The sciences and their cultural consequences: About the future of common sense *

The cultural consequences of the sciences—this is a broad spectrum. I will restrict myself to discussing two of these consequences. First, we should speak of the cultural loss of the validity of scientific world views. This process is not very spectacular. Nonetheless, as I have made plausible, the position of the sciences in the context of modern culture has changed profoundly and irreversibly. The second cultural consequence of the progressive scientification of our civilization is the loss of the competence of common sense.

1. Cultural neutralization of scientific world views

The changes in the cultural significance of scientific world views, due to the loss of the competence of common sense, should be illustrated against the background of a scientific and cultural–historical scene that existed over a hundred years ago. On 23 and 26 February 1883, a scientific debate took place in the House of Deputies of the Prussian Landtag in Berlin. ¹ The agenda point was the budget of the Ministry of Spiritual Education and Medical Affairs, Permanent Expenditure, Chapter 119: Universities. The debate was unusually tumultuous. Commotion arose especially in response to the contributions of Adolf Stockers—applause on the right, laughter on the left—and the president had to reach for the bell. Of course, the budget estimate was not the reason for the commotion; nobody revolted over its small or excessive size. It was not about shifting the focal points of scientific demands, and, in any case, it was not about university reform.

What was it about? The topic of the debate was the ideological conflict between scientific and religious orientations towards reality. For more than two days, the Prussian House of Deputies discussed Darwin's theory of descent, or more precisely its compatibility or incompatibility with the biblical account of creation and the meaning of the first Article of Faith. The trigger for the debate was the fact that a Prussian professor had recently publicly confessed, in a scandal-stimulating manner, to be a follower of Darwinism. This requires some explanation. Of course, by the early 1880s, Darwin's theory had long been accepted in Germany, even in an internationally respected and continuous manner. As early as 1868, Ernst Haeckel's Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (Natural History of Creation) ² was published, and, in 1877, Haeckel gave a speech at the Public Assembly of German Natural Scientists and Physicians, calling for a sweeping reform of public science education. ³ Natural History of Creation—in this book title was the condensed claim that the scientific world view had to replace the relic-like, persistently transmitted religious world view, as a cultural equivalent. The Old Faith and the New ⁴ —this is how the former theologian David Friedrich Strauss, ⁵ who had once been banished from Zurich by eminent pious citizens, formulated this programme right at the beginning of the new empire and made it a bestseller in liberal circles.

So why, in view of this scientific and cultural–historical situation, could a commitment to Darwinism by a professor be regarded as a scandal that requires parliamentary consideration? The special circumstances of the case explain it. The professor in question was not just anyone, and his professorial accreditation of the revolutionary Darwinian world view had not taken place in a liberal circle but rather in the representative institutional capital of science of the state; namely, in the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Moreover, the proclamation of the theory of descent as a valid part of the image of the world in which we live did not happen incidentally in academia, but occurred at the Friedrich meeting on 25 January 1883. Here, an obituary of Darwin was read out, and by no means by an ambitious young graduate intending to gain publicity by provoking the public. The reader of the obituary was none other than the long-time secretary of the academy, the then world-famous physiologist Emil du Bois-Reymond, who was also the rector of the Friedrich-Wilhelms University and thus the representative spokesman for science in the Prussian state. ⁶

In the academic community, the scientific rank of Emil du Bois-Reymond was beyond all doubt. For a long time, he was considered the famous successor to his also famous teacher, Johannes von Muller. Unlike today's practice in our academies, in nineteenth-century Prussia, one could become a member of the academy even as a young man. This is what happened to Emil du Bois-Reymond, by the favour of Alexander von Humboldt, as a 33-year-old. Meanwhile, du Bois-Reymond resided in the magnificent building of the Physiological Institute, which was rebuilt in 1877. Like the parallel building of the Hermann von Helmholtz Physics Institute, it was named by contemporaries as the ‘Palace of Science’ and attracted admiring visitors from all over the world. But du Bois-Reymond's fame extended far beyond the confines of the professional association to the general public. He had a lecturer's competence to an unusual degree. Wherever public spaces had to be filled with academic splendour, Emil du Bois-Reymond was a guaranteed success, even in the presence of ministers.

So, when a man of this importance publicly legitimized the revolutionary Darwinian world view—that was the situation. ⁷ In fact, in his obituary of Darwin, du Bois-Reymond had not exercised any ideological discretion. On the contrary, he had stylized his obituary, which he titled ‘Darwin and Copernicus’, as an ideological triumph of the spirit of modern science. This was the triumph of the right of curiosity; that is, the right of free scientific activity driven by theoretical curiosity through emancipation from any attachment to cultural or even political rules about what, so to speak, may not be true. Du Bois-Reymond's proud conclusion reads: ‘While the Holy Office haunts Copernicus's followers with fire and dungeons, Charles Darwin rests in Westminster Abbey.’ ⁸

In accordance with its outstanding scientific and cultural staging, the case quickly became a scandal. No Holy Office, which could have intervened in science in a disciplinary manner, existed in Prussia, but it did exist in the Christian national Reichsbote. ⁹ The Reichsbote put the bell on the cat, and then Deputy Stocker, who was at that time a court preacher, took up the matter. He was, even as a Protestant, of course in favour of scientific freedom. However, anyone who, as a scientist, finds himself in conflict with the world-view prescriptions of the Holy Scriptures in his quest for knowledge should sort that out for himself, but not bring this conflict to the public as a world-view revolution, especially in a country where people believe everything ‘that a German professor teaches’. ¹⁰

The deputies of the centre, Windhorst first, agreed with Stocker in the ideological assessment of the case. Of course, they also asserted the incompatibility of the latest scientific world view with the traditional religious view of the world, and they also had no doubt about the scandalous nature of the incident. However, unlike Stocker, who had nothing to offer other than an expression of outrage, Windhorst used the case pragmatically as an opportunity to renew the demand for ‘freedom of teaching’. ¹¹ This was a use of the word ‘free’ that sounded ear-piercing to the Prussian statists, including the liberals among them. Here, Windhorst used the word ‘free’ to refer to a university that was under a non-state (that is, church or church-affiliated) sponsorship, where, of course, there could not be any information given about Darwinism in any way other than with apologetic intention.

There is no need to differentiate the cultural–political and ideological fronts in this debate—from Stocker and Windhorst to Virchow and Gossler, the minister of culture who tried his best to mediate all of this. All that has been said is sufficient, in view of this historical background, to realize how inconceivable it is that any parliament in a free, highly developed society could debate the ideological significance of new scientific theories for two full days.

Of course, even today, science debates are a trivial part of the parliamentary agenda. In some well-defined ways, the political weight of these debates has even increased, mainly due to the dramatic increase in science spending relative to both public and gross domestic product. ¹² Moreover, for reasons that are not covered here, ¹³ the practical interest with which the political public relates to scientific progress in hope and concern is steadily growing, and that, too, is reflected in the political institutions. But, despite our growing dependency on scientific achievements and despite the resulting increase in the significance of science policy, the world-view consequences of advances in scientific knowledge are simply no longer a political issue. One could also state it like this: the progress of scientific knowledge is, despite its dramatically increasing practical relevance, in its pure cognitive content a thing without any cultural or political excitement. Nowadays, we are ready to accept every scientific world-view revolution, and, therefore, there can no longer be any parliamentary inquiries. This does not mean, of course, that we are not interested in changes in the image of the world in which we live, which result from the progress of research. Rather, the opposite is the case; the flourishing science journalism alone already proves it. Thus, the process of the ideological and political neutralization of scientific world-view revolutions simply means that we are no longer able to say what difference it really makes in cultural or political terms, whether we are in the scientific world view of what was thought true yesterday, or in the world view offered to us as the more probable today.

What is the reason for the decreasing provocative power of the progress of knowledge? Why have scientific world-view revolutions lost their cultural and political character of imposition? One could assume that, with the evolution of knowledge, the depth of world-view-changing effects caused by new findings decreases. The impositional character of the Copernican Revolution and Darwin's theory then depends on a greater effort of reconstruction to make the picture of the world in which we live consistent again while taking into account new theories. So, one could ask, does the world-view revolutionary significance of the progress of knowledge decrease, and along with it the demand for our efforts to reorient our world views? Karl Popper, the Austro-British philosopher of science, objected to this: The revolutions that are taking place today at the cognitive level, on the basis of research, are no less in their world-view-overthrowing effects but rather greater than in earlier epochs of modern scientific history. ¹⁴ And it is true: one cannot say why the world-view-changing significance of the current molecular Darwinism ¹⁵ of our biophysical chemists, with its tendency to dissolve traditional ideas of the fundamental character of the boundaries between the animated and the inanimate, should be less than the original Darwinism with its historical–genetic dissolution of the boundaries between species, which people, despite having had thousands of years of experience of evolution, thought to be permanent boundaries. Similarly, it is difficult to understand why the alternative between a cosmos that would eventually sink back due to gravitation at the end of its expansion on the one hand and a continuously expanding cosmos on the other ¹⁶ should be less dramatic than the alternative between the central or the peripheral position of our Earth in relation to the Sun. Nevertheless, the names Darwin and Copernicus, ¹⁷ as in the title of du Bois-Reymond's obituary quoted above, stand for revolutionaries and provocateurs of the first rank in the history of scientific culture, while Manfred Eigen's molecular Darwinism or Wolfgang Priester's theory of continuous cosmic expansion can be popular not only within esoteric specialist circles but also exoterically with an ideologically and politically neutralized audience at jubilee events or in company pamphlets. ¹⁸

In this context of the history of scientific culture, one has to search for a long time to find cases that seem to indicate otherwise. I will mention two such cases, which are said to support rather than weaken the thesis of the progressive ideological and political neutralization of scientific progress. The first case, to which I would like to refer by way of example, is related to publications by the scientists Eysenck and Jensen about an alleged unequal distribution of measurable intelligence, also with regard to ethnic affiliations. ¹⁹ A storm of protest arose, first in the US and then in the UK, among the young academic intelligentsia. The thesis of the progressive ideological and political neutralization of scientific progress would correspond to reacting in a methodically critical manner to the theorem of ethnically induced unequal distribution of measurable intelligence; that is, it would question the soundness of the procedures for justifying such a theorem. Instead, the cognitive content of the quoted theorem already had an effect of provoking outrage. ‘That cannot be true!’—this common saying could explain the uproar.

The special circumstances that make it clear, in retrospect, how the professorial communication of certain research results became a scandal can be quickly explained. The case took place in the years when student unrest and its prominence illuminated the academic atmosphere from California to Paris, Frankfurt and Japan. In this context, the phenomenon of a spreading ideological–critical suspicion of the misuse of science also occurred. It was indeed undeniable that, in the history of the totalitarianism of this century, the most manifold forms of the misuse of science for ideological and oppressive purposes took place. ²⁰ Scientists had also been involved in the preparation of the racial ideology of National Socialism with its deadly consequences, and the attribution of valued or less valued human qualities had demonstrably played a significant role in racial discrimination. So, one might ask later, why should the ideologically critical students not turn against the cited theorem with indignation?

Nonetheless, the students’ indignant resistance to the cited actual or supposed results of investigations into the group-specific distribution of measurable intelligence was based on a fundamental misunderstanding, induced by ideological criticism, of the significance of psychological, anthropological or other human scientific findings of characteristics from the perspective of human rights. This significance is not significant at all. On the contrary, it is completely irrelevant. In fact, the National Socialists had granted or denied elementary human rights based on the alleged or actual circumstances of group-specific natural characteristics. It was precisely due to this practice that, in order to counteract the inhumane consequences of the National Socialist orientation towards reality, those uproaring students remained fixated on the equality of all human beings in their possession of certain properties that were considered particularly important. It would have instead been better to point out the irrelevance of the existence or lesser existence of the properties in question in order to preserve our human rights’ subjectivity. It would be even nicer if the answer to the question of to whom human rights subjectivity should be attributed depended on the research results of any professors of psychology or anthropology. Nothing but the banal and therefore fully common-sense-capable continuance of our membership of the Homo sapiens species is enough to give us the status of the holders of human rights. A scientific attestation of this status is not necessary. Indeed, every attempt at such an attestation would endanger what is supposed to be attested in terms of the immutability of its validity. ²¹ It was, again, ideological criticism that misled the students to think that the inviolable and universal validity of human rights in which they engaged themselves cannot be secured by ideological control of research results, but rather only by the ideological neutralization of such results.

The outlined affair is now rightly forgotten. What is not forgotten, but rather remains unchanged, is a second important case in scientific–cultural history involving the recent insistence on cultural and political unreasonableness of being taught, trained and educated within the scope of the world view of modern science. I mean the well-known creationist dispute in the US, which has flared up again and again for more than half a century. Recently, in the state of Louisiana, parents have sought a court ruling that the biblical account of creation should be offered in the curriculum in public schools as a fully equivalent alternative world view to Darwin's theory of evolution. Complementing this, six dozen Nobel Prize laureates found it necessary to put their signatures to a public protest against this attempt.

Doesn’t this well-known case, whose differentiated history is of no interest to us, ²² prove the continuance of a cultural—even political—interest in the fact that the image of the world in which we live has to be this and nothing else? In fact, there can be no question here of world-view-relevant cultural indifference towards the progress of scientific knowledge. In the meantime, the conditions on which, in this most prominent case, the manifest resistance to the perceived scientific image of the world depends are of a highly special kind. The resistance in question necessitates an understanding of the special religious and sociological tradition of the US. Above all, the strict separation of church and state belongs to this tradition from its inception. ²³ This separation—unlike in the beginning of this century in France ²⁴ —did not arise from a secular intention, but separated from the will of the independent-minded pious, who, remembering what their Pilgrim ancestors were exposed to in the state–church absolutism of Europe, wanted to be free of such an authority in relation to matters of confession or the prayer book. In a cultural milieu of this tradition, it is possible to maintain a high cultural level, which exists almost exclusively in sectarian marginal positions in Europe, namely Biblicist fundamentalism, and even in theological faculties, which are not state institutions there. Scientifically, culturally and historically, this is anything but an indicator of deficits in the public cultural validity of the freedom of science. On the contrary, it has always presupposed the undisputed validity of this freedom of science, and with it the highly cultural, not only formal but also factually recognized, right of everyone to disrespect the world view of modern science and to instead read the Bible. In this way, the Biblicist fundamentalism in question demonstrates what it seems to refute; namely, the indiscriminate culmination of the consequences of modern science. Scientific civilization is not more, but less, than any previous civilization, reliant on cultural homogeneity through homogeneous ideological orientation. In other words, the possibility of practical participation in the life of a scientific civilization does not presuppose any participation in the individual or group execution of a world view resulting from scientific findings. The evidence of cultural existence does not seem to fit in with the thesis of the declining cultural significance of scientific world views. Indeed, as I have tried to show briefly, it confirms this thesis.

So, I repeat: with the scientification of our culture and with the successes of science that are reflected in it, the cultural significance of scientific world views decreases. What are the reasons for this extremely consequential scientific and cultural process? It is reasonable to assume that the cultural and political neutralization of scientific world views results from the increasing difficulties in conveying such world views beyond the boundaries of esoteric specialized communities as a common culture. Scientific world-view revolutions have therefore lost their challenging character because the cognitive dimensions of these revolutions extend beyond the receptive capacity of common cultural consciousness. The outlined ideological neutralization of the progress of scientific knowledge would thus be a cultural effect of the degree of differentiation and specialization of scientific research practice. The further the sciences penetrate into the dimensions of the very small, the very large and the very complicated, the more difficult it becomes to synthesize our theoretical insight into what would be socially and culturally perceivable world views.

This is a significant argument. In its quintessence, the scientific–cultural consequences of the loss of the competence of common sense assert that the more scientific information transcends the capability for understanding the possibilities of common, habitat-bound and school-conditioned experience, the less important its significance is for the guarantee of the unity of cultural reality orientation. This does not affect the—not always adequately valued—scientifically cultural fact that popular scientific literature is blunt. It is even bestseller material. The art of our science journalists proves to be brilliant again and again, and, at the same time, the number of scientists whose credibility on the subject is undisputed and who can communicate effectively to the general public as book authors or orators is increasing. Palaeontologists and astrophysicists, biochemists and internists, geologists and ethologists—all of them now also act as popularizers in prominent cases; the impressive displays in the windows of each bookstore demonstrate it. ²⁵

In addition, of course, there are science sections in major daily newspapers and science broadcasts on our electronic media. To convey an idea of the grand scheme of this process, the proportion of science broadcasts in the overall programme of electronic media amounts to far more than 2 per cent, ²⁶ and the ratings are even higher. ²⁷ That is not a small amount, rather contrary to the expected fair amount, if you measure it by the dominant cultural functions of the electronic media. The series of such indications could be continued for a long time—from the excellent mathematical and natural science lessons offered nowadays at our continuing schools, to the public science courses in adult education institutions, to the well-known keynote speaker activities of the eloquent among our teachers—the du Bois-Reymonds of our days, so to speak.

The sciences, including the natural sciences, are thus still quite popular. Nonetheless, the extraordinary cultural diffusion of popular scientific knowledge about the world in which we live cannot stop the loss of the cultural significance of scientific world views. One may even suppose that a reverse correlation is effective here: the cultural and political neutralization of scientific world views is accelerated by nothing other than their medial omnipresence. To give an example: the cultural indifference of scientific progress is, with respect to the cognitive side, completed when, as happened a few weeks ago, the discovery of a cosmic radiation source at the extreme distance of 20,000 million light-years is the penultimate item on the morning news.

The more we publicly, naturally, passively hear about the world in which we live, through information that is disseminated by the media, ²⁸ the more the certainty of perfect cultural indifference of the scientific transformation of the world is consolidated in our contemporaneity. Why is that so? It seems to me that this is because that, with the increasing distance of scientific knowledge from common sense, the importance of this knowledge for the assurance of that minimal homogeneity of its orientation to reality, which holds people culturally and politically capable of communication, is steadily decreasing. The further the sciences penetrate the dimensions of the very large, the very small and the very complicated, the less important what one finds there becomes for the assurance of the consistency of everyday life orientation.

Against this background, one understands why the natural–evolutionary dissolution of substantial boundaries between the species, which had been expected of the cultural cooperative by Darwin at that time, ²⁹ could elicit a profound orientation irritation: the distinction between animal and human, which is as trivial a distinction as it is fundamental, seemed to be threatened in its triviality. ³⁰ This made many of our contemporaries waver momentarily in their certainty of the answer to the question of our specific identity, and it would take some time to recognize that the cognitive revolution, which theorized the animal and human evolution on common provenance, is entirely without any revolutionary significance for the cultural relationship between animals and humans beyond this progress in understanding. Meanwhile, concerns that scientific advances can affect our cultural identity are no longer felt. On the cognitive level, it would certainly be an advancement of a sweeping nature if, as promised for the next millennium, one succeeds in deciphering the big molecule on which the biological identity of our species depends for the genetic information transfer over the succession of generations. Nevertheless, this could mean nothing at all for the cultural self-understanding of the members of this species, apart from the normative mastering of new possible actions that we may gain from this deciphering. Thus, if that deciphering should ever be successful, we will unknowingly take note of it as readers of featured science articles, and if we do not take note of it, it would be meaningless for our common cultural competencies, unless it directly concerns our professional competencies. It should be noted that this applies to the orientation processes that take place on the cognitive level. This remains unaffected by the fact that the practical consequences of theoretical advances may be revolutionary in their application. But the more intensively we are concerned, in hope and fear, with the benefits and disadvantages of scientific progress, the clearer it becomes that the cognitive content of scientific progress is not what touches us culturally or even politically today.

The less the scientific image of the world in which we live is connected with the orientation towards reality based on common experience, the more compelling it becomes to have a special concept of this common orientation of reality. This idea is made available by the concept of the lifeworld, which Edmund Husserl addressed in his famous late work. ³¹ In terms of social theory, the concept of the lifeworld is of a collectively authoritative orientation towards reality, which enables us to communicate and cooperate in social relations. ³² The scientific world views are now disconnected from these lifeworld orientations. This does not mean that one should no longer be interested in scientific world views. But it does mean that it is irrelevant to the lifeworld unity of our social relations whether we are interested in scientific world views or not, or whether we even oppose them, like those American creationists quoted earlier. The concept of the lifeworld, as one easily recognizes against the background of these descriptions, could be conceived only in the scientific–cultural moment in which the successes of the sciences, in their advance into the dimensions of the very large, the very small and the very complicated, finally become obvious, so that binding consequences for our cultural general orientation can no longer be derived from them. Certainly, our lifeworld is fundamentally changed by scientific progress through its technical implementation and economic use. However, the lifeworld processing of this civilization change no longer presupposes a reception of its theoretical requirements. Modern civilization is increasingly becoming a ‘black-box civilization’, requiring us to adopt the art of a life-affirming approach to the emergence of the scientific civilization, without possessing a common cultural theoretical insight into what is happening behind the cover plate of our calculator or under the hood of our car. We will get back to this later.

By the way, the growing incompatibility of the lifeworld and scientific world views can be mirrored in the surprising effects it has when scientists, mostly with popularizing intent, are tempted to give lifeworld-oriented commentary on their subjects, which are extremely remote from real-life experiences. Anyone who is interested in cosmological questions, for example, will diligently register, even as an amateur, that the fusion of primordial neutrons with a corresponding number of protons, which happened within minutes after the Big Bang, to form deuterium nuclei and helium nuclei in a contingently remaining imbalance between the number of neutrons on the one hand and the protons on the other, released enough protons for the later formation of hydrogen atoms. Otherwise, a cosmos in which cosmologists would later appear would never have come about. Nonetheless, it is astonishing to hear that this Big Bang proton surplus has resulted from ‘good luck’. ³³ This is analogous to the glancing announcement that if, after billions of years, our Sun collapses, she will explode and eventually become a huge red-hot star, reaching the Earth's orbit in its dimensions; humanity, however, ‘will be sure to be technologically able by then’ to ‘emigrate to other solar systems’. ³⁴

As said, these are the effects that occur when attempting to popularize something that may well be considered under certain circumstances, even with an understanding of what absolutely cannot be integrated any longer into lifeworlds’ horizons. If the reference to the fortunate circumstance of that proton surplus was really meant to be taken seriously, then one would have to reply just as seriously that the range of our ability to cherish certain events as fortunate does not extend to the vicinity of the Big Bang. It was really serious in the science-, culture- and history-related analogue contexts in the nineteenth century, according to Friedrich Engels. At the beginning of his Dialectics of Nature, he first of all tunes us to the downfall of all things here with communications about the sinking of our Earth into the glow of the Sun. Then he lets the re-erection follow: Nevertheless, we had the certainty that, in the infinite spaces of the cosmos—at that time they were thought to be Newtonian—somewhere, at some point, on another planet, in another solar system, a flourishing life would arise. Thus, the solace of dialectical materialism. ³⁵

The increasing lifeworld indifference to the progress of scientific knowledge is also impressively reflected in the dramatic change in public attitudes towards space travel. Recently, one could hear comments on the heavenly loveliness of the colouring in the giant planet's atmosphere in an English television report that showed us the passage of an American space probe in the vicinity of Jupiter—in words that Cook could have used when he first set foot on the paradisiacal beaches of the South Sea. However, it is easy to see that space travel into the depths of the solar system, or even beyond its limits, has no place in the cultural history of the great expeditions. The cultural effect of the unbelievable view of the Earth from the position of an astronaut finally brings nothing culturally but this as evidence: with all around them glowing, icy, dusty and poisonous deserts, looking back, our Earth, a shiny blue planet against the dark of the cosmos, becomes visible as the only significant place. This cultural effect of modern astronautics was given the term ‘geotropic astronautics’ by Hans Blumenberg. ³⁶

In the last instance, the successful neutralization of scientific world views is a process that belongs to the religious history of highly developed, modern societies. The quintessence of this religious history lusts after scientific world views. ³⁷ This means that the religious orientation towards life, which, with a certain cultural power, were tied to the immutability of certain cognitive world views and able to maintain their stability until the beginning of our own century, have been completely decoupled from the progress of scientific knowledge. Obviously, the fact that the competitive situation between scientific and religious orientations towards reality has been almost completely completed culturally does not mean that the scientific world view has, historically speaking, replaced the religious orientation towards reality. This means that it can no longer be said what difference it actually makes from a religious point of view whether it is cosmological or molecular biologically what we knew yesterday, or rather, what we know today. For the already quoted saying ‘That must not be true’, there is no longer any case of application in relation to the sciences in highly developed societies. This was another prominent feature of the Darwinist dispute, as evidenced in the famous prayer that the wife of the Bishop of Worcester, who was present at the British Naturalists’ Assembly in 1860, broke out with when she heard Huxley's teachings from Darwin: ‘Oh God, do not let it be true, and if it is true, make sure it doesn’t become known!’ ³⁸

Exactly this attitude-leading idea of scientific reality orientation on the one hand and religious reality orientation on the other hand, which are situated in important respects in an exclusionary and thus evolutionary separation relationship, has of course also long determined the science, even until deep into the beginning of our century. ³⁹ This is the prerequisite for historical scientific‒cultural facts about which the report sounds like a report from long-sunken worlds, although these worlds are only 75 years behind us. For example, there was the fact that none other than the Noble-crowned Wilhelm Ostwald held scientific sermons during Sunday's main service, ⁴⁰ or that Haeckel, as the initiator of the Monist League, ⁴¹ seriously considered what to do with the church buildings after the disappearance of the church. One of Haeckel's proposals was to set up herbariums and aquariums in the aisles and to organize pilgrimage-equivalent excursions to the dinosaur finds in the Swabian Alb, so the enlightened audience would have an opportunity to see what we were before we become what we are now, thanks to evolution.

The world-famous mathematician David Hilbert died in 1943, and his dying wish was that the following sentence would be written on his tombstone: ‘We must know, we will know.’ This sentence is an antithesis to the notorious ‘ignoramus-ignorabimus’ of Emil du Bois-Reymond mentioned at the beginning. ⁴² It is not at all important here to tell what the questions were that du Bois-Reymond, at the beginning of the 1870s, considered eternally unanswerable questions, ⁴³ and whether we still accept this unanswerability today or whether they were even correctly posed questions. Regardless of this, Hilbert's gravestone is impressive in that it has achieved complete scientific evidence of the impossibility of saying what it might have been that Hilbert considered so compelling to attain knowledge about, so that he made his posterity pledge to chisel this promise of future scientific knowledge in stone. In addition, it is unthinkable today that any university architect could come up with writing on university portals, like what was written in golden letters at the beginning of this century on the main building of the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg im Breisgau as an inscription, namely in a science–cultural application of the word of the Gospel of John: ‘The truth will set you free.’ ⁴⁴

As a scientific–cultural consequence of the neutralization of scientific world views, the position of the sciences in the overall context of our public culture has changed profoundly. In a nutshell, I would like to characterize this change as follows: in the relationship between the two great traditional legitimizers of scientific practice—curiosity on the one hand and relevance on the other—the weight of relevance has become dominant. I believe there are very subtle signals for this irreversible cultural–historical process. For example, when seeking funding, even our basic researchers, instead of referring to the unrestricted right of curiosity, primarily argue that basic research is always necessary to keep science relevant. The relevance-dominated science becomes emotionless. Professorial properties are no longer required of the professor. Science as a profession becomes a profession like any other, and the scientific enlightenment, which was filled with the pathos of the cultural emancipation of curiosity, lies behind us as a completed enlightenment. ⁴⁵

2. Loss of competence of common sense

While the outlined cultural and political neutralization of scientific knowledge occurs at the cognitive level, the cultural and political weight of scientific knowledge at the application level steadily increases. This process, too, results in the loss of the competence of common sense. I would not have dared to include the term ‘common sense’ in the title of this essay if it were just a foreign term that has become common in contemporary German, and is slightly enriched with English elements. In its origin, however, common sense is a term with a large theoretical charge. This is well known to the historians of culture and science, and more precisely to the historians of philosophy, even though the comprehensive historiography of the common-sense concept, in particular its political–theoretical meaning, has hitherto remained a desideratum. After all, Hans-Georg Gadamer has used the term ‘common sense’, or more precisely his Latin equivalent, in his main work to describe the ‘humanistic concepts’ ⁴⁶ in which relationships of reality were philosophically addressed, in which, today, scientifically, the humanities have competence. ‘Common sense’ appears in other research contexts under the European Keywords, ⁴⁷ and among philosophers, this combination of words has remained fixed as a technical term, notwithstanding its common usage. ⁴⁸

The oldest meaning of the sensus communis concept, which was dominant before the philosophy of the Enlightenment and can be traced back to Aristotle, lies outside the area that we are supposed to address here. Complementary to the doctrine of the external senses, there is the doctrine of the internal senses, to which, in addition to memory and imagination, the sensus communis belongs—our ability to synthesize the heterogeneous variety of our external sensory perceptions into the unity of a consistent reality orientation. ⁴⁹ From the perspective of modern disciplines, it is easy to see that the term sensus communis, in this sense, belongs to the older history of medicine and psychology. ⁵⁰ It is not plausible how common sense in its present use could be related to this in terms of the evolution of its meaning. One recognizes this if one realizes that the sensually mediated reality commerce—because without it nobody would be viable—belongs to the common humane competencies that we may lack, but in which we do not seek to distinguish ourselves from each other.

It is precisely this commonness that, in addition to the performance of the senses that opens up common reality, is claimed to be the ability to judge on everyday practical matters, without which no one can live. There are truths, which would make us incapable of living if we act against them, which are therefore not in dispute at all, and must certainly be regarded as trivial but of fundamental importance. The concept of common sense, in its wider version, is a concept of the common ability to perceive truths of the given characteristic and to orient oneself to them.

It is easy to see that the theory of this common sense is due to a provocation. After all, one does not claim without a specific reason what nobody disputes anyway. The wit of the extended common-sense concept, as it seems to me, is polemical. It arises from a situation in which it is now time to emphasize self-evident truths and to assert, or even assert for the first time, their competences. What is this situation? In terms of historical philosophy, one may find it characterized by the successes of Cartesianism. The sceptical arguments against our confidence in the achievements of our senses are old. ⁵¹ But Descartes, as we know, had methodically surpassed this scepticism to the point where he challenged the evidence of arithmetic. ⁵² The pragmatic meaning of this methodical doubt was known to be the emendation of the grounding of theoretical knowledge, and on the other hand, the common-sense philosophy, in principle, did not want to apply it but considered it appropriate to insist that the common knowledge, on which the life-practical requirements of the sens commun are based, does not require any sceptical examination and refounding at all. ⁵³ Thus, the philosophers would undergo the scholastically handed-down philosophical–scientific knowledge. This is what, in France, Claude Buffier argued against at an early stage, ⁵⁴ and later, in connection with Buffier, all the common-sense philosophers in Scotland, ⁵⁵ in some respects analogous to Napoli Vico. ⁵⁶

In this frontal position, the common-sense concept needs only a slight escalation to advance to the notion of criticism of the subtlety and unworldliness of the scholars. That makes it, then, in the wider cultural and political context of life, suitable as an instance of criticism of the common-sense-distant orthodoxy of zealous theologians. The memory of peacemaking denominational intolerance is alive in it. ⁵⁷ In the all-encompassing context of bourgeois life, common sense thus becomes the authority to assert claims to free, self-determined economic and other activities. With some anachronisms, it could even be said that the common-sense concept of the eighteenth century gathers democratic–theoretical potentials. ⁵⁸ It functions as a concept of what one must assume to be, if not equally distributed, at least commonly distributed, if one expects the augmentation of common welfare in the same way as nothing else, by the free exercising of bourgeois self-determination rights. In any case, the concept of common sense, in continuity with its oldest meaning, is a concept with which any Billy Smith is equipped as well as any lord, even the Archbishop of Canterbury. ⁵⁹ The common-sense philosophy is thus a philosophy of elevating the ranking of what was previously at the very bottom. So, ‘common sense’ could also make a career as a magazine title. Emblematically, although generically not entirely correct, it was elevated by Lord Chesterfield, editor of the magazine, to the status of a queen who suggested herself as a protector of truth, freedom and justice. ⁶⁰

The pathos with which common sense raises its claim to validity here has not been maintained in the philosophical history—not because the real processes of political and cultural modernization made the competences of common sense progressively dispensable, but rather because, against the background of a political common culture of all common-sense participants, what is not common but rather excellent has become all the more interesting and important. The validity claims of common sense are claims for recognizing common competencies, in which one can hardly stand out. The common-sense orientation makes people common and has an equalizing effect. But in this context, too, equality is a medium of liberation, such as the liberation of talents and gifts that are not commonly distributed but extremely rare and thus distinctive. Therefore, for example, in the aesthetics of genius at the turn of the 18th to the nineteenth century, the artistic creativity of common-sense transcendentalism was celebrated for its achievements, ⁶¹ and analogously, the products of scientific and technical genius are emphasized by their location far beyond all common-sense horizons.

Differences among European national cultures could also be made visible through comparative historical studies of common-sense philosophy. There are common national auto- and hetero-stereotypes that want to know whether the British culture is more commonsense-based than the German culture. The cultural heritage to which such prejudices refer is of a complexity that makes these unanalysed judgements indisputable. In the cultural–historical context, however, it is quite possible to discover what the cited prejudice aims at—for example, the psychological historical fact that, in classical German philosophy, in the philosophy of so-called German idealism, common sense is predominantly discredited. ⁶² In contrast, in the West, in France, the defence of common sense as a cultural judgement authority remained philosophically relevant until well into the nineteenth century. Victor Cousin, for example, has enriched the sens commun theory with a theory of the mechanisms of its social efficiency, ⁶³ and Lamennais ⁶⁴ has presented the traditional arguments of traditionalism, ⁶⁵ dating back to Aristotle, as sens commun arguments. ⁶⁶

Incidentally, the striking fact that in the first half of the nineteenth century, the theory of common sense on this side of the Rhine, unlike in the West, became philosophically vacant has a perfect correspondence in the analogous national cultural fate of the concept of eclecticism. In the Enlightenment decades of the eighteenth century, eclecticism was known throughout Europe as a philosophical central virtue of enlightened intelligence. ⁶⁷ In France, this persisted, although in a decreasing trend, until late in the nineteenth century. ⁶⁸ The philosophy of German idealism, however, treats eclecticism with the same disrespect as common sense, ⁶⁹ and one recognizes the relation between the two: esoteric philosophy, whose subject naturally cannot be common sense, simultaneously denies it the right to judge, according to principles stabilized by life experience, the advantages and disadvantages of a practice based on that theory.

The above fragmentary references to the history of the common-sense term only represent an ultra-short history. The sole purpose of these indications is to make the concept of common sense, which has become common use, recognizable as a concept of traditional philosophical weight that justifies it being used to describe an important cultural consequence of the scientification of our civilization.

At the beginning of the 1960s, Helmut Schelsky gave a highly effective lecture titled ‘Human being in the scientific civilization’ at the Rhine–Westphalian Academy of Sciences. ⁷⁰ From the recording and continuation of Schelsky's analyses, one can deduce that a civilization is scientized to the same extent as its assumptions about reality, as we always have to base it on our reality-changing or even reality-preserving action. We no longer assume reality from a common lifeworld, and professional experiences result from the cognitive practice of institutionally specialized sciences. With the relative increase in the proportion of action- and decision-making knowledge that has the status of expert knowledge in the outlined sense, the scope of common sense decreases.

Two hundred years ago, before the beginning of the industrialization process, according to social historians, almost three-quarters of all people were working in primary production; that is, mostly in agriculture. It is completely absurd for me to romanticize this existence here in any way. The mere knowledge of the average life expectancy at that time, which was less than half that of today, should forbid this. The only thing that matters here is an insight into the retrospective nature of the relative scope of common sense, which is complementary to the expansion of the civilizational preconditions dependent on expert knowledge. In simply structured societies that are at the same time not dynamic in the change of structures, it was necessary and possible to sustain a relationship to the overwhelming majority of the real preconditions of one's own physical and social existence that was saturated with life experience and based on common knowledge. Nobody would have been able to live without knowing the most important part of one's own living conditions in everyday life, and one knew it. Expressed in terms of social theory, this means that the degree of social self-sufficiency was considerable. Translated into the perspectives of daily life, this means that, from water to wood or turf energy, the elementary prerequisites for life had the economic status of products of one's own labour, and market purchases or exchange of goods that depended on the specialized work of others were extremely rare compared to modern life. On the contrary, with the scientification of our living conditions, with their complexity and dynamics, not only does the degree of our social self-sufficiency diminish, but also the degree of autonomy of individual life experience. The relative amount of real living conditions that we can judge based on common knowledge is shrinking. ⁷¹

Such descriptions involve at least a civilization-critical intention here. Loss of the competence of common sense and loss of experience are usually compensated ⁷² completely by trust. ⁷³ The word ‘trust’ is used without any emphasis. What is meant is nothing more than the confidence in the distinct importance of trust in the solidity of a specialist's expertise in specialized competences, which we ourselves, as experts in another field, do not possess. Modern civilization in this context has the character of a ‘black-box civilization’. We use and know how to use, in the theoretical and technical preconditions of its usability, what we are increasingly removing from our common and educational knowledge, irrespective of the increasing proportion of our lifetime spent in educational institutions in modern societies.

Even today, one occasionally encounters the demand that education in a scientific civilization should not least mean the reduction of the black-box character of the prerequisites for our civilization's living conditions. Even the scientists and technicians were subject to the cultural demand of education with canonized human contents. In contrast, the knowledge we rely on to understand what is going on behind the top of our calculator or even under the hood of our car has by no means obtained the status of the content of compulsory education.

This complaint is plausible as a complaint from members of expert groups. It is nonetheless inappropriate. Accomplishments from expert knowledge can be culturally integrated only if we can finally assess them according to their advantages and disadvantages on the basis of cultural common knowledge. But the way in which common sense establishes a relationship with expert knowledge does not include the competence to judge the pertinent expert knowledge itself. In modern societies, education is a medium for linking the accomplishments of expert knowledge to our lifeworld. It is not a medium with the function of keeping us judgmentally self-sufficient with regard to the theoretical and technical content of our civilization's living conditions. This existence, for its part, needs to be recognized, and, as a specifically modern common experience, includes the experience of our irreversible reliance on confidence in the reliability of the accomplishments of expert knowledge that nowadays really determine our lives.

In that regard, no commentary on civilization is to be linked to the diagnosis that, with the scientification of our civilization, the sense of community suffers from a loss of competence. This, however, changes to the same extent the idea that the trustworthiness of expert knowledge, which is indispensable for the cultural acceptance of modern civilizations, diminishes. Nowadays, more than anything else, this is due to experts’ disputes, often with signs of increasing bitterness, especially in public hearings, and thus for the eyes and ears of the public in preparation for energy policy and other technology policy issues of significant magnitude.

The consequences of such processes are obvious. ‘Confused? Many are! Play safe. When in doubt, vote No!’ ⁷⁴ —with such a slogan, as in the US, we can now act politically. The inclination to vote ‘no’ during ballots and the inclination to abstain from voting have increased. ⁷⁵ This ‘no’, with which the so-called crisis of acceptance of scientific civilization is expressed, is not an irrational reaction. Rather, it is exactly what one would expect as a rational reaction to uncertainties caused by the loss of confidence in the ability to maintain our civilization's living conditions. ⁷⁶ It is not the ‘no’ of a justified refusal, but rather the ‘no’ of a refusal of judgement: the moratorium ‘no’, as one could call it.

If this interpretation of observable constituents is correct, then the consequence is that modern civilization, in which the loss of competence in common sense are unavoidable due to structural reasons, is at the same time incapable of culturally and politically processing the degree of this loss. Beyond the uncertainty of this loss of competence, the ability to agree within this civilization seems to be rapidly diminishing. This implies that civilizational evolution, the dynamics of which are explained by the evidence of the advantages that it offers, is subjected to a law of diminishing cultural marginal utility.

The increasing moralization of public technology and science–political debates seems to be a clear indication that we are getting nearer to the limits of cultural processability of civilizational dynamics that are difficult to cross. With the sharp sword of good disposition, we cut through the tangled knot of modern life-reality, which we are increasingly unable to unravel with our analytical competences. ⁷⁷ So one finds oneself, for example, exposed to the strict reminder that one should not do everything that one could do. This is certainly a reminder that can be fully approved by the moral common sense. But the difficulties of our civilizational situation are not difficulties arising out of the violation of that common-sense rule. On the contrary, it is the difficulties that we have in establishing ourselves in the visible limits of the cultural processability of civilizational evolution, and in trying to do so we are less concerned with the moral standards of common sense than with the theoretical and technical connotations that grew out of the complexity and dynamics of our civilization. ⁷⁸ But this also results in a political and practical life acceptance problem: the problem of the acceptance of a scientific and technical civilization, which in the meantime exhibits certain uncertainties as to whether it can also meet the scientific and technical requirements of its own self-preservation.

It is easy to see that the cultural ambivalence, in which we thus arrive at the scientific and technical prerequisites of our civilizational existence, tends to favour the humanities, or, more precisely, the historical cultural sciences. Under the impression of the enormous expansion of expenditures on natural and technical sciences as well as for medicine, our cultural scientists have, in recent years, repeatedly expressed a certain despondency over the question of whether it will remain possible to gain the necessary public recognition for the special purposes of the humanities. In truth, such despondency was completely unfounded. The cultural significance of humanities research does not diminish with the scientification of our civilization, which is primarily based on the use of knowledge produced by the practice of the natural sciences. On the contrary, it is steadily increasing. This is related to the temporal side of the aforementioned loss of the competence in common sense—with the shortening of the temporal extension of modern lifeworlds due to dynamics of civilizational evolutionary, that is, the shrinking of the number of years for which we can count on some constancy of the validity of important elements of our cultural life orientation—from school knowledge to professional knowledge and familiarity with the vision and use of our modern civilizational living atmosphere. In this context, the humanities are compensatory in modern culture. It was Joachim Ritter who first advocated this thesis. Finally, with a few subsequent and continuing analyses, the compensatory relationship is to be made plausible, in which our current efforts, which are methodically disciplined by the humanities, to visualize our pasts is related to the shrinking temporal reach of our cultural common orientations.

Joachim Ritter called the scientific–technical civilization an ‘unhistorical’ civilization. ⁷⁹ The phenomena that fit this label are obvious to us: elements of a globally spreading technology and industry are neutral to the regional native cultures over which they are stacked; that is, they are indifferent to their origins and in that sense unhistorical. Against the background of this origin-neutral course of modern civilization, the compensatory function of historical cultural sciences is clear: their achievements in visualizing our contingent native cultures compensate ⁸⁰ for the origin-indifference of modern civilization. Urban planning and architecture offer telling examples that illustrate the compensatory relationship between origin-neutral civilizational modernity on the one hand and reflexive cultural attention to our contingent origin stories on the other hand, as analysed by Ritter. When Frankfurt am Main was still in the early stages of its younger urban development characterized by architectural modernity, the then acting mayor considered blowing up the monumental legacy of the upper-class architectural historicism; namely, the ruins of the opera house. However, now that the silhouette of Frankfurt has been brought very close to that of Dallas or Denver, everyone sees that the expansion of modernity does not compel the liquidation of premodern relics, but unprecedented efforts to reconstruct them.

This phenomenon, which, with the spread of the technically conditioned homogeneity of civilization, does not diminish the reflexive interest in our contingent worlds of origin but rather increases it, is not only about cultural aptitudes that are limited to the aesthetic sphere of life and preferably intellectuals or educated workers. That interest in assuring one's origin-dependent cultural uniqueness, which is complementary to what connects us to ever larger spaces in the scientific–technical civilization, has long penetrated into the political context of life. ‘Regionalism’ is the common European name for this current movement in which, even in international associations, the Friuli and Sardinians, the Austrian-Croatians in Burgenland, and the Jurassians, Bretons, Welsh and Frisians engage themselves in what allows us to be different from one another, rather than to mutually adapt to each other as in a scientific–technical civilization. ⁸¹

All that is said suffices to recognize that Ritter's characterization of civilizational modernity as ‘unhistorical’ is something of considerable cultural-diagnostic productivity. In other respects, however, this labelling is inappropriate. It conceptually obscures an important feature of civilizational modernity. This becomes evident when one considers the temporal conditions of the global propagation of civilizational modernity. The success of this propagation is nothing more than the spatial aspect of the historically singular dynamics of modern civilization. One would have to say that, in contrast to Ritter's thesis, it is not because the modern scientific–technical civilization is unhistorical, but rather exactly the opposite, because it is characterized by a historically unprecedented dynamism, civilizational modernity overshadows all cultures of origin that develop far more slowly. In its global expansion, the homogeneity of the scientific–technical civilization is nothing more than the spatial effect of its evolutionary dynamics measured in terms of temporal standards. From this perspective, the striking contrast between scientific–technical modernity on the one hand and regionally differentiated cultures of origin on the other hand, in which modernity's progressively intensifying orientation towards the past is ignited, is not a contrast between historical and unhistorical worlds but rather a contrast between historical formations with different developmental dynamics.

An important cultural consequence of increased civilizational evolutionary speed is the increase in relic accrual. The faster the amount of scientific and technical innovations grows per unit of time, the greater the speed of obsolescence in relation to what was still valid and used yesterday. This means that, with the increase of the relic rate, which depends on the evolutionary speed, the amount of historically non-simultaneous elements of civilization in the present day is increasing. The sight offered by dynamic civilizations is the sight of a historically broken reality. In the measure of modernity's progressiveness, we also measure its power to create the past and make the past imperative.

Certainly, civilization dynamics can already be observed in prehistory and early history. The chronology of changes in stone-processing technique and transformations in artefact forms clearly show an ongoing shortening of the period until a new type appears. The Times in Prehistory, ⁸² as recorded by Karl J Farr, certainly has sub-geological dimensions; that is, between the relics, which differ with respect to distinct innovative thrusts, there are periods of more than 10,000 years for the earliest periods, which trivially means that the actual evolutions were absolutely unnoticeable to their subjects. There could be no strains arising from the experience of a change-induced cultural familiarity decline.

It is very late in cultural history that our culture was able to discover its historicity at all. I want to demonstrate this using the example of Machiavelli's approach to the history of Rome, which in this respect still precedes the historicism of modern culture. Over many hundreds of pages, Machiavelli commented on the Roman history of Titus Livius, with the pragmatic intention of deriving rules of action for the present from examples of Roman military and political history. This means that, insofar as Machiavelli thought he could do this, he perceived epochs that were chronologically 1500 years back in the past as the present. In contrast, it is evident how absurd it would be to suppose that military-history instructions given to today's officer cadets would inform them of the rules of current combat tactics. Evidently, this would be nonsensical because the dynamic of military development has reached a level that has already made profound changes in tactical and strategic conceptions over the course of a few years. This means that, in the context of civilizational evolution, as the rate of innovation has now reached a level that obscures the obsolescence of important elements of our contemporary culture within the lifespan of the two or three synchronously existing generations, historical consciousness has, so to speak, become as unavoidable as necessary.

But what causes us not to leave the relics of our civilization, which are increasingly dependent on civilizational dynamics, to simple recycling processes, as happens in natural evolution, but rather to preserve them (at least representative specimens) at great material and technical expense? This question about the reasons for our historical interest in preserving the past is a very far-reaching one. ⁸³ To keep it short, a significant story may be told to answer it. I remember a lively debate in the founding Senate of the University of Bochum, in which the future university seal was to be decided. Bochum University was, as we know, the first university in the industrial region that had remained university-free for more than 150 years of our industrial history. Correspondingly, a progressive Senate faction found that one was obliged in the spirit of this industrial belt to choose a technical symbol as the university emblem instead of any symbol of classical–humanistic education. The emblem proposed was a mining tower, which, of course, was opposed by the economists and economic historians, who claimed that the last mines in the south of Bochum would be closed within the next two years. So, how can you choose as the university emblem something that will be outdated tomorrow? A theologian then proposed choosing the graphic of an atomic model. The physicists’ protests followed soon—our ideas of the atomic structure were undergoing a permanent revolution in terms of nuclear physics, so that the speed of innovation-related obsolescence would be even greater here than in that technical emblematic context. Then the hour of classical education struck: Prometheus and Epimetheus—they have since adorned the Bochum seal, not seriously threatened by any innovation boost.

Bringing this little story down to its structural quintessence, it seems to me that the quintessence is as follows: in very dynamic civilizations, the very old tends to age much less rapidly than the less old. This exemplarily demonstrates that in dynamic civilizations, efforts to present the past are not a cultural–evolutionary relic. Rather, they are specifically modern endeavours, the necessity of which grows in a manner complementary to the degree of civilizational dynamics.