Into the Twentieth Century: The Case of Robert Oppenheimer

Abstract

In 1935, philosopher Edmund Husserl argued that the European Sciences (notably physics) were facing a crisis, not in terms of scientific achievements, but in terms of their meaning for culture and society, for human existence. Science had always been a moral factor, Husserl argued, had decisively contributed to the humanisation and enlightenment of human culture, to the realisation of the idea of human beings as reasonable citizens of a humane society. But now, scientific research, precisely because (in the era of quantum physics) it had become so astonishingly successful, represented a threat to civilisation. It was increasingly questionable whether human ethics and politics would be able to master the technological power unleashed by science. The ethical profile of science had become ambivalent. Science and technology had become neutral forces employable for multiple purposes, good and bad. From a benefactor of humanity and culture, science had turned into a substantial risk. Husserl also claimed that, in 1935, only a small number of individuals (true philosophers, acting as “functionaries of humanity”, p. 17) were aware of the critical nature of the situation, although the broader public (Stockmann’s “majority” as it were) would discover sooner or later what was at stake. In August 1945, when two nuclear bombs were dropped on Japanese cities, Husserl’s gloomy predictions seemed to be confirmed. The atomic bomb became a kind of historical end-point or dead-end. As Peter Sloterdijk, in his reply to Husserl’s pupil Martin Heidegger, later formulated it, the history of science is like the burning away of a conceptual fuse winding from Athens to Hiroshima.