Intuiting the Excess: Science, Interpretation, and the Transcendence of Life

Abstract Hermeneutics is a philosophically sophisticated approach to meaning. Its development has mostly emerged from the engagement of religious texts, where the meaning of the text points beyond the immanent frame of text and reader, to something that transcends both. Other humanistic and so‐called “soft sciences” have taken up hermeneutics as an integral part of their work by focusing on meaning immanent within texts and practices, while the so‐called “hard sciences” or explanatory sciences have largely ignored hermeneutics, because science purports to index its claims to empirically verifiable realities immanent within the world. In this essay, I argue that all scientific disciplines engage in hermeneutics, pointing to several features of science that make interpretation integral to science. All science deals in ontological difference. From the first sensuous intuition to the artifactual work of scientific analysis, from the theory articulation to the social process of theoretical development, from the ontological difference between physical objects and living beings to the ontological difference between vital signal and symbolic representation, I show that science always engages a reality much bigger than even its most grand theoretical schemes. I further argue that it is intuition, not intellect, that guides the work of science. Intuition is a metaphysical sense, an apophatic sense that recognizes that theories are inadequate to both the reality science hopes to engage and the phenomenal appearances of that reality. Intuition also guides the work of the scientific community charged with interrogating scientific representation of reality—its theories and models—and works to settle on what theories and models are accepted into or excluded from acceptable representation. Intuition is also at work in the recognition that wholes are greater than the parts. Thus, intuition flows with being. It is infra‐intellectual in that it begins the analytic‐synthetic work of science, but it is also supra‐intellectual in that it is an apophatic sense of the whole in relation to the parts known. Intuition is a knowing not‐knowing, integral to all intellectual practices.