PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE
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tIe the Greek physician or the Greek technician knew by compari–
son! ). The moral imperative of modern science is to search for reli–
able knowledge on the basis of unprejudiced inquiry and critique,
without any preconceived ideas. When we enter into its sphere, we
have the sensation of breathing clean air, of leaving behind us all
vague talk, all plausible opinions, all stubborn prejudice and blind
faith.
Ad b. Modern science shares the age-old striving for total
philosophical knowledge. Philosophy had from the first set itself up
as the science that knows the whole,-not ,as infinitely progressing,
factual knowledge, but as self-contained doctrine. Now modern philo–
sophy since Descartes has identified itself with modern science, but in
such a way that it still retained the philosophical concept of a total
knowledge. It can be shown, however, that for this very reason Des–
cartes did not understand modern science, the investigations of
Galileo for example, and that his own work had in spirit little to do
with modern science, although as a creative mathematician he helped
to advance this science. The ensuing philosophers, even to a certain
extent Kant, were still caught in this totalist conception of science.
Hegel once again believed that he was achieving the construction of
an authentic total science, and that he possessed all the sciences in
his cosmos of the mind.
This identification of modern science and modern philosophy
with their old aspiration to total knowledge was catastrophic for
both of them. The modern sciences which, by a self-deception com–
mon to all of them, looked on those great philosophies of the seven–
teenth century and on some later philosophies as pillars of their own
edifice, were tainted by their aspirations to absolute knowledge.
Modern philosophy has done its greatest work only "in spite of" all
this, or one might say, by a constant misunderstanding.
Ad c. Neither the modern concept of science nor science in
the sense of a total philosophical system coincides with the strictly
philosophical conception of science which Plato formulated in a
way that has never been surpassed. How far removed is the truth, the
knowledge of which Plato interprets in his parable of the cave and
touches on in his dialectic, this truth that applies to being and to that
which is above all being-how fundamentally different it is from the
truth of the sciences, which move only amid the manifestations of
