On the narratives of science: The critique of modernity in Husserl and Heidegger (original) (raw)
It is therefore impossible to judge the existence or validity of narrative knowledge on the basis of scientific knowledge and vice versa: the relevant criteria are different. All we can do is gaze in wonderment at the diversity of discursive species, just as we do at the diversity of plants or animal species. Lyotard (1984: 26) Throughout both Husserl's late writings and Heidegger's contemporary criticism of the technological age, 1 runs a sustained invective intention, an intellectual motiv that not only restages philosophy's age-old indictment of science, but also calls into question the project of European modernity. In this last incarnation, however, philosophy seems to have abandoned the (ethical) case against Promethean hybris. Rather than a normative, metaphysical, or transcendental, critique of science, the texts at issue appear to me as episodes of a different kind in the history of knowledge/discourse: one where philosophy seems to initially acknowledge its own exteriority in order to question, not science, but the historical conditions that made its rise possible.. In 1935, the year of the Vienna lecture, the theme of a crisis, cultural and historical, was definitely in the air (Hitler's rise to power as well as Heisenberg's discoveries in atomic physics serving as clear reminders) and Husserl appealed to a medical vocabulary to describe it: "the European nations are sick; Europe itself, it is said, is in crisis" (Husserl, * Paper presented at the annual Meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences, in conjunction with the Society for Phenomenotogy and Existential Philosophy. Boston 1992.