ABSTRACT
The Enlightenment sought to re-establish human knowledge by doing away with metaphysics. All that would matter would be the unfettered exercise of reason upon the natural world. However, it is possible to argue that modernity has simply seen one metaphysical structure replaced by another. We have seen that in the modern age science has been recognised as the supreme form of knowledge. Yet science is itself established upon a metaphysical basis. For instance, science often maintains that only statements that can be empirically tested can stand as true. Yet this statement itself cannot be tested: it is metaphysical (Lawson 1985: 19). In the same way, science generally bases its observations on the world on the premise that material things are simply present at hand in an unproblematic way. Things do not conceal themselves from us, and the question of how it is that we notice things, how they become recognisable or intelligible to us, is not an issue. This is because much of modern science inhabits a Cartesian world in which material things are defined in terms of their spatial extension and their spatio-temporal motion. No place or direction of motion is any better or worse, or more or less significant, than any other. Locations are just points on a grid. Therefore events can be registered by measurement and calculation (Heidegger 1977: 119), and events are only significant if they can be measured. All of this makes up what Heidegger calls the ‘ground-plan’ of modernity, a set of assumptions that is already known but which never has to be stated before observation takes place.
