Science & Tech Quote by Martin Heidegger

Modern physics dreams of a single formula that would capture the whole of reality, a tidy equation that closes the account. Heidegger hears in that dream a shift more radical than a new scientific theory. What counts as real begins to be determined by the method itself. Entities are no longer approached as presences with their own ways of showing themselves; they are first projected into a framework of measurement, function, and prediction, and only then permitted to appear. Being resolves itself into the method of the totally calculable.

This is not a complaint that science uses math. It is a diagnosis of a historical transformation that began with Descartes and Galileo, where nature was reimagined as a system of measurable magnitudes and law-governed motions. Method ceases to be a tool applied to an independent world; it becomes the lens that constitutes what will count as a world. What cannot be rendered as variables and operations is dismissed as secondary, subjective, or unreal. Calculability becomes the criterion of presence.

Heidegger ties this to the age of the world picture and to the essence of modern technology, which he calls enframing. The drive to make everything available, predictable, and optimizable converts beings into resources, standing reserve. Even the human being risks becoming a bundle of data points, a node in a network of control. Knowledge then aims less at unconcealing than at securing outcomes.

Yet the concern is not anti-scientific. He is asking what is forgotten when the incalculable is excluded: the way beings can disclose themselves in art, in dwelling, in mortality, in wonder. A different stance is needed alongside calculative thinking, a meditative thinking that lets beings be. The danger of total calculability is the amnesia of Being; the saving power would be remembering that the real exceeds method, that the world gives more than any formula can grasp.