from other journal articles. Here information produces more information; things produce things. Processes come to be ignored almost in principle. Further investigation yields nothing more than the reproduction of itself.
If, at any point during this procedure, one endeavored to consult nature—an anthropologist investigates a people group by visiting with said group instead of merely consulting what has been published about said group—it becomes increasingly difficult to reduce these people to mere facts. We find that psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists who are in the field have difficulty reducing observations to basic facts about behavior. This is because people, provided you actually interact with them, resist being boxed into a category.
Suppose, for example, that a psychotherapist knew all about the nature of human psychopathology as it has been published in manuals. She understands psychopathology inside and out. However, as soon as the psychopath is consulted—interviewed or whatever—suddenly the diagnoses all seem ill-fitting, somewhat appropriate but also somewhat missing the bigger picture. There is, of course, a manual devoted to defining, with exacting detail, all of the diagnosable psychological illnesses that have been “discovered.” It’s called the Fifth Diagnostic and Statistical Manual on Mental Disorders (DSM-V). According to it, two people can be diagnosed as depressed and not share a single symptom in common.
Each of the academic disciplines have become entrenched in particular assumptions about Nature to such a degree that the Nature has eventually been reduced the pre-ontological assumptions about it—the abstractions about nature have replaced the concretions of nature.
We have been looking at two different ways of looking at nature: as a process and as a thing. Alfred North Whitehead differentiates these two approaches with terms that are delightfully informative: living and lifeless.
Where we have understood that Heidegger has discerned the ontological from the ontic, so too might we understand how Whitehead (1958) has discerned living and lifeless nature. Like Heidegger, Whitehead cautions against a science whose focus is restricted to what he terms “nature lifeless.” He explains,
Science can find no individual enjoyment in nature: Science can find no aim in nature: Science can find no creativity in nature; it finds mere rules of succession. These negations are true of Natural Science. They are inherent in its methodology. The reason for this blindness of Physical Science lies in the fact that such Science only deals with half the evidence provided by human experience. It divides the seamless coat—or, to change the metaphor into a happier form, it examines the coat, which is superficial, and neglects the body which is fundamental. (p. 211)
The detrimental consequences of “Natural Science”—that is, Heidegger’s ontic-science—are evident in the words of Whitehead. It is important to recognize that Whitehead does not have his arms crossed indignantly. Indeed, few have waved the flag of modern science more valiantly and piously than he. Whitehead is simply intent on pointing out that science, in its haste, has ignored the most fundamental part of Nature: the living part!
To be sure, the “rules of succession” that Whitehead sees in natural science are helpful in understanding the life of science. But these rules are not themselves alive—they are not capable of demonstrating enjoyment or creativity. When scientific discussion is restricted to the rules, one is left with “the grand doctrine of Nature as a self-sufficient, meaningless complex of facts. It is the doctrine of the autonomy of physical science” (p. 180). This includes manuals for the sake of still more manuals. Science takes on a life of its own, but rather than concrete experiences, it has only a succession of facts. This would be like mistaking a person’s coat for who they are as a person! Conan Doyle wrote a series of novels about such an approach to the world: Imagine that your niece has begun seeing somebody about whom she has grown increasingly serious. With talk of marriage, you decide to investigate said romantic partner. Upon their arrival to a family gathering, you take her partner’s coat and smuggle it into your laboratory. Here you proceed to do a comprehensive material analysis á la Sherlock-Holmes. From stitch-pattern and patchwork, you discern pedigree and aspirations; from an absent zipper-tooth, you discern frugality and trustworthiness; from oils lodged deeply into the fibers of cuff, you discern avocation; etc. Meanwhile, your niece and her partner are available for conversation in the adjacent room. The subject—now loading up on snack mix and polite conversation—has been ignored in dogmatic favor of the physical world of things! The coat might be a useful abstraction of the concrete process of being, but it cannot replace the person entirely.
Whitehead and Heidegger alike have identified the problematic consequences that stem from a fact-oriented science. For both of them, the fact-orientation focuses on the most lifeless and least interesting aspects of nature. Whitehead likened fact-orientation to mistaking the coat for its owner while Heidegger likened it to the superfluousness of writing manuals for the sake of more manuals. Although both men are critical of the fact-oriented contemporary sciences, neither are as critical as Husserl has been. You will remember that he was the mathematician from the Introduction who was asked to comment on the state of science just before the Second World War. Instead of applauding modern science, he argued that it was in crisis! Here’s what he has to say about the fact-orientation of this scientific program:
This “fact-world,” as the word already tells us, I find to be out there, and also take it just as it gives itself to me as a something that exists out there. All doubting and rejecting of the data of the natural world leaves standing the general thesis of the natural standpoint. “The” world is as fact-world always there; at the most it is at odd points “other” than I supposed, this or that under such names as “illusion,” “hallucination,” and the like, must be struck out of it, so to speak; but the “it” remains ever, in the more comprehensively, more trustworthily, more perfectly than the naïve lore of experience is able to do, and to solve all the problems of scientific knowledge which offer themselves upon its ground, that is the goal of the sciences of the natural standpoints. (2002, pp. 55–56)
It is apparent that Husserl is not impressed by the reduction of nature to a list of facts. If the consequences of maintaining such a perspective of nature are not evident in his description above, Husserl (1970) goes a bit further in his Crisis. He explains,
Merely fact-minded science makes merely fact-minded people …. [Fact-minded science] excludes in principle precisely the questions which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, find the most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence.… Scientific, objective truth is exclusively a matter of establishing what the world, the physical as well as the spiritual world, is in fact. But can the world, and human existence in it, truthfully have a meaning if the sciences recognize as true only what is objectively established in this fashion …? (pp. 6–7)
In each of these excerpts, Husserl demonstrates the lack of meaning inherent in a world that is exclusively interested in objective scientific fact. In the first instance, the anomalies in human perception—“‘illusion’, ‘hallucination’, and the like”—are understood to inhibit the recognition of nature. As such, they are to be struck from experience. Husserl argues that this is tantamount to striking the life out of nature and reducing it to mere objective fact. In the second instance, he goes a bit further in tracing out the consequences of a “fact-minded science.” This he defines as an institution that is in principle committed to extricating anything meaningful from experience!
In demonstrating the detrimental consequences of a materially-objective, modernist conception of nature, Husserl also insinuates the solution that he sees. In the first excerpt, the implication is that human perception—anomalies and all—must not only be included, but that this must be the starting point; and in the second excerpt, the constitution of nature is understood to come by way of meaningful human existence. In each instance, Husserl demonstrates the second tendency of a viciously bifurcated nature—that wrought by the humanists. Merleau-Ponty (2003) will be used to address this in the following Section.
