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From Vita Contemplativa to VitaActiva: Modern

Instrumentalization of Theoryand the Problem of Measure

Elizabeth Brient

Abstract

In this paper I examine three historically signicant readings of the epochaltransition from the Middle Ages to the modern world: that provided byAlexandre Koyr in From the Closed World to the Innite Universe, that ofHans Blumenberg in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age and that of Hannah

Arendt in The Human Condition. Each of these readings isolates crucialaspects of the epochal transition which contribute to an understanding ofthe loss or transformation of traditional measures for knowing and doingconsequent upon the shift from the contemplative to the active life.Blumenberg provides a philosophical explanation for the cosmological shiftwhich Koyr describes, while Arendt thematizes the dangers inherent in theloss of an ethical measure which accompanies this transition. Yet bothBlumenberg and Arendt conclude that the search for a world-immanentepistemological measure, which would allow us to gauge the adequacy ofour descriptions of the world, is not simply a problem for the modern

philosopher to address, but rather an impossibility already abandoned in thetransition to the modern age. I argue that, on the contrary, such a measureis a requisite of the modern scientic enterprise.

Keywords : Blumenberg, Arendt, contemplation, action,instrumentalization, measure

The epochal transition from the medieval to the modern world has long

been understood as fundamentally determined by the emergence of thenew science and the radical changes in self- and world-understandingwhich accompanied it. The otherworldly orientation of the theocentricMiddle Ages with its overriding emphasis on transcendent goals had togive way to the immanent aims of modern man in this world if the shift

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from the vita contemplativa to that of the vita activa was to be realized.In this transition human self-understanding gradually shifted from that ofthe spectators and admirers of divine creation to that of (as Descartes putit) lords and masters of nature.1 If knowledge of the world is gained

passively by contemplation in the Middle Ages spelled out in terms ofeither divine illumination or abstraction from sense perception it is wonthrough active reconstruction in the modern age. Hence, the shift in humanself-understanding is mirrored by a corresponding change in the functionand nature of theory. Similarly the world, as object of theoretical inquiry,itself undergoes a radical transformation. The cosmos of the Middle Agesis a nite, well-ordered whole, a closed hierarchy whose order and value(indeed its very being) are granted by an innite and benevolent God.

In the transition to the modern age, the world comes to acquire thedivine attribute of innite being, but only at the price of the destructionof this ancient order and the unmooring of humanity from its place inthat meaningful totality.

In what follows, I propose to look at three historically signicant read-ings of this transition: that of Alexandre Koyr in From the Closed Worldto the Innite Universe, that of Hans Blumenberg in The Legitimacy ofthe Modern Age and that of Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition.2

Each of these readings isolates crucial aspects of the epochal transitionwhich contribute to an understanding of the loss of traditional measuresfor human action and for human knowing consequent upon this radicaltransformation in self and world understanding. Blumenberg provides aphilosophical explanation for the cosmological shift which Koyr describes,while Arendt thematizes the dangers inherent in the loss of an ethicalmeasure which accompanies this transition. Yet both Blumenberg andArendt conclude that the search for a world-immanent epistemological

measure, which would allow us to gauge the adequacy of our descriptionsof the world, is not simply a problem for the modern philosopher toaddress, but rather an impossibility already abandoned in the transitionto the modern age. I will argue that, on the contrary, such a measure isa requisite of the modern scientic enterprise.

I

Alexandre Koyrs From the Closed World to the Innite Universe providesthe framework for what has become a standard reading of the transitionfrom the medieval to the modern world-view.3 Here Koyr outlines thegradual process of the destruction of the medieval cosmos and the inni-tization of the universe from the fteenth to the eighteenth century. Thiswas a process, Koyr writes, in which man lost his place in the world, or,

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his fundamental concepts and attributes, but even the very framework ofhis thought.4 This revolution entailed the disappearance from philo-sophical and scientic thought of the conception of nature as kosmos, thatis, as a well-ordered, teleologically determined whole, in which the hier-

archy of value determined the hierarchy and structure of being.

5

In itsplace arose an innite universe, bound together only by the identity ofits fundamental components and by the universality of the laws whichgoverned their motion. In the new cosmology innite, eternal, homo-geneous space is lled with atomically structured bodies, in turn governedby universal, mathematically articulated, laws.

Implied in this shift, Koyr underscores, is the discarding by scienticthought of all considerations based upon value-concepts, such as perfec-

tion, harmony, meaning and aim, and nally the utter devalorization ofbeing, the divorce of the world of value and the world of facts.6 HenceKoyr concludes his study with the following observation:

The innite Universe of the New Cosmology, innite in Duration aswell as in Extension, in which eternal matter in accordance witheternal and necessary laws moves endlessly and aimlessly in eternalspace, inherited all the ontological attributes of Divinity. Yet only

those all the others the departed God took away with Him.7

The innite universe of the new science presents itself as strangelypurposeless, bereft of the value and meaning which had dened the verynature of the ancient cosmos. That value came to be located more andmore outside this stark, factical reality would seem to be a natural conse-quence of the move toward the mechanization and mathematization ofthe world picture.8

Indeed, the commitment to objectivity which governs the new sciencedemands the translation of the particular experience into a language thatis non-perspectival, a language that is not essentially tied to the sensateand interested perspective of a particular knower. Objective realityis thus dissociated from the meaningful and the sensible and is under-stood as the ideal object of an equally ideal disinterested, disembodieda-perspectival subject.9 Thus, only primary qualities are recognized ashaving a basis in reality, and secondary qualities (the building blocks of

Aristotelian science) are irrevocably tied to sensible appearance. Similarly,the new science moves to eliminate all but efcient causes from the inter-pretation of nature, that is, to interpret all physical phenomena as matterin motion. Mathematics provides the ideal language for a science of naturewhose form of description is based on measurable and thus objectivelydeterminate and determinable primary qualities.

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of facts is a consequence of the world-view instituted by the new science and this is an assumption that is all too often taken for granted incontemporary discussions historically, I believe, it can be shown that thereverse is the case. It was actually the transformation of the ancient kosmos

into a mute world of facticity in the theological speculation of late medievalnominalism which made possible the radical shifts in self and world under-standing which characterize the modern era. It is here that Blumenbergsreading of the epochal transition in The Legitimacy of the Modern Ageis particularly illuminating and provides an important corrective to thestandard account provided by Koyr.

II

Blumenberg holds that the turn to active, reconstructive engagement inthe world so characteristic of the modern age was rst made possible,indeed, was impelled by a fundamental shift in the character of the worldssignicance for humanity at the end of the Middle Ages.

A disappearance of order [Ordnungsschwund], causing doubtregarding the existence of a structure of reality that can be related

to man, is the presupposition of a general conception of humanactivity that no longer perceives in given states of affairs the bindingcharacter of the ancient and medieval cosmos, and consequentlyholds them to be, in principle, at mans disposal. . . . The reality thatat the end of the Middle Ages comes to be seen as fact [factum:something done or made, i.e. a contingent state of affairs] provokesthe will to oppose it and concentrates the wills attention upon it. 10

The modern turn to a self-assertive, self-realizing stance in the world thuspresupposes the facticity of reality concomitant upon the loss of a cosmosteleologically ordered to human needs. Blumenberg, in turn, traces thisOrdnungsschwund to the theological absolutism of William of Ockhamand the school of late medieval nominalism.

In the wake of the Condemnation of 1277,11 nominalist theologians ofthe fourteenth century were concerned to defend the doctrine of divinefreedom from any apparent necessities philosophically derived from the

order of nature. Gods absolutely free will was posited as the fundamentaltheological premise, and Gods omnipotence was elevated to the rank ofthe primary divine attribute. This intensifying of the attribute of divineomnipotence had a destructive effect on the medieval cosmos insofar asthe created world came to be grasped by the nominalists as the expres-sion not primarily of Gods goodness or of his wisdom, but rst and



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but its utter facticity, its radically contingent existence as the immediateresult of an absolute will.

Such immediacy undermined the security and stability of the ancientworld system. For Ockham, Gods potentia ordinata (the way things are

in fact at each moment) is only a particular expression of his potentiaabsoluta (Gods absolute power to arrange the world however he choosesat any given time).13 Hence, an innity of possible worlds corresponds toGods potentia absoluta, with the principle of non-contradiction actingas the sole limitation on the range of possibilities. And although thepotentia ordinata represents the divine choice of one actual world, thischoice cannot be rationally accounted for. As a result, the world ordainedby Gods unbounded will no longer presents itself as divinely ordered to

human reason and human needs. It is an indifferent and essentially arbi-trary reality, indeed, one in which the term reality no longer connotesan order of being or a degree of perfection, but simply comes to meanthat which is the case.

It is Blumenbergs thesis in the Legitimacy of the Modern Age that itwas precisely this alienated and alienating quality of the world whichopened up a new horizon of existential possibility: active engagement inthe world aimed at the alteration and transformation of this now indif-

ferent reality.14

The utter facticity of the world became, according toBlumenberg, an irritation and provocation for a rehabilitation of theo-retical curiosity15 and a radical turn toward technicity. The perceiveddeciency of nature vis--vis human needs became the motive force behindmans activity as a whole, and human self-assertion16 the existentialprogramme of the modern age.

The success of this programme, Blumenberg points out, depended onthe prior restriction and refocusing of traditional epistemological preten-

sions carried out by the late medieval nominalists. Confronted by theabsolutism of divine omnipotence, divine reason could no longer func-tion as a meaningful measure for human knowledge of the world.Theological voluntarism had thus necessarily humbled human epistemo-logical pretension, so that hypothesis rather than theoria emerged as theappropriate theoretical attitude when faced with the mute facticity ofnature. Since nominalist theoreticians still maintained the ancient andmedieval cognitive ideal of truth as adequacy to what is, however, they

were compelled to resign themselves to the impossibility of conclusivedemonstration in the science of nature. The emergence of modern sciencedepended, according to Blumenberg, on surrendering the theoretical claimto adaequatio, and reconceptualizing theory as hypothesis.

Nominalistic explanations of the world further provided the structuralframework, Blumenberg claims, for an understanding of reality which



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remained hidden from human reason, pure (qualityless, homogeneous)matter was postulated as the minimal substrate of nature. And sincethe postulated matter was meaningless in itself, it presented itself as amalleable substratum subject to human rationality and technical mastery.

We may not know how nature actually operates, reasoned the earlymodern theoretician, but we can construct mathematically sound modelswhich can accurately predict its behaviour. The production of desiredphenomena then becomes a (sometimes simple, sometimes complicated)matter of the reconstruction of, or articial intervention in, observedprocesses.

In this way hypothesis, experiment and technicity became tools forhuman self-assertion in the face of a natural world which is not teleo-

logically ordered with an eye toward human interests. Modern man tookit upon himself to make up for the perceived inadequacies of natures prod-ucts through productions of his own. This shift in mans theoretical relationto the world, from the blissful repose of the vita contemplativa to that oflaborious reconstruction in the vita activa, is characterized on the one handby surrender of the traditional claim to truth as adaequatio, and on theother by this new use of theory to recreate the world, this time in a humanimage.19 Indeed, Blumenberg claims that modern consciousness is neither

directed to nor sustained by a correspondence between our ideas of natureand what actually exists. Human classication is set over and against theabundance of authentic reality, not in an attempt to prove itself adequateto that reality, but in order to project onto the factically given reality thehuman reality to be produced.

Insofar as Descartes had attempted to secure a guarantee for the corre-spondence between our clear and distinct ideas and the world in hisMeditations, Blumenberg claims, he was still operating within a medieval

epistemological framework, and it wasnt until he relinquished this cogni-tive ideal in his Principles of Philosophy, insists Blumenberg, that hearrived at a modern measure for theoretical accomplishment. ThereDescartes grants that the scientist as model-builder can have no guaranteethat his models of natural processes accurately reect the actualworkingsof nature. But if they save the appearances, i.e. give a consistent, plau-sible account, then they provide a sufcient certainty for application toordinary life, even though they may be uncertain in relation to the absolute

power of God.20The modern approach to knowledge of nature, Blumenberg holds,

is characterized by a rational expediency directed at the production ofphenomena rather than at a share of the truth possessed by God.

As an instrument of self-assertion, theory has no need of the luxury



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and the theoretical attitude into the functional complex of the imma-nent teleology of human self-assertion, and weakens its until then irreducible claim to truth.21

Hence both the function and nature of theory is radically transformed inthe modern age. Theory no longer means theoria; it is no longer thecontemplation of truth, no longer the vehicle for the reception of reality,where reality is the meaningful expression of divine wisdom and order.Once theorys essential and immediate connection to truth was broken inlate medieval nominalism, it was freed up to be used as a tool of self-assertion. Theory directed toward nature had already become hypothesis,and its adoption as an instrument of self-assertion in the modern age trans-

formed hypothesis into a theoretical construct to be tested by manipulatingnature in the experiment, and then applied for the betterment of humanlife in this world.

Once theory is identied with hypothesis in this way, however, it losesits status as an end in itself. For the ancient and medieval theoretician,contemplation of the truth was not a means to some further end, butan end in itself, constitutive of human happiness and fullment. Themodern theoretician, however, no longer nds fullment in the quasi-

divine life of contemplation, but uses theory instrumentally as a meansto world reconstruction.22 The [early-modern] investigator of nature,writes Blumenberg, had to reconstruct the connection between cognitivetruth and nding happiness in a different way if, following FrancisBacons new formula, domination over nature was to be a preconditionof the recovery of paradise.23 Again, however, as Blumenberg is quickto point out, the loss of the immanent value of theory (the bondbetween the contemplation of truth and human happiness) cannot be

viewed as the result of theorys instrumentalization, but is, rather, itsprecondition:

Theory that can no longer be anything but hypothesis has reallyalready lost its immanent value, its status as an end in itself; thusthe functionalization of theory for arbitrarily chosen ends, its entryinto the role of a technique, of a means, is a process subsequent tothe loss of its status as an end in itself.24

Be that as it may, the functionalization of theory as a means to the recon-struction of reality clearly raises new and pressing problems for the modernage. What is to be the measure of our making (or remaking) of the world?What the measure of human happiness and fullment? Can self-assertion,as an existential attitude toward the world, ground meaningful human



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III

Hannah Arendt would agree with Blumenberg that the emergence of themodern age is characterized by the reversal of the traditional hierarchybetween the vita contemplativa and the vita activa, and that it is the

mentality of homo faber(man the maker) which guides the early moderntheoretical enterprise. She would also agree with Blumenbergs assess-ment that the power and success of the new science depended onrelinquishing the traditional measure of truth as adaequatio in the turnto modern world reconstruction. Arendt would be made uneasy, however,by the apparent readiness with which Blumenberg identies the instru-mentalization of theory with the modern theoretical enterprise as a whole,so that he reads progress of knowledge immediately in terms of modern

self-assertion, that is, in terms of the extension of the mastery of reality.25

Indeed, Arendt thematizes the threat of world-loss which results from theelision of value in the theoretical commitment to universal objectivitywhich guides the new science, that is, loss of reality as it is given in concrete,context-imbedded, meaningful experience.

Like Blumenberg, Arendt emphasizes that the modern age is heraldedby a fundamental transformation of the traditional concept of truthand of theory. The traditional assumption that reality is given to the human

knower, i.e. that what truly is will appear of its own accord to the contem-plative beholder, whose capacities are adequate to receive it, gave way tothe conviction that only interference with appearance indeed, only thedoing away with appearances altogether could offer any hope for a truescience of nature. Cartesian doubt, in its radical and universal signicance,Arendt insists, was rst of all a response to the recognition that naturedoes notgive itself up to the eyes either of the body orof the mind; thatbeing does notappear to the contemplative beholder; and that, In orderto be certain one had to make sure, and in order to know one hadto do.26 Theory became hypothetical and had to be tested in theexperimental process. Hence homo faber, man the maker and fabricator,came to the aid of the modern theoretician who could no longer trustreality to appear to the contemplative gaze.

Where formerly truth had resided in the kind of theory that sincethe Greeks had meant the contemplative glance of the beholder whowas concerned with, and received, the reality opening up before him,the question of success took over and the test of theory became apractical one whether or not it will work. Theory became hy-pothesis, and the success of the hypothesis became truth.27

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applicability of theoretical knowledge, or to the technical developmentswhich might or might not follow in the wake of specic scientic discov-eries. The criterion of success is inherent in the very essence and progressof modern science quite apart from its applicability.28 Arendt is quite

right, here, to underscore the fundamental independence of theory fromtechnicity, where Blumenberg is too quick to see in the appropriation oftheory as a tool of self-assertion an essential connection. Historically,Arendt is surely right to insist that the early modern scientist was guidedrst of all by theoretical considerations in the active reconstruction ofnature in the experiment.29 Even Francis Bacon, the great early modernchampion of human self-assertion, who had insisted that the true ends ofknowledge consist in its usefulness and benet to human life,30 warned

the scientist not to let his experimentation be guided by external stan-dards of utility. By merely aiming at the production of useful works,Bacon insisted, the scientist is acting as a mere mechanic, failing toinvestigate the underlying causes of things generally, and simply haltingat a supercial investigation of particulars.31 Only a methodical searchfor and commitment to the discovery of truth, he held, would lead to asubsequent harvest of works useful to human life.32

Be that as it may, however, Arendt is quick to point out that the funda-

mental experience behind the modern reversal of the traditional hierarchybetween contemplation and action lay in the conviction that the search forknowledge had to be grounded in action. The point was not that truthand knowledge were no longer important, but that they could be won onlyby action and not by contemplation.33 Further Arendt would agree withBlumenberg that this transformation in the nature of the theoretical enter-prise was accompanied by a shift in the measure for the success of theory.Once truth was no longer given in contemplation, it had to be actively

reconstructed as hypothesis, and then tested again through moredoing in the experiment.34 The tremendous power of the theoreticalreconstructions generated by the new science resulted from what Arendtmetaphorically describes as the discovery of the Archimedean point, theability to reconceptualize our particular, context-specic, earthly realityfrom a universalperspective.35

Crucial here is the distance gained from our imbedded, contextual ex-perience in the world, by the modern theoretical commitment to an objec-

tivity which aims at the elimination of sensuously given reality as itappears, by reducing the multitude and variety of the concrete to universalpatterns and symbols. On Arendts reading, the conviction that man canonly know with certainty what he has himself made36 lies at the root ofthe modern understanding of mathematics as the model of certain andtransparent knowledge.37 Descartes, she claims, moved the Archimedean



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a framework of mathematical formulas which are its own products.38 Thesearch for a mathematical translation of our experience of nature may thusbe seen as an attempt to ground our knowledge of nature on a securefoundation.

Here the famous reductio scientiae ad mathematicam permits replace-ment of what is sensuously given by a system of mathematicalequations where all real relationships are dissolved into logical rela-tions between man-made symbols. It is this replacement whichpermits modern science to fulll its task of producing thephenomena and objects it wishes to observe.39

Even if one can no longer grasp truth as something given and disclosedto the human mind, the mathematical language of the theoretical recon-struction is itself transparent to the mind which made it.

Further, the modern turn toward experimentation as a means of check-ing theoretical hypotheses itself reects the modern conviction that we canonly know what we ourselves have made. In order to gain knowledge ofthe natural world, which is clearly not man-made, natural processes mustbe imitated in the experiment, and nature remade, as it were, in the labo-

ratory.40

Hence the element of making and fabricating is inherent in theexperiment itself insofar as it aims at the reconstruction of the processesby which natural phenomena are produced. The modern turn toward exper-imentation thus reects a profound shift in the interrogative orientation ofthe theoretician seeking knowledge of nature. The traditional contempla-tive questions of what or why something is, questions which focused onthe intrinsic meaning and value of things, were left to the side in favour ofthat asked by homo faber, man the maker: the question of how something

came to be.Like Koyr, Arendt assumes that earth alienation is a phenomenon

which emerges as a result of the objectivization of reality in the newscience.41 As we have seen, Blumenberg convincingly argued that, on thecontrary, late medieval nominalism had already transformed the value-laden medieval cosmos into a brute world of facticity, and that the shiftto modernity was not characterized so much by earth alienation as it wasby the human response to an already alienated reality by the adoption of

an active, self-assertive stance in the world. The rise of the new science,then, should more properly be viewed as an expression of this new exis-tential attitude. But whereas Blumenberg focuses almost exclusively onthe origins of this shift from the vita contemplativa to the vita activa,Arendts analysis attends specically to the existential consequences of therise of the principles and ideals of homo faber in the modern age.42



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modern age. While he has argued compellingly that it was not the new sci-ence which rst led to the devalorization of being which Koyr describes,and that modern science is not somehow to blame for the disappearanceof the value-laden cosmos of the ancients, nevertheless, as Arendts analy-

sis makes clear, the turn to self-assertion in the world-transforming activi-ties of homo faberbrings with it new and pressing problems.As we have seen, the shift from the vita contemplativa to the vita activa

was characterized not only by the loss of the ancient cosmos, but the lossalso of the traditional function of and measure for truth. The eliminationof contemplation as it was experienced in the ancient and medieval worldled to the loss of the permanent and xed measures which had tra-ditionally guided human action and judgment. By making homo faber,

man the maker and fabricator, the measure of all things, the problem ofnding meaning and value in the newly reconstructed world became acute.In the fabrication process, Arendt points out, it is the end which justi-

es the means. The means are utilized in order to attain the end, and itis the end that guides and justies the choice of means. The problem withthe utility standard which is inherent in the activity of fabrication, Arendtunderscores, is that every end, once realized, may itself become a meansto some further end in another context.43 Utilitarianism, the philosophy

of homo faberpar excellence, is inevitably caught in the potential endless-ness of this endmeans chain, and is itself unable to arrive at some principlewhich would justify its category of utility. That is, Arendt argues, utilitar-ianism is unable to make sense of the distinction between utility (the inorder to) and meaningfulness (that for the sake of which). The in orderto has become the content of the for the sake of; in other words, utilityestablished as meaning generates meaninglessness.44

The only way to put a stop to this endless chain of ends and means and

the meaninglessness which it generates, Arendt argues, is to fall back onthe subjectivity of use itself and to declare the human subject, man theuser and instrumentalizer, an end in himself.45 The problem with makingman the ultimate end of utility, however, is that it robs everything elsethat exists the whole of nature as well as the products of human activity of its own intrinsic worth and independent value. It is for this reasonthat Arendt insists that

while only fabrication with its instrumentality is capable of buildinga world, this same world becomes as worthless as the employed ma-terial, a mere means for further ends, if the standards [of usefulnessand utility] which governed its coming into being are permitted torule it after its establishment.46



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of the fabrication experience so that the standards and measures of homofaberbecome the ultimate standards for human life. The tendency towardthe limitless instrumentalization of everything that exists inherent in thementality of homo faber must be countered, Arendt insists, by an open-

ness to our experience of the earth, and by the human capacity for thoughtand for action within the political realm where political realm is under-stood broadly as the space of individual appearance with others. It is here,according to Arendt, that we must look for a measure of value andmeaning which transcends the endless chain of ends and means generatedby the utilitarianism of homo faber.

IV

Up to this point I have focused on the ethical or practical problems posedby the instrumentalization of theory in the transition to the modern world,in particular the problem of nding an ethical measure for human actionand judgment. A directly related problem which interestingly enoughboth Blumenberg and Arendt fail to address arises concomitantly oncetheoria becomes hypothesis, the problem of nding an epistemologicalmeasure for determining the validity of human conceptual reconstructions

of the world. Both Arendt and Blumenberg take for granted that progressin science is not only possible, but has resulted in an astounding degreeof technological mastery of nature (accompanied, Arendt would say, by anunprecedented loss of world). Yet, both grasp the essence (indeed theproductive power) of that mastery in terms of the imposition of humanconceptual schemes onto a fundamentally transcendent reality.

Arendt, we recall, spoke of the reduction of concrete phenomena toa mathematical order by translating all that man is not into patterns which

are identical with human, mental structures.47 Modern science, she insists,aims at the reduction of all appearances through the force inherent indistance.

Under this condition of remoteness, every assemblage of things istransformed into a mere multitude, and every multitude, no matterhow disordered, incoherent, and confused, will fall into certainpatterns and congurations possessing the same validity and no more

signicance than the mathematical curve, which as Leibniz onceremarked, can always be found between points thrown at randomon a piece of paper.48

Hence, Arendt argues, the mathematical description arrived at in this waydoes not reect an underlying rational order inherent in the phenomena



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a universal perspective which reduces all real relations in the multiplicityand variety of the concrete to abstract patterns woven about a mere collec-tion of objects. The mathematical order arrived at in this way, Arendtclaims, has no more ontological signicance than the curve generated

between points randomly scattered on a page.

49

Indeed, Arendt insists that our ability to produce a mathematical trans-lation of experience demonstrates neither the inherent beauty and orderof nature nor the adequacy of the human mind for grasping the truthabout that order. She categorically rejects the idea that the applicabilityof mathematics to the physical world indicates any sort of harmonybetween mathematics and physics, between mind and matter, or betweenman and the universe.50 To the scientist who would point to technological

achievements as concrete proof that science deals with an authentic ordergiven in nature, Arendt replies that this demonstrates no more than thatman can always apply the results of his mind, that no matter which systemhe uses for the explanation of natural phenomena he will always beable to adopt it as a guiding principle for making and acting.51

But doesnt Arendt move too quickly, here, from the fact that somecurve can be found between random points on a page, and from the factthat we can always adopt our scientic systems as principles for making

and acting, to the conclusion that the pattern discovered on the pageor in nature actually resides in the mind and is imposed from a distancewhich disregards the immediacy and coherence of the concrete? After all,while some curve can be found, even between random points on a page,not any and every curve will do the trick. Indeed, most will not. The pointson the page, themselves, dictate what curve can or cannot be chosen.Similarly, while it may be the case that we can always apply theories aboutnature to our action in the world, this does not mean that allsystems are

equally successful, either in their explanatory power or in the rangeand extent of their applicability. The Ptolemaic description of our solarsystem, for instance, would be decidedly unhelpful when planning thecourse of a Pathnder or Voyager. The natural phenomena themselvesdictate the applicability and workability of a given theoretical order.

Early modern theorists were well aware that the decision betweenhypotheses generated in the search for a universal, objective descriptionof nature was inherently problematic; that any given phenomenon could

potentially be explained by any number of equally valid hypotheses. It isfor this reason that the early modern theorist turned to experimentationin order to counter this potential for arbitrariness in the application of agiven hypothesis.52 Arendt argues, however, that this recourse to exper-imentation involves the theorist in a vicious circle: scientists formulatetheir hypotheses to arrange their experiments and then use these exper-



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she insists, does not serve to connect theory with nature, but rather putsman back once more . . . into the prison of his own mind, into the limi-tations of patterns he himself created.54 Once again, however, Arendtignores the resistance which the natural phenomena themselves offer to

these patterns which we create and apply in the experimental process.Her suspicion that the entire enterprise is hopelessly caught in a viciouscircle, and that our results really have nothing to do with a genuine naturalorder, but that we deal only with the patterns of our own mind, the mindwhich designed the instruments and put nature under its conditions in theexperiment,55 would be immediately borne out if it were the case thatevery well-conceived and executed experiment produced the desiredresult. Any experimental scientist, however, would be quick to point out

that the hypothetical nature with which the scientist has to deal in prac-tice is rarely so co-operative. There is a certain recalcitrance to thematerial given in experience, so that, as Plato already recognized, 56 matteritself tends toward certain forms. Concepts (however we grasp their origin)cannot be successfully applied arbitrarily, as though the world as it isgiven in experience were actually homogeneous material to be formedand reformed at will. Indeed, it is the very resistance of the phenomenato the arbitrary imposition of conceptual schemes which drives the

experimental process.Hence Arendt moves much too quickly from the observation that the

modern theoretical enterprise is grounded on the general premise thatwe only know what we make to the conclusion that we thereforeonly know the man-made, the patterns of our own minds. In fact, themodern dictum that we only know what we make is an expression ofthe conviction that the way to knowledge is through making, that truthis not given immediately in contemplation (theoria) but must be won

through active reconstruction (hypothesis). Concern with measurementand experiment arises precisely in order to counter the threat of epistemo-logical arbitrariness, to answer the need for an epistemological measurefor the truth of theory, by checking the validity of a given hypothesisagainst the resistance offered by the phenomena in question.

While Arendt, like Blumenberg, is right to characterize the epochal shiftin our theoretical relation to the world from the vita contemplativa to thevita activa in terms of the transformation of theoria into hypothesis, both

are mistaken when they insist that this transformation in the natureof the theoretical enterprise was accompanied by a fundamental shift inthe measure for the success of theory. Both claim that in the modern ageadequacy to what is, as the measure of theoretical success, is relinquishedin favour of a new criterion: the successful production of desiredphenomena. Hence, both Arendt and Blumenberg view the experimental



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[the given reality] the reality to be produced and checks the latter,once produced, against it.57 Arendt concurs. She writes, we recall, that inthe modern age, The test of theory became a practical one whetheror not it will work. Theory became hypothesis, and the success of the

hypothesis became truth.

58

What is missing from both accounts is a consideration of the extent towhich the recalcitrance of the given reality serves as a measure for thesuccess or failure of the hypothesis. Further, the success of the hypoth-esis becomes truth only in a provisional sense, and is always subject torevision. Hence, Blumenberg and Arendt are mistaken when they claimthat the measure of theoretical success in the modern age is no longerthought in terms of adaequatio. In fact the adequacy of theory to what is

remains, in a crucial sense, the measure for truth. This measure, however,has been transformed into a purely regulative ideal, constantly directingtheory, but never nally attaining that immediate unity of thought andbeing which had characterized the contemplative conception of truth. Thesuccessful hypothesis is always conceived of as provisional relative tothe regulative ideal which is projected into nature itself, and experiencedin terms of the resistance of natural phenomena to the imposition oftheory. Once theory becomes hypothesis, truth is understood as provi-

sional and conjectural, andprogress in science is determined (among othercriteria59) by the relative responsiveness of theory to the recalcitrance ofreality.

In order to account for the viability of this process, however, a minimalt between mind and nature (a harmony of the sort too quickly rejectedby Arendt) must be assumed. It turns out that faith in a world-immanentlogos, an immanent structure of harmony in the content given in experi-ence, is necessary if there is to be a science of nature at all. Norbert

Wiener, the philosophically oriented mathematician and inventor of cyber-netics, understands Einsteins dictum that The Lord is subtle, but he isntmean to be a statement of just this faith.

I have said that science is impossible without faith. By this I do notmean that the faith on which science depends is religious in natureor involves the acceptance of any of the dogmas of the ordinary reli-gious creeds, yet without faith that nature is subject to law there can

be no science.60

It is precisely this world-immanent logos which serves to ground concept-formation and which safeguards the relative accuracy of human conceptu-alization. Concepts remain innitely inadequate to the richness of objectsgiven in experience. Recognition of this gap motivates our attempts to



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innite richness and unique nature of each individual, which both countersand grounds human attempts to name it.

Thus, I would argue against Blumenbergs and Arendts assessment thatDescartess modernity consists solely in his approach to certainty through

the cogito. His attempt to secure a guarantee for the correspondencebetween our clear and distinct ideas and reality by proving the existenceof a non-deceiving God may be understood as an attempt to rationalizehis faith in the attunement between reason and nature. The circularity ofthis proof may be understood as an unfolding of this cognitive faith, andthe failure of the proof does not serve to discredit that faith, but ratherto make explicit the fact that this cognitive faith is not itself reasonable,but rather a presupposition of reason. Thus the mathematization of nature

characteristic of Cartesian science depends on an understanding of theessence of nature as res extensa. In this Descartes shares Galileos faiththat God wrote the book of nature in the language of mathematics. Withoutthis presupposition even the Descartes of the Principles would be unableto claim that his scientic models are well-founded conjectures.

I have suggested that faith in something like a world-immanent logos(i.e. faith that the world itself exhibits a rational, law-like structure) is anecessary presupposition of modern science, that without such faith there

can be no knowledge of the world, no science of nature. With the destruc-tion of the old world-order, the ancient kosmos at the end of the MiddleAges, it became necessary to provide a new account of world-order.Blumenberg points to the immanent self-assertion of reason through themastery and alteration of reality. The new world-order would then beprecisely that order to be produced. The measure of our knowing wouldno longer be the world with its logos, but the coherence, the internalnecessity and (most importantly) the utility of our conceptual constructs.

Such epistemological utilitarianism, however, insofar as it is rooted inthe mentality of homo faber, driven by the demands of the endsmeansschema, has no answer to the problems posed by loss of value and thethreat of epistemological arbitrariness. Faith in a world-immanent logosas measure, I want to assert, is an inescapable need of human reason(practical as well as theoretical). The integrity and richness of the indi-vidual person or thing, indeed of the world, of reality, is given inexperience and is presupposed by experience, and remains the paradox-

ical measure of that experience. Paradoxical, because in our attempts tograsp reality we immediately run up against the paradoxes of unity andplurality, of totality and innity. Each particular being presents itself as acoincidence of measure and boundlessness. The given experience is itselfinnitely rich and every particular utterly unique. And yet the roseitself remains the measure of my naming it a rose only because it itself



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determinacy which would insure the connectedness of human conceptu-alization and the world. Such a need is precisely that, a need. The positingof such a principle remains an act of faith.

University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia

Notes

1 Ren Descartes, Discourse on Method, Part Six, trans. in The PhilosophicalWritings of Descartes, Vol. 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff andDugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). The largerpassage reads as follows: For they [my speculations] opened my eyes to thepossibility of gaining knowledge which would be very useful in life, and of

discovering a practical philosophy which might replace the speculative philos-ophy taught in the schools. Through this philosophy we could know the powerand action of re, water, air, the stars, the heavens and all the other bodiesin our environment, as distinctly as we know the various crafts of our arti-sans; and we could use this knowledge as the artisans use theirs for allthe purposes for which it is appropriate, and thus make ourselves, as it were,the lords and masters of nature. This is desirable not only for the inventionof innumerable devices which would facilitate our enjoyment of the fruits ofthe earth and all the goods we nd there, but also, and most importantly,for the maintenance of health, which is undoubtedly the chief good and thefoundation of all the other goods in this life (14243/612).

2 Alexandre Koyr, From the Closed World to the Innite Universe (Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957); Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacyof the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, Massachusetts andLondon: The MIT Press, 1983), translation of Die Legitimitt der Neuzeit(erweiterte und berarbeitete Neuausgabe) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973,1974 and 1976); Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London:The University of Chicago Press, 1958).

3 See also Amos Funkensteins more recent study, Theology and the Scientic

Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NewJersey: Princeton University Press, 1986). Like Koyr, Funkenstein describes thetransition from medieval to modern world-views as gradual transplantations ofdivine attributes from God to the world. Where Koyr focuses on the transfer-ence of the divine attribute of innity, Funkenstein traces the migration andtransformation of the divine predicates of omnipresence, omnipotence and prov-idence. Like Koyr, however, Funkenstein does not attempt to provide a philo-sophical explanation for the cosmological shift which he describes. As to thequestion why such transitions came about at the time they did, more often thannot I do not know. Perhaps it is the sign of revolutionary periods that radicaldepartures, paradigm shifts, take inspiration and courage from each other;Funkenstein, op. cit., p. 18. See also Louis Dupr, Passage to Modernity: An Essayin the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven and London: YaleUniversity Press, 1993. Dupr provides a reading of the transition to the modernage which attends both to the role of nominalist theology and to the impact ofItalian humanism in shattering the traditional synthesis that had united cosmic,h d t d t t i th di l ti f t



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6 Ibid.7 Ibid., p. 276. This is an interesting conclusion in that it serves to underscore

the discrepancy between medieval and modern conceptions of reality, i.e. inwhat counts as an ontological attribute. Koyr presupposes a modern concep-tion of ontology here, which understands the nature of being in physicalistic

terms. A medieval conception of ontology, on the other hand, would focuson the four transcendentals (unum, verum, bonum, esse) and their essentialinterrelations.

8 I borrow the phrase of course from E. J. Dijksterhuis classic study of theorigins and development of the physical sciences, The Mechanization ofthe World Picture, trans. C. Dikshoorn (Princeton, New Jersey: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1986).

9 Hence, for Descartes nature is conceived of as extended substance, as thepossible object of study for the pure thinking ego, and Kants transcendentalidealism distinguishes between objective and subjective appearance. See

Karsten Harries essay, Copernican Reections and the Tasks of Metaphysics,International Philosophical Quarterly 23 (1983), pp. 23550. On pp. 23743Harries describes the objective reality of the new science as resting on atwofold reduction of experience which dissociates the meaningful from thesensible and then the sensible from the real.

10 Blumenberg, op. cit., pp. 1378.11 See J. Wippel, The Condemnations of 1270 and 1277 at Paris, Journal of

Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 7 (1977), pp. 169201; Edward Grant, TheCondemnation of 1277: Gods Absolute Power and Physical Thought in

the Middle Ages, Viator, 10 (1979), pp. 21144; and Blumenberg, op. cit.,pp. 1602, 346.12 Thomas Aquinas had already concluded that Gods goodness does not direct

his creative act, since divine goodness is not in need of anything, and DunsScotus argued further that Gods will must have primacy even over his wisdom.This was the line, of course, followed by William of Ockham and laternominalists. See Aquinas, De potentia q.3 a.17; and Scotus, Ordinatio I d.39q.u. n.14. See Funkenstein, op. cit., pp. 1312. For an alternative reading seeMarilyn McCord Adams, William Ockham (Notre Dame, Indiana: Universityof Notre Dame Press, 1987), Vol. II, Chapter 29, Divine Omnipotence and

the Charge of Theologism, pp. 123355.13 For a history of the distinction between potentia dei absoluta et ordinata see

Funkenstein, op. cit., pp. 12452. See also Adams, op. cit., pp. 11861207.14 This was, needless to say, not at all Ockhams intention, or that of later nomi-

nalist theologians. On the contrary, the radical destabilizing of the medievalcosmos carried out in this school was intended to make the existential choicebetween engagement in this world and hope in the next a foregone conclu-sion in favour of the world to come. Ironically, Blumenberg notes, themeaningfulness of that choice was blocked by the reappearance of divine

omnipotence in the realm of individual salvation as well, where the doctrineof predestination makes the absolute separation of the elect from the rejecteditself also a matter of absolute divine willing. See Blumenberg, op. cit.,pp. 137, 151, 345.

15 See Part III of Legitimacy, The Trial of Theoretical Curiosity, especiallyChapter 7, Preludes to a Future Overstepping of Limits, pp. 34360.

16 Blumenberg describes self-assertion as an existential program, according to



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17 Reoccupation is a technical term Blumenberg employs in his understandingof the continuity of history as a succession of positions (in the matrix ofquestions and answers concerning mans interpretation of the world and ofhimself) that are reoccupied (with new contents, or answers) in the transi-tion from one epoch to the next.

18 The modern mechanistic thesis, Blumenberg writes, established the materialsubstratum of the world as something meaningless in itself, and consequentlyas a potentiality open to mans rational disposition. The reoccupation thattook place between the absolutes will and matter dened the world asthat which is precisely not pregiven, as a problem rather than as an estab-lished state of affairs, op. cit., p. 151. Blumenberg goes on in the same passageto address the question why the turn to self-assertion was not made in lateantiquity from the framework of ancient atomism: [T]he question whyatomism could have this signicance as the successor of voluntarism, butnot in its original situation in the ancient world, leads us to a recognition of

the irreversibility of this reoccupation: only after nominalism had executed asufciently radical destruction of the humanly relevant and dependablecosmos could the mechanistic philosophy of nature be adopted as the tool ofself-assertion. See op. cit., Part II, Chapter 3 for A Systematic Comparisonof the Epochal Crisis of Antiquity to that of the Middle Ages, pp. 14579.See also Margaret J. Osler, Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy:Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Osler examines the trans-formation of medieval conceptions about Gods relationship to the creation

into seventeenth-century ideas about matter and method in early articulationsof the mechanical philosophy.19 Hypothesis, which from one point of view is the formal expression of the

renunciation of the claim to truth in the traditional sense of adequacy [adae-quatio], becomes from another point of view a means of self-assertion, thepotential for human production of that which nature makes scarce or doesnot provide for man at all. Blumenberg, op. cit., p. 199. See also p. 353.

20 Ren Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, in The Philosophical Writings ofDescartes, Vol. 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and DugaldMurdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Principle 205, pp.

28990. See also Principle 204: although this method may enable us to under-stand how all the things in nature could have arisen, it should not thereforebe inferred that they were in fact made in this way. Just as the same craftsmancould make two clocks which tell the time equally well and look completelyalike from the outside but have completely different assemblies of wheelsinside, so the supreme craftsman of the real world could have produced allthat we see in several different ways. I am very happy to admit this; and Ishall think I have achieved enough provided only that what I have written issuch as to correspond accurately with all the phenomena of nature, p. 289.

21 Blumenberg, op. cit., p. 208.22 The absolutism of the hidden God freed the theoretical attitude from itspagan ideal of contemplating the world from the divine point of view andthus ultimately sharing Gods happiness. The price of this freedom is thattheory will no longer relate to the resting point of a blissful onlooker butrather to the workplace of human exertion, ibid., p. 200.

23 Ibid., p. 232.



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27 Ibid., p. 278. See also p. 298.28 Ibid., p. 278.29 It is a matter of historical record that modern technology has its origins not

in the evolution of those tools man had always devised for the twofold purposeof easing his labors and erecting the human artice, but exclusively in an alto-

gether non-practical search for useless knowledge, ibid., p. 289.30 Lastly, I would like to give this general admonition to all men, namely,that they reect on the true ends of knowledge, and that they seek itnot from any intellectual satisfaction, nor for contention, nor to look downupon others, nor for reward, or fame, or power, or any of these baser things;but to direct and bring it to perfection in charity, for the benet and use oflife, Francis Bacon, Preface to The Great Instauration, in Novum Organumwith Other Parts of The Great Instauration, trans. and ed. Peter Urbach andJohn Gibson (Chicago and La Salle, Illinois: Open Court, 1994), p. 15.

31 Again, despite an abundance of mechanical experiments, there are very few

that yield much information and help to the understanding. For the mechanic,who is in no way concerned with the investigation of truth, neither directshis mind nor turns his hand to anything unless it serves his work. Furtherprogress in knowledge, in fact, can only be looked for with any condencewhen a large number of experiments are collected and brought together intoa natural history; experiments which, while they are of no use in themselves,simply help the discovery of causes and axioms, Bacon, Book I, Aphorism99, p. 108. See also Book I, Aphorism 121, pp. 1222 and Aphorism 124,pp. 1256.

32 [F]irst, I propose a natural history that does not so much charm with itsvariety or gratify by the immediate fruit of experiments, as provide light forthe discovery of causes. . . . For though I am principally in pursuit of worksand the active part of the sciences, I am nevertheless content to wait forharvest-time, and do not attempt to reap moss or the green corn knowingwell as I do that axioms rightly discovered bring with them hosts of works,not in ones and twos but thick and fast, Bacon, Plan of the Work, p. 25.

33 Arendt, op. cit., p. 290.34 Certainty of knowledge could be reached only under a twofold condition:

rst, that knowledge concerned only what one had done himself so that its

ideal become mathematical knowledge, where we deal only with self-madeentities of the mind and second, that knowledge was of such a nature thatit could be tested only through more doing (ibid., p. 290).

35 For whatever we do today in physics whether we release energy processesthat ordinarily go on only in the sun, or attempt to initiate in a test tube theprocesses of cosmic evolution, or penetrate with the help of telescopesthe cosmic space to a limit of two and even six billion light years, or buildmachines for the production and control of energies unknown in the house-hold of earthly nature, or attain speeds in atomic accelerators which approach

the speed of light, or produce elements not to be found in nature, or disperseradioactive particles, created by us through the use of cosmic radiation, onthe earth we always handle nature from a point in the universe outside theearth. Without actually standing where Archimedes wished to stand (dos moipou sto), still bound to the earth through the human condition, we have founda way to act on the earth and within terrestrial nature as though we disposeof it from outside, from the Archimedean point (ibid., p. 262).



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the emergence of the new ideal of knowing by doing, see Funkenstein, op. cit.,Section V, Divine and Human Knowledge: Knowing by Doing, pp. 290345.

37 The Cartesian method of securing certainty against universal doubt corre-sponded most precisely to the most obvious conclusion to be drawn from thenew physical science: though one cannot know truth as something given and

disclosed, man can at least know what he makes himself. This, indeed, becamethe most general and most generally accepted attitude of the modern age,and it is this conviction, rather than the doubt underlying it, that propelledone generation after another for more than three hundred years into an ever-quickening pace of discovery and development. Arendt, op. cit. pp. 2823.

38 Ibid., p. 284.39 Ibid.40 The experiment repeats the natural process as though man himself were

about to make natures objects, and although in the early stages of the modernage no responsible scientist would have dreamt of the extent to which man

is actually capable of making nature, he nevertheless from the onsetapproached it from the standpoint of the One who made it, and this notfor practical reasons of technical applicability but exclusively for the theo-retical reason that certainty in knowledge could not be gained otherwise,ibid., p. 295.

41 For a discussion of Arendts analysis of the worldlessness of the modern age,see my paper, Hans Blumenberg and Hannah Arendt on the UnworldlyWorldliness of the Modern Age. Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (2000),pp. 513530.

42 Among the outstanding characteristics of the modern age from its beginningto our own time we nd the typical attitudes of homo faber: his instrumen-talization of the world, his condence in tools and in the productivity of themaker of articial objects; his trust in the all-comprehensive range of themeansend category, his conviction that every issue can be solved and everyhuman motivation reduced to the principle of utility; his sovereignty, whichregards everything given as material and thinks of the whole of nature as ofan immense fabric from which we can cut out whatever we want to resewit however we like [Henri Bergson, Evolution cratrice (1948), p. 157]; hisequation of intelligence with ingenuity, that is, his contempt for all thought

which cannot be considered to be the rst step . . . for the fabrication ofarticial objects, particularly of tools to make tools, and to vary their fabri-cation indenitely [Bergson, op. cit., p. 140]; nally, his matter-of-courseidentication of fabrication with action, Arendt, op. cit., pp. 3056.

43 Ibid., p. 154.44 Ibid.45 Arendt notes that Kants formula that every human being must be regarded

as an end in himself, with which he had hoped to exclude the category ofendsmeans from the ethical and political realm, has its origin in utilitarian

thinking (ibid., p. 156).46 Ibid.47 Ibid., p. 266.48 Ibid., p. 267.49 Arendt cites Bertrand Russell here, who had insisted that if it can be shown

that a mathematical web of some kind can be woven about any universecontaining several objects . . . then the fact that our universe lends itself to



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50 Arendt, op. cit., p. 286.51 Ibid., p. 287, my italics52 See, for example, Ren Descartes in Discourse on Method (Part Six).53 Arendt, op. cit., p. 287.54 Ibid., p. 288.

55 Ibid., p. 286.56 In his account of genesis in the Timaeus Plato felt compelled to describe chaosas already exhibiting faint traces of the Forms in the pre-cosmic receptacle.That is, it was not sufcient simply to posit an unlimited (the indeterminatereceptacle), which is then delimited and determined by the Forms imposedby the demiurge. The divine craftsman was obliged to take these inherenttendencies into account, work with them and utilize them, in bringing orderand proportion to the cosmos.

57 Blumenberg, op. cit., p. 200.58 Arendt, op. cit., p. 278.

59 A theoretical hypothesis will also be preferred because it is in keeping withgenerally accepted scientic principles and practices or because it exhibitscertain aesthetic criteria such as simplicity or elegance. However, a hypothesiswill only be considered adequate to the extent that it is able to account forexperimental results, and a proliferation of experimental anomalies whichrun counter to scientic hypotheses or general scientic principles mustultimately undermine the acceptability of these theoretical commitments.

60 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society(New York: Avon Books, 1967), pp. 2623.



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C o p y r i g h t o f I n t e r n a t i o n a l J o u r n a l o f P h i l o s o p h i c a l S t u d i e s i s t h e p r o p e r t y o f R o u t l e d g e a n d

i t s c o n t e n t m a y n o t b e c o p i e d o r e m a i l e d t o m u l t i p l e s i t e s o r p o s t e d t o a l i s t s e r v w i t h o u t t h e

c o p y r i g h t h o l d e r ' s e x p r e s s w r i t t e n p e r m i s s i o n . H o w e v e r , u s e r s m a y p r i n t , d o w n l o a d , o r e m a i l

a r t i c l e s f o r i n d i v i d u a l u s e .

brient arendt vita contemplativa

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