Carleton B. Christensen. What Does (the Young) Heidegger Mean by the Seinsfrage ? Version of record first published: 06 Nov 2010.
Thus, the suggestion that the student of nature must cast nature in the role of a witness has a double sense, a double sense nicely captured by Kant’ s use of the word ‘Entwurf’ . The word means not just ‘plan’ , but also ‘draft’ , in particular, a ‘rough, initial draft’ or ‘sketch’ . It is in fact a noun derived from the verb ‘entwerfen’ , which means to sketch or draft something. At the same time, this verb derives from the German verb ‘werfen’ , which means to throw or to cast. So Kant is by no means simply saying that the revolutionary accomplishment in which modern science is born is the discovery and implementation of the experimental method. Rather, he is saying that the revolution lies in what precedes, at least logically, this discovery and implementation. Kant says that by applying the experimental method to nature, Reason produces nature selbst nach ihrem Entwurfe, that is, ‘according to its own rough draft or sketch’. So what precedes all modern scientific experiment, at least logically, but also in fact historically, in sixteenth-century discussions of method, is the initial drafting or sketching of nature which allows one to see natural phenomena as things to which the experimental method can be applied.
This Entwurf of nature is the radical accomplishment of the renaissance and early modernity, that which ultimately generates Galilean science and renders it not just a scientific revolution, a revolution within science, but the scientific revolution. Modern science only arises when and because early modernity ‘drafts’ (entwirft) a certain general picture of nature only relative to which nature can be seen as something which can be put in the witness box of scientifically experimental method. The rise and subsequent tremendous progress of the new science is simply the filling in, the painting out, of that sketch of nature which makes this radically new kind of natural inquiry possible in the first place. The very notion of experiment, of experimental method, in the distinctively modern sense, is constituted in this initial sketch of nature.
For indeed while experiment as such is nothing new, experiment in the specifically early modern and modern sense involves a number of distinctive, quite rich assumptions . Perhaps the most central of these is that natural entities and systems of such entities form wholes such that the states, proper ties, and dispositions of the whole are in some sense, and in particular, a causal sense, the resultant of the states, properties, and behaviours of the parts. This assumption is presupposed in any treatment of the natural processes initiated and observed in experimental situations as representative, hence indicative of general causal laws; it is what allows one to assume there to be in the experimental situation a genuine distinct ion between relevant and irrelevant features, e.g. between the colour of the liquid in the test tube and the fact that the clock on the lab wall has just struck twelve. It would also seem to be a condition of the possibility of describing the causes of the behaviour of natural phenomena mathematically. Finally, it would seem to rule out final and indeed teleological causes generally — whence the extraordinary polemic of proponents of the new science against final causes.
It is thus no accident that in the methodological discussions immediately preceding Galileo and the rise of modern science, this assumption is explicitly articulated, e.g. in the so-called Padua method of resolution and composition, the ‘analysis’ of observable natural wholes into their parts and then their ‘synthesis’ according to general principles in an explanatory model.8 It also clearly underlies early modern corpuscularist theories of matter and methodologically individualistic analyses of civil society, e.g. in Hobbes’ s Leviathan. Naturally, the sense in which observable natural phenomena are taken as functions of their parts is not exclusively causal. Complex motions , for example, are not causally complex aggregates of simple motions . For Galileo, the simple ‘constituent’ motions are linear, while for Ptolemy they are circular; the general idea of resolution and recomposition is thus not distinctively modern. What is distinctively modern is the universality with which this assumption comes to be applied, a universality founded in the success and fruitfulness of its specifically causal interpretation: the states, behaviours, and causal dispositions of natural things and systems are seen as causal resultants of the states, behaviours, and causal dispositions of their parts. Of course, this causal interpretation is also already anticipated in premodernity, for example, in ancient atomism. But only in early modernity is this ‘aggretative’ view of natural phenomena so successfully implemented that the general assumption becomes a received pattern or method for explaining nature.
The idea that natural science is made possible by a prior ontological Entwurf of nature brings us to one of the most central, constitutive claims of Marburg neo-Kantianism. If the new science is made possible by a prior general sketch of nature for which it is not itself responsible (even though the ongoing success of science may perhaps be regarded as in some sense justifying this picture), then the question arises as to where this picture comes from. According to the Marburg neo-Kantians, this ontological picture of what it is to be or to belong to nature does not just spring unprecedented from the head of Zeus. It is derivative — derivative from a prior conception of what it is to know nature and natural phenomena. In other words, the general ontological picture of nature originates in epistemological assumptions and presumptions about the correct way to know nature.