What Science Cannot Do: The Question Concerning Science and Heidegger

This paper revisits Heidegger’s views on science and examines the relationship between science and thinking. Science, dominated by metaphysical subject-object thinking, understands beings (Seiende) as an object while forgetting the Being (Sein), and for Heidegger, this lack of understanding of Being is the lynchpin to his perception of modern science. This paper re-examines Heidegger’s challenge and concludes that while science ignores Being, Heidegger’s assessment of science is not a critique of science per se, but rather a critique of the danger the scientific way of thinking poses to our life world. It suggests that our unrestricted use of scientific thinking makes the meaning of Being in our own lifeworld become lost. What Heidegger implies is not that “science does not think,” but that human beings who living in the metaphysical and scientifical thinking do not think.