In his lecture Was heißt Denken? (What Is Called Thinking?), delivered as part of his 1951-52 university lecture courses in Freiburg, Martin Heidegger uttered the (in)famous sentence, “Science does not think” (“Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht”). Heidegger himself, to be sure, acknowledges that this might strike as a “shocking statement” (“anstößiger Satz”), but immediately goes on, without any particular need to soften this ‘scandal,’ to clarify that “nonetheless science always and in its own fashion has to do with thinking.” Nonetheless, the statement that “science does not think” has disturbed many, both scientists and philosophers, among the latter especially those whom we colloquially call ‘analytic,’ and continues to do so even today. For them, Heidegger’s claim is, moreover, merely another ‘proof’ that its author was not only a philosopher ignorant of modern natural science, but a bad philosopher altogether, or at the very least an anti-scientific pseudo-philosopher. In his “In Praise of Intolerance to Charlatanism in Academia,” Mario Bunge, for whom Heidegger was, beyond any doubt, a “charlatan” who was “not content with writing nonsense and torturing the German language,” but also “heaped scorn on ‘mere science’,” gives a good summary of this contemptuous attitude. On another occasion, in an interview with El País in April 2008, Bunge calls Heidegger a “fraud who took advantage of the German academic tradition in which obscurity was regarded as profundity,” claiming that he “embraced irrationalism and attacked science, because the more stupid people are, the easier it is to manipulate them from on high.” In the same interview, he goes even further, saying that “Heidegger’s sentences […] are the sentences of a schizophrenic,” and that their content is nothing other than “schizophasia—a typical disorder in an advanced schizophrenic.”
But let us, for the moment, set aside the ad hominem, the amateurish psychologizing, the mockery, the caricaturing, the labelling, and the other forms of discrediting that, unfortunately, still pass as legitimate in some quarters of academic discourse, in which the anecdote all too often performs the task that, in a somewhat more honest academic culture, argument ought to perform. For, in the end, everything comes down to this: the most common objections to Heidegger’s supposedly ‘irrational, uninformed attack’ on science sound convincing only if one first assumes precisely what remains to be demonstrated, namely, that for Heidegger ‘to think’ means the same thing as ‘to engage in scientific inquiry.’ Yet it is here that Heidegger’s claim, however ‘scandalous’ it may sound at first sight, is quite precise. For he does not claim that scientists do not think, nor that science is devoid of thinking, but rather that science as science cannot, by means of its own methods, thematize what is already presupposed within its method. Whoever fails to recognize this distinction will easily turn Heidegger’s claim into a convenient caricature, and then, complacently, present that caricature as evidence against its author. At best, this will amount to a retelling of a long-exhausted narrative. At worst, and this still seems all too common, it will amount to a rite of ‘initiation’ in which some elder ‘magnanimously’ informs a young philosopher whom not to read, what to think about him, and, perhaps most importantly, what there is no longer any need to think about at all.
It is almost ironic that Heidegger himself, already in the same lecture, offers an answer to the question of what he actually meant when he said that “science does not think.” His lecture course, after all, is entitled What Is Called Thinking?, and, as such, is devoted in its entirety to this very problem. The key term in Heidegger’s claim is Denken, thinking, and it is this term, rather than some superficial conception of what scientists do, that must be taken seriously if we are to understand how science “does not think” and yet “always and in its own fashion has to do with thinking.” Heidegger himself is quite clear on this point: “Science does not think in the way thinkers think” (“Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht im Sinne des Denkens der Denker”). And not only that. He maintains that the “most thought-provoking” (“das Bedenklichste”) thing in our “thought-provoking time” (“in unserer bedenklichen Zeit”) is that “we are still not thinking.” It is clear, then, that the whole problem comes back to the question of what thinking (Denken) in the manner of a thinker (Denker) means for Heidegger. The question is not merely an introduction to some later answer, but already in itself determines the path along which thinking must move, and Heidegger formulates this quite directly: “To answer the question ‘What is called thinking?’ is itself always to keep asking, so as to remain underway” (“Das Antworten auf die Frage ‘Was heißt Denken?’ ist selbst immer nur das Fragen als ein Unterwegsbleiben”). The answer itself, therefore, is not the end of the question, but its continuation. Put differently, for Heidegger, thinking does not arrive at some final point at which it could set aside its question as a problem that has been solved. It builds its ‘way’ precisely by ‘remaining on the way.’
But in what sense does such an understanding of the art of thinking as the art of permanent questioning (Fragen) exclude scientific thinking? Isn’t it the case that science, by definition, constantly calls its hypotheses, theories, research programs, and even entire paradigms into question, and from time to time rejects them and replaces them with others? Isn’t the long and rich history of science the best evidence that scientific inquiry itself embodies a form of thinking in the Heideggerian sense outlined above? The answer, however, is no—if we understand Heidegger’s phrase ‘thinking in the manner of thinkers’ as referring specifically to philosophical thinking and, consequently, to philosophical questioning. Philosophy, as its no less rich and even longer history testifies, does not possess a single method guaranteed in advance, an algorithm that it could simply take up, apply to its questions, and thereby produce answers: the very method of philosophy itself is one of its problems. Moreover, philosophy does not begin only once we are already certain how one ought to ask, what constitutes a legitimate question, and by what procedure we shall arrive at an answer. Philosophical thinking simply must be prepared to question its very manner of questioning as well. Every act of philosophical thinking is thus at the same time an opportunity for philosophy to think critically about itself, to re-examine its fundamental conceptual, substantive, and methodological points of departure, including those which seem ‘self-evident’ or are regarded as ‘accepted.’ To philosophically question, then, does not mean merely to doubt a particular answer. It means to call into question even that from which it sets out in search of an answer. Philosophical thinking that exempts itself from such questioning, although it can be highly learned and productive, has already ceased to be philosophical thinking. That, for Heidegger, is thinking in the manner of a thinker, no more, no less. And it is in exactly this sense that Heidegger thought that “science does not think in the way thinkers think.”
Namely, in its ‘normal’ mode of functioning, to put it in Kuhnian terms, science begins from a determinate field and set of assumptions of inquiry, whether it calls these nature, body, space, time, causality, induction, verification, falsification, or something else, and from a determinate method for investigating it, the one we customarily call the scientific method, which is constituted, or at least ought to be constituted, in such a way as to continually test, refute, and correct its claims. What, however, does not become the object of scientific questioning is neither the scientific method itself nor what must already be presupposed for scientific methodology to function at all. As Heidegger himself put it in his 1953 lecture Wissenschaft und Besinnung (Science and Reflection), taking physics as the most exact of the modern natural sciences, “physics as physics can make no assertions about physics; all the assertions of physics speak after the manner of physics.” Thus, for example, physics can and does measure time and calculate the spatial trajectories of bodies with extraordinary precision, and even radically transform the meanings of these concepts within its theoretical frameworks, but physics alone, within its domain of what Heidegger calls calculative thinking (rechnendes Denken), cannot decide what space and time are ontologically. It also can and does work with the assumption of causality as a necessity of physical description and prediction, but physics alone cannot decide whether causality is something that exists in nature, a necessary connection between events, or merely our way of organizing experience. Not to mention that, even though mathematics is the ‘bread and butter’ of modern physics, physics alone cannot (and did not) answer why mathematics is an appropriate language for describing nature at all, as this astonishment was vividly expressed by Eugene Wigner in his famous essay, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences.” This is not to say that science is deficient or that scientists are doing something badly; just a reminder that when science steps out of ‘shut up and calculate’ mode, its mode of thinking is necessarily philosophical.
Some of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century, Heidegger’s younger contemporaries such as Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, understood very well what Heidegger meant without the slightest hint of indignation. Both knew Heidegger well and tried to understand his philosophy through conversations and correspondence with him, while Heidegger, for his part, had the opportunity to discuss the fundamental questions of modern science with these great physicists firsthand, rather than through some ‘a priori’ philosophical conception of what science supposedly is. Their assessments therefore carry particular weight. For example, von Weizsäcker in his The Unity of Nature regards Heidegger’s claim that ‘science does not think’—a claim which he admits “can hardly be quoted to any scientist without provoking anger”—as literally true, but only if we understand ‘to think’ in the strict Heideggerian sense, as the capacity “to put oneself in question once more,” something, as von Weizsäcker adds, “precisely [which] science will not do in its normal practice.” Science, then, is not without thought. On the contrary, it is continually engaged in exceedingly demanding forms of thinking. Yet what is not characteristic of it is precisely that kind of thinking in which the question turns back upon the one who asks it, upon the method by which it is asked, and upon the presuppositions from which the question has become possible. Heidegger’s claim can therefore in no way be understood as an insult to science, still less as an insult to scientists, but rather as a claim concerning the limits of the scientific method.
Finally, Heidegger himself, in a conversation with Richard Wisser in September 1969, recorded for a television program on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, clarifies his 1950s claim along these lines:
“The statement ‘science does not think,’ which caused a great stir when I made it in one of my lectures in Freiburg, means that science does not move within the dimension of philosophy. It is, however, dependent upon this dimension, without being aware of it. For example, physics moves within space, time, and motion. Science, as science, cannot decide what motion is, what space is, and what time is. Science, then, does not think. In this sense, it cannot think by means of its own methods. For example, I cannot say what physics is by using the methods of physics. I can reflect upon what physics is only in the mode of philosophical questioning. The statement ‘science does not think’ is in no way a reproach, but simply a designation of the inner structure of science. What is essential to it is that, on the one hand, science is dependent upon that about which philosophy thinks, while, on the other hand, it forgets philosophy and fails to notice that which ought to be thought.”
If this still sounds like some peculiar Heideggerian whim, let us imagine for a moment that the same insight had been expressed by someone else, perhaps someone from that philosophical (‘analytic’) tradition which so readily takes Heidegger’s statement as evidence of his supposed ignorance of, or even malicious hostility towards, science. Perhaps, for example, Daniel Dennett, one of the most prominent representatives of that tradition, whose claim that “there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination” is viewed far more favorably within that very same tradition. If we set aside the difference in language, philosophical terminology, and, of course, the reputation of the authors, it is difficult not to notice how much the two claims have in common, namely, the view that science as science does not normally question that which enables it to think. So, really, what’s the problem with Heidegger’s “science does not think”?
Boris Kožnjak
Boris Kožnjak is Senior Research Fellow in the Department of the History of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy in Zagreb, Croatia. Holding a degree in physics and a PhD in philosophy, he primarily focuses on the history and philosophy of science, while also maintaining a keen interest in the sociology and psychology of scientific and philosophical knowledge.
