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April 10, 2005
In our contemporary, technologico-scientific age, the insurrection of subjective judgment or value thinking means that "the authority of individual conscience" has utterly assumed the position of the vanished authority of God and of the teaching of the Office of the Church.
We can link Heidegger's tracing of this modern metaphysics in Nihilism with the contemporary work on the history of philosophy. An example is that undertaken by the Carol Merchant on the mechanical view of nature held by seventeenth-century philosophy and science. Merchant says that, twentieth-century advances in relativity and quantum theory notwithstanding, our western commonsense reality is the world of classical physics.
"The legacy left by Newton was the brilliant synthesis of Galilean terrestrial mechanics and Copernican-Keplerian astronomy. Fundamental in generality, it describes and extends over the entire universe. Classical physics and its philosophy structure our consciousness to believe in a world composed of atomic parts, of inert bodies moving with uniform velocity unless forced by another body to deviate from their straight-line paths, of objects seen by reflected light of varying frequencies, and of matter in motion responsible for all the rich variations in colors, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches we cherish as human beings."
Merchant says that the following metaphysical assumptions about the structure of being, knowledge, and method make possible the human manipulation and control of nature.
"1. Matter is composed of particles (the ontological assumption).
2. The universe is a natural order (the principle of identity).
3. Knowledge and information can be abstracted from the natural world (the assumption of context independence).
4. Problems can be analyzed into parts that can be manipulated by mathematics (the methodological assumption).
5. Sense data are discrete (the epistemological assumption)".
These assumptions have meant that science since the seventeenth century has been widely considered to be objective, value-free, context-free knowledge of the external world.
Merchant then connects these metaphysical assumptions to mechanism, (nature is a machine). She says that the new metaphysical understanding of reality in seventeenth-century philosophy and science was:
"... consistent with, and analogous to, the structure of machines. Machines (1) are made up of parts, (2) give particulate information about the world, (3) are based on order and regularity, (perform operations in an ordered sequence), (4) operate in a limited precisely defined domain of the total context, and (5) give us power over nature. In turn, the mechanical structure of reality (1) is made up of atomic parts, (2) consists of discrete information bits extracted from the world, (3) is assumed to operate according to laws and rules, (4) is based on context-free abstraction from the changing complex world of appearance, and (5) is defined so as to give us maximum capability for manipulation and control over nature."
This gives us a calculative-instrumental form of reason that can be deployed as a force of techne. This technological notion of reason merely commodifies physls, turns it into consumable energy, and so furthers Descartes's and Bacon's dream of technological mastery of the earth.
This then is the metaphysics that Heidegger explores in Chapter 15 of his Nihilism book (vol.4 of Nietzsche).Entitled 'The Dominance of the Subject in the Modern Age', it is concerned with the modern Cartesian notion of the self as the active master of its own fate, the one who by dint of its own willful determination employs technology as the means for subduing the earth.
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