32
PARTISAN REVIEW
himself, his own constructions and the patterns of
his
own actions.
5
This is no longer a question of academic objectivity. It cannot be
solved by the reflection that man as a question-asking being na–
turally can only receive answers to match
his
own questions.
If
nothing more was involved, then we would be satisfied that different
questions put "to one and the same physical event" reveal different
but objectively equally "true" aspects of the same phenomenon, just
as the table around which a number of people have taken their places
is seen by each of them in a different aspect, without thereby ceasing
to be the object common to all of them. One could even imagine
that a theory of theories, like the old
mathesis universalis,
might
eventually be able to determine how many such questions are possible
or how many "different types of natural law" can be applied to
the same natural universe without contradiction.
The matter would become somewhat more serious if it turned
out that no question exists at
all
which does not lead to a consistent
set of answers-a perplexity we mentioned earlier when we dis–
cussed the distinction between pattern and meaning. In this instance,
the very distinction between meaningful and meaningless questions
would disappear together with absolute truth, and the consistency
we would be left with could just as well be the consistency of an
asylum for paranoiacs or the consistency of the current demonstra–
tions of the existence of God. However, what is really undermining
the whole modern notion that meaning is contained in the process
as a whole, from which the particular occurrence derives its intel–
ligibility, is that not only can we prove this, in the sense of consistent
deduction, but we can take almost any hypothesis and
act
upon it,
with a sequence of results in reality which not only make sense but
work.
This means quite literally that everything is possible not only
in the realm of ideas but in the field of reality itself.
4 Heidegger, in a discussion in Zurich, published under the title:
"Aus–
sprache mit Martin Heidegger am 6. November 1951"
(Photodruck Jurisverlag
Zuerich, 1952), said as follows: "...
auch der Satz : man kann alles beweisen,
(
ist) nicht ein Freibrief, sondern ein Hinweis auf die M oeg!ichkeit, dass dort,
wo man beweist
im
Sinne der Deduktion aus Axiomen, dies jeder;:;eit
in
gewissem
Sinne moeglich ist. Das ist das unheimlich R aetselhafte, dessen Geheimnis ich
bisher auch nicht an einem Zipfel auf;:;uheben vermochte, dass dieses Verfahren
in der modernen Naturwissenschaft stimmt."
5 Werner Heisenberg in recent publications renders this same thought in
a number of variations. See for example
Das Naturbild der heutigen Physik,
1956.
