decety, "Do Imagined and Executed Actions Share the Same Neural Substrate?" Cognitive Brain
Research 3 (1996): 87-93.

55 MerleauPonty, TheStructureofBehavior; Phenomenology, trans. C. Smith(NewYork: Routledge, 1994
[1962]).
56 A. Martin, "Organization and Origins of Semantic Knowledge in the Brain" inN. G. Jablonski, ed., The
Origin and Diversification ofLanguage (California Academy of Sciences. In press.).

57 D. Perett and N. J. Emery, "Understanding the Intentions of Others from Visual Signals:
Neurophysiological Evidence," Curr Psycho{. Cognit., 13 (1994): 683-694; E. T. Rolls and A. Treves, Neural
Networks and Brain Function (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
58 Dewey, Experience and Nature; Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science; Lakoff and
Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh; Johnson, The Body in the Mind; F. J. Varela, E. Thompson, E. Rosch, The
Embodied Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).
59 A. Martin, unpublished observations.
ROBERT CUMMINGS NEVILLE
PHENOMENOLOGY AND PRAGMATISM:

A Continuing Dialogue with Patrick A. Heelan
The honor of being invited to contribute to this well-deserved Festschrift for Patrick
Heelan is made more pleasurable by the occasion it affords to continue a dialogue with
him that began thirty-five years ago about the relative merits of phenomenology and
pragmatism. Our friendship has not been all philosophical dialogue, of course. We
taught together at Fordham University and again at SUNY Stony Brook. He has been
an important friend within my family since he brought comfort after the brieflife of our
first daughter. When our two other girls were in grade school, he would haul his
definitely non-portable computer over to our house for them to play with, introducing
them to the computer age when I had barely mastered an electrified typewriter. And
now he exercises an avuncular superintendence over our youngest who teaches history
at a neighboring university in Washington. But our philosophic dialogue has always
been a crucial part of the friendship, starting in the early days at Fordham. It continued
in the philosophy and religious studies departments at Stony Brook where Patrick sat
in on my seminar on Peirce. For several years it was formalized around a small group
of philosophers including George Wolf, a neuroscientist, Ed Casey, a phenomenologist,
and David Weissman, a pragmatist, who met monthly in New York City at Jay
Schulkin's apartment. Jay is a pragmatic neuroscientist.
In the dialogue Heelan is the phenomenologist and I the pragmatist. He is a funny
kind of phenomenologist, of course, starting off with his degree in physics and having
none of the Continental tradition's humanistic disdain for science. His approach to
philosophy of science from the phenomenological rather than analytic perspective has
made him a unique and important figure in that discussion, and his Space-Perception
and the Philosophy of Science is a classic in non-analytic philosophy of science. I
myself am a plain old pragmatist (a paleopragmatist), following in the line of Peirce,
Dewey, James (a bit), and Mead, not an analytic philosopher like Quine or Davidson
who discovers some truth in pragmatic themes or a neo-pragmatist like Rorty who
abandons metaphysics and philosophy of nature. My ancestral pragmatic heritage
instead comes through Peirce's editors, Hartshorne and Weiss, and so closely engages
process philosophy and the love of philosophic system that embraces everything from
ontology to religion and cultural criticism.
323
324 ROBERT CUMMINGS NEVILLE
The latest publication in our dialogue is "Hermeneutical Philosophy and

Pragmatism: A Philosophy of Science," that Patrick wrote with our mutual friend, Jay
Schulkin (Heelan was principally responsible for the sections on hermeneutical
philosophy~ meaning Heidegger's ~while Schulkin was principally responsible for
the pragmatism sections). 1 I shall respond here to some of the themes of that paper,
though not to its special focus on philosophy of science. By "hermeneutical
philosophy" that paper means roughly the phenomenological tradition ofHusserl and
more especially Heidegger. I am particularly provoked by the claim in that paper
(surely made by Patrick) that "hermeneutic philosophy seeks a level of understanding
beyond pragmatism which is rather the condition of possibility of the pragmatist's
world in which theory and practice merge in action. " 2 That paper goes on to talk about
Heidegger's focus on ontology as Da-sein 's understanding of historical being and the
alleged danger of "inauthenticity with the reduction of ... 'meditative' thinking to
'calculative' thinking. After all these years, Patrick still thinks that phenomenology is
more profound than pragmatism, which, to him, seems forever tarred with James' broad
brush of practicalism. I have known all along that phenomenology talks big about
profundity whereas pragmatism comes through with more of the abysmal stuff. The
themes I shall discuss here are intended to show pragmatism's superiority in the
profundity contest.
1. MODERNISM AND ITS PRAGMATIC ALTERNATIVE

Heelan's claim that phenomenology, in his broad sense, "seeks a level of understanding
beyond pragmatism which is rather the condition for the possibility of the pragmatist's
world ... " reflects the fundamental Kantian commitment of phenomenology, namely,
to transcendental philosophy. By this I mean both a general and a more specific thing.
Generally, the Kantian conviction is that phenomenology's ontology is more basic and
can account for the truth in pragmatism, but not vice versa. I shall argue against this
throughout this essay. More specifically, the Kantian transcendental argument gives
an honorific status to its conclusion by claiming that, if what it accounts for is actual
and true, then the account is its foundation and is therefore presupposed by what is
actual and true. In Kant's case, the actual and true was apriori synthetic knowledge in
physics and mathematics and the transcendental apparatus of the First Critique was its
account. In Patrick's argument, the actual and true is the limited validity of
pragmatism, and the account is the general phenomenological ontology of Husser! and
Heidegger. His (and Jay's) explication of the connections between these in the paper
under analysis is wonderful.
What is the merit of a transcendental argument? Material logic says that a true
conclusion follows from any number of premises, either true or false. Perhaps any
number of other transcendental structures than Kant's might account for apriori
synthetic knowledge in physics and mathematics, and hence Kant's apparatus is only
one possibility among many. (Kant's argument has the further embarrassment of
failing to sustain the claims that there is real and true apriori synthetic knowledge in
physics and mathematics.) Kant does have an answer in defense of transcendental
argument, as might be expected, in "The Transcendental Doctrine of Method" in the
Critique ofPure Reason.
PHENOMENOLOGY AND PRAGMATISM 325
If the imagination is not simply to be visionary [schwaermen ], but is to be inventive [dichten sol!]
under the strict surveillance of reason, there must always previously be something that is
completely certain, and not invented or merely a matter of opinion, namely the possibility of the
object itself. Once that is established, it is then permissible to have recourse to opinion in regard
to its actuality; but this opinion, if it is not to be groundless, must be brought into connection with
what is actually given and so far certain, as serving to account for what is thus given. Then, and
only then, can the supposition be entitled an hypothesis. (B 797-798, Kemp Smith translation)
As this point is elaborated, it means that we need an apriori transcendental definition
of "world" and what counts as evidence within and for it, before we can have
hypotheses about the nature and content of the world. This passage is the paradigmatic
definition of foundationalism as that has defined modernism.
Against Kant's critique of what he called the "method of hypothesis" Peirce and the
other pragmatists argued that our beliefs and the suppositions and habits of life they
articulate can never be called into question all at once. Most of the time we assume all
of them while attending to events shaped by beliefs and purposes. Only when the
activity guided by beliefs breaks down do we consciously question beliefs, a point upon
which Heelan and Schulkin say phenomenology and pragmatism agree. Therefore, in
the construction of a theory, occasioned by the breakdown of commonsense
epistemological suppositions, we need only hypotheses about what is actual, and what
the world is, each to be critically tested in its own way. Hypotheses about what is
within the world can be checked against hypotheses about what worldliness itself is.
There are logical relations of condition to conditioned in many parts of philosophy,
science, and broader human elements of worldviews, but each can be treated as
hypothetical when questioned. None has to be certain. Nothing has to be certain, only
questionable and correctible when questioned. Hypothesis testing in physics might
very well presuppose a metaphysics of the world and what counts as evidence; but that
metaphysics is an hypothesis in its own tum, with its own degree of confirmation,
undecidedness, and dubiousness.
So pragmatism exposes what Dewey called "the quest for certainty" as, first,
unnecessary for making progress in inquiry and, second, unnecessarily arbitrary in
selecting something real and true as "given" which in tum gives alleged certainty to a
transcendental account of it. The image of science as an edifice built upon a certain
foundation, as in Husserl's The Crisis of European Sciences, is revealed as an unreal
fantasy, modeling learning on geometry rather than what learners do when they learn.
It can be replaced by the pragmatic image of knowledge modeled on learning itself, on
the correction of beliefs and the methodical questioning of them in philosophic and
scientific inquiry to extend and improve knowledge. The language of paradigm shifts,
of which Heelan approves, reflects the pragmatic image of improving what we know
more than the modernist image of building from a sure starting point. The language of
the hermeneutical circle on which Heelan's interpretation of phenomenology turns, is
even better suited to the pragmatic image of engaging the world so as to correct
hypotheses that in tum allows us to correct other hypotheses.
I would say then that the pragmatic alternative to modernism with its Kantian
foundationalism is the more profound of the two philosophic approaches in the respect
that it turns the allegedly apriori transcendental arguments into broadly empirical ones,
hypotheses that are to be developed, questioned, and defended by all the tools available
to philosophical and other forms of inquiry. Moreover, pragmatism can represent the
non-foundationalist elements of phenomenology- the reading of intellectual history
as paradigm shifts and the hermeneutical circle - as elements of pragmatic inquiry

rather than as something that is supposed to ground pragmatism's image of the world
transcendentally. So in this respect I would say that Heelan is a closet pragmatist, for
all his advertisement of phenomenology. Fie on modernism: there is a highroad around
it through pragmatism. 3
2. CONSCIOUSNESS VERSUS INTERPRETATION

Husser! and other phenomenologists had reason to be modernists, however, namely,
their Cartesian assumption that rock-bottom philosophical evidence has to show itself
in consciousness, as Husser! argued in Cartesian Meditations. Consciousness is what
we know, and philosophic method is designed within phenomenology to straighten out
consciousness so as to eliminate confusions and hasty inferences. Descartes' Discourse
on Method is one version of this and Husserl's method of epoche and bracketing,
rotating pure ideas so as to know them without contaminations from the natural
standpoint, is another. What counts is what can be present to consciousness, hopefully
in as non-misleading a form as possible.
Heidegger's kind of phenomenology is not so wedded to consciousness as Husserl's
Cartesianism, and in fact could be pointed in the direction of pragmatic interpretation
theory by Gadamer's hermeneutics. Nevertheless, perhaps Heidegger's chief dif-
ference from Husser! as a phenomenologist is to supplement Cartesian surface clarity
and luminosity with analyses of below-consciousness conditions or structures of con-
sciousness such as being at hand, to hand, bounded by horizons (a consciousness visual
image). These elements, and the existentials and existentiels, are important for their
effects on consciousness. The later Heidegger's emphasis on opening ourselves to
fundamental reality perhaps need not be interpreted as opening our consciousness, but
he probably did mean that and most of his followers take him that way.
The emphasis on consciousness presupposes nominalism in two closely related
senses. First, only what can be fully present in consciousness is real, thereby elimina-
ting what Peirce called real generals, or habits, which are never fully actual in any of
their instances. Second, universals are reduced to patterns or forms of the sort that can
be present in consciousness, and thus cannot be generals. Isn't it too bad to have an
epistemological commitment to consciousness rule out the realist (anti-nominalist)
alternative without a fair hearing?
Pragmatism, by contrast, construes knowing, not as a conscious gaze but as the
activity of interpreting. For pragmatism, reality is directly engaged by human activity
and enjoyment and the engagement is shaped by the ongoing activity of interpreting
things with signs, and then interpreting the interpretations, on ad indefinitum.
Semiotic systems provide the signs that shape interpretive activity, and those signs-in-
systems can be analyzed on their own. But unlike the European tradition of semiotics
that takes its paradigmatic rise from interpreting texts, as Patrick points out, the prag-
matic tradition focuses on how semiotic systems themselves are shaped, made more
definite or indefinite, by how the long-term engagement of reality requires changing
semiotic tools.
The result of the pragmatic emphasis on the interpretive process is that what fills
consciousness at any moment or temporal stretch is never the whole of a thought.
Consciousness cannot possibly fully contain knowledge because much of that
knowledge consists in the habits that are not even exercised in the moment. And the
exercise of a habit in a finite instance, as remarked above, is not the habit itself that by
definition is general across any instantiable moments. A more realistic form for
knowledge is not a vision, encompassable in consciousness, but an assumption on
which we are acting and a probable hypothesis about what might be expected. What
we know is never reducible to what we are thinking of consciously. In fact, "senior
moments" are occasions when what we know cannot be called to consciousness.
Memory is not always repetition of previous conscious ideation but the interpretive
translation of general knowledge into particular conscious expressions. Those particu-
lar conscious expressions are not themselves meaningful unless they can be interpreted
further in terms of the general terms they are supposed to translate.
Which is true, consciousness-nominalism or interpretive-generalism? That depends
on what we find when we interpret experience. Do we find that many things in nature
behave in regular habitual ways? Then it would seem that nature has habits or what
Peirce called generals in it. Does our knowledge rest on habits of thought such that I
answer to "Bob" every particular time my name is called because I have the general
character of being and thinking of myself as Bob? If we find these and similar things,
then realism is true in these senses and consciousness is partial and ephemeral as the
locus of knowledge. Or do we find only color patches, tones, "raw feels," and clear
ideas with mere contiguity and association connecting them, ala Hume? Then con-
sciousness-nominalism is true. In point of fact, we find the former. When conscious-
ness-nominalism attempts to account for this, it has to make each regularity in nature
or general meaning in mind a function of miracle, as Hume noted. Realism is the view
more profoundly grounded in experience.
To interpret phenomenology, especially hermeneutical philosophy, in pragmatic
terms takes the edge off the consciousness-nominalism that otherwise might attach to
it, and it is quite possible to interpret it this way. Phenomenology's affinity for
psychodynamic psychology is a strong move toward epistemological realism. From
a pragmatic standpoint, phenomenology is often an insistence on limiting interpretive
engagement to those signs that come out of a visual imagination. Peirce said about
another reductionistic move that it was like passing a law that everything has to be built
out of paper. A lot of structures simply cannot be built under this law, but on the other
hand many new and wonderful uses of paper will be discovered. So pragmatism can
applaud the phenomenological reduction of signs to consciousness and vision imagery
for its subtle nuance while finding room for much more in interpretation. 4 With regard
to the more general and ready-for-correction view of experience, I take the pragmatic
interpretive approach to be more profound than the phenomenological. This time
Patrick is not a closet pragmatist. His Space-Perception and the Philosophy ofScience
is an attempt to be true to the visual orientation of phenomenology in the discipline of
philosophy of science, both by its very choice of topic and by its arguments. But to the
extent that his arguments trace the hermeneutical circle, a very great extent indeed, he
is dragged unwillingly toward the pragmatic theory of interpretation.
3. REVEALING VERSUS INTERPRETING

Heelan's resistance to the pragmatic theory of interpretation, and that of many
phenomenologists, has its reason in a profound commitment to things in themselves.
As Kantians, they cannot be in favor of what Kant called things in themselves. So

Husserl's things in themselves were more like pure ideas, and Heidegger's were more
real than even real things, unfoldings of being itself. The negative side of this
commitment is opposition to any filtering system of mind. This includes opposition to
that part ofKantianism taken up by the Neo-Kantians that stresses conceptual schemes,
cultural categories and the like. It includes also an even polemical opposition in the last
century to analytic philosophy in both its formal language and informal language
modes. Instead, phenomenology wants things to reveal themselves to us as they are,
not as they answer to the cooked questions we put to them.
The phenomenological opposition to pragmatism in this respect falls on the
pragmatic claim that we only interpret things in certain respects. An interpretation
takes a sign to stand for an object in a certain respect- that's the stock Peircean
definition of interpretation and gives rise to the three elements ofPeircean semiotics:
the study of meanings of signs as defined by semiotic codes, the study of the reference
of signs to objects, and the study of the acts of interpreting the signs to stand for objects
in certain respects. 5 In the pragmatic approach there is no such thing as a whole thing
in itself, for much of what anything is consists in its relations with other things. So,
interpretation picks up on what is important to engage when knowers engage things.
Sometimes the engagements are limited to the ways by which the object known
conditions other things, especially the knower; James' practicalism emphasizes this.
But as soon as people have complex semiotic systems they can ask about the ways
things integrate or harmonize their conditioning and conditioned relations, ways that
I would describe as their essential features. So pragmatism notes that we can know
things from their own perspectives as well as from the perspectives of the things with
which they interact. Nevertheless, interpretation is always in respect of these and those
conditioning and essential features, never in terms of some summary totality of the
things. Pragmatism's metaphysics can deal with "everything" without assuming
totalities or things in themselves, something even Kant warned against. 6
A knower might very well find it possible to engage a thing in all important
respects. Importance can be defined initially as what is important for animal survival,
a theme Heelan and Schulkin stress in their article. But Peirce argued that as soon as
complicated semiotic systems are available people ask what is important in larger
contexts, and indeed redefine human interest as relating appropriately to what is really
valuable (and hence worth valuing) in the universe. As Peirce argued, the most
important questions for inquiry are about what purposes are worth having, his answer
to James' simpler practicalism. For pragmatism, the question of value is constitutive
of the interpretation itself, for the respects in which things are interpreted are a function
of what the interpreter finds worth interpreting. Whereas phenomenology can treat
phenomena as mere facts, and values as other kinds of facts, thus keeping within the
fact-value distinction of modern scientism, pragmatism cannot do that.
In this respect, then, pragmatism privileges the humanistic concern for the
discernment of importance and value. Even scientific knowledge, according to
pragmatism, is the result of hitting up and justifying the importance of certain respects
in which things should be interpreted. Phenomenology, on the other hand, can
represent itself as a kind of science, taking the phenomena in as facts, hopefully
without the bias of interpretive interest. The facts phenomenologically received are
hopefully the things just as they are in themselves. Patrick points out rightly that the
scientific background of phenomenology is the human sciences, Geisteswissenschaften.

But those human sciences, especially in Germany, modeled themselves on the physical
sciences as much as possible and had strong positivistic elements.
Phenomenologists do not have to separate facts from values, of course. Edward
Casey, for instance, tracks the valuations in memory, imagination, and sense of place
with exquisite subtlety. 7 Richard Bernstein has shown brilliantly that Heidegger's
philosophy, for all its rejection of values-talk and ethics, is based on deep ethical ideas
(bad ones). 8 But Casey's Husserlian phenomenology results in claims about the facts
of how valuation permeates experience, and Heidegger's ethics is not only uncritical
but disguised to prevent criticism. Neither builds the assessment of value and
importance into the interpretive act itself, as pragmatism does, though both can be
reflective about the values involved in interpretation. Still, pragmatism is more
humanistic in the sense of proximity to the disciplines of criticism in literature and the
arts, and to the sense of philosophy as inquiry into the good, the true, and the beautiful.
My claim that pragmatism has greater affinity to humanistic thinking than
phenomenology does seems counterintuitive. After all, Peirce was a chemist and an
expert in photo-optics, and the son of the greatest American mathematician of his day.
James set up one of the first laboratories in experimental psychology. Dewey invented
the language of scientific experimentalism. Mead worked his empirical claims through
the social sciences. Moreover, Peirce's early papers tout natural science as the best
way to settle doubt, in explicit contrast to intuitive and dogmatic methods, and these
often are the only essays phenomenologists read by him. Nevertheless, for Peirce,
logic is a restricted form of ethics (the ethics of thought), which in tum is a restricted
form of aesthetics (the aesthetics of action). Peirce was a devout Episcopalian, and the
best paper expressing his philosophy of science is "A Neglected Argument for the
Reality of God." James, too, was religious and is best known for his Gifford Lectures,
the Varieties of Religious Experience. James was deeply focused on emotions and
values, not as facts but as justified or not, justifying or not. Dewey rebelled somewhat
against his Calvinist upbringing but wrote many poems, including one called "Paradise
Lost and Regained."9 Moreover, his philosophy of religion, Our Common Faith, is one
of the most important non-confessional theologies of the twentieth century, and defends
his aesthetic view of"quality," the linchpin of his theory of value and "consummatory
experience" in Art as Experience and The Quest for Certainty. Mead's focus was on
the development of meaning and personal identity through social interaction, humanist
concerns.
I suspect the reason that pragmatism seems scientific to phenomenologists, while
they take themselves to be humanists, is another aspect of modernism. Pragmatism has
no clear boundaries from the social and natural sciences, or from the humanities or
practical modes of life such as politics and jurisprudence. Phenomenologists by
contrast often want to conceive of their discipline as having some kind of professional
integrity, a method peculiar to itself, a distinctly philosophical contribution. Whereas
pragmatism represents philosophy of science as a part of philosophy of nature in which
science and philosophy are combined, phenomenology often follows the general
Kantian division between the study of nature, given over to the sciences, and
philosophy as the transcendental reflection on that. Husserlian phenomenology can be
construed as a special kind of empirical inspection directed at consciousness, as in
Casey's work; but Husserl's strong distinction between the natural standpoint (bad for
philosophy) and the transcendental standpoint (good) at the beginning of Ideas in fact
attempts to restore to phenomenological philosophy a privileged method.
For philosophy to have a privileged method is a bad thing. It limits what
philosophy can learn to what that method recognizes. If philosophy can find new and
effective methods, all to the good- add them to the resources for inquiry. But if
philosophy defines itself by a method, it is reductionistic in just the sense for which
both phenomenologists and pragmatists criticize some sciences. Peirce said that a good
philosophic argument is not like a chain of inferences, as strong as its weakest link, but
rather like a rope of hundreds of strands twisted so as to reinforce one another in one
direction and hold each other in tension in another. With regard to method, pheno-
menology is more "professional," but pragmatism more profound, more deeply
connected with the possibilities oflearning. Heelan the physicist fits pragmatic clothes
for proper humanistic reasons.
4. NATURE AND PRAXIS

The strongest case for the superior profundity (delicious oxymoron) of phenomenology
is that it deals with the ontological question whereas pragmatism does not, limiting
itself to adaptive behaviors and problem solving. This case is wholly mistaken.
Heidegger is famous for raising, indeed naming for our time, the "ontological
question." But he is equally famous for not answering it, for backing away from it in
Being and Time. His later works might be said tore-approach the ontological question
through the indirect way of poetry and metaphor, which Patrick argues is phenomeno-
logy's device for protecting against the inauthenticity ofliteral speech. Heidegger is
by no means the first to understand that literal modes of speech about things are
difficult to apply in speaking of being, or God. The issues were thoroughly explored
in medieval debates, often under the weight of the observation that being is not a genus
(similar to the difference between Sein and Seiendes). The earlier Neo-Platonic
tradition had dealt with speaking of the One beyond the determinate Dyad. And Plato
himself, in the hypotheses of the Parmenides, had rung the subtle changes on these
issues. Heidegger gave a specialized reading ofthe history of Western philosophy and
theology that obscured all these antecedents that should provide a critical context for
present day discussions of the ontological question, now joined to the histories of South
and East Asian philosophies. The result is an ultimately arbitrary claim for revelation
of the Fourfold that looks profound but is only shielded from criticism by a brilliant
rhetoric of invulnerability.
Through Peirce's Scotistic realism, pragmatism is heir to the long discussion of
being and apophatic or negative theology. Unlike Heidegger, Peirce did directly ask
the question, in "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God," of why there is
something rather than nothing, and what being consists in, and how the world of
different things can be together. He proposed an hypothesis to answer this complex of
questions, and then defended that hypothesis as the simplest and best. He might be
mistaken, of course, and I have worked to improve upon his hypothesis and argument.
But he cannot be faulted for failure to deal with profound ontological issues.
Moreover, Peirce's semiotics distinguishes between three forms of reference,
convention (which he called symbolic), iconic, and indexical, providing a new way
forward in dealing with the need for indirection in speaking of being, God, and other
difficult matters. The first kind of reference is within a semiotic system. The second,
the iconic, supposes that the object is like what the referring sign describes. The third,
the indexical, refers by establishing a properly orienting causal relation between the
object and the interpreter, like pointing to get the observer to tum the head in the right
direction; this is the kind of reference involved in carrying across what is important in
the object where the signs are not descriptive, the reference most involved in religion
and ontology where a transformation of soul is required to engage the object at all. I
have developed this pragmatic theory of religious symbols at some length, and believe
it is way to deal with the issues that reduce Heidegger to poetry beyond criticism. 10
The other classical pragmatists were not as directly metaphysical as Peirce, with his
speculative flair. James worked at ontological questions in A Pluralistic Universe,
Essays in Radical Empiricism, and Some Problems of Philosophy; he wasn't awfully
good at them, backing away into discussions of language, just like many
phenomenologists. But he was very good at the subjective side of the questions of the
experience ofbeing, as in Varieties ofReligious Experience. Dewey's discussions of
the "generic traits of existence" and their precariousness in Experience and Nature are
as "existential" as any phenomenologist's. Mead, true, was not much interested in
objective speculative metaphysics, though he was deeply involved with studies of the
ontological grounding of the experiential life-world.
Behind these image problems of which philosophic approach deals more openly
with ontological issues lies a specific philosophical problem. As mentioned, issues of
the nature of being, of why there is something rather than nothing, and the like, are
hard because they deal with the very origins of determinateness; they transcend genera
and species and what might lie within them. On the other hand, the phenomenological
approach to all things is through transcendental consciousness (or some such Husserl-
ian notion) or through Da-sein, ontological human reality. What is missing is a philo-
sophy of nature that connects the origins of determinateness with those origins within
human meaningfulness. Phenomenology can have accounts of how nature feels within
human experience- Merleau-Ponty was great at that- but is too Kantian for philoso-
phy of nature itself. Pragmatism, by contrast, is first and foremost a philosophy of
nature, from which both ontological questions and questions of the definition of the
human lifeworld are approached. Philosophy of nature is neither popular science nor
philosophy of science which in tum knows nature. It is rather philosophical inquiry,
resulting in hypotheses, about the nature of nature within which human life takes place
and which itself is onto logically contingent. The classical pragmatists had extensive
philosophies of nature, not all in agreement, but all endeavoring to show how inten-
tionality and the human life-world are elaborations of and within the natural order. 11
The result of the strong presence of a philosophy of nature in pragmatism and its
usual absence in phenomenology is a decisive difference in the fundamental images
with which the two approaches represent the world. As Patrick says in the essay
provoking this discussion (289), for phenomenology or hermeneutical philosophy there
are three fundamental issues. One is the issue of theory, which might have nature as
its object and is the focus of that article on philosophy of science. Another is the issue
of action or praxis, which is alleged to be the main focus of pragmatism and to which
phenomenology is reconciled in that essay. Beneath both, and the exclusive province
of phenomenology, it is alleged, citing Heidegger, is the issue of ontology. All of these
are issues about humanity in some sense, human theorizing, human praxis, and indeed
human ontology as Da-sein. As I said at the beginning, phenomenology has a deep and
perhaps invincible commitment to the mental habits of the transcendental tum: we do
not really know others or nature, but rather our own experience which might possibly
contain some knowledge of others or nature, at any rate filtered through transcendental
structures of consciousness or Da-sein.
The contrasting pragmatic image is of the world of vast impersonal forces evolving
in some places into intelligent beings and high civilization. The things of nature all
have value and are appreciated more or less by people insofar as their semiotic systems
allow them to engage the world. The continuities of human with animal life are
strongly emphasized in pragmatism, as Schulkin's parts of the article with Heelan
highlight. But in addition nature itself is regarded as at least as subtle as the finest
human intentionality that can ask about the ontological question itself. Peirce's view
mentioned earlier of aesthetics containing ethics, which in tum contains logic and
inquiry, is crucial to the valuational component of the pragmatic view of nature. John
Dewey's rhetoric is perhaps more pointed to express the pragmatic sense of the world.
He distinguished having from doing. Nearly all of human life is the having of our
bodies, ideas, purposes, societies, and trajectories within nature. Dewey described this
with the double meaning of"enjoyment": we enjoy in the sense of suffering as well as
delighting. The capstone of his theory is his category of quality and its use in
interpreting consummatory experience. Only in a small part of life do the habits and
qualities by which we move and have our being break down and become problematic.
Then we do something about that, and proceed to engage in inquiry and praxis.
Of course philosophical inquiry is about what Dewey called problematic situations,
in which we have to inquire and do something. So it might seem to someone who does
a topical word-count that pragmatism is preoccupied with problem-solving. That is
what inquiry and action are about. Dewey, James, and Mead were heavily involved in
treating issues of personal and, even more, social problems, and set the more traditional
philosophical problems within the context of those larger issues, the "problems of men
rather than the problems of philosophers," as Dewey (sexist that he was) liked to say.
I'm not quite sure where Patrick gets the idea that pragmatists are soft on facti city, on
the thrownness of human life in the life-world. 12 Whereas phenomenologists talk
abstractly about that, they are not better known for their political and social
involvement than the pragmatists, unless you count Heidegger's brief career as a
university administrator (a job about which Patrick and I know a lot and wish
Heidegger had known more). Despite the fact that philosophical problem solving is
about problem solving, the pragmatic theory, roughly stated, is that problem solving
is but a small part of the vast richness of human life, which, in many ways, lets the
universe pass through it.
Since antiquity, the meaning of cosmic existence and human life itself has been a
"problematic situation." Philosophic inquiry has developed ideas and intellectual
strategies for dealing with it. These include the analysis of what is real and worthwhile.
Both phenomenology and pragmatism offer further resources.
I have argued here that phenomenologists ought not think of pragmatism as crude
practicalism but as a philosophy as deep as their own. To the extent phenomenology
or hermeneutical philosophy is modernist, it is unnecessarily restrictive and pragmatism
offers an alternative way that can place the good points of phenomenology without the
restrictions. Where phenomenology supposes an exclusive focus on the human,
especially consciousness or Da-sein, pragmatism's epistemology of interpretation lets

the semiosis be determined by the world engaged. Where phenomenology longs to
reveal things in themselves, pragmatism is open to identify and interpret whatever is
there without a commitment to a totalizing metaphysics of presence. Where
phenomenology hopes to be a science, especially a science of the facts of values,
pragmatism builds critical evaluation into the very process of philosophical
interpretation, and in this sense is the more humanistic of the approaches. Where
Heideggerian phenomenology raises the ontological question of being, it does so only
as filtered through, or restricted to the transcendental conditions of human reality; and
it does not deal with that question very effectively even so. Pragmatism, by contrast,
directly addresses the ontological question and offers hypotheses to answer it, aided by
a philosophy of nature. Is it too much to say that phenomenology is profound in
dealing with how reality is revealed within the transcendental structures of the human,
but pragmatism is more profound in dealing with reality, including how the human
arises within nature so as to be able to ask these kinds of questions? I think not.
The real topic of this essay is friendship, Patrick's and mine, which I seek to honor
by these arguments, taking him seriously as the philosopher he is, and calling his
attention to the best that I can bring to its philosophic side. The contest of profundity
is a potlatch.
Boston University
NOTES
Patrick A. Heelan and Jay Schulkin, "Hermeneutical Philosophy and Pragmatism: A Philosophy of
Science," Synthese, 115 ( 1998): 269-302.
2 Ibid., 288.
3 This is the thesis elaborated with heat as well as light in my The High Road around Modernism (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1992). The first chapter of that book is a systematic exposition of Peirce
on many of the points discussed here and it gives the citations to The Collected Papers of Charles Saunders
Peirce, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, eds., (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932).
4 The best case for my point has been made by David Weissman. In Intuition and Ideality (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1987), he analyzed the Cartesian tradition in terms of its visual imagery
commitment;, calling them an "intuition." That was the term by which Peirce characterized Cartesianism
when he showed that there could be no such thing as an intuition, or, as I would say here, a thought of an ob-
ject complete in a finite stretch of consciousness. Then in Hypothesis and the Spiral ofReflection (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1989), he developed a roughly pragmatic view of interpretation as
hypothesis.
5 Peirce's semiotics is developed in brilliant but scattered ways in the materials in volume 2 of The
Collected Papers of Charles Saunders Peirce.
6 Peirce's way of expressing the point about the infinite density of things is in terms of Firstness,
Secondness, and Thirdness: there is a Secondness and Thirdness ofFirstness, a Firstness and Thirdness of
Secondness, a Firstness and Secondness ofThirdness, and degenerate forms of all this ad infinitum. My own
pragmatic metaphysics develops a thoery of things as harmonies of essential and conditional features, for
instance in The High Road around Modernism, Chapter 12. Chapter 5 of that book makes the case against
totality.
7 See Edward Casey's Imagining: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1976), Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) and Getting
Back into Place: Toward a Phenomenological Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1993). Earlier phenomenologists such as Scheler and Schulz also deal with valuation.
8 See Richard Bernstein's "Heidegger's Silence? Ethos and Technology," in Bernstein, The New
Constellation: The Ethical-Political Horizons of Modernity/Postmodernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).
See The Poems ofJohn Dewey, JoAnn Boydston, ed., (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1977), pp. 59ff.
10 See my The Truth of Broken Symbols (Albany: State University ofNew York Press, 1996).
11 My own version of this is in Recovery of the Measure (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1989).
12 Heelan and Schulkin, 290-91.
GOD, RELIGION, AND SCIENCE
SECTION SUMMARIES
PART THREE
From the Phenomenological-Hermeneutic Array ofValues to
Religion and Science
William J. Richardson poses the question ofLacan's conception of science, truth, and
language in his transitional contribution to the next section on values and science,
"Psychoanalytic Praxis and the Truth of Pain." For Lacan, the "subject of science,"
including the whole scientific enterprise in its history, its institutions and all the
virulence of its burgeoning power, must be conceived as the function of a single
hypostasized, egoless subject. Richardson outlines the provocative challenges and
strengths of Lacan' s analysis of "Science and Truth" - together with its limitations.
In his "Poetics Of A Possible God- Faith Or Philosophy," Richard Kearney raises
the traditional controversy of the relation of faith and philosophy: faith or reason?
Kearney appropriates aspects of the Heideggerian perspective exceeding the opposition
God/Being, to show how, if at all, the play of God relates to the play of Being to
contend that a kind of chiasm is possible.
Tom Nickles and Gaye McCollum-Nickles, in their contribution, "On William
James's The Will to Believe," argue that James makes deep connections between
science, religion, and "the array of values." Nickles and McCollum-Nickles offer an
explanation of some of these issues in connection with hermeneutic accounts.
Dominic Balestra's "In-Between Science and Religion," re-traces the demise of the
demarcation between science and non-science by falsifiability in the early Popper
through sophisticated revisions transforming Popperian falsifiability into an historical
and situated criticizability as well as an aspect retaining a Duhemian requirement of
subjectivity. These new transformations open the possibility of applying a revised
Popperian standpoint to the disciplinary rationality of theology, with implications for
reconsidering the relation between science and religion and requiring, for Balestra,
something like Heelan's hermeneutical philosophy of science.
Garrett Barden, "Thinking the Philosophy of Religion," observes that religion as
such is a common human practice. The philosophy of religion is the attempt to give a
philosophical account of that practice as the philosophy of mathematics is the attempt
to offer a mathematical account of that practice. Barden thus poses the question: what
extra-philosophical experience must the philosopher have in order adequately to
undertake the philosophy of religion? It is for Barden telling, that whereas one may
study mathematics for no reason other than to reflect philosophically on mathematics,
one cannot so engage in religious practice.
337
In "Van Gogh's Eyes"- an essay borrowing its title from the collection as a whole
-Thomas J.J. Altizer employs Van Gogh's final painting as offering a passage into a
uniquely modem sacred art, wherein the depths of darkness and abyss first become
manifest as a glorious light, a light through which what had been known as the Eye of
God truly reverses itself with an apocalyptic finality, and yet this reversal is in genuine
continuity with the deeper tradition of Western sacred vision.
Steve Fuller's contribution, "On Science and Religion," counters Patrick Heelan's
commentary on the recent encyclical, Fides et ratio, arguing that the Catholic Church
ought to continue to pursue a universalistic metaphysics, while yet endorsing the spirit
of Heelan's commentary. Fuller hopes to preserve what is traditionally known as
humanism in the name of Christianity: to wit: to favor the human in all cases where a
choice between humans and other living beings must be made.
Writing from the conscientious perspective of comparative linguistics in her essay,
"The Dialogism of Meaning, The Discursive Embeddedness of Knowledge, The
Colloquy of Being," Heidi Byrnes details several foundational considerations regarding
the dialogic construction of meaning and the situated nature ofknowledge. Theoreti-
cally, these issues are framed by a systemic-functional approach to language and in
practice they are located with the notion of genre. Byrnes execplifies these insights by
analysing language use in two environments: namely, that of the evolving scientific
discourse of the English language and of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.
W. Norris Clarke, S.J. in "The Creative Imagination," an abstract promising a
much longer investigation into the human imagination, identifies the creative
imagination in human beings as revealing in a special way the natural union of soul and
body, mind and sense, that is unique to us as embodied spirits. The wisdom story is
used as an illustration: the point of the story is connected at one end with the
intellectual mind, in the form of an idea, and at the other with the body, as incarnated
in a set of concrete sense images conveying a story. The idea and the images form a
single inseparable whole, mirroring the natural whole that is our human nature as
embodied spirit.
In the penultimate contribution to this collection, the musicologist Ernest G.
McClain, proposes an unusual perspective on arithmetic proportion in the bible via a
properly musical hermeneutic in his "A Priestly View of Bible Arithmetic: Deity's Reg-
ulative Aesthetic Activity Within Davidic Musicology." For McClain, music played
a central role in predominantly aural cultures, as Heelan had observed in applying his
conception of a non-distributive lattice logic to examples abstracted from the Rg Veda,
Platonic dialogues, and other ancient sources. Here, McClain applies the notion of
regulative aesthetic activity to the Davidic musicology embedded in Bible mathology.
As is fitting in a book collection conceived as a tribute, the last word remains to

Father Heelan.
WILLIAM J. RICHARDSON, S.J.
PSYCHOANALYTIC PRAXIS AND

THE TRUTH OF PAIN
"The truth of pain is pain itself."
-Anonymous
Dear Patrick:
Another birthday - but a special one - good chance to think back over the years. I have warm
memories ofthe time when we first met as graduate students in Louvain, stumbling through our first
steps in phenomenology. Since then you have probed deeper and deeper into the hermeneutic
approach to the philosophy ofscience. My own way has taken me from the initial reflection on Being
and its truth in Heidegger to an exploration of the foundations of psychoanalysis, and now
serendipitously, back to the problem of truth again. To salute you on the occasion, it seems
appropriate to reflect briefly on the relation between science and truth as it is presented to me now
in the work of the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, the so-called "French Freud." He spoke
at different times and in different ways about both subjects but thematized the two together in a well-
known essay entitled, "Science and Truth. " 1 It is hardly a major landmark in his thought, but it can
serve here as a convenient point of reference for this brief, unavoidably incomplete, reflection.
SCIENCE
Lacan's interest in science was in function of his effort to clarifY in what way
psychoanalysis can be considered a science. Clearly Freud wanted to qualifY it as such,
for this was the only way, he thought, to give his discovery of the unconscious
intellectual respectability in the scientifico-cultural world of his time. The classical
hypothetico-experimental methodology of nineteenth century science held for Freud
an abiding fascination, and his ambition, initially at least, was to develop a theory of
psychoanalysis that could approximate an analogous certitude. But the classic
methodology rested on an epistemology that was positivistic in nature, where objects
of research were essentially accessible through sense perception, and any contribution
of the subject to the knowability of the object could be, in principle, disallowed by the
rigor of procedure. For Lacan, however, the scientific paradigm of choice was not
nineteenth century physics but twentieth century linguistics. Here, the role of the
subject, especially when the method is applied to psychoanalysis, is inseparable from
the research procedure itself, and the scientific character of the process must be
conceived differently.
That difference was marked by the methodology of structuralism, to which Lacan
was introduced by the work of Levi-Strauss. Where natural science for Freud was
"grounded" in a positivist (physically measurable, cause-effect) epistemology, the
structuralist method was "grounded" for Lacan in the sheer formalism of the process:
339
340 WILLIAM J. RICHARDSON, S.J.
This is the problem of the grounding that must assure our discipline its place among the sciences:
a problem of formalization ....
Linguistics can serve us as a guide here, since that is the role it plays in the vanguard of con-
temporary anthropology ... and the reduction of every language to the group of a very small
number of these phonemic oppositions, by initiating an equally rigorous formalization of its
highest morphemes, puts within our reach a precisely defined access to our own field. 2
Lacan's espousal of this formalizing methodology as it occurs in Levi-Strauss'
work appears in the following:
It is clear that [Levi-Strauss] ... can argue for a certain recuperation occurring in chemistry, owing
to a physics of sapid and odorous qualities, otherwise stated, to a correlation between perceptual
values and molecular architecture arrived at by means of a combinatory analysis, i.e., by a
mathematics of the signifier, as has been the case in every science to date.
What's more, when, after having extracted the combinatory element in the elementary structures
of kinshsip, [he] reports that a certain informer, to use the ethnologist's term, is himself fully
capable of drawing the Levi-Straussian graph, what is he telling us if not that, here again, he
extracts the subject from the combinatory in question -the subject who on the graph has no other
existence than the denotation ego? 3
It is the search for a comparable formalism that accounts for Lacan's always expanding
effort to schematize, logicize, mathematicize, and finally topologize his own
speculative conceptualizations: "Mathematical formalization is our goal, our ideal.
Why? Because it alone is matheme, i.e., it alone is capable of being integrally
transmitted."4 And all this was in the effort to make scientifically congenial, in terms,
at least, of what he preferred to call "conjectural "science, the structuralist ideal that he
adopted. 5
Now this trajectory was made possible for Lacan by his conception of the subject
of science, a conception that would serve likewise as model for the subject of
psychoanalysis. Both were born with the cogito of Descartes:
It is unthinkable that psychoanalysis as a practice and the Freudian unconscious as a discovery,
could have taken on their roles before the birth in the century that has been called the century of
genius, i.e., the seventeenth century- of [modem] science... ."
By this Lacan means that the unconscious Freud discovered has no meaning except
with reference to consciousness as described in the Cartesian cogito.
Lacan makes his own Alexander Koyre's (1892-1964) account of the emergence
of modem science: how mathematicization of the physical universe through the work
of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, & Co., found its philosophical complement in the work
of Descartes. Those familiar with Heidegger's critique of technology will recognize the
similarity between Heidegger's interpretation of this event and Lacan's. The
difference? Heidegger sees in it the birth of the subject-object dichotomy that then
spawns scientific positivism with its fateful consequence in the guise of modem
technology. Lacan is interested only in the structure of the subject itself that is at issue.
It is this subject, discovered through the cogito, that Lacan calls the "subjet of
science." For him, it is as if the entire scientific enterprise- its history, its institutions
and all the virulence of its burgeoning power- may be conceived as the function of a
single hypostasized, egoless subject: the "correlate" of science as such, taken as a
whole:
This correlate, as a moment, is the aftermath (defile) of [Descartes'] rejection (rejet) of all
knowledge [in the hyperbolic doubt], but is nevertheless claimed to establish for the subject a
certain anchoring (amarrage) in being; I hold that this rejection of all knowledge constitutes the
subject of science in its definition. 7
Note that this subject is not the subject oflimpid self-awareness that the ego of sum
is often taken to be, for it includes the confounding obscurity of the unconscious that
PSYCHOANALYTIC PRAXIS AND THE TRUTH OF PAIN 341
Freud discovered in it. Rather it is a subject, somehow anchored in "being," that

remains after all "knowledge" has been rejected, like the empty field of what would
eventually be called a mathesis universa/is. The model for such a subject may be found
in game theory, "which takes advantage of the thoroughly calculable character of a
subject, strictly reduced to the formula for a matrix of signifying combinations."8 Such
a subject is not the concrete, singular scientist who plays the game but the position of
correlative subject that a given scientist occupies in the game.
Now this same egoless, disembodied subject, Lacan asserts, is the subject of
psychoanalysis. Its depersonalized character is insisted upon to distinguish it from the
subject with an identity all its own by reason of which it can assume "responsibility,"
i.e., become an individual "responsible" subject. 9 But how can such a subject be
disengaged from Descartes' cogito? Lacan replies:
It is not vain to restate that in the [novelty] (l'epreuve) of writing I am thinking: "therefore I am"
with quotes around the second clause, the notion is legible that thought only grounds being by
knotting itself in speech where every operation goes right to the essence oflanguage. 10
I take him to mean that if the subject can say with certitude that "I am," the ground
of that certitude is not in the thinking but in the saying of it. Descartes himself focuses
on the thinking ofthe subject without adverting to the saying through which the illation
comes to pass:
What about thinking? Here I make my discovery: thought exists; it alone cannot be separated from
me. I am; I exist- this is certain. But for how long? For as long as I am thinking, for perhaps it
could also come to pass that if I were to cease all thinking I would then utterly cease to exist. 11
In all rigor, however, the illation from cogito to sum is valid not when thinking is
taking place but when the subject says that it is taking place and in that sense implicitly
affirms that it itself undeniably exists at that moment precisely in the saying. It is in this
sense that "thought only grounds being by knotting itself in speech where every
operation goes right to the essence oflanguage." 12
The Cartesian subject for Lacan, then, is before all else a speaking subject, a subject
of language. For that very reason it is the subject of the unconscious, for "the way
opened up by Freud has no other meaning than the one I have made my own, namely
that the unconscious is language." 13 Since the beginning of his public teaching (1953)
Lacan has reiterated the thesis: "the unconscious is structured like a language." 14
For the cognoscenti, then, the only thing new here is the force ofLacan's assertion:
the unconscious is language, not simply "structured" by it.
The import of this remark is that the subject that enters psychoanalysis is not simply
the singular human individual that requests it but essentially a "divided" subject. The
sense is that the subject is split between a conscious level, dominated by the "ego,"
which, for, Lacan, is essentially an "imaginary" function as he understands that term, 15
and an unconscious level that is subject to the laws of language operating through it,
and comes to expression beyond control of the conscious ego. The latter he refers to
most frequently not as the "unconscious of the subject" but as the "subject of the
unconscious," i.e., the unconscious as subject, governed by the laws oflanguage.
In explaining how the unconscious works, Lacan utilizes the distinction Saussure
stresses between signifier (speech sound) and signified (concept represented by the
sound). There is this difference in usage, however: for Saussure, the signifier refers
directly to a signified, but for Lacan, the signifier refers rather to another signifier. The
result is that a congeries of signifiers becomes a "signifying chain" that functions like
"rings of a necklace that is a ring in another necklace made of rings." 16 And the
subject? It is not to be identified with the chain of signifiers as such but rather as an
effect of them, suspended from them as it were. "Conveyed (vehicule) by a signifier in
its relation to another signifier, the subject is to be rigorously distinguished from the
biological individual as from the psychological evolution subsumable under the subject
of understanding (comprehension)." 17 And clearly the signifier must be distinguished
from a sign:
Signs ... represent something to someone.... The register of the signifier is instituted in that a
signifier represe.Jts a subject to another signifier. That is the structure of all unconscious
formations: dreams, slips of the tongue, and puns. The same structure explains the subject's
originary division. 18
This is the subject that speaks through the analysand (sujet del' enonciation) as
distinct from the subject of the statement made by the analysand (sujet del' (monee),
which appears on the level of conscious self-awareness. 19 How the signifying chain
functions according to such basic laws oflanguage as metonymy and metaphor, is too
complex a story to be repeated here, 20 but it is such laws as these, taken in the
ensemble, that govern the functioning of the unconscious.
For Lacan's disciples, all of this is old hat. He takes time to remind them only that
in the seminar of the previous year, Crucial Problems for Psychoanalysis (1964-1965),
he had laid stress on the momentary (ponctuel), pulsating, peek-a-boo way in which the
unconscious irrupts in consciousness. But what sense does it make to say that "the
subject on which we operate in psychoanalysis can only be the subject of science"?21
Surely the subject is always instantiated in a singular analysand, designated by a name
and marked by all the modalities of identification that go with it. I take Lacan to mean
that the basic structure of the unconscious as delineated above prescinds from any
singularizing factors and is transindividual, quasi-absolute in nature (like the subject
of game theory), the way the subject of science is a position that functions inde-
pendently of the concrete activity of any individual scientist. This, at any rate, is how
I understand the "thoroughly calculable character of a subject [as] strictly reduced to
the formula for a matrix of signifying combinations."
Once this much is said, little more is offered explicitly here to clarify Lacan's
conception of science. He does remark, however, that everything so far concerns the
subject of science but nothing has been said about its object, a matter that has
"remained unelucidated since the birth of science.'m As for the "object" of
psychoanalysis, Lacan has already spoken of it as object a (what for Freud was the
"lost," i.e. no longer present, "object" of the subject's fundamental quest. 23 As "lost,"
this object is irretrievable; as "cause of desire" (Lacan's formula), it is unattainble. The
subject itself (of science as well as of psychoanalysis), then, is marked by an
irreparable lack/absence/hole that scars its structure with an ineluctable negativity. If
all this characterizes the object of psychoanalysis, surely "the object of science as such
will be thereby modified" 24 - but Lacan doesn't take the matter any further here.
TRUTH
In the aerie ofLacanian theory what has been said up to now is fairly straightforward.
But what can "truth" mean for a subject of this kind? The question for Freud was
much simpler than for Lacan. In his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis he
characterizes "scientific thinking" as follows:
Its endeavor is to arrive at correspondence with reality -that is to say with what exists outside us
and independently of us and, as experience has taught us, is decisive for the fulfillment or disap-
pointment of our wishes. This correspondence with the real external world we call "truth." It re-
mains the aim of scientific work even if we leave the practical value of that work out ofaccount. 25
As for the truth of psychoanalysis, Freud would probably add nuance to the term
"reality" with his distinction between "psychical" and "material" reality/6 but his
method would still be analogous to that of natural science, i.e., to search out the causes
at play in any given phenomenon under investigation. Evidence for this appears in the
frequency with which he refers to his endeavor, especially in the early years, as an
"aetiology," a science (-logos) of causes (aitia-). 27 But all this is the language of
classical positivism, where truth consists in correspondence between a subject's
judgment and an objectjudged. 28 What happens to truth in psychoanalysis when the
positivist ideal is rejected out of hand?
By the time Lacan broaches the question of truth in "Science and Truth," there is
a considerable backlog of his remarks on the subject that he can presume his listeners
have in mind. In the early years of his teaching he made much of the distinction
between "empty" speech and "full" speech: "empty speech takes place when the subject
seems to be talking in vain about someone who, even if he were his spitting image, can
never become one with the assumption of his desire;"29 "full" speech is achieved not
by examination of the "here and now," nor by the examination of resistances, but by
anamnesis:
In psychoanalytic anamnesis it is not a question of reality, but of truth, because the effect of full
speech is to reorder past contingencies by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come,
such as they are constituted by the little freedom through which the subject makes them
present. 30 It is certainly this assumption of his history by the subject, in so far as it is constituted
by the speech addressed to the other, that constitutes the ground of the new method that Freud
called psychoanalysis ... 31
The truth of the subject comes about, then, through the speaking that constitutes the
psychoanalytic process. It is not based on any kind of correspondence; it is essentially
revelatory in nature and takes place when meaning (sens) is discovered in an
historicizing process. It has no other foundation than the efficacy of the language that
utters it and prescinds completely from the "reality" that characterizes the world of its
conscious activity. Founded thus in language itself, truth has an inexhaustible
resilience: "Even if [language] communicates nothing, the discourse represents the
existence of communication; even if it denies the evidence, it affirms that speech
constitutes truth; even if it is intended to deceive, the discourse speculates on faith in
testimony. " 32
There is another element in Lacan's backlog: the negatived nature of truth. As early
as 1955 in "The Freudian Thing," a paper commemorating in Vienna the centenary of
Freud's birth, Lacan delivered a grotesque prosopopeia in the name of truth to the
evident consternation of his audience. "Men, listen, I am giving you the secret. I, Truth,
will speak." His point is that there is no such thing as total truth - especially in
psychoanalysis - and truth arrives at best as damaged goods. Eventually he will claim
that no truth can ever be whole. 33 Here, however, he underlines not simply the
manifestation but the inevitable distortion of truth as it comes to expression:
For you I am the enigma of her who vanishes as soon as she appears.... The discourse of error,
its articulation in acts, could bear witness to the truth against evidence itself. ... For the most
innocent intention is disconcerted at being unable to conceal the fact that one's unsuccessful acts
are the most successful and that one's failure fulfills one's most secret wish .... I wander about
in what you regard as being the least true in essence: in the dream, in the way the nost far-fetched
conceit, the most grotesque nonsense of the joke defies sense, in chance, not in its law, but in its
contingence, and I never do more to change the face of the world than when I give it the profile
of Cleopatra's nose. 34
Truth, then, carries the scars of negativity. In other words: "Error is the habitual
incarnation of truth .... Error is the usual manifestation of the truth itself- so that the
paths of truth are in essence the paths of error. " 35 Clearly, any complete account of truth
must also account for the error and distortion (i.e., non-truth) that infiltrate it.
TRUTH AND CAUSE
The most curious element of this essay is Lacan's proposal to consider truth as
cause. One can think in these terms for Freud, perhaps, since, positivist that he was, he
could well say that the discovery of the patient's truth (e.g., in "Little Hans" or the "Rat
Man") "caused" a relief of symptoms. One might even use this language for the early
Lacan, insofar as the achievement of "full" speech would, in principle, cause the
liberation of a patient, at least partially, from her neurosis. But what does it mean here?
The medium which will serve us at this point is one I brought up earlier. It is the cause: not the
cause as logical category, but as causing the whole efffect. Will you psychoanalysts refuse to take
on the question of the truth as cause when your very careers are built upon it? 36
What in fact is Lacan trying to say beyond playing with the ambiguity of "cause"?
He argues by comparison with other disciplines where truth allegedly also functions
as cause: magic, religion, and science. He manages this by introducing Aristotle's
language about the four causes, though Aristotle himself might be startled by this
allegation of paternity. Be that as it may, for Lacan: in magic, truth functions as
efficient cause; in religion, as final cause; in science, as formal cause and in
psychoanalysis as material cause. None ofthis is self-evident; still less is it satisfactori-
ly argued. For example: what can it mean to say that truth as cause in psychoanalysis
comes under the guise of material cause, because of "the form of impact (incidence) of
the signifier" that Lacan ascribes to it? 37 One can argue, perhaps, that psychoanalysis,
through the" impact of the signifier," which (like the whole oflanguage) Lacan takes
to be "material" in nature, exercises a kind of "material" causality, but the symbolic
order as such is certainly "formal" in nature. And if science functions as "formal"
cause, how does the "formal" causality of science differ from that of the symbolic order
as such, which must be identified with language as "material" cause? Finally, if we take
truth as formal cause (science) and truth as material cause (psychoanalysis) on the most
superficial level, what is the effect of this reciprocal causality? Is it truth as such,
causing itself to be true? What, then, makes it true? What is truth itself? Lacan's
thought leaves us to our hunger here. 38
***
How does one evaluate "Science and Truth" as a contribution to the evolution of
Lacan's thought at this period of its development? Anything thorough would have to
address the heart ofhe matter: the identification (here) of the subject of psychoanalysis
and the subject of science. But that would make for a long day at the office. More
tractable is to comment on Lacan's conception of truth in the essay, but even here
logistic restrictions make it impossible to do more than sketch the bare essentials of a
critique. I shall confine my remarks to three: 1) concerning the fundamental nature of
truth; 2) concerning the relation between truth and language; 3) concerning one
fundamental difficulty that must be addressed.
1. Lacan' s conception of truth in the essay, to the extent that it leaves the achievements
of the savoir of science beyond its ken, I find deeply flawed. Scientific method,
whatever its rigor, is not an end in itself but the means of discovering the way things
are in the world of human experience. The first ingredient of a viable conception of
truth must be the dis-covering of what is the case. More radically, Lacan cites with
approval but without elaboration the gnome of a contemporary philosopher whom he
leaves nameless: "the truth of pain is pain itself."39 I take this to mean that the truth of
pain is not in a judgment about it but in the simple fact that it is what it is and "makes
itself seen," i.e., "evident" as such. 40My claim is that e-vidence in its most radical sense
of making (letting) itself be seen is the fundamental nature of truth from which all other
versions of it derive. Any version of truth (e.g., concordance, coherence) is secondary
to the originary manifestation of what is in fact the case. I submit that this is the most
plausible way to explain the truth revealed by the structuralist method of Levi-Strauss
that Lacan cites with approval, the "corrrelation between perceptual values and
molecular architecture arrived at by means of combinatory analysis, i.e., by the
mathematics of the signifier."41 The e-vidence (truth) is in the sheer manifestation of
the correlation as index of the way things are.
Obviously the notion of originary truth as e-vidence/dis-covery/dis-closure/self-
manifestation recalls Heidegger's thematizing of the Greek word for truth, a-letheia:
a combination of -lethe (what lies hidden in concealment) and a-, the alpha prefix
indicating privation. Taken together, they identify truth as non-concealment, or re-
velation. Of course Lacan was aware ofHeidegger's conception of truth and apparently
was quite comfortable with it in 1953 when describing the psychoanalytic process: "In
psychoanalytic anamnesis it is not a question of reality, but of truth, because the effect
of full speech is to reorder past contingencies by conferring on them the sense of
necessities to come, such as they are constituted by the little freedom through which
the subject makes them present." 42 Apparently he lost interest in the conception as he
turned more and more toward the formalism of Levi-Strauss to develop the "scientific"
character of psychoanalysis.
What Heidegger adds to the conception of truth as e-vidence (dis-covery) is a
frequent reflection on the negative component of truth, lethe. The negativity in question
is not simply an absence of manifestation but includes a dynamic quality that Heidegger
articulates especially in the essay, "On the Essence of Truth." There, after showing that
truth as correspondence is made possible by a prior openness (what I have been calling
"e-vidence," etc.) between knower and known prior to, and enabling, the judgment of
correspondence, he asserts that no account of the essence of truth is complete without
a parallel analysis of a corresponding "non-truth," since no re-velation in a finite world
can be total, i.e., "whole" (pas toute). This non-essence of truth takes two forms:
mystery (Geheimnis), the concealment of what still remains unrevealed, and errancy
(Irre), a compounding in forgetfulness of this double concealment:
Errancy is the essential counteressence to the originary essence of truth. Errancy
opens itself up as the open region for every counterplay to essential truth. Errancy is
the open site for, and ground of, error. Error is not merely an isolated mistake but the
kingdom (the dominion) of the history of those entanglements in which all kinds of
erring get interwoven. In conformity with its openness and its relatedness to beings as
a whole, every mode of comportment has its manner of erring. Error "extends from the
most ordinary wasting of time, making a mistake, and mis-calculating, to going astray
and venturing too far in one's essential attitudes and decisions .... By leading them
astray, errancy dominates human beings through and through."43
My suggestion is that this conception of a non-essence (i.e., negativity) ingredient
to the essence of truth is comprehensive enough to make room for the hypostasized
Truth of the famous prospopeia as well as for the residual distortions and lies that
contaminate truth. This certainly would account for the fact that no truth can be
"whole" (pas toute). And if we go this far, may we not have a suggestive reading of the
following passage:
This lack of truth about truth, necessitating as it does all the traps meta-language - as sham and
logic - falls into, is the true place of Urverdriingung, i.e., of primal repression which draws
towards it every other repression. 44
To claim a correlation between lethe for Heidegger and "repression" for Lacan
(here even "primary" repression) would be a daring move. But if it worked, we might
go one step further and ask if there might not be a discernible similarity between lethe
(Heidegger) and the real (Lacan). If so, the next question would be to ask ifthe event
of a-letheia (privation of lethe) might not be thought as the event in which the World,
through the functioning of symbolic and imaginary, were constituted. But none of these
extensions is necessary for Lacanians to find in Heidegger's experience of a-letheia the
valuable philosophic support for Lacan's experience of truth in psychoanalysis, of
which he is in need.
Be that as it may, does an aletheic conception of truth offer us a way of thinking
truth as cause? As a matter of fact, Heidegger does suggest that Aristotle's four causes
combine to constitute a process of revelation. To clarify the notion of techne, he writes:
Techne is a mode of a/etheuein. It reveals whatever does not bring itself forth and does not yet lie
here before us, whatever can look and tum out now one way and now another. Whoever builds
a house ... reveals what is to be brought forth, according to the perspectives of the four modes of
occasioning. This revealing gathers together in advance the aspect and the matter of house ... with
a view to the finished thing envisioned as completed, and from this gathering determines the
manner of its construction. Thus what is decisive in techne does not lie at all in making and
manipulating nor in the using of means, but rather in the aforementioned revealing. It is as
revealing, and not as manufacturing, that techne is a bringing fortb. 45
Aristotle's four causes coalesce, then, in a process of revelation. If this revelatory
coalescence be conceived as "cause," what would be its "effect"? Using language as
loosely as Lacan does, may we not say that the "effect" of aletheia is freedom- not in
any voluntaristic sense, of course, but simply as a liberation from the constraint of
darkness (lethe)? More precisely, the effect of a successful analysis would be the
experience of freedom that comes to an analysand through the dis-covery that "Thou
art that," the moment when "the real journey begins."46 "The truth of pain is pain
itself."
2. Lacan insists on one more point, the close correlation between truth and language:
"since the truth is grounded in the fact that it speaks, ... [it] has no other means by
which to do so."47 For Heidegger, this correlation is based upon his interpretation of the
meaning of logos for the early Greeks, as may be seen, for example, in the work of
Heraclitus. 48 Although logos from early on was associated with speech, the original
sense of it for Heraclitus came from legein, meaning "to gather" (as one gathers wood),
or "to bring together" into some kind of unity that thereby becomes manifest as what
it is. Like physis, logos was from the beginning associated with the coming to pass of
a-letheia, the unconcealment of everything that is. The task of human beings would be
to collaborate with the process by letting beings be seen as what they are. Eventually,
it became possible to think of this gathering process (the coming-to-pass of truth) as
originary Language and the task of human beings as bringing it to expression in words.
Heidegger does not argue that Heraclitus saw this clearly himself but claims rather to
be articulating what Heraclitus left unsaid yet somehow inscribed in the language he
used. At any rate, the vocation of human beings as such would be to bring to
articulation the language of Logos as process of Aletheia, a task for which the poets
serve as models. 49
Transposed into the context of Lacanian psychoanalysis, this would mean, I
suggest, that "truth is grounded in the fact that it speaks," because a-letheia comes-to-
pass through the logos operating in the very action through which the analysand
achieves full speech. "It has no other means with which to do so. "
3. BUT all this founders on the irreducible fact that "there is no Other of the Other,"
and Beinf!)A-tetheia/Logos must certainly be considered as Other than the language of
psychoanalysis - or so the objection goes. I have dealt with this issue at length
elsewhere, 50 and shall recall briefly only what is relevant to the present context. When
Lacan speaks of Being, he refers to it as some kind of substance:
There is no metalanguage. When I say that, that means apparently no language of Being. But is
there Being? ... Being is, as they say and Non-being is not. ... This Being can be supposed only
for certain words- individual, for example, or substance. 51
But is the Being Heidegger speaks of a "substance"? No way! It is neither a
substance nor any other kind of thing that "is"- the classic analysis in Being and Time
reveals it precisely as "No-thing" (Nichts). 52 In no way can it be considered a
metalanguage- a language that "is" beyond language. Rather than something that "is,"
Being/Logos is the process by which everything that "is" is let be what it is, thus
showing itself (becoming e-vident) as what it is and functioning as such. Profoundly
different from whatever "is," Being lets everything that is be present, manifesting itself
as what it is and able to function as such.
A case in point: In Seminar X. 1972-1973. Encore, Lacan distinguishes between
existence and existence, and Fink elucidates the difference:
In Lacan's terminology, existence is a product oflanguage: language brings things
into existence (makes them part of human reality), things which had no existence prior
to being ciphered, symbolized, or put into words.
The real, therefore, does not exist, since it precedes language; Lacan reserves a
separate word for it, ... : it "ex-sists." It exists outside of or apart from our reality.
Obviously, insofar as we name and talk about the Real and weave it into a theoretical
discourse on language and the "time before the word,"
we draw it into language and thereby give a kind of existence to that which, in its very concept,
has only ex-sistence. 53
But whether Lacan speaks of existence or ex-sistence, each one is what it is as
different from the other in order to mean anything at all. What lets them be manifest
as what they are, precisely in their differentiation from one another - this is what
Heidegger understands by Being. Without something of the sort, Lacan's entire
speculation, I submit, lacks the philosophial warrant of which it is in need.
***
To conclude: once Lacan identifies the subject of psychoanalysis with the subject
of science, obscurities persist with regard to the analogy between the respective modes
of savoir to be found in each discipline when one considers their respective relation to
truth. Surely truth must be allowed a place in science beyond the ken of the sheer
methodology of exactitude, but as to how that truth is to be conceived so as to be
discoverable in both science and psychoanalysis (in however analogous a fashion) must
remain for now an open question. In 1965, Lacan leaves us completely in the dark. The
hypothesis ventured here is that a conception of truth as evidence/dis-closure- in short
as aletheia for Heidegger (including the non-truth that this comports) goes a long way
toward satisfying Lacan's need for such a concept. How much further can it go? For
now that must remain to be seen.
Boston College
NOTES
Jacques Lacan, "Science and Truth," trans. B. Fink News Letter ofthe Freudian Field, I (1989): 4-29/855-
77. The essay, published separately in Ecrits ( 1966, 855-77), was the opening lecture of Le Seminaire. Livre
XIII. L 'objet de Ia psychanalyse (1965-1966) (unpublished).
2 Lacan, Ecrits. A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977).
3 Lacan, "Science and Truth," 10.
4 The Semina ire ofJacques Lacan. Book XX (1972-1973). On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and
Knowledge. J.-A. Miller, ed., B. Fink, trans. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 119.
5 Lacan prefers to call Dilthey's Geisteswissenschaften "conjectural" rather than "humane" or"social"
sciences because "conjectural" allows the suggestion of exact calculability (in terms, at least, of probability
theory), whereas "human" and "social" leave room for an anthropocentric humanism that he repudiates. The
term allows a closer approximation of "conjectural" science to "exact" science: "The opposition between
exact sciences and conjectural sciences is no longer sustainable once conjecture is subject to exact calculation
(using probability) and exactness is merely grounded in a formalism separating axioms from laws for
rouping symbols" (1989 II). Psychoanalysis would be just such a conjectural science.
Ibid.,6.
7 Ibid., 5.
8 Ibid, 9.
9 Ibid., II.
10 Ibid., 13.
11 R. Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans., D. A. Cress
~Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), 65.
13 Ibid., 13.
14 Explanations of this thesis abound: e.g., B. Fink, The Lacanian Subject. Between Language and
Jouissance. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); J. S. Lee, Jacques Lacan (Boston: Twayne, 1990);
J. Dor, Introduction to the Reading ofLacan. The Unconscious Structured Like a Language. J. F. Gurewich
and S. Fairfield, eds., (Northvale, NJ and London: Jason Aronson, 1997); J.P. Muller and W. J. Richardson,
Lacan and Language. A Reader's Guide to the Ecrits (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 1-25.
15 The "ego" for Lacan is essentially a unified image, perceived as if reflected in a mirror embodied in some
other that gathers into unity the still disordered elements of the becoming subject (Ecrits, 1-7).
16 Lacan, Ecrits, 153.
18 Lacan, "Position of the Unconscious," trans. Bruce Fink in Fink, M. Jaanus, R. Feldstein, eds., Reading
Seminar XI. Lacan 's Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsychoanalysis (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1995), 269.
19 Leupin notes that when Lacan rewrites Descartes' cogito as I think, "therefore I am" as cited above, he
intends to underline the division between the (speaking) "subject of the enunciation" and the (spoken)
"subject of the enunciated." A. Leupin, "Introduction," Leupin, ed., La can and the Human Sciences Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1991) 20, n. 4.
20 R. Grigg, "Metaphor and Metonymy," Newsletter of the Freudian Field, 3 (1989): 59-79.
22 Ibid., 12.
23 S. Freud, Negation [1925] in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud.
Trans. and cd. J. Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 1966-74), S.E. 19,237.
25 Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, S.E. 22 [ 1932], 170.
26 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, S.E. 4 and 5 [ 1900], 620.
27 For example: "On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome under the DescriptionAnxiety
Neurosis. Incidence and Aetiology of Anxiety Neurosis" (1895); "Obsessions and Phobias: Their Psychical
Mechanism and Their Aetiology" (1895); "Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses" (1896); "Further
Remarks on the Neuropsychoses of Defence. The Specific Aetiology of Hysteria" ( 1896); "The Aetiology
of Hysteria" (1896); "Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses" (1896); "My Views on the Part Played by
Sexuality in the Aetiology of the Neuroses" ( 1906); Introductury Lectures on Psychoanalysis. General Theory
of the Neuroses. Some thoughts on Elements and Regression- Aetiology (1916), etc.
28 For a succinct analysis of the nature of truth both as correspondence and coherence, and each as distinct
from meaning, see M. Cavell, The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1996 [1993]), 17-18.
29 Ecrits, 45.
30 Ibid., 48.
31 Ibid.
32
Ecrits, 43.
33 On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 92.
34 Ecrits, 12!-122.
35 Lac an, The Seminar ofJacques La can. Book 1. Freud's Papers on Technique. 1953-1954. Ed. J. A. Miller.
J. Forrester, trans. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 263/289.

36 "Science and Truth," 17. The word "cause," to begin with, is highly ambiguous, and Lacan makes much
of this ambiguity. Bowie summarizes: "Lacan toys relentlessly with a single pun, on the word cause: the
unconscious is the cause of truth (causes it, makes it happen) and analysis has sole responsibility for
defending truth's cause (its interests, its standing). This piece of word-play is confidently executed, and has
the support of etymology: the Latin causa had both senses and also, for that matter, gave birth to the thing
(chose) so elaborately played upon in "The Freudian Thing." But does the pun portray or disguise its own
incoherence? The two senses of cause can scarcely have equivalent and co-active roles in the causerie of
~sychoanalysis." M. Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 119.
7 "Science and Truth," 22.
38 See "Science and Truth," 23.
39 Ibid., 18. Who the philosopheer was is a matter of conjecture. Fink ("Jacques Lacan, 'Science and Truth."'
News Letter of the Freudian Field I & 2 [ 1989]: 4-29; 28) suggests Merleau-Ponty, but Dany No bus, in a
private communication, notes that Merleau-Ponty died in 1960, five years earlier, and could hardly be referred
to as "a philosopher [recently] awarded full academic honors."
40 The Oxford Dictionary ofEnglish Etymology notes "evident" from the Latin e-videre as having originally
the sense of the middle voice as "making itself seen." At the risk of annoying the reader, I shall hereafter
h(phenate the word "e-vidence" to emphasize the middle voice sense in which I am using it.
4 "Science and Truth," I 0.
42 Ecrits, 48.
43 M. Heidegger, "On the Essence of Truth," D. F. Krell, ed., Basic Writings (San Francisco: Harper & Row,
1993), 134.
45 Heidegger, "The Age of the World as Picture," The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays.
J;,ran.s. and ed. W.Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 13.
Ecrits, 7.
48 Heidegger, "Logos (Heraclitus Fragment B50)" in Early Greek Thinking, trans. D. F. Krell (New York:
Harper & Row, 1975), 59-78.

49 It should be noted that Lacan personally translated this article into French (1956).
50 W. J. Richardson, "Psychoanalysis and the Being-Question" in J. H. Smith and W. Kerrigan, eds.,
Interpreting Lacan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); "Heidegger Among the Doctors" in J. Sallis,
ed., Reading Heidegger. Commemorations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); "La verite dans
Ia psychanalyse" in R. Major eta!., eds., Lacan avec les Philosophes. Bibliotheque du College international
de philosophic (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991 ).
51 On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 118.
52 Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (London: SCM Press, 1962), 228-235.
53 Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1995), 25.
RICHARD KEARNEY
POETICS OF A POSSIBLE GOD

- FAITH OR PHILOSOPHY?
The question of how faith relates to philosophy is an enduring controversy. Aut fides
aut ratio? was an age-old query. One view was that philosophical thinking about Being
was a mere 'handmaiden' to theology, and could at best serve to provide rational
explanations and proofs of God. Another, particularly strong in the late middle ages,
was that there were in fact 'two truths' at issue here: one pertaining to the worldly
realm of ontology and science, the other to the heavenly sphere of religious belief. As
the adage went: quasi sint duae contrariae veritates.
It would seem to be this latter view that the early Heidegger espouses when he
argues that theology and philosophy are radically distinct disciplines, the former based
on the positum of monotheistic Revelation, the latter committed to an agnostic ques-
tioning of all that is. That at least was his position in 1927 when he delivered his
famous lecture on "Phenomenology and Theology" to the theologians in Tiibingen.
Here he wrote: "Theology is a positive science and as such is absolutely different from
philosophy ... The occurrence of revelation, which is passed down to faith and which
accordingly occurs through faithfulness itself, discloses itself only to faith ... Theology
has a meaning and a value only if it functions as an ingredient of faith, of this particular
kind of historical occurrence." 1 The corrolary view endorsed by Heidegger was that
"philosophical research is atheism. " 2 Indeed, it was Heidegger' s firmly held conviction
that the phenomenological method he developed in the twenties resisted all forms of
"prophetism" and refused the temptation to provide ethical or evaluative "guidelines
for life. " 3 This persuasion was sustained thoughout Being and Time (1927) where God
hardly gets a look in; and it even evolved into an "agressive atheism" in the thirties
when, as Caputo informs us, Heidegger reinforced his rejection of his young theologi-
calleanings and considered "Christianity as a decadent falling away from experience."4
It was, however, in his controversial 1935 lectures, Introduction to Metaphysics,
that Heidegger spelt out most clearly the opposition between philosophy and faith. He
declared here that philosophy could not even begin to pose its inaugural question -
Why is there something rather than nothing? - if it had recourse to theological answers
e.g., God created the world. The God of theology, he holds, does not and cannot feature
in philosophy. And by the same token, as St. Paul acknowledged from the other side
of the fence, faith is a "folly for philosophers." The logos of St. John has little or
351
352 RICHARD KEARNEY
nothing to do with the logos of Heraclitus and Greek metaphysics. In fact in this text
Heidegger delivers the uncompromising verdict that a Christian philosophy is a "round
square and a misunderstanding. " 5
This antithetical relation between philosophy and theology was reiterated in several
subsequent statements by Heidegger in the forties and early fifties. We might cite, for
example, his avowal to a group of Swiss theologians at the Academy ofHofgeismar in
1952 that while he came from a theological background he believes that "faith has no
need for the thinking of Being"; adding that if he, Heidegger, were ever to embark on
such a thing as theology "the word Being would not feature in it."6 He makes a similar
point to A. Noack in 1953, declaring that there is nothing in philosophy that could
prepare us for, or confirm, the experience of faith and grace. "If I were addressed by
faith," he concludes, "I would abandon my vocation as a philosopher." 7 In this
scenario, Being can never be a predicate of God. And the God of faith has no real role
in a philosophy ofBeing. 8
2
Nothing could be more evident then, could it: either God or Being? But never both at
once, nor one in positive relation to the other. Things are not so simple, however. For
while Heidegger does seem to advance an either/or view in the above statements, there
are numerous other passages in which he appears to take a different view. I am thinking
particularly here ofhis enigmatic, but pointed, confession in the Der Spiegel interview,
published after his death in 1976, that "only a god can save us now"(Nur ein Gott kann
uns retten). The passage in question reads as follows: "Philosophy cannot produce an
immediate effect which would change the present state of the world. This is not only
true for philosophy but for all specifically human endeavours. Only a God can save us
now. The only possibility remaining to us in thought and in poetry is to remain availa-
ble for the manifestation of this God or for the abssence of this God in our decline."9
But what kind of a "god" is Heidegger talking about here? Is it the God of theology
(revelation, faith and grace)? The God of philosophy (Aristotle and western meta-
physics)? Or the God of the poets (Holderlin, the German romantics and ancient
tragedians)? I have argued at some length elsewhere that it is in fact the last of these
-the "God" of the poets- that Heidegger has in mind when he makes his Der Spiegel
statement. I do not propose to reiterate these arguments here, but rather to pose the
further question: how can such a deity of poetic saying and thinking relate, if at all, to
the eschatological God of the possible we are seeking to adumbrate in this work?
What first needs to be established is that for Heidegger the "God" of poetics is
essentially a deity that appears as a "holy" dimension within a phenomenology of
Being. This is made evident in a telling passage in The Letter on Humanism, addressed
to Jean Beaufret in 1947; 10 and it is elaborated on in a number of later texts where
Heidegger speaks of the "holy" as one of the four ontological dimensions of the
"Fourfold" (Das Geviert), alongside mortals, sky, and earth. He offers as examples of
its radiance the creation and dedication of a statue, a temple or a tragic drama. In "The
Origin of the Art Work," he writes: "To dedicate means to consecrate, in the sense that
in setting up the work the holy is opened up as holy and the god is invoked into the
openness of the presence. Praise belongs to dedication as doing honour to the dignity
and splendour of the god. Dignity and splendor are not properties beside and behind
POETICS OF A POSSIBLE GOD- FAITH OR PHILOSOPHY? 353
which the god, too, stands as something distinct, but it is rather in the dignity, in the
splendour that the god is present. In the reflected glory of this splendour there glows,
i. e., there lightens itself, what we called the word." 11 Here Christ and Apollo are
brothers.There is no question of the old theological privileging of Monotheistic
Revelation over Greek paganism. Indeed one might even say the opposite: that for
Heidegger's ontology, the Greek aesthetic of divinity is actually closer to the sacred
presencing of Being than either the God of Jacob, Isaac, and the prophets, or the divine
causa sui of metaphysics before which one can neither pray nor dance. As Caputo puts
it, the "saving god" ofHeidegger has "virtually nothing to do with the God whom Jesus
called abba or with the religion of the cross ... " 12
And yet in certain passages Heidegger does admit of a some form of relationship
between ontology and theology. Although we have seen how Heidegger opposes faith
and philosophy in the Introduction to Metaphysics, this does not prevent him from
acknowledging, however obliquely, certain kinds of indirect rapport between the two.
The first of these entails an "as if' mode of methodological atheism whereby a believer
can learn more about his or her faith by contrasting it with its alternative (i. e.,
philosophy). This would fit in with Dostoyevsky's view that true faith comes forth
from the crucible of doubt, or with Kierkegaard's claim that the religious leap of faith
(by virtue of the absurd) is rendered all the more authentic by virtue of its traversal and
ultimate surpassing of philosophical reasoning. But there is a second, and to my mind
more fruitful, form of indirect relationship between philosophical and theological
reflection outlined by Heidegger. This he calls, rehearsing an old category of Thomistic
thought, the analogy of proper proportionality: a is to b what cis to d. In this scheme
of things, one might say that Dasein is to the sacredness of Being what the believer is
to the God of Revelation. Thus while careful to safeguard the distinctness of the two
approachs- philosophical and theological- Heidegger does admit of a certain transfer
or crossing-over between a new understanding of Being and of God. 13
What particularly interests me here are the implications of the analogical transfer
between Heidegger's ontological rethinking of Being as the "loving possible" and our
eschatological rethinking of God as "may-be."
3
Heidegger did not always insist on a polar opposition between God and Being. In
certain later texts he entertained certain more congenial modes of relation between the
two. The most suggestive is the analogical model outlined in the Introduction to
Metaphysics. But there are other tantalizing passages where similar modes of
rapprochement are hinted at. In The Piety of Thinking, for example, Heidegger speaks
of "certain historical junctures which call for a correlative parallelism, intimate and
non-indifferent, between the two modes ofthought." 14 While in Poetry, Language and
Thought he goes so far as to maintain that the "default of God and the divinities" is not
to be understood as an empty nothing but rather as a "coming-into-presence" of the
"divine in the world of the Greeks, in prophetic Judaism or in the presencing of
Jesus." 15 This more inclusive or pluralist approach to the respective truth-revelations
of Greek ontology and Judeo-Christian faith leaves room for a less confrontational
dialogue between the "saving god" of Being and the redeeming God of monotheism.
354 RICHARD KEARNEY
If Heidegger has something useful to teach us about the overcoming of the onto-
theological prejudice against the possible, then it is reasonable to assume that a
renewed thinking about Being as "loving possible" will also have radical implications
for our understanding of God. In short, the overcoming of metaphysics, qua onto-
theology, may have something to contribute to a new theology as well as to a new
ontology. There is no doubt in my mind that Heidegger's luminous analysis of Being
as das Vermogen des mogens - surpassing the traditional categories of both
possibilitas and potentia and reversing the priority of actuality over possibility- has
revolutionary lessons for a post-Heideggerean approach to God. Suddenly we find
ourselves attentive to a whole variety of forgotten thoughts about God as one "who
may be" (Cusanus, Bruno, Boehme) or as one "who is beyond being and non-being"
(Eckhart, Bingen, Tauler). Thoughts ostracized as "mystical" or "heretical" by the
mainstream orthodoxy find themselves back in the light of day. The retrieval of the
forgetfulness of being discovers a parallell in the reversal of the forgetfulness of God
as posse. For if Being can be reinterpreted as a loving can-be (pouvoir-etre), God may
be reinterpeted as a loving may-be (peut-etre)? 16 For this much, at least, religious
thinking must be thankful to Heidegger's intellectual daring.
The famous "step back" from the metaphysics of will, manifest today in the
planetary domination of technology, opens us to the "possible future" (die mogliche
Ankunft) of another way of existing. Whereas Heidegger reads this possibility as a
postrnodem dispensation in the destiny of Being, emerging from the dark night of
modem forgetfulness, we read it rather as the promised coming of the Kingdom. The
former conceives of this future topologically as the lighting up of a new clearing or site
(topos) for finite Dasein - a new way of being in the temporal-historical world. The
latter, by contrast, considers the future "possible" eschatologically as the elevation of
our finite existence into an infinite no-time (a-chronos) and no-place (u-topos) which
eye has not seen nor ear heard. Neither a finite earth nor a Platonic heaven- but, as
Paul tells us, a "new heaven and a new earth."
This is what Levinas terms the "Messianic" kingdom where we may exist
otherwise than being. Such an eschatological Kingdom is "beyond Being," as I read it,
to the extent that it does not passively await the circular "happening" of what-is- the
event of the Same origin returning in its end. 17 On the contrary, there is an ethical
urgency to eschatological expectation; an acute awareness that if the "possible advent"
indeed comes as unpredictable surprise, like a thief in the night, it always comes
through the face of the most vulnerable, the cry of"the smallest of these," the widow,
the orphaned, the hungry who ask "where are you?," the defenseless ones who forbid
murder. This is the Resurrection of the Just prefigured and "possibilised" (dia tes
dynameos) by the laws of Moses. This is the wisdom of the Prophets and the dying and
rising of Jesus (I.C. 6:14). This is also the possibilising power of the Spirit (dynamis
pneumatoslpneuma tes dynameos) which raised Christ from the dead and prepared the
disciples for their prophetic mission (I. C. 2:4; R. 15: 19; TM. I:7; AC.4:33/1 :8/8:1 0;
LK.I: 35/24: 49/9: 1/10:19/24:48). As Kittel observes in the Dictionary of the New
Testament, the "divine possible" (dunamis theou) -or what I call the "God who may-
be" - "expresses itself as the support or gift of the Spirit which manifests itself in the
personal rapport between Christ and man .... only accessible through faith. 18
This is, assuredly the same divine dynamis which we read of in the Prologue to St.
John- the promise of light and new life in the darkest abyss: "The light shone in
darkness ... and to all those who received it was given the possibility of becoming
children of God." Several decisive eschatological motifs revolve around this passage.
First, we are told that these children are born not "of blood" but "of God." A new
category of natality and filiality thus emerges which sees progeny as eschatological
rather than merely biological - that is, as pro-created from the future rather than
engendered by the past. This marks the transition from tribal to cosmopolitan
affiliation, so celebrated by Paul, the opening up of a kingdom which includes each
human being as a son or daughter of the eschatological God. 19 No longer mere
offspring of archaic gods and ancestors, each person is now invited to become
descendents of a future still to come, strangers reborn as neighbours in the Word,
adopted sons and daughters of the deus adventurus - the God of the Possible.
This new category of eschatological filiality epitomises the vital promise of"Word
becoming flesh" described by John (I: I, 18) as the glory of a "father's only son." It
is a promise never fully realized until the Kingdom comes - and with it "a new heaven
and a new earth." We are speaking of a messianic time which subverts and supersedes
the linear, causal time of history moving ineluctably from past to pre-sent to future. The
messianic paternity of the possible is "eternal" not because it refuses time but because
it brushes historical time against the grain- anti-clockwise as it were- disclosing a
past which unfolds achronically out of the future. Such a-chronic time is neither
archeological nor teleological. It is not preconditioned by some sacred arche in illo
tempore, nor dialectically impelled by some terminus futurus. Resisting all modes of
causal determinism - efficient, formal, material or final - the messianic time of the
Posses! constantly surprises us. It operates according to a paradoxical tempo of hyperon
proteron, or what Levinas calls "future anteriority." A tempo wherein the Messiah can
be now and still to come at one and the same time. Before time began, for-ever present
and after the end of time. Paradoxically already here and not yet here in the eternal now
(Jetztzeit). Eternal that is, in the eschatological rather than Platonic sense. Whence the
Johannine claim that "He who comes after me ranks ahead of me because he was
before me" (John I: 16); or the prophesy of Isaiah that the child "born for us" today
shall be "father of the world to come"; or again, the Messianic saying that "before
Abraham was I am" - and ever will be. The eschaton, like the angelus nov-us blown
backwards against time, comes to us from the future to redeem the past, contretemps.
This messianic tempo relates to our notion of the divine "possible" in that it
surprises us with possibilities which would have been impossible to us without such
grace. It reveals possibles which are beyond both my impossibles and possibles (as
horizonal projections of Dasein culminating in the impossibility of any further
possibility- viz. my ownmost possiblity of death). In much the same way as children
are beyond the possibles of parents who beget them, the possibles given to me by the
posse would be impossible were they not a gift. That is what is meant by the biblical
sentiment that nothing is impossible to God, even if impossible for me. The possibles
opened up by the eschatological I-AM-WHO-MAY-BE promise a new natality in a
new time: rebirth into a filiality so infinite it is never final. That is why we are called
by the posse not only to struggle for justice so that the kingdom may come, but also to
give thanks that the kingdom has already come and continues to come from out of the
future into every moment, from beyond time, against time, into time, the Word
becoming flesh forever, sans fin, without end.
356 RICHARD KEARNEY
4
How do we describe this interminable, infinite May-Be? What metaphors, figures,
images might we adopt to speak of this unspeakable enigma? Here again, I believe we
may find some help from the Heideggerean analogy of proportionality. It is perhaps
suggestive that Heidegger chose to convey the ontological "power of the possible" in
terms of play. In a number of later texts he describes the interrelationship between
mortals and gods, within the fourfold of Being, as a mirror-game (Spiegel-Spiel).
Taking such examples as a pair of peasant shoes painted by Van Gogh or a meal of
bread and wine ephanized in Trakl's poem, A Winter Evening, Heidegger seeks to
demonstrate how even the most simple things may participate in the ontological "play
of the world" once transfigured by the poet or artist. Through art the "thing things" and
the "world worlds" - a ludic tautology which discloses the "loving power" (das
mogende Vermogen) of Being itself. The thinker bears witness to such disclosure. 20
Each human being is a homo ludens transfiguring the world to the extent that God
is a deus ludens who possibilizes the world in the first place. Biblically interpreted, the
possiblizing play of the world is a "may-be" dependent upon humans for its coming to
be, a fragile promise symbolized in Judea-Christian-Islamic mysticism by the naked
playful child. We think here of Meister Eckhart's nackter Knabe or the "little child" in
Proverbs which "enchants the sons of man" as it creates the cosmos (8:28-31). David
rehearses this motif when he declares that he will "dance and play" before his Creator.
For as Kings II tells us, "David and the house oflsrael danced before the Lord with all
their heart" (Kings IL Sam. 6:5, 21). And persuing this motif, St. Jerome describes the
messianic age prophesied in Zaccharie (8:5) as "a play between young men and
women" where the "joy of the Spirit will manifest itself in the harmonious gestures of
its children who dance together, repeating David's boast that he will dance and play
before the face of the Lord."21
This eschatological vision of a kingdom of play is reiterated by many of the early
Church Fathers and later mystics. Origen interprets the image of Wisdom playing
before the Creator as a praefiguratio of the divine-human interplay of the New
Creation (De Principis, /, 4,4). Gregory of Nyssa describes the eschatological God as
one who "always plays as he turns the world to and fro" (Carmina, 1, 2,2). While
Clement of Alexandria elaborates on this idea when he affirms that those who bear
witness to the messiah "participate in the mystical play of children (mystike paidia)"
(Paedagogus, /, 5, 22,1). And, finally, Maximus the Confessor goes further still when
he explains that the game of Genesis reveals each human person as a homo ludens
formed in the image of the divine player himself. "Truly," he writes, "we should
consider our life as a game played by children before God;" adding that this game is
nothing other than the Incarnation itself which surpasses all the limits of nature
(Ambigua, 261-262a). This leads on to the idea, so dear to many mystics, that the Word
becoming flesh in the history of creation constitutes a "trinitarian play" in which the
"Spirit plays freely before the Father so that he becomes fecund and creative" through
the coming into being of his Son. 22
This recurring motif of Creation as "child play" epitomises, I believe, the
eschatological posse as both promise and powerlessness, fecundity and fragility. For
the God of the possible is like child play to the extent that it opens up a realm of free
possibles but is unable to actualize those possibles without the help of other human
beings. Etty Hillesum offers one of the most vivid testimonies to the childlike
helplessness of God in her extraordinary Diaries 1941-43: "If God does not help me
to go on, then I shall have to help God ... I shall merely try to help God as best I can,
and if I succeed in doing that, then I shall be of use to others as well. " 23 Or as she puts
it, addressing God directly about his inability to intervene to save the Jews from the
Holocaust: "You cannot help us, but we must help You and defend Your dwelling
place inside us to the last."24
By choosing to be a player rather than an emperor of creation, God chooses power-
lessness. This choice expresses itself as self-emptying, kenosis, letting go. God thus
empowers human powerlessness by giving away his power, by possibilising us and our
good actions- so that we may supplement and co-accomplish creation. 25 To be made
in God's image is therefore, paradoxically, to be powerless; but with the possibility of
receiving power from God to overcome our powerlessness, by responding to the call
of creation with the words: "I am able." To God's "I may be" each one of us is invited
to reply "I can" just as to each "I can," God replies "I may be." In this eschatological
play of power and powerlessness the human selfbecomes the capable self. L 'homme
faillible, to use Ricoeur's terms, becomes l'homme capable. Or to borrow another
startling thought from the Holocaust witness, Etty Hillesum, it is when stripped of all
external illusions and supports that we find the strength of God within. Faced with the
certainty of imminent dispatch to Westerbork concentration camp and the collapse of
European civilisation all around her, Hillesum could still write: "I have been feeling
strong ... so free of fears and anxieties .... Perhaps I shall walk right across Russia one
day, who knows? ... we are lost permanently and for all time unless we provide an
alternative, a dazzling and dynamic alternative with which to start afresh somewhere."26
It is then the dispossessed self, emptied of ego and naked as a child, that becomes
a "lodging" for the "in-dwelling" of possible God. Or to put it another way, it is in the
renunciation of my will-to-power, and even in my refusal to rest satisfied with my own-
most totality as a being-towards-death, that I open myself to the infinite empowering-
possibilising of God. Abandoning ego, I allow the infinite to beget itself in my
persona. This was the essence ofHillesum's extraordinary testimony. And an echo of
Eckhart's teaching that the "pure of heart knows no bounds to its capabilities."27
The metaphor of eschatological play also reveals the dispossessive nature of the
kingdom. The kingdom is precisely that which can never be fully possessed in the here
and now, but always directs us towards an advent still to come- "an alternative with
which to start afresh somewhere." Indeed we can only ever find the kingdom by losing
it, by renouncing the illusion that we possess it here and now. If we think we have the
kingdom it can only be in the mode of the "as if," as imaginary, a play of images. At
best, such images may serve as icons of something beyond our grasp, cyphers of a
transcendence which eye has not (literally) seen nor ear (literally) heard. But images
nonetheless which promise a better world, carrying the ethical imperative that things
must change. This is the role of art and more especially of religious art. At worst, such
kingdom-images degenerate into idols which harbour the illusion of immediate
possession, of total and totalizing power (Hitler's Third Reich, Stalin's New Soviet
Man). The ancient prophets called this idolatry. Today it goes by the more colloquial
names of fetishism and ideology- false fantasies peddled by consumer and propaganda
industries. The danger of play, in short, is when the players forget they are players:
when they deny they are dealing with images and mistake the figural for the literal, the
358 RICHARD KEARNEY
possible for the actual. The virtue of play, by contrast, is when we do not take
ourselves, or our world, or our God literally. When we learn the humility and humour
of participating in a game without a Master. Like a child playing in sand by the edge
of the sea. Not idle play. Sacred play upon which the future of our world reposes.
The ludic possible comports, for humans as for God, a double movement of
engagement and detachment. It reminds us that we are in the world but not wholly of
the world. Committed to action yet never a mere thing in the midst of things.
Preoccupied for our neighbour's good but never submerged in mindless busyness. Or
as Rahner puts it in Man at Play: "The internal gaiety of the person who plays, and for
whom honesty and humour are sisters, is ultimately a religious matter, for this quality
can only be attained by those who participate in heaven and in earth." 28 The mystical
metaphorics of play teaches us to become ioculatores domini - players in the world
who are at once iconoclasts and lovers of the earth. Disciples of a gaiety that
transfigures dread.
5
It is telling in this regard that one of the most powerful figures of the Trinity in the
Oriental Church is that of a sacred dance-play between three persons. This was known
as perichoresis in Greek and as circumincessio in Latin. Meaning literally "dance
(chora) around (peri)," it referred to a circular movement where Father, Son and Spirit
gave place to each other in a gesture of reciprocal dispossession rather than fusing into
a single substance or identical presence. The Latin spells this out even more
intriguingly by punning on the dual phonetic connotations of circum-in-sessio (from
sedo, to sit or assume a position) and circum-in-cession (from cedo, to cede, give way
or dis-position). So what emerges is an image of the three distinct persons moving
towards each other in a gesture of immanence and away from each other in a gesture
of transcendence. At once belonging and distance. Moving in and out of position. An
interplay of loving and letting go.
This trinitarian play includes humanity, of course, to the extent that the second
person becomes incarnate and enters history. "God sent his own son, born of woman,
so that we could be adopted as his sons" (Gal. 4). Here the Son becomes the famous
"Lord of the Dance" inviting all believers in the kingdom to join in the "great dance of
creation and rebirth" as Lucian put it (De Saltatione, 7). To accept this invitation is to
join the dance-play of the possible that began in Genesis, before we ever came to be,
and that continues on beyond our death until the kingdom comes. We thus find
ourselves players in an eschatological game of which we are neither the initiators nor
the culminators, a game which we cannot master since its possibles are always beyond
our possibles, refiguring the play of genesis, prefiguring the play of eschaton, a game
that knows no end-game, no stalemate, whose ultimate move is always still to come.
But if we cannot master the divine play of the possible we can partake of it as a gift
given to us, a grace that heals and enables, a love that comes to us from the future
summoning us towards the other beyond ourselves. This is surely what Gregory of
Nyssa had in mind when he spoke of our eschatological vocation to transfigure the
world into a new creation by forming a "dancing choir which looks forever forward to
the Lord who leads the dance" (pros ena blepousa tau chorou choryphaion). 29 In this
sense we might describe the new creation as a pro-creation, for it is not something we
invent out of ourselves, a possible projected by our subjective dreams and imaginings
alone; no, it is a creation for the other, on behalf of the other. If God has created the
world for us, we recreate the world for God. We carry each other within; we give birth
to each other. And when and if we do, we cannot tell the dancer from the dance.
This play of mutual rebirth promises more, it seems to me, than the Spiegel-Spiel
of the Destiny of Being which happens when it happens, come what may and
irrespective of our actions. If the play of eschatological possibility may indeed "save
us," it is only to the extent that we choose to respond to it by acting to bring the coming
Kingdom closer, making it more possible, as it were, by each of our actions, while
acknowledging that its ultimate realization is impossible to us alone. That's what we
mean when we say "God may be." The Kingdom is possible but we may decide not
to accept the invitation. The Gospel of Matthew acknowledges this freedom to respond
or refuse when it says, "we sang for you but you did not dance" (Mt. II, 17). We don't
have to dance. And the eschatological dance cannot be danced without two dancers. To
respond to the song of the Creator is to hear the Word which promises a possible world
to come, a second creation or recreation of justice and peace, a world which the divine
posse is always ready to offer but which can only come about when humanity says yes
by joining the dance, entering the play of on-going genesis, transfiguring the earth. God
cannot become fully God, nor the Word fully flesh, until creation becomes a "new
heaven and a new earth."
7
So how, if at all, does the play of God relate to the play of Being? Are we condemned
to yet another dualism? I do not believe so. Some kind of chiasm is possible between
them. For if the God of the possible is indeed possest, this is not a matter of opposing
posse to esse in some binary division. On the contrary, the possest contains the
possibilility of esse within itself. But unlike the old metaphysical esse, conceived as
"presence," the realization of possest 's divine esse, if and when it occurs, if and when
the kingdom comes, will be a new esse, refigured and transfigured in a mirror-play
where it recognizes its other and not just the image of itself returning to itself. In this
way, posse brings being beyond being into new being, other-being. Is such a thing
possible? Not for us alone. But it is not impossible to God - if we help God become
God. How? By opening ourselves to the "loving possible," by acting each moment to
make the impossible that bit more possible.
Boston College
NOTES
1 Martin Heidegger, "Phenomenology and Theology" in The Piety of Thinking: Essays by Martin
Heidegger, trans. J. G. Hart and J. C. Maraldo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 7, 10-1 I.
2 Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. T. Kisiel (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1992), 80. This series oflectures was delivered at Marburg inl925 and considered by many
to be the first and to some extent 'unexpurgated' version of Being and Time.
3 Ibid.
4 See John Caputo's revealing account ofHeidegger's move from early theistic interests to a position of
"methodological atheism" and ultimately to a frankly "agressive atheism" in the late twenties, "Heidegger
and Theology," Cambridge Companion to Heidegger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 277-
360 RICHARD KEARNEY
278: "If (Heidegger) had begun as an ultraconservative Catholic, and if he had after 1917 become deeply
involved in a dialogue with liberal Protestant historical theology, he was after 1928 deeply antagonistic to
Christianity in general and to the Catholicism of Freiburg in particular, and he gives indications of having
become personally atheistic ... He would not accept the young Jesuits who came to Freiburg as his doctoral
students and he treated other Catholic students like Max MUller exceedingly badly. When their dissertations
were submitted ... Heidegger treated them with disdain ... When Martin Honecker died unexpectedly in 1941,
Heidegger succeeded in having the Chair (of Catholic Philosophy) abolished, the very one to which he
himself had aspired a quarter of a century earlier... his position during the thirties was that Christianity was
a decadent falling away from the primordiality of experience."
5 Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1959), 107.
6 Reported by Jean Beaufret in La Quinzaine Litteraire, no. 196, 1974, 3. See my discussion of this theme
in Kearney, Poetique du Possible, (Paris: ed. Beauchesne, 1984), 252 f.
7 Heidegger, The Piety of Thinking,, 34, 36. See also my Poetique du Possible, 253, notes 2 and 3.
Heidegger, "Address to students in the University of Zurich," November 1951. See The Piety ofThinking,
65.
Der Spiegel, 31 May 1976.
10 Heidegger, Letter On Humanism, trans. F. Capuzzi and J. Gray, in Basic Writings, ed., D. Krell (New
York: Harper and Row, 1977), 193-242.

11 "The Origin of the Art Work" in Poetry, Language and Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper
and Row, 1971 ), 44. For Heidegger this poetic "naming of the holy" epitomised the original Greek mythos
of aesthetic experience where the gods showed themselves as part of a larger cosmic-ontological poeisis. See
my development of this theme in my essay, "Heidegger's Gods" in Kearney, Poetics of Modernity, (New
Jersey: Humanities Press, 1995), 50-64.
12 Caputo, "Heidegger and Theology," 283.
13 See Heidegger's famous preface to An Introduction to Metaphysics (1935).
14 See my Poetique du Possible, 253, note 3.
15 Ibid. 554. note 4

16 See my discussion of the contrast between the eschatological Peut-etre and the ontological Pouvoir-etre
in Poetique du Possible, parts 2 to 4.

17 See my Poetique du Possible, 254, note. 6.
18 Ibid., 252, note I.
19 This eschatological-Pauline vision of universal citizenship seems to have deeply influenced Immanuel
a
Kant's theory of cosmopolitanism and more recently that of Julia Kristeva, see Etrangers nous-memes,
Fayard, Paris, 1988 and Nations without Nationalism, trans. L. Roudiez, (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993).
20 While the ontological notion of Spiel remains elusive in Heidegger's own work, it is developed by later
phenomenologists such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Eugen Fink and Mikel Dufrenne. See my discussion of the
central role of 'ontological' play in these thinkers in Poetique du Possible, 260-267.
21 Jerome, Commentarii in Zachariam, fL 8, quoted by Rahner, op.cit.
22 See my Poetique du Possible, 269, note 25.
23 Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life, (New York: Owl Books, 1996), 174.
24 Ibid., 176
25 Here one would have to distinguish between notions of power (potestas) as eschatological possest rather
than potentia/possibilitas, as auctoritas rather than imperium.

26 Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life, 192-193.
27 Meister Eckhart, God Awaits You, ed. Richard Chilson (Notre Dame, Indiana: Ave Maria Press, 1996),
36. The passage continues: "A pure heart is unencumbered, without worry, and not attached to things. It does
not desire to have its own way, but is content to be immersed in God's loving will. A pure heart is forgetful
of self." In this connection see also Etty Hillesum, op.cit. 204: "Truly, my life is one long hearkening unto
(hineinhorchen) my self and unto others, unto God. And if! say that I hearken, it is really God who hearkens
inside me. The most essential and the deepest in me hearkening unto the most essential and deepest in the
other. God to God." See also Hillesum on "soul," Ibid., 229: "Sometimes it bursts into full flame within me
... And though I am sick and anemic and more or less bedridden, every minute seems so full and so precious
... 'I rejoice and exult time and again, oh God: I am grateful to You for having given me this life' ... A soul
is forged out of fire and rock crystal."
28 Poetique du Possible, 270, note 27.
29 Ibid., 271.
THOMAS NICKLES AND GAYE McCOLLUM-NICKLES
JAMES ON BOOTSTRAPS, EVOLUTION, AND LIFE
In the late nineteenth century, the successes of blind, mechanistic, deterministic science
severely challenged the traditional view that human beings possess moral worth
deriving from our ability to act as free, responsible, creative agents. For many this
freedom included the power to respond to a deeper, spiritual reality. No one
experienced this problem more acutely than William James, a tough-minded scientist
and tender-minded human being who had been an artist and who eloquently defended
the right, indeed the urgency, of a broadly religious attitude toward the world. James
wrestled with this problematic, in various guises, in many of his papers and books.
Here we confine ourselves to neglected aspects of two of his papers, "The Will to
Believe" and the lesser studied "Great Men and their Environments." The first was
given as a lecture in 1896, but has antecedents in James's early writings. 1 The second
was a lecture given already in 1880. For brevity we shall refer to these papers as "Will
to Believe" and "Great Men."
The problem we wish to address is that of the overall compatibility of his two
essays. For example, "Will to Believe" seems to advocate a bold, intentional, strongly
voluntaristic, "bootstrap" approach to the world, while "Great Men" would seem to
reduce creativity to a mechanistic Darwinian process of blind chance variations
followed by natural and social selection- a stochastic process hardly more attractive
than the deterministic mechanism that worried James and so many others. We claim
that the clash is not as serious as may first appear, although we cannot attempt to deal
with all of the tensions. One thing that interests us in both papers is the interplay of
scientific and (broadly) religious ideas, specifically ideas concerning human agency.
"The Will to Believe" is usually read as a defense of the right to religious belief and to
an active engagement with the world-and that it is. But James is obviously arguing
for a transformed view of scientific inquiry as well, the sort of view that only received
a detailed development in the late twentieth century. Here one is tempted to say that
James is importing the idea of a religious or existential "leap of faith" into scientific
methodology. Meanwhile, in "Great Men" he appeals to the latest science of his day,
in the form of Darwin's evolutionary theory, to defend human agency against what
James takes to be a serious misunderstanding of Darwinian evolution. This
misunderstanding was being broadcast far and wide by Herbert Spencer, then a
dominant intellectual force in Britain and America.
361
362 THOMAS NICKLES & GAYE McCOLLUM-NICKLES
It is relevant to compare James's situation with that of the seventeenth century, as

described by Amos Funkenstein in Theology and the Scientific Imagination. 2 Funken-
stein shows that many of the central concepts and methods of the scientific revolution
were deeply rooted in prior centuries of theological debate. The original theological
content of the idea of a law of nature is well known, but, according to Funkenstein, the
groundwork for many later concepts and practices - conservation laws, lawful and
causal necessity, the method ofhypothesis, idealization and simplification and counter-
factual reasoning, etc. -can be found in medieval and scholastic theological debates.
After all, modem science did not simply spring fully formed from the head of a Galileo,
Descartes, or Newton. It had to be constructed from extant cultural resources, and no
set of resources was more culturally pervasive than that of theology and religion. 3
Funkenstein' s is not a "one-way" thesis, for he also shows how theology was trans-
formed by the new science as well as by other movements such as the Protestant Re-
formation. In a word, theology became secularized in the literal sense that it was in-
creasingly "conceived by laymen for laymen." 4 Funkenstein's is actually a unity thesis:
in the seventeenth century, for many prominent investigators such as Spinoza and
Leibniz, theology and science were basically one large subject. "Never before or after
were science, philosophy, and theology seen as almost one and the same occupation."5
Key terms were often more or less interchangeable, especially as one analogy built
another.
Living in a very different time, James was well aware that that sort of unity, down
to the level of theological and scientific detail, was no longer possible. But he
hankered after a sufficient degree of unity that our lives are not bifurcated into two
sectors that are not only distinct but also flatly incompatible. James held that the
scientific and religious approaches to the world still had something to learn from one
another. As we hinted above, in "Will to Believe" he defends a broad unity-of-method
thesis, while in "Great Men" he appeals to more substantive scientific results to defend
his view of agency. We view James's flexible, non-doctrinaire pragmatism as an
attempt to bridge apparently dichotomous enterprises.
There is another point of connection between Funkenstein's thesis and James's
pragmatism. Funkenstein explores the theme of maker's or doer's knowledge:
Verum etfactum convertuntur- the identity of truth with doing, or of knowledge with construction
- had been seen, in the Middle Ages, at best as the character of divine knowledge. In the
seventeenth century it became also the mark of human knowledge, epitomized in the mathematical
physics that showed not only how things are structured, but also how they are made. The identity
of truth and fact was also claimed by a new brand of political theoreticians for whom the body
politic seemed through and through a man-made artifact: human society is a spontaneous human
construction. A new ideal ... was born - the ideal of knowledge-by-doing, or knowledge by
construction. 6
If we are right, James takes this making idea to the next stage in sketching a
bootstrap methodology for science and religion - and life.
I. "THE WILL TO BELIEVE" AS BOOTSTRAP METHODOLOGY
James and other pragmatists thoroughly reject the idea of a foundationist epistemology
or methodology of science. Science never attains bedrock certainty, hence completely
reliable premises and procedures are never available as an "absolute" starting point or
infallible guide to research. Nothing is given. Everything must be worked out and
established by honest toil, but this also requires taking risks. James would make the
WILLIAM JAMES ON BOOTSTRAPS, EVOLUTION, AND LIFE 363
same point about religious belief, whether narrowly or broadly understood. Gone are
the days of resting comfortably upon an unchallenged foundation of religious belief,
or of an optimistic view of the possibilities for action in the world. Religion no longer
can offer a life of absolute security. James's approach is the more existential one of
facing the risk by taking a leap of faith.
James is more sensitive than most thinkers to the fact that the epistemological and
existential situations are especially unstable at the frontiers of science and of life. The
very fact that something is a frontier means that we do not know what lies on the other
side. Worse, at the frontier of science or life we face the unknown with tools that we
expect to be inadequate in ways that we cannot yet know. Hence James's emphasis on
"genuine options." 7 We can read "Will to Believe" as an exercise in what we might
call the "frontier epistemology" of science as well as an exploration of the role of will
and passion in momentous life choices.
The epistemic situations we encounter at the frontier call for a bootstrap
epistemology (our term, not James's). One cannot construct knowledge, brick by brick,
using only "compacting forces," that is, the forces pushing downward on an already
established foundation. Rather, any investigative community working at the frontier
of its problem domain needs to pull itself upward ("tensile forces") by means of a non-
magical bootstrap device that consists initially of risky hypotheses and techniques. 8 At
the frontier, investigators should proceed opportunistically, taking advantage of
serendipity, and should cross-check or confirm whatever they can as they go along.
Since nothing is given, they must try out different "takes" on the world.
The basic idea of a bootstrap operation (as we are using the term) is that the
operation is potentially self-justifying in some degree. It is a risky move that, if suc-
cessful, will produce confirming consequences that otherwise probably would not have
been available to inquiry. Such a move is not fallaciously circular precisely because
of the risk: there is no guarantee that it will succeed. Indeed, it very often fails, both
in life and in science, although we can sometimes learn from that failure. The bootstrap
move itself typically results from a deliberate, practical decision, an action decision.
Given that confirmation only comes later, even in the most successful cases, what
could justify choosing this option now rather than an alternative strategy? If the
question means, Why choose risk rather than avoid it?, James provides a justification
in terms of pragmatic reasons: one cannot engage the frontier effectively at all without
taking risks. One cannot attempt to be creative and original at all without taking risks.
The justification for risk-taking is pragmatic in the sense that the reasons for it are
prudential rather than evidential: there is no known alternative to such risk taking if
inquiry is to proceed expeditiously into unknown territory. A second sort of
justification may lie in the future: a bootstrap operation is forward looking. When it
is successful, the prudential reasons will give way to evidential reasons as additional
information (such as successful tests of consequences) comes in.
Pascal was first to show clearly that, once we take into account utilities as well as
probabilities, adopting a risky strategy can be rational. Although James rejects Pascal's
mechanical, calculative approach to belief in God, his own pragmatic defense of risky
options is not totally different. But James adds, in effect, that Pascal was too forward-
looking: for risky commitments can make this life more meaningful, more rewarding.
We need not wait for the life to come. That is the explicit message of"Will to Believe"
and an implicit theme of"Great Men." In "Will to Believe" James goes still further
beyond Pascal to hint that our efforts may even help to make God possible.
On the other hand, if the question asks, Why choose this specific risky strategy over
that one?, then one must get down to details. In science this stage of inquiry is
sometimes called "pursuit" or "heuristic appraisal. " 9 The goal of inquiry is to convert
the high heuristic appraisal of the chosen option into a high epistemic appraisal, to
transform promise into fertile research product. Since success depends on
consequences, this is a consequentialist methodological strategy; and since good
consequences are far from guaranteed, success depends on serendipity and plain luck. 10
In 9 of "Will to Believe," James sets out three degrees or levels of what we are
calling bootstrapping operations. His overt concern here is with moral and religious
questions. However, what he says is informed by his understanding of scientific
research and has important methodological implications for us. The three degrees
constitute three increasingly strong moves away from the conservative, foundational-
empiricist position that he attributes to W. K. Clifford. 11 He famously quotes Clifford
as saying, "It is wrong always, anywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon
insufficient evidence." One may ask whether people typically have that much control
over their beliefs. However, since James himself was a strong voluntarist, let us
concede this point for purposes of discussion.
Against the Cliffordian charge that James's willingness to go out on limbs can lead
to "dupery," James retorts, "Dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through
hope is worse than dupery through fear?" 12 There is constant chance of failure in any
such enterprise, James acknowledges, but such risk is rational, on pragmatic grounds,
given the goal of finding or making new truth. In our terms James's point is, roughly,
that it is better to risk Type II error (accepting a falsehood) than to commit Type I error
(rejecting truth) systematically, on methodological principle. Scientists working at the
frontier must balance fear of being ridiculed by the next generation of students against
being ignored completely because pedestrian and boring.
James's first level of bootstrap is simply the familiar method of hypothesis. 13 One
may entertain a hypothesis H in advance of the evidence and then accept or reject H
for purposes of further research on the basis of tests of the predictive consequences of
H. A major advantage of the method of hypothesis over older "Baconian" inductive
methods is that one can formulate and test hypotheses even in data-poor domains.
Hypotheses furnish extra premises (or, on the operational side, principles of reasoning
or practical techniques) and hence enrich the possibilities for reasoning about the
problem domain in question. Logically speaking, "for the sake of discussion," one can
use a hypothesis as a premise in reasoning, just as if it were an established truth. 14
Another well-known advantage is that hypotheses can provide theoretically deeper
accounts of the domain than inductive-statistical compilations of the data usually can.
In any event, employing a hypothesis is rather like taking out a loan. In business, the
loan provides funds that you can use as if they were your own (subject to contractual
constraints). If invested successfully, the profits can be used to pay offthe loan and
then some. So in a sense one can make something of nothing. 15
The basic method of hypothesis involves no direct belief-commitment, only
decisions about which hypotheses now being entertained seem interesting enough to
put to the test. So the method of hypothesis, as ordinarily understood, falls short of a
leap of faith in the religious sense. There is certainly a degree of commitment, a
modest investment of one's investigative resources, including one's own life, but this
method does not require belief that the hypothesis is true, only the supposition or
pretense that it is. This is a legitimate, scientific "as if."
James's second level of bootstrap requires a stronger commitment that we may call
belief. Believing in H, he says, may make available evidence that would have been
missed without this degree of commitment to H. His central example is making
friends. Unless you take the first step and commit yourself to other people, to some
degree, you may never find out whether they harbor incipient friendly feelings toward
you.
James's pragmatic justification for such moves is "that a rule of thinking which
would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds
of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule." 16
Can we find any counterpart to second-level commitments in science? Yes, easily.
Firmly believing that a problem is solvable within the limits of available resources has
been a stimulus to many investigators, successful and unsuccessful. Without this
degree of commitment it is highly unlikely that the successful ones would have
invested the effort that finally led to the solution. Even in mathematics one rarely plays
with sets of premises just to see what follows. Rather, one usually has in mind a
candidate theorem, which has the status of a mathematical hypothesis, to which one
may become sufficiently strongly committed to invest much effort in finding a proof.
The point extends easily to empirical science. Many creative scientists have firmly
believed that they were on the right track before the evidence sufficiently supported
their commitments. We may interpret 'belief broadly to include commitment to a
theory, method, or research program to any degree clearly stronger than mere
supposition. One does not stake a major part of one's scientific life and career on mere
supposition. Here then are cases in which existing evidence and supporting reasons are
not likely to be found unless investigators are already strongly committed to an
appropriate hypothesis or similar risky investigative strategy.
Among major methodologists of science, one can find much in Thomas Kuhn's and
Paul Feyerabend's writings that corresponds with James's second-level claim. 17
Consider Feyerabend. In his early, strong-empiricist writings, Feyerabend contended
that confronting a deep theory T 1 with serious competitors T2, T3 , etc., would typically
bring out empirical content ofT1 itself that would not otherwise be available. For these
empirical assumptions or consequences would remain hidden unless exposed by means
of comparative theory tests. Feyerabend concluded that empiricism demands that some
investigators should riskily invest much time and effort and their professional
reputations in developing alternative theories, most of which will go contrary to the
current scientific orthodoxy. Kuhn rejected Feyerabend's advocacy of theory
proliferation on the grounds that there are not enough resources available to make such
an immense project possible, at least in physics, and that it would fragment the relevant
scientific community.
On Kuhn's own account of normal scientific research under a paradigm, the
scientific practitioners follow a James-like way of belief rather than the Cartesian-
Cliffordian method ofdoubt. 18 In his account of normal science, Kuhn, like Michael
Polanyi before him, stresses the belief or faith side of science rather than the skeptical
side. Normal scientists take their paradigm for granted and never question it, unless a
crisis develops. Indeed, the paradigm is deeply ingrained in the cognitive practices of
366 THOMAS NICKLES & GA YE McCOLLUM-NICKLES
the community. 19 It is not a mere hypothesis tentatively proposed for investigation. On

the contrary, it is a professional way of life. It is only by living inside the paradigm
that the investigators gain their particular perspective on the world. For normal
scientists, the paradigm guarantees that their research puzzles are solvable in its terms.
The job of the practitioners is to convert this heuristic promise into justified results.
James's third level of commitment is the most controversial:
And wherefaith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say
that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the 'lowest kind of immorality' into which a
thinking being can fall.Z 0
This third level or degree of bootstrap holds that commitment can, in certain
circumstances, not merely find but actually create the evidence in its own support.
Here we have bootstrapping at its most powerful and generative! As before, James's
examples are from the sphere of moral action.
A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds
to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a
desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact
is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A
government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist o~; this
condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted."
Think of business cycles (our particular example but one very close to James's).
In a "bullish" economy, investors and consumers are confident in the future and this
very confidence drives the economy upward, whereas in a "bear" market we have the
reverse: lack of confidence undermines the very thing that people desire to happen.
American business life would collapse without the leap involved in trust, James tells
us. The evidence-before-action requirement of strong empiricists fails utterly in
practice. At the personal level, the idea seems to be that encapsulated in the popular
slogan, "you can do it only if you first believe that you can do it."
This third stage connects directly with James's extension or revision (or
abandonment!) of Peirce's pragmatism. For Peirce, the meaning of a claim is defined
in terms of its testable consequences. James added, to Peirce's chagrin, that the
meaning (now in a wider sense including "meaning for life") depends not only on the
logical consequences of the content of the claim but on the life consequences of
believing or holding the claim. At this third level of bootstrapping, James claims that
the believing itself can help create those very consequences.
Clearly we can find "life" examples of this phenomenon, as indicated above, but
what about scientific examples? Here we enter the contentious realm of social
construction. We do not aim to contribute to this controversy, only to illustrate what
appears to be, or perhaps ought to be, James's position. 22 Kuhn again furnishes a
prominent example from the methodology of science. The paradigm, in its various
components but chiefly its exemplary puzzle solutions, provides a particular
perspective on the world. Better, it defines and informs the set oflegitimate scientific
practices, without which the scientific facts, phenomena, etc., would not even exist.
Critics have charged Kuhn with an indefensible idealism on this point.
A more careful discussion, along similar lines, is provided by Ian Hacking, who
treats in detail the development of statistical-probabilistic thinking in the sciences
during the latter half of the nineteenth century.
There is a sense in which many of the facts presented by the bureaucracies did not even exist ahead
of time. Categories had to be invented into which people could conveniently fall in order to be
counted. The systematic collection of data about people has affected not only the ways in which
we conceive of a society, but also the ways in which we describe our neighbour. It has profoundly
transformed what we choose to do, who we try to be, and what we think of ourselves .... These
are examples of questions about what I call 'making up people'. 23
Hacking documents the emergence of new "styles of reasoning," and notes:
The statistical example makes plain that the growth of a style of reasoning is a matter not only of
thought but of action. Take so seemingly unproblematic a topic as population. We have become
used to a picture: the number of people in a city or in a nation is determinate, like the number of
people in a room at noon, and not like the number of people in a riot, or the number of suicides in
the world last year. But even the very notion of an exact population is one which has little sense
until there are institutions for establishing and defining what 'population' means .... 24
[S]tyles of reasoning are curiously self-authenticating. A proposition can be assessed as true-or-
false only when there is some style of reasoning and investigation that helps determine its truth
value. What the proposition means depends upon the ways in which we might settle its truth. That
innocent observation verges nervously on circularity. We cannot justify the style as the way best
to the discovery of the truth of the proposition, because the sense of the proposition itself depends
upon the style of reasoning by which its truth is settled.... Such thoughts call in question the idea
of an independent world-given criterion oftruth. 25
The fit with James in these cases is not perfect, but close enough to be interesting.
The world does not present itself to us already self-organized and classified. Even
science is a constructive enterprise that blurs the distinction between finding and
making, discovery and invention. And when successful, our new languages and
theories and practices and results interlock in such a way as to be mutually supporting,
that is, partially self-supporting. This is not surprising when we stop to ask what
alternative there is to a linear, foundational model of inquiry other than a coherentist
model premised on mutual support.
2. CREATIVITY AND EVOLUTION
In "Great Men" James's announced problem is that of causally explaining how and
why communities change from generation to generation. His answer is: "The
difference is due to the accumulated influences of individuals, of their examples, their
initiatives, and their decisions." 26 The line he takes is Darwinian: "A remarkable
parallel, which I think has never been noticed, obtains between the facts of social
evolution, on the one hand, and of zoological evolution as expounded by Mr. Darwin
on the other.'m In James's own words "the Spencer school" replies to all of this that
social changes "are due to the environment, to the circumstances, the physical
geography, the ancestral conditions, the increasing experience of outer relations; to
everything, in fact, except the Grants and the Bismarcks, the Joneses and the Smiths."28
The reference is to Herbert Spencer, the evolutionary thinker whose account is often
confused with Darwin's. 29 James wants to set the record straight. His paper becomes
a vehement attack on Spencer's denial that great men become important because of
their own spontaneity or creativity and force of will. According to Spencer, they are
simply the fortunate products of large, deterministic social and geographical forces.
James defends his own position on human agency on Darwinian grounds, and he draws
on other sciences as well. In short, he defends his rather traditional view of human
agency by invoking what he takes to be the best recent science and by claiming that
Spencer's science is pre-Darwinian, indeed pre-Galilean pseudoscience!
According to James it is crucial that we distinguish different levels of generality or
"cycles of operation" in nature and society. The large-scale social forces and
tendencies that Spencer invokes do indeed have an explanatory role to play, but their
account is very coarse-grained and cannot account for the actions of particular
individuals. In effect, Spencer is too Lamarckian to understand Darwin's distinction

between an individual and a population. For his part, James insists that (1) single
individuals sometimes achieve sufficient importance to change single-handedly the
course of history; and (2) remaining changes can be explained in terms of "the
accumulated influences of [ordinary] individuals, of their examples, their initiatives,
and their decisions."30
General factors cannot explain a Shakespeare, Bismarck, or an Agassiz, because,
clearly, all the rest of the people living under those general conditions are not
Shakespeares, Bismarcks, or Agassizes. Retorts James:
Can it be that Mr. Spencer holds the convergence of sociological pressures to have so impinged
on Stratford-upon-Avon about the 26th of April, 1564, that a W. Shakespeare, with all his mental
peculiarities, had to be born there? ... And does he mean to say that if the aforesaid W.
Shakespeare had died of cholera infantum, another mother at Stratford-upon-Avon would needs
have engendered a duplicate copy of him, to restore the sociologic equilibrium?"
The Spencer school cannot explain individual variation, James says, for the causes
of variation occur on too small a scale for the sociologist to notice, indeed, on so small
a scale that no one in James's day was aware of the mechanism of variation.
At this point James invokes the Darwinian theory in some detail. The most relevant
points are these: Darwin's theory combines three distinct mechanisms, a mechanism
of variation, a mechanism of selection, and a mechanism of transmission of the selected
features, statistically speaking, to the next generation. James correctly notes that a
main reason why Darwin could advance beyond other evolutionary thinkers such as the
Lamarckians was his clever separation ofboth the problem of the origin oflife and the
problem of individual variation from the problems of selection and transmission.
Darwin himself devoted most of his attention to selection, in the form of natural
selection and sexual selection-the only processes really accessible to investigation in
his time. Given a relatively stable environment and enough time for iteration of the
blind-variation-plus-selective-retention process over many, many generations, even
very slight selective advantages can accumulate substantially. By this process, claimed
Darwin, significantly new designs in the form of new species (and eventually new
genera, orders, etc.) have been produced. Darwinian evolution is not creative in one
or a few big jumps. It is a multi-pass process so gradual that we can scarcely note the
overall changes from one generation to the next. 32
James observes that, with respect to the selection process, Darwin's variations are
undirected, blind, purposeless, purely contingent. He strongly attacks Lamarckians and
others who hold that nature can directly inform an organism what changes it needs to
make for its selective advantage. His reasons are that we have no evidence of such in-
formation (our term). Even habits depend on the critter's particular cognitive "take"
on the world. In these remarkable passages, James strongly anticipates recent criticism
of instructive theories of learning, including simple inductivist and behaviorist
accounts. 33
James appreciates that in biological evolution evolved creatures do not face a set
of static, fixed environmental niches waiting to be filled. On the contrary, these
creatures interact with the natural environment and change it in various ways. To some
degree they create their own niches. This was a very insightful observation to make
before the turn of the twentieth century/4 and it is the biological counterpart of James's
third level of bootstrap discussed above- the one in which a theoretical commitment
or practice creates the very evidence that epistemically supports it.
James also recognizes that a Darwinian evolutionary process is historical in the

sense that slight contingencies can alter the overall direction of the process. If one
species, for purely contingent reasons (at this level of description), develops a slight
advantage over another, that advantage may, in time, be parlayed into complete
dominance. By contrast, Spencer's stress on deterministic mechanisms makes his a
universe without contingency at any level of description.
So much for the evolution ofbiological species. In the latter part of"Great Men,"
James proceeds to apply the Darwinian mechanisms to "mental evolution," to human
creative thought and action and social evolution. Human originality depends on three
things, corresponding to Darwin's three evolutionary mechanisms: first the unexplained
fact that some people are able to produce many variant ideas, some of them interesting;
second and third, the ability to select the more fruitful ones and the ability or initiative
to transmit them to others, to disseminate them far and wide- at which point a more
anonymous sociocultural selection process becomes definitive. Although the overall
form is the same, the specific content of the theory of social evolution differs from that
of biological evolution. For example, we would not want to say that nature consciously
or purposefully transmits characteristics of its fitter individuals to the next generation.
In James's view the more creative people are alive to hosts of problems and many
variant solution candidates. As with biological evolution, we do not know where these
variants come from or how they are generated, and we have little control over their
production. What we can discern, to some degree, is the selective factors that operate,
the criteria, the fashions, the other forces that together make one idea more sustainable
than another. At this level we do have a certain amount of control. And, as with
biological evolution, successful ideas (and practices) can in tum affect the very
environment that selected them, altering the intellectual fitness landscape (to use the
later language of Sewall Wright).
In his argument against Spencer, James does not equate the spontaneous production
of novel ideas with the spontaneity involved in free will. On the contrary, he promises,
for purposes of discussion, not to invoke free will at all in this essay. His overall
strategy appears to be that of a dominance argument: I can show that Spencer is wrong
even without bringing in free will. Contrary to Spencer, we must take individual
variation as a given and as a sine qua non of social change. Nor is this a difficulty for
James, since the ultimate explanation of variation is irrelevant to the problem.
Darwinian variation is the key to social evolution, for without it there would be nothing
to select and hence there would be no evolutionary change in the correct, Darwinian
sense of the term.
3. SOME TENSIONS BETWEEN THE TWO ESSAYS
Many of James's best known essays are popular essays directed to a wide public.
Accordingly, we can readily find many things to quibble over and some serious
difficulties as well. For example, James rather mushes together the will and the
passions in "Will to Believe," and we are now acutely aware of the difficulties in
providing a specifically Darwinian account of social evolution of the sort that James
has in mind in "Great Men."
Another difficulty is this: the fact that very general social and geographical forces
do not suffice to explain individual behavior does not entail that such actions are can
exhibit full, undetermined, Jamesian agency, for there are the detailed life
circumstances to take into account as well. In other words it is not clear how his
distinction of different levels or cycles of operation saves James from the determinism
objection. He speaks of the cycles as being relatively independent of each other, so that
determinism at the microlevel does not entail determinism at higher levels of
description, but can they be relevantly independent?
With a bit of interpretative license, we may extract this reply from "Great Men."
First, since James concedes the determinism issue there, for purposes of discussion, we
cannot expect his position to sound fully voluntaristic. 35 Second, those who find his
voluntarism excessive anyway, can read "Great Men" as a contribution to soft
determinism, although that was certainly not James's intention. Third, sometimes we
do have evidence of mutual independence of natural processes, as in the case of
Darwin's three mechanisms, given the rejection of direct, inductive-instructivist
theories of habit formation. Fourth, even where that sort of ontological independence
fails, we limited beings often must operate on the assumption of epistemic
independence. Since we have no epistemic access to the hidden causes, we cannot help
but ignore them in our thought and action, even if determinism is true.
Once again we must remember that James is primarily concerned with human prac-
tice, with the human perspective, with what is available to human cognition, with what
we can attend to, as guides to our practice, and not with constructing great, "God's-
eye," ontological world pictures. From this pragmatic perspective, given that the
human take on the world is partial, perspectival, his position seems justified. We also
agree with him that the best way to proceed at the frontier of life or of science, where
we lack firmly established guiding rules, is by casuistry- by appeal to known cases,
successful and unsuccessful, that more-or-less resemble our current problem situation.
Incidentally, Kuhn defends a similar position in his attack on the existence of
methodological rules and his promotion of case-based reasoning modeled on
exemplars. 36 He does not deny that deterministic rules or laws may be operating at the
neural level, but those are completely inaccessible to practicing scientists. What the
latter use for guidance, what is cognitively accessible to them, is not methodological
rules but exemplary problem solutions available from their disciplinary history. Hence
it is appropriate that methodology of science confine itself to this level of description.
The point is epistemic and pragmatic. We conclude that James has a genuinely
interesting response to the determinism "tension."
We now tum to another set of difficulties surrounding James's conception ofhuman
creativity. Here, too, it is far from clear that his approach defeats the mechanistic
position that he battled against. For his Darwinian account of creativity, if taken
completely seriously, as we do, clashes with the traditional idea of intentional human
planning and design - and also with the idea of a God who employs Darwinian
evolution as the creative engine of a divine plan. 37 The question is whether these
clashes are fatal to James's project.
According to the traditional "human design" model (which, infinitely amplified,
becomes the "God design" or "God creation" model), the creation of new design is an
intentional action that reflects intelligence and planning. The designer (painter,
composer, military strategist, scientist working at the frontier, carpenter planning a set
of cabinets) consciously and deliberately constructs a plan and then executes it. On the
standard model, both the planning and the execution typically encounter subproblems,
which are solved, after more thinking and planning and perhaps some tinkering, by a
flash of insight that more-or-less solves the design problem at one stroke. Important
features of this model of creativity are: (1) the assumption that there can be no design
without an intelligent designer, (2) that intelligent designers solve problems on the
basis of insights or "aha!" experiences that are spontaneous rather than mechanical, and
(3) that resolve the problem in a saltatory manner.
The trouble is that the Darwinian process appears to be incompatible with all three
features. There is no intelligent designer. There is no inspiration or insight involved,
and the process proceeds, for all we know, in a mechanical fashion with no need for
freedom or spontaneity in the agent sense. In this respect there would seem to be no
gain in James's exchanging a Spencerian deterministic mechanism for a Darwinian
stochastic one. Moreover, the Darwinian evolutionary process is extremely gradual and
iterative and cannot be said, even metaphorically, to solve a fitness problem in one or
a few strokes. For these reasons Darwinian evolution scarcely resembles a human
bootstrap process. Furthermore, it is extremely doubtful whether a strictly Darwinian
evolutionary process is compatible with the existence of a caring, guiding God. 38 The
very undirectedness of variation that provided the basis of James's independence claim
now comes back to haunt him. 39 Besides, insofar as explaining the provenance of
design becomes the central problem, as it was for both William Paley and for Darwin,
is it not cheating to postulate the existence even of a deistic creator-God? So how can
appeal to Darwin help James to defend his view of agency and his religious perspective
on the world?
Consider further the assumption that there can be no design without an intelligent
designer. Until Darwin this assumption seemed a priori true, for to deny it seemed to
require a rejection of the principle of sufficient reason. Stated slightly differently, the
assumption seemed to embody an unchallengeable conservation principle: there must
be at least as much design in the designer as in the designed product. Otherwise, we
would get something for nothing. Thus we must have intelligence before design!
Yet something from nothing, or rather, more from less, is precisely what we do get
on the Darwinian model of creativity. The Darwinian model turns the human design
model upside down. For on the Darwinian view intelligence itself (and its products,
including knowledge) is not a given but something that must be explained. Otherwise,
the question of where design comes from is begged completely. From this point of
view, positing a more intelligent designer to explain a given design is regressive in that
it increases rather than decreases the total amount of design that must be accounted
for. 40 Hence positing the traditional Judea-Christian God as the beginning of the
process begs the question infinitely! To be sure, James's God was limited, but the
tension remains.
The astounding thing is that, despite the fact that it proceeds blindly, apparently
unintelligently, with rampant contingency operative in all three mechanisms (variation,
selection, transmission), biological evolution is surely the most creative process known
to us. Indeed, in the sense that more design emerges from less, we have, relatively
speaking, creation ex nihilo.
Notice that, surprisingly, the creation of the universe by the Judea-Christian God
is not creation ex nihilo in this precise sense, since God already possesses more design
(infinitely more, presumably) than the product of the design. There is no violation of
the presumed conservation law. 41 Ironically, in this specific respect, Darwinian
evolution is the more genuinely creative process - the one that "breaks" the
conservation principle.
4. RELAXING MORE OF THE TENSIONS

The question left to us by the previous section is how tightly Jamesian agency and
bootstrapping is wedded to the human design model as opposed to an evolutionary
model. Much of the appearance of clash can be removed by taking into account four
points, all of which James himself hints at in "Great Men." First, even the
thoroughgoing evolutionist can allow a good deal of deliberate planning and
strategizing at the frontier- as long as the knowledge supposedly brought to bear can
itself be explained as the ultimate product of prior blind search processes. 42 After all,
the reason the evolutionary process is so powerful is that it can build upon its own
previous results. The overall point, to repeat, is that now we see intelligent,
consciously chosen, deliberate, intentional research practices as something to be
explained as products of a long series of prior evolutionary stages, characterized by
zillions of false starts and much waste, rather than as a divinely created faculty of
Reason or Intelligence, given from the start.
Second, in "Great Men" and elsewhere, James supposes that much of the variation
process in human problem solving occurs subconsciously. Indeed, most of the
selection must also, else we would be conscious of the entire process, and that would
be a "blooming buzzing confusion" indeed! Our conscious deliberations over which
hypothesis or technique to select typically concern only two or a few alternatives.
Otherwise, we should suffer from cognitive overload. On James's view those thoughts
or impulses to action that pop into consciousness have already been selected somehow,
as worthy of conscious attention. Once we have conscious access to an idea, we may
act on it directly or we may continue the selection process by scrutinizing it critically
and making deliberate (but still risky) decisions about whether or not to pursue it.
Third, although it does not fit the "insight" model of creation, Darwinian evolution
is, after all, a bootstrap process, for creation ex nihilo (in our restricted sense) is
precisely what a successful bootstrap operation accomplishes. It produces the means
to become partially self-sustaining. That is also what is so interesting about scientific
work at the frontier of research. It, too, can only proceed by a partially blind variation
plus selective retention process, and, when successful, it, too, involves creation of more
knowledge from less, hence creation ex nihilo. 43 It is human beings in creative
communities who create ex nihilo in this more radical sense. In fact there would be no
need for frontier epistemology if we already knew what was beyond any arbitrarily
designated "frontier." In fact, there would be no need for epistemology at all. The
traditional God needs none, since He already knows everything and effortlessly. 44
The very fact that James takes frontier epistemology so seriously shows that he rejects
the Platonic view that we already know in advance where to look, and for what. 45
No longer, then, do the two models seem absolutely contradictory. In a sense they
are complementary, but with their traditional roles reversed. Intelligence comes last,
not first, in the evolutionary process; and "blind variation," which is usually considered
a last resort when all else fails, tantamount to grasping at straws, is actually the first
resort. Instead of seeing the blind variation model as the complete absence of a
creative, intelligent process, the Darwinian sees it as something already presupposed
by the intelligent design model, else no intelligence would be available in the first
place. One could even imagine combining the models in a quite deliberate way, with
human beings using a Darwinian and wider classes of variation-plus-selective-retention
processes explicitly as a new, more "biological" way to solve problems. In fact, we
need not merely imagine, for the field of evolutionary computation already exists and
is expanding rapidly. 46
But let us continue to ease the tensions between the models with the fourth point.
What in nature could correspond to the bootstrap operation of proposing or committing
to an unjustified or only partially justified hypothesis or technique? Answer: One can
treat nature's production of variant organisms as an application, on a statistical-
populational scale, of the method of multiple working hypotheses. 47 In a sense
biological nature skips the 'entertaining-a-hypothesis' stage or planning stage and goes
straight to building the variant modeled on the Bauplan implicit in the genome-plus-
normal environment. And, given that the successful "hypothesis-variants" can alter the
environment in their favor, we can move further up the scale of Jamesian bootstraps.
Of course, it would take more work than this to take fully seriously talk about
biological nature being a creative problem solver.
We conclude that James does possess the resources to relax the central tensions, to
soften the apparent incompatibilities, between the human design model and the
evolutionary model. However, other difficulties remain to be resolved, particularly
those involving a role for God. 48
Although the modem world is too compartmentalized to admit of anything like the
cultural unity of science and theology that Funkenstein claims for the seventeenth
century, and although modem science and technology have, to some considerable
degree, replaced religion as the dominant cultural project, there are still loci where
these two cultures interact fruitfully. The work of William James is certainly a case in
point.
University ofNevada, Reno/Sage Ridge School
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We wish to congratulate Patrick Heelan for his lifetime of stimulating contributions to philosophy, physics,
and related fields. Our modest contribution attempts to address some of the problem areas in which he is
interested. We have benefited from conversations with Guy Axtell.
NOTES
For antecedents to "The Will to Believe" in James's writing, see William Wemham, James's Will-to-
Believe Doctrine: A Heretical View (Kingston and Montreal: MeGill-Queen's University Press, 1987).
2 Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1986).
3 Because philosophy and virtually all of Western culture was filtered through the Church during the Middle
Ages, one can readily extend Funkenstein's thesis to epistemology and other branches of philosophy. God
is the perfect knower and a kind of model for epistemology. Absolutists and foundationists of many kinds
take comfort in this model, the absolutely objective, all-encompassing "view from nowhere" (Nagel 1986).
However, despite his theism, James rejected all such views.
4 Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination, p. 3.
5 Ibid.
Ibid., p. 12.
In Vlll of"Will to Believe," James plays down the magnitude of choices in science. We find this rather
puzzling, since he was aware how such choices could change a life, including Darwin's and his own. In
"Great Men," he writes: "Whether a young man enters business or the ministry may depend on a decision
which has to be made before a certain day. He takes the place offered in the counting-house, and is
committed. Little by little, the habits, the know ledges, of the other career, which once lay so near, cease to
be reckoned even among his possibilities. At first, he may sometimes doubt whether the self he murdered
in that decisive hour might not have been the better of the two; but with the years such questions themselves
expire .... "William James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York:
Longmans, Green; Reprinted New York: Dover, 1956 [ 1897)), 227. See also Note 22 below.
8 Daniel Dennett's central, tensile force metaphor is that of cranes versus skyhooks. Dennett, Darwin's
Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 73ff.
9 Thomas Nickles, "Heuristic Appraisal: A Proposal," Social Epistemology 3 (1989): 175-188.
10 In the moral sphere this issue has recently been discussed by Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel, and many
others under the rubric of "moral luck." See Daniel Statman, ed., Moral Luck (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993 ).
11 As Hollinger points out, James is unfair to Clifford and mischaracterizes his real position. See David A.
Hollinger, "James, Clifford, and the Scientific Conscience" in Ruth Anna Putnam, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to William James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 69-83. We cannot consider
here whether James was also unfair to Spencer.
12 James, p. 27. All page references are to the Dover edition of The Will to Believe and Other Essays.
13 The next several paragraphs parallel the discussion in T. Nickles, "Epistemic Amplification: Toward a
Bootstrap Methodology of Science" in Jerzy Brzezinksi, Franco Coniglione, and Tadeusz Marek, eds ..
Science: Between Algorithm and Creativil)! (Delft: Eburon, 1992), 29-52, 34ff. but with significant changes.
14 This is a step beyond the once revolutionary algebraic technique ofletting symbols such as x andy stand
for unknown numbers and manipulating them in mathematical equations just as if they were known numbers.
In the mathematical case no hypotheses are involved.
15 In "Great Men," delivered in 1880, James already makes a more subtle but devastating criticism of
inductive methods that attempt to avoid risky hypotheses (1880, 222, 246ff, 251 ff), namely that simple
inductive theories, whereby nature directly molds us (or our intellect or our knowledge) like a seal in wax are
incompatible with what we know about human cognition as "partial" or perspectival rather than Godlike. In
today's terms, James is combating instructive theories of learning, which hold, in some form, that mere
objective repetition or regularity directly gives us knowledge rather than its being something that we have
to recognize or "take" to be the case. (Such "taking" need not be conscious.) We return to this point below.
See also Gary Cziko, Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995).
16 James, p. 28.
17 See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure ofScientific Revolutions (2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1970) and Kuhn, "Reflections on my Critics" in Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave, eds., Criticism and the
Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 231-278 and Paul Feyerabend,
Philosophical Papers, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). Feyerabend's position owes
something to John Stuart Mill's insistence that positions should be thoroughly debated, with the consideration
of alternatives, even when, or especially when, there is a consensus in favor of the position. James, who often
cites Mill with approval and who dedicated Pragmatism to him, would have agreed.
18 Nickles, "Kuhn, Historical Philosophy of Science, and Case-Based Reasoning," Configurations 6 (1998):
51-85. Special issue on Thomas Kuhn.

19 For a "practices" versus a "Weltanschauung" interpretation of Kuhn that we find convincing, see Joseph
Rouse, Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy ofScience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
(1987), Chap. 2.
20 James, p. 25, James's emphasis.
21 James, p. 24.
22 As we observed in Note 7, given his strong ultra-Peircean pragmatism, James sometimes takes a
surprisingly conservative line on science, as when he remarks that "in our dealings with objective nature we
obviously are recorders, not makers of the truth" James, 20. Richard Rorty ("Religious Faith, Intellectual
Responsibility, and Romance" in Putnam, ed., The Cambridge Companion to William James, 84-102),
defending a thoroughgoing "soft" pragmatism, criticizes James as inconsistent on this point. Insofar as a
thoroughgoing pragmatist tends to blur traditionally absolute distinctions, we should expect James to fuzz
not only the distinction between finding and constructing (discovering versus inventing) but also the
distinction between belief and related kinds of commitment and those between heuristic appraisal and
epistemic appraisal, and between prudential and epistemic reasons. But blurring does not mean abandoning
completely; otherwise, we lose James's insistence that there is genuine risk of failure.
23 Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3.
24 Hacking, 6.
25 Hacking, 7.
26 James, 218.
27 James, 216.
28 James, 218.
29 Spencer had enormous influence in the America of James's day. At the October 2000 Biennial Meeting
of the Philosophy of Science Association in Vancouver, Michael Ruse contended in a symposium paper that
prominent American evolutionists to this day often conflate Spencer and Darwin. Insofar as this is true,
James would seem to be an early exception.

3 For analytical convenience we separate these two strands of James's story. "Great Men" is a long, rich
piece. We here call attention only to selected aspects of it.
31 James, 235.
32 Nickles, "A Multi-Pass Conception of Scientific Inquiry," Danish Yearbook of Philosophy, vol. 32.
Edited by Stig Andur Pedersen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanem Press, 1997): 11-43.
33 Cziko, Without Miracles.
34 Such a set of static niches existing in advance of the process of evolution would be a biological version
of a "block universe" of the sort that James vigorously rejected. For a recent discussion of the point at issue,
see Richard Lewontin, "Adaptation" in Richard Levins and R. L. Lewontin, eds., The Dialectical Biologist
~Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
5 Nevertheless, there are passages where a Spencerian could legitimately accuse James of begging the
question, as when he writes by way of conclusion on p. 227: "We see this power of individuai initiative
exemplified .... "
36 Kuhn, The Structure ofScientific Revolutions.
37 In many articles over the past forty years, Donald T. Campbell has defended the Darwinian model as the
only defensible account of creativity. See, e. g., Campbell, "Evolutionary Epistemology" in P. A. Schilpp,
ed., The Philosophy of Karl Popper (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1974), 413-63. More recently, Richard
Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1986) and Daniel Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea
also defends the claim that all novel design must originate by a process of variation-plus-selection.
38 In "Will to Believe" James does not attempt to justify belief in such a divine being. Many readers have
been disappointed that his "religious hypothesis" asserts only that "the best things are the more eternal things"
and that "we are better off even now if we believe the first assertion to be true" (pp. 25f).
39 True, James acknowledges that an onmiscient being could understand the entire causal nexus, given the
working assumption of determinism (p. 218); however, James elsewhere suggests that his God is limited. The
problem only worsens if causal determinism is replaced by a thoroughly probabilistic view of micro
processes.
40 Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, Chap. I.
41 By rejecting the conservation principle, Darwinian evolution challenges the traditional cosmological or
causal proof of God as well as the argument from design. We cannot here consider the objections that (I)
biological evolution does not violate the conservation law once the design already present in the selecting
natural environment is taken into account and (2) that the whole idea of evolution progressively creating more
design is really more Spencerian than Darwinian. Spencer posited a universal evolutionary process by which
matter passes from a rather amorphous and homogeneous state to one more differentiated and complexly
organized. Unfortunately, his turgid, grandiose formulations gave the idea of "universal evolution" a bad
name from which it has only recently partially recovered. Cf. Cziko, Without Miracles.
42 Campbell has always emphasized this point.
43 We say partially blind because scientjsts do bring some knowledge to the frontier. They usually have
some idea of which approaches are likely to be more fertile than others. However, as Campbell has so often
insisted, the fact that search is necessary at all shows that, to that extent, the investigators are "blind."
44 Hence the irony of making any sort ofepistemic model of God and of basing epistemology on a "God's
e5eview."
4 Scientific inquiry, when successful, produces more knowledge from less, more epistemic design, so to
speak, from less, and in this crucial respect creates something from nothing. The only way to deny this
conclusion, as far as we can see, is to posit some sort of inner light, an innate capacity to intuit the truths of
the universe, or else to posit direct, divine inspiration. In either case, the problem of inquiry is solved in
something like Plato's manner in the Meno: the knowledge was implicit within us already and only had to
be made explicit. Pragmatists and other empiricists thoroughly reject such an account.
46 For a clear introduction see, e. g., John Koza, Genetic Programming: On the Programming ofComputers
by Means ofNatural Selection, vol. I (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), which is already nearly a decade old.
Of course, today's programs remain quite limited in various ways. Although Darwin was the first to discover
the power of variation-plus-selective-retention processes, his turns out to be only one (or one family) of a
large domain of such processes. Hence criticism of proposed evolutionary processes on the ground that they
are not exact analogues of Darwinian biological evolution is often misplaced. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous
Idea, emphasizes this point, but it is also generally assumed by people working in the field of evolutionary
computation.
47 Cf. T. C. Chamberlain, "Studies for Students," Journal ofGeology 5 (1897): 837-848. Reprinted under
the title, "The Method ofMultiple Working Hypotheses" in C. Albritton, ed., Philosophy ofGeohistory, 1785-
1970 (Stroudsburg, PA: Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross, 1975), 125-131.
48 See, e.g., James's essay, "Is Life Worth Living?," in James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in
Popular Philosophy.
DOMINIC BALESTRA
IN-BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION
1. METHODOLOGICAL DEMARCATION: A WANING WALL
Stripped of its seventeenth and eighteenth century Deistic, if not theistic, sensibility,
science entered the twentieth century as agnostic and indifferent, if not outrightly
antagonistic, toward religion. Religion was often viewed as the enemy of modern
science; and its theology was presumed to be intellectually vacuous. "Real science"
was clearly understood to be objective, empirical and rational. It bore no relationship
to theology, none of any cognitive import - except perhaps to eliminate theology as
contributing toward any understanding of the cosmos. This view of the relationship
between science and religion was further reinforced by logical empiricism. In the
latter's view science aimed to establish empirically testable, generalized explanations
of observable but problematic phenomena. Such phenomena might be freely falling
bodies or the deviation of a planet from the expected path of its usual orbit. As the
phrase "logical empiricism" suggests, in its view the objectivity of science rested with
an evidential base of empirical facts, facts which were independent of any hypothesized
theory under question and available to all through sense observation. And the
rationality of science was ascribed to the logical testability of its explanatory
hypotheses.
The rationality and objectivity of science was synonymous with, respectively,
logicality and empiricism. Only those aspects of science amenable to this model of
objective rationality, features internal to what was called the "context ofjustification,"
were of cognitive significance. Social, economic or psychological factors in the
genesis of a hypothesis, such as for example, the development of nineteenth
thermodynamic theory as motivated by the central role of the steam engine in the
industrial revolution, were considered irrelevant to the question of whether a theory
was true or rationally warranted. In general, such social and historical dimensions of
science were relegated to a distinct "context of discovery" which was presumed to be
external to science qua knowledge. In this way the agnostic or atheist could square
with history and acknowledge the role of religious motives in the founding fathers,
most notably Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, for whom the vocation of the natural
philosopher was to read the mind of God in the Book of Nature.
This portrait of scientific knowledge grew out of the modem dogma of a fact/value
dichotomy, which relegated questions of ethics, values and the meaning of life to a
377
378 DOMINIC BALESTRA
subjective sphere alien to the fact world of science. Indeed, armed with its verifiability
principle of meaningfulness, logical empiricism reinforced the treatment of questions
of ethics as nonrational matters for meta-ethical analysis of feelings and emotions, and
it prohibited theology, revealed or natural, as meaningless assertions construed as
emotive expressions of "wish fulfillment" or the absurdity of our place in the universe.
With few exceptions philosophical treatment of science and religion was quite sparse.
For the most part philosophy sought to demarcate science in order to protect it from
metaphysics, especially of the religious kind. Even though Karl Popper recognized the
folly of rendering metaphysics as meaningless and rejected logical empiricism's theory
of meaning, he insisted upon a demarcation of science from metaphysics in order to
display the superiority of scientific rationality.
Popper's position rests upon two, closely related themes in the philosophy of
science: one, the logicist thesis that rationality is logicality; and two, the demarcation
thesis which asserted that as a result of the rationality thesis, science is distinctively
privileged as an intellectual enterprise. All other intellectual disciplines - ethics,
history, political theory, and social sciences (but not theology which was usually
excluded as intellectually unacceptable) -were considered more or less rational to the
extent that they could exhibit the pattern of scientific rationality as understood
according to these two theses. As a result of the work of Toulmin, Kuhn, the later
Popper and Lakatos among others, these two themes collapsed under the weight of a
much more historically minded, critical scrutiny of the theory of science.
The first thesis, that rationality is logicality, asserts that the rationality of science
ultimately rests with its methodology, the so called hypothetical-deductive method of
modem science. And this method is a means of logically testing a scientific hypothesis
(proposed as a universal explanatory theory of a problematic phenomenon) by refer-
ence to a firm, objective base of empirical fact; and the second, the demarcation thesis
held that such empirical testability essentially distinguishes a scientific hypothesis
from a non-scientific one.
Insofar as scientific theories include universal statements, inductive logic (as Hume
had argued) can not establish scientific laws and theories as true; logically speaking
even the best confirmed and long established theories could be false. This logical
feature of induction combined with the fact that the history of science exhibits
confirmed theories which subsequently come to be rejected, provides a strong case that
the theories of science are fallible and so only provisional or tentative. Early in his
work Karl Popper recognized and argued for such fallibility of all scientific theories.
Accordingly, he asked, whence the rationality of science?
Having rejected the inductivist construal of the method of science, Popper exploited
a basic feature of deductive logic, viz., though a universal statement can not be
demonstrated as true on the basis of a finite number of experimental confirmations, a
universal assertion (All S are W) could be proven false by a single, contradictory
statement (some S is not W). Armed with this fact oflogic, Popper developed the
theme that, although science is at best conjecture, it is rational conjecture precisely
because it submits its plausible, conjectured theories to severe attempts at falsification
by critical experiment. In Popper's own words, "only the falsity of the theory can be
inferred from empirical evidence, and this inference is a purely deductive one." 1
Accordingly, the rationality of science consists in a critical process of bold conjecture
and critical refutation. Having interpreted the H-D method of scientific testing as a
IN-BETWEEN SCIENCE AND RELIGION 379
logic of falsification, Popper revised the demarcation thesis to read: "the criterion of
the scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability."2 In
spite of this strong statement of falsifiability, Popper argued for other theses which
reveal a much more subtle falsifiability, one which Lakatos called sophisticated
methodological falsificationism. Two of these theses are: one, the primacy of theory
over observation (this is akin to the Kuhnian thesis that all observations are theory-
laden, there are no theory neutral facts); and two, the logic of the problem-situation,
which maintains that the critical method of conjecture and refutation only has
significance in the context of a clearly formulated and shared problem-situation. Thus,
science conjectures theories as proposed solutions to problems and to the extent that
the conjecture survives critical attempts to refute it, we may rationally accept the
theory, at least until a better rival is proposed and both are put to a test. Furthermore,
the rational assessment of rival theories is predicated upon a shared problem-situation.
A major line of argument against falsifiability originates with Pierre Duhem's thesis
of the non-falsifiability of isolated scientific hypotheses. In his words: "In sum, the
physicist can never subject an isolated hypothesis to experimental test, but only a
whole group of hypotheses; when the experiment is in disagreement with his
predictions, what he learns is that at least one of the hypotheses constituting this group
is unacceptable and ought to be modified; but the experiment does not designate which
one should be changed." 3 The "whole group," to which Duhem refers, involves a
complex network which includes: background knowledge, "hard core" theories (e. g,
Aristotle's two domain laws of natural motion or the three laws of motion in Newton),
auxiliary hypotheses (such as explain the workings of the radio telescopes in astronomy
and legitimate the "observed results" as evidence), and the hypothesis under test. The
logic of falsification cannot target the hypothesis under consideration nor compel its
rejection. The logic can guarantee only that somewhere something is amiss. It does
not tell us where to look, or how to locate the source of the trouble. Indeed, one could
introduce new auxiliary hypotheses in order to absorb the shock of failure and to
immunize against the otherwise fatal effects of a recalcitrant experiment. For example,
one of the objections to the Copernican theory which requires the earth to rotate at
about one thousand mile per hour, was the "recalcitrant" result that a body falling from
a high tower did not land sufficiently far to the west of the tower. Galileo responded
to this by conjecturing his theory of circular inertia as an auxiliary hypothesis to
explain the apparent anomaly. Though Galileo's circular inertia was mistaken, the
tower problem generated the development of a series of hypotheses of inertia, by
Descartes, Huygens, and Newton. The sequence of such auxiliary hypotheses is
designed to "protect" some fundamental theoretical principles. The latter is similar to
Kuhn's paradigmatic theory or Lakatos's "hard core" of the research program. Sooner
or later the series of auxiliary hypotheses, which Lakatos appropriately named the
"protective belt," must exhibit some corroborated empirical results, otherwise it risks
being judged as ad hoc. The subsequent development of the protective belt generates,
in programmatic response to various problems for the "hard core" and possibly
subsidiary principles, a complex historical series of subsidiary theories which retains
the "hard core." Lakatos named this historical series a scientific research program. In
the case of scientific cosmology, the "hard core" of Hoyle's research program is the
Steady-State theory in contrast to the Expanding Universe theory of the Big Bang
proponents. Hoyle responded to Hubble's observation of the red shift and its prima
facie support of an expanding universe, with an auxiliary hypothesis of the constant
ratio of the rate of expansion to the density of matter. The Steady State theory and the
Big Bang theory emerged as rival research programs, and in time the Big Bang
exhibited the empirical results that have made it the accepted theory today. The case
of the eventual acceptance of the Big Bang theory exhibits two important features of
the rationality functioning in the methodology of a scientific research program: one, no
logically simple test from one result decided the question; and two, that "rational
assessment" is in terms of sequenced problem-shifts which are the outcome of a
programmatic, historical sequence of conceptual and experimental results. Today's
philosophy of science recognizes that there is no ahistorical instant rationality of an
abstracted hypothetical-deductive logic of testing. It is in the retrospect of history that
the rationality of the theory choice can be judged. Moreover, given the provisional
status of any theory and the theory-laden nature of empirical observations, it becomes
clear that the rational judgment, even in the light of history, is not exclusively due to
a logic of testing the research program against a pure empirical evidential base.
However, it does not follow that a logic of experiments is not an essential part of
rational theory choice, only that logic is not enough. Despite its brilliance Lakatos'
development of methodological falsificationism does not succeed in eradicating the
subject's judgment in the rational appraisal and choice of theories. The judgment of
the experienced scientist, like Aristotle's phronesis in the individual's moral judgment,
is an essential aspect of scientific rationality. Pierre Duhem recognized this at the end
of his penetrating analysis of crucial experiments and his argument for non-falsifiability
where he concludes
The sound experimental criticism of a hypothesis is subordinated to certain moral
conditions; in order to estimate correctly the agreement of a physical theory with the
facts, it is not enough to be a good mathematician and skillful experimenter; one must
also be an impartial and faithful judge. 4
Since Duhem first argued his thesis, subsequent philosophers of science (most
notably W.V. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, and Imre Lakatos) have developed its argument
and expanded its thesis. And even Karl Popper, the champion of falsifiability, has
successively revised his position in response to Duhemian criticisms such that it more
and more resembles that of Lakatos. In a later work, Objective Knowledge, Popper
locates the heart of scientific rationality with the progress achieved in advancing the
problem-situation. In his words: "[P]rogressiveness is one of the things we demand
of a good tentative theory: and it is brought out by the critical discussion of it: the
theory is progressive if our discussion shows that it has really made a difference to the
problem we wanted to solve; that is, if the newly emerging problems are different from
the old ones." 5
The clear result is that the distinctive advantage of modus to/lens for the logicist
thesis is diminished and the Popperian program of falsification is no longer tenable.
Its sharp demarcation thesis wanes, and history enters into its rationality. Kuhn and
Quine, Lakatos and Laudan, Newton-Smith and even Feyerabend, have in each's
respective way developed a Duhemian philosophical program for enlarging the fun-
ctioning unit of rational appraisal from a single isolated hypothesis to a complex,
programmatic network of theories (conjectured in response to a core problem)
variously characterized as paradigm, conceptual scheme, research program, research

tradition and even a Wittgensteinian "form oflife."6
Even if we were to distinguish between an isolated test statement and a
contextualized test statement, and identify the latter as the potential "falsifier," the
rational import gained could not be restricted to a sharply demarcated scientific
context. For as conjectural, such theory-laden statements are fallible and therefore
provisional. Accordingly, any demarcation of science predicated upon falsifiability can
only be a matter of degree and in terms of its historical situation. Now we see that the
rationality of science is a highly complicated, historically situated process of critical
discussion among inquirers in an open communication, something more like the kind
of rationality Popper has always recognized as operative in good philosophy. In
Conjectures and Refutations he responded to his own question of the rational
assessment of irrefutable, metaphysical theories, asserting "[E]very rational theory, no
matter whether scientific or philosophical, is rational in so far as it tries to solve certain
problems. A theory is comprehensible and reasonable only in its relation to a given
problem-situation, and it can be rationally discussed only by discussing this relation." 7
Thus, the demise of falsifiability does not entail the irrationality of science; rather it
reforms scientific rationality by locating it in a wider genus of criticizability, and
thereby, replaces the formula of "conjecture and refutation" by "conjecture and
critique." In accord with Popper this criticizability is always historically situated, but
pace Popper it retains the Duhemian insight that the subject's judgment is an essential
aspect of scientific rationality.
2. RATIONALITY OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION: A MATRIX IN-BETWEEN

In this reform, even in the wake of demarcation there still survives an unmistakable
feature always at the heart of Western rationality: that a rationally acceptable theory,
doctrine, interpretation or whatever appropriate unit of the disciplinary inquiry, is one
which has withstood the critique of the discipline as a proposed answer to the questions
posed by the problematic shared by members of the discipline. Obviously, though
Popper did not anticipate it, this opens a Popperian standpoint to reconsidering the
disciplinary rationality of theology, revealed or natural. Indeed, in his discussion of
rationality and tradition there can be no doubt that the matrix of scientific rationality
is a tradition. He says: " ... 'science' is differentiated from the older myths not by
being something distinct from a myth, but by a second-order tradition - that of
critically discussing the myth." 8 In so far as a theology is a tradition of critical
consideration and discussion of the religious myths passed on from one generation to
the next, a theological, disciplinary enterprise need be no less rational than a scientific
one. 9
In spite of Popper's attempts to objectify the norms of rational assessment in such
a way that no appeal to the subject is needed for rational choice, 10 an important
corollary to the preceding discussion of rationality and demarcation is that in
intellectual questions regarding theology or science the respective judgments of the
experienced scientist or the experienced theologian are ineradicable to their traditions
as rational. It then follows that the judgment of the individual who is experienced as
both scientist and theologian is especially desirable in the dialogue between theology
and science. Methodological results of the philosophy of science have removed a
dense wall which divided modem science and theology. No doubt its recent fallout has
helped create a climate much more hospitable to moving across disciplines in dialogue
about the big questions. And the recent revival of such big questions in physics and
biology have charged the atmosphere with some exciting prospects for shared
understanding. At the same time these developments, when set in a larger historical
context, advise caution. Theology should remember the legacy of Galileo 's struggles
with a theology which had yoked itself with the science of Aristotle. Today philosophy
of science is virtually unanimous about the fallible and so provisional status of all
scientific theories. Our methodological finding underscores the lessons of history.
Does this mean that science as provisional knowledge and theology as "eternal"
revelation can only meet at the end of history with nothing to exchange between now
and then?
The last twenty-five years has witnessed a profusion of provocative exchanges
across the science-religion divide which range from critical conflict to open dialogue
or even attempts at some kind of convergence. Theologian and physicist, Ian Barbour,
offers a useful classification which offers a reflective perspective from which to
address the above question. In brief, Barbour partitions the possible relationships
between science and theology into four basic types: Conflict, Independence, Dialogue,
and Integration. The scientific reductionism of Jacques Monod' s Chance and Necessity
and Edward Wilson's sociobiology 11 represent instances of a "scientism" which
inevitably leads to a conflict with theology. By excluding any other knowledge as
valid, and adding the a priori lemma that there is no God (because the web of science
can not recover any God), then there can be no rational room for any theology, revealed
or natural. On the side of religion, as we have seen in the case of"creationism", naive
literalist readings of Scripture invade the disciplinary integrity of the sciences. There
can be no tolerance from either perspective for, due to naive literalism in the theology
and naive realism and methodological chauvinism in the sciences, confrontation and
conflict are inevitable.
The demarcation between the language of science and the language of theology
initiated by Galileo eventually developed into Kant's epistemological dualism. It is a
good illustration of the Independence type of relationship between science and
theology. Each discipline with its respective autonomy with nothing to say to each
other. But for Kant it was at the price of laying claim to a truth about reality in itself,
whether it would be about the starry skies above us or the word of God within! In an
interesting way both of these types share a naive realist perspective regarding reality
and our knowledge of it. Both presuppose that the metaphysics of science or theology
is all or nothing, that it insures complete and final knowledge of reality or all inquiry
is in vain. For such a transcendental standpoint, there is no in-between. But recent
philosophy of science says, with virtual unanimity, that our science is by its very nature
historical, incomplete and thereby provisional. Accordingly, we find both the Conflict
view and the Independence view unacceptable because of the metaphysical dogmatism
each presupposes. This conclusion may not be obvious in the case of the Independence
view. For one might subscribe to disciplinary autonomy without claiming complete or
permanent knowledge, conceding that our current science is provisional and
incomplete. But what would this imply? A pluralism, but which is itself provisional
and for which the possibility of convergence, or an authentic dialogue, between science
and theology in the long run, can not be excluded.
The last two categories, Dialogue and Integration, represent positions more in line
with the tension-filled road out of Rome, of a fides quaerens intel/ectum. Because of
the provisional and incomplete nature of the findings of science, the Dialogue view
cautiously restrains any premature integration at either a substantive level or a
methodological level. It recognizes sufficient parallels between the disciplines to
warrant a dialogical relation between science and theology. In this relation it is usually
theology reformulating its understanding of a basic doctrine, such as creation, in light
of the best current knowledge from science. But it also recognizes disciplinary
differences which require respecting the integrity of the distinct disciplines.
Representatives of the Dialogue view are Wolfgang Pannenberg, Eman McMullin,
John Polkinghome, and I suspect Patrick Heelan.
The last category, Integration, holds that some sort of integration between the
content of science and theology is possible. Barbour distinguishes three versions of
Integration. One version is a "natural theology" which claims that the existence of God
can be inferred, at least as a plausible hypothesis (Richard Swinburne), from the
evidence of design in nature which science discovers. Like the eighteenth century
"physicotheology" which it resembles, this natural theology is vulnerable to unexpected
findings in science which might conflict with the basic theological claims. The second
version is a "theology of nature" which, in appropriating scientific theories within its
otherwise distinctly theological concepts, may reformulate its understandings of basic
theological doctrines, such as that of creation. The Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de
Chardin's The Phenomenon ofMan readily comes to mind as an example of a theology
of nature. More recently the current theologian and biochemist Arthur Peacocke works
a critical realist approach to develop a theology of nature. A major issue for the
theology of nature is the nature of God's creative action: is it a continuous creation
with God as remote but primary cause? Or, is it a deistic like plan initiated and
implemented into a proximate chain of secondary causality, the domain of scientific
study? The third version oflntegration, "systematic synthesis," is a comprehensive
metaphysics which incorporates contributions from both science and theology into a
coherent worldview. The process metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead exemplifies
this version of integration. It is interesting to note that each version of integration
represents a standpoint which works the integration respectively from science to
theology, from theology to science, and from both science and theology into an
"overriding" metaphysics. In every case theology is affected by science, in the "natural
theology" even the data of theology may be construed as derived from the findings of
science. In the latter two versions, theology's understandings of the data of theology
may be affected by science. But are the concepts or theories of science ever reformed
as a result of theological developments? No example comes readily to mind. A way
may be through an indirect route, made possible by theology's subsumption within the
more comprehensive, integrative metaphysics. A way which seems quite Hegelian and
which places a philosophical metaphysics in a privileged position vis-a-vis science and
theology. But if an Anglo-American philosophy of science calls for a historically
situated scientific rationality which requires a tum to the Duhemian judgement of the
subject, it is an ironic call for something like the standpoint of Patrick Heelan's
hermeneutical phenomenology 12 to address the in-between of science and religion.
Fordham University
NOTES
Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 55.
2 Popper, Conjectures and RefUtations, 37.
3 Pierre Duhem, The Aim and Structure ofPhysical Theory, translated from the 1914 French edition by
Wiener (New York: Atheneum Press, 1954), II, ch. VI, 180-190.
4 Duhem, The Aim and Structure ofPhysical Theory, ch. VI, "Physical Theory and Experiment," 218. First
published in French, 1906.
5 Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 288.
See W.H. Newton-Smith, The Rationality ofScience (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981 ), chs. III -
VI for a critical examination of this development in Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn, and Feyerabend. A more recent,
but briefer, presentation of the development of the unit of scientific rationality is provided by Ernan
McMullin, "The Shaping of Scientific Rationality" in E. McMullin, ed., Construction and Constraint: The
Shaping ofScientific Rationality (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).
7 Popper, Conjectures and Refutations.
8 Ibid., ch. 4, "Towards a Rational Theory of Tradition," 127.
9 See Nancy Murphy, Theology in an Age ofScientific Reasoning (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1990) for an exemplary treatment of a theological rationality which parallels scientific rationality. For an up
to date comprehensive treatment of a "postfoundationalist" rationality across the disciplines of science and
theology see J. Wentzel van Huyssteen, The Shaping ofRationality: Toward lnterdisciplinarity in Theology
and Science (Grand Rapids, Ml: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1999).
1 Karl Popper, Objective Knowledge, see especially ch. 3, "Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject,"
106-152.
11 Despite Edward 0. Wilson's more recent and more sophisticated appreciation of the philosophical
presuppositions of his evolutionary enterprise, he begins Consilience: The Unity ofKnowledge (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1998) pleading guilty to anticipated charges of"ontological reductionism, scientism" only
to dismissively call for moving on! II.
12 A good place for Anglo-American philosophers to enter Heelan's hermeneutical philosophy of science
is Ch. I, "Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Philosophy of Science," and Ch. 13, "Hermeneutics and the
History of Science," in his work Space-Perception and the Philosophy ofScience (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1983).
GARRETT BARDEN
THINKING THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
At the Higher Institute ofPhilosophy in Leuven, in December 1998, 1 I raised this question: who
can think the philosophy of religion? Thirty six years earlier in 1962, in the same city, I met
Patrick Heelan for the first time. - He was then completing his doctoral work in the Institute on
Heisenberg and the nature of quantum mechanics. 2 I was beginning philosophy in the College
Saint Albert in the outskirts of the city. I visited Patrick Heelan in his rooms weekly and learnt
much from him then and later. To contribute an essay in his honour is for me, therefore, a great
privilege and an opportunity, not to repay, but to acknowledge, a debt. To pursue a question that
I raised first in Leuven is, I hope, an appropriate acknowledgment.
If the philosophy of religion has been dominantlf the consideration of proofs of the
existence of God, still it is recognized that proofs are only rarely the concern of
religious people. The reality of God is presupposed in the three North African
Mediterranean religions of the Book, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, 4 but proofs of
His existence are a curious by-product of religious life. The attempt to find a proof is
a philosophical5 rather than primarily a religious enterprise and its relation to religious
life obscure. 6
Religion, like science, art, and common-sense, is a common human practice. The
philosophy of religion is the philosophical reflection on that practice as the philosophy
of science is the philosophical reflection on scientific practice. 7 Within the western
philosophical tradition the philosophy of religion has also been, knowingly or
unknowingly, an effort to overcome and complete religion by philosophy. Rush Rhees
suggests, for example, that Brentano thinks of religion as a substitute for philosophy
and, I suppose, of philosophy as the better and more complete enterprise. 8 It is
plausible to understand Plato as thinking of philosophy in this way but even in
Christianity, where Plato's influence has been deep and pervasive, religious and
philosophical experience are quite distinct; no-one prays to the GOOD, that is, the
GOOD is not the kind of thing that one prays to; confer Pascal's distinction between
the God of Philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 9
Many things have divided philosophers during the twentieth century but there has
emerged a common theme: that of different contexts and of the relationships between
them. 10 Wittgenstein wrote of language-games, Collingwood of sets of absolute
presuppositions, Kuhn of paradigms ... Hardly anyone would now think it odd to think
of religion and philosophy as different language games or contexts even if there is
much less agreement as to what the relationships between them are. 11 Philosophy will
try to give an account of religion but it will neither overcome nor complete it.
385
386 GARRETT BARDEN
There is generally more resistance to the autonomy of religion than there is, say, to
the autonomy of music. This resistance has, I think, three sources. The first is the fact
that traditionally - at least in the recent tradition - the philosophy of religion has
concentrated on proofs for God's existence and this enquiry, being philosophical,
resents the intrusion of another, and, as it is inclined to presume, lesser, discourse.
Furthermore, philosophers have tended to assume in practice that their discourse is
context and subject independent and that the several contexts that divide others do not
impinge upon philosophers. 12
The second source of resistance has two currents. The first current is the demand
that religious discourse puts on those who engage in it; the second is the underlying
suspicion that those who do not engage in it cannot understand it. Once more we come
upon the ironic fact that philosophers, who are happy to speak of the inability of
someone confined within one paradigm to understand what is said in another,
nonetheless become fretful when confronted with a paradigm, context or language
game that someone suggests they are unable to understand. These two currents run
together in a single confluence because one cannot learn religion in quite the same way
as one can learn mathematics.
A third source of resistance is that religions commonly speak also of something that
is of great importance and yet of startling ordinariness, that science leaves untouched:
making sense of life. God to whom believers pray and Who, they believe, hears and
answers their prayers, 13 is the same who makes sense of their life. 14
In the Leuven paper I concluded that only someone engaged in religious discourse
could properly undertake its philosophical study. Rush Rhees and John Dowling come
to a similar conclusion. 15
The conclusion may meet some resistance. Yet were it suggested that only someone
who had engaged in mathematics could properly undertake its philosophical study,
there would be less resistance or none. It would, on the contrary, be manifestly bizarre
to make any other claim. Consider Goldbach's conjecture: every even number is the
sum of two prime numbers. 16 This conjecture could hardly be easier to understand-
provided only that one can work within the language game of mathematics. That
language game does not demand that the practitioner give a full explanation of what a
number is; only that the practitioner can play mathematically with numbers. But
imagine someone wholly unfamiliar with mathematics. Could that person understand
the conjecture? Could that person understand J9 = 3? or that 3 x 3 = 9? Presumably
not. Now imagine trying to teach such a person the meaning of those expressions but
without engaging in mathematics. 17 They mean nothing; outside that context they are
no more than odd marks or sounds; they are intelligible only within it; are thus context-
dependent.18 The ability to undertake the philosophy of mathematics depends upon the
philosopher's ability to engage intelligently in mathematics. The data upon which the
philosopher of mathematics relies and which he tries to understand are the data of his
own conscious intelligent experience of doing mathematics.
The same appears in music. Were someone wholly tune-deaf so that he could hear
only a succession of different notes but could neither recognize nor appreciate any
melody, could he undertake the philosophy of music?
Between mathematics and music there is this difference: we know or think we know
how to induct someone into mathematics whereas we are somewhat less inclined to
claim this in the case of music. But it may be the case that our teaching of both
THINKING THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION 387
mathematics and music is something like our teaching of language; we present the
practice and the infant picks it up bit by bit in ways that we hardly understand. We are
perhaps inclined to accept that someone may have no understanding of either
mathematics or music. On the other hand, if someone can speak we would have some
difficulty with the suggestion that he had no understanding of poetry. What would he
not understand? The words are quite familiar and those that are not can be taught as
they would be taught in everyday speech; this is what we do if someone is unfamiliar
with a word in a poem. But words are used differently in poems than in everyday
speech; it is not that they have different individual meanings but that the language-
game is different. That is what someone fails to grasp when he fails to understand
poetry. He doesn't know in practice what is going on. In the quite ordinary
expression, poetry means nothing to him. Ifthe philosophical enquiry into poetry is the
effort to discover what is going on, the philosopher's failure to experience this is a fatal
flaw.
Here we hit upon a new and curious difficulty that is not encountered in the
discussion of mathematics nor, I think, in the discussion of music. The person who has
no sense of what is going on in poetry, nonetheless does understand the words and so
can say something, even something quite perceptive, about a poem.
Religion is in a similar, not the same, case. Religious practice is gestural but also
linguistic. At least the prayers, if not the gestures, are intelligible to anyone who
understands the language [Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin, Arabic, English, etc.] in
which they are written. A critical analysis of the prayers or other religious texts within
a religious tradition will yield, for example, an account of the development of the idea
of God within that tradition and this critical work can be done by the unbeliever.
Some prayers may well be read by the unbeliever as poems. The great Psalm, the
De profund is, 19 speaks to the human condition whether or not one is a believer but the
non-believer who reads it must radically reinterpret the One who is addressed. For the
non-believer Yahweh is a powerf..tl myth or symbol expressing something of what it
is to be human; not the reality that He is for the believer.
The distinction I am making is not quite the same as Rush Rhees' distinction
between "the believer who worships and the sceptic who goes through the form of
worship" 20 There, as he says, the difference is that "the believer is committing himself
by what he says and does, whereas the sceptic is not." 21 That difference remains
between the believer and the non-believer who reads the Psalm as a poem; or perhaps
it would be better to say that a different kind of committment is involved in each case.
The non-believer here is not going through the form of worship; he is not engaged in
worship at all. The sceptic, in Rush Rhees analysis, cannot think what the believer
thinks but does consider that the difference matters; the non-believing reader eliminates
the importance of the reality of Yahweh by transposing Him into a deep, moving, and
significant symbol, but a symbol of the human.
What if someone were to say that he could understand someone going through the
motions of worship or prayer - for social reasons, for example - saying the words
without meaning them but that he could not understand someone using the prayer as
a poem? One might say this because he made no sense of poetry or because he made
no sense of using this particular text as a poem. And someone who, without believing,
did use the text as a poem would have to try to say how the words were used. Perhaps
he would say that the poem is about despair and hope: the despair that humans often
388 GARRETT BARDEN
feel, perhaps more often when much of their life has been run, when faced with their
unalterable past and its sometimes awful consequences. None can look back and think
that the lives of others have been only improved by his actions; we at least at times face
our iniquities and their consequences and can feel with the Psalmist:
If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, 0 Lord, who shall stand? 22
Read as a poem, the psalm is the virtual form of a moral action or attitude; in the
language-game of a particular religion, 23 it is not the moral act itself. What is the poetic
reading of the psalm? When the psalm is read as a poem, how are the words used?
Are they used as the moral act of reflection on one's past or as the virtual form of that
reflection, as a method of contemplating that moral action yet not the action? If the
poetic reading is a way of contemplating the moral action, as I think it is, then as well
as the religious use of the psalm, there is the sceptical use, the poetic use and the
directly moral use. 24 These uses, even if related, are not identical.
Read as a poem, the words of the psalm are used to allow the reader to contemplate
a moral action through the creation of an illusory or virtual event. The poetic reader,
rather than engage in the moral action expressed, contemplates it. The reader is, of
course, engaged in the moral act of reading poetically but this is quite distinct and very
different from the act manifested in the psalm and it is this act of reading poetically that
is studied by Susanne Langer? 5
Read poetically, the dramatic speaker within the psalm is an element in the poetic
illusion. The reader contemplates the speaker speaking to his addressee who is,
likewise, an element in the poetic illusion.
Still, even within poetic reading there will be, no doubt, some distinction between
believer and unbeliever. But it is important to note that both can read the psalm poeti-
cally. What of a directly moral reading? The shift from a poetic to a moral reading is
precisely a shift from the poetic contemplation of an illusory moral act to engagement
in that act. The moral reader takes the words of the psalm as his own. He, with these
borrowed words, engages in his own moral action. He no longer poetically contem-
plates the moral action but is engaged in it. Compare how we learn to express our
thanks. We are taught to say "Thank you" but when we say these words - and they are,
so to speak, borrowed from the existing language - we engage in the moral action
"being grateful and expressing gratitude" unless we don't mean what we say and then,
exactly like the sceptic "who merely goes through the form of worship," we do not
commit ourselves. We have not done with the words what we seemed to be doing with
them.
The genuine direct moral reader, or user, of the psalm, then, commits himself. Now
a distinction between the believing moral actor and the non-believing moral actor
emerges sharply. The non-believer cannot fully use the words. He can acknowledge
his iniquities but he cannot address Yahweh. Neither can he do anything but address
Yahweh because, in the psalm, human iniquities are not simply evils between humans
-although between humans- they are between humans and Yahweh. The non-
believing moral actor cannot think of his iniquities as the psalmist thinks of them and
so, however initially appropriate the words of the psalm may have seemed to him, in
the final analysis they must fail him and he must look for others. He cannot think of
himself as the speaker of the psalm for that speaker experiences himself in relation to
Yahweh. 26 He cannot, in the end, use the psalm as he knows the psalm is meant to be
used.
He "cannot." It is not merely that he "will not." He is not playing, and cannot play,
the game in which the psalm makes complete sense. "In one sense we may say that the
sceptic can understand a good deal of religion. That is why he may be able to discuss
it. But I repeat that I think that, in one sense, his chief trouble is that he does not
understand, in the sense that he just cannot think anything of the sort.'m What I am
suggesting here is not that the non-believer understands how to use the psalm but does
not choose to use it that way; it is rather that, because he does not believe, he does not
understand how to play that game. The non-believer cannot be now the speaker of the
psalm. Perhaps one who once believed and now does not is in a different case.
The believer, on the other hand, can borrow the psalm completely. He shares with
the non-believer the sense of failure, inadequacy, and finitude but he does so within the
context, tradition or language-game within which the psalm is written. His religion is
developed and expressed in the traditions of that language-game. He can speak the
words entirely in his own voice for the words express a commitment that he can give.
This is not only the moral commitment that he shares with the non-believer but the
commitment to the entire game and so to a particular way of understanding reality.
This understanding is not complete even if one of the temptations peculiar to religion
is to think that it is; none the less, it is an understanding of reality radically different to
that of the non-believer.
The particular way of understanding the world is a particular way of being in the
world; being able to play a particular language-game is both a way of understanding
and a way of being in the world. Consider the fifth and sixth verses of the De
profundis:
I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his word do I hope.
My soul waiteth for the Lord more than they that watch for the morning:
I say more than they that watch for the morning.
Here the believer is engaged in an action that, I think, has only a metaphorical
connection with any possible action that the non-believer could undertake. Again in
these verses the words do not describe what the one who prays is doing as if he had
done something and is now describing the action, as I might now say that I am writing
an essay or typing on a word-processor. It is rather that with these words I perform the
action that they describe. 28 The words are very ordinary. Everyone knows what it
means to wait. With some more difficulty, and the difficulty is not religious but
cultural, one can understand what it means to wait more than they that watch for the
morning. 29 But what does it mean to wait for the Lord? I suggest that this can be
known only to those who do it although they know it experientially and, for the most
part, not technically. As Cyril Barrett has it in the article already referred to: " ... this
wonder can be felt and experienced by the simplest person who might never be able to
express and articulate it in the manner of Aquinas.'' 30 To "feel and experience this
wonder " is simply "to wonder in this way" or "to know this wonder experientially.''31
Thus, when the believer recites the fifth and sixth verses religiously he knows experien-
tially what he is doing; knows experientially what it means to wait for the Lord; knows
this because this is what he is doing. He is present to himself as waiting for the Lord. 32
The believer does not know technically what he is doing; he cannot, merely because
he prays, express and articulate it in the manner of Aquinas or in any other
philosophical tradition. But, and this is what is cardinal, what he undergoes when he
prays is what he may try to express and articulate philosophically. In the absence of
390 GARRETI BARDEN
that experience there is nothing for him to investigate, nothing for him to express and
articulate. 33
There is nothing peculiar about the philosophy of religion that demands this
experiential base. One who understands nothing of mathematics has not the
experiential base from which to begin his philosophical enquiry into mathematics; one
who cannot read poetry has not the experiential base from which to pursue the
philosophical effort to understand the act of poetic reading; one, if there be such a one
which I doubt, who has never felt a demand to act responsibly lacks the experience on
which to base his reflections on moral action. He will necessarily and utterly fail to
understand moral action. The same is true of religion. But between, on the one hand,
mathematics and, on the other hand, responsible action and religion, there is this
difference. Someone of normal intelligence in our culture can, ifhe wishes, learn some
mathematics without committing himself as a whole; he can, however odd it might be
thought, take up mathematics only in order to study the philosophy ofmathematics. 34
But one cannot take up responsible action only in order to study it. One cannot take
up religion only in order to study it. For both forms oflife demand a commitment that
to undertake for some extrinsic reason only would so contaminate it as to render it
futile and void. That personal commitment is intrinsic to the both forms of life. It is not
that one should not take them up for this reason; because of the kind of game they are,
one cannot.
University College Cork, Ireland
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I should like to thank Cyril Barrett S.J. of Oxford and William Desmond ofLeuven who kindly
discussed several attempts to deal with the question asked in this essay.
NOTES
"Who Can Think the Philosophy of Religion?" Leuven, December, 1998.
2 Patrick A. Heelan, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity: A Study of the Physical Philosophy of Werner
Heisenberg (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1965).
3 Not exclusively even in recent times. Cf. Buber, Collingwood, Levinas, Lonergan, Marcel, Nedoncelle,
Unamuno, Wittgenstein ... but still the dominant bias persists.
4 Bernard J. Lonergan, Philosophy of God, and Theology (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1973),
remarks that ".there is no difficulty about theologians in a theology department reflecting on specifically
Christian religious experience but there would be some difficulty in asking philosophers in a philosophy
department to reflect on specifically Christian religious experience." 13-14. The burden of this essay is that
if philosophers are to attempt a philosophy of religion, they must reflect on some religious experience; it may
be Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Sikh.... Whether or not there is a religious experience utterly unrelated
to any religious tradition is a serious question that is not faced here. Sufficient for the moment to note that
there is no religious experience utterly unrelated to any cultural tradition since the experiencing subject is
inevitably a cultural subject. Compare: a linguistic experience utterly unrelated to any language.
5 Furthermore, if the attempt to find a proof of God's existence is philosophical, it should be noticed that
there are several 'philosophies' within which proofs are considered and several philosophers by whom they
are considered. Consequently, the entire programme is considerably more uncertain, ambiguous and hazy
than might, at first sight, be imagined. Cf. Lonergan, Philosophy of God, and Theology, 11-14, and R. G.
Collingwood's early work, Religion and Philosophy (London: Oxford University Press, I 916), 59-71.
Cf. Leszek Kolakowski, Religion (London: Fontana, 1982), 75. See Lonergan's Philosophy ofGod, and
Theology remark on an incongruity in Insight where the proof of the existence of God makes "no appeal to
religious experience" while, in contrast, "my cognitional theory was based on a long and methodical appeal
to experience," 12. That there exist different contexts is widely recognized; that questions arise as to how
they are related is less commonly accepted.
7 Patrick A. Heelan, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1983), 2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his review of Gabriel Marcel's Etre etA voir remarks that Marcel
makes clear that philosophical enquiry is into the actions - among others he mentions prayer - that the
enquirer is engaged in. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Review in La Vie Intellectuelle, Paris, Vol. XLV (1936): 98-109.
This is true also of Bergson (cf. Barden, "Method in Philosophy" in John Mullarkey, ed., The New Bergson,
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 32-40.
8 Cf. Rush Rhees in D. Z. Phillips, ed., Rush-Rhees on Religion and Philosophy (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), I 21.
9 Pascal's distinction is not the end of the matter. The religious person in Judaism, Christianity or Islam
prays to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and, qua religious person, presupposes in religious practice
the reality of God but raises neither the philosophical question about God's existence nor the philosophical
question of the relationship between, say, the Being that accounts for the ultimate intelligibility of the
universe, and the God to whom prayers are addressed. Cf. D. Cyril Barrett, S.J., "The Usefulness of God,"
Milltown Studies, 41 (1998): 23-34, esp. 30-31.
10 What is common is the question not any solution to it. It is sometimes suggested that a common
conclusion is the rejection of truth and the espousal of a more or less radical relativism that is taken to be the
only solution to the questions raised by the acknowledgement of different language-games or contexts. That
there are different contexts or language-games and that serious questions arise as to how they are related is
clearly so; that the answer to these questions is radical relativism is, I think, deeply mistaken, that is, it is a
deep, not a superficial, error. Cf. Barden, "Insight and Mirrors," Method, Los Angeles, Vol. 4, No.2 (1986):
85-104, and Barden, After Principles (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990).
11 In fact, few face the issue squarely. The question as to the influence of the male imagination on the course
of Western Philosophy is raised in some feminist writings.
12 Compare the common discussions of proofs of the existence of God with this remark of John Henry
Newman: "Begin again. I am not to draw out a proof of the being of God, but the mode in which practically
an individual believes in it." Quoted in a paper by Michael Paul Gallagher given at the Lonergan Centre,
Milltown Park, Dublin, on the 3 I st March 2000. Here there is the suggestion that accepting or rejecting
God's existence within "philosophical discourse" has an existential character that is absent from accepting
or rejecting other philosophical positions. In the end, Newman does not confine this existential influence to
questions of God and religious committment. To be context and subject independent is, I think, what many
seem to mean by "objective." The issue of context limitation and subject bias is raised in some feminist
discussions of philosophical enquiry and is a crucial and recurrent theme in Lonergan's discussions of
philosophical understanding and judgement.
13 On prayers being heard and answered, see John Dowling, A Philosophy ofReligious Experience (Dublin:
Oscail, 1999), Ch. 12, 13-21.

14 I am not suggesting that, psychologically, the only way to make sense of life is by reference to God nor
that any way of making sense of life that includes reference to God is, by that fact alone, satisfactory. Nor
do I deny that popular readings of basic science may be used to this end. In a popular reading, for example,
evolutionary theory may be used in a variety of ways to explain the purpose of life but basic science discovers
no purpose.
15 Rush Rhees, 205 and Dowling, Ch. 10.
16 Goldbach, in the eighteenth century, made this conjecture in a letter to Euler. Neither an exception to it,
nor a proof of it, has been found.
17 Henri Bergson repeatedly writes ofteaching as bringing the student to perform the experiment for himself;
to understand a mathematical proof is to be able to follow it. See my "Method in Philosophy" in John
Mullarkey (ed.), The New Bergson.
19 Psalm 130; some editions 129.
20 Rush Rhees, 199.
21 Ibid.
22 Psalm 130, verse 3 [King James Version] Another translation reads: If thou wilt keep record of our
iniquities, Lord, who has the strength to bear it? The translation from The Jerusalem Bible reads: If you never
overlooked our sins, Yahweh I Lord, could anyone survive?
392 GARRETT BARDEN
23 On the idea of"virtual form," see Suzanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1953).
24 The relationship between literature as the virtual form of moral action and moral action itself is a recurrent
theme in the writings of George Steiner.

25 Langer, Feeling and Form, 219 "Now, all this analysis is not intended as an exercise in the New Criticism,
but merely to show that all poetry is a creation of illusory events, even when it looks like a statement of
opinions, philosophical or political or aesthetic" or, one might add, religious or moral. In Langer's work, as
here, the term "illusion" and its cognates is, clearly, not derogatory.
26 The suggestion here is not that the religious reader experiences Yahweh but that he is present to himself
as one related to Yahweh. Compare how we remember absent friends. See on this Dowling, Ch. 9, and
Raymond Moloney, "The Person as Subject of Spirituality in the Writings of Bernard Lonergan," Milltown
Studies, No. 45 (2000): 66-80, 75.
27 Rhees, 198.
28 The allusion to John Austin is clear but the range is enlarged. Prayer is one of the things we do with
words. But note that we do things with the words only when we mean them, only when we use them in a
certain way. To promise, that is to utter a promise, without meaning what one says is not to promise. To
pray sceptically is not to pray.
29 Those that watch anxiously for the morning are shepherds for whom the night brings danger to their
animals and for whom the coming of morning brings greater safety.
30 Barrett, "The Usefulness of God," 31.
31 On the distinction between "experiential knowledge" and "technical knowledge" see Aquinas' discussion
of the mind's knowledge of itself [Summa Theologiae, I ques. 87 a.l], Lonergan, "Cognitional Structure" in
F. E. Crowe, ed., Collection (London: Darton, Longaman and Todd, 1967), esp., 226-227, and Wittgenstein's
discussion of being in pain. Wittgenstein claims that the person in pain does not 'know' that he is in pain;
what he means is that the person in pain does not know this by observing his own behaviour; obviously, he
does not want to deny that the person is aware that he is in pain; he means that being in pain and being aware
of this are the same thing.
32 This is sometimes what Bergson has in mind when he writes of intuition. See particularly his letter to A.
A. Mitchell [Melanges, p.l 030-31] and my forthcoming "Creative Freedom" [Proceedings of the Bergson
Conference, Longhirst, April 2000].
13 A recent essay by Moloney (cited above) can serve as an experiment. His essay is an effort to express and
articulate philosophically the nature of religious experience. I think that a reading of this essay would incline
the reader to agree that the author was trying to express and articulate an experience that he had undergone
and would likewise incline the reader to the view that Moloney's meaning would be beyond him could he not
refer to his own experience. I do not suggest that, because the author attempts to express and articulate his
own experience, that he is correct or adequate; one might want to disagree with Moloney or to add to his
account. One might, for example, reject his philosophy. To pray does not require prior philosophical purity.
My assertion is simply that Moloney is writing of something rather than nothing; that what he is writing about
is an experience that he has undergone, that his account cannot be adequately understood or assessed by a
reader who has not undergone that experience.
34 To decide to study mathematics and to implement that decision is, of course, a moral act. Thus, to avoid
the moral dimension of living is not possible. But, whereas one can decide to study mathematics in order to
study the philosophy of mathematics, it is not possible to decide to act responsibly only in order to study the
philosophy of responsible action. To pretend to commit oneself is not to commit oneself. How does one
pretend to oneself? Self-deception?
THOMAS J. J. ALTIZER
VAN GOGH'S EYES

In Honor ofPatrick A. Heelan
Vincent van Gogh is surely the most sacred painter of the late modem world, and his
impact has been truly universal, thereby establishing Van Gogh as a truly unique artist,
but also, and inescapably for us, a unique saint. While sanctity can rarely be
recognized in the true artist, it would appear to be undeniable in Van Gogh, perhaps the
most humble of modem artists, yet also the most fiercely independent. Passion
dominated Van Gogh, even to the point of madness, self-mutilation, and suicide, for
it is the deeply passionate Van Gogh who gave us our greatest self-portraits since
Rembrandt, and no other artist has revealed so much about himself in his work.
Perhaps his eyes are here most self-revealing, and even as he could affirm that he
preferred painting eyes to cathedrals, the eyes of his greatest self-portraits unveil a truly
new cathedral, a cathedral of a new world, a new totality uniting the sacred and the
profane, or eternity and the here and now, or flesh and Spirit. Although Van Gogh is
the deepest of modem Calvinists, he is also a truly new Catholic artist, yet here the
"natural" and the "supernatural," or nature and grace, are simply indistinguishable, as
he called forth not only a truly new nature, but a truly new grace, and a truly embodied
grace, one embodied in the depths of body itself. These are the depths which are most
openly embodied in Van Gogh's eyes, eyes revealing the deepest abyss, but an abyss
which is finally a transfiguring abyss, one here not only deeply envisioned, but deeply
embodied as well.
Van Gogh could respond to his last self-portrait painted in Paris as the very face of
death, but this is a new face of death, a death which is truly universal and truly unique
at once, and one here centered upon the artist's eyes, eyes that are a center and a
periphery simultaneously, enclosing their viewer within this vision, and if this is a
vision of the face of death, this is a face which here becomes our own. Although his
artistic odyssey lasted only a decade, and underwent deep transformations, this is an
odyssey which can be understood as a voyage to death, and as a voyage to a new death,
a death that is a primal or sacred death, and yet one occurring in our own immediate
actuality. A genuine encounter with a Van Gogh self-portrait, dissolves every true
passivity in the face of death, then death ceases to be an actuality which one has never
known, as death truly becomes our own, but in becoming our own, death as death is
transfigured. Then it is present as life itself, a life embodied in these eyes, and if these
393
394 THOMAS J. J. ALTIZER
are eyes of the face of death, these eyes even thereby are dazzlingly present, and
present not only as the center of this vision, but as the periphery or horizon of a totality
of death, but a totality thereby truly embodied, and embodied in these self-portraits.
Such an embodiment could only be a transfiguring embodiment, now life and death are
truly indistinguishable, for death in being truly embodied, thereby ceases to be death
alone, ceases to be a sheer nothingness, but becomes instead an embodied nothingness
or an embodied death, and thus a death actually occurring, and actually occurring in
these self-portraits.
As opposed to a Rembrandt self-portrait, the eyes of Van Gogh's self-portraits are
not truly a center of these paintings, or, insofar as they are a center, this is a center truly
and fully united with its periphery. Here the canvas as a whole becomes an embodiment
of these eyes, and these are eyes which see at every point within this startlingly new
field, for now the eye itself is not only inseparable but indistinguishable from its
horizon of vision. Van Gogh could even be said to have anticipated quantum physics,
at least insofar as that revolutionary new physics dissolves the boundary between the
observer and the observed, and yet while quantum physics destroys all possibility of
visualization, Van Gogh's mature painting fully envisions a new totality in which
subject and object are indistinguishable, and while this had already occurred in
Impressionism, this is a revolutionary movement which is not truly fulfilled until Van
Gogh, unless it also occurs simultaneously in Cezanne. Just as Renaissance painting
anticipated seventeenth century physics, it is fully possible that modem painting
anticipated twentieth century physics, and at no point is this so clear as it is in the
revolutionary transformation of the subject that here occurs, a subject now truly ceasing
to be an interior and individual subject, but that very perishing releases a new totality
or a new world, a world only made possible by this perishing, and thus a world
inseparable from the dissolution or death of the truly interior subject.
It must never be forgotten that Van Gogh alone among our great painters was a
preacher of the Gospel, but this does not cease when he fully becomes a painter, it
becomes profoundly deeper, and while Van Gogh ever more fully distanced himself
from all ecclesiastical Christianity, and could even believe in the advent of a new
religion, one altogether new and which will have no name (Letter 542, 9/25-26, 88),
he surely created an iconography for this new religion, and above all so in his final
painting. Wheat Field with Crows, painted shortly before his suicide, is perhaps his
greatest painting, and surely his most purely sacred work, it certainly embodies a new
iconography, one in which the traditional icon is truly reversed, as the ecstatic light of
this field is inseparable from the dark abyss of these heavens. The very blackness of
these crows seemingly resists every fragment of this ecstatic light, and even as the
wheat is bending away from us, the crows are flying towards us, but these seemingly
contrary movements are in deep harmony with one another, for just as this field and
this sky are inseparable, the crows and the field are inseparable, and not only
inseparable, but finally indistinguishable, and indistinguishable if only because of the
ecstasy which they embody.
If only because of this ecstasy we can respond to these crows as eyes, eyes which
see in our own when we are caught up in this ecstatic moment, then the very blackness
of the crows captures the darkness of death, but now death is the very opposite of all
possible passivity, and is ecstatically present, a presence releasing truly new eyes, eyes
which now see the fullness and the finality of death itself. Here, that finality is an
VAN GOGH'S EYES 395
ecstatic finality, and one which we actually see, but we do so only with new eyes, and
if these are the eyes of Van Gogh, they are eyes that are given us in this painting, eyes
which may be understood as a consummation of Van Gogh's work, but eyes which
perhaps impelled that suicide which almost immediately followed the completion of
this painting, a suicide seemingly occurring even here, and one which we enact in fully
responding to this painting.
Certainly this is a sanctification of darkness, and of the deepest darkness and the
deepest abyss, and precisely thereby darkness finally becomes indistinguishable from
light, and while these crows are darkness and darkness alone, now such darkness
becomes light itself, and does so in that ultimate turbulence which is here released, a
turbulence which is chaos itself, but now a truly sanctioned or holy chaos. If the
sanctification of evil is the deepest of all our prohibitions, so, too, is a genuine
sanctification of darkness, and if that occurs in this painting, it does so with a full
clarity that overwhelms us, for if darkness now is truly light itself, this is a light that is
indistinguishable from darkness, and is so in the very fullness of vision which is here
at hand. Now our eyes not only truly see darkness, but become transfigured in that
very seeing, and if this is an ecstatic transfiguration, releasing a truly new joy, this is
a joy inseparable from the depths of darkness and abyss, but now abyss is a
transfigured abyss, and one transfigured in a truly new seeing, and a seeing in which
our eyes become the very eyes of abyss. So that if Van Gogh's eyes are the eyes of the
depths of abyss, they are eyes not only in which we actually see the depths of abyss,
but see these depths with the very eye of abyss itself. That is an eye which our
traditional iconography could know as the very eye of God, but that is an eye of
absolute light, whereas this eye is an eye of absolute darkness, but an absolute darkness
that here is transfigured into an absolute light.
Now if the eye of God is the deep and ultimate center of all ancient Christian
iconography, an eye symbolizing and even embodying an absolute omniscience, and
an absolute omniscience which is an absolute omnipotence, this eye is neither abated
nor dissolved in Van Gogh's mature painting, it is far rather transfigured, and even
absolutely transfigured, and now there is no distinction whatsoever between the seer
and the seen. Thus we can see this wheat field as the very Body of God, but its glory
is inseparable from the dark and abysmal sky which is its ground, and the crows are not
simply intermediaries between the sky and the field, not simply messengers whether
heavenly or demonic, but enactors of this glory, enactors who can be understood as the
eye or the Eye of God, but now an eye that is not only an omniscient eye, but an
ubiquitous eye, and hence an eye seeing in our own. This is the deep goal and even
ground of Byzantine iconography, one deeply forbidden or abated in Western Christian
iconography, and if it is an Eastern and not a Western iconography that is resurrected
by Van Gogh, this is a resurrection inseparable from a deep Protestant or Calvinist
ground, an absolutely iconoclastic ground, so that here a pure iconography and a pure
iconoclasm are not simply conjoined, but truly united, and united so that each is
inseparable and even indistinguishable from the other. Only in Van Gogh does such
a fully visual coincidentia oppositorum occur, unless it also occurs in Cezanne, and
nowhere is this occurrence so luminous as it is in Wheat Field with Crows, a painting
whose absolute sacrality is indistinguishable from its absolute profanity, or whose
absolute light is indistinguishable from absolute darkness. 1
Of course, such a movement is not confined to Van Gogh, for something truly
parallel to it universally occurs throughout all genuinely modem art, with the result that
all traditional iconography disappears in modem art, and the traditional icon is now
only manifest as a pale and empty vessel, one stripped of every power except for a
dehumanizing passivity, and even the traditional icons in Van Gogh's painting can
stand forth only insofar as they embody their very opposite, so that here an absolute
transformation of art has occurred, and one whose only apparent parallel occurs in the
birth of Christianity. Christianity is the only religion in the world which historically
triumphed by effecting a pure negation and reversal of a visionary world, and this even
occurs in the very birth of Christian art, for although that art is a continuation of
classical and Hellenistic art, it only evolves by actually reversing that art. While there
is no full Christian art until Byzantine art, Byzantine art is far more Eastern than
classical, and was itself transcended and reversed in the West by the triumphant advent
of Gothic art. Early Christian art is striking not simply because of its return to a pre-
classical style, but also because of its crudity and fragility, a crudity not only deriving
from a loss of clarity, but more deeply from a literalization of symbolism wherein the
symbol becomes little more than a sign. After the advent of Christianity, full painting
and sculpture do not appear in the West for a thousand years, and therefore if only
artistically Christianity can be identified as the most powerful counterrevolution in
history, and the art which it negated was the highest and purest visual art which had
until then been realized in the world.
It is not impossible to understand Van Gogh as an inheriter of this counter-
revolution, but only insofar as he embodies its opposite, and just as Van Gogh cannot
be understood apart from Christianity, he also cannot be understood apart from a
negation of Christianity, and this in an Hegelian sense, for this is a negation which
preserves and transcends that which it negates. Above all this is true of Van Gogh's
negation of the Christian God, a negation of God which is certainly not a dissolution
of God, but far rather a reversal of God, and most clearly a reversal of every established
or manifest icon of God, as the Eye of God is now truly reversed, and reversed by way
of a passage into its very opposite. Hence if we can actually see the Body of God in
Wheat Field with Crows, and see that Body through the very Eye of God, this is an eye
which is a truly reverse eye, an eye reversing that absolute light which is manifest as
the primal or primordial Eye of God, and reversing it so as to call forth its absolute
opposite, that absolute darkness which could only be the opposite of absolute light, and
thus the true opposite of primordial Godhead itself. While Gnosticism can know the
absolute darkness of the Creator, it cannot know the darkness of Godhead itself, that
is a darkness which is only actually manifest with the birth of the modem world, a birth
that is consummated in Van Gogh, for Van Gogh was the first painter fully to envision
the absolute darkness of Godhead itself.
Certainly Van Gogh truly revolutionized Christian iconography, and therefore
revolutionized the Christian vision of God, but despite the deep conservatism of
Christian theological traditions, the Christian vision of God from its very beginning had
been truly revolutionary, clearly revolutionary from the perspective of the ancient
world, and even revolutionary from the perspective of Torah itself, as most clearly
manifest in Paul and the Fourth Gospel. Not until the advent of Christianity is an
absolute transcendence called forth in thinking itself, as for the first time infinity is
actually thought, an infinity wholly alien to Greek philosophical thinking, so that Philo
could inaugurate scholastic philosophy by thinking infinity, a scholastic philosophy
VAN GOGH'S EYES 397
which does not truly end until Spinoza, and ends by way of a conceptual identification
of infinity and finitude. Spinoza's revolutionary thinking is thereby a decisive way into
the revolutionary painting of Van Gogh, but neither Spinoza nor Van Gogh can be
understood apart from understanding a revolutionary transformation not simply of a
given and ancient tradition, but a revolutionary transformation of a tradition which
itself was profoundly revolutionary in its original ground, and most clearly
revolutionary in its understanding and vision of God.
Now it is just by understanding that Christianity was truly revolutionary in its

original vision of God that we can be prepared for the possibility that a revolutionary
transformation of that ground could be in genuine continuity with an original
Christianity, and far more deeply so than what in modernity has become manifest as
orthodox Christianity, an orthodox Christianity that unlike its historical precedents has
ceased to evolve, and not only ceased to evolve but become ever more static and
lifeless, as most clearly manifest in its imaginative expressions, and at no other point
is there such an overwhelming gulf between a fully modem Christianity and pre-
modem Christianity. Surely the end of Christendom has issued in the end of Christian
art, or the end of an orthodox Christian art, or even the end of an art that is
recognizably Christian, unless we recognize the deeply Christian ground of a Van
Gogh, but doing so entails the acceptance of the possibility that a revolutionary
transformation of Christian art could itself be deeply Christian, and perhaps most
deeply Christian precisely in that transformation. Just as an original Christianity truly
transcended if it did not end the ancient world, a revolutionary transformation of
Christianity could both transcend and end the Christian world, or end that Christian
world which is openly manifest as a Christian world.
Van Gogh's self-portraits not only deeply reveal himself, but make manifest a new
center of consciousness, a center deeply dissolving or reversing itself, but this is a
reversal not only of a center of consciousness, but of a unique center of consciousness,
one with its own deep history, an integral history comprehending almost three thousand
years of historical evolution. We can actually see this history in the evolution of art,
an evolution revolving about a visual revolution, one which occurred in ancient Greece,
as most clearly manifest in the birth and evolution of a uniquely Greek sculpture. Not
until this revolution does the human face fully and decisively appear in art, one
paralleling the advent of a truly integral and individual human voice in the Homeric
epics, each of these breakthroughs was grounded in the ending of an archaic world, one
which can be understood as an axial revolution occurring throughout the world, or
throughout the deepest centers of the ancient world. Ionia, a Greek colony in Asia
minor, and thus the crossroads between two worlds, was both the birthplace of Greek
philosophy and an original site of a truly new and revolutionary art, and there, on the
island of Samos, we can almost see the birth of Greek sculpture, one occurring in the
Hera of Samos, a marble sculpture of the sixth century, and a sculpture in which a
column seemingly undergoes a metamorphosis into a woman. But this is a woman
whose grace and dignity is itself a temple, a temple both sacred and profane, or fully
divine and yet wholly human, as a new and vibrant humanity is drawn forth from an
archaic Gate of Hom.
The great discovery of Greek art in the sixth century was of the statue as an integral
and individual organism, an organism embodying and realizing its own world, a world
which is at once both truly individual and unique, and yet a world organically calling
forth a universal cosmos in its own center of space. By the time of the Apollo of
Piombino (circa 500 BCE), Greek sculpture is almost finally born, as the individual
stands forth in his full presence, and Apollo, the most uniquely Greek of the Olympian
deities, is present to us as deity and humanity at once, a god still bearing discrete signs
of his archaic origin, but standing before us with a full individual identity, as deity itself
undergoes a metamorphosis into a fully human form. A world or cosmos of dawning
light here encompasses us, a light embodying a new world, and one now present as
body itself, a new body which had never hitherto been manifest, and an organic body
which is an integral whole, a whole in which head and torso are one, and in which face
is body and body is face. Here face knows a repose which never previously had
appeared in art, a repose anticipated by the Cycladic heads of the late third millennium,
but those heads and all of their archaic counterparts are faceless, whereas the face of
this Apollo is truly face, even if it is a face which is interior and exterior
simultaneously, a face in which body and soul are one. Apollo can truly be seen as the
Olympian deity he is only when we see as and through Apollo himself, then we see not
only his eyes, but see with and through them as well, and openly to behold these eyes
is to be drawn into a pure moment of Olympian calm, then light is everywhere, and
vision is all encompassing.
The organic fullness and absolute clarity of this new sculpture truly engulf~ us, and
we are ecstatically awakened, as though resurrected from the dead, truly awakened by
the birth of ourselves as an incarnate perception, an organic perception which is the full
actuality of a bodily energeia, an energeia that is truly bodily and truly divine at once.
Nowhere else in the world has such a perception ever been manifest, for an integral and
organic fullness of visual and bodily presence lasted but a moment in history,
nevertheless, it is possible to speak of an evolutionary metamorphosis of this incarnate
moment, a transformation wherein bodily presence passes from the without to the
within, or passes from a presence which is exterior and interior simultaneously, to a
presence where the without appears within, and appears so as to give full expression
to an integral and organic face. The fourth century was the great period of portraiture
in the ancient world, not until then do faces appear which are truly and uniquely
individual, a possibility only established when face has realized a genuine distance
from torso or body, as a face appears which is face alone, and therefore a face which
has lost an integral union or harmony with body. Therein face stands forth so as to
establish a new perspective, wherein the subject of consciousness stands forth so as to
encounter a new object of vision, a new object which is mirrored in the new
prominence which is now given in portraiture to the eyes.
The advent of the individual face in art does not occur until the third millennium
BCE, this happens with the birth of the statue in Sumeria, and nothing is more forceful
here than the subject's eyes, eyes which are consumed by the deity which they behold,
for here the eyes are the very embodiment of face, and a face that is a face only by way
of its reflection of its god, before whom face as face itself is faceless. This is the deep
tradition that was shattered by the advent of Greek art, but a tradition to which Greek
art seemingly returns in its very consummation or ending, and if this occurs by way of
a deep interiorization of vision, the center of consciousness passes within body itself,
thereby establishing a real distance between body and consciousness, as a previous
harmony between body and consciousness ever more progressively becomes disrupted
VAN GOGH'S EYES 399
and annulled. Nothing more fully embodies this disruption than the new autonomy of
the eyes in Hellenistic sculpture, eyes which are perhaps most fully manifest in the
Bronze Portrait of "Lucius Junius Brutus," nowhere else in ancient art is such an
intense inner life so fully manifest in portraiture, one here centered in the eyes, and
these eyes shine forth from an interior ground that is far distant from the face that is
here manifest, thereby giving witness to the birth of a truly new immanent distance, an
immanent distance that becomes totally other with the birth of Christianity.
While it is extraordinarily difficult if not impossible to establish any genuine
continuity between Greek art and Christian art, there is a deep parallel between Greek
portraiture and Christian portraiture, and one far deeper in late medieval Western art
than in Byzantine art, and one above all manifest in the Gothic revolution of art, which
gave us perhaps the most revolutionary of all painters in Giotto. Only in Gothic
painting is Christ portrayed as being simultaneously fully human and fully divine, and
even if this simultaneity is the dogmatic center of Christianity, it is one which has never
fully or even actually been understood theologically, and only in painting has it clearly
and decisively been called forth, a painting most purely realized by Giotto, and most
ecstatically realized by Giotto in the Scrovegni Chapel frescoes. These frescoes created
the Christian epic tradition, one here centered in the life of Christ, and not only is this
the first full portrayal of the life of Christ, a life enacted through a gallery of fully
human figures, who for the first time in Christian art are portrayed as fully individual
figures, but these truly individual figures comprise a unitary cosmos, and one which is
centered in the integral movement and the full actuality of Christ. Yet this is a
revolutionary Christ, as a traditional iconographic isolation of Christ ends in these
paintings, and here the epiphany of Christ does not occur in Heaven as it does in
Byzantine and Romanesque painting, but rather on earth, and for the first time in
Christian painting the world itself stands forth as a truly real and absolutely actual
world. Giotto is the supreme painter of the Incarnation, and thereby occurs the
imaginative realization of an absolutely new world, a world which parallels the cosmos
of Greek sculpture, and does so most clearly in the portraiture of the Scrovegni Chapel
frescoes, but these frescoes are the very opposite of the ecstatic moment of Greek
sculpture, and are so if only because of their deep and integral movement, a movement
which is an ecstatic celebration of the absolute sacrifice of Christ, one realized here in
every truly human center, and realized in the full individuality of these centers, centers
which are finally centers of Christ and of Christ alone.
Surely there is a genuine continuity between Giotto and Van Gogh, as most clearly
manifest in that ecstatic world which they both portray, but a profound transformation
of portraiture occurs between Giotto and Van Gogh, as iconographically manifest in
the evolution which here occurs of portraits of Christ, a Christ who ever more fully
becomes a human and only human Christ, until finally seemingly disappearing
altogether from our imaginative horizon. But this evolution is not unrelated to the deep
transformation of portraiture itself in modem painting, moving from the absolute
depths of Rembrandt to the absolute surface of cubist and abstract painting, and
nowhere is this clearer than in portraits of the human eye, an eye moving from the deep
center to the deep periphery of modem painting, and an eye transformed from a
uniquely human eye to a truly chaotic or a truly abstract eye, a transformation which
also can be understood as an iconographic transformation, as luminously manifest in
that ultimate movement occurring between Rembrandt and Van Gogh. Perhaps only
Rembrandt among our classical artists had a profound impact upon Van Gogh, and if
it is possible to understand Van Gogh as a reborn Rembrandt, this is a rebirth occurring
at the end of that modernity of which Rembrandt was one of the deep creators, thus this
is a rebirth which is inevitably a reversal of the birth of modernity, hence a reversal of
the "I" or "eye" of modernity, and one most clearly occurring in painting itself, and
here most clearly occurring in the eyes of Van Gogh.
Although profoundly veiled in Rembrandt's self-portraits, a deeply and uniquely
modem eye or "I" is ultimately the Eye of God, here is an absolute pride which even
Augustine could not imagine, just as it is truly alien to Dante, but it is foreshadowed
in Giotto's eyes, eyes which in the Scrovegeni Chapel frescoes are most deeply the
eyes of Christ, and it is also foreshadowed in the highest moments of Greek sculpture
when the face of deity is manifest as the face of humanity, here is a deep iconographic
tradition which while alien to the theological mind is manifest for all to see, and just
as a Meister Eckhart could know the depths of every "I" as the depths of Godhead
itself, these are depths which are fully released in a uniquely modem iconography, and
become manifest for all to see in the self-portraits of Van Gogh. If Wheat Field with
Crows is the greatest of these self-portraits, here we not only see the Eye of God, and
see it as totality itself, but we see with and through the Eye of God, and even if the eye
has now perished as a solitary eye, just as the "I'' has perished as an interior "1," it is
this very perishing which releases the totality of this Eye. But the very enactment of
this Eye, and its ecstatic enactment, is not an isolated or solitary enactment, it is far
rather a culmination of a long and deep tradition, a tradition surely deeply present in
Rembrandt's self-portraits, and if these give us our purest portraits of a uniquely
modem eye or "1," these self-portraits truly are reborn in Van Gogh's self-portraits, but
now a uniquely modem "I" is openly manifest as the Eye of God.
Yet it is so manifest only insofar as it has undergone an ultimate and profound
reversal, now the deep veils of modem painting are dissolved, and with that dissolution
the eye or "I" is reversed, a reversal wherein an absolute light is transfigured into an
absolute darkness, and this occurs not by way of dissolution but by enactment itself,
an enactment renewing an early modem enactment, but with the dissolution of the
interior "1," this enactment can now only be the enactment of the Eye of God, yet now
and for the first time an absolutely iconoclastic enactment of the Eye of God, so that
the Eye of God is enacted wholly apart from every established icon or image. True, a
comparable and perhaps purer iconoclasm is manifest in Rembrandt's self-portraits,
and this occurs through an absolute discipline wherein all imagery whatsoever is
submitted to an absolute order that had never occurred in painting before, one fully
comparable to the absolute order of modem mathematical physics, and no doubt an
absolute discipline is required in modem physics and modem painting alike to exclude
every possible image of God. Never before had such a pure and total iconoclasm
occurred in the world, but this dissolution of every possible image of God opened if it
did not establish the way to full and actual images of totality itself, images truly absent
from the traditions of Western art, but images which become overwhelming with the
culmination ofWestem art.
So it is that the eyes of Van Gogh are the eyes of a truly new totality, one it is true
made possible by a long tradition of art, and one released only by the ending or
fulfillment of that tradition, and if these eyes are finally the Eye of God, that had been
latently if not actually true throughout this tradition, yet only now is the Eye of God
VAN GOGH'S EYES 401
totality itself in Western art, just as only now is an absolute light only manifest as
absolute darkness. And this is true if only because now and only now an absolute
iconoclasm is inseparable from an absolute iconography, so that if Van Gogh gave us
our first fully actual image of the absolute darkness of God, that is a darkness
impervious to every possible icon, but it is just thereby that icon itself becomes all in
all, and becomes all in all in the very eyes of Van Gogh. For the first time in art, these
are eyes without any possible center, and therefore without any possible face, so that
if Wheat Field with Crows is Van Gogh's greatest self-portrait, face as face is now
wholly absent, or is present only as the depths of abyss itself, and if it is the eyes of this
abyss which are the eyes of Van Gogh, these are eyes which truly are the Eye of God,
and an eye which is manifest as such only with the dissolution of every other eye or
"1."
Thereby absolute transcendence has reversed itself, that very absolute
transcendence which is only manifest as a consequence of the advent of an original
Christianity, an original Christianity which was most openly revolutionary in its
enactment of the absolute transcendence of God, and even if that enactment in an
original Christianity is inseparable from an enactment of the absolute immanence of
God, it is only in the deepest moments of Christian history that the immanence and the
transcendence of God are manifest as being fully and integrally united, moments which
perish with the full realization of modernity, and with that realization the transcendence
of God becomes manifest as being transcendence and transcendence alone, thereby
becoming a truly alien or empty transcendence, and one which is precisely thereby
susceptible to its own deep reversal. Surely such a reversal occurs in Van Gogh's
mature painting, if it does not occur in all of the deepest expressions of a fully and
finally modem art, but if these are reversals of a truly alien transcendence, they are
impossible apart from a naming of that transcendence, or an envisionment of that
transcendence, and if this occurs most purely in Van Gogh, it also and even thereby
occurs most gloriously in Van Gogh, as now and only now an absolute reversal of
transcendence becomes an absolutely joyous act, not even Byzantine icons of the glory
of God embody such a pure joy, or even such a glorious celebration.
Van Gogh has given us a purer joy than any other modem painter, if only here he
is surely in continuity with Giotto, the most joyous of medieval painters, but now joy
can only be a dark and abysmal joy, a joy released only by the deepest darkness, yet
that darkness is absolute light in Van Gogh's greatest paintings, and only that
coincidentia oppositorum releases this ecstatic joy. Can we understand this ecstasy as
a truly holy joy, and even a joy made possible by the abysmal darkness of God, a
darkness only now openly and fully manifest, and so fully manifest that only it and it
alone can be a true icon of God for us? Yes, this is a profoundly iconoclastic icon, an
icon bringing to an end every other icon of God, and just as Byzantine iconography can
enact only absolute light and absolute light alone, here there is enacted only absolute
darkness and absolute darkness alone, yet each are joyous enactments, and it is only in
the wake of this ecstatic enactment of absolute darkness that the Western mind and
sensibility became open to Byzantine art. Already Dante could envision an absolute
light that only becomes manifest as a consequence of a voyage through an absolute
darkness, and if thereby Dante is the deepest precursor of a full modernity, he is also
our only poet who has fully envisioned an absolute joy, yet that is a joy which is
comprehensively celebrated in our deepest painting, and if here painting truly
transcends poetry, it can do so only by a pure iconoclasm that is impossible for poetry,
but which nevertheless is realized in the purest imagery of painting.
That is an imagery which is fully called forth in Wheat Field with Crows, but this
occurs only through the full embodiment of an absolute darkness, it is precisely
because this is a full and fmal embodiment that it is a joyous embodiment, an
embodiment releasing a truly incarnate energy, an energeia that is a fully bodily
energeia, and one that we can actually perceive, and if we do so with truly new eyes,
these are eyes that are given us by Van Gogh, a gift which is truly a gift of grace, and
a grace that can only be realized by envisioning and celebrating an absolute darkness.
That very envisionment ~ celebration, and is celebration here precisely because it is
envisionment, now a full and actual seeing can only be a joyous seeing, and even if that
has always been true, it is only a seeing of the center of darkness, only an actual seeing
of the deepest abyss, which most openly and finally calls forth the absolute joy of
seeing itself, a joy only fully manifest in a vision of absolute darkness. If the eyes of
Van Gogh call forth that darkness, a darkness which is finally the darkness of God,
here that darkness is ecstatically affirmed, and affirmed just by way of its full
envisionment, an envisionment which can only be a joyous envisionment, and hence
a joyous celebration of even the deepest and most ultimate darkness of God.
Emeritus, State University ofNew York at Stony Brook
NOTES
See for a fuller discussion, my article, "Nietzsche's Apocalyptic Thinking, New Nietzsche Studies, 4 3/4
(2000): 1-13 and in my books Total Presence: The Language ofJesus and the Language of Today (New
York: The Seabury Press, 1980) and History as Apocalypse (Albany: The State University of New York
Press).
STEVE FULLER
A CATHOLIC STANCE TOWARD SCIENTIFIC

INQUIRY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
I first met Patrick Heelan when I was doing my Ph.D. in history and philosophy of
science at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was a visiting fellow in 1982-3. As
both a Jesuit and a hermeneutical phenomenologist, he was a dangerous person to have
in such an avowedly godless and positivist environment. (Adolf Griinbaum was still
prowling the corridors of the Cathedral of Learning.) Nevertheless, I was impressed by
Heelan's independence of mind and originality of thought, the two qualities that over
the years I have come to value the most in people. At the time, I was especially
impressed by his recent book, Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science. It
remains the best defense of the incommensurability thesis that is ordinarily associated
with Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. However, in what follows, I tackle the issues
raised in a recent, but no less challenging, work. Here Heelan takes on Pope John Paul
II' s 1998 encyclical, Fides et Ratio, by arguing for a liberalization of the Church's
philosophical stance toward scientific inquiry . 1
Contrary to the letter of Heelan's commentary, I believe that the Catholic Church
should continue to pursue a universalistic metaphysical stance. However, I accept the
spirit of his commentary, which is to attack the absolutism traditionally associated with
the Church's preferred metaphysics, Thomism. Thus, I would defend a non-absolutist
universalism. A good example, cited by Heelan, is the Jesuit Bernard Lonergan's
lifelong effort to reproduce for modem times the original ecumenism of Thomas
Aquinas's philosophy, which after all was controversial in its own day for its critical
engagement with the Islamically oriented, Averroist interpretation of Aristotle, which
seemed to challenge God's capacity to influence the course of miture. However, I
would further argue that a non-absolutist universalism extends to incorporating
elements of modem science into the Church's metaphysics, the model for which might
be Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy, which has taken direct inspiration
from 20th century developments in physics, biology, and even sociology. (Thus, I
follow with interest the efforts of the John Templeton Foundation to promote "progress
in theology.") However, I believe that a more important qualification needs to be made
to the Church's aspiration to universalism. It is epitomized by the following
observation, which I shall elaborate below. {{there is a choice between adopting a
universalistic stance toward humans and toward all living things, Christianity
resolutely prefers the human option.
To be sure, in a world of infinite resources, all creatures should be allowed to live
the fullest lives they can. But we do not live in such a world and are unlikely to do so
403
404 STEVE FULLER
in the foreseeable future. However, the world religions differ significantly on what to
make of this situation. The Western world religions- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
- privilege human beings above all other creatures, while the Eastern ones generally
hold a more egalitarian attitude toward the plenitude of nature. This difference helps
explain the enormous significance that Western culture has traditionally attached to the
birth and death of individual humans, refusing to reduce these events to transitional
phases in larger cosmic processes that engulf all the species. It has spawned a variety
of Western contributions to world thought that might otherwise seem unrelated, ranging
from modem medicine to existentialist philosophy. More negatively, the West's privi-
leging of the human has probably impeded its acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolu-
tion. The fact that the major anti-humanistic scientific doctrines originated in the West
should not be confused with what accounts for their reception in Western culture. The
West seems to excel in simultaneously high levels of intellectual innovation and resis-
tance to said innovation. (The East perhaps displays the mirror image of simultaneously
low levels of both.) Finally, I would argue that this point also suggests that the Western
religions cannot completely escape responsibility for the environmental despoliation
that has attended the global march of capitalism, as that too has been justified as a
radical extension of humanity's God-like creative powers over nature.
Whatever else, the above considerations imply that apologetic theologians will need
to catch up with recent scientific developments and their relationship to a wide variety
of religious beliefs, the result of which will necessitate a shift in the register of their
defense of universalism. Indeed, the very title of the papal encyclical - "faith and
reason"- already gets us to a bad start by suggesting that all forms of faith and all
forms of reason stand on opposite sides of a conceptual divide that must be somehow
bridged. This way of putting the issue is a throwback to the late 19th century, when
"faith" and "reason" first began to stand for institutionalized forms of inquiry -
"religion" and "science" - that were competing for dominance in the educational
systems of the Western world. Heelan somewhat mystifies matters when he casts this
as a clash that arises only because "religion" and "science" are treated as alternative
"metaphysics" struggling for hegemony. He makes it seem as though the problem is in
the very intellectual project of metaphysics, a position that in 20th century philosophy
both positivists and phenomenologists have invoked to distinguish themselves, often
from each other. However, I would argue that the problem is less the intellectual
project of metaphysics than the social function that it most frequently serves, namely,
a dogmatic foundation to the curriculum, a.k.a. "scholasticism."
But as I have already intimated, the situation is - and for a long time has been -
much more complicated. Indeed, I would venture that the doctrines of most Eastern
religions are better disposed to alignments with the latest scientific developments than
those of Western ones. Initial evidence can be found in the pervasive "oriental" themes
in the science popularization literature, which is unfortunately all too easily dismissed
in academic quarters. These themes range from FritjhofCapra's theoretically oriented
"Tao of Physics" to more "self-help" variants, such as the "quantum medicine"
practiced by Deepak Chopra. I shall explore the philosophical underpinnings of these
alignments below. My main thesis is that Christians would be better served by
conjuring with the contrast between the uniqueness of human nature and a "pan-
naturalism" that sees humanity as continuous with the rest of nature. In more striking
A CATHOLIC STANCE TOWARD SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY 405
terms: What is at risk from modern science is not the existence of God, but the existence
ofMan.
Let me start with the themes raised by a piece that frames Heelan's argument,
Charles Taylor's 1996 speech to the University ofDayton, "A Catholic Modernity?"
Taylor defends Christianity as a moral supplement to our otherwise thoroughly secular
world-view. He correctly observes that secular modernity helped to universalize the
Christian message by releasing it from sectarian captivity. The route from Christendom
to the Protestant Reformation to the Enlightenment is the well-documented backbone
of modem European cultural history. But surprisingly, Taylor does not treat the rise of
capitalism in all its world-transformative hubris as one modem expression of this very
same Christian trajectory, albeit one that has failed in its consequences though not its
intentions. It is a bit too convenient to reduce the entire history of capitalism to the
rapacious pursuit of self-interest. As Max Weber famously argued in The Protestant
Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the defining principle of modem capitalism has been
that just as one can never be too good, one can never be too wealthy; hence, the
capitalist's tell-tale preference for long-term investment over short-term consumption.
Indeed, such latter-day devotees of Adam Smith as Friedrich von Hayek and Robert
Nozick have continued (mistakenly, in my view) to believe with genuine moral fervor
that this sensibility will inevitably trickle down to benefit all of humanity. And, had the
"captains of industry" of the 19th and 20th centuries managed to produce wealth in a
way that improved the living conditions of all human beings, even at the cost of a
greater degradation to the rest of nature, they too would now be treated as many of
them wished, namely, secular realizers of Christ's message. At the very least, they
would have met with the approval of Karl Marx.
Unfortunately, the great capitalists failed to improve the lot of both humanity and
the ecology. But that fact should not obscure that these are separate goals that may cut
against each other, depending on the circumstances. Faced with a principled choice,
Christians stand with their capitalist spawn on the side of the humans, even at the cost
of living in a purely synthetic environment. But I am afraid that the demands of
"political correctness," perhaps combined with some wishful thinking about what is
realizable in nature, typically make us reluctant to face such a choice, even as a
hypothesis. Moreover, the particular way in which capitalism has failed its moral
promise has allowed scientific developments that further erode Christian values. I refer
here, of course, to the Neo-Darwinian synthesis in evolutionary biology. However, the
relevant subversion here is not the 19th century one of science arrogantly placing
humanity above God. On the contrary, it is a case of science humbling humanity's
place in nature, so as to license the denial of life to (sometimes potential) fellow
humans in favor of promoting other forms of life.
20th century advances in genetics have been decisive in shaping these emerging
intuitions. The idea that species can be treated as "essential natures," which is
presupposed by the great Western religions, would seem to be refuted by the fact that
all animals share 95+% of their genes. Indeed, this fact has spurred much of the
research associated with "sociobiology" and "evolutionary psychology," which seeks
to find cross-species analogues for traits that had been traditionally restricted to
humans. Indeed, philosophical intuitions about the distinctiveness of language as a
communication system have been already so eroded that the repetition by a Noam
Chomsky or a Jiirgen Habermas of Aristotle's original claim that human nature is tied
406 STEVE FULLER
to the possession of a "language organ" is beginning to sound old-fashioned and

perhaps even uninformed. This point has potentially enormous political consequences,
at least at the level of ideology. Over the last 300 years, the Left has been rhetorically
helped by the idea that the essence of humans is qualitatively different from that of
other animals, which is then used to identify and criticize forms of oppression that
inhibit the realization of that essence, typically by reducing humans to the status of
animals (e.g., slavery). In contrast, the Right has benefited from a flatter view of natural
virtue, one which reduces the human advantage to matters of "survival" and
"environmental fitness." Although Darwinism nowadays provides the most persuasive
idiom for expressing this sensibility, it can also be found in more traditional discourses
of"entitlement" and "inheritance," which blend biological, economic, and legal matters
so as to justify the status quo.
Christianity ultimately requires differences in kind, whereas modem biological
science only affords differences of degree. To be sure, no respectable biological
scientist has claimed that, say, ants have the same level of cognitive and emotional
complexity as humans. But I do not believe we are far from a time when it will be
common to argue that the differences between, say, humans and other mammals are
sufficiently small to warrant dealing with trade-offs in welfare provision on a case-by-
case basis. Simply being human will not be enough to justify the preferential treatment
of humans by humans. This strikes me as a radical contravention of the spirit of
Christianity and the other major Western religions, which have privileged the human
-no matter how weak, poor, or infirm- because they are said to be created in "the
image and likeness of God." Accordingly, in the Western tradition, these moments of
caring for humans in a "diminished" state have tended to mark humanity's most
intimate connection with the divine. Not surprisingly, then, these moments have also
been the targets of determined anti-Christians, most notably Friedrich Nietzsche. Yet,
as Max Weber might have relished, what begins charismatically often ends up in
bureaucracy. And so, nowadays one can find Nietzsche's Anti-Christianity sublimated
in the cross-species bookkeeping of Peter Singer, the utilitarian philosopher of the
"animal liberation" movement.
But if modem evolutionary biology seems to be anti-Christian, it does not follow
that it is anti-religious. What may be violently opposed by Christians, Jews, and
Muslims may be, at least in principle, acceptable to Hindus, Jains, Buddhists,
Confucians, Taoists, and Shintos. Barring some radical change of doctrine on the part
of evolutionists or Christians, I would guess that influential representatives of one or
more of the Eastern religions with an egalitarian attitude toward life forms will
enthusiastically embrace Neo-Darwinism, thereby indirectly recasting Christianity's
universalistic ethic toward humans as a rhetorical prop for an outdated conception of
species chauvinism.
A culture that allows both science and religion to flourish is not necessarily a safe
haven for human beings. Consider the animal liberation and "deep ecology"
movements, which often seem to harbor misanthropic attitudes toward humans who are
derelict in their responsibilities to the larger natural environment. Moreover, these
movements are no passing fad, but periodically recur in the Western tradition as an
expression of alienation. The quest for totality, a nihilistic desire for selflessness, and
a kindness toward animals coupled with a contempt for humans is as old as Neo-
Platonism but probably reached its consummate expression in the 19th century
Romantic movement. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to conclude that evolutionary

orientalism is limited to the ecological side of biology. Genetics can also be seen as
complicit, especially once Lucretius' De Rerum Natura is portrayed as the intellectual
way-station between the Hindu doctrine of the transmigration of souls and the Neo-
Mendelian doctrine (popularized by Richard Dawkins as the "selfish gene") that
organisms are mere vehicles for the endless recombination of genes. Indeed, when the
Aligarh was established in 1875 as the first pan-Indian university - synthesizing
Muslim, Hindu, and Christian teachings within a British imperial academic framework
- Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius figured prominently as philosophical entry
points to the emerging scientific theories of atomism and evolution.
In this context, the recent emergence of the Intelligent Design Movement - that is,
a philosophically sophisticated and scientifically literate Creationism - should be seen
as a valuable contribution to the reconciliation of science and religion that keeps
Christianity (and the Western religions more generally) in the picture of subsequent
developments in evolutionary biology. I refer here to the work of the philosopher
William Dembski, the biochemist Michael Behe, and their redoubtable Huxley figure,
the lawyer Phillip Johnson. It is worth recalling that design-based arguments have
historically enjoyed the advantage of encouraging people to think of suffering and other
suboptimal states of nature as having been put there for a reason, a source of challenges
to be fathomed and, where possible, overcome by human ingenuity. However, since
Voltaire's Candide satirized this version of God's sense of cosmic justice, or theodicy,
as pollyannish - or, more precisely, "panglossian" - we tend to forget that historically
the alternative has been to regard cosmic suffering as evidence for the inherent
meaninglessness of life. This view is common in the great Eastern religions, but in
modem Europe it has been most closely associated with the fatalistic philosophy of
Arthur Schopenhauer. "Fate" here is simply a placeholder for whatever resists the will.
The chance-based (or "probabilistic," to use the philosophical euphemism) processes
postulated by Neo-Darwinism, may be interpreted this way. But so too may the original
creation of a perfect clockwork universe, whose deterministic laws neither require nor
permit the intervention of additional intelligence. This seems to have been Voltaire's
own Newton-inspired view of God as deus absconditus.
However, the fatalistic approach to theodicy has been revamped in recent years by
Peter Singer for a more analytically oriented and scientifically literate audience. Singer
is rather rare among contemporary ethicists in defining the summum bonum in terms
of the alleviation of cosmic suffering, rather than the specific improvement of human
welfare. Indeed, he returns utilitarianism to its pre-capitalist roots in Epicurean
philosophy, which stressed the prevention of pain over the pursuit of pleasure in a
world that is ultimately out of our control. Epicurus had been an early exponent of the
"smaller is beautiful" principle as a "therapy of desire," in Martha Nussbaum's terms,
and his Roman popularizer Lucretius elaborated this principle on what we would now
regard as a "proto-scientific" basis. However, Lucretius has also been revived outside
this metaphysically ascetic context. For, beneath their seeming indifference to the
meaning of individual lives, Epicureans revel in the novel combination of atoms from
which new orders emerge and into which they ultimately dissipate. This point has been
pursued most enthusiastically in recent francophone "philosophy of nature," most
notably in Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers' Order out of Chaos, but also in the
work of Michel Serres and his protege, the sociologist Bruno Latour.
408 STEVE FULLER
To be sure, Singer himself has raised the scientific standard of moral accounting
used to decide when to trade off, say, the survival of a diseased human against that of
a healthy pig. Nevertheless, Singer's is a science of hard facts, not corrigible hypo-
theses. Specifically, science gives content to the brute incontrovertibility of suffering.
But as with other forms of fatalism, I find the appeal to "brute facts" here superstitious
as well as politically and scientifically conservative in its consequences. What if Singer
had lived 150 years ago? He would probably have taken the path ofleast resistance and
terminated a variety of severely disabled humans (including a quadriplegic like Steven
Hawking), simply because there was no immedi-ate means of remedying their disability
without substantially rearranging the physical environment in which healthy humans
and other animals dwell. In other words, Singer defers to the authority of science
without acknowledging a major lesson taught by the history of science, namely, that
science is likely to change its collective mind radically over a period that extends
beyond the time-frame in which political decisions are normally taken.
Indeed, the closeness with which Singer ties his moral judgements to current
scientific research suggests that he might not be the biggest defender of extensive
public funding for research designed to overturn current scientific assumptions, even
though (or because?) he is happy to use those assumptions to ground his judgements.
Certainly his followers are often of this disposition. Thus, an influential version of
"political correctness" in our times supports the abortion and euthanasia of humans,
while at the same time opposing the production and distribution of biomedical
technologies that might enhance human lives in ways that would complicate
judgements of termination. The opposition to new biotechnologies is officially
expressed in terms of possible environmental hazards and genetic monstrosities (as well
as a background belief that the earth already houses too many humans to afford a
sustainable environment for all life-forms). To be sure, these concerns have some basis
in fact, but more tellingly they presuppose an unwillingness to embrace the human
introduction of substantial novelty into the world. However, these same people would
probably have no qualms about welcoming a recently mutated organism in which no
human intervention is implicated.
There is a philosophical, a scientific, and a political lesson in all this. The
philosophical lesson is that fatalism is one - perhaps the only - philosophy that can be
justly accused of trading on a confusion of ontology and epistemology. Depending on
how one conceptualizes the temporal scope of fatalism, there are two ways of capturing
this point. On the one hand, fatalists mistakenly presume that our current state of
knowledge can be taken as our most likely long-term state of knowledge. On the other
hand, fatalists mistakenly infer the transient nature of reality from the transient nature
of our knowledge of reality. In all this, I believe that Singer would find much support
from the great Eastern religions. The scientific lesson points to a deep tension in the
constitution of contemporary biology. The medical imperative to do everything possi-
ble to promote human life, including the funding of expensive research and the distri-
bution of its fruits, may cut against larger evolutionary considerations that weigh the
opportunity costs of indefinitely prolonging human life against other forms oflife being
allowed to decline and even disappear. Finally, the political lesson is that if the Church
wishes to continue promoting the value of human life in a realistic fashion, then it
should encourage the new biotechnologies and not simply presume that a passive atti-
tude toward nature will take care of matters in a morally satisfactory way. In addition,
the Church needs to "spin" its opposition to abortion and euthanasia so that it appears
to be a spur to further biomedical research and applications and not simply a reac-
tionary gesture predicated on a mystified understanding of the sanctity of human life.
The centerpiece of Heelan's critique of the papal encyclical draws on the
philosophical background in phenomenology that he shares with John Paul II. Heelan
seems to believe that phenomenology provides at least a foil, perhaps even an alterna-
tive, to the rather dogmatic understanding of the religion-science relationship displayed
in the encyclical. To be sure, phenomenology is the philosophical approach that has
been most consistently sensitive to the excesses of scientific naturalism, without
automatically reverting to a mystical supernaturalism or an irrationalist rejection of
science. However, phenomenology is not really up to the task that Heelan sets for it,
and in the current scientific climate it may actually expedite the anti-humanism that has
attended the rise ofNeo-Darwinism. Singer's ethical stance is not generally seen as a
threat to the value of human life because our understanding of animals is sufficiently
limited that cross-species attributions of intelligence and feeling remain restricted. But
with the advancement of science in this area, the frontiers of our imagination will be
extended to ease cross-species attributions of morally relevant mental traits.
Given the time it took for humans to generalize many of the family's traditional
welfare functions as powers of the state, we should not expect that overnight the
average person's intuitions about the moral worth of strange animals will approximate
those associated with pet ownership. Nevertheless, the long term is likely to witness
what might be called "cross-species relativism," which easily accepts that non-humans
have "their own" language, emotions, and hence moral entitlements- indeed, appro-
priate to the bodies and environments in which these non-humans find themselves "en-
tangled," to quote Heelan. For all its potentially revolutionary character at the level of
state policy, this view is familiar as a scientific perspective. Jakob von Uexkuell's
"theoretical biology" and James Gibson's "ecological psychology" are perhaps the two
most important 20th century precedents. In their day, both views had rather chequered
reputations because they were not unambiguously aligned with Darwinism. This turns
out to be quite significant in the present context, as it highlights the tension between
saying that each species has a distinct world-view and that species identity is a continu-
ous property. While the former is associated with von Uexkuell and Gibson and justi-
fies Singer's species egalitarianism, it jars with the latter, more strictly Darwinian the-
sis. The practical consequence of trying to uphold both views at once comes out when
considering the status of deviant species members, including those who might be most
naturally identified as disabled. For the strict Darwinian, these are potential harbingers
of (living) things to come, depending on the selection environment for the deviant's
offspring. Darwinism is studiously agnostic on whether humans should act to make the
environment more hospitable to the offspring of these deviants, but surely the Church
is in a position to take a stand that is both positive and scientifically supported.
My main criticism of Heelan is his failure to reconcile the tension that results from
advocating both a radical questioning of philosophical premises and a tolerance for an
unlimited plurality of responses. He leaves the questions of why and how one should
relentlessly question unanswered. Classical skepticism's singular lesson to philosophy
is that reason's "how" can easily undermine its "why," if the "why" is not made explicit
from the outset but merely presumed. In the artificial world of philosophical discourse,
this point can be demonstrated in a few logically simple steps. But in "real-time"
410 STEVE FULLER
discourses, the skeptic's lesson may take such a long time to learn that it becomes
ingrained without ever having been acknowledged. At this point, we start to realize just
how "cunning" reason can be. Thus, the Enlightenment wits of 18th century Europe
may have celebrated the pursuit of scientific inquiry wherever it may lead because they
held it to be the distinctive mark of the human, yet a 300-year consequence of such
relentless pursuit may be that the human no longer appears so distinctive - in which
case, why privilege what humans happen to think? This strikes me as precisely the
ethical-cum-epistemic predicament in which we find ourselves today, and Heelan's
response to Fides et Ratio does precious little to get us out of it. To be sure, his appeal
to the "hermeneutics of suspicion" as a model for this radical questioning is prima facie
plausible, locating the inquiring impulse in the creative tension between the full range
of human interests and the institutions for their expression. By recasting radical ques-
tioning as "hermeneutical," Heelan imports an anthropocentric perspective that is meant
to ensure that reason does not become self-destructive. Yet the plausibility of this move
diminishes once humans are not seen as essentially different from other forms oflife.
The one redeeming value of what Heelan euphemistically calls an "institutional
philosophy" (a.k.a. "ideology"), such as the Church's Neo-Thomist metaphysics, is that
it closely monitors the bearing of reason's "how" on its "why," so as to constrain the
"how" before it manages to subvert the "why." While I do not believe that philosophy
always needs to be "institutionalized" in this sense, it may make sense in terms of the
fundamental issues with which the Church is concerned. In particular, our relentless
quest for biological knowledge has led to an erosion of the distinction between humans
and other animal species, and in the process, has raised questions about the sanctity of
human life. Singer has set an influential precedent for interpreting the moral impli-
cations of this development, namely, a species egalitarianism that is compatible with
many Eastern religions but fundamentally incompatible with Christianity. I have argued
here that the appropriate Catholic response is not to reject science, or even Darwinism,
but to connect the distinctive Christian concern for the "weaker" members of homo
sapiens with an enthusiastic endorsement of scientific research and social reforms
aimed at improving the lot of these people, not least by enabling them to continue to
contribute to the lot of humanity. The alternative, I fear, is one that marked the Nazi
"war on cancer" namely, the cultivation of a national ecology that would house only
the fittest life forms - regardless of species - and selectively breed out (if not
exterminate) the rest. 2
University of Warwick, United Kingdom
NOTES
1 Patrick Heelan, "John Paul II on 'Faith and Reason."' Forthcoming.
2 For an excellent account of the multifarious contributions that the blind and the deaf have made to there-
conceptualization of fundamental issues about the nature oflanguage and thought in the modem period, see
Jonathan Ree, I See a Voice (New York: Harper Collins, 1999). On the Nazi drive to prevent cancer by
engaging in ecological hygiene, see Robert Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999). Proctor's account has added poignancy because many of the Nazi doctors who participated in
this "war" eventually fled to the US and UK, where they spearheaded post-war research that would lead to
state-mandated smoke-free environments and other stigmatizations of people who pursued "unhealthy
lifestyles."
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THE DIALOGISM OF MEANING, THE DISCURSIVE

EMBEDDEDNESS OF KNOWLEDGE, THE
COLLOQUY OF BEING
While the field of linguistics is far from an undifferentiated whole, 1 much linguistic
theorizing over the centuries is unified by an understanding of linguistic patterns as
being separate from individual and cultural knowledge. With the end of the Cold War,
however, that conceptualization is seen as severely hindering our ability to address
pressing problems on all levels of society. Among these are the concurrent demands for
sophisticated levels of multiliteracies in the multicultural environment of the global
information age, even as countries must deal with the consequences of dramatic
migrations of entire ethnic groups and momentous country-internal demographic and
economic shifts. All of these involve the ability to use languages competently in order
for individuals and groups to participate in and contribute to the knowledge of
societies, indeed in order to enable the existence of a viable multicultural civil society.
To exemplify a possible new relationship between knowledge and language, I single
out two treatments. Both emphasize meaning-making as definitional for the human
capacity to be a "languaging" species 2 and both stress dialogism as a constitutive rather
than additive feature in that meaning-making capacity. The first is that of the Russian
philologist Bakhtin; the second is systemic-functional linguistics, elaborated over
roughly the last three decades by the British-Australian linguist Halliday and his
followers.
As Holquist indicates, the master trope at the heart of all of Bakhtin's projects is
heteroglossia, or polyphony, even, as in his book on Rabelais, a "carnevalization."3
That means that from the well-known struggle in human language between centrifugal
forces, which reflect the specificity of individual consciousnesses, and centripetal
forces, whose shared center instantiates the possibility of communication within a
cultural-linguistic community in the first place, Bakhtin chose to focus on the former.
By contrast, the Western tradition consistently privileged a unifying project, whether
in the ideological systems of theologies and epistemologies, in the elaborate
justifications of diverse claims to power, or in the creation of nation states on the basis
of one normed, therefore the correct language that itself epitomized one, therefore the
superior culture. 4
411
412 HEIDI BYRNES
What is gained by beginning with polyphony, with multiplicity, with multi-

voicedness? It is the potential for an exquisite awareness of the social foundation of
language, of the process and the extraordinary fragility of human cultural work, both
on the individual and the social plane, of the inherent historicity of human language and
meaning, of ontogenetic and phylogenetic developments in language as system in use,
of the constitutive role of the utterance in a dialogic setting, as expressed and meant
and also as understood- and that is, finally, an exquisite awareness of the necessity of
the Other. Bakhtin states it this way: "Every utterance participates in the 'unitary
language' (in its centripetal forces and tendencies) and at the same time partakes of
social and historical heteroglossia (the centrifugal, stratifying forces)." 5
He discusses these issues with deep insight in notes collected in The Problem ofthe
Text, "6 which focus on the text as utterance. Among the central characterizations of text
is its life "on the boundary between two consciousnesses, two subjects ... The text is not
a thing, and therefore the second consciousness, the consciousness of the perceived,
can in no way be eliminated or neutralized ... Understanding is always dialogic to some
degree ... The real object is social (public) man, who speaks and expresses himself
through other means." 7 In this fashion, Bakhtin asserts a priority for meaning-making
in the lived world of people, rather than for description or explanation of the purely for-
mal features of a language system. Far from reducing the "scientificness" of such in-
quiry, the typical objection raised against it, he asserts that all science inevitably deals
with individualities, with unrepeatable, single phenomena. But while the material
sciences in pursuit of answers to highly defined questions for well-specified interests
may be able to disregard that fact, for the human sciences, which engage physical,
biological, and social realities, such an approach comes at great peril. For language,
most especially, it risks a thorough misunderstanding of its foundational dynamics,
inasmuch as language, as a semiotic system of the fourth order, is instituted to deal with
commonsense knowledge of the world, the reality that lies in and around us, including,
quite emphatically, human uncertainties, judgments, values, and interests. 8
For those issues to get their due, we must ascertain the specific forms and functions
the individuality of the socially constituted utterance takes. We can do so by carefully
analyzing form-function relationships at various levels of the text, from the phonetic-
phonemic-graphemic level, to the level of lexicogrammatical features, to register, and
genre. Indeed, such an approach would respond to Geertz' s demand that we should
apply critical categories to social events and social categories to symbolic structures as
a way of "getting straight how the massive fact of cultural and historical particularity
comports with the equally massive fact of cross-cultural and cross-historical acces-
sibility,"9 a way of attempting to understand the social history of moral imagination.
What are the extralinguistic functions that an utterance performs and how does it
do so? Among the most interesting and also most comprehensive and elaborated
answers to that question is functional linguistics. Broadly stated, it underscores the
symbiotic relationship between human activity and language, where we must think "the
very existence of one as the condition for the existence of the other." 10 In its American
version it focuses primarily on individual cognition, investigating how the foundational
communicative task of establishing the commonality of relevant mental representations
(background knowledge) between two communicating minds is accomplished, in terms
of accessibility due to shared cultural frames (the shared permanent semantic memory),
due to shared current discourse (the shared episodic memory), and through the shared
MEANING, DISCURSIVE KNOWLEDGE, BEING 413
speech situation (the current focus of attention). 11 In its British-Australian version,

systemic-functional linguistics, it takes an explicitly social turn. To Halliday, a
functional analysis oflanguage must seek to account for how language is actually used
since "every text - that is, everything that is said or written - unfolds in some context
of use ... language has evolved to satisfy human needs; and the way it is organized is
functional with respect to these needs - it is not arbitrary." 12 As a consequence,
prevailing notions of the relation of language form and meaning, and particularly
grammar and meaning, are stood on their head: language is not a system of forms to
which meanings are then attached, but "a system of meanings, accompanied by forms
through which the meanings can be realized." 13 In other words, the Saussurean dictum
of the arbitrariness of the sign which has influenced so much 20th century thinking
holds only in a general way with regard to the potentialities of human semo-genesis for
a range of construals of reality. It does not hold for the actual social practices of
language use in a particular community.
In order to serve human life, language must express two general kinds of functions:
an ideational or reflective, which allows us to understand our environment, and an
interpersonal or active, which allows us to act on others, where both of these meta-
functions are held together and operationalized by a third metafunctional component,
the textual. In this fashion language creates a semiotic world of its own, a parallel
universe, as it were, that exists only at the level of meaning but serves both as means
and as model, or metaphor, for the world of action and experience. Meanings in
specific utterances are the result of choices being made within a network of inter-
locking options that language, seen as a network of relations, makes available.
Closer analysis, particularly of the languages of literate societies, reveals the
elaboration of two basic forms of semiosis that inhere in these practices. Halliday calls
them the congruent forms of semiosis, the grammar of everyday life action and
experience which emphasizes function, process, and flow, and the synoptic forms of
semiosis, which emphasize stasis, structure, and "thinginess." Over time, the latter
came to dominate in public and written language, characteristics of language use which
thereby gradually reconstrue life, from the primacy of doing and happening, to a reality
as object. In other words, the world is now experienced in metaphorical terms, as a text,
as a consequence of which dramatically different knowledge potentialities are created. 14
Having established the metaphorical reconstrual of the world as text we can see
even more clearly that language is a construer of reality, not just its representer, where
that construal, furthermore, is of a model of reality, not reality itself. 15 Where might
such a model of reality come from? In the most general sense it arises from a social
context with its acts of meaning and these are themselves occasioned by the need "for
carrying out some social action, by co-actants in some social relation, placed in some
semiotic contact. The meaning potential of language and its lexicogrammatical
resources must be such as to enable its speakers to construe these important aspects of
their social experience." 16 In the following I will explicate this claim of knowledge as
being discursively embedded within social action in two ways, generally in the context
of genre, and specifically in the area of scientific discourse.
Although the term genre usually describes literary-stylistic features of verbal art,
the new genre studies reposition the notion by placing it in the context of recurrent
social situations. Seen in this fashion, genres are the result of typified rhetorical action,
thereby embodying in their totality an aspect of cultural rationality. 17 Genres arise as
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a result of particular conditions of speech and a particular function (scientific,

technical, commentarial, business, everyday). They thus constitute "certain relatively
stable thematic, compositional, and stylistic types ofutterance." 18 But while Bakhtin's
observations were largely conceptual, systemic-functional linguistics can draw on a
powerful semantic analysis of the grammar of English, particularly with regard to the
analysis of contexts of situation in terms of registers or genres. 19 This analysis is based
on the dimensions of field - the social activity that is taking place which often
determines what we commonly refer to as its content- tenor- the relationship between
the participants, including their roles and statuses - and mode - the part that language
is playing in the situation, including the channel. For our purposes here I single out one
case, namely a close investigation of the development of science in Western thinking
as exemplified through the changing forms of the English language, in order to show
how this kind of analysis can provide a fascinating look at the symbiotic relationship
between social activity and interests and the use of the resource potentialities of
language which, in turn, influence the construal of that social activity.
While the layperson's characterization of scientific language tends to focus on its
highly developed terminological apparatus and believes that to be the major difference
between ordinary and scientific language, this is, in a way, the least interesting issue.
For example, if we focus on the highest level of language use, rhetorical-linguistic
analysis, we come to understand the discursive nature of scientific writing in terms of
a highly formalized literary genre. In particular, Bazerman has investigated the
experimental report in the sciences as a most remarkable human literary
accomplishment, whereby linguistic means were developed that moved toward
relatively stable meaning and assent among people sharing wide numbers of social
variables, even while sharing participation in a certain kind of scientific activity. The
consequence of the shape of these statements is that they increasingly give us immense
control of the material world in which we reside. That matter is all the more remarkable
as the discourse itself hides any traces of a self-conscious control of the nature of the
text but, instead, presents itself as simply a transparent transmitter of natural facts
without ever realizing, much less acknowledging, the massive linguistic work that has
gone into scientific communication. 20
But it is in the middle, at the intersection oflexicon and grammar, that knowledge
is actually construed or, as Slobin phrases it, where "thinking for speaking" takes
place. 21 In their investigation of the lexicogrammatical resources of English for an
evolving scientific discourse Halliday and Martin22 trace a development in social-
semiotic terms of close to 2500 years. Involving, in each case, linguistic potentialities
and social interests, it has advanced at a particularly rapid pace beginning with the 17th
century formation of science in England. In particular, early Greek scientists took up
and developed a specific resource of the grammar of Greek, namely the transcategori-
zing ability to derive from one lexical stem various other word classes, one of the
results of derivational morphology, e.g., from "stable" to "stability", or from "moving"
to "motion" to "motionless", the linguistic means for creating abstract entities which
had begun as the names of processes or properties. Further, Greek mathematicians
developed the modifying potential of the Greek nominal group, especially the potential
of extending the nominal group with embedded clauses and prepositional phrases. The
result: the power to specify bodies and figures in complex ways, enabling them to
reveal themselves as being open to measurement. Subsequently, through the process
of calquing between Greek and Latin - a reasonably uncomplicated process because

of the systemic similarity of both languages as part of the same language family - Latin
took over these resources, further extending them through the ability of its grammar to
construe systems of definitions and taxonomies oflogical relations.
Comparing the English of Chaucer's Treatise on the Astrolabe and Equatory of
Planet with the language of Newton, Halliday concludes that English, in that period,
noticeably expands its resources oftranscategorialization. It does so particularly from
verbal into nominal structures, thereby producing a massive lateral shift into
grammatical metaphor. By grammatical metaphor is meant the possibility of expressing
something that was originally construed as process, prototypically expressed by a verb,
into a thing, prototypically realized as a noun. In other words, instead of metaphor
being located at the lexical level- our common understanding of the term, including
our awareness of its pervasive power, both positive and negative, 23 - we have here an
even deeper, because lexicogrammatical, metaphorical influence on our way of seeing
the world. Of course, this resource has existed in language all along and has been used
in everyday language in a way that achieved certain flexible balances. However, in the
evolving scientific discourse this resource was deployed at a dramatically higher rate
and further amplified by the recursive modification and embedding of the nominal
group. The emerging variety of language provided a basis for doing experimental
science, a way oflinguistically construing an edifice of things which can hold reality
still and can keep it under observation and subject it to experimentation. In other words,
this form of "scientific" language construed, through the quality of a noun, a
persistence in time as contrasted with context-dependent change in time as verbs
express it, a supporting semiotic condition for creating timeless units of analysis that
were no longer subjected to the more direct influence of historical processes.
Furthermore, through interlocking sequences ofverbal and nominal expressions (e.g.,
"X moves from A to B under conditions Y"; followed by "this movement of X is due
to Y") it created a highly controlled progression of small steps that provide the semiotic
basis for an extraordinarily logical Machbarkeit. 24
We have witnessed the stunning victory of this way of seeing the world over the last
two hundred years, so much so that the discourse of scientific inquiry, developed for
highly specific purposes under highly specific conditions, has now essentially become
the discourse of any kind of academic literacy, regardless of the field of inquiry and,
even more generally, any kind of public literacy, regardless of the field of human
activity. When it is then adopted as the public discourse of a technocratic and
bureaucratic world it can take on positions of power that not only threaten to
overwhelm the validity of the grammar of everyday experience, with its values and
beliefs as foundations for ways ofliving, but that can create a disconnect between those
who have access to and control of these discursive forms and those who do not.
One closing note on the contemporary scene. At the very point when linguistic
resources at the lexicogrammatical and the generic level that front the physical
"thinginess" of the world seem to have won the day, we observe a rise in semiotic
processes in all aspects of human life. Not surprisingly, language use reflects and
facilitates this increased interface in human social interaction with semiotic, alongside
our more customary contact with physical or biological environments. Seen in this
light, the much talked about ubiquitous presence of "communication" in our lives
refers not only to the simple fact that a multitude of electronic media are now available
416 HEIDI BYRNES
to us. More interestingly, it refers to our being immersed in a range of semiotic systems
which rely for their remarkable adaptability on complex relations of systemic
functionalism (rather than merely pragmatic functionalism). Indeed, "communication"
is surfacing as a useful metaphor by means of which researchers in the natural sciences,
from physics to chemistry to biology, and, most particularly, in the biological sciences
are beginning to understand some of their most pressing problems and questions.
Developments in two areas of human social activity, each involving language,
suggest that these new voices will become more audible in the future. The first is the
semotechnology of the computer and other media that readily mix oral and written
genres, and therefore realign the two major forms of construing reality by creating a
new balance between synoptic and congruent forms of semiosis of everyday life. The
second area is our gradual acknowledgment of the ubiquitous presence of a kind of
heteroglossia that has always marked human societies but which hierarchical forms of
government deliberately reduced through powerful ideologies. For all their inherent
difficulties, more democratic forms of governance, particularly under the influence of
multi-ethnic and multicultural demands, will need to address them - including through
changed discursive practices.
230: CONTEMPLATION TO ATTAIN LOVE

Note: Two preliminary observations should be made. First, Love ought to manifest itself more by
deeds than by words.
231: Second, Love consists in a mutual communication between two persons. ...
232: The First Prelude. A composition ... Here it is to see myselfas standing before God our Lord,
and also before the angels and saints, who are interceding for me.
233. The Second Prelude is to ask for what I desire. Here it will be to ask for interior knowledge
of all the great good I have received ...
234. The First Point. I will call back into my memory the gif/s I have received ... Then I will reflect
on myself. and consider what I on my part ought in all reason and justice to offer and give to the
Divine Majesty, namely, all my possessions, and myself along with them. I will speak as one
making an offering with deep affection, and say:
"Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and all my will- all that
I have and possess. You, Lord, have given all that to me. I now give it back to you, 0 Lord. All of
it is yours. Dispose of it according to your will. Give me love ofyourself along with your grace,
for that is enough for me. -The Spiritual Exercises ofSaint Ignatius 25
In the final section of the paper I would like to carry these insights into a seemingly
unrelated environment. My specific focus is to show how the perspectives highlighted
in the previous sections might contribute to understanding the development of our
spiritual abilities in general and the form this takes within the Spiritual Exercises of
Saint Ignatius in particular. Though we tend to link the notion of spiritual exercises
with a community of religious believers, such was not its inception. Indeed, it was
philosophy, foundationally conceived of as a way of life, that was the context within
which the notion of spiritual exercises had flourished in antiquity. According to Harlot,
that philosophy was a spiritual exercise, one whose outstanding feature were
philosophical discourses rather than solitary reflection."26
Its dialoging nature has two interrelated aspects. On the communal level, Harlot
finds that these discourses provided justifications and theoretical foundations for the
kinds of decisions one is rationally to make in order to be able to live life as an exercise
of wisdom, rather than demonstrating the perfect life of a sage. On the individual level
the dialogic forms of"doing philosophy" encouraged two important movements: a kind
ofinteriorization which links one to the "universality of reason" within the confines of
space and time, and also a kind of exteriorization, a new way of being-in-the-world
which consists in becoming aware of oneself as a part of nature, and a portion of
universal reason. In this fashion, spiritual exercises constitute an exploration and
deliberate exploitation of the possibility of a radical transformation of perspective
through identification with an "Other," "nature" or "universal reason." If, then, to
philosophize is to learn how to dialogue and true dialoguing is, as Hadot puts it, an
'"exercise of authentic presence' of the self to itself, and of the self to others,"27 then
dialoguing is at the heart of spiritual exercises. It follows that a more refined awareness
of and attuned engagement in one's dialoging capacity becomes a particularly effective
way of exercising one's spiritual potentialities.
Not surprisingly, primitive Christian theology could absorb the notion of spiritual
exercises that had characterized ancient philosophy as a practice of universal reason,
though that absorption involved a unique way of blending two potentially conflicting
aspects, an affirmation of the believer's assent to the centrality of faith and also to a
universal reason, here understood as the law of the Logos as divine reason. However,
that extraordinary union ultimately was not sustainable in Christian practice, not even
in the context of monastic life. This is so since philosophy, as the practice of the wis-
dom of reason, became the servant of theology for which it provided necessary concep-
tual, logical, physical, and metaphysical resources, a service that inherently changed
its very nature from goal to means. And outside of monastic life philosophy became
less and less a way oflife and more an enterprise focused on abstract theoretical activi-
ty and means to achieve other ends. Thus, both the assumptions that were foundational
for the practice of spiritual exercises in the early Christian tradition and the practice
itselflargely disappeared, except in the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius.
Two questions arise: First, what can and does the notion of spiritual exercises mean
in the context of the practice of Christian faith and spirituality within the Exercises?
Second, what can it mean for contemporary spirituality, given the intervening victory
of a rationality that is completely beholden to notions of science and, therefore
seemingly leaves no room for a rationality of faith as the exercises seem to presuppose
it? To my mind, that second question awaits comprehensive treatment, Pope John Paul
Il's eloquent and deeply held explications in Faith and Reason notwithstanding.
Below, I explore some tentative answers to both questions, using discursive approaches
as a vantage point. 28
As a general observation, I suggest that the significance of the Exercises for the
spirituality of an entire religious order, the Society of Jesus, and for its individual
members derives both from the content and, just as importantly, from the practice of
the Exercises. 29 In line with the interrelationship of language and being and proto-
typically instantiated by prayerful dialogue, that practice is both communal and
individual in nature. Being a member of the Society of Jesus, the official name of the
Jesuits, is not just to know the community's foundational narrative once and for all, like
a given set of facts. Instead, it is a reinternalizing - the German erinnern/to remember
comes to mind -and thus an ever more elaborated re-knowing of the Christian story
within the practices of the Exercises, as the Founder of the Society of Jesus created
them, practices that build on the genre of a dialogue shared among all members,
throughout the changed circumstances of their individual lives and over the history of
the order.
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Though the focus of the Exercises quite naturally rests on the individual believer,
the novice and later the fully ordained priestly member of the order, is typically
accompanied by a spiritual director with whom he will engage in something like an
"outer dialogue" as the retreat progresses. This person not only directs the retreatant
toward an appropriately deepened understanding of the practices themselves but, as
careful and supportive observer, listener, and conversational partner, journeys along,
as the retreatant enters more and more into dialogue with the deepest rationality of his
beliefs. The fact that future members of the order experience the Exercises early in their
spiritual formation and that there is an expectation of an annual repeat signals two
things: first, an understanding of the formativeness of the experience as a way of
creating a community through shared discursive practices, particularly on the basis of
a 30-day, so called silent retreat; and, second, its equally foundational openendedness,
both for individual members of the Society of Jesus and for the order as a whole. Much
in line with Bakhtin's observation about both centrifugal and centripetal forces in
language practices, such a dynamic tension seems critical for an order that, not
coincidentally, is not cloistered, but lives in the world.
To me, a particularly interesting manifestation of this openness is the fact that the
Exercises were made available right from the beginning in diverse formats to members
of the larger Christian community who were situated in diverse walks of life and,
furthermore, could be presumed to be differentially gifted from the spiritual standpoint.
In pointing to that fact I am not so much highlighting the Church's need, in the wake
of the Protestant Reformation, to strengthen its own forms of spirituality. Instead, for
our purposes here, the more interesting aspect of the availability of the Exercises to the
laity is the implied assumption that their very form was reasonable, accessible, and
comprehensively experiencable by all persons in a way that could and would deeply
affect them in their lives. I take the discursiveness of the Exercises to provide that
culturally reasonable, affectively and intellectually accessible, and eminently practical
and practicable feature: any human being can tum to it and, when exercised, it can lead
to a more fundamental way of being for any and all of us - not only the pious or
dedicated religious.
Let us then tum to the "Contemplation to Attain Love," the conclusion and climax
of the spiritual experience of the Exercises in the fourth week. In overview fashion, one
could say that it is situated at the end of a four-week progression which elicits from the
retreatant a faith experience which begins by highlighting the experience of giftedness
through God's mercy, progresses to a commitment in order to love and serve him more,
and, in the Third and Fourth Weeks, emphasizes union in Christ's suffering and in his
joys. 30 The Exercises do this through prayerful contemplation of the major scriptural
texts that tell the Christian story of salvation, where the retreatant engages in dialogue
in the present by incorporating the possible past dialogues of both the sacred and
profane actors in the Biblical story itself, as well as her imagined dialogue with those
actors, but particularly with Jesus. This is accomplished initially by what is referred to
as a "composition of place," a putting oneself into the scene and imagining, as vividly
as possible, all the aspects of the event, in sights and sounds, smells, movements,
gestures, and, most importantly, both affective and linguistic responses by these actors
in relation to the retreatant and the retreatant toward them. Throughout, colloquies
occur, most particularly with Jesus, as a way of concluding a particular exercise.
While the literature tends to emphasize the importance of imagination in this

attempt to put exercitants in touch with their deepest desires and intentionalities, this
imaginative situating of oneself might also be seen as a form of bringing to bear the
rich reservoir of multiple "texts" that shape one's consciousness in order to engage in
new dialogues, new prayers. In other words, the retreatant is asked to activate all her
cultural knowledge regarding conversations and, as we have seen, by implication, all
aspects of her cultural rationality as she situates herself in this discourse world.
Importantly, this is not the rationality oflogic, but the rationality of lived experience,
in all its multi-voiced variations, a polyphony that differs dramatically both from
simplistic relativizations of the relationship between God and humans on the one hand,
and pious recitations of formulaic prayers to God on the other. Both careless and
meaningless surrender to variation and thoughtless and dangerous exertion or
acceptance of hegemony are thus avoided - clear and present dangers in all faith
practices, but particularly in institutional churches.
Who are the conversational partners? I have already mentioned the retreatant's
"outer dialogue" with the retreat director. But, of course, it is the inner dialogue that
matters. Here I once more tum to Bakhtin. In his discussion of the nature of
understanding as being inherently dialogic he suggests that understanding itself enters
the dialogue in a constitutive fashion, akin to a third party who stands above all the
participants in the dialogue, to the observer in the observed world of quantum physics,
as Bakhtin states in rather remarkable fashion for his time and place. The person who
understands inevitably becomes a third party in the dialogue and there holds a special
position, inasmuch as the author "presupposes a higher superaddressee (third), whose
absolutely just responsive understanding is presumed, either in some metaphysical
distance or in distant historical time ... he is a constitutive aspect of the whole utterance,
who, under deeper analysis, can be revealed in it. This follows from the nature of the
word, which ... does not stop at immediate understanding but presses on further and
further (indefinitely). " 31
I believe it is not a coincidence that the retreatant' s key conversational partner in
this "inner dialogue" in the Exercises is Jesus, the fully human Son of God, God made
man. Thus, the final prayer, addresses "the Lord," not God the Father, as the addressee
who is to receive "my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and all my will- all that
I have and possess." It is the Lord who, in and through and with his humanity, has
"given all that to me" because he himself took on our humanity and used it in the
complex circumstances of his human life, in successes and seemingly utter failure on
the cross. What the retreatant can now "give back to you" is not some abstract notion
of "liberty" or "understanding," but a situated liberty and understanding that, at the
same time, involves memory, and, thereby shapes the will in terms of cosmic rationality
that links the human and the divine.
We have then, in the Exercises a particularly rich infusion of Trinitarian thinking,
one of the most controversial concepts in the emerging Christian community that con-
fronted and affronted the Judaic tradition of"the Lord our God is One" with God the
Son. God the Father begets the fully human and fully divine Son, Jesus, who, with his
salvific actions completed, promises and sends us the Spirit of understanding, the Spirit
of Counsel and Wisdom that will be with us through all times and will enable us to
speak to all nations. It is to Jesus, the human Son and risen Christ, that the believer ad-
dresses herself. As she addresses him, the Son of God, she is dialoguing with him as
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God who so loved the world, in a way that graces her human existence, thereby defin-
ing Christian living, not in terms of moral failure or success, but as remaining in Christ.
In Jesus' 'just responsive understanding," to use Bakhtin's phrasing for the superad-
dressee, time and place are bridged in the midst of the exercise of prayerful dialoguing.
Throughout the Exercises and their notes, numerous references occur to diverse
forms of prayer, with a primary distinction being made between meditation and
contemplation. The former is usually described as a discursive mental prayer,
appropriate for "beginners." It might well occupy that lesser rank because of a
prevailing notion oflanguage at the time, as a form oflogic, a rationality that could all
too easily endanger the development of what are referred to as the spiritual senses. In
reverse, an affective imagination is valued for its presumed ability to nurture those
senses. To the extent that we have come to understand that language in dialogue and
discourse is not the practice of the rationality of formal logical relations but, instead,
perhaps our most comprehensive way of engaging with the world, it might be possible
to reconsider this lower status. Indeed, such a reconsideration is all the more justified
as the previous assessment conceptualizes language, thought, and imagery as
considerably more separate than a dialogic and semiotic understanding of language
supports. For example, modem psychology identifies inner speech - and much of
discursive prayer is likely to take that form - not as the interior aspect of external
planned or calculated speech. Instead it attributes to it a function of its own, namely
that of enabling a thinking in pure meanings, a "dynamic, shifting, unstable thing,
fluttering between word and thought."32 In other words, if the preferred reliance on the
imagination is only intended to assure the affective engagement of the retreatant, the
development of her spiritual senses, then I see no inherent reason to discount the
potentialities for just such an affective imagination via the situated and imaginative
discourses of prayerful meditation.
Through such an open-ended environment which adds memory upon memory,
voice upon voice, and affect upon affect, the Exercises lead to what competent
discursive practice, including prayer, is always about: they instantiate the stable
thematic, and compositional, and affecting forms of understanding, thereby enabling
the retreatant to know how to mean with confidence in the first place. That
understanding, of course, is now beyond human understanding; - it is faith. In that
sense a believer's freedom and the ability to make discerning choices, both, are a
consequence of an exquisite "understanding" of the Christian salvific story, an
understanding that will be the more capacious the more all aspects of intellect and
moral desire are exercised in prayerful dialogues. Beyond the notion of the "spiritual
senses" to which I already referred, perhaps such an expansive understanding of our
being in terms of the "Other," of the Christ Jesus of faith, is also a way of
understanding how we come to experience the "peace of Christ" which we are
promised in the Spirit who will heal us.
It goes without saying that an unabridged set of texts of the Christian experience is
best able to provide the necessary polyphony for the individual believer's
understanding as she develops her faith in dialogue with the experiences of other
believers. The Catholic tradition has this possibility in particularly rich abundance -
and therein lies its inspiritedness - though it has not always used it to greatest benefit.
The Exercises, however, affirm that rich reservoir for informing individual choices
through practices of discernment within a community of believers. They do so in a way
that powerfully counteracts what is so often the justification given for the various forms
of fundamentalist abridgements in the first place, whether they appear inside or outside
the Church, namely to assure that the believer avoids "failure" and is guaranteed moral
superiority and success. By contrast, in their content, their structure, and their practice,
they are remarkable testimony to Ignatius' unshakable and extraordinarily bold
assumption of the freedom of the children of God and the graced rationality of human
relationships with God in and through our life-world, in the colloquy of Being.
Glory be to God for dappled things -

For skies ofcouple-co/our as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls;finches wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced- fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adtizzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
-Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., Pied Beauty33
NOTES
For a particularly noteworthy case, see Ruqaiya Hasan's comprehensive analysis ofBourdieu's Language
and Symbolic Power in "The Disempowerment Game: Bourdieu and Language in Literacy," Linguistics and
Education, !0, I (1999): 25-87, and the potentially negative impact she attributes to his position with regard
to literacy education understood as a complex ability to decipher the world.
2 A. L. Becker, Beyond Translation: Essays Toward a Modern Philology (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1995) uses this felicitous term to realign the privileged focus on language as a system, by
saying: "A language is essentially a dictionary and a grammar. Languaging, on the other hand, is context
shaping. Languaging both shapes and is shaped by context. It is a kind of attunement between a person and
a context" ( 9). Readers who hear in Becker's verbalization of a noun an echo of Heidegger's often-times
extraordinary uses of grammatical metaphor will also recognize in that practice the intent to reverse the highly
problematic reification of much of our world, in language and in cultural practice. Cf. my additional
comments on the phenomenon of grammatical metaphor in the body of the paper.
3 Cf the introduction to The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael
Holquist (Austin, TX: The University of Texas Press, 1981).
4 Cf. M. M. Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel, in Holquist, op. cit., 269-272.
5 Ibid., 272.
6 Bakhtin, "The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences: An Experiment
in Philosophical Analysis," in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 103-131.
7 Op. cit., 107-113.
For an excellent discussion of these issues, see the "General Orientation" in M.A. K. Halliday and James
R. Martin, Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power(London/Washington: Falmer Press, 1993), 3-21.
9 Clifford Geertz, "Found in Translation: On the Social History of the Moral Imagination" in Geertz, Local
Knowledge (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 36-54. The quote is from 48.
10 Hasan, "The Conception of Context in Text" in Peter H. Fries and Michael Gregory, eds., Discourse in
Society: Systemic Functional Perspectives: Meaning and Choice in Language- Studies for Michael Halliday
(Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1995), 185-283. The quote is from page 184.
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11 Talmy Givon, "The Functional Approach to Grammar" in Michael Tomasello, ed., The New Psychology
of Language: Cognitive and Functional Approaches to Language Structure (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum, 1998), 41-66.
12 Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar (London: Edward Arnold, 1985), xiii.
13 Ibid., xiv.
14 Halliday, "Towards a Language-Based Theory of Learning," Linguistics and Education, 5, 2 (1993): 93-
116.
15 See particularly Hasan, "The Disernpowerment Game," 53.
16 Ibid., 62.
17 Carolyn R. Miller, "Genre As Social Action," Quarterly Journal ofSpeech, 70,2 (1984): 151-167.
18 Bakhtin, "The Problem of Speech Genres" in Emerson and Holquist, eds., Speech Genres and Other
Late Essays, 60-102.

19 For elaboration of this point, see Jay L. Lemke, Textual Politics: Discourse and Social Dynamics.
(London: Taylor and Francis, 1995), 1-18.

2 For an in-depth investigation oflarger discursive aspects of this phenomenon, see Charles Bazerman's
study, Shaping Written Knowledge. The Genre and Activity ofthe Experimental Article in Science (Madison,
WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
21 For a particularly thoughtful analysis of the relationship between situated cognition and language
processing, see Dan I. Slobin, "From 'Thought and Language' to 'Thinking for Speaking"' in John J.
Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson, eds., Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press; 1996), 70-96. Much like Becker, Slobin, too, prefers verbal over nominal forms of expressing the kind
of dynamic decision-making that takes place in actual speech.
22 In the following discussion, I rely heavily on the various studies included in Halliday and Martin, op cit.
23 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
24 While I claim no expertise in scientific analysis nor in philosophical reasoning, it seems to me that a
number of publications by Patrick A. Heelan point in a direction similar to what I have here explicated from
the linguistic viewpoint, e. g., "Galileo, Luther, and the Hermeneutics of Natural Science" in T. Stapleton,
ed., The Question ofHermeneutics: Festschrift for Joseph Kockelmans (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 363-375;
"The Scope of Hermeneutics in Natural Science," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 29.2
(19980): 273-298; Patrick A. Heelan and Jay Schulkin, "Hermeneutical Philosophy and Pragmatism: A
Philosophy of Science," Synthese 115 (1998): 269-302.
25 The Spiritual Exercises ofSaint Ignatius. Translated and with a commentary by George E. Ganss, S.J.
(St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1992).

26 Pierre Hadot, Philosophy As a Way ofLife. Spiritual Exercises From Socrates to Foucault. (Cambridge,
MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 20. Particularly useful is the lengthy introduction by Arnold I. Davidson
which provides an overview of the major arguments Hadot makes in the book.
27 Ibid.
28 For a particularly powerful affirmation of what he perceives to be an essential relationship between
theology and philosophy, see the encyclical by Pope John Paul II, issued in September 1998, Fides et Ratio.
See also Patrick A. Heelan's manuscript of a presentation at the Jesuit Core Conference, Seattle University,
March 2, 2000, entitled "Faith and Reason: The Core of a Jesuit Liberal Education."
29 Though I have had the privilege of doing the Exercises in their Annotation XIX version with Patrick
Heelan as my director over a ten-month period, and although I belong to an extraordinarily vibrant Jesuit
parish, the observations I make here reflect strictly my own personal continued engagement with both the
content and the form of the Exercises. Furthermore, given the centrality of the Exercises for the Jesuit order
and their significant contribution to Roman Catholic spirituality in general, a voluminous scholarly secondary
literature exists, aside from numerous published aids to spiritual growth based on the Exercises. With few
exceptions, my comments here do not refer to either of these source categories.
3 For an accessible overview of the progression of the Exercises, particularly from the perspective of the
role of the imagination, see Frederick G. McLeod, "Imagination with the Act of Faith," Review for Religious,
46 (1986): 242-256.
31 Bakhtin, The Problem of the Text, particularly 120- I 27. The quote is from 126-127.
32 For an extensive discussion of inner speech, see Lev Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1986). This quote is from 249.

33 Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Pied Beauty" in Catherine Philips, ed., Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Critical
Edition ofthe Major Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 132-133.
W. NORRIS CLARKE, S.J.
THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION
My aim in this essay is to engage in a philosophical exploration of the creative

imagination in human beings, seeking to discern both its basic structure and its special
significance for understanding what it means to be human. For it is unique in the
universe, so far as we know it, to human beings: God and angels are certainly creative,
but by pure intelligence, without images; animals have imagination, but principally
reproductive, to conserve images of past experience, not creative, save to a very limited
degree, always tied down to present particular experiences and concrete problems.
Humans, on the other hand, enjoy a far wider scope of creative imagination, due partly
to the power of human intelligence to abstract, and so break free of the concrete
material present we find ourselves situated in - which animals cannot do - and partly
from the freedom which our imagination participates in because of its association with
the free will of the human spirit.
In addition to being unique to human beings - taking "human" in the widest sense
of rational animal or embodied spirit, since there might be other species of this kind of
being in our cosmos- the creative imagination seems to be uniquely revealing of what
it means to be human, in the sense of a privileged expression of the intrinsic unity of
body and soul, as at once distinct, yet constituting one single being, operating here
precisely as the unity of body and soul, matter and spirit, collaborating in a single act.
It is this second aspect of the creative imagination, its privileged expression of the
intrinsic unity of mind and body- and more broadly, of soul and body- that especially
interests me and seems to me the most philosophically illuminating. In general I mean
by "creative imagination" that power or ability that human beings have, not just to store
up sense images of our past experiences, but to actively create new images never before
experienced by the imaginer - or perhaps by any human person before or after - put
together either by new combinations of old images, or by creatively making up entirely
new ones out of the basic raw material of our experience already lodged inside of us
but now unified under totally new forms of our own creation. Obvious examples of the
exercise of our creative imagination are works of literature (such as poetry, novels,
drama), the various plastic arts, creative technology and problem solving in various
fields, including the sciences (in which there are many famous examples of new
theories discovered this way), and finally the one that has especially caught my
attention and in which I have considerable experience, namely, storytelling, and in
particular what are now called "wisdom stories."
423
424 W. NORRIS CLARKE, S.J.
For many years in my teaching of courses on human nature, the human person, etc.,
in the Thomistic tradition, I never bothered much with the imagination, let alone the
creative imagination, except to mention it briefly, following the tradition of most
Thomists and other scholastics, who ordinarily pay careful attention to the reproductive
imagination and its role in preparing the abstraction of universal ideas, but have very
little if anything to say about the creative imagination. This includes both Aristotle and
St. Thomas himself- the latter a little better than most of the others, though still very
terse. But in the last 10 or 15 years of my 50-year career I have gradually waked up to
the profound importance of this distinctive aspect of human nature, both for
understanding our own individual selves and for understanding and promoting the
healthy functioning of any living culture. This was due partly to (1) initially fortuitous
encounters with a network of image therapists using creative visualization to improve
health (both physical and psychic) and public performances of all kinds (such as public
speaking, acting, etc.), including athletics and even medical practice; (2) reflecting on
the now widely recognized role of creative imagination in scientific and technological
discovery; (3) encounter with psychologists studying the indispensable role of
imagination in moral development: you can't learn how to act appropriately morally
towards others unless you use your imagination to put yourself in the shoes of other
persons and creatively imagine how you would feel if you were treated in such and
such a way as you are planning to do towards them; (4) much more generally,
reflecting on the work of psychologists studying the central importance of storytelling,
specifically the telling of "wisdom stories," for the healthy psychological and moral
character development both of young people and of a whole culture; this includes the
identification of the distinctive traits of what is now called "narrative thinking" as
opposed to other modes of rational thinking.
I shall argue that the acts of the creative imagination show forth in a special way the
intrinsic unity of the human mind and body, spirit and matter, the human being
precisely as embodied spirit, best grounded in St. Thomas's vision of the unity of
human nature. This is because the act of the creative imagination is a single act
performed by collaboration of the two great complementary poles of human activity,
soul and body, to produce an act that is not either/or, produced either by the sense
powers alone or the intellect alone, or by one after the other, but indissolubly by both
together, in an image or set of images shot through with the light of intelligence that
expresses itself not apart from, but precisely in and through the images. The unity of
the product of the creative imagination is obvious - implying the unity of the act that
produced it - but the irreducibly dipolar origin of the act as involving both body and
soul also shines forth for the attentive philosopher willing to probe beyond the surface.
I am taking a stand here against many rationalist thinkers, for whom the products
of the creative imagination are merely confused ideas on the way to their ideal
completion as clear and distinct ideas. On the contrary, the fruits of the creative
imagination are not a stage to be gotten beyond and left behind, but a unique expression
of the very being of the human person as embodied spirit, and so to be cherished and
nurtured as an irreplaceable aspect of authentic human development.
The creative imagination best fulfills its role for healthy human development only
when it serves under the guidance - as its handmaiden, so to speak - of the light of
intelligence, or of what we might better call the wisdom of the soul, since this includes
both free will and the emotions. In so doing, we reject as both inadequate and
CREATIVE IMAGINATION 425
dangerous the opposing thesis put forward by certain thinkers of the Romantic School,
echoed by certain philosophers, psychologists and psychoanalysts today, for whom the
creative imagination is a completely autonomous power, quite independent of, even
opposed to, reason, acknowledging no master or guide beyond itself, since it is the
original source, impenetrable to reason, of all the products of reason itself. There are
important moral implications involved here. For if the activity of the creative
imagination is not carried on under the guidance and illumination of reason ordered
towards the good, since it has no conscience or power of judgment on its own, it can
easily be taken over from below by our uncontrolled passions and instincts, from within
by evil designs of the will, or from without by the absorption of seductive but
ambivalent or dehumanizing images projected onto us by various media channels not
under our control. Vivid images have a peculiar power of weaving a spell over
embodied spirits like ourselves - both for good and evil. 1
I would like to use as my paradigm example of the creative imagination at work
what are commonly called "wisdom stories," since I am more familiar and personally
involved with them as an amateur storyteller myself. The defining traits of a wisdom
story is that first, it is a genuine story with a surprise ending; second, it is centered
around a genuine human individual (not a stylized type, as in Aesop's Fables, or a
superhuman/ divine figure, as in creation myths, etc.), and third, it incorporates some
bit of wisdom for the human journey arising out of the collective wisdom of a particular
culture or cultures. Thus usually it is attributed to no particular author, but is handed
down by word of mouth from generation to generation, no one knows from when or
where, and embodies the collective wisdom of the people, e.g., Grimm's Fairy Tales.
Occasionally - but rarely successfully, to my mind - one finds a wisdom story
deliberately made up by a known author (such as the well-known one, "The Happy
Prince," by Oscar Wilde). It is by such stories, involving heroes that can be admired
and imitated - or the opposite - that the youth of all the older cultures (not just the
pre-literate ones) have been traditionally initiated into moral training. This potent "way
of stories" is unfortunately diminishing in the educational practice of our own time,
both at home and in school, its place taken by the television screen - a medium that
substitutes ready-made images produced by someone else and received passively by the
viewer instead ofbeing actively elicited by the creative imagination of the listener. I
also choose the wisdom story as my medium of exploration because it illustrates so
vividly the intrinsic collaboration of both mind and body.
Let me present as a classic example of the genre, this brief wisdom story from
Africa, one of their many examples of teaching ethical lessons by story:
The Chief in a certain village announced that he would give a feast for the men of the village. He
would provide the food, but he asked each man to bring a bottle of palm wine, which would then
be poured into the great bowl and shared by all as a symbol of their common bond. So Mbutu went
home and told his wife about the invitation. "Oh, that's fine; I'm happy for you," she said. "Well,
the food is fine," he replied, "but I don't have any palm wine and it is expensive." "Oh, that's all
right, we can manage," she said. "I know what I'll do: I'll fill my jar with water, pour it in, and no
one will know the difference" [the jars were opaque]. "Oh no, don't do that; you might get in
trouble." "Look, I'm a man; I'm smart; you're only a woman." So that's what he did: filled his jar
with water, marched down and poured it into the great common bowl like all the others, feeling
pretty good about his cleverness. Then the Chief said: "Now we will all drink a toast and then
share the feast." So everyone dipped his cup into the common bowl, and then drank. A gasp ran
through the whole assembly: there was only water in every cup!
Every one had made the same decision: the other people will do the right thing, so
I'll be able to get away with it and save myself some money! Result: social disaster!
Moral: If everyone followed this principle - and if one, why not all? - then moral
chaos! This is not the way for a good man, a wise man, to act!
What is so special about this product of the creative imagination is that it is rooted
in two distinct but inseparable poles of the human psyche: on the one hand, it is clearly
rooted in the body by its concrete sense imagery of a particular human experience in
space and time; on the other, it is also clearly rooted in the intellectual part of the soul
(both intellect and will), because of the universal principle that unmistakably shines
forth through it for anyone equipped with the use of reason (children from about six on
get it right away). The idea just simply shines in and through the image. It is not as
though there were two distinct contents of the story: one the idea, the other the
imagery; one part in the mind, the result of an act of the mind; the other part in the
body, the act of the senses or the simple sensory imagination. The two are fused
together in a single act and single product, precisely as an idea incarnated in an image,
i.e., the expression of an embodied-spirit, grasped all at once as a meaning shining
through a manifold of images and held as one in the unity of human consciousness,
which is simultaneously intellectual and sensible.
We can indeed, if we wish, abstract out the intellectual truth embedded in the story
and think about it, discuss it. But this is not at all the same as the experience of seeing
the two fused together, the idea shining through the image, the soul expressing itself
through the body. This disembodied truth, this wisdom for the journey expressed in an
abstract proposition, can indeed be recognized as true. But it does not engage us deeply
at all the levels of our being - intellectual, sensible, emotional- and it does not move
us to action, at least not nearly so directly and spontaneously, as does the same truth
incarnated in the story. This is especially true for children and young people, but it
holds significantly for all us adults too. It is no wonder that most of the great religions
of the world proclaim their basic message first through a story, then through a creed of
some kind. Thus in Christianity first comes the story of Jesus, only later the Creed, with
its propositions distilled one by one out of the foundational story.
Why is this? It seems to me that precisely because our very being is to be embodied
spirits it is connatural for us to try to express what we know with our intellect in some
way also through our body, to incarnate, so to speak, what is spiritual in us in matter.
Thus if my soul is happy, it is natural for me to express it by dancing, or singing, or just
smiling; if it is sad, by weeping or looking glum, etc. In acquiring my truths about
reality I have to work hard with the resources of my intelligence, trying to think things
out and think them through to their intelligible conclusions; and if these are challenged,
I must meet the challenge by rational arguments, not just by presenting images: one
cannot solve a dispute about the truth just by telling different stories to each other. But
once one has gotten hold of some truth, especially an important one, it is natural for us
to want to express it, both to ourselves and especially to others, by enlisting the body
to clothe it in some vivid image or story that will move the other to share it and
appreciate it as we do.
This is partly because images are naturally more emotion-laden than abstract ideas
or propositions and hence more effective in getting our attention and moving us to
action. Almost all images, it seems, have a certain aura of feelings, of emotions,
attached to them, whether positive or negative, and do not leave us indifferent,
CREATIVE IMAGINATION 427
detached, or even bored, as we can be by purely abstract ideas. To hear abstractly that
the situation of poor people in a city is deplorable will be registered by us, but will not
move us immediately; whereas to see a photo or hear a story told about a ragged,
skeleton-like child eating food from a garbage dump is much more likely to galvanize
us into action to do something about it.
But as we search more profoundly for the roots of all this, we discover that it is
deeply consonant with St. Thomas's strong philosophical affirmation of the intrinsic
unity of body and soul in human beings, that these are not two substances somehow
extrinsically connected, nor is the spiritual soul imprisoned in the body, but there is a
connatural intrinsic union between them that is good and necessary for the soul itself,
as well as the body, in order to fulfill their common human destiny as an embodied
spirit on a journey towards final fulfillment in union with God. It follows naturally, St.
Thomas tells us, that the distinctive mode of human knowing in operation will reflect
the distinctive mode of human being on the deeper level of its nature. He does not
hesitate to draw the conclusion (that shocked his more conservative Augustinian
colleagues at the University of Paris at the time, including St. Bonaventure), namely:
"I answer that, in the state of the present life, in which the soul is united to a corruptible
body, it is impossible for our intellect to understand anything actually, except by
turning [or "converting itself'] to phantasms [images in the imagination]" (Summa
Theo/ogiae I, 84, 7). Our intellectual knowing, therefore, must always start by
bouncing off some image held in the imagination. But once in possession of this initial
knowledge abstracted from matter, the intellect can follow the trail of its deficient
intelligibility all the way back through the chain of its causes to its ultimate spiritual
Source. It is precisely our search for the meaning of matter, "led by the hand by
material things" (manuducimur), as he puts it in a graphic image, that leads us to the
heights of spirit- a distinctive human journey, Thomas remarks, that is "a longer way"
(longior via) than that of the angels.
It was this tying the intellect so closely to the senses in human knowing that so
upset the more "spiritual-minded" Augustinians of his day, who felt that Aquinas was
under-mining the spiritual nobility of the human soul by which we are primarily
constituted as images of God. Thus a key doctrine of St. Bonaventure was that the
human soul had "two faces": one, the Aristotelian, that faced downward towards the
world of matter, to abstract their intelligible natures; the other, the Augustinian, that
looked directly upward into the world of spirit, to know its own spiritual soul, the
angels, and God. St. Thomas equivalently replied: "Sorry, the human soul has only one
face. It cannot look directly into the world of spirit; it must first look down into the
world of matter and then be led back by the chain of causality (reductio ad causas) to
the higher world of spirit." We should understand, of course, that Thomas is here
speaking only of the natural mode of human knowing. He readily admits that in
mystical experience God can supernaturally "touch" the soul directly from within and
infuse spiritual ideas into it without passing through sense images. St. Augustine, the
source for St. Bonaventure, never distinguished that clearly between the natural and
supernatural orders. St. Thomas also admits the immediate concomitant knowledge by
the human soul of itself as knower and source of its actions - not by abstraction or
inference- but only once activated by initially attending, however briefly, to some
image in the imagination as its springboard, so to speak (De Anima, a. 17).
It becomes easy to understand, then, that just as the way up for human knowing
must pass through the senses to arrive at intellectually understood truth, so on the way
down from its own intelligent possession of some truth or inherited wisdom to
expressing and sharing this with another human being we should naturally seek to
reclothe our abstracted wisdom in some vivid imagery that will resonate more
powerfully and connaturally within the whole being, soul and body, of the other
person. To do this one must call upon the creative imagination, since neither the
communicator nor the receiver is having a present sensory experience from which to
abstract it. The wisdom story is a wonderfully apt way of expressing and passing down
my own or my culture's inherited wisdom, reclothed by the creative imagination in the
language of an engaging story, to a receiver who is also a body-soul knower. And what
is essential to grasp here is that this product of the creative imagination, the story, is
taken in as a whole all at once- not first the images, then the meaning abstracted from
it- but the idea shining in and through the concrete image-complex of the story itself,
i.e., an idea not abstracted from, but incarnate in, an image. We in the West often like
to reflect on the story afterwards and formulate abstractly the universal truth embedded
therein. But in many oral cultures, apparently, such as the Native American, they do not
like to do that. They say the meaning is in the story, and should not be separated out,
for life itself is a story!
Another important evidence that reveals the role of the intellectual soul at work
within the creative imagination is the freedom involved in the creative combination or
construction of new images, such as mermaids, giants, elves, other worlds entirely (as
in science fiction). Animals seem to have a limited creativity of imagination in making
up new ways to solve present practical problems - an Australian friend of mine insists
his sheep dog constantly amazes him by its creativity in solving problems of herding
sheep. But this undeniable imaginative creativity is always limited to solving present
practical problems. Our human creativity of imagination seems to have an unlimited
range of creation of new images for the sheer joy or thrill of it, independently of any
immediate sense-presented practical problem. But such wide-ranging freedom, tran-
scending any immediate present of space and time, is a distinctive mark of the spiritual
will, linked directly with its sister faculty of the soul, intelligence itself.
In sum, transcendence over space, time, and material particularity of context, plus
unlimited freedom of creativity in the combination or construction of images, are thus
the hallmark of the human creative imagination, and a privileged expression of the
intrinsic unity of soul and body in a product that manifests the integrated collaboration
of both levels of our human nature at once in a unique human artifact.
Emeritus, Fordham University
NOTES
1 A survey of the history of philosophy reveals that the question of the nature and value of the creative
imagination in human beings turns out to be a sign of contradiction among philosophers, evoking strongly
opposed opinions on several points; it thus serves as a touchstone of the thinker's more fundamental position
on the nature of the union between body and soul, or what it means to be authentically human. I have been
much helped in this latter exploration by the recently published and extremely valuable Summa on the
imagination by Eva Brann, The World ofImagination (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991).
ERNEST G. McCLAIN
A PRIESTLY VIEW OF BIBLE ARITHMETIC:

Deity's Regulative Aesthetic Activity Within Davidic Musicology
INTRODUCTION
In "Music as Basic Metaphor and Deep Structure in Plato and in Ancient Cultures,"
Patrick Heelan modified the concepts of Boolean algebra to accord with Plato's
musicalized political theory in the fourth century BC. 1 The result is a non-distributive
lattice ofpartially ordered sets displayed in Figure 1.
T1
(Infinitely variable tuning- including equal temperament
;:;?~~
T3 (Pythagorean)
2'.J'~LP ~
T 5 (Just)
7?
T1 (Archytas) Tu (Ptolemy)
2p.3q.5'.7".11 1::iiLPT
T0 (Octave)
2p
Figure 1. Lattice of Musical Tunings

Heelan's algebra is illustrated here with examples from the Bible suggesting that
much authorial narrative is harmonica! allegory. His carefully defined symbols embrace
a mythologized early Mesopotamian "net of the Gods" in which this material was re-
fined in the matrix arithmetic of the cuneiform record before the emergence of Judaism
in the second millennium BC. Hebrew development constitutes a Davidic musicology
inspiring prophesy, ritual, narrative, and numerology in both Old and New Testaments.
The dramatic power of Heelan's formal lattice to synthesize an ancient
mathematical allegory extending from the first page of Genesis to the last page of
Revelation requires studying his symbols in the metaphors of Bible authors. Only Plato
429
430 ERNEST G. McCLAIN
carefully explains the forgotten matrix arithmetic, and he has been widely ignored
except by Philo of Alexandria who has been mistrusted. 2 Once the reader adopts an
appropriate mind set, bible authors prove to explain their models with remarkable
clarity. Tuning theory is made possible by the ear's ability to discriminate consonances
with considerable accuracy. Only ratio matters. Fractions are avoided by the use of
least common multiples. Numerosity is governed by the principle of smallest integers
in every context; the Chosen are "the fewest of all peoples." 3 And because pitch
perception as rising or falling is quantified in a 2-dimensional continuum, arithmetical
reciprocals always are relevant. The Jews invent nothing; they inherit a spiritual
domain "flowing with milk and honey" from thousands of years of Semitic musical
experience. 4 Both Greek and Jewish cultures know the same approximations to equal
temperament, for which Plato demanded that the conception of number be broadened
to include real number. Bible authors instead mythologize approximation with rational
numbers adjusted to human need. Only at Heelan's highest level, T 1, where tempera-
ment dogma competes with a regulative aesthetic activity involving other possible
tunings, are contrary purposes reconciled. YHWH's refusal to let David build his
temple can be understood as ensuring freedom of human choice; David accepts this
rejection and contents himself with planning for one. When Solomon's temple
eventually is dedicated the perfect unisons of David's 288 professional singers ("sons
of Asaph") accompanied by 120 "priests with trumpets" raise such a "cloud of glory
that the priests could not stand to minister." 5 When New Jerusalem descends from the
clouds at the end of Revelation these forces are dwarfed by a chorus of 144,000 male
virgins "singing a new song" reserved for them, accompanied by 24 angelic harpists.
These integers define pentatonic and heptatonic modal tuning systems which can be
decoded by Heelan's algebra. There is no effort toward either musical or mathematical
secrecy, nor any expectation that a reader can understand authorial models without the
ability to "reckon" for himself. 6 General meaning is always made evident by the
narrative. Heelan's schema is a guide to a deeper esoteric allegory.
The perception of tonal beauty- and the very possibility of an aesthetic community
-is dependent on a certain aural tolerance of approximation. There is no "crisis of the
irrational" in Israel. What the Bible encodes for a musician is an awesome integration
of opposites under the strict but elastic discipline of the ear.
2. THE CYCLIC OCTAVE T0 AS A PRIORI ASSUMPTION,

AND A FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH LIMITS
Both Greek and Jewish tuning theory assume a double octave as normative, framed by
the proportion 1:2::2:4 so that the first is "small" and the second "great." This idea is
encoded in the three Hebrew consonants which spell Eden while summing to 124 as
a numerical notation. In this arithmetical context it is useful to keep in mind Socrates'
observation that "2 is no more half than double," and an ancient affection for the notion
of the universe as unfolding from the middle (Greek mese) as a kind of world egg. It
proves convenient to the rigorous pursuit of perfect inverse symmetry to utilize our
modem pitch class "D" - center of symmetry in alphabetical notation - as a fixed
reference allowing Deity to think of himself simultaneously as "beginning, middle, and
end," as illustrated in Figure 2.
A PRIESTLY VIEW OF BIBLICAL ARITHMETIC 431
Figure 2. The Model Octave on D as "Divinity"
D =I. 2. 4. R..
D .....a_
i9: o<(S II
r:r
Physical application to string length (whether as multiples or as submultiples) has no effect on

tonal "pitch class," which is regarded mathematically as an invariant "cyclic residue."
Multiple meanings abound, detested by Aristotelian philosophy but cherished by

all ancient scribes in every language, with never enough symbols for the richness of
their thought. We must imagine these "God numbers" in motion, self-moving restlessly
for-evermore. 7 But Judaism is breaking away from established Semitic practice: the
highest deity in Mesopotamia is a "do-nothing," a "One" whose meaning is defined
only by context, and Egyptian Osiris is clearly dead on first appearance. Bible authors
conceive their only God as both the demiurgic unit from which all integers emanate as
multiples, and as the comprehensive whole, encoded in the largest integer necessary,
which affords judgment on its constituent submultiples. The Jewish deity is presented
as a rather overstressed Good Shepherd within the midst of his people. The most
adequate expression of this perspective on numerosity lies in the notion offactorials:
it is articulated brilliantly during the first millennium AD in Sepher Yezirah where the
"six working days of the creation week" are imagined as factorial six, meaning
1x2x3x4x5x6=720, and the contemplation of Deity on the Sabbath reserved for him
involves factorial seven, 7x720=5040, which functions as Heelan's limit L:<O:A in his
third tuning (T7). But Ezekiel already attests this limit perhaps a thousand years earlier
as the seven years (meaning 2x7x360=5040 "days and nights") when the fires in Jeru-
salem, the city of peace, are fed by burning all of the instruments of"Jewish warfare."
All of the biggest numerical limits in the Bible are examples of the deified number
4 defining the double octave. This phrase is Cyrus Gordon's translation of Kiriath-
Arba,8later Hebron, near where Sarah is buried in the cave ofMachpelah after dying
at 127. Mother of the "first-hom Jew" (Isaac, "He laughs"), her death age sums 1+2+4+
8+ 16+32+64, the first seven powers of 2 from 2= I to 2 6 needed for identifying him
as a Jewish "new Horus" and applying ratio theory to heptatonic Davidic musicology. 9
Here is where Isaac dies at 180,for 1:2::2:4 must be interpreted as 45:90::90:180/or
the smallest 12-tribe musicology, while defining also the yearly half-cycle of the sun
(and the geometer's semi-circle required for displaying Pythagorean triples). New
Testament arithmetic needs a 13-digit integer which extends numerical doubling,
meaning cyclic identity, to 240 , deliberately violating the principle of smallest integers
to construct an ecumenical heaven large enough for the virtuous of all people.
Glancing ahead at Heelan's formulas we see that the prime numbers 3, 5, 7, and 11
define the four tuning systems he studied ( T3, T5, T7, T 11 ) by their largest prime
generators, but always within some appropriate limit (L). His lattice is non-distributive
in the sense that "the musical spaces of the different tunings cannot simply be
represented by unions and intersections of Venn diagrams: a union of two musical
spaces is more than the simple sum of the musical possibilities of each" for
combinations of these primes create new intervals which none can produce by
themselves. Furthermore, because the powers of prime numbers never agree except at
the zero power equated with 1, any rational formula produces an infinity of arithmetical
possibilities while leaving the performer under the same constraints of self and
instrument. No wonder the Jewish Deity discovers that "the imagination of man's heart
is evil from his youth" (Gen. 9:21) for the womb of the cosmic octave 1:2 cannot be
divided into aliquot parts by any rational numbers whatever. In this harmonica! context
"man" (as an odd integer) born of"woman" ("female" powers of2 define the cyclic
matrix) is indeed a sinful creature by nature, requiring an able algebraic "Shepherd"
under any circumstances, and severe limitations on his behavior.
3. TUNING T3 AS THE SPIRAL

OF MUSICAL FIFTHS AND FOURTHS, WITH L=13
Heelan's tuning T3, rather unfairly known in the West as Pythagorean (which achieved
the same results by a different process), is the historical serpentine spiral of alternating
musical fifths and fourths displayed in Figure 3.
II
Pentatonic model
Heptatonic (Diatonic) model
Twelve tone "'cosmolog:ical" systems model (with 13th pitch class).
Figure 3. The "Great Serpent" Spiral Of Musical Fifths And Fourths

A near-coincidence in the pitch of the first and thirteenth tones limits practical applica-
tion to 12 tones, and theoretical overview to 13. A bronze "serpent on a pole" is the
only image YHWH ever authorized of his own "saving" power, and it was employed
in the tribal cult until the reforms of Hezekiah c. 700 BC. 10
String-length ratios for this sequence are quantified easily by the ancient Chinese
rule, not well-known in the West, "add or subtract one-third," i.e., to or from successive
values for falling musical fourths of3 :4 or rising musical fifths of 3:2, reading from left
to right. A less elegant rubric reading from right to left is subtract one-fourth for rising
fourths of 3:4 or add one-half for falling fifths of 2:3. (Consecutive fourths of 3:4
where needed keep the tonal serpent within the frame of a single octave.) For modem
vibration ratios (applied here when projecting scale order into tone-circles) the two
rules are reversed. Because octave doubling has no effect on pitch class it can be elimi-
nated for most purposes so that tones are identified merely as a sequence of triples, 1-3-
9, etc. emanating from unity and readily mapped by an abstract sequence of counters:
, etc. These are the "stones" from which God is able to "raise up children to
Abraham."
In Figure 3, it is helpful to think of "D" as symbolizing Deity looking out on us
from the middle of his world. Any set of consecutive triples (always the fewest
possible, meaning one fewer than the number of pitch classes) can be mapped into any
desired modal permutation order by doubling its value enough times to become the
largest integer (i.e., "tallest" man, string, or pipe), and then doubling the others as
needed to lie within an octave. 11 To the right of Deity as "D" (i.e., to our left) add or
subtract one-third produces vibration ratios for G C F .... His left arm (reading now
from our left to right by the converse rule, subtract one-fourth or add one-half, holds
vibration ratios for A E B ... On pitchpipes and harps this tuning order is visibly,
aurally, and tangibly serpentine, as in Figure 4:
Figure 4. Spiral 5ths tuning Figure 5. Scale order

on harps and pitchpipes. "straightens" the cosmic serpent.
The resulting scale order, however, is almost straight line as in Figure 5. Only in Equal
Temperament can 12-tone scale order "straighten" the ancient Egyptian cosmic serpent
Apophis perfectly. Caleb spies the Holy Land with Joshua with the same accuracy
shown by Vincenzio Galileo in the sixteenth century AD when this temperament
science had to be reinvented because its Mesopotamian origin was forgotten, Plato no
longer was read with musical comprehension, Kabbalism had lost its Davidic clarity,
and a new concept of zero as nothingness had intruded on the old idea of the "One"
as the point of origin. 12
4. DAVIDIC AND NEW TESTAMENT VALIDATION OF TUNING T3

Three Hebrew consonants in David's name notate 4.6.4 to show perfect fifths of2:3
and 3:2 in both directions from the center and correlating with G:D::D:A in the spiral
tuning order of Figure 3. In the scale order of Figures 5 and 6, however, these
symmetric fifths overlap by a wholetone of 8:9, and the algebra transforms into the
Greek musical proportion 12:9::8:6 (and 24:18:16:12 in the second or "great" octave)
to define a triune Deity for tuning theory (encoding the fixed limits of conventional
tetrachords in the normative modes).
0
D
:
_a_
j9=o 0 II
7T
D G A D nsmg G A
D A G D falling
12 9 8 6
(Pitch class IS constant while
numbers reciprocate:)
Figure 6. David as the "Musical Proportion" 12:9::8:6

It is a personal fancy that 4+6+4=14 probably shows David as an irrepressible

teenager, obnoxious to his older brothers, and that the rays in his tone-circle show his
metaphorical "slingshot" aimed at Goliath at six o'clock, and that his overlapping
alternate meanings as "8"and "9" (i.e., reciprocal meanings of 2/3 and 3/2) illustrate
both his personal duplicity and his dexterity in dodging Saul's spear, occasionally
thrown at him from the throne at 12 o'clock. David's three tones are the only common
elements in Heelan's four tunings. Isaac fathers twin sons Esau and Jacob at the age
of60 where these same ratios are encoded five times larger in 60:45::40:30. When old
and blind and deceived by his wife, Isaac confers the blessing due to first-born Esau
on the trickster Jacob, for the smaller integer (8, or 5x8 = 40) obviously is "born first."
But it is indistinguishable in Semitic function (and to the blind Isaac's touch) from 9
and 5x9=45, the "younger son" required for Hebrew cosmology because 45 doubles
naturally into 90, 180, and 360 which correlate music, geometry, and the calendar.
David's reorganization of Levite musicians into a professional band of 288
"prepared to cast lots for their duties, small and great, teacher and pupil alike" 13
provides for a pentatonic (5-tone) scale displayed in Figure 7, and extending across a
CE
double octave.
D 172. 144. 288!
(128, 256) ( 81' 162)
A G
(108, 216) (96, 192)
Figure 7. Egyptian Star Glyph As Pentatonic Scale

Any five consecutive pitch classes in tuning order require definition by 1-3-9-27-81;
and perfect inverse symmetry in the scale requires doubling the middle value (9) until
it is largest (i.e., through 18, 36, and 72 into 144 for the small octave, and again into
288 for a second or great octave). Other generators are doubled as required by the
framing ratios 72:144::144:288 (in which Deity symbolized by D is "beginning,
pattern suggests the star glyph in the Egyptian heavens: *

middle, and end"). In an octave circle mapping the radiance of the tone ratios the
And the rays outline the
pentagonal doorway to the Davidic temple's Holy of Holies: (The inequality of
pitch ratios tends to be glossed over in practice, for there are no semitones to vivifY
interval contrasts for voice and ear.)
Similar reasoning produces two more pitch classes for a self-symmetric heptatonic
model known as "Mode of the Prophets" displayed in Figure 8.
The middle generator among 1-3-9-27-81-243-729 which define F C G D A E B
is 33=27, and it must be doubled through 54, 108, 216, and 432 into 864 to embrace a
small octave, and doubled again into 1, 728 for a double octave. 14 The radial pattern in
Figure 8 should be rotated physically to enthrone each tone in turn at 12 o'clock;
A PRIESTLY VIEW OF13IBLICAL ARITHMETIC 435
because the pattern is self-symmetric its numbers can be applied to the circle in the
opposite direction. In this "D" mode the new pitch classes at Band F, which introduce
the first semitones, lie very close to a horizontal diameter and constitute an approximate
kind of cosmic "balance"; their "tritone" ratio of729:512 (F-G-A-B progresses through
three wholetones of8:9) approximates the square root of2 with only a slight excess.
(The balance and plumb line are primary Bible metaphors for personal behavior.) In all
other modes the disposition of wholetones and semi tones is asymmetric, for in all
diatonic tunings they are locked into this pattern.
D = 432, 864, ...
c E
B F
729 512
A G
Figure 8. World Soul and Mode of the Prophets

In the F and B modes when either 29=512 or 36=729 is enthroned at 12 o'clock the
other functions as plumb bob near six o'clock, as the square root of 2 approximation
in each other's octaves. Don't fail to observe a slight oscillation in this plumb line by
rotating Figure 8 both ways, for the reciprocal tritone ratios overlap by a useless micro-
interval known to musicians as a comma. The comma results from a trivial natural
cyclic excess in the 2:3 ratios of the musical fifth, insignificant in Figures 5, 6, 7, and
8, but an annoyance when allowed to accumulate. 15
Abram explores this Holy Land of tonal cosmology while carrying a name whose
letters sum to 35=243, thus defining any six consecutive pitch classes in the spiral
sequence. He is already as indifferent as David to "left and right" and so he embodies
pitch classes D, G, C, F, B-flat, E-flat in one direction and D, A, E, B, F-sharp, C-sharp
in the other in the way YHWH expects his Chosen to behave, indifferent to all reversals
of fortune. These 11 pitch classes are the limit of perfect inverse symmetry in 12-tone
approximations to equal temperament. At the age of 86, however, Abram, hoping for
an heir, fathers Ishmael on Sarai's Egyptian maid Hagar. When 86 is read exponentially
as 86=8x8x8x8x8x8=262, 144 it embraces the first twelve tones in spiral fifths tuning
(3 11 =177,147 is the largest male generator required). Later when informed by God
(under the Hebrew name Elohim, whose letter values also sum to 86) that the aging
Sarah will bear a legitimate heir at 90, Abram expresses regret: "Oh that Ishmael might
live in thy sight!" And Elohim (86 read exponentially as 86) assures him: "As for
Ishmael, I have heard you; behold, I will bless him and make him fruitful and multiply
him exceedingly; he shall be the father of twelve princes, and I will make him a great
nation" (Gen 17: 18-20). And so Abram becomes the patriarch also of 12 Arab tribes
who remain proud of that descent. There can be little doubt that authors are reveling
in the economy of an exponential notation, changing the names of both Deity and his
leading characters in playing a game which only the numerate can follow. God power
(as opposed to mankind's multiplicative power) is exponential, and is boldly advertised

as such in New Testament Greek by using derivatives of the technical term dynamis.
5. TUNINGT5
AS "CHOSEN PEOPLE" AND SYMMETRIC ALTERNATIVE TO T3
The ancient asymmetric Jewish "Mode of the Torah" (correlating with our "white key"
mode on E) is defined across a double octave by the same 288 "singers" and 120
"priests with trumpets" who perform at the dedication of Solomon's temple. They are
realigned now, however, in a "Just" tuning in which moveable sounds within Davidic
tetrachords are generated by the prime number 5 as "pure" major thirds of 4:5 or
complementary minor thirds of5:6 within embracing fifths of2:3. (Technically, the 2:3
ratio is now acquiring its own derivative arithmetical and harmonica/ means.) The
Mode ofthe Torah in its canonic diatonic form is Plato's "true Hellenic mode" (Greek
Dorian) correlating with our "white key" mode on E. 16 Because of its asymmetry it
requires a double octave framed by 120:60::60:30 in one direction and by
72:144::144:288 in the other, as displayed in Table 1 for the "small" octave. (A paired
"white key" mode on C, our normative major scale, needs the same numbers in the
opposite direction.) David's three tones from T3 (i.e., the triune Deity) are common to
all three modes.
Table 1. The paired asymmetric modes on E and C,

transposed to D for direct correlation
bb b
"white key" E mode D c A G f e D
transposed down
"white key" C mode D e f# G A b c# D

transposed up
numbers increase 72 80 90 96 108 120 135 144
numbers decrease 60 54 48 45 40 36 32 30
This paired system of 3+4+4= 11 tones thus provides 8 alternates for the 11 symmetries
in Abram. Their model "small" octaves are integrated by factorial 6=720 (the least
common multiple of60 and 144) at which point integers become available also for the
pentatonic doorway to the temple (i.e., with alternate pitches for c and C, and forE and
e). Furthermore, 2 9=8x8x8=8 3=512 now becomes available for an alternate square root
of 2 ratio defining a-flat as a twelfth tone at 720:512- which proves to be a "hair"
(Ezekiel's metaphor) more accurate than 729:512 as a square root of2 approximation,
while coinciding almost perfectly with G-sharp. The two thirteen tone systems T3 and
T 5 considered aurally equivalent, are symmetric approximations to Equal
Temperament, whose values lie within the commas between Spiral Fifths and Just
tunings. Figure 9 displays the combined systems. 17
Heelan's computation limit for both Lp and L1 is 12 pitch classes; both sets define
a 131h under reciprocation; but the computation limit for a single octave is ~ 86=262, 144
in T3 and only ~ factorial 6=720 in T 5 A double octave Just tuning for the Chosen
People is thus 2x720=1,440 which happens to be the sum of the letter values in Adam,
who is properly claimed in Jewish folklore to contain the "seeds" of all tribal
descendants. The tone-circle of Figure 9 shows the Jewish "sheepfold" in a way
congenial for the eye; "David's slingshot" lies closest to Equal Temperament and
suggests why God is sometimes flanked by two very superior "angels."
D
F
B
b r
Figure 9. YHWH's "Sheepfold" for Tunings T3 and T 5

The triune deity symbolized by G:D:A (structured by 12:9::8:6 encoded in David) "watches over"
the commas between Spiral Fifths and Just tunings at other loci enclosing Equal temperament
values. The excess in T3 is counterbalanced by the defect in T5 so that the two systems are in near
perfect agreement again at A~ -g#and G# -a~. This natural serendipity was probably discovered
by studying the symmetry systematically rather than by constructing it artificially. Thus the final
result appears to be a "gift of the god numbers" deified in Mesopotamia.
6. T7 PROVIDES DIVINE PERSPECTIVE
((j))
70=35
fallmg nsmg
50:49
t./2
Figure 10. Septima! Comma
35:49::50:70
Heelan's tuning T7 is named for Plato's friend Archytas who tried unwisely to integrate
the first four primes into the normative Greek tetrachordal system. 18 The prime number
7 deserves its exclusion from musical "working days" but serves two nobler functions:
1) as the cardinal number of our heptatonic musicology, still far from exhausted in its
resources; and 2) in affording oversight into least noticeable differences. 19 The simplest
Diophantine approximation to the square root of2 is the undersized ratio 7:5 displayed
reciprocally in the proportion 35:49::50:70. Most normal ears probably notice the
difference between 49 and 50 under laboratory conditions, but their errors are halved
by being centered symmetrically within the octave double 35 :70; in this context 49 and
50 are 99 percent correct and may inspire the popular notion of Deity's 99 names. The
one percent error in each correlates with the Greek computation of the difference
between a quartertone and a third tone (arithmetically 204/3-204/4= 17 when computed
in modem logarithmic cents, 1200 to the octave). This 49:50 septimal comma is
displayed radially in Figure 10 to alert the eye to its 34 cent value. Its errors of 17
cents in each direction merit consideration as the extent of Divine Mercy in forgiving
"sins of missing the mark." The Spiral Fifths comma at this point totals 24 cents
overlap; the Just comma which emerges from 45:32 in this region has a defective
comma of 20 cents, and both of these commas are centered (so that their errors are
halved). Noah's "flood" (discussion is suppressed here) reduces these commas
considerably but at the expense of a numerological deluge. Caleb's ratio reduces the
error still further to the insignificance it has in Vincenzio Galilei's temperament of
1600 AD. But the one percent "tithe of a tithe" which Levites pass on to the High Priest
covers the sins in the 49:50 ratio and probably justifies our accepting 7:5 as mapping
Divine mercy. In this case the 50th "small unit" symbolizes the Divine Son who takes
the sins of the world upon Himself' in the manner exaggerated for the eye in Figure 11.
Figure 11. Analysis of the sins of approximation forgiven
within the septimal comma 35:49::50:70. Satan's comma is greater than Isaac's.
Divine Mercy limtts 49:50
Satan requires GII:AI.

[
................. ................
........................
....................
'Savicx" Ilia 7:5 (-17 cents)
'Giants" Ilia 3:2 (-:t12 cents)
{ ......
Isaac requires only ao:gll "Humans" via 5:4 (-10 cents)
ancient theoretical 'Flood" numerosity (-1% cents)
computationallimrt
'Caleb" via 18:17 (-1 cent)
"'Hear, 0 Israel"
In the Old Testament, however, authors still think in terms of"God is my Savior" for
they are unembarrassed to be using "One" to mean both whole and part. It is Isaiah and
the Greeks who differentiate these functions.
Among the Chosen People defined by factorial6 = 720, the 7:5 square root com-
putation is 7/5x360=504, but a reciprocal of 5/7x720 cannot be computed until the
latter is multiplied by 7 into factorial7=5040. This gross inflation of numerosity serves
no useful function (it defines an alternate 12th tone we don't intend to use anyway)
except in the niceties of theory. In Hindu and Platonic mythology the prime number 7
introduces a third and lower caste of characters whose fuller biblical functions have yet
to be discovered (probably in the census data not yet decoded). "Satan" as a "fallen
angel" of729:512 from tuning T3 loses out to a lower caste "fiver" of720:512=45:32
in Tuning T5, but in each case 512=8x8x8=29 is surrogate for the "One" God Himself,
and early Christian bishops recognized 888 as the sum of the numerical values in the
Greek name of Jesus (IESOUS). But beyond this (in 7:5 displayed symmetrically within
5040) a third caste Savior has already "rescued" the whole system. (It is the smallest
unit which "saves" the system.) The trivial excess in Spiral Fifths is offset
symbolically, I suggest, by the ritual of male circumcision, and the defect in Just thirds
is compensated by males feasting on a sacrificial lamb once a year at the temple. The
"son of a priest" who composed Revelation understood perfectly that "Satan" (meaning
36=729, encoded in 666) had to be allowed his period on the throne of heaven for the
resurrection drama to be completed by 888, meaning by 83=512 in the region of 6
o'clock. Tuning T7 has a computational limit of 5040 within which Plato found 37
candidates for "guardians" of his model city in Laws. David's authors actually name
37 warriors when telling of the fighting prowess of his private band of"thirty."
7. HOW TUNING T 11 EMPHASIZES THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE
Heelan's fourth tuning, T 11 named for the astronomer Ptolemy who writes in the middle
of the second century AD, is not Platonic except metaphorically. Ptolemy is justly
proud of the economy of his system: four numbers 9-10-11-12 framed by a familiar
perfect fourth of 3:4 (belonging also to the three older tunings) illustrate how a
tetrachord can be made "barbaric" for the ear by subdividing it into three gradually
diminishing intervals which cannot be discriminated successfully from each other in
any normative musical way. (Differences between successive intervals of 182, 165, and
150 cents are less than the commas between T3 and T5 .) But if this is true for primes
like 11 it is also true for all larger primes; if God forgives any errors whatever in the
computation of equal temperament boundary markers then the door is wide open for
ambiguity as the products of other primes drift cyclically within the commas forgiven. 20
And this appears to be how Jewish authors view their allegory. In this system any man,
however humble (meaning any odd integer), is a potential "priest" in some context.
Because any tone among the 12 can be the tonic of a tuning system T 1, and pitch is not
fixed in any case, the septimal comma of Divine Forgiveness can be located anywhere.
Figure 12 attempts to convey, by its twelve colored septimal commas of 49:50, the
amount of human freedom guaranteed within the octave by the "self-limitation" of a
merciful Deity which YHWH becomes.
Figure 12. Justice and Mercy
Within the "Jubilee commas" graphed as colored segments surrounding Equal Temperament
values the ear cannot discriminate other pitch classes in a musical context. This small amount of
mercifUl insensitivity is a common assumption of Greek and Davidic musicology, making musical
collaboration possible but inviting alternative conceptions.
Greek authors emphasize human limitation; Jewish authors emphasize Divine Mercy.
These opposing conceptions are in perfect agreement arithmetically when studied
musically- which philology has not yet learned to do. Biblical conceptions of God and
Man are adjusted perfectly to each other.
8. THE NAMES OF GOD
So great has been Jewish respect for the Torah (the Pentateuch) that it was assumed
only Moses could have written it, and this is not far wrong. The Hebrew letters in
Moses sum to 345 and compare favorably with Plato's algebra for the same T5 tuning
as "4:3 mated with the 5." But the El Shaddai whom Abraham knew also sums to 345,
and 3x4x5=60 defines the basic octave of the system as 2:1=60:30.
The YHWH who assures Moses that Abram/Abraham had known him as El
Shaddai encodes 10.5.6.5, a formula which possesses an awesome range of allusions
to both Babylonian and Bible harmonica! allegory, of sufficient complexity to produce
a Davidic 12-tone temperament. 21 The numbers 10.5.6.5 sum to 26, and 26 is the
significant "tail" in the biblical cube root value of 126 meaning 1.26. But 10+5 which
sums to 15 is the r.umber once deified by Ishtar, the great mother Goddess whose
"powers" YHWH usurps, and whose doubling produces 30 and 60 and their multiples.
10x5=50 symbolizes Enlil, the active head of the Mesopotamian pantheon, and 6x5=30
symbolizes the Moon god Sin. 10x6=60 symbolizes Anu/An, the "do-nothing" head
of the pantheon, and 60 was written as a large "1" anticipating monotheism - where
unity is burdened with cares. But in Babylonian base 60 this "I" had to be interpreted
as 60 5 to incorporate Abram symmetry (the worth of 60 is determined by the place
value of the largest base 60 fraction associated with it, in this case defining the 121h
tone). But when 60 5 is interpreted as YHWH and read exponentially in base 10 it
becomes 10 5x6 5=60 5.: 777,600,000 - a grotesque expansion of the 600,000 really
needed in base 10. A scribal "translation jest" is involved with the Jewish Godhead,
unknown to later "unmusical" generations. And in this jest we meet Noah's "father"
who dies at 777 just five years before the flood, and Noah at 600 followed by three
"sons" as 000 - meaning derivative fivers (5, 25, and 125 before they have been
doubled to "fill out" their places). Fortunately for our understanding, Plutarch (initiated
as a priest of Isis) notices the same thing happening at Delphi, assures us that in Egypt
"60 is the first of numbers," that Egyptian further subdivisions are by 60s, and coyly
alludes to the mysterious Greek letter E meaning "5" engraved on a stone at the sacred
shrine. 22 Both the Greek Apollo and the Jewish YHWH deify 60S (written in cuneiform
as "1 ") as meaning 777,600,000, making both God and man "fivers" (but in quite
different senses) in both cultures. Today we need Greeks like Plato and Plutarch to help
us learn again how to read Jewish scripture with Philo's understanding. My respect for
Heelan's algebra lies in its promise to provide a new Bible hermeneutics by alerting
modern scholars to the mental adjustments they must make when trying to rediscover
the authorial logic in numerological references.
F B Fl Cl Gl
rorgotten cornerstone"
Figure 13
The Chosen People as 13 alternates in systems T3 and TS, sharing G, D, A in
common. (The "Davidic" cube root temperament correction of 1/125 is available only
in the upright triangle which maps "male" reciprocals.)
For instance, Jews are taught to say Adonai when they see il1il~ (YHWH)
(considered too sacred to pronounce except once a year by the High Priest in the soli-
tude of the inner sanctum), and the Hebrew in Adonai sums to 86 which, as 86 , also en-
codes the samel2 tones in spiral fifths as YHWH (and also allowing the thirteenth to
appear only as a reciprocal). The Hebrew letters in El-0/am, translated as "Everlasting
God," notate 30 and 40 which frame tetrachords of3:4 in Spiral Fifths, and they sum
to 70 which holds the "saving" formula of35:49::50:70. This formula justifies the fifty
year sacred calendar (50:70 is a repetition of35:49) within which nothing can be har-
vested in any 7th year (7 is not a "working" number) nor in any 50th (there are no pro-
ducts of2, 3, 5, or 7 between 49x360=17,640 and 50x360=18,000 (the circumference
in cubits of Ezekiel's temple area). These examples of Hebrew and Greek gematria,
beloved by Kabbalists, hold some of the most powerful algebra in the Bible.
Figure 13 shows the Chosen as "the fewest of all people" in two different systems.
In Revelation the city of New Jerusalem descends from the clouds as the cube of
12,000- meaning 1,728,000,000,000. Its "head" digits of 1,728 encode the double
octave of Plato's World Soul (see Table 2). Its tail of nine trailing zeros are exactly
sufficient to complete the spiral of 13 tones in spiral fifths, supremely confident that
all "sins" are atoned. 23
Table 2. New Jerusalem

"First and "last" disagree by a comma but are
assumed to coincide, as treated in musical practice
1 tone nurmer read dow 11_ I _r~_cJ__u.P_j

1-F- ___1,024._000,000,000
1,536,000,000,000
_ x3/2>-1--~
x3/4- x213-
I~
I A
1,152,000,000,000
1,728,_000,000,000
1,296,000,000,000
x3/4=
x3/2=
x3/4=
x4/3=
x2/3=
x4/3=
IE 972,000,000,000
1 ,458,000,000,000
x3/4=
x3/2=
' x4/3=
x213=
~
I! 1,093,500,000,000 x3/4= x413='~'
~-~ 1 ,640,250,000,000
1.23o. 187. 500.000 !
x312=
x3/4=
x213=
x413=
J
I
i 011 922,640,625,000 x3/4= I x4/3= i
I A# 1,383,960,937,500 i x3/2= j
x2/3:
H
1 E# 1 1,037,970,703"--,1_25'-.JI_ _ ___! __ x413-=-:.J
9. CONCLUSIONS
Bible mythography is a mode of thinking we treat as pre-scientific; Heelan's algebra

suggests how it might be considered as prescient. In its fullest development Judaic
thought seems a perfect union of the knowledge and wisdom of its own age and, for
musicians, possibly a religion for all time, graciously attuned to human ears. What
more could our age expect of any theology, ancient or modem? The Deity enthroned
here to exercise aesthetic judgment allows music to be an art of the universal within the
particular, forever in contrast to philosophy as the art of the disembodied universal.
Heelan as a priestly philosopher is forging a new tool which promises to facilitate
ecumenical understanding, and to promote the healing of old animosities, and not by
altering anybody's text, but by enlarging everybody's imagination. 24
Emeritus, Brooklyn College

NOTES
Patrick A. Heelan, "Music as Basic Metaphor and Deep Structure in Plato and in Ancient Cultures,"
Journal ofSocial and Biological Structures, v. 2, no. 4 (1979): 279-291.
2 See Ernest G.McClain, The Pythagorean Plato: Prelude to the Song Itself (York Beach,MN: Nicolas-Hays,
1978, 1984), for my analysis of Plato's mathematical allegories- developed before I understood their relation
to the Bible.
3 Asserted to Moses, Deut. 7:7. All quotations are from the Revised Standard Version, (Nelson and Sons,
1952) unless otherwise noted.

4 Reiterated 24 times in the Old Testament, and expanded at Deut 6: 10-11 to include: "great and goodly
cities, which you did not build, and houses full of all good things, which you did not fill, and cisterns hewn
out, which you did not hew, and vineyards and olive trees, which you did not plant."
5 II Chron. 5:11-13.
6 Revelation 13:18.
7 This doctrine of self-moving numbers, indubitably authentic in Pythagorean thought, ensures lasting
ridicule for Aristotles' classmate Xenocrates.
8 See also the reference in Anchor Bible Dictionary.
9 These fractions were notated in the hieroglyph for the eye of the hawk symbolizing the newborn Pharaoh,
an idea transformed into the notion of YHWH as a "great eagle" watching over Israel. They are the
foundation of ratio theory as it was studied in the pattern of ten pebbles in the Holy Tetractys.
10 "Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live"
(Numbers 21:8).
11 Israel's first king, Saul, selected by Samuel with divine assistance, is a "head" taller than anyone else.
12 As a place marker, zero may carry the implication that "this place is full," not empty.
13 I Chron. 25:1-8.
14 The "small" octave is Plato's model planetary system in Timaeus. The "great" octave supplies the head
digits for "New Jerusalem" in Revelation.

15 See Songs from Silence by Kilmer, Crocker, and Brown (Bit Enki records, 1975) for an excellent
discussion of Assyrian lyre tuning texts from ca. 1400 BC which explains in careful detail how all seven
modes are tuned in both directions, anticipating Greek tuning theory by nearly a thousand years.
16 Jewish modes are identified by A. Z. Idelsohn in Jewish Music in its Historical Development (Schocken,
I 967), but various traditional ornaments and pitch inflections may vary widely from the Greek norms
displayed here.
17 Commas of80:81 between the two systems are the difference between a wholetone of9:8 and one of
10:9.
18 The Archytas tuning is generally assumed to have been only theoretical, and never adopted.
19 On extremely resonant stringed instruments like the piano the seventh partial sounds this 7:5 interval
(often very powerfully on Stein way pianos), but the performer who is nearest and thus in the best location
to hear them normally has attention focused elsewhere, and other auditors are unlikely to be near enough to
perceive them.
20 Several larger primes enter Greek tuning theory "by the back door" when other intervals are simply
halved numerically. Thus 9:8 when halved produces the tempered semi tone 18:17 of Caleb and Galilei, and
10:9 produces 20:19, and 15:16 produces the two quartertones 30:3 I and 31:32. But these larger primes are
not generally computed, although Adam's death at 930 occurs precisely where the Greek Just enharmonic
?enera is reciprocated. This matter requires further study. Numerical subtleties prove endless.
1 See my essay, "The 'Star of David' as Jewish Harmonica! Metaphor," International Journal of
Musicology, 6 (1997): 25-49.

22 See his essays "Isis and Osiris" and "TheE at Delphi" in volume 5 of his Moralia (Harvard, 1936).
23 The last few tones are named differently than in Figure 3 only because I always interpret the largest
number (as "king") as enthroned on D for my own sanity.
24 My understanding of Bible musicology is owed mainly to a continuing dialogue, now in its fifth decade,
with Siegmund Levarie, who inspired much of this analysis and contributed consistently to it. We are both
unwilling to pursue gematria beyond our own understanding of Bible musicology, won directly from its
arithmetical clues. The arithmetic presented here owes nothing to Kabbalism except a shared faith in symbolic
meaning and a certain prodding to look more deeply into Hebrew than we are able. Kabbalistic fancy must
not be allowed to obscure the very real science in Davidic musicology. This study needs more
interdisciplinary collaboration by a new generation freed from old prejudices. Harvey Wheeler awakened
my interest in political science models. Richard Sacksteder ensured a degree of mathematical rigor. A period
of intense collaboration with Antonio de Nicohis in studying Rigvedic symbolism alerted me to similar
harmonica) models in the Bible. Twenty years of discussing Plato with the incomparable Greek scholar John
Bremer proves invaluable. These friends and certain others are responsible for my results in more ways than
can be acknowledged here. The Myth oflnvariance: The Origins ofthe Gods, Mathematics and Music From
the RG VEDA to Plato (New York: Nicolas Hays, 1976) is my earliest survey of pre-biblical mythology, with
an introduction by Siegmund Levarie and edited by Patrick A. Heelan.
PATRICK A. HEELAN, S.J.
AFTERWORD
THE HERMENEUTICS OF NATURAL SCIENCE

In this volume Stephen Toulmin and Allan Janik have represented me as the person
who converted Hans-Georg Gadamer to the recognition that the natural sciences and
technology are hermeneutical, like history, art, the humanities, and the social sciences.
That is, they are constituted by human meanings embodied in language, symbols, and
cultural practices. The two cultures of the natural sciences and the human arts are
thereby brought together under a common historical hermeneutical umbrella that gives
shape to all science, technology, and culture- even to theology (see below). I doff my
hat with respect - and deep appreciation - to Stephen and Allan. But I continue to
muse: surely it took a slew (Gaelic from 'sluagh,' a tribe) to change such a strongly
entrenched tradition of which Gadamer was chief! Who were the members of this
tribe? Stephen, of course, was one, a special one. Allan too, and Babette Babich - and
others. I still recall with excitement my encounter with Gadamer at Boston College in
April 1974 when I spoke up to challenge him about his exclusion of the natural
sciences and technology from the umbrella of human hermeneutic constitution.
Memories, warm memories!
The issue in question also has a certain majesty. Aristotle and Plato were the Magi
from the Middle East whom the West followed consistently for two thousand years and
more, in pagan, Christian, and post-Christian times. They taught that knowledge was
expressible only in objective universals, and that such knowledge became science only
when integrated through laws and theories that permitted inferences to be made by
mathematical or logical deduction. Euclid's geometry was a model, and so was
Archimedes. In such a science, however, there was no place for randomness, contin-
gency, and human freedom, that is, for the stuff of real individuals, real history, real
emergent development, and real social choices. Universals trimmed the differences
among real individuals and reduced the latter to "irrationals." Biological evolution and
other forms of emergent development stem from contingent opportunities that are
similarly "irrational." History can do no better because it refuses to trim real events of
their particularity; the stories it tells are about "irrational" events. Even technologies,
because they re-shape the lives of real men and women in ways not deducible from
general laws, so they too, despite their association with the sciences, are "irrational."
Finally, society itself turns out to be "irrational," because it is the maker and
445
446 PATRICK A. HEELAN, S.J.
transformer of the languages, representations, and cultural practices through which

knowledge is handed down from generation to generation in ever new and unpre-
dictable words, grammars, forms of discourse, and cultural activities.
It was to account for a local community's science of the local real life-world that
the hermeneutics of Da-sein (Heidegger's term for the human subject) was introduced.
Heideggerian ontological (or existential) hermeneutics criticizes the universality and
theory-ladenness of science. The theory-laden practices of science, however, produce
new real life-world phenomena that are post-theoretical and (mistakenly? metaphor-
ically? ironically?) named by theoretical names. But are these so-named phenomena
truly "theory-laden" realities, I mean, are they constituted by theory? Heidegger
answers correctly, No! But we who come later need to push the question further.
Since such post-theoretical phenomena (though theoretically named) are the products
of practices that embody new theory-based technologies and institutions, we need to
reflect further on why they are not constituted by the theory which provides their
names. Only the abstract model elements named by the theory are constituted by the
theory. In contrast, the phenomena named by the theory are constituted by the experi-
mental practices of the laboratory or (what I have called) "readable technologies."
How is it that the same terms have two different meanings and are applied to two
different objects? Because science works under the hermeneutical umbrella of culture,
it has a history, a community, and a freedom that is unintelligible and unexplainable by
theory alone. The two meanings, one deriving from theory and the other deriving from
praxis, come together contingently and freely in the local life-world of scientists and
others trained in the use of appropriate readable technologies. These meanings can be
connected by figures of speech, by metaphor or analogy. Usually, however, either the
theoretical meaning is used mistakenly to trump - more precisely, to replace - the
practical one, as when philosophers of science recite the mantra that scientific pheno-
mena are - "univocally" and "literally" - theory-laden, or the practical (post-theore-
tical) meaning is mistakenly identified with the pre-theoretical meaning, as when
scientists and science writers talk down to the general public using images and
analogies from daily life.
How firm is the age-old belief that scientific thinking dispels ambiguity, diversity,
contingency of meaning, and metaphor? This belief which stems from Plato and
Aristotle was adopted by modem science and incorporated into the early scientific
metaphor of the "lynx-eyed." The Roman Accademia dei Lincei (predecessor of the
present Papal Academy of Sciences) to which Galileo belonged, was the name of one
of the earliest academies of science in Europe. Early modem scientists saw themselves
as 'seeing' more keenly than merely human eyes the shape, number, and quantity of
things. As theoretical scientific vocabularies these terms were thought to be no more
than specifications of the visual shapes, numbers, and quantities that belong to the life-
world -perhaps, as ideal or limiting cases of these, as Koyre and Husser! thought. But
they are not so. They tum out, instead, to be specified by mathematical models related
to the life-world by measurement, and processes of measurement are not like seeing,
they are more like working with tools in a black box. Eventually, the black box is
opened, and I discuss below the new post-theoretical phenomena that are found there.
The importance of metaphor for science, however, and for a correct understanding of
the history of science has to be recognized.
AFTERWORD 447
What then are the post-theoretical phenomena of science? They are new furniture
for an ever-changing historical life-world. The river of life, history, language, and
culture runs through life-worlds and in its flow it never stops revising and reshaping
life-worlds. New invariants and symmetries are created that diversifY both subjects and
objects. The dynamic of a community's history is driven by its culture, and its culture
is driven by science and technology ever transmuting the present into a free and
contingent future. The optimism of this principle tends to be muted by its pessimistic
counterpart: there is no guarantee that a free and contingent future will be a progressive
one. Whether the future - or, for that matter, the present- is healthy/progressive and
on the road to survive or in decline and on the road to extinction is not something that
the sciences can judge. This can be done only by a culture informed by historical,
moral, and religious thought whose parts like the whole are sheltered under the one
hermeneutical umbrella.
When the modem trajectories of philosophy and natural science crossed, they
influenced one another in fateful ways. Analytical philosophy of science is the residue
of such a crossing that reflects both the enormous prestige of theoretical thinking and
a strong cultural preference for the Naturwissenschaflen over the Geisteswissen-
schaflen. In England and the USA, the privilege given to theory and to modem physics
was carried over into the philosophy of science, and even to philosophy itself.
Philosophy and the philosophy of science lost touch with the grass roots of reality, with
particulars, history, freedom, society, survival. If we concede, as we should, that the
sciences are of and about, not just theories and systems, but real life-worlds, then
science begins and ends in the scientists' life-world where theories are eventually used
to produce post-theoretical phenomena. Philosophy, being also a theory user, should
also ask: how should theory function within philosophy so as to understand the grass
roots of human experience? Philosophy and science should go beyond the role of
theory to the phenomenology and hermeneutics of the grass roots. Up until recently,
Continental Philosophy tended to dwell almost exclusively on the deformations
associated with theoretical scientific thinking, while analytic philosophy dwelt almost
exclusively on the beauty of its successful theoretical models. Recalling, however, that
theory enters essentially into all inquiry, its positive role needs also to be researched
within the traditions of Continental Philosophy. That has always been my aim.
Before taking up philosophy as a career, I studied theoretical physics and did
research in theoretical geophysics. I also took courses on relativistic cosmological
models by Erwin SchrOdinger and John Synge at the Institute for Advanced Studies in
Dublin and taught the subject to graduate students. I worked as a post-doc at Princeton
with Eugene Wigner on the localization of elementary particles, using quantum field
theory, and later had many conversations with Werner Heisenberg about the quantum
theory. I found that this scientific material contained enough philosophical "mysteries"
of the grass roots kind to last a lifetime and beyond. I also found, however, that most
of them were related to one another and were generated by the single assumption that
universal theory, scientific and/or philosophical, in contrast with local knowledge,
constitutes the goal of human inquiry. While addressing specific questions, I found
myself grappling with systemic weaknesses in both Analytic and Continental
Philosophy focused on the mediations whereby scientific research passes from the
recognition of a problem to the acceptance of a solution. What are these mediations?
First, the initial problem presents itself as an experience in the pre-theoretical life-world
of a scientific community that does not understand it and is ready to take steps to come
to an understanding of it. The first step is to transform the problem by fmding a suita-
ble hypothesis/theory. The hypothesis/theory is then transformed by laboratory
practices into a new kind of problem which depends on new theory-laden technologies.
The new technologies in turn produce new sets of experiences different from the initial
experience and take place in a changed post-theoretical life-world different from the
initial life-world of the unsolved problem. This outcome is then freely taken to be the
solution to the original problem under the conditions set by the original search for
understanding. The cycle of activities is transformative not only of the local ambient
life-world of the researchers through the addition of new local technologies, but also
of the members of the local scientific community, oflocal scientific language, represen-
tations, and media. These steps form a sequence of time-ordered human activities,
many of them freely made and without guarantee of success, that can only be described
in narrative form that belongs to the genre of the history of science. This kind of narra-
tive makes sense only on the presumption of one local hermeneutical cultural umbrella.
After exchanging the practice of physics for the profession of philosophy, I
addressed the following challenging philosophical topics:
A HERMENEUTIC PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
+ A Husserlean intentionality analysis of the early Bohr-Heisenberg view of the quantum theory; of
quantum logic as a context logic of differently embodied inquirers; of the problems of causality and
localization in quantum mechanics.
+ Heideggerian analysis of the ontological status of measurement and laboratory data.
+ The Husserlean group transformation structure of perceptual objects in general, and of theoretically
denominated laboratory entities construed as perceptual objects.
+ A critique of David Marr's program for machine perception.
VAN GOGH'S EYES

+ A study of Vincent van Gogh's painting, Bedroom at Aries (1888), of the art and aesthetics of the
(negatively curved) local Riemannian pictorial space achieved by the artist and how the artist used the
theory and technology of perspective to achieve his purpose.
GOD
+ Using a common philosophically understood method underlying theology and natural science, scientists
who are religious and theologians who respect the processes of natural science should be able to gain
reliable experiential, intellectual, and rational knowledge both ofNature, the subject matter of the natural
sciences, and of God, the subject matter of religion.
A HERMENEUTIC PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

My introduction to philosophical research was influenced in equal parts by the writings
of Edmund Husser!, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer,
and Paul Ricoeur, and the lectures of Jean Ladriere at the University of Leuven
(Louvain). Leuven is the location of the Husser! Archives. I also owe much to the
influence of Bernard J. F. Lonergan, S.J., especially to his Insight and Method in
Theology. My phenomenological research was tempered from the start, then, by
recourse to Aristotle, Aquinas, and Kant. Later I was to find among my American
colleagues some who moved me further in the direction of existential hermeneutics,
such as William Richardson, S.J., Joseph J. Kockelmans, Theodore Kisiel, Hugh
Silverman, and Babette Babich. I discovered many of the more technical details of
philosophy and the history of science in discussion with the analytic philosophers at the
AFTERWORD 449
Pittsburgh Center for the History and Philosophy of Science where in 1983 I was a
senior fellow.
What I learned from Lonergan is the importance of the starting point in any inquiry.
Insight into insight or the "phenomenology" of insight became for me the starting point
for a philosophy of science. A similar but richer message came from the phenomeno-
logical tradition with its emphasis on "die Sache selbst," which in Husserlean language
is the object constituted as known by language, community, history, technology, and
the human body, and revealed through the intentionality of inquiry. One begins, not
as Plato, Descartes, and Hume did, by asking the epistemological question: what can
we know? (for we don't know whether we are competent to answer it), but, as
Aristotle, Aquinas, Husserl, Heidegger, and Lonergan did, with the ontological
question: what is knowing? Which leads to the further questions: what do we do when
we know, and why is this doing a knowing? For the answers to these must be in some
sense self-evident; the Being of Knowing must be - in some sense to be uncovered
prior to the beginning of any trustworthy inquiry - the Knowing of Being.
My first book, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity (1965), studied the
intentionality-structure of quantum mechanics under the original Bohr-Heisenberg
account, and criticized the later, more frequently held, objectivist account of John von
Neumann and Eugene Wigner that construed the quantum theory as a new universal
theory of physics. In the Bohr-Heisenberg account, the quantum theory spoke about
the (observed) microsystem as it was revealed to a macroscopic observer through the
process of measurement. Measurement for Bohr and Heisenberg was central; it was
quantitative, technological, social, historical, linguistic, teleological, and local. It was
the action of one local part of the humanly inhabited cosmos on another local part that
strangely (to classical epistemologists!) had the capacity to change both local observer
and observed. This mysterious capacity does not lie in the non-physical or spiritual
agency of the human Mind, as proposed by von Neumann and Wigner, but in the
intentional character of the measurement process and its ability to shape the way an
object- here a quantum mechanical object- is "dressed" to make its appearance as a
cultural object within the context of a particular culture, in this case a local historical
scientific community.
I was to do much further study on these and other topics, among them quantum
logic, measurement, locality, and causality which are names for the set of
epistemological problems associated with the quantum theory that are particularly
recalcitrant to classical epistemology.
Quantum logic studies the deviance in truth-functionality that seems to characterize
experimental sentences in quantum mechanics. For many logicians, quantum
mechanics seems to involve either a third truth-value intermediate between T(ruth) and
F(alsity), say, I(ndeterminacy) or a range of truth-values between 0 and 1. In either
case, there is deep uneasiness about the objective goals of both science and logic. I
found the basic paper of Birkhoff and von Neumann incoherent and claimed that in
keeping with Bohr-Heisenberg's original interpretation of quantum mechanics it was
sufficient to hold that any experimental sentence formulated in quantum mechanics
becomes truth-functional (either Tor F) only conditional to the prior implementation
of a specific local measurement process. In my view, since truth-functionality in
quantum mechanics is locally context-dependent, quantum logic should be addressed
as a specific case oflocal contextuality in sentential logic. This solution, though often
anthologized in quantum logic collections, offended against several dominant

perspectives: the nominalism of the logical empiricists and the objectivism inherent in
the new universalist interpretation of quantum mechanics. It also offended, on the one
hand, the universalist historico-political leanings of the neokantian founders of the
logical empiricist school and, on the other, the postmodemist longings of those who
looked to the "weirdness" of the quantum theory for disembodied spiritual inspiration.
The articulation of the notion of contextuality requires sophisticated tools and
techniques that stem from Continental approaches to knowledge, using, for example,
such notions as intentionality, phenomenology, constitution, history, hermeneutics, and
local embodiment. Such philosophic tools are simply not available to objectivist social
science or analytic (rationalist or empiricist) philosophy. The use of Continental tools
unlocked for me some of the "mysteries" of the quantum theory and opened up a large
field of inquiry that I hope others will be able to develop and appropriate in time.
Among the topics of outstanding importance for the understanding not just of
quantum mechanics but of all empirical science is measurement, for the measurement
process is that which can bring model-defined "theoretical entities" into the domain of
human culture and perception, revealing them as cultural entities of scientific
laboratory culture. Among these cultural entities, some become perceptual entities
under the philosophical criteria implicit in Husserl's (Hilbert inspired) analysis of the
noetic-noematic invariances of any perceptual object under the group theoretic
variation of its characteristic profiles. By measurement the theoretical and quantitative
language of a model gets translated into a cultural and perceptual life-world language.
Look! we say, that trace (one of the characteristic group theoretic profiles of) is a
proton with 10 Mev energy in this local setup. Measurement is where the language of
theory gets "dressed" within a social, historical, and technological context with local
perceptual "clothes." Measurement is a hermeneutic performance, like the playing and
replaying of a game or like a musical or theatrical performance. Bob Crease has
developed this notion in a book called The Play of Nature. This is not the literary
hermeneutics of author/text/reader (ATR) but the existential hermeneutics of coded-
energy/embodied-receptor/lifeworld-interpretation (CE/ER/LI, perhaps), which is the
transcendental structure of human perception in the tradition of Husser!, Merleau-
Ponty, Heidegger, and Lonergan.
My approach to the problems of localization and causality in quantum mechanics
was influenced by a study I began in the late sixties (and recently revisited) of the
pictorial space of Vincent van Gogh's painting, "The Bedroom at Aries." This led to
a comparison between, on the one hand, the non-Euclidean spaces of visual and
pictorial presentations and, on the other, the Euclidean space of science and traditional
mathematical perspective. The Van Gogh study was sparked by discussions at a course
(on differential geometry) given by Erwin Schrodinger at the Dublin Institute for
Advanced Studies in the late 1940's and by a lecture I gave some years later at
Fordham University on pictorial spaces at the invitation of my friend, the distinguished
art historian, Irma B. Jaffe. The metric structures of visual and pictorial spaces
fascinated me because they seemed to follow a negatively curved Riemannian metric
rather than the Euclidean metric of classical physics which both culture and philosophy
assume to be the one and only, "true," "real" and "actual" space of experience. This
problem led to my second book.
AFTERWORD 451
Space-Perception and the Philosophy ofScience (1983/1988) is a book about the

philosophy of science, but it is often read as a book about vision. It uses vision as a
starting point and helpful illustration that shows how to address the analysis of science
from the standpoint of an embodied, hermeneutical and phenomenological philosophy.
I show that the shapes, sizes, and distances that people actually see in the life-world and
in pictures do not fit a Euclidean space but seem to belong rather to members of the
two-parameter family of finite hyperbolic Riemannian spaces. (One parameter is
correlated with the overall diameter of the visual space and the other with the distance
from the viewer of the local quasi-Euclidean zone of vision directly in front of the
viewer's eyes.) The finitude of the cosmos and the locality of places and times were
accepted by Plato, Aristotle, and nearly all of the ancient philosophers and by most
people till the end of the fourteenth century. However, the new technologies of
perspective, mapping, navigation, and time keeping changed all that and made it
possible for the cultural elite to entertain belief in a single infinite - terrestrial and
heavenly - Euclidean space and a single universal time The authority of a single
cosmological geometry and a single cosmological time over the multiplicity of local
perceptual places and times was full blown by the times of Descartes and Newton, and
has persisted right up to the present day.
The conclusion of Part I of my Space-Perception is that the scientific (post-
theoretical) organization of space does not have to be single, universal, and theoretical-
ly Euclidean, but could be local, contextual, and theoretically Riemannian. Each form
of organization is tied hermeneutically to some form of local practical appreciation of
the environment. It is Euclidean if attention is paid to the "carpentering" of the
environment, and Riemannian if attention is paid to the purposefulness of direct local
action in the world. Local places and times do not have to be "irrational," they too can
be scientific with the discovery that the presentations of self to the world and vice versa
are often deployed in daily life in Riemannian metric spaces.
In Part II of Space-Perception, I address the following questions: What philosophi-
cal weight should be given to modem science given that it narrowed the options of
spatial theory to just the Euclidean? What "reality" weights should be assigned to the
diversity of modes of spatial perception when contrasted with the uniqueness of
Euclidean space? Do answers to these questions throw any light on the "mysteries" of
quantum mechanics?
The phenomenological principle is that the local life-world is the primary horizon
of perception within which reality is given to individual humans. This principle takes
issue both with rationalist criteria (the privilege of theory over practice) and the
empiricist criteria (the privilege of measured data over cultural perception). One of
the sources of paradoxes for scientific modernity is the tension in common usage
between theory and practice, measurement and perception. This tension is resolved
only when it is understood that reality (in a philosophical analysis) is never given
absolutely in a unique way, but is always given locally in a local space for a local
community for local purposes and, therefore, in spaces with possibly different metrical
structure. If in keeping with the above principle, scientific reality is the phenomenolo-
gical "die Sache selbst," then the local "being-in-the-world" within which it is given
is a local laboratory culture. Reality, then, is always given to a human locally, and its
furniture is "dressed" characteristically for that local situation according to the
Husserlian-Hilbertian theoretical criteria referred to above.
One of the standard "mysteries" of quantum mechanics is that particles are not
localized spatial entities before they are measured. The reason for this, I claim, is that,
prior to the setup of a measurement process, there is no constituted, local life-world
space in which a particle can make its appearance. Setting up a measurement process
then constitutes the local life-world space (here, it is the local laboratory culture) in
which a particle can display itself as a localized entity. With this analysis the
"localization problem" in quantum mechanics disappears. A problem of understanding,
however, remains. What quantum mechanics seems to be saying is that in a world
where all real entities are of necessity localized even in science, quantum particles are
exceptions. But when properly understood, quantum mechanics should be interpreted
as saying that in a world where real spatiality is always of a local life-world kind, the
relevant life-world space has first to be constituted before objects can be experienced
as localized entities. In science, however, the local life-world space for scientific
observers is constituted by an implemented measurement process, and it is in this space
that the particle is "dressed" to display itself to local scientific observers.
Following the same analysis, the "causality problem" in quantum mechanics also
disappears. Causality (in the Humean sense) is defined as the lawful ordering of
localized events in before/after sequences. Since in quantum mechanics things are not
localized prior to measurement, they cannot be said to participate in orderly before/after
sequences of interactions prior to the setting up of a space-constituting measurement
process.
So much for quantum mechanics. A final word on machine perception: if visual
and other perceptual spaces are hermeneutically engendered and if they are Riemannian
within non-carpentered life-world spaces, then the machine processing of Euclidean
optical signals can go only so far before it encounters the need to be guided by top-
down local cultural factors. These are the kinds of active cultural intentions that are
at the core of narratives of human life and to which Riemannian vision is culturally
attuned. Machine processing beyond this point is possible only if the machine is
already a servant of the culture and not its master.
VAN GOGH'S EYES

Returning to pictorial vision, I was early fascinated by the realism of Van Gogh's
paintings, particularly ofhis Bedroom at Aries (1888) which I had seen at the Chicago
Art Institute and which gripped me with the experience of a transfixing presence that
I can only describe as being in that room. As I mentioned above, I took a course on
Riemannian geometry given by Erwin SchrOdinger at the Dublin Institute for Advanced
Studies in the late forties. During the course, he raised the question: was it possible to
see- or, at least, imagine- a non-Euclidean or Riemannian world? Wasn't such an
intuition of space necessary just to be able to do Riemannian geometry?
Some elliptic and hyperbolic three-dimensional (3D) Riemannian spaces are finite
in size, and since they are not in themselves closed by any enclosing Riemannian 3D
surface, they would, if experienced as the container of the visible cosmos, be
experienced from the viewer's position at the center as spatially unlimited, though not
infmite - something like the finite but unlimited character of the 2D surface of a sphere
if it were to be explored by a 2D visitor. Riemannian spaces would then be model
spaces for visual worlds, like Euclidean space for "carpentered" measured worlds.
AFTERWORD 453
Though the geometrical metric is new, the basic idea is as old as Aristotle, for Aristotle
says in De Coelo (279a) that beyond the starry heavens, there is nothing, not even
empty space.
In Chicago I seemed to recognize in the local pictorial space of the painting the
features of such a finite but nevertheless unenclosed space which is the local space of
his bedroom as experienced by almost any viewer. The noisy, everyday world was not
represented, but was it excluded merely by omission or in a still more definitive way?
Try to imagine what you, the viewer, would see if, when looking at the painting, the
closed shutters were opened. You would find, I think, one of two possible alternatives.
Either the finite yet unenclosed space of the room would have to change to
accommodate the new presence of an intrusive busy everyday world, or else one's
vision had to be blocked by a solid object such as, maybe, a solid sky like the skies in
many ofVan Gogh paintings. For beyond the bedroom, beyond its closed shutters and
walls, there is nothing, not even empty space. Then I asked myself, could it be that
Vincent had discovered the art and aesthetics of suggesting a local (for empirical
reasons, a negatively curved) Riemannian world space? Here was a scientific problem
wrapped in an aesthetic problem and an aesthetic problem wrapped in a scientific
problem. Was it true that the viewer's perception was captured by the unlimited
finitude of (a negatively curved) Riemannian space? If so, how was this achieved?
What technique did Vincent use?
In Auvers-sur-Oise where he died, there is a statue by Zadkin of Vincent van Gogh
as a remote figure bent under the burden of the easel on his shoulder. As we know
from a letter to his brother Theo written from Arles, Vincent also carried about with
him a clumsy and costly perspective frame ("cadre perspectif') which he used to make
his compositions. Why? Because, as he wrote to Theo and his friend Emile Bernard,
form is very important for a painter, and on that account he does exercises in
perspective to perfect his ability to capture true form on a canvas. Perspective is a
technique based on a mathematical theory for projecting 3D objects onto a flat picture
plane from a fixed sight point. Its basic assumptions are that objective physical space
is Euclidean (and, of course, infinite), and rays of light follow straight lines and obey
the laws of geometrical optics in this space. Perspective is the proto-science that was
historically one of the paradigms for modem science. In his letters, Vincent claimed
that his search for true forms led him to discover a new, a "modem" ( "moderne") use
of perspective different from its "former" ("ancien") use, by which he meant the way
German, Italian, and even Flemish artists used it. This, he believed, would necessitate
a new art of color and representation ("dessin ") and of how artists work ( "Ia vie
artistique"). So Vincent had a technique, and one based on mathematical perspective.
But what was it? He did not say.
Even to ask such a question today would be taken by some critics and cultural
anthropologists to be artistically insensitive or worse, to be a kind of wickedness, for,
according to Natalie Heinich, a cultural anthropologist of heroes and hero worship, and
author of The Glory of Vincent Van Gogh: An Anthropology ofAdmiration (1996), Van
Gogh is worshiped by posterity as a redemptive figure who, by his rejection in his own
lifetime and death, inspired artists with the courage to liberate themselves from objec-
tive rules, to free perception from perspective, creativity from rationality, and culture
from theory and especially from the alien authority of scientific theories. For this
reason, she writes, he "marks a turning point, an aesthetic, historical, and ethical
rereading of art." He is the first postmodemist.
It is fair to say that the suffering Vincent was innocent of wanting to be a martyr for
postmodemism. He treated the science and practice of perspective as necessary for an
artist, but he discovered that its formal inflexibility qua mere tool was complemented
by the eye's flexibility in using it for different tasks. He respected it then as a
generalized tool for the artist to use in expressing visual form, and for the viewer as a
kind of"text" for the locally situated eye to "read" in "context." For him perspective
was as necessary for vision as for artistic creativity, but in isolation from a specific
visual task perspectival depiction was incomplete, it was a "text" without a practical
life-world "context." It accounted just for a part of what underlay the meaningful task-
filled meeting of subject and object, viewer and painting.
Vincent's artistic problem was to depict his bedroom so that a viewer sees it as a
local finite yet unenclosed universe of peace, quiet, trust, and intimate companionship.
He accepted the tradition that mathematical perspective and the technology of the
perspective frame were the scientific tools a painter should use to depict a scene and
he used them because they were part of a tradition that linked painting to an artist's
experience of what counted as "the true and the possible ... and the really existing" and
this "really existing" was for him in a real sense sacred. In so doing Vincent, however,
made two discoveries: firstly, that the eyes, searching in a picture for a visual
"language" that "speaks" of a meaningful local place, do not find the "language" just
in the universal "grammar" of perspective alone but only as complemented by ways of
looking that convey the experience of a local place with a local meaning and feeling;
secondly, that he could adapt the technology of the perspective frame in keeping with
mathematical theory (using, for example, diagonal lines in his grid rather than
horizontal-vertical lines) to make it serve his artistic goal of opening, within a viewer's
local life-world space, the gates offeeling to reveal the beauty, peace, and intimacy of
that particular place, his bedroom. This constituted, I think, an essential part of his
"new" and "modem" use of perspective.
Vincent found a way of making it possible for a viewer to experience a particular
local motif by using a scientifically designed universal technology in a particular way
to shape the forms and colors on the canvas so that the artistic "utterance" as a whole
would evoke in the viewer the particularity of the local experience he intended to
convey. The product of this interpretive viewing is what phenomenology calls the
presentation of"the things themselves" (die Sachen selbst). Is this not what Van Gogh
meant by "the true and the possible as to form ... and the really existing"? The task-
filled meaning of the Bedroom painting is not the architecture of the room or its
furniture as mere physical set-up, but its implied entry into the artist's Bedroom-as-
Total-World in a mood of peace, totality, intimacy, trust, and possibly, hoped-for
companionship, a gift only a prepared viewer, (Heidegger's) Dasein as Ek-sistenz,
would be able to receive.
GOD
Since the recurring question in my Afterword reflections is about local (post-
theoretical) practical knowledge as the goal of science in contrast with universal
theoretical knowledge, I will end with some speculative reflections on the turning point
AFTERWORD 455
of seeking in local practical knowledge an understanding of theological as well as

scientific knowledge.
I refer back to a paper I read at a meeting of scientists, philosophers, and
theologians at Notre-Dame University in 1993, entitled "Lonergan and the Measures
of God." It asks whether people's religious and spiritual lives are based on purely
theoretical, say, philosophical or theological arguments, or on local practicallifeworld
experiences. The term "God" in the paper's title refers mostly to the God of Christian
theology but can be taken mutatis mutandis for the unique object of any monotheistic
theological thinking. The "measures of God" refer to the kind of local (post-
theoretical) practical knowledge that individual persons may have of the God described
by their theological belief.
"Lonergan" in the paper's title is Bernard B. F. Lonergan, S.J. (1904-1984), a
Canadian philosopher and theologian who deeply influenced my thinking at the crucial
point in time when I turned my attention from physics to the philosophy of science.
His principal works are, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (1957), focused
mostly on mathematics and the natural sciences, and Method in Theology (1972)
focused on theology. Both works are concerned with the development and assessment
of scientific understanding in the theoretical Aristotelian tradition of modem science.
However, unlike the former which is content to dwell in the construction and testing
of natural science theoretical models, the latter is forced by its subject matter to dwell
also on the transformation of propositional and theoretical belief into practical faith.
Lonergan's word for this transformation is "conversion." "By conversion," he writes,
"is understood a transformation of the subject and his world ... it is as if one's eyes
were opened and one's former world faded or fell away" (Method, p. 130). This is
replaced by a new local (post-theoretical) life-world within which the subject comes
to live. Conversion is the outcome of free choice, love, and commitment and, while
intensely personal, it is also communal and can be handed on within a historical
community. Conversion, Lonergan says, is the foundation for theology.
But, is it not also the case that conversion is the foundation for science? That was
a moment of conversion, for example, in Galileo' s life when in the winter of 1609 he
made his telescopic discovery of the gibbous phases of Venus. It was then, as
astronomer Owen Gingrich once told me, that Galileo came to have complete faith in
the Copernican system. On that same day, he went to his desk and wrote his protocol
notes, not in Italian as he was accustomed to do, but in Latin, the universal language
of science. Speaking thereafter to all the world, Galileo stated that Nature is a Book
written in the language of geometry and the horizons of nature are structured by the
geometry of the Copernican system. Other natural philosophers continued to follow
Aristotle and Ptolemy, but for Galileo, astronomy, mechanics, and all of natural science
was a divine revelation about Nature expressed in God's own language of mathematics.
For Galileo, mathematics was geometry and geometry was an idealization of
measurable shape, size, and motion. This conversion experience changed the direction
ofGalileo's scientific inquiry in fundamental ways; what formerly was experienced as
relative to place in a local geocentric system organized by a hierarchy of sensible
qualities came to be experienced as relative to an abstract heliocentric model organized
on the basis of measurable shape, size, and motion. What formerly, for example, was
experienced as a stone in local downward fall toward its natural place at the center of
the Earth until stopped by the ground came to be re-described, after his conversion, as
a stone following a parabolic trajectory above the surface of a turning Earth in a

Sun-centered cosmology as imagined by a disinterested viewer in outer space. The old
facts dissolved with the old perspective, and gave way to new facts generated by the
new perspective.
There was much yet to be researched and, perhaps, revised, but all began with a
human decision. The grounds for this decision would be debated by many even today
in historical retrospect. Galileo, however, made his fateful act of faith and committed
himself and his colleagues to a model, a set of experimental practices, and an
interpretation of them that would profoundly mark the next few centuries of Western
culture and religion. His new scientific faith did not change an iota of the theory but,
like Van Gogh, it changed his life-world. Ultimately it changed ours too in
fundamental ways. In changing that life-world, which was more important? The
theory? The practices? The virtuosi in all parts of Europe that also committed their
faith to the new scientific process? Nor must we forget the emerging new economic,
military, political, bureaucratic, and other orders that would find it in their interest to
join the movement of modern science. All of these collaborated in a commitment of
faith to support and develop a community of empirico-mathematical natural
philosophers.
For what end? Basically, though much to the surprise of many of our
contemporaries, it was for a theological end: to possess, as far as possible, a divine
guarantee of unity and simplicity in Nature. The fall of the old cosmology had created
a theological rift that for cultural reasons had to be filled, for the old geocentric life-
world of antiquity that the Christian community inherited contained a host of traditional
images and symbols that worked for both nature and the Christian faith, while the new
heliocentric life-world was at first embarrassingly empty of useful theological images.
Galileo, being a devout Christian, tried, not too successfully, to supply such images in
his debates with theologians, but it was not until Newton published his System of the
World that Nature was once again filled- but only for a time - with theological
meaning. Absolute Space and gravitation became the symbolic venue where Nature
and Divine Providence worked together to maintain the stability of the World System.
It will probably always be so that theology will be linked with the science of the natural
order (though whether the natural order includes, as I would hold, the cultural order is
a decision about which many would disagree), because as long as the science of the
natural order seeks an intrinsic unity in some Final Account, such an account must
surely be in some sense theological.
Scientists are thought to know, while theologians are thought just to believe. It
should be clear from what has been said that the intellectual environment of science,
like the intellectual environment of theology, is full of local historical background,
some of which masquerades as universal knowledge. More precisely, much of what
is called scientific knowledge is not universal, trans-cultural, and trans-temporal, as it
(usually) purports to be - but is the product of the faith researchers have in experts
belonging to their local historical scientific community.
Finally, just as a good philosophy of natural science needs Lonergan's Method in
Theology, so a good theology needs to reflect more on the scientific structures studied
in Insight. I shall try to make plausible the claim that the foundation of theology in
conversion, history, and transformations of life-world horizons must have its own
analogue, a quasi-laboratory to complement the consecrated words and practices of a
AFTERWORD 457
religious tradition. By a quasi-laboratory I mean a domain for empirical investigation

so set off by common background and context that relevant data can be harvested with
security in terms of some antecedent theoretical- here, theological- model. New
theological insight is not limited to pure theoretical speculation or the study of the
literary works of dead theologians, institutional councils, and leadership, but comes
also from the study of current religious witness, a quasi-laboratory where theological
insights and theories are used, successfully or unsuccessfully, by expert religious and
spiritual guides and witnesses.
Such a claim may be unsettling in the Catholic theological context because, among
other reasons, it raises the specter of enthusiasm, old and new, from the Shakers and
Quietists of the seventeenth century to the present-day Pentecostalists, and the threat
enthusiasm always poses to academic theologians and hierarchical institutions.
Theologians and institutions have enormous reluctance to use their theological theories
or theory-laden canons to "measure" and pass judgment on local events of a religious
character. I stress the context of "measurement," for measurements are done
individually, case by individual case, each constrained by place, community, and
history. In "Belief: Today's Issue," a paper he read to Pax Romana in 1968, Lonergan
gave among his own reasons for this reluctance: God is not an entity within this world
and so cannot become known by experience; no one knows God face-to-face in this life
and so no one can look for confirmation of theological theories in human religious
experience. In 1968, Lonergan took the position that there was no quasi-laboratory that
could provide, as it were, public ecclesial "measures" of religious experience, or, at
least speaking to Pax Romana, he was unwilling to defend such a position. Whatever
one might say in defense of the influence ofDionysos on the Platonic tradition, at least
within the context of Apollonian classical thinking in theology, Dionysos has no part
to play.
Four years later, however, in Method, and to a different audience, he makes a
stunningly different claim: theology in relation to religious experience is like
economics in relation to business. Religious life can flourish without theology, just as
business can flourish without economics, but just as economics results from intellectual
inquiry into business, so theology results - or should result, he says - from intellectual
inquiry into religious life. Lonergan gives the old word faith a new meaning: "Faith,"
he says, "is the knowledge born of religious love" (p. 115), it is the cognitive
intentional counterpart of that transformation of the life-world wrought by sanctifYing
grace; faith makes possible a conversion that opens horizons of religious experience.
He distinguishes, as I do, faith from religious belief The latter is the readiness to
accept the historically sedimented pattern of communal understanding that people
living within a religious tradition have, based on the totality of their religious culture,
comprising sacred books, rituals, accepted teachings, and other cultural traditions of
use in daily life. In contrast with religious belief, faith, being the knowledge born of
love, expresses its interiority in four stages: religious experience; insight or
theory-making; judgment or theory-accepting or -rejecting; and responsible decision
which is the self-transcendent outcome of the loving part of faith's interior intention.
By the time Method appeared in 1972, Lonergan was ready to accept the fact and
necessity of a quasi-laboratory of faith, a community practice able to provide the
experts with, as it were, public "measures" of the life of faith.
I turn now specifically to Christianity. For the purpose of this paper I take it to be
a community defined by faith in a God, Creator of the Cosmos, but not a part of it, who
has made a historic covenant with a free human community offering individual, social,
and, perhaps, even cosmic redemption through the incarnation, death, and resurrection
of his Son, Jesus Christ, in the Church that was founded by the Holy Spirit. The
Christian question would be, whether faith in such a God, articulated by theologians
and administered by the institutional Church, can be referred to a particular historical
quasi-laboratory of religious experience, in which theological statements about living
"in the spirit of faith" can be "measured" or "tested" by experiential signs interpreted
as marked with a divine approval.
Such a question may sound strange, perhaps very strange indeed, coming from a
practicing Catholic. Beyond the Catholic community, however, there is no such
reluctance; one finds today a plethora of religious theologies stemming, for example,
from interpretations of contemporary evolutionary and cosmological science. One of
the reasons for the widespread appeal of Stephen Hawking's A BriefHistory of Time
is his argument that astrophysical theories can lead the religious inquirer to the "Mind
of God." Since all scientific theories aim at prediction and control, this kind of
argument deeply undercuts our image of human life, for it presupposes a metaphysics
where human freedom is absent and human decisions are pre-ordained by neurological
circuits. Existence in this story is determined by cosmological "crunches" and
"rebirths" which, though bearing some reminiscence of the mythic cosmological cycles
of the Great Year of Stoic or Hindu cosmology with their "eternal return of the Same,"
are nevertheless of an entirely different genre; they are secular, not sacred, predictions.
By contrast, what is characteristic at least of Christianity is the drama of the biblical
narratives that underline human freedom in making history in the life-world in which
we live. Instead of looking to cosmological models, should we not, following
Lonergan, look for a quasi-laboratory of religious experience where human freedom
is respected and history retains its edge of uncertainty? Such is more likely to be a faith
community of people productive, as Lonergan has said, of"works of self-transcendent
love animated by faith,"- among whom some are expert in interpreting theologically
the horizons of critical religious experience.
In such a quasi-laboratory community, what would be the "measures"? One
suggestion is criteria afforded, for instance, by techniques of"spiritual discernment."
By "spiritual discernment" I mean prayerful techniques equipped with practical
theological language and responsive, say, to what the Christian tradition calls the
"spiritual senses" which serve to "measure" divine presence and action in a community.
Such historical practices of spiritual discernment were taught throughout the history of
the Church and have been an essential part of good or "perfect" Christian living for two
thousand years. Borrowed from the Stoics and other pre-Christian sources, they were
adapted for Christianity by the desert fathers and monks and they are still taught and
practiced and monitored by spiritual directors today. Such Christian spiritual exercises
introduce the better prepared and motivated to a religious path where everyday
decisions within the life-world context are examined in the light of spiritual criteria
traditional to the path being followed.
One such set of practices of spiritual discernment, for example, is taught by St.
Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit Order, in his Spiritual Exercises. Such
spiritual exercises, as Pierre Hadot has shown in his Philosophy as a Way of Life
AFTERWORD 459
(1995), have their roots in ancient philosophy, in Socrates, the Stoics, and Epicurus, for
whom wisdom was a form of practical reason focused on the divine. The exercises of
Ignatius lead participants in silent prayer to play the role of actors in Gospel narratives,
representing themselves as disciples eager to share the life of the faith community of
Jesus. Ignatius and other spiritual writers speak of the experience of"spiritual senses."
These bear an analogy to the physical senses: of the "eyes" of faith, the "bitterness" of
remorse, the "sweetness" of charity, the "tears" of divine love and sorrow or, more
generally, of"spiritual touches," "consolation," and "desolation." All such information
is structured a priori by theological language in some way analogous to the way
laboratory information is structured by scientific theory, but stressing the individuality
of each participant. With the scientific analogy in mind, can we then speak of such
spiritual exercises as constituting a quasi-laboratory of religious experience?
Laboratory experimentation and its protocols are properly described in narrative
form, because every experiment is particular, involving actions of particular people at
a definite place and time, motivated by a common purpose, equipped with an
explanatory theory, and brought to the bar of experience as subject to a jury of peer
experts. So, too, would religious experience in the quasi-laboratory of spiritual
exercises be presented in narrative form under explanatory theological categories.
I have argued that both science and theology should exhibit the range of structures
that Lonergan describes in Method and Insight. Such a conclusion does not guarantee
that the natural sciences reveal the God of the Bible. What it shows is merely that there
is a common philosophically understood method underlying theology and natural
science, and that using that method within the established traditions of Christian life
and practice, scientists who are Christian and theologians who respect the processes of
natural science should be able to gain reliable experiential, intellectual, and rational
knowledge both of Nature, the subject matter of the natural sciences, and of the
Christian Trinitarian God, the subject matter of the Christian religion.
Finally, I want to address the editor of this handsome volume, Dr. Babette Babich,
and the authors who contributed to this wonderful collection to speak my delight,
wonder, and thanks! The collection, though dedicated to my honor, really celebrates
no one individual unless it is theoaz,uov(great spirit), Eros, of whom the wise woman
Diotima in Plato's Symposium says, that he is neither wise nor ignorant for "he is the
interpreter between the gods and men."
PATRICK A. HEELAN, S.J.: BIBLIOGRAPHY
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
DAVID B. ALLISON is Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York

at Stony Brook. He is the author of Reading the New Nietzsche and editor of the
pathbreaking anthology, The New Nietzsche and, with Babette E. Babich, co-editor of
New Nietzsche Studies. Co-author and -editor of numerous books and essays,
including, with Mark Roberts, The Disordered Mother: Miinchhausen By Proxy, as
well as on Nietzsche, Derrida, de Sade, Schreber, etc., he has also translated several
works by Jacques Derrida including Speech and Phenomenon.
THOMAS J. J. ALTIZER is Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the State
University of New York at Stony Brook and is now working on manuscripts on
Godhead and the Nothing and the apocalyptic Trinity. Among other books, he is the
author of the New Apocalypse ( 1967); History as Apocalypse (1985); Genesis and
Apocalypse (1990); The Genesis of God (1993); and The Contemporary Jesus (1997).
BABETTE E. BABICH is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University and Adjunct
Research Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. She is author of
Nietzsche's Philosophy of Science (1994, Italian translation in 1996) and essays on
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Holderlin, with interests ranging from epistemology to aesthetics
including postmodem musicology, etc. The founding editor of the journal, New
Nietzsche Studies, which she co-edits with David B. Allison, she has also edited From
Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire ( 1996) and coedited Continental and
Postmodern Currents in the Philosophy ofScience ( 1994). Recently she compiled and
edited Nietzsche, Theories ofKnowledge, Critical Theory and the Sciences (1999) and
Nietzsche, Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science (1999).
DOMINIC BALESTRA is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department at
Fordham University, New York. His current interests are in rationality in science and
religion and his recent publications include "At the Origins of Modem Science:
Demythologizing Pythagoreanism" ( 1999) and "Science and Religion" in Philosophy
of Religion: A Guide to the Subject ( 1998).
GARRETT BARDEN is Emeritus Professor ofPhilosophy of University College Cork.
He was born in Dublin in 1939 and studied there, in Leuven, in Oxford, and in West
Australia. He taught Philosophy for twenty seven years at University College Cork and
has held Visiting Professorships in several countries including France, Iceland, and
Slovakia. His enduring interest is the epistemology of human action. He now lives in
Lismore, Co. Waterford, Ireland.
D. CYRIL BARRETT, S.J., is Tutor in Philosophy in Campion Hall at the University
of Oxford. He has taught philosophy in Jesuit houses and in the University of Warwick
from which he has retired. He is a member of the International Art Critics Association
and an ongoing contributor to art journals. He has also organized or been involved in
international art exhibitions. He edited Wittgenstein's lectures on aesthetics and
469
470 SCIENCE, VAN GOGH, AND GOD
religious belief, has authored a book on Wittgenstein on Ethics and Religious Beliefand
has just completed a commentary on Wittgenstein's lectures on religious belief.
HEIDI BYRNES is Professor of German/Linguistics at Georgetown University. Her
research focus within second language acquisition (SLA) is the advanced instructed
Ieamer of German, particularly the learners' acquisition of academic literacy, discourse
analysis, and cross-cultural discourse. She has most recently edited a volume entitled
Learning Second and Foreign Languages: Perspectives in Research and Scholarship
( 1998) which provides an overview of the field of instructed second language learning
by adults. She is currently preparing a book on constructing content-based foreign
language curricula.
W. NORRIS CLARKE, S.J., received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the Catholic
University ofLouvain in 1949, taught philosophy at Fordham University in New York,
1955-1985 and is now Professor Emeritus there. He was Co-Founder and Editor-in-
Chief of the International Philosophical Quarterly, 1961-85, also former president of
the American Catholic Philosophical Association and of the Metaphysical Society of
America. He is the author of some 65 articles and 6 books, including Person and Being
(1993), Explorations in Metaphysics (1994), and The One and the Many: A
Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (2001).
JOHN CLEARY, Professor of Philosophy at Boston College and senior lecturer in
Philosophy as NUl Maynooth, Ireland. He was director of the Boston Area Colloquium
in Ancient Philosophy from 1984-1988 and is the founding and general editor for the
BACAP Proceedings. He has written extensively on ancient philosophy, including one
monograph on Aristotle in the Many Senses ofPriority (1988) and a book on Aristotle
and Mathematics (1995). He also engages in research on the history and philosophy
of mathematics, political philosophy, and the philosophy of art.
RICHARD COBB-STEVENS is Professor and Chair ofthe Department of Philosophy
at Boston College. He has published extensively on American Pragmatism and on
Husserl's Phenomenology. His most recent book is Husser! et !a Philosophie
Analytique ( 1998).
JOHN J. COMPTON is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University.
He is author of essays on issues in philosophy of science, philosophy of nature, science
and society, science and religion, philosophy of mind, and the problem of freedom, as
well as on several figures in the phenomenological tradition- centrally, Husser!, Sartre,
and Merleau-Ponty. His "Some Contributions of Existential Phenomenology to the
Philosophy of Natural Science" appears in Lawrence Hass and Dorothea Olkowsky,
eds., Rereading Merleau-Ponty (2000) and "The Persistence of Freedom" will appear
in the Review ofMetaphysics (2001).
ROBERT P. CREASE is Professor of Philosophy at the State University ofNew York
at Stony Brook, and historian at Brookhaven National Laboratory. He is interested in
issues of philosophy that are illuminated by the history of science, and issues of history
that are illuminated by the philosophy of science. His books in philosophy and history
of science include The Play ofNature: Experimentation as Performance ( 1993 ), The
Second Creation: Makers of the Revolution in 20th Century Physics (1986; 1996),
Making Physics: A Biography ofBrookhaven National Laboratory 1946-1972 (1999).
He co-wrote Peace and War: Reminiscences of a Life at the Frontiers of Science
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 471
(1998), and edited Hermeneutics and the Natural Sciences (1997). He teaches ethics
courses for scientists, and writes a monthly column on issues of science and society,
"Critical Point," for Physics World.
STEVEN CROWELL is Professor of Philosophy and Professor of German and Slavic
Studies at Rice University. He is author of Husser!, Heidegger, and the Space of
Meaning: Paths Toward Transcendental Philosophy (200 1) and numerous articles in
the field of aesthetics, philosophy of history, and continental philosophy. He serves on
the Board of Directors of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and
currently edits the Series in Continental Thought at Ohio University Press.
STEVE FULLER is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick, UK.
Originally trained in the history and philosophy of science (Ph.D., 1985, University of
Pittsburgh), he is the founder of the research program of social epistemology. It is the
name of a quarterly journal he founded with Taylor & Francis in 1987 as well as the
first of his six books: Social Epistemology (1988); Philosophy of Science and Its
Discontents (1993); Philosophy, Rhetoric and the End ofKnowledge (1993), Science
(1997); The Governance of Science: Ideology and the Future of the Open Society
(2000); Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times (2000); and Knowledge
Management Foundations (2001).
RAGNAR FJELLAND is Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Center for the
Study of the Sciences and the Humanities and Department of Physics, University of
Bergen in Norway. He was director of the Center 1993-95 and 1999-2001. He was a
member of the National Research Ethics Committee for Natural Science and
Technology, 1991-1999. His current interests include the significance of technology
for the acquisition of scientific knowledge, philosophical aspects of chaos theory,
fractal geometry and complexity, ethical problems raised by modem science and
technology, and the challenge of environmental problems to science. He has published
six books (in Norwegian) and a number of articles on the philosophy of science,
technology, and ethics. His most recent book is Vitenskap - mel/om sikkerhet og
usikkerhet [Science - between certainty and uncertainty] 1999.
DIMITRI GINEV is Professor of History of Hermeneutics at the University of Sofia,
Bulgaria. Among his books are: Grundriss einer kritischen Wissenschaftstheorie
(1989); Dialogues on Scientific Rationality (1989); Essays in Hermeneutic Theory of
Culture (1995); A Passage To a Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science (1997), Critique
ofEpistemological Reason (2000).
JENNIFER HANSEN is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Gettysburg College. Her
book, Mad Women and Wise Men: A Philosophical Analysis of Gender and
Melancholia, is forthcoming. She has published several articles as well as a translation
of Jacques Taminiaux's "The Interpretation of Aristotle's Notion of Arete in
Heidegger's First Courses." She is the executive editor of Studies in Practical
Philosophy.
ROM HARRE is Emeritus Fellow ofLinacre College, Oxford and currently teaches at
Georgetown and American Universities in Washington, DC. His most recent
publications include One Thousand Years ofPhilosophy (2000), Positioning Theory
(1998) with Luk van Langenhove and The Discursive Mind (1996) with Grant Gillett.
His current research interests include the nature of experiments and the role of
Artificial Intelligence modeling in cognitive psychology.
IRMA B. JAFFE is Emeritus Professor of Art History at Fordham University. She was
appointed founder and chair of the Department of Art and Music at Fordham University
in 1966. On her retirement from the university in 1987, she became Cultural
Consultant for the Italian Encyclopaedia Institute. Her publications include books and
articles on American and European art ranging from the eighteenth to the twentieth
century. In 1996, the Italian government appointed her cavaliere in the Order ofMerit
of the Italian Republic. At present, she is at work on a book about sixteenth century
Italian women poets.
ALLAN JANIK is Research Fellow at the University oflnnsbruck's Brenner Archives
Research Institute and Adjunct Professor for the Philosophy of Culture at the
University of Vienna. He has held a varied range of visiting appointments at Graz,
Innsbruck, Bergen, Stockholm, Mexico City and has lectured extensively in Europe.
He is also ChiefDramaturg of the Innsbrucker Kellertheater, for which he has adapted
Shakespeare's King Lear. He is co-author, with Stephen Toulmin, of Wittgenstein 's
Vienna Revisited; with Hans V eigl, Wittgenstein in Vienna; with Monika Seekircher
and Jorg Markowitsch, Die Practik der Physik; Kunskapsbegreppet i praktisk filsofi
[The Concept of Knowledge in Practical Philosophy]; Style Politics and the Future of
Philosophy; Essays on Wittgenstein and Weininger; How Not to Interpret a Culture;
Cordelis Tysnad [Cordelia's Silence]; Niirvarons Dimension [The Dimension of
Presence: Essays on Wittgenstein).
RICHARD KEARNEY is Professor of Philosophy, Boston College. Author of many
essays, and edited and co-edited collections, some of his books include Modern
Movements in European Philosophy ( 1995), Postnationalist Ireland (1996), The Wake
ofImagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture ( 1998), Poetics ofImagining: Modern
to Post-Modern (1999). His newest book is entitled, The God Who May Be: The
Hermeneutics ofReligion (2001).
THEODORE KISIEL is Presidential Research Professor for Philosophy at Northern
Illinois University. He is the author of The Genesis of Heidegger 's Being and Time
(1993), co-translator of Werner Marx's Heidegger and the Tradition, translator of
Heidegger's History Of The Concept Of Time, and co-editor of Phenomenology and
the Natural Sciences (1970) and Reading Heidegger from the Start (1994). His
numerous articles on Heidegger, hermeneutic phenomenology, and a hermeneutics of
the natural sciences are currently being gathered together into book form.
JOSEPH J. KOCKELMANS is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy AND
Fellow Emeritus, Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies at Pennsylvania State
University. He has published several books on the philosophies of both Husser! and
Heidegger. He has also published books and articles on the philosophy of science.
One of his latest publications is entitled Ideas for a Hermeneutic Phenomenology ofthe
Natural Sciences. A second volume of this work, devoted to methodological issues is
currently under review for publication. Over the past years, he has become very
interested in the philosophy of music, to which he has devoted several articles.
JEAN LADRERE is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the Universite Catholique de
Louvain, Belgium. He is the author of Les limitations internes des formalismes: etude
sur Ia signification du theoreme de Godel et des theoremes apparentes dans Ia theorie

des fondements des mathematiques (2000); L 'ethique dans I 'univers de Ia rationalite
(1997); Articulation du sens ( 1984); L 'Articulation du sens. Les langages de Ia foi
(1984). A study of his thought appeared by Jean Fran9ois Malherbe, Le langage
theologique a!'age de Ia science: lecture de Jean Ladriere (1985).
JOSEPH MARGOLIS is currently Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple
University. His interests are centered on the theory of history and culture, with
emphasis on the formation of the self and our understanding of the arts and sciences.
His most recent publications include: What, After All, Is a Work ofArt (1999) and the
Philosophy ofInterpretation, co-edited with Tom Rockmore (2000). Forthcoming are
Selves and Other Texts and The Quarrel Between Invariance and Flux (200 I), co-
authored with Jacques Catudal. He is the co-editor, with Tom Rockmore, of a new
series in philosophy, "Philosophy and the Historical Tum," to be published by
University of California Press.
WOLFE MAYS has been editor of The Journal of the British Society for
Phenomenology since 1970. He is currently Visiting Professor of Philosophy at
Manchester University in the United Kingdom and was formerly Reader in Philosophy
at the University of Manchester and has taught at Edinburgh University as well as
Northwestern, Purdue, and Wisconsin Universities. He is a founding member of the
International Center for Genetic Epistemology at the University of Geneva, where he
collaborated with Jean Piaget. He was also an Emeritus Leverhulme Fellow and
Director of the EEC funded Intellectual Skills Project. Among his 140 publications are
two books on Whitehead, one on Koestler, and two co-authored books (with Piaget and
others). He is at the moment working on artificial intelligence as well as Husserl's
theory of a pure logical grammar and he is also preparing a book on Piaget.
ERNEST G. McCLAIN is Emeritus Professor of Music at Brooklyn University and
author of The Myth oflnvariance (1976) and The Pythagorean Plato (1978; 84).
GAYE McCOLLUM-NICKLES currently teaches at Sage Ridge School and was
formerly an instructor at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is the author of articles
in English literature.
ROBERT NEVILLE is Dean of the School of Divinity at Boston University. He writes
in the fields of philosophy, religion and theology. Before his appointment to the
deanship in 1988, Dean Neville was the Director of the Boston University Division of
Religious and Theological Studies and chair of the Religion Department. He was Dean
of Humanities and Fine Arts at the State University ofNew York at Stony Brook, and
has also taught at Yale, Fordham, and SUNY Purchase. An ordained elder in the
Missouri East Conference of the United Methodist Church, Dean Neville has pastored
in Missouri and 'New York. He is a prolific author of books including Boston
ConfUcianism (2000); The Cosmology ofFreedom (1995); Eternity and Time's Flow
(1993); The Highroad around Modernism (1992); Behind the Masks of God (1991);
The Tao and the Daimon (1982).
TOM NICKLES is Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department, University of
Nevada, Reno. He is editor of Scientific Discovery, Logic, and Rationality (1980) and
Scientific Discovery: Case Studies ( 1980) and author of many articles in philosophy of
science. He is currently editing a volume on Thomas Kuhn.
TONY O'CONNOR lectures in Philosophy at University College, Cork, Ireland.

Currently, he is president of the British Society for Phenomenology. He has published
articles on various aspects of Continental European Philosophy. He is a member of the
international editorial advisory board of the Routledge book series, Continental
Philosophy. His current research interests lie in the areas of Philosophy and Culture
and Political Philosophy.
LEO J. O'DONOVAN, S.J., has served as Georgetown University's 47th president
since 1989. Professor of Theology at Georgetown and a past president of the Catholic
Theological Society of America, Fr. 0 'Donovan is the editor of five books, has written
extensively about the work of the Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner, and has published
other articles and essays widely. He is a former associate editor of the Journal ofthe
American Academy ofReligion. In recent years, in addition to scholarly writing on Ex
corde Ecclesiae, Pope John Paul II's Apostolic Constitution on the nature and role of
the Catholic university, and other issues in Catholic and Jesuit higher education, Fr.
O'Donovan has published numerous art reviews and essays in The Washingtonian,
America, and Commonweal.
FRAN<;OIS RAFFOUL is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State
University. He is the author of Heidegger and the Subject (1999) and co-editor, with
David Pettigrew, of two collections: Disseminating Lacan (1996) and Heidegger and
Practical Philosophy (200 I).
WILLIAM J. RICHARDSON, S.J, is Professor of Philosophy at Boston College. He
is the author of Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (Preface by Martin
Heidegger) and co-author, with John P. Muller, of Lacan and Language: A Reader's
Guide to the Ecrits and The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic
Reading. He has written widely in the fields of philosophy and psychoanalysis and at
present is preparing a study on the ethics of psychoanalysis. He maintains a private
practice of psychoanalysis in Newton, MA.
BARBARA SAUNDERS is Research Professor in the Department of Anthropology
at the University of Leuven, Belgium. Her research interests are focussed in the
anthropology and historiography of color.
ROBERT C. SCHARFF is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New
Hampshire. His research includes 19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy
(especially Dilthey, Heidegger, and the hermeneutics of science), the history of
positivism (especially Comte and Mill and the connection between classical positivism
and post-positivist developments in recent analytic philosophy) and the philosophy of
technology. In addition to articles on these figures and topics, he is the author of
Comte After Positivism (1995) and editor (with Val Dusek) of the Technological
Condition: A Philosophy of Technology (2001). Current projects include a book How
History Matters to Philosophy and a collection (with Kenneth Westphal), Philosophical
Understanding: Reflection and Justification in the Continental Tradition. Since 1995,
he has been Editor of Continental Philosophy Review (formerly, Man and World).
JAY SCHULKIN is a Research Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at Georgetown
University School of Medicine. He has published eight books, one of which is entitled,
The Pursuit of Inquiry (1982) and the latest of which is entitled, Roots of Social
Sensibility and Neural Function (2000).
THOMAS SEEBOHM (Dr. Phil., University ofMainz, 1962, venia legendi, 1969) was
Professor of Philosophy at the Pennsylvania State University and later of the University
ofMainz and is now Emeritus Professor at the University ofMainz. He has published
books and articles in journals and chapters in books on Kant, German Idealism,
phenomenology, hermeneutics, and philosophy oflogic.
JACQUES TAMINIAUX is Adelmann Professor ofPhilosophy at Boston College and
former Director of the Center for Phenomenological Studies at Louvain-la-Neuve. He
is the author of numerous monographs in French, including La Nostalgie de Ia Grece
a l'aube de l'idealisme allemand. Kant et les Grecs dans l'itineraire de Schiller, de
Holder/in, et de Hegel (1967); Le regard et l'excedent (1977) and Le theatre des
philosophes. La tragedie, l'etre, /'action (1995). In English, his works include
Dialectic and Difference: Finitude in Modern Thought (1985); Heidegger and the
Project ofFundamental Ontology ( 1991 ); Poetics, Speculation and Judgment (1993 );
and The Thracian Maid and the Professional Thinker: Arendt and Heidegger (1998).
STEPHEN TOULMIN is Henry R. Luce Professor at the University of Southern
California. Educated in England, initially in physics at Cambridge University, he
ultimately studied philosophy under Wittgenstein during his last two years, and took
up a position as Lecturer in the philosophy of science at Oxford. He is the recipient of
a number of academic honors, including the Ehrenkreuz fiir Wissenschafi und Kunst
awarded by the Austrian Government and has held chairs at numerous universities,
most recently the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. He is the author
or co-author of 18 books, including The Uses of Argument (1958), Foresight and
Understanding (1961), Wittgenstein 's Vienna (with A. S. Janik), Knowing and Acting
(1976), The Return to Cosmology (1982), Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of
Modernity (1989). His most recent book is Return to Reason (2001).
JOHN ZIMAN is Emeritus Professor of Physics of the University of Bristol in the
United Kingdom. He was brought up in New Zealand, studied at Oxford, and lectured
at Cambridge, before becoming Professor of Theoretical Physics at Bristol in 1964. His
researches on the theory of the electrical and magnetic properties of solid and liquid
metals earned his election to the Royal Society in 1967. Voluntary early retirement
from Bristol in 1982 was followed by a period as Visiting Professor at Imperial
College, London, and from 1986 to 1991 as founding Director of the Science Policy
Support Group. Since 1994 he has been the Convenor of the Epistemology Group,
which studies the evolution of knowledge and invention. He was Chairman of the
Council for Science and Society from 1976 to 1990, and has written extensively on
various aspects of the social relations of science and technology.
INDEX OF NAMES
Adams, J., 291, 295, 297. Bazerman, C., 414, 422n.

Adorno, T., 68. Beaufret, J., 255, 352, 360n.
Alberti, L. B., 234-, 306. Becker, A.L., 421n, 422n.
Alexander, 175n. Beckett, S., 280.
Allison, D., 19. Beckmann, M., 299.
Altizer, T. J. J., 338, 402n. Beethoven, L., 266.
Altran, S., 216n. Behe, M., 407.
Anaximander, 153. Bell, C., 282-.
Annas, J., 176n. Bell, J., 57, 64n.
Ape!, K. 0., 25. Beller, M. 54, 64n, 68, 77n.
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 35, 389, 392n, Benjamin, W., 306-.
403, 424-, 446. Bergson, H., 391n, 392n.
Archimedes, 58, 443. Berkeley, G., 103.
Archytas, 435. Bernard, C., 27.
Arendt, H., 231, 251-. Bernouilli, J., 103.
Aristarchus, 163. Bernstein, R., 329, 333n.
Aristotle, 22, 35, 61, 71, 99, 142, 147, Betti, E., 138, 140, 152n.
154, 158, 161n, 163-, 196, 232, 253, Biemel, W., 278n.
280, 305-, 344, 346, 379, 380, 382, Billig, M., 216n.
403,405,424,439n,443-. Birkhoff, G., 37, 447.
Arnheim, R., 39. Birt, T., 138.
Aronowitz, S., 77n. Boatner, M., 298.
Arp, J., 299. Bogden, R. J., 321n, 322n.
Atlan, H., 78n. Boden, M.A., 321n.
Augustine, St., 213,427. Boeckh, P. A., 138, 141, 143-144, 152n,
Austin, J.L., 317, 32ln, 392n. 154.
Ayer, A.J., 125n. Boehme, J., 354.
Bohm, D., 27.
Babich, B., 15n, 17n, 20, 77n, 154, Bohr, N., 6, 27, 29,31-,53-,447.
161n,231,278n,443,457,446. Boltzmann, L., 95n.
Bach, J.S., 311. Bonaventure, St., 427.
Bacon, F., 180, 182. Boscovich, R., 102.
Back, A., 176n. Bourdieu, P., 421n.
Bakhtin, M., 411-. Boyle, R., 220.
Balestra, D., 337. Brahe, T., 97.
Baltas, A. , K. Gavroglu, & V. Kindi, Braque, G., 280, 285, 303.
10, 17n. Brancusi, C., 300, 302-303.
Barbour, 1., 382-3. Brann, E., 428n.
Barbour, J., 295. Bremer, J., 440n.
Barden, G., 337, 391n, 392n. Brentano, F., 321n, 385.
Baron-Cohen, S., 216n, 321n. Broglie, L. de, 54.
Barnes, J., 164, 176n. Brouwer, L. W., 174, 177.
Barrett, C., 232, 389, 390, 390n, 391n, Bruno, G., 354.
392n. Bowie, M., 348n, 349n.
Baudrillard, J., 78n. Brunelleschi, 233-.
Baxandall, M., 306, 312n. Bryson, N.,164, 241, 247, 249n.
477
478 INDEX OF NAMES
Buber, M., 386n. Copernicus, N., 340.

Buchdahl, G., 18n. Copley, J.S., 293.
Bunge, M., 53. Cornford, F.M., 61, 65n.
Buridan, 58. Costal, A., 312n.
Burtt, Sir C., 224. Cotter, H., 304n.
Burrt, E., 65n. Cousin, V., 282.
Butterfield, H., 15n. Crease, R., 19-20, 40n, 4ln, 44, 52n, 73,
Bynum, T.W., 313n. 186n, 448.
Byrnes, H., ix, 338. Croce, B., 283.
Crombie, A. C., 15n.
Calion, M., J. Law, & A. Rip, 217n. Crowe, F. E., 388n.
Campbell, D. T., 375n. Crowell, S., 231.
Capra, F., 404. Curtius, E. R., 139, 152n.
Caputo, J., 351, 359n, 360n. Cziko, G., 374n, 375n.
Camap, R., 21, 84, 127, 129, 136n.
Cartwright, N., 313n. Dalton, F., 198.
Casey, E., 329., 333n. Damasio, A., 202n, 32ln, 322n.
Cassirer, E., 93n, 94n, 128. Damisch, H., 237, 238n.
Castell, M., 312n. Dante, 400-402.
Cavell, M., 349n. Danto, A., 242-243, 246, 249n, 265,
Caws, P., 68. 273.
Celan, P., 273. Darwin, C., 98, 182, 361-, 404-409.
Celsus, 13 7. David, J. L., 288.
Cezanne, P., 85, 267, 280, 282, 285, Davidson, D., 70, 73, 323.
394-395. Dawkins, M. S., 202n.
Chamberlain, T. C., 376n. Dawkins, R., 375n, 407.
Chardin, T. de, 383. Dear, P., 8, 15-16n.
Chase, J., 297. Decety, J., 322n.
Chaucer, 415. Decety, J., M. Perani, M. Jeannarod,
Chomsky, N., 405. 322n.
Chopra, D., 404. Deleuze, G., 78n.
Christo, 266. Dembski, W., 407.
Churchland, P., & P. Churchland, 321n. Democritus, 99, 100, 110,407.
Clark, A., 317-318, 32ln, 322n. Dennett, D. C., 216n, 32ln, 374n, 375n,
Clark, Sir K., 282, 286n. 376n.
Clark, S., 103. Denis, M., 282, 286n.
Clarke, W. N., 338. DeQuincey, 282.
Cleary, J., 22, 175n. Derain, A., 280.
Clement of Alexandria, 356. Derrida, J., 68, 267, 272.
Clifford, W. K., 364-365, 374n. Descartes, R., 54, 57, 77, 78n, 100, 103,
Cobb-Stevens, R., 21. 156-, 174, 196, 203-206, 249n, 253,
Cohen, H., 128. 326,341-, 348n,362,379,447,449.
Cohen, H. F., 15n. Dewey, J., 184-185, 196,315-,323-.
Cohen, R. S., 94n. Diaghilev, S., 280.
Cohen, R. S., & T. Schnelle, 5-. Dickinson, J., 293.
Coles, A., 313n. Dilthey, W., 4, 14n, 25, 79, 91, 126n,
Collingwood, R. G., 95n, 153, 161n, 138-139, 154, 178, 348n.
385, 390n. Dorment, R., 304n.
Compton, J. J., 22, 202n. Domseiff, F., 136n.
Comte, A., 21, 117-. Dostoevsky, F., 353.
Conant, J. B., 10. Dowling, J., 386, 391n.
Constant, B., 281. Drake, S., 65n.
INDEX OF NAMES 479
Dretske, F., 322n. Fry, R., 282, 286n.

Dreyfus, H., 190, 194n. Fuller, S., 9, 16-17n, 215n, 338.
Drury, M., 91, 95n. Funkenstein, A., 362, 373, 373, 371n.
Duchamp, M., 280, 283, 285-286. Fuykuyama, D., 15n.
Durer, A., 270, 306.
Dufrenne, M., 284, 360n. Gaugin, P., 269, 278n, 282.
Duhem, P., 15n, 73, 87, 184, 186n, 337, Gauzi, F., 278n.
375-377, 380, 380n. Gadamer, H.-G., 16n, 19, 25-, 45, 79,
95n, 126n, 138, 140-141, 154, 178,
Eckhart, [Meister], 348, 356-357, 360n, 277n, 316, 321n,360n,443,446.
396. Ga1ilei, V., 436, 440n.
Edgerton, S. Y., 238n. Ga1ileo, G., xx, 44, 54, 57, 59, 100,
Einstein, A., 27, 29, 33, 54-, 70, 76, 97, 155-, 163, 182, 198, 334, 362, 377-,
109, 184. 444,453.
Einstein, A., & B. Podolsky, N. Rosen, Gallagher, M.P., 39ln.
55-. Gallup, D., 312n.
Elster, J., 215n. Garcia, R., 178-.
Epicurus, 407, 457. Gauss, 108, 109.
Etzioni, A., 215n. Geertz, C., 216n, 410, 421n.
Euclid, 26, 29, 157-158, 168,443. Giacometti, A., 277n
Eudoxus, 164, 169-170. Gibson, J. J., 202n, 237, 238n, 317,
Euler, L., 103. 321n, 322n, 408.
Gierre, R., 60, 65n.
Fann, K. T., 91, 93n, 95n. Giere, R., & A. Richardson, 15n.
Faraday, M., 83, 220. Ginev, D., 20, 52n.
Favrholdt, D., 65n. Ginev, D., & R. Cohen, 52n.
Feuer, L., 225-226, 229n. Gingrich, 0., 453.
Feyerabend, P., 20, 130, 365, 374n, 380, Giotto,235,287-,399,401.
403. Givan, T., 422n.
Fichte, G., 139. GOdel, K., 73.
Ficker, L. von, 88. Goldhill, S., 312n.
Findlay, J. N., 147. Goldstein, S., 64.
Fink, B., 347, 348n, 349n, 350n. Golinski, J., 15n.
Fink, E., 188, 360n. Gombrich, E., 240-.
Finn, G., 78. Gooding, D. G., 228n.
Fish, S., 68. Goodman, N., 242.
Fjelland, R., 6, 20, 77n. Goodman, R. B., 125n.
Flacius, 137. Gordon, C., 429,
Flanagan, 0., 202n. Granier, J., 78n.
Fleck, L., 2-, 73. Green, J., 312n.
Fleming, S., 182. Gregory of Nyssa, 356, 358.
Flexner, J. T., 298. Grene, M., 202n.
Foucault, M., 22, 187-. Grice, H. P., 321n.
Francesca, P. della, 280. Grigg, R., 349n.
Franklin, B., 293. Oris, J., 280.
Frayn, M., 31, 40n. Grondin, J., 152n.
Freeland, C., 313n. Gross, P., & N. Levitt, 53, 69, 217n.
Freeman, W. J., 202n. Gruber, H., & J. Voneche, 186n.
Frege, G., 2, 87-88, 94n, 174-175, 176n. Griinbaum, A., 403.
Freud, S., 86, 333, 339-. Grunewald, H., 299.
Friedman, M., 15n, 18n, 136n, 312n.
Frith, C. D., & U. Frith, 216n.
480 INDEX OF NAMES
Haas, F. A. J. de, 176n. Hertz, H., 20-21, 79-,97-.

Habennas, J., 26, 405. Hesiod, 71.
Habgood, J., 216n. Hilbert, D., 89, 448.
Hackennan, N., & K. Ashworth, 78n. Hillesum, E., 357, 360n.
Hacking, I., 7, 16n, 75, 78n, 366-337, Hirsch, Jr., B.D., 152n.
375n. Hobbes, T., 155.
Hadot, P., 312n, 416-417, 422n, 456. Holderlin, F., 352.
Hagen, J., 294. Hofstadter, A., 132.
Haldane, J. S., 27. Hollinger, D.A., 374n.
Halliday, M.A. K., 411-. Holquist, M., 411-.
Halliday, M. A. K., & J. Martin, 414, Holton, G., 27, 53, 229n.
42ln, 422n. Honecker, M., 360n.
Haller, R., 125n. Hopkins, G. M., 419.
Hamilton, K., 94n. Hopkins, S., 297, 298n.
Hamsun, K., 269. Hook, R., 103.
Hancock, J., 294. Horgan, J., 77n.
Hansen, H. P. E., 59. Hoyle, F., 379.
Hanson, N. R., 3, 316, 321n. Hume, D., 174, 324, 374, 450.
Harding, S., 126n. Husser!, E., 2-, 22, 33, 58-59, 61-63,
Harre, R., 6, 15n, 23, 216n, 228n. 68, 126n, 128, 141, 146-147, 152n,
Hart, R., 78n. 155-, 178-, 186n, 187-, 196-, 241,
Hartshorne, C. & P. Weiss, 323, 333n. 251-, 283-284, 303n, 321n, 324-,
Harwood, J., 17n. 444-.
Hasan, R., 421n, 422n. Hussey, E., 176n.
Hayek, F. von, 405. Huygens, C., 101, 379.
Hayles, N. K., 71. Huyssteen, J. W. van, 380n.
Hawking, S., 15n, 69,408,456.
Hazlitt, W., 239. Idelson, A. Z., 440n.
Heath, T. L., 175n. Ignatius of Loyola, St., 416-, 456-457.
Hegel, G. W. F., 139, 196, 261, 379. Ihde, D., 71, 126n.
Heelan, P. A., xi, 1-, 25-, 31-, 95n, Illich, 1., 312n, 313n.
117, 160, 161n, 198, 202n, 204-206, Indiana, R., 300.
215, 215n, 216n, 217n, 218, 233-, Ingarden, R., 284.
231-232,239-,305-,315-,323-,338, Inhelder, B., & J. Piaget, 186n.
339,383,380n,381,384n,385,387n, lonesco, E., 280.
403-,422n,421-,447-. lrigaray, L., 77n.
Heelan, P. A., & J. Schulkin, 40n, 41n,
43-, 64n, 73, 124n, 184, 186n, 216n, J!ihnig, D., 277n.
278n, 316, 321n, 328, 333n, 334n, Jaffe, I. B., 231-232,298,448.
422n, 427-. James, W., 159, 161n, 181, 184, 315-,
Heidegger, M., 7, 21-22,33,47-,61-62, 323-, 337, 361-.
73-74, 78n, 79,89,95n, 119,122-124, Jammer, M., 101, 103, 109.
126n, 127-, 138-141, 143, 152n, 178, Janik, A., 20, 95n, 443.
187-, 231, 251-, 265-, 321n, 324-, Janik, A., & C. P. Berger, 94n.
351-, 421n, 444-. Janik, A., & S. Toulmin, 93n.
Heinich, N., 451. Jardine, N., 16-17n.
Heisenberg, W., xi-, 2-, 26, 29, 31-, Jasanoff, S., G. E. Markle, J.C.Petersen,
53-54, 76, 278n, 447-. & T. J. Pinch, 215n.
Helmholtz, H. von, 97, 99, 103-104, Jaspers, K., 316, 321n.
108. Jeannerod, M., 322n.
Heraclitus, 255, 257-258, 340-341, Jefferson, T., 295, 295.
343n, 346-347, 352. Jerome, St., 350, 354n.
INDEX OF NAMES 481
Joas, H., 206-. Lakoff, M., & G. Johnson, 321n, 322n,

Johansen, T., 308, 313n. 422n.
John, St., 351. Lakatos, 1., 174, 378-.
John Paul II, Pope, 403-,417, 422n. Lamarck, 364.
Johns, J., 300-. Lambert, J.H., 26.
Johnson, M., 321n, 322n. Langer, S., 388, 392n.
Johnson, P., 407. Lask, E., 127-128.
Johnson-Laird, P., 216n. Latour, B., 7, 73,407.
Jordan, M., 317. Latour, B., & S. Woolgar, 229n.
Joyce, J., 280. Latrobe, B., 294.
Laudan, L., 5, 13, 15n, 126n, 376.
Kaufmann, S. A., 217n. Lavoisier, J., 198.
Kant, I., 17n, 25-26, 29, 36, 76, 84, 94n, Lear, J., 174, 176n.
98, 109, 111-112, 127, 155, 177, 252, Lee, J. S., 348n.
281, 306, 309, 324, 328, 360n, 382, Leibniz, G., 102.
446. Lemke, J. L., 422n.
Kantorovich, A., 216n. Leupin, A., 349n.
Kearney; R., 337, 360n. Levarie, S., 440n.
Keill, J., 103. Levi-Strauss, C., 339-.
Kelly, E., 231, 299-. Levinas, E., 354-, 390n.
Kelvin, W. T., 104, 110. Levitt, N., 63, 65n.
Kepler, J., 97, 99, 100, 101, 114, 163, Lewontin, R. C., 18n, 371n.
182, 220, 334, 377. Lichtenberg, G.C., 92.
Kerszberg, P., 18n. Locke, J., 174.
Kierkegaard, S., 27, 92, 353. Lonergan, B. J. F., 35, 40n, 390n, 392n,
Kirchoff, 99-100, 103, 107, 110. 403,446-.
Kisiel, T., 21, 132, 136n, 446. Lovejoy, A. 0., 125n.
Kitcher, P., 52n. Lucian, 358.
Klee, P., 273, 277n, 278n. Lucretius, 407.
Klein, Y., 280. Luhmann, N., 217n.
Klingsbigl, W., 93n. Liineberg, R., xiii.
Knorr, W. R., 175n. Lyotard, J.-F., 71.
Knorr-Cetina, K., 229n.
Kockelmans, J., 21, 124n, 446. Mach, E., 11, 13, 73, 80, 82, 84, 88,
Kolakowski, L., 94n, 391n. 93n, 94n, 103.
Kooslyn, S. M., 322n. Macintyre, A., 16, 70, 77n.
Komblith, H., 322n. MacQuarrie, J., & E. Robinson, 132-
Kosuth, J., 286. 133.
Koyre, A., 58, 65n, 334, 444. Madison, J., 291-293.
Koza, J., 376n. Mahoney, M., 161n.
Krause, K., 92. Malcolm, N., 95n.
Krieger, D. J., 215n. Malevich, K., 266,280-282,285.
Kristeva, J., 354n. Mandelbrot, B., 62, 65n.
Kuhn, T., 5-, 22, 33, 47, 70, 130, 178- Mannetti, A., 234.
179, 365-367, 370, 374n, 378, 385, Mannheim, K., 17n.
403. Margolis, J., 231, 249n, 278.
Matisse, 282, 285, 302.
LaBerge, D., 202n. Marat, 288.
Lacan, J., 337, 339-. Marcel, G., 390n, 391n.
Lachterman, D., 156, 161n, 175n. Markus, G., 52n.
Ladriere, J., 19, 446. Marr, D., 446.
482 INDEX OF NAMES
Martin, A., 300-301, 304n. Newton, 1., 25-26, 29, 81, 84, 97, 99-
Martin, A., 322n. 102, 104, 108, 109-111, 114-115, 163,
Marx, K., 405. 180, 182, 220, 362, 377, 379, 407,
Maximus the Confessor, 356. 415,449, 454.
Maxwell, J. C., 83, 97, 103. Newton-Smith, W., 380, 384n.
Maupertuis, 103. Nickles, T., 374n, 375n.
Mays, W., 22. Nickles, T., & G. McCollum-Nickles,
McClain, E., 338, 439n, 440n. 337.
McCleod, F. G., 422n. Nicola, L., 292.
McGuiness, B., 93n, 94n. Nicolas, A.T. de 440n.
McMullin, E., 4, 382, 384n. Nietzsche, F., 7, 10, 13, 17n, 69, 73,
Mead, G. H., 206-, 316, 32ln, 323-. 78n, 185, 256, 258, 271-273, 312n,
Merleau-Ponty, M., 22, 33, 39-40, 187-, 406.
197, 231, 244, 249n, 251-, 283, 309, Nijinsky, R., 280.
315-,331,349n,39ln,446,448. Noack, A., 346.
Mermin, D., 64n. Nobus D., 349n.
Merton, R., 15n, 216n. Nozick, R., 405.
Michelangelo, 282. Nussbaum, M., 309n, 407.
Mignucci, M., 176n.
Mill, J. S., 119, 374n. O'Connor, T., 22.
Miller, C. R., 422n. O'Donovan, L. J., 232.
Miller, J.P., 16ln. Oppenheimer, J. H., 222.
Millikan, R., 215n, 224. Oreseme, N., 58.
Minsky, M., 202n. Origen, 356.
Mitchell, W. J. T., 242-242, 246-247, Ostwald, W., 84.
249n.
Modrak, D., 176n. Pais, A., 64n, 65n.
Moghaddam, F. H., 229n. Paley, W., 371.
Moloney, R., 392n. Pannenberg, W., 383.
Mondrian, P., 280, 282, 285, 300, 303. Panofsky, E., 237, 238n.
Monk, R., 93n, 94n. Pareto, 226, 229n.
Monod, J., 382. Parmenides, 175n, 330.
Monroe, K. R., 216n. Pascal, B., 363-364, 385, 39ln.
Monroe, J., 295, 293. Passmore, J., 94n.
Morin, E., 78n. Paul, St., 351-.
Moukanos, D. D., 175n. Peacocke, A., 383.
Muller, M., 360n. Peirce, C. S., 82, 94n, 313-, 323-, 366.
Muller, J.P., & W. J. Richardson, 348n. Perett, D., & N.J. Emery, 322n.
Murdoch, D., 64. Pevsner, N., 285.
Murphy, N., 384n. Philo, 396, 428, 438.
Murphy, J.P., 125n. Piaget, J., 177-.
Piatelli-Palmarini, M., 186n.
Nagel, T., 373n, 374n. Picasso, P., 280, 282, 285, 303.
Natorp, P., 128, 136n. Pichler, A., 95n.
Nelkin, D., 68, 77n. Pickering, A., 125n, 136n.
Netz, R., 176n. Pinker, S., 321n.
Neumann, J. von, 31-,447. Pippin, R., 18n.
Neurath, 0., 87, 129, 136n. Planck, M., 54.
Neville, R. C., 232, 333n, 334n. Plato, 154, 164,271-273,307, 305,309,
Newman, J. H., 391n. 330,375n,381,421,427-,443-.
INDEX OF NAMES 483
Plotkin, H. C., 216n. Rousseau, J.-J., 182, 288, 291.

Plutarch, 438, 440n. Ruse, M., 375n.
Poggeler, 0., 273, 277n. Ruskin, J., 231,239-.
Poincare, H., 111. Russell, B., 29, 88, 94n, 145, 174, 181,
Polanyi, M., 181-182, 186n, 221, 225, 183, 185, 186n.
228n, 365.
Polkinghome, J., 383. Sacks, 0., 216n.
Pollock, J., 266, 281. Sagan, C., 15n.
Popper, K., 5, 131, 136n, 240, 315, Santayana, G., 185.
321n, 337, 378-. Sartre, J.-P., 259.
Portman, A., 202n. Saunders, B., 11-12, 232.
Premack, D., 321n. Saussure, F. de, 242, 341, 413.
Prigogine, 1., 53. Schafer, L., 10.
Prigogine, 1., & I. Stengers, 407. Schafer, L., & T, Schnelle, 17n.
Principe, L., 12, 15n. Schaffer, S., 15n, 17n.
Proctor, R., 41 On. Schama, S., 303, 304n.
Protagoras, 171. Schapere, D., 46, 52n.
Proust, M., 280. Schapiro, M., 231, 265-272, 277n,
Ptolemy, 437, 453. 278n.
Pseudo-Alexander, 167-. Scharff, R., 21, 125n, 126n.
Pynchon, T., 71. Scheler, M., 333n.
Putnam, H., 37, 125, 126n, 198, 202n. Schleiermacher, F., 138-139, 141, 152n.
Puttfarken, T., 277. Schlick, M., 89.
Schmid, H., 278n.
Quine, W.V.O., 73, 87, 323, 380. Schoenberg, A., 279.
Schofe1d, M., 175n.
Rabelais, F., 411. Schopenhauer, A., 407.
Rahner, H., 358, 355n. Schrodinger, E., 26-27, 31-, 55, 445,
Rauschenberg, R., 300. 448,450.
Ree, J., 410n. Schulkin, J., 232, 321n.
Reichenbach, H., 118-. Schutz, A., 321n, 333n.
Reinhardt, A., 300. Sdzui, R., 152n.
Rhees, R., 385-. Searle, J., 221n, 321n, 322n.
Rembrandt, 393-394, 399-400. Seebolun, T., 21, 152n.
Richardson, A., 136n, 289. Seigfried, C. H., 125.
Richardson, J., 293. Seinfeld, J., 68.
Richardson, W. J., 337, 350n, 446. Sellars, W., 316, 317n.
Rickert, H., 128. Serres, M., 407.
Ricoeur, P., 157, 161n, 357, 446. Seurat, G., 280, 282, 285.
Riemann, 158-159,449-. Sextus Empiricus, 152n.
Riemenschneider, 306. Silverman, A., 313n.
Rizzolatti, G., & M. A. Arbib, 322n. Silverman, H., 446.
Robbins, B., & A. Ross, 77n. Singer, P., 406-
Robespierre, 288. Sklar, L., 4.
Rolls, E. T., & A. Treves, 322n. Shakespeare, W., 77, 94n.
Rorty, R., 43, 125n, 126n, 323, 374n. Shapin, S., 11, 15n.
Rosen, S., 161n. Shepard, R., 318.
Rosenberg, C. F., 77n. Shepard R., & L. A. Cooper, 322n.
Ross, A., 6. Sherif, M., 228n.
Rouault, G., 280. Signac, 280.
Rouse, J., 124, 126n, 180-181, 186n, Simmel, G., 216n, 217n.
370n. Singer, P., 404-.
484 INDEX OF NAMES
Singer, W., 216n. Vico, G. B., 155.

Slobin, D. I., 414, 422n. Vieta, S., 155-.
Smith, A., 405. Vlaminck, M. de, 280.
Snow, C. P., 53. Voltaire, F.M., 407.
Snyder, J., 312n. Vygotsky, L., 422n.
Socrates, 307.
Sokal, A., 6, 53, 67-.
Sophocles, 273. Waldman, D., 304n.
Sorabji, R., 313n. Walker, B., 297.
Sprague, R., 313n. Warren, J., 293-294.
Spencer, H., 361-. Washington, Gen. G., 292-292.
Spengler, 92. Weber, M., 405-406.
Spinoza, B., 362, 397. Weizsiicker, C. F. von, 14n.
Stambaugh, J., 132. Weinberg, S., 6, 68, 77n, 78n.
Statman, D., 374n. Weininger, 0., 92.
Stevens, W., 239, 249n, 250n. Weissman, D., 333n.
Stein, G., 283. Wellmer, A., 25.
Steiner, G., 392n. Wernham, W., 373n.
Stoss, V., 306. West, B., 288-.
Stravinsky, I., 280. Wheeler, H., 440n.
Stuhr, J. J., 125n. Wheeler, J. A., 35.
Sweeney, J. J., 286, 286n. White, J., 238n.
Swift, J., 68. White, M., 125n.
Swinburne, R., 383. Whitehead, A. N., 196, 322n, 332, 383,
Synge, J., I, 445. 403.
Syrianus, 175n, 176n. Wians, W., 164, 175n.
Wigner, E., xi, 31-,445,447.
Taminiaux, J., 231. Wilczek, F., 32, 40n.
Tarski, A., 181. Wilde, 0., 425.
Taubes, J., 267. Wilkes, K. V., 313n.
Tauler, J., 348. Williams, B., 374n
Taylor, C., 70, 126n, 405. Willis, E., 68, 78n.
Thales, 153. Wilson, E. 0., 378, 384n.
Theodote, 307. Windelband, W., 128.
Thornton, W., 294. Wittgenstein, L., 8, 20-21, 29, 59, 79,
Tolstoi, L., 92. 83-, 125n,284,286n,311,32ln,385,
Toulmin, S., 16n, 19, 94n, 130, 378, 386n, 388n.
443. Woolf, V., 280.
Trakl, G., 278n, 356. Wright, F. L., 303.
Trumbull, J., 231, 287-. Wright, S., 369.
Turing, A., 73. Wright, G. H. von, 93n.
Turner, F., 239.
Xenocrates, 439n.
Uexkuell, J. von, 408. Xenophon, 307.
Valery, P., 231,252-254. Youngerman, J., 300.

Van Gogh, V., 39, 231, 233-, 247-,
258, 265-, 280, 282, 318, 338, XX 350, Zajicek, G., 18n.
393-,446-,448,450-. Ziman, J., 6, 15n, 23, 215n, 217n.
Van Gogh, T., 451. Zimmerman, J., 95n.
Varela, F., & E. Thompson, & E.
Rosch, 202n, 322n.
Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science
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34. M.D. Grmek, R.S. Cohen and G. Cimino (eds.): On Scientific Discovery. The 1977 Brice
Lectures. 1981 ISBN 90-277-1122-4; Pb 90-277-1123-2
35. S. Amsterdamski: Between Experience and Metaphysics. Philosophical Problems of the Evol-
ution of Science. Translated from Polish. [Synthese Library 77] 1975
ISBN 90-277-0568-2; Pb 90-277-0580-1
36. M. Markovic and G. Petrovic (eds.): Praxis. Yugoslav Essays in the Philosophy and Method-
ology of the Social Sciences. [Synthese Library 134] 1979
ISBN 90-277-0727-8; Pb 90-277-0968-8
37. H. von Helmholtz: Epistemological Writings. The Paul Hertz I Moritz Schlick Centenary
Edition of 1921. Translated from German by M.F. Lowe. Edited with an Introduction and
Bibliography by R.S. Cohen andY. Elkana. [Synthese Library 79] 1977
ISBN 90-277-0290-X; Pb 90-277-0582-8
38. R.M. Martin: Pragmatics, Truth and Language. 1979
ISBN 90-277-0992-0; Pb 90-277-0993-9
39. R.S. Cohen, P.K. Feyerabend and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos.
40. Not published.
41. Not published.
42. H.R. Maturana and F.J. Varela: Autopoiesis and Cognition. The Realization of the Living. With
a Preface to "Autopoiesis' by S. Beer. 1980 ISBN 90-277-1015-5; Pb 90-277-1016-3
43. A. Kasher (ed.): Language in Focus: Foundations, Methods and Systems. Essays in Memory
of Yehoshua Bar-Hillel. [Synthese Library 89] 1976
ISBN 90-277-0644-1; Pb 90-277-0645-X
44. T.D. Thao: Investigations into the Origin of Language and Consciousness. 1984
ISBN 90-277-0827-4
45. F.G.-I. Nagasaka (ed.): Japanese Studies in the Philosophy of Science. 1997
ISBN 0-7923-4781-1
46. P.L. Kapitza: Experiment, Theory, Practice. Articles and Addresses. Edited by R.S. Cohen.
1980 ISBN 90-277-1061-9; Pb 90-277-1062-7
47. M.L. Dalla Chiara (ed.): Italian Studies in the Philosophy of Science. 1981
ISBN 90-277-0735-9; Pb 90-277-1073-2
48. M.W. Wartofsky: Models. Representation and the Scientific Understanding. [Synthese Library
129] 1979 ISBN 90-277-0736-7; Pb 90-277-0947-5
49. T.D. Thao: Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism. Edited by R.S. Cohen. 1986
ISBN 90-277-0737-5
50. Y. Fried and J. Agassi: Paranoia. A Study in Diagnosis. [Synthese Library 102] 1976
ISBN 90-277-0704-9; Pb 90-277-0705-7
51. K.H. Wolff: Surrender and Cath. Experience and Inquiry Today. [Synthese Library 105] 1976
ISBN 90-277-0758-8; Pb 90-277-0765-0
52. K. Kosik: Dialectics of the Concrete. A Study on Problems of Man and World. 1976
ISBN 90-277-0761-8; Pb 90-277-0764-2
53. N. Goodman: The Structure ofAppearance. [Synthese Library 107] 1977
ISBN 90-277-0773-1; Pb 90-277-0774-X
54. H.A. Simon: Models of Discovery and Other Topics in the Methods of Science. [Synthese
Library 114] 1977 ISBN 90-277-0812-6; Pb 90-277-0858-4
55. M. Lazerowitz: The Language of Philosophy. Freud and Wittgenstein. [Synthese Library 117]
1977 ISBN 90-277-0826-6; Pb 90-277-0862-2
56. T. Nickles (ed.): Scientific Discovery, Lagic, and Rationality. 1980
ISBN 90-277-1069-4; Pb 90-277-1070-8
57. J. Margolis: Persons and Mind. The Prospects ofNonreductive Materialism. [Synthese Library
121] 1978 ISBN 90-277-0854-1; Pb 90-277-0863-0
58. G. Radnitzky and G. Andersson (eds.): Progress and Rationality in Science. [Synthese Library
125] 1978 ISBN 90-277-0921-1; Pb 90-277-0922-X
59. G. Radnitzky and G. Andersson (eds.): The Structure and Development of Science. [Synthese
Library 136] 1979 ISBN90-277-0994-7; Pb90-277-0995-5
60. T. Nickles (ed.): Scientific Discovery. Case Studies. 1980
ISBN 90-277 -1092-9; Pb 90-277-1093-7
61. M.A. Finocchiaro: Galileo and the Art of Reasoning. Rhetorical Foundation of Logic and
Scientific Method. 1980 ISBN 90-277-1094-5; Pb 90-277-1095-3
62. W.A. Wallace: Prelude to Galileo. Essays on Medieval and 16th-Century Sources of Galileo's
Thought. 1981 ISBN 90-277-1215-8; Pb 90-277-1216-6
63. F. Rapp: Analytical Philosophy of Technology. Translated from German. 1981
ISBN 90-277-1221-2; Pb 90-277-1222-0
64. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Hegel and the Sciences. 1984 ISBN 90-277-0726-X
65. J. Agassi: Science and Society. Studies in the Sociology of Science. 1981
ISBN 90-277-1244-1; Pb 90-277-1245-X
66. L. Tondl: Problems of Semantics. A Contribution to the Analysis of the Language of Science.
Translated from Czech. 1981 ISBN 90-277-0148-2; Pb 90-277-0316-7
67. J. Agassi and R.S. Cohen (eds. ): Scientific Philosophy Today. Essays in Honor of Mario Bunge.
1982 ISBN 90-277-1262-X; Pb 90-277-1263-8
68. W. Krajewski (ed.): Polish Essays in the Philosophy of the Natural Sciences. Translated from
Polish and edited by R.S. Cohen and C.R. Fawcett. 1982
ISBN 90-277-1286-7; Pb 90-277-1287-5
69. J.H. Fetzer: Scientific Knowledge. Causation, Explanation and Corroboration. 1981
ISBN 90-277-1335-9; Pb 90-277-1336-7
70. S. Grossberg: Studies ofMind and Brain. Neural Principles of Learning, Perception, Develop-
ment, Cognition, and Motor Control. 1982 ISBN 90-277-1359-6; Pb 90-277-1360-X
71. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Epistemology, Methodology, and the Social Sciences.
1983. ISBN 90-277-1454-1
72. K. Berka: Measurement. Its Concepts, Theories and Problems. Translated from Czech. 1983
ISBN 90-277-1416-9
73. G.L. Pandit: The Structure and Growth of Scientific Knowledge. A Study in the Methodology
of Epistemic Appraisal. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1434-7
74. A.A. Zinov'ev: Logical Physics. Translated from Russian. Edited by R.S. Cohen. 1983
[see also Volume 9] ISBN 90-277-0734-0
75. G-G. Granger: Formal Thought and the Sciences of Man. Translated from French. With and
Introduction by A. Rosenberg. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1524-6
76. R.S. Cohen and L. Laudan (eds.): Physics, Philosophy and Psychoanalysis. Essays in Honor
of Adolf Griinbaum. 1983 ISBN 90-277-1533-5
77. G. Biihme, W. van den Daele, R. Hohlfeld, W. Krohn and W. Schafer: Finalization in Science.
The Social Orientation of Scientific Progress. Translated from German. Edited by W. Schafer.
1983 ISBN 90-277-1549-1
78. D. Shapere: Reason and the Search for Knowledge. Investigations in the Philosophy of Science.
1984 ISBN 90-277-1551-3; Pb 90-277-1641-2
79. G. Andersson (ed.): Rationality in Science and Politics. Translated from German. 1984
ISBN 90-277-1575-0; Pb 90-277-1953-5
80. P.T. Durbin and F. Rapp (eds.): Philosophy and Technology. [Also Philosophy and Technology
Series, Vol. 1] 1983 ISBN 90-277-1576-9
81. M. Markovic: Dialectical Theory of Meaning. Translated from Serbo-Croat. 1984
ISBN 90-277-1596-3
82. R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Physical Sciences and History of Physics. 1984.
ISBN 90-277-1615-3
83. E. Meyerson: The Relativistic Deduction. Epistemological Implications of the Theory of
Relativity. Translated from French. With a Review by Albert Einstein and an Introduction
by Milic Capek. 1985 ISBN 90-277-1699-4
84. R.S. Cohen and M. W. Wartofsky (eds.): Methodology, Metaphysics and the History of Science.
In Memory of Benjamin Nelson. 1984 ISBN 90-277-1711-7
85. G. Tamas: The Logic of Categories. Translated from Hungarian. Edited by R.S. Cohen. 1986
ISBN 90-277-1742-7
86. S.L. de C. Fernandes: Foundations ofObjective Knowledge. The Relations of Popper's Theory
of Knowledge to That of Kant. 1985 ISBN 90-277-1809-1
87. R.S. Cohen and T. Schnelle (eds.): Cognition and Fact. Materials on Ludwik Fleck. 1986
ISBN 90-277-1902-0
88. G. Freudenthal: Atom and Individual in the Age ofNewton. On the Genesis of the Mechanistic
World View. Translated from German. 1986 ISBN 90-277-1905-5
89. A. Donagan, A.N. Perovich Jr and M. V. Wedin (eds.): Human Nature and Natural Knowledge.
Essays presented to Marjorie Grene on the Occasion of Her 75th Birthday. 1986
ISBN 90-277-1974-8
90. C. Mitcham and A. Running (eds.): Philosophy and Technology II. Information Technology
and Computers in Theory and Practice. [Also Philosophy and Technology Series, Vol. 2] 1986
ISBN 90-277-1975-6
91. M. Grene and D. Nails (eds.): Spinoza and the Sciences. 1986 ISBN 90-277-1976-4
92. S.P. Turner: The Search for a Methodology of Social Science. Durkheim, Weber, and the
19th-Century Problem of Cause, Probability, and Action. 1986. ISBN 90-277-2067-3
93. I.C. Jarvie: Thinking about Society. Theory and Practice. 1986 ISBN 90-277-2068-1
94. E. Ullmann-Margalit (ed.): The Kaleidoscope of Science. The Israel Colloquium: Studies in
History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science, Vol. 1. 1986
ISBN 90-277-2158-0; Pb 90-277-2159-9
95. E. Ullmann-Margalit (ed.): The Prism of Science. The Israel Colloquium: Studies in History,
Philosophy, and Sociology of Science, Vol. 2. 1986
ISBN 90-277-2160-2; Pb 90-277-2161-0
96. G. Markus: Language and Production. A Critique of the Paradigms. Translated from French.
1986 ISBN 90-277-2169-6
97. F. Amrine, F.J. Zucker and H. Wheeler (eds.): Goethe and the Sciences: A Reappraisal. 1987
ISBN 90-277-2265-X; Pb 90-277-2400-8
98. J.C. Pitt and M. Pera (eds.): Rational Changes in Science. Essays on Scientific Reasoning.
Translated from Italian. 1987 ISBN 90-277-2417-2
99. 0. Costa de Beauregard: Time, the Physical Magnitude. 1987 ISBN 90-277-2444-X
100. A. Shimony and D. Nails (eds.): Naturalistic Epistemology. A Symposium of 1\vo Decades.
1987 ISBN 90-277-2337-0
101. N. Rotenstreich: Time and Meaning in History. 1987 ISBN 90-277-2467-9
102. D.B. Zilberman: The Birth of Meaning in Hindu Thought. Edited by R.S. Cohen. 1988
ISBN 90-277-2497-0
103. T.F. Glick (ed.): The Comparative Reception of Relativity. 1987 ISBN 90-277-2498-9
104. Z. Harris, M. Gottfried, T. Ryckman, P. Mattick Jr, A. Daladier, T.N. Harris and S. Harris: The
Form of Information in Science. Analysis of an Immunology Sublanguage. With a Preface by
Hilary Putnam. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2516-0
105. F. Burwick (ed.): Approaches to Organic Form. Permutations in Science and Culture. 1987
ISBN 90-277-2541-1
106. M. Almasi: The Philosophy of Appearances. Translated from Hungarian. 1989
ISBN 90-277-2150-5
107. S. Hook, W.L. O'Neill and R. O'Toole (eds.): Philosophy, History and Social Action. Essays
in Honor of Lewis Feuer. With an Autobiographical Essay by L. Feuer. 1988
ISBN 90-277-2644-2
108. I. Hronszky, M. Feher and B. Dajka: Scientific Knowledge Socialized. Selected Proceedings of
the 5th Joint International Conference on the History and Philosophy of Science organized by
the IUHPS (Veszprem, Hungary, 1984). 1988 ISBN 90-277-2284-6
109. P. Tillers and E. D. Green (eds.): Probability and Inference in the Law of Evidence. The Uses
and Limits ofBayesianism. 1988 ISBN 90-277-2689-2
110. E. Ullmann-Margalit (ed.): Science in Reflection. The Israel Colloquium: Studies in History,
Philosophy, and Sociology of Science, Vol. 3. 1988
ISBN 90-277-2712-0; Pb 90-277-2713-9
111. K. Gavroglu, Y. Goudaroulis and P. Nicolacopoulos (eds.): Imre Lakatos and Theories of
Scientific Change. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2766-X
112. B. Glassner and J.D. Moreno (eds.): The Qualitative-Quantitative Distinction in the Social
Sciences. 1989 ISBN 90-277-2829-1
113. K. Arens: Structures of Knowing. Psychologies of the 19th Century. 1989
ISBN 0-7923-0009-2
114. A. Janik: Style, Politics and the Future of Philosophy. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0056-4
115. F. Amrine (ed.): Literature and Science as Modes of Expression. With an Introduction by S.
Weininger. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0133-1
116. J.R. Brown and J. Mittelstrass (eds.): An Intimate Relation. Studies in the History and Philo-
sophy of Science. Presented to Robert E. Butts on His 60th Birthday. 1989
ISBN 0-7923-0169-2
117. F. D' Agostino and I. C. Jarvie (eds.): Freedom and Rationality. Essays in Honor of John
Watkins. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0264-8
118. D. Zolo: Reflexive Epistemology. The Philosophical Legacy of Otto Neurath. 1989
ISBN 0-7923-0320-2
119. M. Kearn, B.S. Philips and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Georg Simmel and Contemporary Sociology.
1989 ISBN 0-7923-0407-1
120. T.H. Levere and W.R. Shea (eds.): Nature, Experiment and the Science. Essays on Galileo and
the Nature of Science. In Honour of Stillman Drake. 1989 ISBN 0-7923-0420-9
121. P. Nicolacopoulos (ed.): Greek Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science. 1990
ISBN 0-7923-0717-8
122. R. Cooke and D. Costantini (eds.): Statistics in Science. The Foundations of Statistical Methods
in Biology, Physics and Economics. 1990 ISBN 0-7923-0797-6
123. P. Duhem: The Origins of Statics. Translated from French by G.F. Leneaux, V.N. Vagliente
and G.H. Wagner. With an Introduction by S.L. Jaki. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-0898-0
124. H. Kamerlingh Onnes: Through Measurement to Knowledge. The Selected Papers, 1853-1926.
Edited and with an Introduction by K. Gavroglu andY. Goudaroulis. 1991
ISBN 0-7923-0825-5
125. M. Capek: The New Aspects of Time: Its Continuity and Novelties. Selected Papers in the
Philosophy of Science. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-0911-1
126. S. Unguru (ed.): Physics, Cosmology and Astronomy, 1300-1700. Tension and Accommoda-
tion. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1022-5
127. Z. Bechler: Newton's Physics on the Conceptual Structure of the Scientific Revolution. 1991
ISBN 0-7923-1054-3
128. E. Meyerson: Explanation in the Sciences. Translated from French by M-A. Siple and D.A.
Siple. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1129-9
129. A. I. Tauber (ed.): Organism and the Origins of Self 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1185-X
130. F.J. Varela and J-P. Dupuy (eds.): Understanding Origins. Contemporary Views on the Origin
of Life, Mind and Society. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1251-1
131. G.L. Pandit: Methodological Variance. Essays in Epistemological Ontology and the Method-
ology of Science. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1263-5
132. G. Munevar (ed.): Beyond Reason. Essays on the Philosophy of Paul Feyerabend. 1991
ISBN 0-7923-1272-4
133. T.E. Uebel (ed.): Rediscovering the Forgotten Vienna Circle. Austrian Studies on Otto Neurath
and the Vienna Circle. Partly translated from German. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1276-7
134. W.R. Woodward and R.S. Cohen (eds.): World Views and Scientific Discipline Formation.
Science Studies in the [former] German Democratic Republic. Partly translated from German
by W.R. Woodward. 1991 ISBN 0-7923-1286-4
135. P. Zambelli: The Speculum Astronomiae and Its Enigma. Astrology, Theology and Science in
Albertus Magnus and His Contemporaries. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1380-1
136. P. Petitjean, C. Jami and A.M. Moulin (eds.): Science and Empires. Historical Studies about
Scientific Development and European Expansion. ISBN 0-7923-1518-9
137. W.A. Wallace: Galileo's Logic of Discovery and Proof The Background, Content, and Use of
His Appropriated Treatises on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1577-4
138. W.A. Wallace: Galileo 's Logical Treatises. A Translation, with Notes and Commentary, of His
Appropriated Latin Questions on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1578-2
Set (137 + 138) ISBN 0-7923-1579-0
139. M.J. Nye, J.L. Richards and R.H. Stuewer (eds.): The Invention of Physical Science. Intersec-
tions of Mathematics, Theology and Natural Philosophy since the Seventeenth Century. Essays
in Honor of Erwin N. Hiebert. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1753-X
140. G. Corsi, M.L. dalla Chiara and G.C. Ghirardi (eds.): Bridging the Gap: Philosophy, Mathem-
atics and Physics. Lectures on the Foundations of Science. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1761-0
141. C.-H. Lin and D. Fu (eds.): Philosophy and Conceptual History of Science in Taiwan. 1992
ISBN 0-7923-1766-1
142. S. Sarkar (ed.): The Founders of Evolutionary Genetics. A Centenary Reappraisal. 1992
ISBN 0-7923-1777-7
143. J. Blackmore (ed.): Ernst Mach -A Deeper Look. Documents and New Perspectives. 1992
ISBN 0-7923-1853-6
144. P. Kroes and M. Bakker (eds. ): Technological Development and Science in the Industrial Age.
New Perspectives on the Science-Technology Relationship. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1898-6
145. S. Amsterdamski: Between History and Method. Disputes about the Rationality of Science.
1992 ISBN 0-7923-1941-9
146. E. Ullmann-Margalit (ed.): The Scientific Enterprise. The Bar-Hillel Colloquium: Studies in
History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science, Volume 4. 1992 ISBN 0-7923-1992-3
147. L. Embree (ed.): Metaarchaeology. Reflections by Archaeologists and Philosophers. 1992
ISBN 0-7923-2023-9
148. S. French and H. Kamminga (eds.): Correspondence, Invariance and Heuristics. Essays in
Honour of Heinz Post. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2085-9
149. M. Bunzl: The Context of Explanation. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2153-7
150. LB. Cohen (ed.): The Natural Sciences and the Social Sciences. Some Critical and Historical
Perspectives. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2223-1
151. K. Gavroglu, Y. Christianidis and E. Nicolaidis (eds.): Trends in the Historiography ofScience.
1994 ISBN 0-7923-2255-X
152. S. Poggi and M. Bossi (eds.): Romanticism in Science. Science in Europe, 1790-1840. 1994
ISBN 0-7923-2336-X
153. J. Faye and H.J. Folse (eds.): Niels Bohr and Contemporary Philosophy. 1994
ISBN 0-7923-2378-5
154. C. C. Gould and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Artifacts, Representations, and Social Practice. Essays for
Marx W. Wartofsky. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2481-1
155. R.E. Butts: Historical Pragmatics. Philosophical Essays. 1993 ISBN 0-7923-2498-6
156. R. Rashed: The Development ofArabic Mathematics: Between Arithmetic and Algebra. Trans-
lated from French by A.F.W. Armstrong. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2565-6
157. I. Szumilewicz-Lachman (ed.): Zygmunt Zawirski: His Life and Work. With Selected Writings
on Time,' Logic and the Methodology of Science. Translations by Feliks Lachman. Ed. by R.S.
Cohen, with the assistance of B. Bergo. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2566-4
158. S.N. Haq: Names, Natures and Things. The Alchemist Jabir ibn Hayylin and His Kitiib al-Ahjiir
(Book of Stones). 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2587-7
159. P. Plaass: Kant's Theory ofNatural Science. Translation, Analytic Introduction and Comment-
ary by Alfred E. and Maria G. Miller. 1994 ISBN 0-7923-2750-0
160. J. Misiek (ed.): The Problem of Rationality in Science and its Philosophy. On Popper vs.
Polanyi. The Polish Conferences 1988-89. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2925-2
161. I.C. Jarvie and N. Laor (eds.): Critical Rationalism, Metaphysics and Science. Essays for
Joseph Agassi, Volume I. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2960-0
162. I.C. Jarvie and N. Laor (eds.): Critical Rationalism, the Social Sciences and the Humanities.
Essays for Joseph Agassi, Volume II. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2961-9
Set (161-162) ISBN 0-7923-2962-7
163. K. Gavroglu, J. Stachel and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Physics, Philosophy, and the Scientific
Community. Essays in the Philosophy and History of the Natural Sciences and Mathematics.
In Honor of RobertS. Cohen. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2988-0
164. K. Gavroglu, J. Stachel and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Science, Politics and Social Practice.
Essays on Marxism and Science, Philosophy of Culture and the Social Sciences. In Honor of
Robert S. Cohen. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2989-9
165. K. Gavroglu, J. Stachel and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): Science, Mind and Art. Essays on Science
and the Humanistic Understanding in Art, Epistemology, Religion and Ethics. Essays in Honor
of RobertS. Cohen. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-2990-2
Set (163-165) ISBN 0-7923-2991-0
166. K.H. Wolff: Transformation in the Writing. A Case of Surrender-and-Catch. 1995
ISBN 0-7923-3178-8
167. A.J. Kox and D.M. Siegel (eds.): No Truth Except in the Details. Essays in Honor of Martin J.
Klein. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3195-8
168. J. Blackmore: Ludwig Boltzmann, His Later Life and Philosophy, 1900--1906. Book One: A
Documentary History. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3231-8
169. R.S. Cohen, R. Hilpinen and R. Qiu (eds.): Realism and Anti-Realism in the Philosophy of
Science. Beijing International Conference, 1992. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3233-4
170. I. Ku~uradi and R.S. Cohen (eds.): The Concept of Knowledge. The Ankara Seminar. 1995
ISBN 0-7923-3241-5
171. M.A. Grodin (ed.): Meta Medical Ethics: The Philosophical Foundations of Bioethics. 1995
ISBN 0-7923-3344-6
172. S. Ramirez and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Mexican Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science.
1995 ISBN 0-7923-3462-0
173. C. Dilworth: The Metaphysics of Science. An Account of Modem Science in Terms of Prin-
ciples, Laws and Theories. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3693-3
174. J. Blackmore: Ludwig Boltzmann, His Later Life and Philosophy, 1900-1906 Book Two: The
Philosopher. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3464-7
175. P. Damerow: Abstraction and Representation. Essays on the Cultural Evolution of Thinking.
1996 ISBN 0-7923-3816-2
176. M.S. Macrakis: Scarcity's Ways: The Origins of Capital. A Critical Essay on Thermodynamics,
Statistical Mechanics and Economics. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4760-9
177. M. Marion and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Quebec Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Part I: Logic,
Mathematics, Physics and History of Science. Essays in Honor ofHugues Leblanc. 1995
ISBN 0-7923-3559-7
178. M. Marion and R.S. Cohen (eds. ): Quebec Studies in the Philosophy ofScience. Part II: Biology,
Psychology, Cognitive Science and Economics. Essays in Honor of Hugues Leblanc. 1996
ISBN 0-7923-3560-0
Set (177-178) ISBN 0-7923-3561-9
179. Fan Dainian and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Chinese Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science
and Technology. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3463-9
180. P. Forman and J.M. Sanchez-Ron (eds.): National Military Establishments and the Advance-
ment of Science and Technology. Studies in 20th Century History. 1996
ISBN 0-7923-3541-4
181. E.J. Post: Quantum Reprogramming. Ensembles and Single Systems: A Two-Tier Approach
to Quantum Mechanics. 1995 ISBN 0-7923-3565-1
182. A.I. Tauber (ed.): The Elusive Synthesis: Aesthetics and Science. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-3904-5
183. S. Sarkar (ed. ): The Philosophy and History of Molecular Biology: New Perspectives. 1996
ISBN 0-7923-3947-9
184. J.T. Cushing, A. Fine and S. Goldstein (eds.): Bohmian Mechanics and Quantum Theory: An
Appraisal. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-4028-0
185. K. Michalski: Logic and Time. An Essay on Husserl's Theory of Meaning. 1996
ISBN 0-7923-4082-5
186. G. Munevar (ed.): Spanish Studies in the Philosophy of Science. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-4147-3
187. G. Schubring (ed.): Hermann Giinther Graflmann (1809-1877): Visionary Mathematician,
Scientist and Neohumanist Scholar. Papers from a Sesquicentennial Conference. 1996
ISBN 0-7923-4261-5
188. M. Bitbol: Schrodinger's Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-4266-6
189. J. Faye, U. Scheffler and M. Urchs (eds.): Perspectives on Time. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4330-1
190. K. Lehrer and J.C. Marek (eds.): Austrian Philosophy Past and Present. Essays in Honor of
Rudolf Haller. 1996 ISBN 0-7923-4347-6
191. J.L. Lagrange: Analytical Mechanics. Translated and edited by Auguste Boissonade and Victor
N. Vagliente. Translated from the Mecanique Analytique, novelle edition of 1811. 1997
ISBN 0-7923-4349-2
192. D. Ginev and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Issues and Images in the Philosophy of Science. Scientific
and Philosophical Essays in Honour of Azarya Polikarov. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4444-8
193. R.S. Cohen, M. Home and J. Stachel (eds.): Experimental Metaphysics. Quantum Mechanical
Studies for Abner Shimony, Volume One. 1997 ISBN 0-7923-4452-9
194. R.S. Cohen, M. Home and J. Stachel (eds.): Potentiality, Entanglement and Passion-at-a-
Distance. Quantum Mechanical Studies for Abner Shimony, Volume Two. 1997
ISBN 0-7923-4453-7; Set 0-7923-4454-5
195. R.S. Cohen and A.I. Tauber (eds.): Philosophies of Nature: The Human Dimension. 1997
ISBN 0-7923-4579-7
196. M. Otte and M. Panza (eds.): Analysis and Synthesis in Mathematics. History and Philosophy.
1997 ISBN 0-7923-4570-3
197. A. Denkel: The Natural Background of Meaning. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5331-5
198. D. Baird, R.I. G. Hughes and A. Nordmann (eds.): Heinrich Hertz: Classical Physicist, Modem
Philosopher. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-4653-X
199. A. Franklin: Can That be Right? Essays on Experiment, Evidence, and Science. 1999
ISBN 0-7923-5464-8
200. D. Raven, W. Krohn and R.S. Cohen (eds.): The Social Origins of Modem Science. 2000
ISBN 0-7923-6457-0
201. Reserved
202. Reserved
203. B. Babich and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory.
Nietzsche and the Sciences I. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5742-6
204. B. Babich and R.S. Cohen (eds.): Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science. Nietz-
sche and the Science II. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5743-4
205. R. Hooykaas: Fact, Faith and Fiction in the Development of Science. The Gifford Lectures
given in the University of St Andrews 1976. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5774-4
206. M. Feher, 0. Kiss and L. Ropolyi (eds. ): Hermeneutics and Science. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5798-1
207. R.M. MacLeod (ed.): Science and the Pacific War. Science and Survival in the Pacific, 1939-
1945. 1999 ISBN0-7923-5851-1
208. I. Hanzel: The Concept of Scientific Law in the Philosophy of Science and Epistemology. A
Study of Theoretical Reason. 1999 ISBN 0-7923-5852-X
209. G. Helm; R.J. Deltete (ed./transl.): The Historical Development of Energetics. 1999
ISBN 0-7923-5874-0
210. A. Orenstein and P. Kotatko (eds.): Knowledge, Language and Logic. Questions for Quine.
1999 ISBN 0-7923-5986-0
211. R.S. Cohen and H. Levine (eds.): Maimonides and the Sciences. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6053-2
212. H. Gourko, D.I. Williamson and A.I. Tauber (eds.): The Evolutionary Biology Papers of Elie
Metchnikoff. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6067-2
213. S. D' Agostino: A History of the Ideas of Theoretical Physics. Essays on the Nineteenth and
Twentieth Century Physics. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6094-X
214. S. Lelas: Science and Modernity. Toward An Integral Theory of Science. 2000
ISBN 0-7923-6303-5
215. E. Agazzi and M. Pauri (eds.): The Reality of the Unobservable. Observability, Unobservability
and Their Impact on the Issue of Scientific Realism. 2000 ISBN 0-7923-6311-6
216. P. Hoyningen-Huene and H. Sankey (eds.): Incommensurability and Related Matters. 2001
ISBN 0-7923-6989-0
217. A. Nieto-Galan: Colouring Textiles. A History of Natural Dyestuffs in Industrial Europe. 2001
ISBN 0-7923-7022-8
218. J. Blackmore, R. Itagaki and S. Tanaka (eds.): Ernst Mach's Vienna 1895-1930. Or Phenom-
enalism as Philosophy of Science. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-7122-4
219. R. Vihalemm (ed.): Estonian Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. 2001
ISBN 0-7923-7189-5
220. W. Lefevre (ed.): Between Leibniz. Newton, and Kant. Philosophy and Science in the Eighteenth
Century. 2001 ISBN 0-7923-7198-4
221. T.F. Glick, M.A. Puig-Samper and R. Ruiz (eds.): The Reception of Darwinism in the Iberian
World. Spain, Spanish America and Brazil. 2001 ISBN 1-4020-0082-0
222. U. Klein (ed.): Tools and Modes of Representation in the Laboratory Sciences. 2001
ISBN 1-4020-0100-2
223. P. Duhem: Mixture and Chemical Combination. And Related Essays. Edited and translated,
with an introduction, by Paul Needham. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0232-7
224. J.C. Boudri: What was Mechanical about Mechanics. The Concept of Force Betweem Meta-
physics and Mechanics from Newton to Lagrange. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0233-5
225. B.E. Babich (ed.): Hermeneutic Philosophy of Science, Van Gogh's Eyes, and God. Essays in
Honor of Patrick A. Heelan, S.J. 2002 ISBN 1-4020-0234-3
Also of interest:
R.S. Cohen and M.W. Wartofsky (eds.): A Portrait of Twenty-Five Years Boston Colloquia for the
Philosophy of Science, 1960-1985. 1985 ISBN Pb 90-277-1971-3
Previous volumes are still available.
KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS- DORDRECHT I BOSTON I LONDON

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HERMENEUTIC PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE,

VAN GOGH'S EYES, AND GOD

ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University

Editorial Advisory Board

THOMAS F. GLICK, Boston University

SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

ISBN 978-90-481-5926-0 ISBN 978-94-017-1767-0 (eBook)

Printed an acid-iree paper

All Rights Reserved

PREFACE I "Patrick Heelan" by JEAN LADRIERE & MARC JAGER xi

HERMENEUTICS AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

GOD: RELIGION AND SCIENCE

BIBLIOGRAPHY: PATRICK A. HEELAN 461

QUANTUM MECHANICS AND OBJECTIVITY: A STUDY OF THE

It has practically become commonplace to say that the development of quantum

SPACE-PERCEPTION AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE (1983)

- Translated by David B. Allison

Patrick Aidan Heelan as cox - far left, looking right.

THE FORTUNES OF INCOMMENSURABILITY

PATRICK A. HEELAN, S.J. -PHYSICIST, PRIEST, PHILOSOPHER

SCIENCE, ERROR, AND HERMENEUTICS

operates a massive backhoe on an urban construction site experiences or "lives" the

INCOMMENSURABILITY AND STYLIZED RESISTANCE

The positive achievement of the present volume redresses the conceptual

of the philosophy or sociology of science, etc., a charge of scientism is about as much

BETWEEN THOUGHTSTYLES AND PARADIGMS

We have noted the relevance of terminological incommensurabilities in the thinking

Fleck challenges the standard story of the triumphalist emergence of modem

ERROR AND SCIENTIFIC TRUTH

science Fleck established - leukergy) 66 other characteristic changes of those same

Fordham University/Georgetown University

The terminology of a horizonal analysis is classically phenomenological. It refers to "an analysis of

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979 [1935]).

Kritische Studienausgabe (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), IX, 503.

Hermeneutics and the Philosophy of Science

philosophy of science overcoming the impasses of analytic approaches. Crease makes

alternative representations of mechanics to clarify its conceptual problems and

cogmt1ve intuition. In The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental

THE HERMENEUTICS OF THE NATURAL SCIENCES

One of the most creative transitions in twentieth-century philosophy is explicitly

twentieth century, too, we may view Niels Bohr's idea of Complementarity as a

If we make a further move on, to consider the additional factors introduced by

University of Southern California

began an intensive study of continental philosophy, especially the works of Husserl,

Philosophical Society), wrote an article, "Heisenberg and Radical Theoretic Change,"

State University ofNew York at Stony Brook/Brookhaven National Laboratory

6 (1975): 113-136, and following: 136.

18 Ibid., x; also 3-4.

THE HERMENEUTIC CONTEXT OF CONSTITUTION

In this paper I concentrate on two distinctions introduced by Patrick A. Heelan. At

I. WEAK AND STRONG HERMENEUTICS OF SCIENCE

communicative openness of the idealized (formalized, standardized) languages of

2. THEORY-LADENNESS AND CULTURAL PRAXIS-LADENNESS

only to reintegrate the (allegedly monological) scientific research in the hermeneutic

3. OVERCOMING THE TRADITIONAL CONTEXT-DISTINCTION

production of various structural, catalytic, and regulatory proteins; decreased enzyme

transformations with respect to the scope of validity of the principle of relativity.

of these practices presuppose an irreducible intersubjectivity, "everyday Dasein" is to