What’s in a word?1
The German word Wissenschaft dates from the fourteenth century, when it was coined in order to translate the same Latin sciens, scientia from which the English term “science” was also derived. Nevertheless, Wissenschaft implies a more complex set of associations than does science tout court. To begin with, it carries with its translation of scientia an array of etymological connections via wissen, to know, to the old High German wizzan and the old Anglo-Saxon wita. As a noun corresponding to wissen, Wissenschaft denotes rather than connotes the ways or conduits of knowing (as heard in English only with the archaic wis, to show the way or instruct, or wist, to know, and these scarcely survive at all). Knowledge as such, or Erkenntnis, does not by contrast necessarily suggest ways or conduits of knowing at all; nor does it have any necessary or specific connection with science.
The English word “science”, by contrast with Wissenschaft, is not an Anglo-Saxon word even by extension. It is rooted in the Latin scire, to know, and is arguably also related to scindere, to cut or divide. As such, science is a word that has associations that are all its own. It has had its “non-Arts” designation only since the eighteenth century, prior to which science could mean artistry, technique, expertise or virtuosity (a usage that survives, as Babette Babich has impishly indicated,2 in Minnesota Fats’s boast that he has his game of pool “down to a science”; here, “fine art” could substitute for “science” directly, as it would have in the Middle Ages). While Wissenschaft, for its part, has, in modern German, increasingly come to share science’s limiting focus on the mathematical or natural sciences, its usage to this very day remains much broader, much more comprehensive, than any such limiting focus might imply. The
Wildhagen-Héraucourt German-English Dictionary defines Wissenschaft initially as natural science, but then goes on immediately to define it as “learning, scholarship, erudition, and knowledge”. Wissenschaft, that is to say, entails rigorous, systematic pursuits of knowledge in a variety of areas not coverable by the mathematical and natural sciences as these are understood in the English-speaking world.
If Wissenschaft once referred purely and simply to knowledge – as in Goethe’s davon hab’ ich kein Wissenschaft – it corresponds in more modern usage, then, to the collective pursuits of or paths to different kinds of knowledge. It is a more comprehensive term than science is usually taken to be. Accordingly, the Wahrig Dictionary defines Wissenschaft as “geordnetes, vollgerichtig, aufgebautes, zusammenhändiges Gebiet von Erkenntnissen”, a more capacious understanding than most English definitions of science would entail. In keeping with this difference in catchment, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, in at least one of its editions, itself distinguishes science from Wissenschaft. The former is defined as “the state or fact of knowing; knowledge or cognizance of something specified or implied”, the latter as “(the systematic pursuit of) knowledge, science, learning, scholarship”. (In French, as we shall see, la science, according to any French-English Dictionary I know, means knowledge first, and science second.) Wissenschaft as reduced to the ordered, systematic disciplinary area of knowledge, of something specified rather than implied, corresponds only to the Shorter OED’s last sub-entry: “The kind of organized knowledge or intellectual activity of which the various branches of learning are examples.” For this and other reasons it is salutary to recall that Max Weber’s celebrated address of 1919, “Wissenschaft als Beruf”, is about what its title says it is about – not science in the narrower, English-language sense (which merely provides the most immediate hook on which to hang a translation) but Wissenschaft. This is why Weber’s Address tells us so little about science as we have come to understand the term in English, and so much about academic life as a framework for the pursuit of a scholarly vocation or calling
In view of these differences, the sheer breadth of professional Wissenschaften in contemporary German usage should not surprise us. German academic fields of study can generally be expressed as so many Wissenschaften: Musikwissenschaft, Literaturwissenschaft, Museumswissenschaft, and Kunstwissenschaft may serve as examples. No-one before Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) nailed down what was to become a key distinction between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften, a distinction that, while it overlaps with C.P. Snow’s juxtaposition of the “two cultures”, certainly cannot be mapped on to it with any exactness, since the term Geisteswissenschaften – spiritual sciences – will still have a peculiar ring to it in English. Even “human sciences” is a less common formulation in English than are les sciences humaines in French. (Les sciences are almost always pluralized in French, whereas science in English is most often put in the singular.)
But even if we know in advance that Wissenschaften at large cover more ground than the activities conventionally marshalled under the banner of science in English, Friedrich Nietzsche’s identification of himself as a man of science may still strike an English-speaker as odd, or as being a mere figure of speech. But it is neither. It was, to begin with, a literal description of Nietzsche’s professional standing as a philologist, even though classical philology, a Wissenschaft among other Wissenschaften (as no German-speaker would have disputed) would hardly qualify as a science, as this term is and was understood in English. More broadly, however, Nietzsche, when he opened his Genealogy of Morals with the admonition that “we are lost to ourselves, we men of science”,3 was suggesting that his standing and formation as a philologist entitled him to generalize about the lack of self-knowledge exhibited by “men of science” in general, this being a claim that Wissenschaft would allow him to advance while science, in the more restricted English sense, would not. Science in English, despite (or because of) its singularity, seems designed to distinguish – to distinguish one kind of knowledge or scholarship from another or others, as in the paradigm of the natural sciences once these are held to be prototypical for the meaning of science at large. By contrast, Nietzsche’s “gay science”, as Heidegger (an astute reader of Nietzsche) was aware, has to do with an exuberant joy of learning. “The term Wissenschaft,” said Heidegger (of Nietzsche), “resounds with passion (Leidenschaft), the passion of a well-grounded mastery over the things that confront us and over our own ways of responding to what confronts us”.4 To render Wissenschaft in this sentence as “science” in the narrower, English-language sense is to rob Heidegger’s point of all meaning, and even to miss Heidegger’s broader claim that the growth of what he called Machenschaft or machination, the monotonic play of technical calculability, itself constitutes a wholly ominous threat.
Heidegger, as is well known, entertained the deepest doubts about Machenschaft and regarded it as a form of estrangement from being, and his erstwhile student Herbert Marcuse was, more pointedly, to link technological reasoning with illegitimate forms of domination.5 He did so under the influence of Western Marxism at large, and under the additional impress of Horkheimer and Adorno’s view, given memorable expression in their Dialectic of Enlightenment,6 that science had long reflected hierarchy and coercion. Hegelian Marxists were by no means alone in their various perceptions of the downside of scientific and technological advance. They simply had their own way(s) of accounting for and
characterizing something that was sufficiently well-marked to have been noticed by many others (including student radicals and academic philosophers of science) at the time. Althusser, from all published appearances, was alone among Western Marxist theorists in having ignored it, as we shall see in Chapter 6. In view of this startling omission, the least that can be said as a preliminary point is that Althusser, in his concern to strike against the received ideas of Hegelian Marxism succeeds, despite himself, in casting one of them – the negative implications of unfettered scientific advance – into stark relief.
To make this point is to raise another one. It is consonant with the overall argument of the present study that if we contrast Wissenschaft (in its broader, German sense) with science (in its narrower, English sense), then Marx can be seen, readily enough, as having discussed, and as having made arguments about, the former. Engels on the other hand was concerned to make (and became preoccupied with making) markedly more ambitious claims about the latter, and to do so in such a way as to run Wissenschaft and science together, as though there were no significant differences between the two.7 This is a point to which we will obviously return, mainly in Chapter 2, since Engels’s conflation of Wissenschaft and science produced enormous subsequent (and consequent) confusion, as we are about to see.
1 Unpublished communication. My “Preface” is greatly indebted to Babette Babich. The reader is referred to her Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Science: Reflecting Science on the Grounds of Art and Life, Albany, State University of New York Press, 1994, passim; “Nietzsche’s Critique of Science and Scientific Culture”, in G. Moore and T. Brobjer, eds, Nietzsche and Science, Aldershot, Avebury Press, 2003; and “Heidegger’s Relation to Nietzsche’s Thinking: Connivance, Nihilism and Value”, New Nietzsche Studies, 3/3, 1999, pp. 23–52.
2 C.P. Snow, The Two Cultures, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1959. Also New York, Mentor, 1964, passim.
3 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, tr. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, ed. W. Kaufmann, New York, Vintage, 1989, p. 15.
4 Martin Heidegger, Zollikon Seminars: Protocols-Conversations-Letters, tr. Franz Mayr and Richard Askay, ed. Medard Boss, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2001, p. 20. I am indebted to Babette Babich for this reference.
5 Herbert Marcuse, “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology”, in Technology, War and Fascism: Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, ed. D. Kellner, New York and London, Routledge, 1998, vol. I, p. 49.
6 First published Amsterdam, 1947. English translation by John Cumming, New York, Continuum/Herder and Herder, 1972.
7 See in particular Terrell Carver, “Marx and Marxism,” in T.M. Porter and D. Ross, eds, Cambridge History of Science, vol. 7, The Modern Social Sciences, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002.