Page 186 - Contribution To Phenomenology

PHILOSOPHY AND ECOLOGICAL CRISIS 179

nature which was written in mathematical language. But only the
movements of the planets are pure, regular and simple enough to lend
themselves straightforwardly to an explanation by mathematical principles.
The natural processes on earth in their complex interdependence, their
unpredictable irregularities must first be isolated from each other and
purified from all disturbing influences, before they can be subsumed
under and explained by simple mathematical principles and their
conjunction. It is in the scientific experiment that such a pure case of a
reproducible natural process is artificially produced. Modern science in its
second phase becomes experimental science.
Ullrich shows that a high structural affinity exists between such a
scientific experiment and an industrial process of production. "The
reproducible experimentally constructed natural process is the prototype
of the fully automatic industrial production."^ Science itself in its second
experimental phase is already characterized by technological rationahty.
Just as the scientist wants to dominate the natural process from the
outside and from a distance, so the capitalist wants to dominate the
process of production from the outside. And just as the scientist has to
take nature apart into isolated elementary processes and has to put them
together again in such a way that they become fully predictable and
controllable, so too the capitalist has to take the production process apart
into elementary jobs, isolate and purify them from all disturbing
influences and finally has to put them together in such a way that a
uniform, totally predictable and controllable production process is the
outcome.
For the capitalist who wants to increase the production of
surplus-value, the automatic steadily running production line which can be
steered and controlled from the outside becomes the model of industrial
production. Scientific technology in the form of machines is needed for
the full realization of this model. "The capitalist logic finds its fulfillment
only in the machinery of scientific technology and scientific technology can
only develop within the framework of the capitalist production model.'*^^
The modern age is characterized by a historically unprecedented
dynamic, an ever increasing acceleration, a total mobilization of human
and non-human resources. This explosion of growth and productivity was

^ Otto Ullrich, Technik und Herrschaft. Vom Hand-werk zur verdinglichten
Blockstruktur industrieller Produktion (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M., 1979), 81.
^1 Ibid., 140.