It may seem unfair to use medicine and psychology rather than physics to focus on the contrast between physical science and its methods on the one hand, and the phenomenological method on the other. But throughout his critical analysis of the modern scientific method, Heidegger emphasized the intimate relation between modern conceptions of method and modern conceptions of bodyhood. Tracing the modern scientific method back to its first formulation in the philosophy of Descartes, Heidegger sees its foundation in the Cartesian concept of a disembodied subject or ‘ego’, separate and independent of its objects, which makes the self-certainty of its own independent reality (“I think therefore I am”) and its own mathematical reasoning into the measure of all things. That this disembodied ego happens to be mysteriously located in some physical body object only confirms its own separation from those other bodies that are the objects of physical-scientific investigation. Out of this concept comes a ‘scientific’ definition of truth which rules out in advance all that cannot be quantitatively measured and calculatively predicted with the highest degree of mathematical certainty or probability. The root meaning of the word phenomenon is phainesthai – to shine forth or come to light. The purpose of the modern scientific method is not, as in Greek to let phenomena show themselves or come to light in their essential nature, but rather to secure with maximum calculative certainty the reckonability, predictability and controllability of both nature and man.
Modern ‘scientific method’ is in this sense the credo of what today has been termed the ‘control freak’. Calculation and control however, are themselves a specific mode of relatedness to the world. But this mode of relatedness to the world, that governs the methodical scientific procedures of the physicist, chemist or biologist is not itself anything physical, chemical or biological, nor is it the object of any possible experiment. It is a way of being in the world in which the researcher’s mental attitude is all important but in which the scientist’s felt bodily relation to space and time, things and people, has no place. For the human body itself is seen as a physical body-object no different in essence from any other.
The scientist takes the standpoint that their own “I” is here, whilst the object, whether thing or person, is ‘over there’ or ‘out there’, to be viewed at a distance through the lens of some body organ or instrument. Phenomenologically understood, things are quite different however. Our “being-in-the-world” is not a composite of three discrete elements: an ego or “I”, a body-object, and the world understood as a set of other body-objects. For our being ‘here’ is at the same time a being ‘there’ with, and as I will suggest within those other body objects.
“When I direct someone towards a windowsill with a gesture of my right hand, my bodily existence as a human being does not end at the tip of my index finger. While perceiving the windowsill….I extend myself bodily far beyond this fingertip to that windowsill. In fact, bodily I reach out even further than this to touch all the phenomena, present or merely visualized, represented ones.”
What appears as the physical phenomenon of space is the space of our own bodily awareness of the world. The space of our body’s sensory awareness of the world has a non-local or field character — it is not bounded by the spatial dimensions of our own bodies viewed as localized objects within that space. Fundamental science is field-phenomenological science, dispensing with the notion that subjectivity or awareness is something localized within objects in physical space (the human brain for example) and recognizing instead its own intrinsic spatiality, its non-local or field character.
The second major principle of the phenomenological method as Heidegger presents it, is awareness of our own mode of relatedness to things, our way of “being-in-the world”. But there is no way of being in the world, not even that of the model modern scientist, that is not grounded in a particular relation to our own bodies, and to our own felt, bodily relation to the world. The question for Heidegger is only whether we fully let ourselves into this felt bodily relation to the world, whether we become aware of it or whether we reduce our own bodyhood to a mere object for a disembodied subject or “I”, an object that is in ‘space’ in the manner of a physical object. Heidegger challenges the whole idea that our own bodies stand ‘in’ space in the same way that a glass of water stands on a table, that they are seated on chairs in the same way that a cushion might be, or that they move in essentially the same manner as billiard balls. It is not my body that rests on the chair upon which I sit. I rest on the seat in a bodily way. My seatedness, like my potential movements in space, and like my perception of other objects in space, are not states, actions or perceptions of an independent body-object. They are different ways in which I body my own being in the world. But as Heidegger points out:
“We know by now a great deal — almost more than we can encompass — about what we call the body, without having seriously thought about what bodying is. It is something more and different from merely ‘carrying a body around with one’.”
The modern scientific method is itself the embodiment of a particular way of being in the world, and of a particular mode of relatedness, not only to the world, but to our own bodies. It was in the course of the nineteenth century that this method firmly established itself. But as Nietzsche already recognized at the time: “It is not the victory of science that characterizes our 19th century, but the victory of scientific method over science.” Quoting this statement of Nietzsche’s, Heidegger adds, that for this method, what is primary is “not nature, as it addresses itself to mankind…but how mankind, with the intention of conquering nature should represent nature to itself.” It is “the most monstrous assault of mankind on nature”. The conclusion from these remarks is a simple one. Science is not something to be abandoned to superstition, substituted for with the symbols of archaic spiritual traditions, or sacrificed to the demands of corporate profit-making. Nor, however, is it something that can any more be left to those scientists, who, as disciples of the modern scientific method, remain in bondage to their own dogmas. In doing so they have reduced themselves to the status of corporate servants, paid to dish up an endless supply of new technologies with which not only nature but our own human nature — our bodies themselves — can be psychologically, chemically and genetically assaulted, all in the holy name of ‘science’.