52 theory
an often overlooked diversity amidst the sciences, all science today would stand
on the same ground: to a scientific perspective, the unknown appears never as
unknowable but always and only as not-yet-known. Scientific ignorance, in
other words, is the space and time of scientific knowledge just waiting to hap-
pen, an indispensable provocation to the quest for a knowledge that would be
complete.
We can find a powerful and still widely echoed analysis of this scientific
attitude in sociologist Max Weber’s classic 1918 lecture titled “Science as a
Vocation,”^3 in which Weber emphasizes that the rationalized attitude defining
modern science (and modern culture more broadly) implies both a “disen-
chantment”(Entzauberung)of the world and, correlatively, a calculated attempt
to master that world technologically. As Weber very famously puts it, our world
would be “disenchanted” when we approach it in “the knowledge or belief ”
that “there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play” in the
world and hence “that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation.”^4
While the “savage” or religious believer as Weber imagines him would implore
mysterious powers by magical means, those of us moderns shaped by the
processes of rationalization find rather that “technical means and calculations
perform the service.”^5 Now, as Weber notes in discussing an individual’s use
of the streetcar whose workings the individual cannot in fact understand or
explain, the individual agent within a disenchanted world does not need ac-
tually to possess or to command the scientific knowledge that grounds the
technological powers upon which that individual nevertheless counts daily; he
needs rather to know—or more precisely to believe—that such knowledge is,
in principle, at all times available or at least possible.
From Weber’s perspective, then, the type of rationality governing the in-
tersection of science and technology in modern culture is one that aims to
secure both conceptual and practical control over our natural and social worlds
by means of a thinking that is calculative and instrumental, concerned pri-
marily with understanding and manipulating means-ends relations. As is well
known, in order to function as it does, such thinking attempts to frame reality
in terms of an “objectivity” that would stand open to the comprehension, ma-
nipulation, and eventual mastery of a rational human subject who can analyze
such an objective reality in value-neutral terms—which means in terms that
say nothing about the purpose or meaning of such reality or about the direction
we ought to take in our manipulations of it. (One might note here that, if a
good deal of the rhetoric within and around science today still clings to this
pretense of value-neutrality, such pretense becomes increasingly difficult to
maintain as scientific knowing is bound ever more intimately and powerfully
with technological activity that does always have a direction and effect—hence
blurring the boundary between nature and culture, and introducing the ques-
tion of final causes, traditionally associated with the artifact, into our explora-
tion of nature, which turns increasingly artifactual.^6 When our investigation of