Bridging the gap: Art, science, philosophy-modernity in question

In 1958, for a international conference titled Man and the Atom, physicist Werner Heisenberg argued that modern physics and its applications have overcome and renewed philosophy from Antiquity to Kant in the dispute over the formation of matter. He even asserted that the arts themselves, should consider the changes that occurred in the scientific view of nature. While few years earlier, in The Question Concerning Technology, Martin Heidegger defined the essence of modern technology as an 'enframing,' a limitation, when humans are challenged by themselves and nature more than the other way around, and saw in art a 'saving power' against this enframing of technology. This paper will consequently consider the interaction between the three fields: modern science, philosophy and the arts, and will show how, in spite of all appearances, these fields are not as distant and autonomous as usually assumed. My argument is that they jointly participated (willingly or not) to the western project of modernity, and that it becomes necessary to reconsider this joint project in our global and contemporary context.