I believe this is the point that Heidegger is trying to make: that by losing some sense of meaning in Truth, that is by failing to instill our beliefs with meaning, we have become alienated from the world around us. I think primarily of the poem recited at the end of the essay as well as his talk of religious experience at the beginning - by the loss of the gods, religion becomes little more than “religious experience” and the world itself becomes subjective. Is he suggesting that we’ve lost any sense of purposeful truth? He makes reference to the Greeks who we claims, by nature of their mindset and culture, did not have a complete picture of the world nor did they strive for one. In this post-Christian age on the other hand, there appears to be some striving for an objective, rational reality based on research and empirical evidence. The truth in things must come in and of themselves right? This is some inheritance in a belief in absolute truth as described in Christianity. Yet when Man has become subjective then what chance does humanity have of finding truth in anything? Now the objectivity that is lost is not that of absolute certainty in everything. But as historically defined truth becomes historiography, then the ages of the world simply become lost. There must be purpose or relevancy in what we find, not simply understanding.

From the reading The Age of the World Picture by Martin Heidegger, we explore the ways in which modernity has shaped our experience and conception of reality. These notions construct the framework for the “world picture” that we experience and thus our view of the world is contingent on how we interpret and incorporate the metaphysical aspects of our age. For Heidegger, in order to help us understand the world picture, we must first understand the essence which this view of the world emerges from. According to Heidegger, the modern lense is shaped by five essential phenomena, which include: science, machine technology, aesthetics, culture, and the loss of Gods. From these phenomena, it is apparent that our age has highly complicated and unique essential aspects that help form our world picture. I appreciate Heidegger’s notion that it is vacuous to attempt to compare Greek science with modern science (research). He explains that modern sciences use projections, procedures, and methods to help shape the enterprise of research. Heidegger is especially critical of the ways in which we use the idea of “progress” as a measure of a disciplines essence. Comparing Greek, Medieval, and contemporary science in this light is similar to a literary scholar asserting that “Shakespearean poetry is more advanced than that of Aeschylus.” (p. 58) It is clear from this example that the essence of sixteenth-century poetry is not comparable to the essence of Greek tragedy. This same notion should be applied to our constant desire to compare modern science and its predecessors. I agree with the ideas put forth by Heidegger as they resonate with what is said in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. However, I believe Kuhn’s work to be more fruitful to contemporary readers as it is less abstract, dense to read, and written by someone with first-hand experience of modern science as opposed to a philosopher.  

On page 121, Heidegger explains how experimentation becomes possible when the knowledge of nature has been transformed into research. And that essentially, modern science is different from science done during the time of the Greeks since it was not research based, and hence, not experimental. What exactly would you call the testing that they did then? Is it just tinkering out of curiosity because there was not a formal question that they were trying to solve that is part of research? He then suggests that experimentation begins with laying down a law as its basis, but were there not specific beliefs of facts and constancy of change that were generally accepted even here as well that was informing their ‘tinkering’? When exactly is there a change between this ‘tinkering’ or non-experimentation to research and thus, experimentation?
Then on the next page, he describes experimentation as “that methodology which, in its planning and execution, is supported and guided on the basis of the fundamental law laid down, in order to adduce the facts that either verify and confirm the law or deny it confirmation. There more exactly the ground plan of nature is projected, the more exact becomes the possibility of experiment.” Earlier he suggested that it is impossible base the essence of modern science by comparing the old to the new because one is not more correct than the other. It seems that here he suggests that there cannot be progress in science because there is no way to deem one era of science better than the other. Yet, in this statement, where through experimentation there can eventually be a more and more exact picture of nature produced, does Heidegger see that in modern science there can be progress or that there is a specific goal of science that we are reaching for?

What is the difference between the researcher and the scholar? I believe that research although very methodological, is also very comparative. It requires comparing to the results of other people’s work and explaining why the results were the way they were. So, to say that the scholar is replaced by the researcher and does not need a library because he is constantly on the move (125) seems contradictory to me because the researcher should just be expanded to someone that does research as well someone who can look at it critically.

Also when he describes research as needing a procedure, and that the procedure is more than the method or methodology but instead the opening up of a sphere- what he calls projection (118), what exactly does Heidegger mean by this? And how to we open up the sphere when doing research?

The phenomena of the modern age are science, technology, art/aesthetics, culture, and “degodization”.  Heidegger asks what the interpretation of truth is that lies at these phenomena’s bases, then qualifies his question by narrowing its parameters to include only the realm of science.  Heidegger suggests that we cannot apply the term “progress” to how science has changed since Greek times–there was less of a need to be exact back then, so we should not be allowed to use our modern thinking and suppose that we can solve their problems.  Their science worked at the time, and our science works now (both barring anomalies); this is very similar to Kuhn’s idea of progress (or lack thereof) when a paradigm shift occurs.  Heidegger also discusses the role of research in the modern age.  What Kuhn calls paradigms, I think Heidegger calls the “metaphysical ground” within the essence of the modern age: it guides research, and introduces a sort of subjectivity to the experiment.  Within a particular metaphysical ground (or paradigm), I suppose research could be conducted objectively; however, if somebody else is operating under a different umbrella, then the research may not seem objective from their point of view.  Is worldview, then, a grander (as in larger) form of the phenomena of the modern age?  Are we world-building when these phenomena are expanded upon and combined in some way or another?  To draw on the example from class, if the Middle Age worldview was 2D and holier figures appeared bigger, and the modern worldview is that of perspective and materialism, then how can we see the Middle Age picture’s revealed meaning?  If I am interpreting Heidegger correctly, I don’t think we can fully do this.  We no longer are standing on the same metaphysical ground, therefore we cannot look at the picture in the same way as someone from the Middle Ages would.  Similarly, someone from the Middle Ages could not look at the modern world picture and understand it in the way we do.  Is there a way that we can comprehend other ages’ world pictures if we do not come from a place which has the metaphysical groundwork laid out for us?

I wish I could think of other ways to explain this without always falling back on Kuhn, but since reading The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, it is the only comparison that comes to mind… 

The beginning of “The Age of the World Picture” starts with a basic definition of metaphysics, and how that defines how the world is formed in a way during the period in which that interpretation of reality holds sway.  This had me reflecting on this course, and my liberal arts natural science bachelor’s degree as the end draws near and how an emphasis throughout that seems unique is that of the broader context within which we operate.  Trying to understand how what we do now will effect tomorrow, then with the added context of the past and why we are doing what we’re doing in the first place.  Knowing how/why we see/understand the world isn’t necessarily going to allow us to reshape the social frameworks we find ourselves in (as I believe was a conclusion we came to after our last lecture and first reading of Heidegger,) but that doesn’t necessarily make the pursuit of that understanding meaningless.  As a statement I’m sure the previous sentence is  loaded with objectionable implications that could be deconstructed by someone with a more holistic view of the topic, but the fact of the matter is that when I remove myself from the pursuit of knowledge to examine it, I seem to be very pragmatic: knowledge is pursued to be applied to problems; it is a tool.  This is contrary to how/why I pursue knowledge, but nonetheless there’s a part of me that sees it that way…

Anyways, the point of the over-sharing of my personal issues of cognitive-dissonance was to set up a question (qualified by a leader question…)  First, is the first half of the previous paragraph a somewhat precise summary of metaphysics and the position of Heiddeger with respect to the unchangeable nature of our “worldview” so to speak?  If not then the following question can be disregarded, but if we assume that we cannot change the world we live in even with the knowledge of what motivates/defines it, then does it matter if we study it or not?  Would the metaphysical shifts that have/will happen occur regardless of whether or not we study them – are we passive observers of something outside of our influence, or are we pulling at a thread or starting a conversation when we define what defines our world that leaves it open for the possibility to change?