The logic of science and technology as a developmental tendency of modernity

The historical question of the connection between science and modernity

At first glance, the connection of science and modernity is a historical matter and, in fact, it is a controversial issue in the history of science. It can be recalled that the 20th-century (grand) narrative of the Scientific Revolution owes much to previous historical judgments, such as the Renaissance contempt of medieval barbarism and the positivist pride of the superiority of modern science over pre-modern credulity. Alexandre Koyré, a well-known champion of (the thesis of) the Scientific Revolution, believed in the uniqueness and irreversibility of the rise of a modern scientific outlook, mathematical to its core (1939, 1957, 1965). Thomas Kuhn mitigated this perspective only in part. He modeled his idea of scientific revolutions according to (his interpretation of) the Copernican Revolution (1957, 1962). He also considered modern (post-Copernican, Galilean) science to be incommensurable with the pre-modern (Aristotelian) kind.

On the other hand, historians of Antiquity and the Middle Ages opposed these modernist narratives by positing the likelihood of a continuity between pre-modern and modern science. For instance, Anneliese Maier (1949, 1951) and Marshall Clagett (1959) pointed to the medieval preparation of the principle of inertia, a crucial concept according to Koyré’s Galilean Studies; Pierre Duhem argued for the ‘modernity’ of medieval epistemology (1908), and, more recently, Edward Grant showed the richness of medieval cosmologies against the idea of the uniqueness of the modern shift ‘from the closed world to the infinite universe’, arguing for the medieval foundations of modern science in the Middle Ages (1994, 1996). ³ The list of anti-modernist historians of science could be extended indefinitely. As for the geographical origin of science in Europe, the ideological character of this assumption has long been criticized by many scholars, among them Joseph Needham in his renowned volumes on Science and Civilization in China (1954 onwards).

It is not my present purpose to discuss the historical validity of these different claims, but only to point out an academic controversy and show the difficulty in conceiving of science as an exclusively modern achievement, given the untenable nature of the thesis that there was no science before the modern era (or outside Europe). Thus, the modernity of modern science should not go hand in hand with denying the existence of scientific cultures before, say, the Renaissance or the 17th century. In the same manner, it would make no particular sense to stick to a Eurocentric perspective, considering the global character of science back in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, or to neglect the cumulative character of science and technology in the longue durée (Renn, 2012). Thus, without denying the continuity and global scale of natural knowledge, one should ask instead whether modern (European) science is qualitatively different from the knowledge that preceded and prepared it. Moreover, did a new understanding of science affect its contents? More specifically, the question worth asking is whether the modern era has conferred new meanings to science and has opened unprecedented possibilities of its development.

This reformulation of the question concerning the link between science and modernity means a shift from a ‘technical’ understanding of scientific development (focused on contents, achievements and presumably trans-cultural and meta-historical theories) to a ‘cultural’ one (focused on the mutual interactions of natural investigation and philosophical reflection), that is, from a perspective focused on quantitative continuity to one focused on qualitative discontinuity. From this angle, natural investigation ceases to be defined as science in the singular and loses its presumed a-historical universalism. Rather, it acquires a plural meaning as a product of history rather than the absolute measure of historical development, as Comte contended. As remarked, Comte could take science as the key of modernity precisely because, in his opinion, science has an objective character that transcends history so that its progress might be used to judge the stage of historical development of mankind. On the other hand, it should be remarked that renouncing these assumptions for a historical concept of science entails a risk of circularity as far as the relation between science and modernity is concerned: the risk of defining modernity through (modern) science and vice versa. Heller has provided two (slightly different) solutions to this interdependency of modern science and modernity, one in a work of her youth, Renaissance Man (first issued in Hungarian, Budapest, 1968), and one in A Theory of Modernity (1999).

In the former book, Heller stressed the importance of the transition between the 15th and the 17th centuries in European history, when a new consciousness of the historicity of mankind gradually became established. In particular, she opposed the ‘Renaissance dynamic concept of man’ to the static ancient one. During the Renaissance, the ‘natural’ relation between individual and community, that is, the ‘ready-made’ place in society depending on birth, was irreversibly shaken, questioned, destroyed, and eventually dynamicized. Here follows her Zygmunt Bauman-like assessment: ‘everything became fluid; social upheavals succeeded one another with unbelievable speed; individuals situated higher and lower in the social hierarchy changed places rapidly’ (Heller, 1978: 2). ⁴ The ‘discovery of man’ as a historical being was at the same time a ‘discovery of (a dynamic) nature’ which entailed a reassessment of the relation between man and his environment in terms of domination. Along with Edgar Zilsel, she emphasized the relevance of Francis Bacon’s discourse on the scientific-technological ‘conquest of nature’ (Zilsel, 1957).

Two chapters of Heller’s book on Renaissance anthropology dealt with the emergence of the modern scientific outlook: Chapter 12, ‘Nature and man’, and Chapter 13, ‘Work, science techné and art’. In these sections, she argued for the structural correspondence between (the modern understanding of) man (and society) and (the understanding of) nature. She claimed that ‘the dynamic concept of man and the dynamic conception of nature were […] inseparable during the Renaissance’ (Heller, 1978: 382). In the wake of Cassirer (1927), her treatment of the infinitistic philosophies by Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno and Charles de Bouvelle showed the close ties between their views on nature and the emerging conception of humanity:

The world’s infinitude expresses at the same time the boundlessness of man’s capacity for knowledge and man’s potential, nature’s dynamics expresses man’s dynamism, nature’s purposefulness the purposefulness of human activity. (1978: 377)

The stress on the structural correspondence between philosophy/science and humanity/society shows the way in which Heller conceived the idea of scientific development and modernity as early as the 1960s. The roots of modern science are not to be found in science itself, say, in its method, epistemology or internal development. Rather, science is part of a broad socio-cultural development. In Renaissance Man, Heller identified this process, the unfolding of modernity, with capitalism. The Renaissance, she argued, took place between two more stable socio-economical systems: feudalism, before it, and capitalist society, after. The Renaissance was the ‘dawn of capitalism’. Arguing from a Marxian perspective, Heller implicitly subordinated the cultural phenomena to the economical basis, although she was rather reluctant to explicitly address this economicist premise. It should be noticed that such a Marxian approach allowed her to avoid the aforementioned risk of conceptual circularity: if scientific modernity is a cultural aspect mirroring a socio-economic historical process, it appears as an epiphenomenon of that basis. Using Marx’s words, modernity lies in the structure and not in the super-structure. Heller later abandoned this structure-superstructure dependency and replaced it with the thesis of the mutual inseparability of the dynamics of modernity and the modern social arrangement, which we will consider in the following. Still, as we shall see, she persisted with many historical and philosophical ideas she had already presented in Renaissance Man, in particular the theses of the dynamic essence of modernity and the epochal gulf dividing the ancient static world and the modern developing one.

Science as a logic of modernity

‘Freedom’, Heller writes, ‘became the foundation of the modern world. It is the foundation that grounds nothing’ (1999: 12). This idea corresponds to Habermas’s suggestion, in the aforementioned Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne, that the aspiration of the groundless project of modernity is a self-reflexive almost-foundation. Modernity, according to him, is a historical-philosophical category, which is at the same time the product and the precondition of the philosophischer Diskurs, of modern thought and existence. ⁵

Heller inherits her interest in the problem of modernity from a long tradition that can be traced back to Hegel and Marx. In the preface to A Theory of Modernity, she claims that a reflection on that issue is an almost unavoidable task of contemporary philosophy: ‘It is hardly an exaggeration to say that all political and social theories and philosophies conceived in modernity are also theories or philosophies of modernity’ (Heller, 1999: vii). She regards it as the unfolding of freedom that includes post-modernity as well. Post-modernity is actually the culmination of modernity, ‘not a stage that comes after’ it. Heller defines it as ‘the self-reflective consciousness of modernity itself’ (p. 4).

Post-modernity, according to her, renounces the (Hegelian, post-Hegelian) claim to a privileged position in history, as well as the knowledge of the ‘historical laws’. Instead of progress, she embraces the thesis of a constantly becoming present. She describes our age as ‘the absolute present tense’, resorting to the metaphor of ‘the railway station of the present’ where there are no trains to take. This presentist viewpoint of a transient hic et nunc aims at overcoming, without renouncing historicism, the two major modernist narratives of the recent past. These are, according to Heller, the liberal one and the Marxist/socialist one (p. 7). Both perspectives, in Heller’s expression, ‘marginalized the present’, reducing it to a painful step toward a future to be reached either gradually or abruptly through a revolution. Heller simply denies any future-oriented justification of human sacrifice and suffering.

According to Heller’s (post-Marxist, post-modern) account, there are two interrelated ‘constituents’ of modernity. The first is dynamism of the ‘bad infinitude’ of a never-ending and all-consummating criticism. This ‘constant replacement of the old with the new’ – just as science and technology do (pp. 44–5) – can also be called the process of enlightenment, a two-sided development in which, according to Theodor W. Adorno’s and Max Horkheimer’s Dialektik der Aufklärung (1944: Dialectic of Enlightenment), reason and science turn from instruments of emancipation into their opposite. Heller especially points to the nihilistic and destructive character of enlightenment that ‘cannot be stopped from within the dynamics’ (Heller, 1999: 41).

Heller conceives of this ‘dynamics of modernity’ as the development of three Logics corresponding to the three Weberian dominant spheres of modern life: science, politics and economy (p. 38). She calls them: 1) the Logic of technology-science as the dominating worldview; 2) the Logic of the division of social positions, functions and wealth; and 3) the Logic of political power or domination. These tendencies evolve in such a way that none prevails over the others. Rather, they support one another and also mutually restrict one another (p. 66). All of them are necessary for the survival and reproduction of modernity.

The second component of modernity, along with these three Logics, is the ‘social arrangement’, which substitutes ‘the model of stratification’ of the ancient societies for ‘a functionalist model’ (p. 50):

In the pre-modern social arrangement, the social functions that men and women perform are mostly determined by the social position allocated to them in the hierarchy of social stratification at the time of their birth. Contrarily, in the modern social arrangement the position that men and women finally occupy in the hierarchy of stratification is acquired (in the main) by them, through their performance and the exercise of their abilities in fulfilling specific functions in specific institutions.

The relation between dynamics, or Logics, and social arrangement is not (Marxian) subordination in terms of an economicist structure-superstructure dependency. Rather, it resembles Weber’s accentuation of the spiritual conditions of economic structures – famously in Der protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1920: The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). Accordingly, culture ceases to be a peripheral symptom of an underlying socio-economic reality. Also science, as a cultural phenomenon, can come closer to the heart of (Heller’s understanding of) modernity. It is in fact one of its indispensable Logics.

Heller notes that even modernist narratives had already accorded to science and technology an essential role in their future-oriented perspectives. She writes that ‘the constant development of technology is pivotal for progression’ (Heller, 1999: 8) and, in the case of Marx’s theory, one could even speak of redemptive expectations from technology (‘Technology and Redemption’, p. 26). As Heller underscores, Marx based his prognostication on the observation that capitalism creates the conditions for the abolishment of scarcity (p. 29). ⁶

Even renouncing messianic expectations, Heller persists with the idea of modern science as a process. This dynamism is indeed what distinguishes modern knowledge from the pre-modern kind, in exactly the same manner as modern and ancient societies diverge from one another. In her Italian lectures on the anthropology of modernity (2009), she illustrated this idea with an example derived from a well-known account of the Scientific Revolution: she pitted the developing science of Galileo, Newton and the moderns to the ‘eternity’ of the Aristotelian truth of the Middle Ages (Heller, 2009: 48). ⁷ The recourse to this opposition of Aristotelianism and Galilean/Newtonian science stems from the Kuhnian model of a revolutionary paradigm change. Once again, the problem appears as not simply historical but, rather, philosophical because it implies an interpretation of science itself and its foundations.

Science and technology from an essentialist viewpoint

It is now time to address Heller’s understanding of scientific development. She essentially derives her model from Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). She even resorts to his idea of the dichotomy between normal and revolutionary science. The first is characterized by a problem-solving (or puzzle-solving) attitude within a given framework, or paradigm. The second is the radical rebuttal and substitution of previous schemes and a revision of knowledge beginning from its most basic principles. Kuhn regarded it as an inevitable outcome of situations where it is impossible to solve crucial problems or ‘puzzles’ within a given paradigm. Here is not the place to discuss the flaws in this reductive conception of science and scientific development, especially its historical weakness, or the ambiguity of the concept of paradigm, which seems to eclectically gather many dimensions, social, philosophical and theoretical (Masterman, 1970). What matters to us here is the use that Heller makes of the paradigm-and-revolution model to reflect on certain aspects of modern science: first, the discontinuity of its development; second, and most important, that science, at least in its radical turns, requires ‘theoretical-philosophical thinking’, that is to say, in Heller’s words, creativity and productivity (Heller, 1999: 67).

Besides Kuhnian epistemology, Heller attaches special relevance to an element that was absent from Kuhn’s assessment: technology. She deems technology to be inseparable from modern science. Science relies on the technical advancement that it, in its turn, enhances. Most importantly, science-technology deeply affects the way modern man thinks and acts. Contrary to revolutionary science (which is quite exceptional), normal science and technology are restricted to problem-solving or, according to a distinction derived from Hannah Arendt, to ‘cognition’ rather than ‘thinking’ (the latter conceived as a universal theoretical speculative attitude) (p. 257 n. 7).

Heller is not interested, however, in technology in its factual (historical) concreteness but rather in its ‘essence’. In order to deal with this issue, she relies on Heidegger, especially on the main thesis of Die Frage nach der Technik that ‘the essence of technology is not technological’ (Heidegger, 1962: 5). ⁸ This essence resides in the way in which the modern man relates himself to the world and acts. It is the ‘modern’ way of regarding and dealing with things and of understanding Truth. As a consequence of this technological horizon that ‘enframes’ modern men, nature becomes ‘the arsenal of things for human use. Men themselves become objects for use. The whole universe is instrumentalized or is in waiting as a ‘standing reserve’ for subsequent instrumentalization’ (Heller, 1999: 69).

Yet, Heller departs from Heidegger’s narrative on a fundamental point: she does not embrace the idea that there is only one single, all-embracing, modern worldview, not even a totalizing technological ‘enframing’. As she remarks: ‘I think […] that moderns are characterized by the fragmentation of a once unified and homogeneous world explanation, rather than by the opposite’ (p. 258 n. 25). More precisely, technology supports only one of the two fundamental ‘imaginary institutions’ (or world explanations) of modernity: science. Heller at times speaks of science as an ‘imaginary institution’ and at times of ‘technological imagination’, but as far as I can see these expressions are synonymous.

The second imaginary institution providing a world explanation is historical consciousness. Whereas technological problem-solving concerns action (while science provides the dominant world explanation), historical recollection is a meaning-rendering activity (basically interpretative, or ‘hermeneutic’) (p. 72). Unlike technological cognition, recollection is ‘an end in itself’. The duplicity of modern man’s imagination, Heller claims, can be shown through his two-faced relation to nature, depending on the assumption of one or the other of the two concurring ‘imaginary institutions’. On the one hand, nature appears, as already remarked along with Heidegger, as the ‘standing reserve’ for exploitation. On the other, it is the beautiful landscape for admired contemplation: ‘The more nature is regarded [as] a mere object, a standing reserve for use, the more beautiful it becomes in the eye of the beholder who lets nature be, untouched as it is’ (p. 73).

The two imaginary institutions can influence each other. ‘Historicity and historical thinking have invaded science, and continue to invade it’ (p. 73). This remark (what Heller calls a feedback of historical self-understanding into scientific imagination) seems suited to describe some basic concerns of 20th-century épistémologie historique, but Heller instead derives her idea from sources other than the theories of knowledge stemming from the French philosophical tradition. In fact, she picks up on Arendt’s reflection ‘on the developmental Logic of technology in terms of events’ (p. 74). Special events can in fact be taken as watersheds in the history of thought from particular philosophical perspectives. For instance, Arendt claimed that ‘the modern world began with the explosion of the first atomic bomb’ (p. 74). Heller, for her part, stresses less spectacular ‘technological events’, such as the mechanization of the household and the new means of communication, for their powerful and enduring transformation of everyday life.

In spite of this invasion of historical imagination into the realm of science, it is science that prevails as the ‘dominant world explanation’. In a way, modern science is the substitute for religion, capable (or deemed to be capable) of answering ‘the questions concerning what is, how and why’. This shift from religious statics to scientific dynamics in the world explanation is, as one reads, ‘one of the major differences between the essence of pre-modern social arrangement and the essence of modernity’ (p. 75). Science, she contends, relies on freedom. Its intrinsic fallibility creates a condition in which ‘the meaning of life’ is set free – this is the Weberian idea that science ‘disenchants the world’.

It should be noted that Heller is not interested in the existing sciences in their concrete historical dimension, in their practices and theories, but rather in what we could call the ‘cultural meaning of science’: ‘“Science” is not just chemistry and physics, it is not biology or meteorology, it is SCIENCE as such, science with capital letters’ (p. 77). Echoing Heidegger’s words, she remarks: ‘As the essence of technology is not technological, so the essence of science as the dominant world explanation of modernity is not scientific’ (p. 75). This hegemonic position of science in modernity, its being ‘the authoritative point of reference’, implies that the adjective ‘scientific’ becomes the equivalent to ‘true’ and, as such, can be used as an ideological legitimation of power. As Heller observes, ‘the “dominant world explanation” is the highest authority – or, more precisely, the highest authorities draw legitimacy from a dominant world explanation’ (p. 75). Moreover, science is the spirit of the institutions of science, which have the monopoly of decision about what is science and what is merely pseudo-science: ‘Recommendations coming from outside institutions are sometimes treated the same way as heretics were treated by the Orthodox Church in the Middle Ages’ (p. 262 n. 56). Science also has the tendency to expand, that is, it becomes a model to be followed in a wide variety of fields, eventually even in the exercise of power and in the normalization and rationalization of society. This is when science becomes ideology, that is to say, it becomes a consensus-producing source of power legitimacy.

In my mind there is one single dominant imaginary institution (or world explanation) in modernity, and this is science. Technological imagination and thinking elevated […] science to the position of the dominant world explanation. Thus our modern ‘vision of the world’ as a whole is shaped by science as ideology. (p. 70)

Technology and science as ideology

The definition of science as the dominant world explanation, the stress on the essence of science in the singular and science as ideology hint at the function of science to reproduce, shape, and maybe even produce socio-political dynamics. Since Heller does not expand on this point, it is expedient to focus on the source to which she refers: ‘Jürgen Habermas’ beautiful analysis in Technik und Wissenschaft als “Ideologie”’ (p. 259 n. 31).

Habermas’s essay on ‘Technology and Science as Ideologies’ dates back to 1968 and was delivered as a talk in Frankfurt on Main on the occasion of Herbert Marcuse’s 70th birthday. In it Habermas developed Marcuse’s thesis that ‘the liberating force of technology – the instrumentalization (Instrumentalisierung) of things – turns into a fetter of liberation (Befreiung); the instrumentalization of man’ (Habermas, 1969: 7). This thesis relies on the assumption of a twofold meaning (or function) of science-technology. On the one hand, as Produktivkraft (force of production), it is the precondition of the contemporary (capitalistic and industrial) development of production. On the other, as Ideologie, it legitimates the given society, providing arguments to support its progress and, at the same time, veiling the inequalities and injustices that it also produces.

Habermas conceives of contemporary society as a form of technocracy or, rather, as a tendency toward the realization of technocracy. In it, politics is reduced to the solution of technical problems related to administration and the conservation of the status quo by eliminating the dysfunctions that could occur in a given social system. Accordingly, the task of rationality shifts from criticism to improving efficiency, while political praxis ceases to deal with principles and general aims and is downplayed to problem-solving in an unquestionable framework.

According to Habermas, this efficiency-oriented rationalization lacking socio-political criticism has two directions: bottom-up and top-down. First, it is the transformation of all realms of society – the military, education, health care, even family – into technically manageable systems. Second, it wipes out all traditional forms of socio-political legitimacy – mythology, religion, metaphysics, tradition – and substitutes them for modern ideologies. In the name of science, they attack traditional forms of legitimacy as ideological. ‘Ideologies have the same origin of the criticism of ideology’ (p. 72) ⁹ and rest on a sort of fetishism of science. What is more, science and technology themselves replace the loss of traditional forms of political legitimacy: they provide a modern ideological substitute for them.

The function of all ideologies, Habermas states, is to hinder the understanding, the discussion and the criticism of basic aspects of society (p. 89). ¹⁰ Technocratical ideology, in particular, propagates the conviction that scientific progress corresponds to political advancement (p. 81). By contrast, Habermas divides the technical ability at problem-solving (or, rather, instrumental thought and action, according to the Weberian category of zweckrationales Handeln) and the emancipating power of communicative interaction among men (kommunikatives Handeln or symbolisch vermittelte Interaktion). The qualitative difference between technicality and a free and communicative praxis passes unperceived under technocratic ideology: ‘The ideological core of this [technocratic] consciousness is the elimination of the difference between praxis and technique’ (p. 91). ¹¹ A consequence of the success of this ideology is the exclusion of the masses from politics, that is, an anti-democratic drive of modern societies depending on the (technocratic and scientistic) assumption that, since politics has to deal with technical problems exclusively, decisions should be taken by experts and cannot be subjected to public debate (p. 78).

In his essay Habermas derived the basic concepts of ‘rationality’ and ‘rationalization’ from Weber’s thesis of the penetration of technological rationality (die Durchsetzung des Typus zweckrationalen Handelns) into all realms of modern society and culture. In particular, he claimed that this (virtually all-inclusive) expansion depended on the institutionalization of modern science and technology:

The progressive ‘rationalization’ of society is linked to the institutionalization of scientific and technological development. To the extent that technology and science permeate social institutions and thus transform them, old legitimations are destroyed. (p. 48) ¹²

Heller’s ideas of a technological imagery and science as the dominant worldview similarly point to the penetration of technology-science into most social and cultural fields. In order to support her thesis, she (like Habermas) refers to some essence of scientific and technological activity mainly coincident with instrumental rationality or, in Weber’s expression, Zweckrationalität. In Heller’s assessment, the affirmation of this rationality goes hand in hand with the evolution of modernity itself.

Different approaches to the scientific-technological nexus: Historical epistemology and externalist history of science

Heller’s and Habermas’s reflections on the cultural and ideological implications of science and technology are useful to address the question of modernity. Still, their analyses do not address the problem of science in itself, that is, the matters linked to its contents and epistemology, theory and empirical basis, its conceptuality and historical development. Although Habermas distinguishes between the material and the ideological dimensions of technology-science, he limits himself to dealing with the latter. He does not focus on science as such, but only on science as ideology, which he conceives as the cultural and political extension of certain mechanisms to society as a whole. Heller’s essentialist treatment is not really different: she deals with the dynamic essence of science-technology without elaborating on its concrete unfolding. This raises a major question, namely the question concerning the factual forms of interrelation between science-technology as such and its abstract cultural form as essence/ideology. What does an essentialist/ideological interpretation reflect of the sciences and technologies in their historical, empirical and factual phenomenology? Does the ideologization of science affect and changes scientific research itself? How does it penetrate scientific theories? These questions could be reduced to the difficulty of interpreting the connection between science and technology, an issue that has been debated at length by philosophers and historians of science. Let us briefly recount, in the following, some theoretical perspectives derived from externalist history of science and historical epistemology that could integrate Heller’s reflections while questioning some of her premises.

It should be first recounted that, in the last century, the technological bond of modern science served as a means to stress the wide social preconditions of scientific production, especially from a Marxian perspective. The origin of this line of research has often been traced back to the 1931 London International Congress of History of Science and Technology. On that occasion, Boris Hessen, as a member of the Soviet delegation headed by Nikolai Bukharin, argued for the relevance of the social environment for Newton’s scientific achievement, in a well-known communication entitled ‘The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia’ (1931). In spite of its stylistic roughness (and Marxist excesses), Hessen’s essay inspired many scholars working on the so-called ‘externalist history of science’, among them, Zilsel (already mentioned as a source for Heller), who brought forward the idea that modern science was the outcome of an exceptional exchange between craftsmen and theoreticians (see Conner, 2005: 276–82 on Zilsel’s thesis; 376–80 on Hessen’s thesis). The interrelation between scientific production and the economic and socio-political environment has since then inspired countless studies, including some departing from Marxian engagement. Some of them have become standard references, albeit controversial, of the most recent history of science, for instance Shapin (1994) and Biagioli (1993). These examples should be sufficient to stress how controversial it can be to separate scientific activity and technological production from economic and political-historical factors. In other words, both the interdependency and the relative independency of Heller’s three dynamics of modernity would require a special treatment that takes into account the results of the externalist history of science.

As mentioned above, all of these instances seem to fall under the compass of what today is called historical epistemology, a historical-philosophical research agenda that brings together a history of science with a strong externalist vocation and a reflection on science renouncing a-historical a prioristic foundations. To mention a scholar who made some of the most significant contributions to historical epistemology in recent years, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger observed in his introduction to historical epistemology: ‘Along with the historization of the science philosophy one meets a development that could be regarded as the epistemologization of science history’ (Rheinberger, 2007: 13). As for the technological issue, this approach proposes looking for ‘a way to talk about explanations in science that implicitly incorporates the relationship between historicity and technology’ (Norton Wise, 2009: 39). Hence, historical epistemology opens up a possibility to reassess the relation between science and technology through a historical revision of its a priori conditions, and thereby to overcome the cultural gap that separates, as Heller pointed out, the technological and the historical ‘imaginary institutions’ of modernity.

Rheinberger reassessed the relation between science and technology, especially in the laboratory, drawing on Gaston Bachelard’s phénoménotechnique and Bruno Latour’s technoscience. At the beginning of a well-known essay about the interplay between science and technology in the research on molecular biology, ‘Das Epistemische Ding und seine technische Bedingungen’ (‘The Epistemic Thing and its Technical Premises’), he explicitly distanced his epistemological treatment of the question about technology from the ‘common’ criticism of instrumental rationality (die übliche Kritik der instrumentellen Vernunft) by scholars of the Frankfurt School like Habermas (Rheinberger, 1992: 68). Rather, he regarded the modern fusion of science and technology as a challenging theoretical issue capable of revealing a very different spirit of contemporary scientific research than mere problem-solving: ‘Scientific activity is only and then scientific inasmuch as it “generates surprises” on the “way to the unknown,” that is, it produces future’ (p. 71). ¹³ This creative and future-oriented activity is produced in an environment where the objects of scientific research are inseparable from the technological conditions. To explain this idea, Rheinberger introduced a terminological distinction between the object of research Wissenschaftsobjekt (literally, scientific object) and the technological objects (die technologischen Objekte) within a given experimental setup (die Experimentalbedingungen). The former, the Wissenschaftsobjekt, has ‘a fragile state’ since it refers to questions to be answered rather than to something given and determined. Thus, it is in a certain sense an ‘absent’ object (in gewisser Weise abwesend) that ‘embodies that which is still unknown’ (es verkörpert das, was man noch nicht weiß) (p. 70). By contrast, ‘technological objects’ are clearly determined ‘things’. They offer answers, unlike the ‘research objects’ which, rather, raise questions. Yet, the separation between these different epistemic objects is only transient (p. 72). ¹⁴ According to Rheinberger, there is continuity between research and technological objects: a Wissenschaftsobjekt can potentially become a technological object (ein mögliches technologisches Objekt) and, in turn, research objects (Wissenschaftsobjekte) always come into being from an experimental constellation of technological objects (and, under certain conditions, technological objects can become research objects) (p. 72). ¹⁵ This conceptualization allows Rheinberger to stress the inseparability of science and technology, of the empirical and the theoretical moment in scientific production, as well as the centrality of doing in science over conceptualization (pp. 12–13). ¹⁶ As Bachelard had contended before, scientific objects are realized and materialized by the scientific discourse and not given as natural (Gaukroger, 1976: 212, 216). Drawing on such premises, Rheinberger argued for an idea of science-technology that is at odds with a mechanical problem-solving activity.

It has also been contended that the creative interdependency of science and technology cannot be restricted to contemporary laboratory research, but constitutes a central motor of scientific development in general. Ernst Mach, back in his pioneering studies on the history of physics (1883), took the history of statics as an example that ‘illustrates in an excellent manner the process of the formation of science generally. […] These beginnings point unmistakably to their origin in the experiences of the manual arts’ (p. 89). Jürgen Renn and Peter Damerow recently reassessed this interdependency in the framework of a historical epistemological research program focused on the history of mechanics. They proposed to use for their analyses the concept of ‘mental models’, derived from cognitive sciences. These are conceptual ‘instruments for drawing conclusions in the context of given knowledge’ which ‘link present with past experiences by embedding new experiences in a cognitive network of previous experiences’ (Renn and Damerow, 2007: 313). ¹⁷ Mental models have the advantage of bypassing the sharp separation between experience and theory by identifying conceptual-experiential tools that can endure centuries, like the mental model of motion-implies-force for the Aristotelian and post-Aristotelian dynamics or special models which were developed for the comprehension of machines in the pre-modern as well as in the modern era (Renn and Damerow, 2011).

In particular, according to these scholars, modern mechanics was the product of the fruitful fusion of theoretical and technical activity in the age of the rediscovery of Archimedes and the pseudo-Aristotelian Mechanical Problems, which paved the way toward the physics of Galileo and Newton and the mechanistic ontologies of the Baroque (Renn and Damerow, 2010). Beginning in the Renaissance, mathematicians like Guidobaldo del Monte, Giovanni Battista Benedetti and Galileo (as a kind of ‘scientist-engineers’) worked in close collaboration with craftsmen and developed their theories through reflection on the ‘challenging’ technological objects provided by architecture, ballistics, navigation, and other developing fields. ¹⁸ Hence, the reduction of technology to problem-solving is quite misleading even in the studies on the very origins of modern science.

Our analysis has shown a series of aspects in Heller’s treatment of science or in her premises that require further investigation. First, the distinction of the development (the ‘Logic’) of science-technology from economic and political factors is historically and theoretically problematic and needs a more detailed treatment than that contained in her A Theory of Modernity. Moreover, the reduction of science and technology to problem-solving and instrumental thought is questionable from both a historical and a theoretical point of view. A further controversial issue is the Kuhnian opposition between a creative element in science that becomes manifest only at certain ‘revolutionary’ moments and a generally mechanical methodology. This distinction seems to echo an old prejudice concerning the superiority of scientific theoreticians (or rather, geniuses, from Copernicus, Galileo and Newton to Einstein) over the mass of merely passive technicians (and craftsmen, in the old days).

Heller convincingly argued for the centrality of the Logic of technology and science within the project of modernity as one of its most important cultural elements. In light of the objections stemming from the history of science and historical epistemology, the Weberian/Habermasian claim concerning the expansion of instrumental rationality from science to other cultural and social fields and institutions should be reassessed. How and when did the idea of science and technology as problem-solving first emerge? How and when did the idea of a scientific society as a functional (perfectible) system emerge? It seems expedient to reformulate Habermas’s concept of science as ideology and Heller’s idea of the essence of science (as well as Heidegger’s ‘untechnological essence’ of technology and Kuhn’s ‘normal science’) as historical problems. The issue at stake would no longer be the question as to how technological thought expanded, but rather as to how a certain understanding of science and technology emerged in history and was used to legitimate socio-political and cultural transformations. Furthermore, a better understanding of the phenomenon of modern science could be only the result of additional reflection on the conceptual development of science as such, in its mutual relation to technology. Thus, the historical-philosophical question about science and modernity could be enriched significantly by including stimuli coming from historical epistemology, especially a reflection on knowledge stressing the historical nature of science and its research objects, as well as consideration of the environmental factors of scientific production. Thanks to this approach, Heller’s question concerning the dynamic essence of science-technology would acquire a historical-epistemological concreteness that might reinforce her thesis of modernity as a developing and unfinished (intrinsically interminable) project.