modernity and the mystical 53“natural” reality thus alters that reality itself, epistemology and ethics are no
longer clearly separable.)
With a similar emphasis on the will to mastery that one might see oper-
ative in the technologies of an instrumental and calculative rationality, one of
the most influential European philosophers of the twentieth century, Martin
Heidegger, will argue (already in his 1938 essay “The Age of the World Pic-
ture”)^7 that modern science is built on the foundation of a distinctively modern
understanding of reality or being that implies a distinctively modern attitude
concerning the nature and purpose of the human subject who would seek to
know “the truth” about that reality or being. Within these modern perspectives
as Heidegger analyzes them, the nature of “being” itself, the character of the
real, is framed primarily in terms of “objectivity,” and the essence of “truth” is
located in subjective certainty or security with respect to the knowledge and
control of objectified being. Operating according to its preestablished ground
rules, science will count as “real” only that realm of being which can be defined
objectively, which means observed empirically and measured quantitatively ac-
cording to consistent method, and it ranks degrees of truth or knowledge ac-
cording to the level of rational certainty that the human subject can reach
through such methodical definition, observation, and measurement—in short,
through what Heidegger later calls “calculative” thinking.^8 Certainty, in other
words, is sought through the calculative or predictive power of science, and
that power derives from the possibility of verification through methodic reg-
ulation and repetition. As Heidegger puts it, “knowing, as research, calls what-
ever is to account with regard to the way in which it lets itself be put at the
disposal of representation. Research has disposal over anything that is when
it can either calculate it in its future course or verify a calculation about it as
past.”^9
This emphasis on subjective certainty within modern science and its cul-
ture has a lineage, both religious and philosophical, that is important to any
understanding of how we tend to associate certainty with “freedom.” The re-
ligious lineage would be seen notably in Protestant conceptions of faith as the
inward, individual certainty of salvation, and the philosophical lineage would
be seen notably in Rene ́ Descartes’s decisive attempt in the early seventeenth
century to re-ground philosophy in the self-certainty of the thinking subject.
The religious and, especially, philosophical obsessions with certainty in the
modern world imply a conception of freedom that in significant ways shapes
both science and our attitudes about science:
Liberationfromthe revelational certainty of salvation [was] intrinsi-
cally a freeingtoa certainty [Gewissheit] in which man makes secure
for himself the true as the known of his own knowing [Wissens].
That was possible only through self-liberating man’s guaranteeing
for himself the certainty of the knowable. Such a thing could hap-