How Heidegger and Habermas Viewed Science Through Heisenberg

Cont Philos Rev (2010) 42:483–509
DOI 10.1007/s11007-009-9124-y
Science as instrumental reason: Heidegger, Habermas,

Heisenberg
Cathryn Carson
Published online: 5 December 2009

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009
Abstract In modern continental thought, natural science is widely portrayed as an

exclusively instrumental mode of reason. The breadth of this consensus has partly
preempted the question of how it came to persuade. The process of persuasion, as it
played out in Germany, can be explored by reconstructing the intellectual exchanges
among three twentieth-century theorists of science, Heidegger, Habermas, and
Werner Heisenberg. Taking an iconic Heisenberg as a kind of limiting case of ‘‘the
scientist,’’ Heidegger and Habermas each found themselves driven to place new
constraints on their previously more capacious assessments of science, especially its
capacity to reflect on its method. Tracing how that happened, through archival and
historical contextualization and close readings of their texts, lets us make visible
Heidegger and Habermas’s intellectual affinities and argumentative parallels, which
derived not only from their shared grounding in earlier reactions against positivism,
but also from confrontation with contemporary events. The latter included, for
Heidegger, the rise of a technically powerful science exemplified by nuclear
physics, and for Habermas, post-World War II controversies over science, tech-
nology, and their socially critical possibilities.
Keywords Martin Heidegger Jürgen Habermas Werner Heisenberg

Instrumental rationality Science Positivism
1 Introduction
Whatever their other disputes, modern German intellectuals have rarely disagreed
about science. Their consensus has been that modern science is, in a word,
C. Carson (&)
Department of History, University of California, 3229 Dwinelle Hall,
Berkeley, CA 94720-2550, USA
e-mail: clcarson@berkeley.edu
123
484 C. Carson
instrumental at its core. That character is supposed to be anchored in its nomological

orientation, its experimental method, and its unreflexive constitution of nature as
object. Then lawful regularity obtained through scientific investigation opens the
door to prediction—and thus to control. In this view, instrumentality is simply in the
nature of science: the ‘‘I’’ of its investigator, the subject facing its objects, is
intrinsically in search of mastery over its world. And this has been true of the
venture, so the world-historical account runs, since the seventeenth century’s twin
revolutions in natural science and Cartesian philosophy, out of which the modern
age was born. Its character was reinforced by Enlightenment desires for dominion
over nature and by industrial-age scientism and positivism. And science is
intrinsically limited. Self-conscious reflection is ruled out by its own canons.
Instrumentality exhausts its essence, and there is nothing substantively more to it
than that.
It bears remembering, all the same, that the instrumental view has its own history.
At one time, quite different views had sometimes found a foothold instead. Rather
than a project defined only by self-asserting domination, science once also served as
a prototype of intersubjectivity in dialogic encounter with other inquirers guided by
reason. It was imagined to open up crucial realms of human freedom in a line
leading from the Enlightenment philosophes to the mid-twentieth-century left. Even
in Germany, it appeared as a cultural force in the tradition of the bios theoretikos
and notions of Bildung, or self-cultivation. Older understandings of science saw it as
liberating and liberal; and if they had never been universal, they had been powerful
still. Exactly because the instrumental conception of science has so dominated
certain strands of recent discussion, it cries out to be taken as a historical problem,
not a self-evident truth.
In particular, a history of the accounting of scientific reason needs to take
seriously its engagements with practicing scientists and their science. Instrumen-
talist arguments about the nature of science took their cues from Nietzsche, Weber,
Dilthey, and Husserl, observers of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
when natural scientists, following Hermann von Helmholtz, were not just
proclaiming their project’s significance for progress and Bildung, but proudly
announcing that knowledge is power, Wissen ist Macht.1 The intellectual struggle
against positivism, understood as the unthinking elevation of natural science’s
cognitive authority, became a rallying cry for an otherwise diverse group of
thinkers. These were no merely abstract debates. Ongoing battles for disciplinary
authority powerfully shaped reactions to science’s claims. By the mid-twentieth-
century, ostensibly philosophical tracts could be found peppered with references to
atomic bombs, cyclotrons, satellites, cybernetics, science policy, and education
reform, invoking scientists by name.
This paper focuses on Heidegger and Habermas, in the mid-twentieth century
two of the instrumental view’s most influential spokesmen. With greater temporal
attentiveness than the philosophical literature usually musters, it seeks to chart how
their arguments about science developed in detail. The paper explores where their
understandings were grounded in an era’s singularity and concreteness, and where
1
Helmholtz (1903, p. 180).
123
Science as instrumental reason 485
they spun off into universal, exceptionless assertions about the scientific project
itself. To this end it displays how both figures were in dialogue, open or hidden,
with the paper’s third man. Werner Heisenberg enters the story as a prominent
scientist with a reflective bent, with whom both Heidegger and Habermas found
themselves confronted in turn. For Heidegger and Habermas, this paper argues,
Heisenberg took on a role that was almost iconic—in Heidegger’s case, through
direct confrontation; in Habermas’s, in more mediated form. Heisenberg came to
figure for his philosophical colleagues first as a final hope for deviation from the
narrative of instrumentality, and then, as he changed and they changed, in a
curiously parallel manner, as the modern age’s unthinking embodiment instead. In a
fashion sometimes deliberate and sometimes strangely unconscious, he embodied
the possibilities and limits of a post-positivist, post-objectivist, post-classical
physics.2 By directing attention to matters epistemic (the subject-object relation and
the possibility of reflection) and societal (scientists’ growing technical and political
power), Heisenberg spotlights Heidegger and Habermas’s seeming convergence—a
convergence that, absent an appreciation of these historical conjunctions, may seem
philosophically dubious, even absurd.
2 First encounters
Heidegger’s theological and philosophical training are well known. Less often
discussed is his early interest, at the time of his famous vocational crisis, in logic,
mathematics and science.3 Natural science was not central to the young Heidegger’s
thinking; it would not take that place until the later 1930s. Yet the early works show
signs of attention, and many positions and strategies that later characterized his full-
blown concern made their appearance at the start of his thought.4
In a particularly telling instance, Heidegger’s habilitation address of 1915, which
dealt with concepts of temporality in historical scholarship, took up contemporary
neo-Kantian debates about methodological differences between the natural and the
human or cultural sciences.5 The starting point for so many twentieth-century
intellectuals, the conception of natural science articulated in this debate over
method, was both an answer to positivism and a thorough-going concession to it.
Positivism—the term will come up again—was the claim that direct sense
experience was the unique origin of all reliable knowledge. Science’s rock-solid
construction was built on stand-alone objectivity without interpretative intervention.
Positive knowledge had a self-confident automaticity to it, grounded in scientific
method. It allowed the empirical natural sciences to deliver lawful regularities about
phenomena; and asking for more than that from knowledge was a mistake. The
2
For Heisenberg on his own terms see Carson (2010a forthcoming).
3
Ott (1988, pp. 69–70, 73–74, 86; Sheehan 1988).
4
The essays on Heidegger in Kockelmans and Kisiel (1970) have not been bettered. See also
Kockelmans (1985), Glazebrook (2000).
5
Heidegger (1978a). One picks up resonances here of Dilthey and, more proximately, Rickert and neo-
Kantian concerns. Cf. Heidegger (1988); Kisiel (1973).
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486 C. Carson
enormously diverse rubric of positivism was used to cover everything from careful
epistemological argumentation to simple-minded cheerleading for science, and it
generated a broad-ranging reaction among defenders of other methodologically
divergent branches of scholarship. In turn-of-the-century argumentation, positivism
was often identified with scientists such as the physicist and philosopher Ernst
Mach.6
In his habilitation address, in a move common in the philosophical debate of the
day, as a stand-in for natural science Heidegger considered physics. To articulate a
presumptive consensus on this science he selected two prominent theoretical
physicists of the early twentieth century. These were Max Planck and Albert
Einstein, among the originators of the challenges to nineteenth-century physics and
participants in their own disciplinary confrontation with Mach. And so beginning
from Planck, Heidegger defined the goal of physics as a unified dynamics
prescribing comprehensive equations of motions of masses in space and time. He
then used Einstein’s fixation on measurement to bring things to a point.7 Examining
special relativity a decade after its publication, Heidegger already felt confident that
Einstein’s operationalist treatment of time did not break with classical Galilean
notions of its measurability. Rather, it only confirmed them. Time was part of the
framework for the description of motion, and science’s concept of time centered
upon measurement in a positivist sense.
Out of physicists’ own post-positivist discussions Heidegger was drawing
conclusions about their way of grasping the world. At the same time, he was
articulating a world-historical continuity in their practice from its classical Galilean
origins to its most up-to-date form.8 And he was drawing from the thinking of two
practicing scientists, whose observations he put to work for his own ends. Now
practicing scientists typically had little interest in this kind of examination,
Heidegger noted, insofar as it contributed nothing useful in the sciences’ own terms.
But this itself was an interesting observation, Heidegger suggested, because of how
it defined the scientist’s legitimate task. It meant that such reflections, to quote him,
‘‘are significant for the researcher in a particular science if and only if he forgets
himself as such and—philosophizes.’’9
The interest in natural science would continue below the surface of Heidegger’s
thinking, though in the 1920s and early 1930s he put other issues first. While this
secondary preoccupation is sometimes noted, Heidegger scholarship has worked out
its implications only in part.10 Through his confrontation with neo-Kantianism and
6
Standard introductions are Schnädelbach (1984), Kolakowski (1968).
7
Planck’s and Einstein’s positions were in fact in tension. Heidegger cites both Planck’s (1910)
Columbia lectures, whose introduction reworks his famous challenge to Mach, and Einstein’s (1905)
relativity paper, which, by contrast, draws on Machian inspirations. While the treatment of Einstein is
unexceptionable, Heidegger partly bypasses Planck’s point that mechanics (space–time description of
masses in motion) must be put alongside electrodynamics in a broader dynamical scheme unified by
thermodynamics. On Planck and Einstein see Heilbron (1986), Holton (1988).
8
The motif of a grand trajectory from Galileo to the present served everyone from Cassirer to Husserl to
Koyré to Borkenau. See Carson (2010b forthcoming).
9
Heidegger (1978a, pp. 416–417).
10
Chevalley (1992).
123
Being and Time (1927), then into the lectures on metaphysics, Heidegger continued
to think through the nature of temporality and the origins of the theoretical attitude.
The constitution of science’s objects out of ordinary experience raised questions
about the broad venture of scholarship (Wissenschaft) of which natural science was
a part. Over these years Heidegger grew more determined to revisit the subject-
object relation and reconsider philosophy’s Cartesian step. He also made
increasingly pointed allusions to contemporary academia’s struggles for disciplinary
legitimation and power. His 1929 inaugural address in Freiburg, for instance, began
playing his ideas against the modern university’s fragmented special sciences,
which made their cases more and more in terms of application and use.11
In this context, it is not really surprising that the philosopher’s attention was
attracted to a rising star of natural science. When Heisenberg was appointed in 1927
to Leipzig’s chair of theoretical physics, he was celebrated as Germany’s youngest
full professor, age 25.12 The son of a professor of Byzantine philology, Heisenberg
came out of the German educated bourgeoisie and the youth movement deeply
invested in making science fit into cultural patterns of meaning. In the second half of
the 1920s he had helped lay the foundations of quantum mechanics and begun
drawing epistemological consequences. While his philosophical background was
conventional and his allegiances somewhat unstable—he took up the interpretative
problems of the new physics at a level of sophistication characteristic of informal
collegial discussion, not the philosophical seminar—he was interested enough in the
questions and familiar enough with the issues to speak to professional philosophers.
He chose to lay out the significance of his discipline using the vocabulary of
contemporary philosophical debate.
The deepest lesson Heisenberg drew in these years was a lesson on the
methodology of science. Modern physics, following its own internal dynamic, had
been forced to reflect on, and revise, its epistemic presumptions. The demand that
the world be lawful and predictable, the assumption that a law of causality
obtained—were these truly preconditions of science? Just as Einstein’s general
relativity had shown that Euclidean geometry was no Kantian apriori, determinacy
and causality were not requirements for building up a secure science. Rather, those
constraints could be cautiously loosened without undermining the scientific
enterprise as a whole.13 As Heisenberg put it in an essay of 1931, the law of
causality certainly ‘‘formed the basis for the grand attempt at an objective natural
science undertaken by physicists in the last century.’’14 But, objectivity itself had to
be rethought: this was the strongest claim he articulated out of quantum mechanics.
The older, classical physics had intended to mirror a world of material elements
in motion, unfolding their trajectories in space and time. But after quantum
mechanics, this was no longer possible. Space–time trajectories had no meaning
11
For example, Heidegger (1973, 1978a, b), though with attention to the late-1930s notes that overlay
the latter text; for the Freiburg inaugural lecture, Heidegger (1930).
12
Cassidy (1992; Heelan 1965).
13
(For example Heisenberg 1931). Heisenberg is most famous for uncertainty, but in his thinking that
notion was actually comparatively marginal.
14
Ibid., pp. 174–175.
123
488 C. Carson
without making observations; it was only in the measurement process that they were
objectified at all. More than that, at the quantum level, observation was ineliminably
shaped by the observer’s intent. If a physicist set up an apparatus to measure a
system’s wavelike behavior, this was what he would observe. If he went looking for
particles, that was what he would find. Only in observers’ ordinary-language
communication—here Heisenberg followed the lead of Niels Bohr—could such
complementary aspects be coordinated. Objectivity gave way to something like
objectifiability, a more limited basis. And objectifiability itself was stabilized in
language. It was secured by a communicative community’s intersubjective
exchange.15
In Heisenberg’s stress on measurement there was an element of operationalism.
In the context of the physicists’ own debate over positivism, he indeed went through
a brief positivist phase. But by the early 1930s, he had broken with that allegiance
and settled into a view he chose to express as a revision of classical German
idealism. ‘‘Exactly an ‘objective’ physics in [Kant’s] sense, i.e., a completely sharp
division of the world into subject and object, is no longer possible,’’ he proposed.16
In his thinking, the reproblematization of the familiar subject-object relation was
central. It had been brought to attention by quantum mechanics, but it was
potentially productive far beyond. For if physics could make do so successfully
without old-style objectivity, then what about other branches of science? Here
transcendental attentiveness, he suggested, had to be brought back into science,
making reflection part of the game.
By the time Heisenberg was making these claims, Heidegger had already begun
reading popular accounts of the new physics.17 Points of mutual interest were not far
to seek. In the small world of German academia, the two men were introduced via
Viktor von Weizsäcker, a founder of mind–body medicine, who was the uncle of
Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Heisenberg’s young student and philosophical
sounding board. In 1935, the physicist and the philosopher met in Heidegger’s
retreat in Todtnauberg.18 Thereafter Heisenberg became a point of reference, open
or covert, in Heidegger’s commentary on science.
3 Science and the modern age
How Heidegger’s allusions unfolded is now the question we need to pursue.19

Through the 1930s, Heidegger would increasingly mark his distance from the
contemporary venture of Wissenschaft. Whatever one makes of the impassioned
15
(Carson 2003).
16
Heisenberg (1931, p. 182). Heisenberg’s youthful positivism has often confused commentators, as
have his later Platonic and Aristotelian turns. If there is a common thread to this eclectic philosophy, it is
attention to the self-limitation of objective science.
17
Chevalley (1992, p. 348), citing Pascual Jordan and Max Born.
18
Von Weizsäcker (1949, 1977).
19
For a diligent but unfocused attempt to work out the connection, assuming that Heisenberg was a
Platonist and Heidegger simply right about science, see Hempel (1990). A more insightful, though
entirely textually based, discussion is Pöggeler (1993).
123
address of Freiburg’s new National Socialist rector, for instance, a crisis of this sort
dominates the text.20 Scholarship as a conventional, ongoing routine was distracted
from questions of import about being. Yet in Heidegger’s lectures of fall 1935,
startlingly enough, quantum physicists were given a partial exemption:
The greatness and superiority of natural science in the sixteenth and
seventeenth century goes back to the fact that those researchers were all
philosophers; they understood that there are no plain facts [in the positivist
sense]… Where real research is done that opens things up, the situation is no
different from three hundred years ago;… the leading minds of atomic physics
today, Niels Bohr and Heisenberg, think philosophically through and through
[durch und durch philosophisch denken] and for that reason alone create new
ways of posing questions and above all hold out in the realm of what bears
questioning.21
His scientific informants to the contrary, Heidegger still asserted that the essential
notions of science remained continuous across the classical-quantum divide, even as
quantum physics left old-style objectivity behind. Physics continued to occupy
itself, he maintained, with ‘‘regions of space in which something material moves
from place to place or rests in place’’—space–time trajectories still. But he gave the
theorists credit for keeping their eyes on the one thing that mattered. For they passed
beyond science’s conventional self-certainty to gain a transcendental view. This
move of ‘‘continual self-reflection [ständige Selbstbesinnung] belongs to each
science,’’ too, he allowed.22
Yet the circumspection of these thoughts would soon fade. Already by 1935
Heidegger’s views were starting to shift, and over the next years, his construal of
science was universalized and radicalized. Heidegger’s line of thought increasingly
highlighted the creation of modern notions of subjective and objective, tied into the
new Cartesian subject’s demand for certainty of knowledge. That demand grounded
a view of mathematization as prescription that things make their appearance as
objects measurable, predictable, calculable, and governable in a technological
sense.23 Then from 1936 on, Heidegger dug into Nietzsche, thinking through what
came to seem the terminus of Western metaphysics itself. Under the influence of
this reading, the modern subject was transformed into the representer and producer
who imposed his demands for predictability and control.
In this view, Wissenschaft now simply extended the primacy of the technological
will, its essence being to set things up within the realm of ‘‘domination and direction
of what is made into objects in the service of use and breeding [Nutzung und
Züchtung].’’24 Heidegger’s increasingly apocalyptic lectures from the later 1930s
are shot through with sharp, dismissive comments about Nazi enlistment of science
20
Heidegger (1933; see Bambach 2003).
21
Heidegger (1962, p. 51).
22
Ibid., pp. 15, 139. The discussion of transcendental reflection follows on Kant, naturally, though
Heidegger’s Besinnung is a more general mindfulness.
23
Heidegger (1998, §26), (1953, p. 148), (1962, §B.I.5, esp. pp. 71–72).
24
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490 C. Carson
in industry-university partnerships and in the service of the Four-Year Plan. Human

beings became fodder for the nihilistic process; Heidegger imagined factories for
human material steered by the most recent biochemical discoveries.25 But the
paramount indicator of all that was wrong was the appearance of the man of
organization and mastery. Such ‘‘Führer-natures,’’ the ultimate subjects, were only
‘‘the first to be set into service [die ersten Angestellten] within the routine of the
unconditional exploitation of what exists in the service of securing the emptiness of
the forgetting of being.’’26
The Third Reich’s mobilization of Wissenschaft, and scholars’ self-mobilization,
simply re-marked the course that Wissenschaft was taking itself. Science was
threatened by its own technical nature, which National Socialism hardly created,
only brought to the fore.27 And natural science increasingly served Heidegger as
paradigm for Wissenschaft as a whole.28 This was, he put it in a pivotal 1938
lecture, the ‘‘age of the world picture’’ (Die Zeit des Weltbildes), with the world
ordered into an objectified picture and any sense lost for another relation with being.
Object and subject were created at the same time. And as always, the point of origin
was marked by classical mathematical physics. Yet ‘‘[i]nsofar as modern atomic
physics, too, remains physics,’’ Heidegger now proposed, ‘‘the essential, which
alone matters here, holds of it, too.’’29 In fact, he put it late in the Second World
War, ‘‘physics must be technology, because theoretical physics is the real, pure
technology.’’30
Interestingly, similar experiences brought Heisenberg to similar reflections,
expressed in his own idiom but consonant nonetheless. When Heisenberg had
started in physics in the 1920s, he had sought science’s farthest-reaching
ramifications in the philosophical realm. By hard experience, however, he learned
in the Third Reich to defend his work against attacks for its ‘‘Jewish’’ abstraction—
by painting theory’s possibilities for technical use.31 Is science ideological? Is it
non-objective? Hardly; it works. The high point of Heisenberg’s own mobilization
was his leading role in applied nuclear fission research for German Army Ordnance
during the war, and the experience brought him to reflect on a kind of
instrumentality he increasingly suspected at science’s core. In private wartime
musings, he pondered the world-historical significance of science, situating its
strategy of objectifying impoverishment within a grander scheme of language,
thought, meaning, and value.32 In a famous lecture of the same period, treating
Goethe’s hostility to Newton’s objectification, Heisenberg played uneasily with
25
‘‘Völkisch’’ science—examples might be Nazi racial hygiene or ‘‘Aryan’’ physics—belonged to the
same historic constellation, oriented to the ‘‘end effect’’ (Ergebnis). Heidegger (1954a, pp. 92, 95; 1989,
pp. 142, 148).
26
Heidegger (1954a, p. 96).
27
Heidegger (1991).
28
Heidegger (1989, pp. 148, 155).
29
30
Heidegger (1995, p. 8). On physics as paradigm see Heidegger (1991, p. 14, n. 2).
31
(For example Heisenberg 1934). On the ‘‘Aryan’’ physics attack on Heisenberg see Beyerchen (1977).
32
Heisenberg (1989b).
123
what he called ‘‘the constant development of natural science towards an exact

mastery of nature.’’ Whatever a scientist’s intention, he concluded, objectifying
empirical investigation opened the door to intervention—and power.33
Heisenberg kept his grander thoughts to himself, but he sent Heidegger the
Goethe lecture in his collection of popular essays.34 In fact, Heidegger was the only
nonscientist on Heisenberg’s courtesy list; from Heidegger’s later texts, we know
the little collection was studied in some depth. The two men were thinking in similar
directions. For questions about science and technology would continue to preoccupy
the physicist, bringing him into loose contact with like-minded intellectual circles.
However, on one matter he diverged in practice from Heidegger’s prescription.
Heidegger had concluded that transcendental thinking by a discipline’s practitioners
was ruled out. It was not only missing in practice, but impossible in principle, a kind
of category mistake. That is, the kind of general ‘‘reflection on science’’ (Besinnung
auf die Wissenschaft) that the situation required could be done by no special science
operating within its own frame. The only figure who could carry it out was the
philosopher, who stood above those rules.35 Heisenberg was of another view.
4 Staging a dialogue
Of course, with the war’s end, questions about science, especially physics, took on
an extraordinary point. Post-Hiroshima, post-Nagasaki, the atomic bomb was
central to every physicists’ reflections on the world-changing power of science.
Heisenberg’s own thinking stretched over a broader definition of science, with
illustrations from chemical warfare to psychologically guided propaganda to
nightmares of genetic engineering (Züchtung).36 He sometimes thought the larger
problem was wrapped up in the scientific project itself. Reflecting on Nuremberg
revelations of human experimentation, he wrote of the ‘‘unheard-of crimes that
either presumed means made available by science or appeared to be influenced by
particular directions in science or medicine.’’ He continued, ‘‘There are forces at
work that aim to prevent misuse. But because we do not know if such defensive
moves can really dispel the dangers… we still face the question: whether something
about the way we pursue our science and pose our questions must fundamentally be
changed.’’37
For their part, Heidegger’s own postwar lectures insistently evoked nuclear
fission—as an indicator, again, of something greater at stake. ‘‘Man is fixated,’’ he
declared, ‘‘on what could happen with the explosion of the atomic bomb. He does
33
Heisenberg (1941), included in his lecture collection Wandlungen in den Grundlagen der
Naturwissenschaft from the 1942 edition onward.
34
Heisenberg to Held, S. Hirzel Verlag, 23 March 1948, Werner-Heisenberg-Archiv, München
(henceforth WHM), Korrespondenz 1948.
35
Enacted in Heidegger (1991, pp. 11–12), and going back, for instance, to Heidegger (1962, p. 5;
cf. 1989, p. 142).
36
Heisenberg (1947).
37
Heisenberg (1948, p. 7).
123
492 C. Carson
not see what has already happened.’’38 For the metaphysical step had already been
taken. In the modern world, Heidegger suggested in semiprivate lectures of 1949, in
a formulation that has since become notorious, an essential sameness linked
industrialized food production to uranium mining for weapons, motorized agricul-
ture to manufacture of corpses in gas chambers and death camps and onto starvation
blockades and production of hydrogen bombs.39 Grasping the nature of technology
in the modern age meant coming clear on the nature of science. It required
understanding, first, in what ways science and technology were tied, and then
perceiving where technology might go beyond science.
Over the course of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Heidegger worked his way
towards formulating the question, then indicating a direction in which the answer
might lie.40 His thinking began slowly building from subject-centered notions like
Gegenständigkeit (objectness), rooted in his late-1930s conceptions of modern
science. In those lectures of the postwar years, which are now recognized as critical
texts, certain new ideas came to the fore. These included such soon-to-be central
terms as Bestand (standing-reserve) and Ge-Stell (enframing), invented in order to
capture a collection of ways in which the world was taken hold of by human beings
for service. In the now-famous lecture ‘‘Das Ge-Stell,’’ Heidegger noted that natural
science stood at the beginning of this moment. ‘‘For physics,’’ he pointed out,
‘‘nature is the Bestand of energy and matter.’’41
Heidegger’s process of rethinking found its widely influential consolidation in his
celebrated text ‘‘The Question Concerning Technology’’ (Die Frage nach der
Technik). That essay, in fact, was a lecture, too, carried off in November 1953 in
Munich in a larger symposium sponsored by the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts.42
Heisenberg’s role in the latter event has sometimes been noted. What has not been
grasped is how central the physicist was to either the ideas or the framing. The 1953
exchange encapsulated Heidegger’s encounter with science: its form of objectivity,
its inner tie to technology, the possibility of a shift in its nature. Indeed, as staged on
the Munich platform, the symposium featuring the Heidegger-Heisenber encounter
threw into relief the very conceivability of a scientist engaged in reflection.
By 1953, Heidegger had in fact been after Heisenberg for several years, trying to
arrange a half-open confrontation. In his thinking, Heisenberg stood for ‘‘the
scientist’’ writ large.43 However, repeated proposals for a joint lecture series had all
fallen through.44 The Munich plan was better worked-out than these other projects.
38
Heidegger (1954b, p. 164).
39
Heidegger (1994a, p. 27).
40
Tracing the process in its cultural setting, see Allen (2006).
41
Heidegger (1994a, p. 42); see also Heidegger (1994b).
42
Heidegger (1954c). The lecture anchored this first major postwar collection, published in 1954. The
standard English translation in Heidegger (1977) dates the lecture to 1955, but this is wrong.
43
There was talk of a jointly edited journal, for instance; Heidegger commented to a potential coeditor
that they needed to clarify ‘‘the relationship to what [Heisenberg’s] name represents.’’ Heidegger to
Nebel, Pentecost 1949, quoted in Jünger and Nebel (2003, p. 783). On this network see Morat (2004).
44
Hattingberg to Heisenberg, 4 March 1950, WHM Korrespondenz 1950; Stroomann to Heisenberg, 9
May 1951, WHM Korrespondenz 1951 under Bühlerhöhe; Heisenberg to Eickemeyer, 28 August 1951,
WHM DFR Heisenberg; Heidegger to Heisenberg, 2 September 1951, WHM Korrespondenz 1951;
123
It involved a week-long program on ‘‘The Arts in the Technical Age,’’ tacitly built
around Heidegger. The symposium came at a point in the early 1950s when
sonorous discussions about technology—its relations to human intention or destiny,
its creative or demonic nature, and so on—were reaching an apex of popular
appeal.45 As a colleague communicated the point with some urgency to Heisenberg,
‘‘Heidegger can only conceive of his lecture as a continuation of yours in the frame
of the meeting.’’46
Despite some reluctance, Heisenberg came on board and eventually wrote up a
draft for private circulation.47 As a basis for discussion, Heidegger, too, sent around
his own preparatory piece. This was the essay later published as ‘‘Science and
Reflection’’ (Wissenschaft und Besinnung).48 That essay dealt centrally with the
nature of Wissenschaft as Heidegger had begun conceiving it in the 1930s, now
formulated via explication of the sentence, ‘‘Science is the theory of the real.’’ The
piece discoursed at length on modern physics, referred directly to Heisenberg, and
reached towards Heidegger’s newer formulations.49 Heidegger read it to a small
circle preparing the symposium, commenting to a colleague, ‘‘What matters to me
above all else is that Heisenberg hear [it].’’50 Then the month before the Munich
event, Heisenberg’s draft and Heidegger’s thoughts were discussed by the group.
Heidegger continued thinking and writing—‘‘I am severely taxed by the Munich
lecture… and related correspondence with Heisenberg,’’ he wrote to another
friend—and in the end would push his argument to a new point.51
It was on the Munich symposium’s second evening that Heisenberg delivered
his address on ‘‘The Picture of Nature of Modern Physics’’ (Das Naturbild der
modernen Physik). Heisenberg was willing to say that technical advance transformed
the human environment, removing its inhabitants from unmediated encounter with
nature. Instead of some original world, human beings now confronted structures and
situations that their own technological activity had called forth. In the modern world,
Heisenberg said in good idealist diction, ‘‘we encounter only ourselves’’ in the
Footnote 44 continued
Stroomann to Heisenberg, 4 January 1952; Pahl to Heisenberg, 2 February 1952, WHM Korrespondenz
1952.
45
Beyler (2003); as background Rohkrämer (1999), Hård and Jamison (1998), Herf (1994).
46
Podewils to Heisenberg, 4 May 1953 (quotation); also Heidegger to Heisenberg, 18 March 1953 and 9
June 1953, WHM Korrespondenz 1953.
47
Heisenberg to Podewils, 2 May 1953, WHM Korrespondenz 1953. Afterwards Heisenberg would
privately describe the venture as ‘‘particularly problematic’’: Heisenberg to Scholz, 24 April 1954, WHM.
48
Heidegger (1954d).
49
Heisenberg to Podewils, 17 September 1953, WHM Korrespondenz 1953; Fritz Heidegger to
Heisenberg, 25 September 1953, WHM New. In Heidegger (1954d) the emergent shift is visible on p. 61,
including some comments manifestly added after the fact. Otherwise the piece largely recapitulates
Heidegger’s earlier thinking in somewhat different terms.
50
Draft minutes of discussion, 4 August 1953, Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste, Archiv,
Ordner I,A; Heidegger to Podewils, 18 July 1953, emphasis in the original, in Kunze (1989), T. 3. I am
indebted to Frau Sylvia Langemann for helping me with this material. Heidegger delivered the piece in at
least two other venues, but this version is the one he finally published.
51
Heidegger to Boss, 28 October 1953, excerpted in Heidegger (1987, p. 310); Heidegger to Heisenberg,
6 November 1953, WHM Korrespondenz 1953.
123
494 C. Carson
objectified consequences of our own actions.52 Yet this strange alienation was
actually—this was what he had to say that was new—the true point of contact with
science. For modern physics had already made plain the impossibility of abstracting
from human activity. It had gone beyond the Cartesian separation of subject and
object, no longer occupying itself with particles and motions in themselves. Rather
than nature on its own, its object, too, was nature as exposed to human posing of
questions. And these changes pointed, finally, to the appropriate course to take with
respect to technology. Technology was uncanny, threatening, and disorienting; direct
access to nature was lost. But physics had already learned to build without familiar
foundations, and the result was nothing unsure, but a science more secure than before.
So for technology, too, the task of the present was ‘‘to come to terms’’: while seeing the
limits of previous attitudes, to master the situation, not to run from it.53
When Heidegger entered the auditorium the evening after the physicist, the stage
was perfectly set. When science took hold of the world, the philosopher now
suggested, it challenged it to stand ready as energy; and this feature characterized
modern technology, too, from industrialized food production to uranium mining for
weapons.54 But modern technology’s creations were now no longer objects. In the
same way as physics (so Heidegger finally saw it) lost hold of the object, that
Cartesian creation, and began dissolving it into the subject-object relation itself, so
too Bestand, nature ordered to stand available as energy for service, made objects
secondary to the polymorphous fungibility of pure subject-object relationality—
relationality in which human beings were now caught up as well.55
So Heisenberg understood something, but not all that mattered; he was one step
short of thinking it through. ‘‘The impression spreads,’’ Heidegger said,
that whatever man encounters exists only insofar as it is a human product. This
impression calls forth a final deceptive aspect. It appears that man encounters
everywhere only himself. Heisenberg has pointed out, completely correctly,
that the real must present itself in this way to man today. Nevertheless, man
today in truth no longer anywhere encounters himself, that is, his essence.56
In giving the impression of surpassing the old metaphysics, the physicist only
demonstrated how firmly he stood on its ground. In fact, he intensified the trend of
the age even as he thought he overcame it, remaining trapped in the ordering
attitude characteristic of science. And this, Heidegger suggested, was the real
danger: losing sight of ‘‘every other possibility of revealing.’’57 Shaping the will to
master technology was science’s instrumental stance, now beyond all restraint.
52
Heisenberg (1953, p. 47).
53
Ibid.
54
Heidegger (1954c, pp. 26, 22–23). The latter paragraph borrowed from Heidegger (1994a, p. 27), but
silently dropped the comparison to gas chambers and death camps, which now fit less well into the
framework of Bestand as energy alone.
55
Heidegger (1954d, p. 61), paragraph added after Heidegger (1954c), foreshadowed in Heidegger
(1994a, p. 42), but in as yet unclear form. In his copy of Heidegger (1994a) Heidegger noted at that point,
‘‘Atomphysik.’’
56
Heidegger (1954c, p. 35, emphasis in the original).
57
Ibid.
123
However, technology held open prospects for non-instrumental ways in which

being might again reveal itself, in a manner not dissimilar to art.58 For Heidegger,
invoking Hölderlin, one found the saving power growing out of the danger. But the
danger first had to be brought into view. In his lecture he cryptically commented,
‘‘The unrestrainable in the ordering and the restrained in the saving pass one another
by as the paths of two stars in the sky.’’ Yet their very bypassing was ‘‘the hidden
aspect of their nearness.’’ On the Munich platform Heidegger enacted the bypassing,
with Heisenberg as his opposite number. If ‘‘the essence of technology is in an
eminent sense ambivalent,’’ both endangering and saving, then as Heidegger spoke
he was seeking to stage it.59 He had already told Heisenberg what the latter was
expected to say; even the title of the physicist’s lecture, ‘‘Das Naturbild der
modernen Physik,’’ was Heidegger’s choice.60 And in his preparatory discourse on
‘‘Science and Reflection’’ the philosopher had gone so far as to offer the following
instructions:
Even if the sciences by their own ways and means can never advance to the
essence of Wissenschaft, still each researcher and teacher of the sciences, each
human being who passes through a science, can move as a thinking being on
various planes of reflection and keep it alert. Yet even where, by some special
favor, the highest level of reflection is reached, it must be satisfied with merely
preparing a readiness for the word that our human race today needs.61
How Heidegger conceived Heisenberg’s role, and his own, was plain.
Certainly, Heisenberg’s formulation pushed Heidegger to express his point as he
did. As the pure relationality of Bestand came to the fore, dissolving both subjects and
objects, marginal comments in Heidegger’s copy of ‘‘Science and Reflection’’
directly quoted Heisenberg’s draft lecture text.62 At the same time, there was
something capricious in the philosopher’s claim that he had captured the essence of
modern physics. On the key question of continuity across the classical-modern divide,
Heidegger’s arguments had pointed in any number of directions. Thus he persisted in
asserting, against Heisenberg’s explications, that modern physics traced space–time
trajectories of material bodies. Then causal accounting was still supposed to make
objects calculable and governable, no less when absolute was weakened to statistical
causality.63 Remarking Heisenberg’s postwar interest in energy’s interconversions,
58
The point is still elusive in Heidegger (1954c); later essays make it clearer. See Dreyfus (2002).
59
Heidegger (1954c, p. 41). On performance see Mehring (1992).
60
Minutes on ‘‘Kunst und Technik,’’ 27 March 1953, WHM Korrespondenz 1953 under Podewils.
61
Heidegger (1954d, p. 70).
62
Ibid., p. 61. The annotation is reproduced in the Gesamtausgabe edition (v. 7).
63
In addition, the tour of Aristotelian causality in Heidegger (1954c, pp. 15–20) may be a counter to
Heisenberg’s simple-minded comments (Heisenberg 1952). Heidegger was provoked by the piece, as well
as by his ongoing exchange with Heisenberg, out of which (he reported to a colleague) came the lecture’s
first draft with its long excursus on causality: Heidegger (1954d, p. 51); Heidegger to Boss, 28 October
1953, in Heidegger (1987, p. 310). On the larger relevance of Heidegger’s early thinking on Aristotle see
Feenberg (2005, ch. 2).
123
496 C. Carson
Heidegger interpreted it in the direction of ‘‘standing reserve’’ (Bestand).64

Conspicuously, ‘‘Science and Reflection’’ went on at length about field physics,
under the impression, it would seem, that fields were intrinsically quantum.65 Later
the main issue would become the all-mastering nature of Heisenberg’s unified field
theory of elementary particles. Even if the last was probably the best thing for
Heidegger to latch onto, still these were not all the same point.66 Even if Heisenberg’s
own thinking was not crystal-clear, it would appear that Heidegger had his conclusion
before he quite had the reasoning to support it.
Finally, if there was an argument (that is, more than an assertion) in Heidegger’s
dismissal of science’s capacity to examine its foundations, it is hard to spell out
what that argument was. Heisenberg did practice something that looked like
reflection. Starting from strictly Kantian questions, he passed to a broader set of
concerns, asking how science’s objectifying approach to the world proceeded,
where it encountered limits, how else its power might be understood, and what other
ways of approaching the world there might be. The example could have borne
addressing or refuting in detail, if Heidegger had chosen.67 What made it easier to
bypass, of course, was the by now exceptionless affirmation that, as Heidegger put it
in short form about this same time, ‘‘science does not think [Die Wissenschaft denkt
nicht].’’ That is, thinking in his sense was reserved for something else. As for
Wissenschaft, ‘‘that [it] cannot think is not a shortcoming, but an advantage.’’ Only
by this kind of tunnel vision could it make its way.68
And yet, historically, Heidegger may have been right about one thing. There was
something unreflexive going on. When the physicist told his Munich audience in
1953 about the current age’s task of ‘‘coming to terms,’’ the overtones were hard to
miss. Heisenberg, who was also advising the West German government on civil
nuclear power, spoke unself-consciously of turning atomic energy to human ends,
directing it by human values, subjecting it to human will and control. In the ‘‘atomic
age,’’ the culmination of the modern era, this was truly the instrumentalist
conception in fullest flower.69
64
(For example Heidegger 1962, p. 73; Heidegger 1994a, pp. 43, 42). The promotion of ‘‘energy’’ to its
uniquely central role, which it does not hold in 1949 in Heidegger (1994a), may owe something to
Heisenberg (1949), referenced in Heidegger (1954d, p. 61).
65
Heidegger (1954d, p. 60). See also the supposed citation to Planck, ‘‘Wirklich ist, was sich messen
läßt,’’ on p. 58, which would have made Planck turn over in his grave. What Planck had offered was a
mildly ironic comment on the quantum, whose strangeness had given scientists pause: the quantum had to
be accepted because it had been experimentally measured; and ‘‘was man messen kann, das existiert
auch.’’ Planck (1949, p. 77).
66
Heidegger (1954d, pp. 60–61), finally placed front and center in Heidegger (1997, esp. p. 46). Note the
language of Beherrschung in Heisenberg (1949, p. 97).
67
The closest Heidegger came to addressing it overtly is Heidegger (1997, p. 9). For a different
assessment see Luhmann (2002).
68
Heidegger (1954e, p. 133). He would repeat the point over the next decade and a half, sometimes with
specific dismissive reference to Heisenberg: e.g., Heidegger (1987, pp. 74, 161–162, 269). Heisenberg’s
attempts to respond include Heisenberg (1959) and Heisenberg (1967, esp. pp. 34–35, 38–39).
69
The meaning of the Atomzeitalter is exposited in Heidegger (1997, pp. 45–47, 83). On the
contemporary discourse of ‘‘mastering’’ technology see Seubold (1986, pp. 284–288).
123
5 Enter Habermas
To turn in a seemingly different direction, a brief, early essay on Heidegger provides

a surprisingly good entry point to Jürgen Habermas’s thinking on science. At the
same time as Heidegger was putting the finishing touches on ‘‘Science and
Reflection,’’ the 24-year-old philosophy student would make his first small public
splash.70 The year 1953 saw not just the delivery of ‘‘The Question Concerning
Technology,’’ but also the publication of Heidegger’s 1935 lecture course
Introduction to Metaphysics. Those lectures, finally published eight years after
war’s end, were marked by augural pronouncements—the flight of the gods, the
massification of man, the loathing suspicion of everything creative and free. They
also stood out for their foreboding for Germany as the country where these pressures
came most to bear. The now-published text added that what was being served up at
the time as the philosophy of National Socialism had ‘‘not the least to do’’ with ‘‘the
inner truth and greatness of this movement.’’71 For the young Habermas, authoring a
freelance review for a major national daily, the connection was eye-opening. In his
critical assessment, Habermas’s comments famously circled around that allusion
about National Socialism; and subsequent discussion has rightly made much of the
political portent.72
Tellingly, Habermas zeroed in on the phrase Heidegger placed parenthetically to
explain National Socialism’s ‘‘inner truth and greatness,’’ namely ‘‘the encounter of
planetarily determined technology and man of the modern age.’’ Although this point
has sometimes been neglected in recountings of Habermas’s challenge, it was not
simply the political logic that he was taking apart. The young reviewer was a
philosophy student, and he also wanted to make a philosophical point. Heidegger’s
radical stance, Habermas suggested, was made possible by two momentous
omissions. One was the counterweight of Christian conceptions of equality and
freedom. The other was a broader conception of reason. For ‘‘[w]hen it is not
acknowledged,’’ Habermas wrote, ‘‘that since Descartes, alongside the line of
thinking that through calculation puts things at our disposal [des rechnend verfügbar
machenden Denkens], there runs the other line of interpretative understanding, then
we lose sight of the dialectical plasticity of the modern age’s development—a
dialectic that provides the creative legitimation for that sort of thinking that aims at
mastery through objectification.’’73
This small intervention opens up three issues. First, Habermas was not contesting
the portrayal of science’s instrumental rationality. Instead he wanted to make room
for something alongside it. That move undercut the exceptionlessness of Heideg-
ger’s characterization of Wissenschaft; the question is in what the exception would
consist. Second, on display is a heavy load of humanistic-scientific tension, coded in
quasi-hermeneutic terms. Finally, Habermas’s framing of the problem (and his
70
Habermas (1953a). When reprinting his essays, Habermas often edited out allusions to concerns of the
moment. I use the originals wherever there is a difference; in this case the reprinted version is identical.
71
Heidegger (1953, pp. 29, 152 [quotation]). See Janicaud (1992) and Kisiel (2001).
72
(For example Holub 1991, pp. 16–18; Matuštı́k 2003, pp. 12–17).
73
Habermas (1953a, emphasis added).
123
498 C. Carson
diction) had powerful Heideggerian components; it was time, he suggested, ‘‘to

think with Heidegger against Heidegger.’’74 For whatever his politics, the young
Habermas had been, so he later put it, ‘‘intellectually strongly influenced by
Heidegger.’’ Before the 1953 article, which he came to mark as his break, he would
count him the thinker ‘‘in whose philosophy I lived.’’75
A year earlier, reviewing a book sympathetic to Heidegger by his colleague
Ludwig Landgrebe, Habermas had in fact celebrated Heidegger’s pursuit of the
‘‘question of being’’ as the culmination of philosophical thinking. This question was
simultaneously, he wrote, ‘‘the question of the basis of Western thought since Plato,
whose essence and blight has found its fulfillment in modern technology.’’ In truth,
Habermas suggested in these early comments, ‘‘the embarrassment that natural
science has gotten itself into’’ suggested exactly that nature ‘‘only receives its
essence when it is taken hold of by man in experiment.’’76 But this was not the only
way to approach the world, which was more than science’s continuous system of
relations of determination: that much Habermas took from his early education in an
extended neo-Kantian tradition distinguishing natural from human sciences.77
Instead of trying to ‘‘master’’ things, man had to learn how to ‘‘let them be.’’78
6 Between reason and politics: tacking maneuvers
As Habermas’s ideas evolved, they would be conditioned by a second line of

thought. In 1953 he read Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of
Enlightenment. Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, especially its chapter on ‘‘Means
and Ends,’’ offered a new set of tools; Herbert Marcuse’s reaction to Heidegger
would help Habermas with his own.79 Without taking up the details of the Frankfurt
School’s argument about science,80 one thing is plain enough: on this topic its
rhetorical fusion with a Heideggerian idiom caused few problems. Habermas did not
switch his allegiances to critical theory until the mid-1950s. While certain aspects of
the move marked a radical break, others were a much smoother transition.
Through the 1950s Habermas, speaking in a voice now more recognizable to
most Habermasians today, also remained intellectually engaged with empirical
social research and critique. In this context a key line of his argument about science
was worked out in connection with a famous late-1950s assessment of the failures of
post-1945 West German university reform. Watching the transformation of
contemporary society, Habermas suggested that traditional ideals of contemplative
74
Ibid.
75
Habermas (1992a, p. 147); Habermas (1981c, p. 515). For a thorough exposition see Moses (2007,
ch. 5).
76
Habermas (1952).
77
On the influence of Habermas’s teacher Erich Rothacker (which Heidegger perceived in the 1953
review: Heidegger to Podewils, 19 August 1953, in Kunze (1989) see Dahms (1994, pp. 363–373).
78
Habermas (1952). See also the pathos-filled essay Habermas (1953b).
79
Habermas (1981c, 1992b).
80
see Vogel (1996).
123
self-formation, of Humboldtian Bildung through Wissenschaft, had to be rethought

in this new postwar world in which state, economy, and research interpenetrated.
Even as he evoked theoretical examples from atomic physics to animal psychology,
Los Alamos served him, as it served so many others, as metonym for science’s post-
Cartesian orientation toward instrumental application.81 But as long as Wissenschaft
was cultivated in this way, and here Habermas pushed the point further, it backed
away from normative statements. When it did so, it emphatically neutralized itself
with respect to social praxis. This interest in praxis, practical action in the human
world, was the new preoccupation that Habermas brought into play.
For instrumental rationality spoke only of means, not of ends; positivism
declared ends to fall outside rational debate altogether. Praxis, of course, guided by
a deliberately non-instrumental conception of reason, was becoming Habermas’s
overriding concern. As for science, as long as it imagined itself as pure theory, it
would be trapped in a handmaiden role backed up by an ideology that condemned it
to blindness about its own state. Scientists needed to become more than deliverers of
means, to step up and address ends, to take up the social and political consequences
of their work.
In Habermas’s case, this was not some abstract demand. It responded to the
concrete historical circumstances of the nuclear age. In the face of nuclear
annihilation, physicists were entering into public dialogue out of urgent concern for
the socially irrational ways in which their work was exploited, as weapons
production overshadowed civil nuclear power. If, Habermas wrote, ‘‘one trusts
Landgrebe’s interpretation of Heisenberg’s uncertainty relation, we can even expect
that already today reflection on the foundations of science automatically extends
itself to reflection on the social arrangements under which physical research is
pursued.’’82 In Habermasian terms, this was a move of reflection in the tradition of
critical theory. It kept a tie to reflection in the transcendental sense. It had to be
carried out by each discipline’s practitioners; for as the special sciences grew more
specialized, no one else was capable of it.
Here was the shift: Physicists once again seemed available as exemplars of
reflection, in a new, wider conception of science. Through the late 1950s, into the
early 1960s, Habermas still held out hope for this critical chance. Weeks after his
little article appeared came the Göttingen Manifesto of West Germany’s most
prominent atomic scientists, led by Heisenberg’s colleague and confederate Carl
Friedrich von Weizsäcker and a small core including Heisenberg himself. The
manifesto was an electrifying public stand against nuclearizing the new West
German federal army and a de facto critique of the government’s nuclear strategic
thinking. Habermas was a deeply committed supporter of the mass movement of
anti-nuclear weapons protest that was galvanized by the physicists’ statement. He
closely followed the arguments of von Weizsäcker, now jumping from physics to
philosophy to politics, as the latter dissected the logic of graduated nuclear
deterrence. Reflections on ‘‘living with the bomb’’—here Habermas took up the
physicist’s words—were his prime example of scientists accepting their new
81
Habermas (1957, p. 273).
82
Ibid., p. 283. The citation is to Landgrebe (1952, pp. 91ff).
123
500 C. Carson
obligations in the atomic age.83 Clearly, scientists as contributor to critical societal

debate, far beyond instrumentality, still had real resonance for the author of 1962’s
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas felt it within the realm of
possibility that he could mobilize them in the service of progressive political
change.84
Behind these hopeful representations, however, there were troublesome issues
that left Habermas’s position somewhat intellectually precarious. Into the early
1960s he occasionally poked at the problems, but mostly the tensions remained
unresolved. A starting point for scientists’ socially critical function was supposed to
be reflection upon their discipline’s epistemic stance. Of the latter sort of reflection
there were plenty of examples. But Habermas never fully resolved his ambivalence
about what these philosophizing scientists had to say. What Habermas was willing
to call ‘‘the self-reflection of physicists from Planck to Heisenberg and von
Weizsäcker’’ was sometimes, he said, more like ‘‘positivistic-speculative sci-
ence.’’85 Exactly what he meant he did not fully spell out. Even more importantly,
Habermas needed to explain what really tied together the two strands of reflection.
What connected the epistemically and the socially critical? Historically, biograph-
ically, the one may sometimes have led to the other; but any connection of principle
was hard to puzzle out.86 While contemporary scientists vocally asserted the link
when it suited them, they failed to give any truly cogent argument. The most
principled thing on offer was a kind of thoughtful ambivalence, as a Heisenberg or a
von Weizsäcker struggled to articulate how their factual knowledge and scientific
rationality gave insight into matters of value.87 So in philosophical terms, what was
the status of theory (Heidegger’s old problem) and its relation to praxis (Habermas’s
new one)? The question needed an answer—for both the original era of German
idealism and the current, thoroughly scientized age.88 And how could natural
scientists’ critical reflection, of whatever sort, be reconciled with the idea that their
practice could deliver only calculative knowledge? Habermas seems to have wanted
both, but at this point he could really only juxtapose them, not work out how they
escaped contradiction.89
83
Habermass [sic] (1958); Habermas (1958); Habermas (1963a, p. 420), a reference omitted from the
version in Habermas (1981b).
84
Habermas (1962a). When Habermas and Ralf Dahrendorf drafted a public appeal in the wake of the
famous Spiegel Affair of fall 1962, a watershed in West German public political life, they included von
Weizsäcker and Habermas in the elite circle of targeted signers. See Habermas to Heisenberg, 11
November 1962, and Heisenberg to Habermas, 15 November 1962, WHM; Carson (2010a forthcoming,
ch. 11).
85
Habermas (1957, pp. 282, 284); Habermas (1963b, p. 162 [quotation]; the passage is omitted from the
fourth expanded edition of 1971).
86
He would make a similar point in Habermas (1973a).
87
(For example Heisenberg 1967, p. 34). Values were what mattered in guiding science, yet ‘‘‘[d]iese
Wertvorstellungen… können nicht aus der Wissenschaft selbst kommen; jedenfalls kommen sie
einstweilen nicht daher.’’
88
Habermas (1963a).
89
Habermas (1963b, pp. 162 vs. 176).
123
7 Natural science and human interests
By the early 1960s the combination was proving unstable. Two things seem to have
caused the balance to tip: first, Habermas’s engagement with debates over scientific
advising; second, theoretical controversies within social science. In these years, a
famous essay by the sociologist Helmut Schelsky provoked the so-called
‘‘technocracy debate’’ about the expert’s political role in a scientized society.90
Habermas weighed in against Schelsky’s technocratic portrait, as well as
‘‘decisionistic’’ alternatives making scientists mere deliverers of means. In place
of both he proposed a dialogic model in which social interests and technological
solutions were dialectically engaged. In this picture, open communication between
scientists and politicians, mediated via the public, was supposed to subject a
previously unreflected relationship to rational democratic scrutiny.91 It was a happy
picture, still imbued with the hope that scientists would step up to the plate, and it
became a major progressive point of reference in the ensuing debate. Unfortunately
for Habermas, in the real world of scientific advising a dialogic third way was hard
to make out. A few experts, led by the nuclear scientists, did ‘‘seize the initiative,’’
he said, to reflect publicly on their research. Still, ‘‘the examples are meager,’’ he
had to concede; most advising went on behind closed doors.92 In truth, over the next
years, nuclear scientists increasingly went in-house as advisors, appearing in public
principally to expound on the technological benefits of research to justify ambitious
resource demands.
The change in the landscape of scientists’ social reflection was then matched by
controversies internal to social science. Precisely because of the theoretical loading
of the famous ‘‘positivism debate’’ in which Habermas stood up for critical theory,
the confrontation would have major consequences for his conception of science.
Habermas’s ideal of a critical social science was set up in opposition to what he
portrayed as a value-free ‘‘social technology.’’ That target, identified first with
Schelsky, then with Karl Popper, operated with a more limited conception of social
science than Habermas could accept, ascertaining laws of behavior on a purely
empirical model, advising on smoothing out social conflicts and stabilizing society
in a feedback loop of observation and action. The debate, particularly Habermas’s
exchanges with the Popperian Hans Albert, ended up deep in the thickets of
contemporary Wissenschaftstheorie. That field was to Habermas’s mind still
governed by analytic philosophy, late nineteenth-century positivism’s intellectual
heir.93
Much was in flux, and clarification was needed. The result was a series of short
essays published beginning in 1963 in which Habermas finally began to fill out his
90
Schelsky (1961). In the background is Ellul (1954).
91
Habermas (1964a). Most essays from this decade are translated in Habermas (1970), (1971), (1973b),
or Adey and Frisby (1976).
92
Habermas (1964a, p. 143). There is also the problem that most of Habermas’s examples of advising in
practice look more like RAND than like democratic discussion.
93
Habermas (1962b) and the contributions in Benseler (1969), including Albert (1964). For background
see Dahms (1994) and Albrecht et al. (1999, ch. 7). Holub (1991, ch. 2), gives a reading sympathetic to
Habermas.
123
502 C. Carson
picture of natural science. As he now spelled out its functions, science’s capacity for
technical application was ‘‘not post facto or by accident.’’94 The character of science
emerged directly from the hypothetico-deductive construction of its theories. The
kinds of lawlike statements it produced, and its manner of testing them, showed
essential correspondence with something outside of science. That was the set of
ordinary-life processes of self-preservation and labor by means of which a subject
sought out stability in experience and regulated action by success in gaining mastery
over the world. This version of philosophical anthropology put science in its natural
place.
Habermas’s account served two purposes. First, it gave specificity to his claim
that science was just one way of approaching the world, rooted in a definite kind of
experience and action. Second, it intimated what other approaches might be
possible—specifically, ones not based on monologic objectification in the service of
technical control, but grounded in subjects’ mutual intelligibility and hermeneutics.
Natural science essentially served as contrast to Habermas’s hoped-for critical
social theory: this was the terminus ad quem. The latter’s legitimation as a coequal
mode of reason had been denied since positivists captured the Enlightenment legacy
and reduced Wissenschaft to purposive-rational control.
Habermas would spin out these ideas into an ambitious philosophical-historical
synthesis in the late-1960s Knowledge and Human Interests, whose origins and
arguments can only be briefly sketched here.95 Starting from thoughts tentatively
articulated as early as 1960,96 Habermas developed his famous notion of the
cognitive or knowledge-constitutive interests (erkenntnisleitende Interessen). These
interests, even though largely obscured in the contemporary sciences, fundamentally
governed knowledge-producing activity. In his 1965 inaugural lecture in Frankfurt,
installed to carry critical theory into the future, Habermas laid out his famous
schema of (now) three distinct kinds of Wissenschaften: empirical-analytical,
historical-hermeneutic, and critical. These originated in three separate interests
(technical, practical, and emancipatory) and went back to three kinds of species
activities (labor, language, and power).97 Then in Knowledge and Human Interests
(published in German three years later) Habermas went onto make the philosophical
claim plausible in a historical narrative, tracing the theory of knowledge from Kant
through the trio of Peirce, Dilthey, and Freud, ending with Nietzsche’s own version
of interested knowledge.
For Habermas, knowledge-constituting interests became the point of fusion
among several distinct philosophical programs. These included Kantian transcen-
dental reflection on object-constitution, neo-Kantian distinctions among modes of
gaining knowledge, Marxian anthropological concern for species natural history,
and phenomenological attention to prescientific understandings and the lifeworld.
94
Habermas (1963d, p. 182); with some overlaps, Habermas (1963c). Relevant for developing the claim
is Habermas (1964b).
95
Habermas (1968a). Good analyses are Vogel (1996, ch. 5), and McCarthy (1978, ch. 1–2).
96
Habermas (1963b, p. 176). See also the analysis of origins in Dahms (1994).
97
Habermas (1965). The key passage on natural science (pp. 156–157) is adapted from Habermas
(1964b, p. 244).
123
Along the way, ideas about natural science fed in from different sources and
thinkers, all of them taken, however, to point the same way.98 They came from
Edmund Husserl as Heidegger’s more acceptable stand-in; from Franz Borkenau,
Horkheimer-Adorno, and Marcuse in turn; from Arnold Gehlen and Jean Piaget as
theorists of philosophical anthropology and human development; from as far afield,
even, as John Dewey and the American pragmatic tradition.99
The human interest in control anchored instrumentality in the essence of science.
This was not a historically contingent development. As Habermas would argue
contra Marcuse in 1968, it was in the nature of the ‘‘project,’’ and no alternative was
conceivable at all.100 At the same time, other origins were ruled out. It was a
mistake, for instance, to imagine that science had roots in pure theory, in
disinterested contemplation of natural order—a familiar understanding that might
give it some purchase for Bildung and some relation to praxis. To Habermas’s eye,
the idea of pure theory was science’s own attempt to obscure the constituting
conditions of its objectivity. Instead, purposive-rational technical control simply
served an interest entirely different from intersubjective understanding or eman-
cipatory reflection. And in the end, there was no way that natural science could
break out of its shell. Indeed, Habermas suggested with some irony, it was truly ‘‘the
glory of the sciences that they apply their methods without distraction, without
reflection on the interest that leads them. Because the sciences methodologically do
not know what they do, they are all the more certain of their discipline.’’101
8 Conclusion
Habermas did not go unchallenged by German philosophers of science. He later

partly conceded that he had done more suggesting than demonstrating that the
sciences definitively and permanently tied down to knowledge-constitutive interests
in a one-to-one fashion.102 But in the end, instead of rethinking his argument,
Habermas mostly reasserted it. He was interested in moving on; natural science had
98
Habermas incorporated each thinker as he encountered him, even as the argument shifted as he went.
Along with Habermas (1968a), the following examples are taken from Habermas (1963c, d, 1965, 1968b),
along with Habermas (1973a), where, following Marcuse (1964, ch. 6), Heidegger is finally given his due
on p. 396.
99
For his account of natural science in Habermas (1968a), Habermas in fact placed the turn-of-the-
century pragmatist Charles S. Peirce at the center. Peirce supplied Habermas with three things at once.
The first was a logic of scientific inquiry conceived as a life process within the framework of self-
correcting technical action. The second, by contrast, was an anti-positivist attentiveness to the constitutive
role of the community of investigators, tying reality into intersubjectivity and discourse. All the same,
Peirce delivered, finally, a remnant objectivism (so Habermas saw it) that trapped the pragmatist, despite
himself, in a monologic positivist quagmire. Thus the intimations of discursive intersubjectivity in
science could be bypassed by Habermas in Peirce’s oeuvre, as they had been bypassed by Heidegger in
Heisenberg’s.
100
Habermas (1968b, p. 55).
101
Habermas (1965, p. 165). Without a belief in objectivity, he pointed out, science had no defense
against ‘‘Aryan’’ physics or Lysenkoist genetics.
102
Albert (1964, esp. pp. 201–203, 233); Lobkowicz (1974); Krüger (1974). For Habermas’s concession,
Habermas (1973a, p. 394); for arguments about physics, pp. 392–393 (on the constitution of objects in
123
504 C. Carson
never been his main concern. Rather, natural science again served as the negative
foil for the positive message. This time, however, the positive pole was not
Heideggerian Denken, but emancipatory social science. Like Heidegger, however,
Habermas took up those aspects of other thinkers’ arguments that suited his needs,
picking and choosing, shifting the argument, highlighting and citing and leaving
behind. And yet by a strange irony, Habermas’s own bid to capture the
exceptionless nature of science had some of the same weaknesses as Heidegger’s
displayed. In particular, it was open to an objection not unlike the one Habermas
had earlier directed against Heidegger’s reduction of Wissenschaft. If social science
(for this was the argument’s telos) could be guided by more than one interest,
emancipation alongside sociotechnical control; if ‘‘alongside the line of thinking
that through calculation puts things at our disposal’’ there might run another strand
of reason in this object domain, then the monofocal restriction of natural science to
instrumental reason was hard to justify. Could science be otherwise? What else
might it be?
This was not, however, an argument that Habermas or his followers happened
upon. Habermas’s next project, his theory of communicative action, essentially took
the instrumental picture of science as given.103 His identification of science with
instrumental reason did carry, and widely. It carried as part of a much broader body
of thinking, in which many other commentators, among them Heidegger, loomed
large. Certainly, Heidegger and Habermas took their arguments in different
directions. Habermas carefully said that he was not condemning natural science;
Heidegger’s criticism was more sweeping by far. The two also developed highly
divergent assessments of what should be done with and about science.104 But they
still had a great deal in common. Besides Habermas’s own Heideggerian origins,
they shared a common point of departure in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century reactions to positivism, as well as a partly overlapping trajectory through
the nuclear era.
Of course, positivism itself framed the argument that science’s essence was
circumscribed by prediction and control. Its flat view of science, like its flattened
view of its history, had originated in a particular intellectual moment. It was brought
to bear on a thoroughly scientized age by positivism’s opponents, but only by
leaving some of science’s complications out of the picture. Simply holding onto the
positivist view of science—even intensifying it in the face of the twentieth century’s
methodological challenges—was a kind of philosophical shortcut. It was a shortcut
Footnote 102 continued

quantum mechanics), pp. 374–376 (addressing certain transcendental-sounding propositions advanced by
von Weizsäcker).
103
Habermas (1981d). That massive Weberian-Husserlian undertaking was written up in the Max Planck
Institute for Research on the Conditions of Life in the Scientific-Technical World, which Habermas
co-directed in the 1970s with Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. See Drieschner (1996) and von Weizsäcker
(1981); for Heisenberg’s role, (Carson 2010a, ch. 10). Habermas’s group in the institute carried out a
program of study on the planning of research and the ‘‘finalization of science’’; cf. van den Daele et al.
(1979). The project developed Habermas’s mid-1960s thinking on science policy but did not revisit his
philosophical point.
104
Habermas’s call to bring research under critical, reflective control would have struck Heidegger as
subjectivist and instrumental all over again.
123
that bypassed the empirical intricacies embodied in actual scientists like Heisenberg
and their thinking, in the service of a simple and polar conceptual scheme.
Acknowledgments I thank David Moshfegh, Michael Allen, Daniel Morat, Robert P. Crease, Paul
Forman, Arne Hessenbruch, Ulrich Wengenroth, Peter Eli Gordon, Dirk Moses, Ralph Dumain, and
Matthias Dörries for discussions, and reviewers of an earlier version of this essay for helpful suggestions.
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How Heidegger and Habermas Viewed Science Through Heisenberg

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How Heidegger and Habermas Viewed Science Through Heisenberg

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Cont Philos Rev (2010) 42:483–509

Science as instrumental reason: Heidegger, Habermas,

Published online: 5 December 2009

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

Keywords Martin Heidegger Jürgen Habermas Werner Heisenberg

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

3 Science and the modern age

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6 Between reason and politics: tacking maneuvers

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

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

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

7 Natural science and human interests

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

Footnote 102 continued

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