Science and the End of Modernity

Abstract

Where are we now after such a long and oblique journey? What, after all, is science; what is its subject and its object; what is its place in our life-world, and how can it be vindicated? Is it a complex but still reliable and rational endeavour, or rather a contingent social construction; is it only a manifestation, or one of the driving forces, or the essential determining factor of our mode of existence? In the previous chapters some of the answers have been adumbrated by claiming, first, that the basic presupposition of the Scientific Revolution, i.e. the idea of self-transcendence (by purification and bracketing) of the historical human knowing subject, is neither realisable nor necessary for understanding of how science came about and what is its epistemological legitimation. Then, it was argued that the classical naturalistic, that is, species universal, biological, and anthropological account of the subject is insufficient because it leaves us with an unfinished, incomplete being. It has also been suggested that some sort of “historicised Kantianism” (as Marx Wartofsky would call it), with history naturalised, would be the most appropriate approach to answering those questions. This means that a historical pre-understanding of and attitude toward the world is both unavoidable and indispensable for science to emerge. Historicity means that no human cognitive achievement, philosophy and science included, may aspire to even species-wide, far less species-transcending or divine, truth. Neither Baconian purge, nor Cartesian doubt, nor Carnapian abstraction can make human cognition collapse into Identity between Pure Reason and Reality, Language and the World, Knowledge and the Object. The fancy of the privileged position of humans from which the Divine Blueprint can be seen and captured in scientific theories, can be supported by religion but not by philosophy, and especially not by science. From elementary perception to sophisticated performance human subjects are engaged in precarious, historically-changing interpretation rather than in blessed depiction of the world.