a general obfuscation of risks. Criticism of science is also counterproductive for the recognition of risks.
Accordingly, the risk consciousness of the afflicted, which is frequently expressed in the environmental movement, and in criticism of industry, experts and culture, is usually both critical and credulous of science. A solid background of faith in science is part of the paradoxical basic equipment of the critique of modernization. Thus, risk consciousness is neither a traditional nor a lay person’s consciousness, but is essentially determined by and oriented to science. For, in order to recognize risks at all and make them the reference point of one’s own thought and action, it is necessary on principle that invisible causality relationships between objectively, temporally, and spatially very divergent conditions, as well as more or less speculative projections, be believed, that they be immunized against the objections that are always possible. But that means that the invisible – even more, that which is by nature beyond perception, that which is only connected or calculated theoretically – becomes the unproblematic element of personal thought, perception and experience. The ‘experiential logic’ of everyday thought is reversed, as it were. One no longer ascends merely from personal experience to general judgments, but rather general knowledge devoid of personal experience becomes the central determinant of personal experience. Chemical formulas and reactions, invisible pollutant levels, biological cycles and chain reactions have to rule seeing and thinking if one wishes to go to the barricades against risks. In this sense, we are dealing not with ‘second-hand experience’, in risk consciousness, but with ‘second-hand non-experience’. Furthermore, ultimately no one can know about risks, so long as to know means to have consciously experienced.