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CHAPTER ONE

CRITIQUE OF THE MATHEMATIZATION OF NATURE—FROM PHILOSOPHY OF ARITHMETIC TO THE CRISIS OF EUROPEAN SCIENCES

Edmund Husserl

The Logical Investigations signify [. . .] a beginning or rather a breakthrough. They were not written for anyone who is satisfied with his prejudices, for anyone who already has his philosophy, his psychology, his logic, his epistemology. For such a one they are a hollow “scholastic logicism” or some other sort of “ism.” They differ, however, essentially from other philosophical proposals through the fact that they have no intention of being anything more than probes which attempt to get at the primary presuppositions of the sense of the Logos and thereby of all science, and to clarify these presuppositions in specific analyses. The Logical Investigations are [. . .] far removed from any attempt to persuade the reader, by way of some sort of dialectical tricks, to accept a philosophy that was for the author already an accepted fact.

—Edmund Husserl¹

I seek not to instruct but only to lead, to point out and describe what I see. I claim no other right than that of speaking according to my best lights, principally before myself but in the same manner also before others, as one who has lived in all its seriousness the fate of a philosophical existence.

—Edmund Husserl²

The purpose of this chapter and the following chapter is to establish a background to my discussion of Arendt’s and Patočka’s critiques of science, which is, according to them, one of the sources of existential crisis in today’s societies.³ In this chapter, I will consider Edmund Husserl’s critique of the natural sciences. In order to understand the trajectory of Husserl’s thinking, I will start with his critique of psychologism and anthropologism and end with his critique of the mathematization of nature as he formulates it in his last published work, The Crisis of European Sciences. I do not claim to evaluate Husserl’s phenomenology and his attempt to establish philosophy as a rigorous science.⁴ My purpose is to concentrate on Husserl’s critique of science, which is, at the same time, a critique of reason. For Husserl, reason is a bastion against the flood of skepticism and relativism. Reason, however, is not something “in the world”: “Reason itself, including theoretical reason in particular, is a form-concept.”⁵ For Husserl, then, to clarify the idea of reason is “the general task that I must accomplish for myself if I am to call myself a philosopher.”⁶ A caveat is necessary in any discussion of Husserl. So, I might say with Alfred Schütz, “An attempt to reduce the work of a great philosopher to a few basic propositions understandable to an audience not familiar with his thought is, as a rule, a hopeless undertaking.”⁷

I will argue that Husserl’s critique of sciences is an underlying motif from the beginning to the end of his career.⁸ My claim is that Husserl’s critique of natural science as he outlines it in Crisis is a continuation of his critique of “the present state of the science”⁹ that he first considers in Philosophy of Arithmetic. No doubt, his thinking and the focus of his critique changed, but not this principal motif: a critique of science as having become blinded by its own technical mastery rather than as a responsible practice aware of its own foundation. As he writes in Ideas III, “The sciences become [. . .] factories turning out very valuable and practically useful propositions [. . .] in which one can work as laborer and inventive technician [. . . and] from which, as a practical man, one can without inner understanding derive products and at best comprehend [their] technical efficiency.”¹⁰ Following from this insight, Husserl’s critique of science is tied to his thinking concerning the primacy of the prescientific life, or, as he calls it later, the Lebenswelt—the life-world.¹¹ We cannot understand the world constructed by sciences unless we show that scientific explanations of the world grew out of the world in which we live; that the origin of formal knowledge is based on our experience of the life-world. For Husserl, “the world is the horizon of our total attitude” and “our belief in being is a belief in the world”;¹² there is no other world than the one we live in. As Ludwig Landgrebe reminds us, for Husserl, the philosophical foundation must be based on “absolute responsibility.”¹³ Hence, in order to be responsible for our knowledge about the world we live in, we must acknowledge the primacy of the life-world. It is the foundation from which all our knowledge proceeds.

Husserl’s initial endeavor to inquire into the problem of meaning that underlies the possibility of knowledge, and his concomitant effort to secure knowledge from the “skeptical quagmire,” underlies his whole oeuvre. It is a journey that proceeds from investigations of mathematical concepts, through questioning the psychological basis of logic, and, later, extending his inquiries from formal logic to the problem of knowledge, as such—as when he considers the problem of “the relation of knowledge to what is transcendent” (IP, 60; italics in original); that is, the relation between our thinking and the world. Finally, he broadens his phenomenological investigations to consider the life-world.¹⁴

We might agree neither with Husserl’s claim that the crisis of the modern age is contemporaneous with the crisis of sciences, positivism, and the consequent decapitation of metaphysics;¹⁵ nor with his observation that “the crisis of philosophy implies the crisis of all modern sciences” leading to a “crisis of European humanity itself in respect to the total meaningfulness of its cultural life, its total ‘Existenz’” (Crisis, § 5, 12). Yet the foreboding he expressed is still with us. The influence of Husserl’s work reveals the relevance of his critique not only for his age but for ours as well.

What can be said of Husserl’s struggle? Aron Gurwitsch reminds us that, in 1922, Max Weber also developed a critique of science. However, “whereas Weber is prepared to resign himself to the given state of affairs, Husserl holds out the prospect of a regeneration of western man under the very idea of philosophy, into the unity of which the sciences have to be reintegrated.”¹⁶ As Husserl notes, sciences “require such criticism and grounding under the guidance of the idea of a philosophy, in which they must find their places” (FTL, § 104, 277; italics in original).

Husserl’s struggle (ILI, § 8, 45) against the disciples of psychologism, anthropologism, and naturalistic relativism is but another replay of the struggles undertaken by Socrates and Descartes. To be sure, neither historical setting nor society is the same, but the old struggle upholding the claims of reason against the general climate of skepticism seems to be unceasing. This is why Husserl, in his last work, insists:

The history of philosophy [. . .] takes on the character of a struggle for existence [. . .] between [. . .] the philosophy of naïve faith in reason [. . .] and the skepticism which negates or repudiates it in empiricist fashion [. . .] until finally the consciously recognized world-problem of the deepest essential interrelation between reason and what is in general, the enigma of all enigmas, has to become the actual theme of inquiry. (Crisis, § 5, 13; italics in original)

The problem can be stated thus: if experience, as skeptics and relativists decree, is the only basis for our reasoning, then it is difficult to see how we can explain the meaning of “what is in general,” in other words, the meaning of the world. The correlation between our reasoning and the world becomes “the enigma of all enigmas.” As Husserl mockingly puts it in The Idea of Phenomenology, “What do the things themselves care about our ways of thinking and the logical rules that govern them? They are laws of our thinking, psychological laws” (61). To put it differently, thoughts and things in the world have nothing in common. So, if we think that reasoning is “inside” us (immanent), so to speak, and the world is “outside” us (transcendent), how can we know that the things in the world are as we think they are? This puzzle can lead to a mistaken belief that “knowledge as such is a riddle” (IP, 27). This riddle contains the problem of correspondence and transcendence. Do the things in the world correspond to our knowledge of them? Or, as Husserl asks, what could it mean “for a being to be known in itself and yet be known in knowledge” (IP, 23; italics in original)? This is the problem of the correlation between our subjective thinking and the world of objects. The correspondence between our thinking and the world implies the problem of transcendence. According to Husserl, “Transcendence remains both the initial and the guiding problem for the critique of knowledge” (IP, 28). How can we know that we know the world that is outside us? For Husserl, it is phenomenology that can account for our knowledge of the world. Husserl’s many introductions to phenomenology document his unfailing belief in the ideas of truth and reason that will guide us toward knowledge.

In his review of Husserl’s Crisis, Patočka remarks that to charge Husserl with the claim that his many introductions to phenomenology prevent him from finally getting to his philosophy is to miss the point: it is to blame him for something that is implicit to his project.¹⁷ Husserl does not want to present ready-made concepts that we can use as tools, without question.¹⁸ On the contrary, he wants to show the way toward phenomenology. Husserl speaks of a “zigzag pattern” of investigation (Crisis, § 9l, 58), leading Eugen Fink to describe phenomenology as an “open system.”¹⁹ Husserl’s different investigations are paths that each of us must take in order to see “things themselves” and, in the spirit of scientific community, to contribute to the overall advancement and improvement of phenomenological investigations. As Lothar Eley remarks: “Husserl conceived of phenomenology as a working philosophy”;²⁰ or, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, philosophy is “a continuous beginning.”²¹ For Husserl, the idea of philosophy is “the idea of an infinite task.”²²

Not only are many researchers needed to carry phenomenological investigations forward; one’s own personal journey is also required, and this intellectual journey must be based on a constant critique of one’s own achievements. Only by traveling many paths can one grasp the idea of phenomenology as being based on personal responsibility.

It is not the case that ready-made rules will lead us into the paradise of things themselves.²³ The philosophical manual cannot help us to answer questions such as: Why do we take for granted the transcendent world? How does “this ‘idealization’” come about, and why do we not “wonder about the origin of things”?²⁴ In the end, Husserl notes, these questions lead to further “wonder”: How did it come about that science posits the knowledge of mathematical nature as primary? Why do we take for granted that the scientific conversion of “sensible causalities into mathematical causalities” gives us “mathematical, true nature,”²⁵ which “becomes” the true world while the world of our living is relegated to its fuzzy manifestation?

For Husserl, then, to understand the correlation between our subjective thinking and the world is to reflect on the nature of knowledge. It is to show that we can know objects in the world; and, further, that the transformation of the world as it was performed by modern natural science is based on things in the world, on the life-world. To grasp the meaning of the world and our existence within it, we have to go back to the beginning. Phenomenology, by going back to the things themselves, can show us not only that “the enigma of all enigmas” is merely apparent, but also that scientific mathematical knowledge does not precede our knowledge of the world; its structure is erected from things themselves. Finally, as in Husserl’s last writing, phenomenology can make clear why the idea of modern science based on the mathematization of nature is problematic: it fails to account for our existence in the world.

Thus, according to Husserl, the phenomenological method is the way toward things themselves. Yet we need to understand the method first. Otherwise, it would be like explaining Pythagoras’s theorem that a² + b² = c² without knowing that it expresses a relation concerning the sides of the right-angle triangle in Euclidean geometry.²⁶ Likewise, we cannot pass judgment on phenomenology if we do not know what phenomenology actually is. As Husserl warns, “Phenomenology is not ‘literature’ by means of which one goes riding for pleasure, as it were, while reading. [. . .] One must [. . .] work in order to acquire a methodically schooled eye and only thereby the capability of making one’s own judgment.”²⁷ To do so, one must be able to give reasons for every step in one’s thinking; to validate judgments by enabling others to extend the method. Phenomenology is the continuation of the journey that began in ancient Greece, the journey from δόξα (doxa) to ἐπιστήμη (epistēmē).

DEFENSE OF REASON

By defending the idea of reason, Husserl fights to safeguard the European intellectual heritage. He fights to redeem “reason” from relativistic interpretations and to reinstate it to its proper place, which reason and reasoning has held since Plato and Aristotle. As Plato and Aristotle conceived of it, reason is an answer to wonder, θαυμαζω (thaumazo), leading to philosophy, love of wisdom.²⁸ As Husserl explains, “In the breakthrough of philosophy [. . .] in which all sciences are thus contained, I see [. . .] the primal phenomenon of spiritual Europe.”²⁹ Once established, “philosophy, science, is the title for a special class of cultural structures.”³⁰

For Husserl, the idea of reason implicates logic as the domain of purely formal laws. The unacceptable alternative to a “pure” logic grounded formally would be the empirical logic of John Stuart Mill, for whom logic is nothing more than “a mere assemblage of psychological chapters, offered with the intention to regulate knowledge practically,”³¹ thereby making logic dependent on our thinking, instead of being its benchmark. According to Husserl, Mill’s account of logic—based on our mental states (psychologism) or our human biology (anthropologism)—becomes relative, supposedly dependent on the situation humans find themselves in. The foundation of knowledge is eliminated. Skepticism concerning knowledge becomes the reigning dogma.

According to Husserl, “It is reason which ultimately gives meaning to everything that is thought to be, all things, values, and ends.” We understand everything around us according to the “normative relatedness to what, since the beginning of philosophy, is meant by the word ‘truth’—truth in itself—and correlatively the term ‘what is’—οντως ον [ontos on, Being]” (Crisis, § 5, 12–13). Once we deny the correlation between truth and Being—in other words, between reason and the world—epistēmē becomes a riddle. For Husserl, in our age “the sense of the word ‘truth’ has been totally altered by relativism.” According to relativists, there is no single truth but only different, contingent truths relative to our situation in the world. Yet the meaning of “truth” that relativists use is still based on an idea of truth that is extrapolated from its original usage in logic, which is, as Husserl notes, “the only sense we all employ when we talk of truth. In a single sense there is only a single truth, in an equivocal sense there are naturally as many ‘truths’ as there are equivocal uses” (LI, § 36, 80).

The problem that Husserl recognizes is: when our “faith in ‘absolute’ reason, through which the world has its meaning, the faith in the meaning of history, of humanity, the faith in [human] freedom, that is, [our] capacity to secure rational meaning for [our] individual and common human existence” is lost, the descent into skepticism is inevitable (Crisis, § 5, 13). The problem of skepticism is not some academic preoccupation of a lonely philosopher but has real repercussions for everyday living. If reason—this touchstone of truth—is relativized, all reasoning becomes suspect. By extension, if reasoning cannot provide justification for our claims about the world, human existence seems to be without any rational basis. It becomes meaningless.³² As Husserl notes in his last work, if the idea of reason is eliminated as superfluous because it is conflated with reasoning about facts, then society is in crisis because it lacks a firm foundation. To avoid such grave consequences, Husserl strives to elucidate the confusion of our age, “a collapse of the belief in ‘reason,’ understood [by] the ancients” as epistēmē (Crisis, § 5, 12). His struggle is against the substitution of epistēmē with doxa: changeable opinions that are presented without reasons to support them.

Husserl starts with psychological investigations in Philosophy of Arithmetic, only to become dissatisfied with the smuggling of psychological explanation into the system of formal knowledge, and thus opening a door to skepticism and relativism. As he says later, logic reduced to psychology becomes “a psychologistically determined technology of correct thinking.”³³ Husserl realizes that by using a psychological type of explanation, “an unnoticed μετάβασις εις αλλο γένος [metabasis eis allo genos]” (LI, § 2, 13) changes the foundation of knowledge into Mill’s “mere assemblage of psychological chapters” (LI, § 13, 30), cited above.

As an example of this unnoticed metabasis, Husserl identifies the problematic fusion of logic and psychology. Formal logic—the systematic inquiry into the formal structures of reasoning—is by its very nature independent of experience, whereas psychology investigates human experience. As Husserl points out, the merging of these two different types of investigation constitutes the metabasis leading to “the setting up of invalid aims” because “the employment of methods [is] wrong in principle, not commensurate with the discipline’s true objects.” Disregarding, or forgetting, that formal logic is independent of experience, “the genuinely basic propositions and theories are shoved, often in extraordinary disguises, among wholly alien lines of thought, and appear as side-issues or incidental consequences” (LI, § 2, 13). This category mistake, as we would call it today, following Gilbert Ryle,³⁴ or the conflation of dissimilar categories by treating them as the same, “can have the most damaging consequences” for understanding the lines of inquiry that are the aims of each science (LI, § 2, 13). By treating heterogeneous categories as the same (psychology, based on empirical investigations leading to hypothetical “laws of nature”; and logic, with its formal laws), empirical psychology is mistakenly posited as the foundation of formal knowledge. Since Aristotle, on the contrary, knowledge, by definition, is about principles that are timeless. In our modern phraseology, principles are independent of our mental states, which are happenings in the world. According to Husserl’s Logical Investigations, this confusion obliterates the genuine importance of logic as the system of a priori rules that guides our thinking and is important also for the empirical scientific method. If the art—τέχνη (technē)—of thinking is based on our psychological makeup, or, as Husserl puts it, is “a psychologistically determined technology of correct thinking,”³⁵ then judgments become a set of relativistic propositions, lacking any firm basis against which we can discriminate as to which statements are true and which are not.

At the beginning of Logical Investigations, Husserl observes that doctrines put forward by representatives of psychologism—which for Husserl is skepticism and relativism at its worst—amount to nothing less than “bellum omnium contra omnes” (LI, § 1, 11).³⁶ Reason is reduced to our experience here and now and explained on the empirical basis only. As a consequence, there is no independent foundation that can serve as the ground for evaluation of our different claims about the world. Any and every opinion is declared “true,” leading to a war of all against all, because if all claims are supposedly correct, there is no possibility whereby we might “separate individual conviction from universally binding truth.” If experience is all that is left to us, there is nothing to guide us toward the truth of our assertions. The normative character of our reasoning cannot be based on temporal experience because this experience is relative to our situation here and now. For Husserl, then, the initial motive for the critique of knowledge must be to revisit “questions of principle”—this “task [. . .] must ever be tackled anew” (LI, § 2, 12).

PHILOSOPHY OF ARITHMETIC

In Philosophy of Arithmetic, Husserl’s first book, he is concerned with the concepts, such as “unity, multiplicity and number,” that are “fundamental to human knowledge on the whole” (14). As he notes, since these concepts are not established clearly, they give rise to “the considerable difficulties that accrue to their understanding,” thereby instituting “dangerous errors and subtle controversies” (PA, 14). He cautions that we need to inquire into the foundation of knowledge by making clear to ourselves the basic presuppositions from which our claims proceed (ILI, § 12, 59). Only “through patient investigation of details” can we become aware of the foundations that our knowledge is based on (PA, 5; ILI, § 6, 33–34). For Husserl, “if we are not to be shattered on the rocks of extreme scepticism” (LI, § 6, 17), the path of “painstaking criticism” (PA, 5) must be traveled repeatedly (LI, § 3, 13).

As already noted, Philosophy of Arithmetic is based on “psychological researches,” because Husserl starts from the prevailing assumption of his age that “psychology [is] the science from which logic in general and the logic of the deductive sciences had to hope for philosophical clarification.” Yet he had begun to doubt the reigning wisdom of his time, according to which logic was reduced to psychology. As he says, “Such a psychological foundation never came to satisfy me” (LI, § 2). Gottlob Frege’s review of Husserl’s book reaffirmed his already changed understanding.³⁷ The announced second volume of Philosophy of Arithmetic was never published.

It would be erroneous, however, to assume that Husserl’s first book is unconnected to his later work. Already in Philosophy of Arithmetic, Husserl shows that science can proceed, and proceed well, even though the foundational basis on which science rests is overlooked, or even forgotten. As he cautions, this state of affairs will eventually give rise to problems. In the first instance, this realization leads Husserl to question those beliefs that conflate logic and psychology. Thus Husserl turns to the problem of psychologism³⁸ and anthropologism.

It is imperative to remember that Husserl (along with Frege) attacks “logical psychologism.”³⁹ In Germany, the appeal to psychologism, as Jitendra Nath Mohanty explains, had probably first been made by Benno Erdmann. For Erdmann, psychologism is the “thesis that the logical principles such as the principle of non-contradiction derive their necessity from ‘the essence of our presentation and thinking.’”⁴⁰ As Heidegger also explains, “‘Psychologism’ expresses the priority of psychology, particularly with regard to logic and its project.”⁴¹

THE SPECTER OF PSYCHOLOGISM

Opiates suppress the symptoms; they do not cure the disease. (ILI, § 2, 23)

At the beginning of Logical Investigations, Husserl suggests a parallel between the artist’s and the scientist’s activity. While the artist performs or creates his art, he can only rarely account for the rules by which it is framed. He is simply the master of “technique” acquired through practice, and his judgment is related to his activity as an artist (LI, § 4, 15). If we take art in its broad sense, as the ancient Greeks did, then we are thinking of technē. This assessment, then, also applies, generally speaking, to science. So, while doing research, the scientist does not need to reflect on the rules that are constitutive of science, but follows her knowledge, instinct, and observations, which she has acquired through her training as a scientist: “Even the mathematician, the physicist and the astronomer need not understand the ultimate grounds of their activities in order to carry through even the most important scientific performances” (LI, § 4, 15). There is nothing surprising about the fact that scientists are not expected to perform validations all the time. Yet the danger is that they become “lost in an excessive symbolism” (FTL, § 33, 98). Husserl draws attention to the scientific practice in which, in order to “economize thought,” scientists use “abbreviations and substitutes,” instead of going back to the basic axioms on which scientific knowledge is based (LI, § 9, 23; italics in original). By privileging the so-called need “for greater exactness,” theory is substituted with “its symbolic analogue.” In short, theory is defined “in terms of mere rules of the game” (FTL, § 34, 100). As Husserl sums up, “The incomplete state of all sciences depends on this fact”; that is, on ignorance of the foundational basis from which science has evolved. He insists that sciences stand in need of “inner clarity and rationality” (LI, § 4, 15).

To be sure, this lack of understanding did not slow the growth of science, bringing about “a formerly undreamt of mastery over nature”; however, this kind of science “cannot satisfy us theoretically” (LI, § 4, 16). We need to account for the metaphysics presupposed by the notions that “an external world exists” and “is spread out in space and time”; that space is mathematical and “three-dimensional and Euclidean, and its time [is] a one-dimensional rectilinear manifold; that all process is subject to the causal principle etc” (LI, § 5, 16). These metaphysical notions migrated from Aristotle’s Metaphysics into epistemology. Without any further reflection on the problematic nature of these assumptions, these notions—now taken as belonging to the positive sciences—are understood as “reality” (LI, § 5, 16). The result is a “physicalism” that has forgotten its own metaphysical ground.⁴²

As Husserl elaborates later, to believe in one of the forms of naturalism, physicalism, or positivism is to believe that the world is “the universe of realities in the form of mutual exteriority.” It is to hold that nature is nothing else but “the realm of the pure res extensae” where “every body [stands] under rules of general causality.”⁴³ Moreover, the law of causality is presumed to govern physical as well as psychical processes. This is the metabasis that Husserl is concerned with. Yet a simple reflection reveals that the law of causality cannot be found in the world. It is a formal law, which guides our scientific (that is, empirical) understanding. It is prior to our understanding of nature, and it structures our understanding of nature as “the realm of the pure res extensae.” As Husserl says in Crisis, “The rationality of the exact sciences is of a piece with the rationality of the Egyptian pyramids.”⁴⁴

In order to understand Husserl’s charge, let us turn our attention to his Logical Investigations. In doing so, we need to keep in mind that, in LI, he presents “a new foundation of pure logic and epistemology”;⁴⁵ furthermore, according to his later explanation, the LI is not concerned with the “cognition of reality, but rather [. . . with] the possibility of analytic cognition” that Husserl considers “to be the primary and fundamental type of cognition” (ILI, § 8, 47; italics in original). That is, Husserl is concerned with the formal laws that underpin our knowledge of “reality.” Hence, in LI, his focus is to clarify the idea of analytic, formal reasoning, which is the domain of logic. In what does pure logic—that is, the formal basis of all our judgments—consist? What is the dividing line “between truths of reason and truths of fact” (ILI, § 6, 36)? In other words, what is the difference between formal and empirical knowledge?

Husserl suggests that Theodor Lipps’s claim can illuminate the relationship between formal and psychological laws, which Husserl terms the problem of psychologism. For Lipps, either “logic is a physics of thinking or it is nothing at all.”⁴⁶ In a certain way, Husserl’s comment on Lipps’s thesis could be seen to delineate the shift in Husserl’s thinking between LI and his final work, Crisis. This shift can be summed up by Husserl’s admission, in LI, that he was always concerned with “the relationship [. . .] between the subjectivity of knowing and the objectivity of the content known” (2). In other words, Husserl attempts to clarify further and further answers to questions that are apparently puzzling. What kind of ground is there for reason to claim any justification for the truth of our beliefs—our subjective thinking? How can our subjective thinking correspond to the objective world, or, rather, to the world of objects? How is it that each of us can think formally; that is to say, think independently from our own subjective way of thinking? Why is it that “a physics of thinking”—that is, our subjective thinking—cannot account for our ability to think and judge according to formal rules? Why is it that apophantic logic, the formal system of predicative statements/judgments, is an instance of the “correct” way of thinking; yet, once instantiated, is independent of our thinking? How is it that we can think of the idea of truth even though ideal truth can never be in the world?

Answering such questions cannot be achieved from within the empirical domain, because the formal rules that underpin such questions transcend our finite thinking. Those rules, or formal laws as Husserl sometimes calls them, are valid for everyone who is familiar with the formal system, irrespective of time and place. For Husserl, to reflect on these questions is to realize that Lipps is mistaken, and that “a physics of thinking” must be based on something other than our psychological experience.

As already noted, Husserl traces the problematic relationship between logic and psychology to Mill, who claimed that logic was a subcategory of psychology (LI, § 13, 29). Likewise for Lipps, “logic is a psychological discipline just as surely as knowing only arises in the mind, and as thinking which terminates in knowledge is a mental happening.”⁴⁷ However, if logic, taken as Husserl argues, is the domain of formal knowledge on a par with arithmetic, then it cannot be reduced to our mental states, which are happenings in the world, and therefore changeable. To reduce logic thus would be to deprive formal laws of their apodictic status and to think of them as “probable” instead of certain; this reduction would equate them with natural laws. This is what occurs with the metabasis mentioned earlier. For Husserl, formal laws and natural laws are different in character; they belong to different categories. By conflating them, psychologism eliminates the apodictic, timeless truth of formal laws. Formal laws are reduced to empirical, causal laws explainable by changeable time and space and the current state of empirical knowledge. The foundation from which our judgments about the world proceed becomes void of reason, so to speak. We lose the rational basis that is atemporal, and, instead, we take temporal judgments as our “guide,” forgetting that these judgments are contingent on the situation we are in. In order to be “apodictic,” formal rules must be based on something other than “a physics of thinking”; they must be prior to our experience, prior to our acts of judging. Formal rules are analytic, established by insight alone. In other words, in order to provide a frame of reference for the accuracy of our judgments, these formal rules must be independent of our changeable experience; ensuring, ideally, that everybody can understand everybody else. To reflect on such atemporal rules, one must inquire into the possibility of foundational science.

Foundational science must be separate from scientific investigations and from the empirical domain, which is, by definition, the domain of changeable truths. These empirical truths must be based on something that is unchanging, something that only such a formal, foundational science can provide. As Husserl notes, “A rich imagination, a comprehensive memory, a capacity for close attention etc., are fine things, but they have intellectual meaning only in the case of a thinking being, whose validation falls under laws and forms” (LI, § 8, 22; italics in original); and this validation cannot be explained by our mental processes alone. To put it another way: no empirical science can serve as the realm of formal truth on which empirical science itself is based. To accept that “the essential theoretical foundations of logic lie in psychology” (LI, § 17, 40) is to propose that logic is relative to our experience. It is to deny that the idea of truth can be understood consistently by any and all thinking beings, because, in this formulation, truth in itself does not depend on any particular thinking being. Following Husserl, we can say that truth is the property of a proposition—apophansis—and is universal: in other words, truth is the general idea that guides our thinking. It is atemporal. It can be accessed all the time and everywhere as long as the formal structure of judgments is understood. Thus, the idea of the universality/generality of truth means nothing other than that regardless of time or space, there is the possibility of the repeatability of formal, timeless judgments that are the domain of truth in itself. This is the system of formal knowledge, and it is this system that is passed on throughout the ages.⁴⁸

DOXA AND EPISTĒMĒ IN LOGICAL INVESTIGATIONS

If man loses this faith [in reason], it means nothing less than the loss of faith “in himself,” in his own true being. This true being is not something he always already has, with the self-evidence of the “I am,” but something he only has and can have in the form of the struggle for his truth, the struggle to make himself true. True being is everywhere an ideal goal, a task of epistēmē or “reason,” as opposed to being which through doxa is merely thought to be, unquestioned and “obvious.” (Crisis, § 5, 13; italics in original)

The issue Husserl tackles is that of where the system of formal knowledge, or “pure logic,” comes from if it is not, as psychologism decrees, an outcome of our singular mental processes, our individual thinking. Is the system of formal logic based on our mental processes; in other words, on the empirical foundation? Is logic a formal system, a normative science, or a technology?⁴⁹ In short, is the art (technē) of thinking the same as logic, which is the domain of the formal rules that are at the basis of our finite thinking?

For Husserl, every finite judgment must have some basis: something that transcends the particular act of judging. There must be something other that can validate our experience, so that we can arrive at knowledge that others can understand, too. As Husserl explains, we must distinguish between someone judging that 2 × 2 = 4 and “the true judgement, as the correct judgement in accordance with truth” (LI, § 36, 80). In other words, we must draw a distinction between the true content of judgment and the act of judging. So, if I assert that 2 × 2 = 4, this is clearly determined causally because my assertion is caused by the actual question asked, say, in a mathematical class. It is my subjective judgment that I offer to others on a certain occasion. But if my judgment was not based on something that transcends my particular mental process (subjectivity), there would be no way to account for it. There would be no principle according to which my teacher could mark my judgment as correct. Hence there is a difference between my judgment that 2 × 2 = 4 and the content of my judgment, which expresses “the truth, 2 × 2 = 4” (LI, § 36, 80). This is the puzzle that Husserl notes at the beginning of LI: the relationship between our acts of judgment, or, in other words, the subjectivity of thinking; and the objectivity of the content of judgment. Our acts of judgment are events in the world; they are causally determined and subjective. We can always be wrong. Yet their content is objective, guaranteed by the formal laws that are independent of our thinking (LI, 2). If this distinction is denied (or forgotten), then it seems that the validity of our judgments is dependent on the subjectivity of our thinking; the event in the world. The possibility of distinguishing between doxa and epistēmē vanishes.

Since the ancient Greeks, epistēmē and science have been related: “Science aims at knowledge” (LI, § 6, 17). Yet knowledge is not something self-evident. If it were, we would have neither science, nor, at the most basic level, any disputes about things in the world. As every one of us surely acknowledges, this is not the case. But how can we then distinguish between doxa and epistēmē?

Husserl explains that to know something means to give reasons; it is to validate our assertions, which will show to anyone that a certain state of affairs is, or is not. It is to furnish reasons for others to see beyond doubt why something must be so, or cannot be. It is to present a valid judgment about the given state of affairs. Yet truth is not something in the world: “We possess truth as the object of a correct judgement. But this alone is not enough, since not every correct judgement, every affirmation or rejection of a state of affairs that accords with truth, is knowledge of the being or non-being of this state of affairs.” We must be able to distinguish our judgment from “blind belief, from vague opining, however firm and decided” (LI, § 6, 17; italics in original). It is one thing to be correct about a state of affairs (doxa), and it is quite another to be able to give reasons to validate our judgment concerning this state of affairs as correct (epistēmē). Doxa becomes epistēmē—knowledge—if we give reasons for the truth of our propositions, if “we methodically validate them” (LI, § 6, 19).

However, Husserl notes that to provide validating arguments is not sufficient. In order for validating arguments to be understandable by anyone at any time and any place, they must be repeatable across time. “If they were formless and lawless, if it were not a fundamental truth that all validating arguments have certain indwelling ‘forms,’ [. . .] typical of the whole class of arguments, and that the correctness of this whole class of arguments is guaranteed just by their form [, . . .] there would be no science” (LI, § 8, 21). Science, as we know it, can exist only because it is based on formal validating arguments that present the acid test for the correctness of our judgments. Once those formal arguments are systematized, sedimented into repeatable forms, not only can we offer a justification for our claims about the world, but, in turn, those formal validating arguments will also guide our investigation of nature.

According to Husserl, “The most perfect ‘mark’ of correctness is inward evidence; it counts as an immediate intimation of truth itself” (LI, § 6, 17). The marker of truth is independent of our particular experience; it is something that is a priori and something that we can see in a single glance. Knowing something with certainty and without a doubt is analytic thinking because it is independent of experience. Yet it is “no gift of nature,” as Husserl notes; rather, it is something we can achieve only through methodological procedures (LI, § 6, 19). In other words, through methodical steps we arrive at the formal law that is given to us in certainty because “connections of validation are not governed by caprice or chance, but by reason and order, i.e., by regulative laws” (LI, § 7, 20). Take, for example, the modus Barbara. If I assert that all As are Bs, and all Bs are Cs, the conclusion must follow that all As are Cs. This judgment is valid without exception whether I, or anyone else, think it or not; whether I pronounce it or not. It is an a priori formal categorical judgment that will always be true because of its form. It is evidence that I can access immediately by inward reflection. When this type of judgment is established, it transgresses its particular instantiation and becomes valid for anyone acquainted with formal logic.

Formal judgments have no experiential content. They deal with concepts only and hence can be examined by insight alone. By contrast, natural laws are extrapolated from experience, and they always depend on some state of affairs in the world. We observe many particular instances of certain states of affairs, and, by abstracting from those particulars, we subsume them under the one, preferably simple, explanation, thereby formulating a so-called natural law. Natural laws are not apodictic. Their stipulation is only an approximation to the observed regularities of nature, and they are relative to our state of knowledge at a particular time. This does not mean they do not help us to predict, and hence master, nature, but their content cannot be established for all time.

Science does not take into account the changeability of nature. It is, first and foremost, a system of formal rules that scientists use to “decipher the book of nature,” as Galileo understood it;⁵⁰ and under which fluctuations are read as departures from a fixed norm. Using these formal rules, scientists order and systematize finite individual experiences of nature into a standardized manifold that is impossible to find in the world of our living. As Alexandre Koyré notes: “The Galilean concept of motion (as well as that of space) seems to us so ‘natural’ that we even believe we have derived it from experience and observation, though, obviously, nobody has ever encountered an inertia motion for the simple reason that such a motion is utterly and absolutely impossible.”⁵¹

This is what Husserl reminds us: formal judgments are the foundation from which a scientific method proceeds to assemble, categorize, and “order” disparate empirical claims into a system that we call science. Everyone practicing science must become a master of these formal rules, which can be repeated across time and space. They express truth in itself. Truth is possible only in the formal domain, unaffected by changeable experience; whereas natural laws are hypothetical, expressed in abstract, simplified forms that contain many singular instances as their constituent parts and that explain those parts according to a type. Truth is the ideal limit, which, in the empirical domain, we can approach only asymptotically (LI, § 6, 18).

In order to communicate scientific hypotheses about nature, there must be a system of formal rules that is understandable across time and space. As Husserl puts it: “Every operative fashioning of one form out of others has its law [. . .] of reiteration,” which makes possible “the infinity of possible forms of judgments” (FTL, § 13, 52–53; italics in original). Otherwise, there would be nothing from which science could proceed and make its prognostications. To simplify somewhat, by taking as an example the simple formal judgment “S is p,” we can say that if this predicative judgment did not apply to countless empirical instantiations of predication in nature, which are changeable by definition, we could not have science. Originally, this predication was nothing but extrapolation from repeated regularities in nature. Once the repeatability of events can be expressed by the formal structure, for example, “S is p,” this formal proposition—stripped of particularities we encounter in our everyday living—will order our future experience.⁵²

From then on, we can use the formal predicative proposition, that is, the formal type that covers any thing whatsoever in order to understand a particular “thing” in nature. In the case of the formal assertion “S is p,” we substitute any objects whatsoever for S and p, and the resulting judgment is considered valid, irrespective of our experience, because of its “indwelling” form. So, by applying this form to our experience and by substituting our empirical observations for S and p, the statement “A swan is white,” for example, becomes an empirical instantiation of this basic predicative form; because we know that this formal, or experientially empty, apophansis is a form that embraces many particular instances of objects experienced by us. This form, once established, is given to us a priori; we can access it by insight alone. It gives us the empty form of predication that applies to any object whatsoever. Once we use it to judge our experience, it holds as long as we do not encounter, for example, a black swan. Once encountered, although the form is unaffected by this discovery, its empirical correlative—the act of judgment—is changed. The basic form of a predication, S is p, does not cover this new empirical fact. One has to use a different formal judgment in order to assert, perhaps a disjunctive proposition that “S is either p or r”—“A swan is either white or black.”

In the empirical domain, “in the vast majority of cases we lack [. . .] absolute knowledge of truth, in whose place we make use [. . .] of the inner evidence for a higher or lower degree of probability for our state of affairs, with which, if probability-levels become high enough, a firm judgement is usually associated” (LI, § 6, 17). If knowledge is tied to truth, then it becomes clear that truth is nothing but the idea that will guide our search for knowledge (LI, § 6, 18).⁵³

Hence, as Husserl stresses, the claim that “as far as their theoretical content is concerned [, . . .] logic is related to psychology just as any branch of chemical technology is related to chemistry, [or] as land-surveying is to geometry etc.[,]” is absurd (LI, § 17, 40).⁵⁴ It is, rather, the other way around: logic is the foundation that supplies the formal laws of judgment to sciences that deal with the empirical world,⁵⁵ in the same way that geometry, although originally derived from land-surveying, now grounds it.

It is worth underscoring Husserl’s critique of causal justification of formal laws of logic in the manner of natural laws. To highlight the mistake of attributing to hypothetical natural laws the status of formal apodictic laws, he cites Lipps again:

The rules, therefore, on which one must proceed in order to think rightly, are merely rules on which one must proceed in order to think as the nature of thought, its specific lawfulness, demands. They are, in short, identical with the natural laws of thinking itself. Logic is a physics of thinking or it is nothing at all.⁵⁶

As already noted, Husserl is critical of Lipps, who explains logic as being determined by our psychological makeup. As Husserl says, in the claim just cited, Lipps already uses the formal law of causation—the specific lawfulness of thinking—to explain his assertion about “the nature of thought.” Our judgment that one event proceeds from another already presupposes the formal law of causation. It is not the case that the rules of our thinking are the thinking itself. To put it differently, this is the metabasis, pointed out by Husserl, that erroneously reduces the rules of thinking to the thinking itself.

The case of the archaic Greeks might serve as an explanation. Fire, for example, can be explained by recourse to myth: “One day someone went into the forest and was given a burning log by one of the gods.” Fire is then explained by mythical powers and there is no need to look for other justification. Myth provides all: “cause,” “effect,” and “reasons” in one package; the story that is told. Everything is as it always was.⁵⁷ The idea of reasoning in the form of validation—that is, providing reasons for our assertions—is antithetic to mythical thinking.

For the ancient philosophers, the mythical explanation was “unscientific.” Likewise, in our time, to assert something means that we also give reasons, so that it can be seen why something is the case or why it is not. Without justification presented in the form of reasoning, there is no recourse to an understanding that others can follow. Why should they believe our claims? So we give reasons as to why there is fire: yet, in offering reasons for fire, we already presuppose the principle of causality; that is, the formal law that every consequent has its antecedent, which explains it. Or, more simply, the notion that every cause has its effect, and that we can understand certain events according to those that preceded them.

Plato considered “why” something is or is not when he recounted Socrates’ explanation to Phaedo: “When I was a young man I was wonderfully keen on that wisdom which they call natural science, for I thought splendid to know the causes of everything, why it comes to be, why it perishes and why it exists.”⁵⁸ However, Aristotle was the first to formalize this line of thinking. From our empirical encounters with the world, Aristotle abstracted the four formal causes that became the basis for our understanding. His four causes were derived from the experience of things that the Greeks encountered in their everyday living,⁵⁹ and they referred back to it.⁶⁰ In other words, the four causes explained experience a priori.

After Aristotle, to understand things in the world is to search for the four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. Without knowing these causes, we cannot claim to know the existence and nature of the thing. By searching for causes, we are looking for a “why” in terms of antecedents. Senses—that is, experience—as Aristotle explains, “do not tell the ‘why’ of anything—e.g. why fire is hot; they only say that it is hot.”⁶¹ To not ask why is to not seek a cause. (Gods gave us fire: there is nothing more to it.) By contrast, we search for causes to understand why something comes onto being; as Plato says, “why it perishes and why it exists.” We seek reasons that we can give for our opinions, thereby validating them. For Aristotle, then, “wisdom is knowledge about certain principles and causes.” In short, if we seek knowledge, then “we must inquire of what kind are the causes and the principles.” Only then can we reach knowledge, which is, for Aristotle, wisdom.⁶²

For us moderns, Aristotle’s explanation of the four causes seems strange. Our understanding has been shaped by the universal law of causality based on the mathematical hypothesis that stipulates that “every occurrence in ‘nature’—idealized nature—must come under exact laws” (Crisis, 53). This modern idea of causality is Galilean: only in the Galilean universe, our universe, does the hypothesis of perfect causality become a general law that supposedly “rules” all processes in the world. As Husserl notes: “With Galileo, then, begins the surreptitious substitution of idealized nature for prescientifically intuited nature” (Crisis, § 9h, 49–50). The law of causality governs the heavenly bodies, pendulums, rocks, and atoms. Since that historical time, a description of events that follow each other and that we encounter in the world is transformed into mathematical language and formalized as the law of causality. Its abstract formula ensures its validity and it is now considered a priori: prior to our scientific explanation of the world.

In connection with the four causes, as already noted, Aristotle’s theory applies to the world of our living. The same applies mutatis mutandis to Aristotle’s logic. Aristotle’s logic is not “pure” logic in the sense we understand it today. Husserl observes that “Aristotle relates his analytics to the real world,” thus his analytics contain “the categories of reality” (FTL, § 12, 49). So, Husserl notes, the Aristotelian formal system is not free of the things we encounter in the life-world, because Aristotle’s system “lacked formal ontology.” Strictly speaking, Aristotle was not aware, or rather did not recognize, that “formal ontology is intrinsically prior to the ontology of realities” (FTL, § 26, 80). His system is not reduced to a formal “anything-whatever.” The same applies to the Euclidean geometry: for Euclid, geometry was a “theory of intuited world-space” (FTL, § 29, 92).

Husserl points out that the Aristotelian and Euclidian systems do not, or, rather, cannot, account for the difference between things in the world and the objects in general that populate today’s domain of formal ontology. Formal ontology is essentially about “regarding the judgment sphere theoretically as a specific Objective field of apriori ideality, just as the geometer regards the sphere of pure geometrical shapes and the arithmetician regards the sphere of numbers” (FTL, § 26, 81). And it is exactly this confusion between formal ontology and the world in which we live that was to occupy Husserl in his last years.

ANTHROPOLOGISM

Husserl’s critique of psychologism applies, mutatis mutandis, to anthropologism. Anthropologism is for Husserl also a form of relativism (FTL, § 24, 76). The underlying claim of anthropologism is that what is true or false depends on our species. There might be other species and they might judge differently. What is true for us might be false for them.

As Husserl explains, this misconception is already based on our understanding of true and false; it is based on our categorization of judgment. Further, to use the true/false distinction and then claim that it might be different for other species means that we do not understand the meaning of true and false. There is also another problem. If we say that truth for a different species might be nonexistent, which means that there would be no truth per se, then this claim is a fallacy, sometimes called the liar paradox. The claim appeals to truth by declaring that there is no truth.

Finally, if anthropologism’s claim is that our truth is relative to our human constitution, then if there were no humans, there would be no truth.⁶³ This claim, once again, surreptitiously relies on the notion of truth to assert itself as true. Husserl comments that “if we confine ourselves to the only species actually known to us, animal species,” then this claim amounts to two possible outcomes. The first possibility is that truth is dependent on us, humans, who “invented” truth; so if something happens to our species, then truth will mutate (“a change in [human] constitution would mean a change in the world”). This is already discussed above. Here, the concept of truth is relied upon to assert that “truth” is contingent on our species and, by the same token, that nature is dependent on us (if we change, the world will change with us)—which is again a misunderstanding of the meaning of the idea of truth. We assert something we deny. The second possibility is that despite the fact that we are “animal species,” we are also “evolutionary products of the world,” which can lead to the claim that “our truth” is the product of the environment and changeable with it (LI, § 36, 81; IP, 18). Once again, the same objection applies. As Husserl sums up, “We are playing a pretty game: man evolves from the world and the world from man; God creates man and man God” (LI, § 36, 81).

THE IDEA OF PHENOMENOLOGY

Natural thought in life and in science is untroubled by the difficulties concerning the possibility of knowledge, while philosophical thought is determined by the position taken with respect to the problems of the possibility of knowledge. (IP, 61; italics in original)

Husserl is the first to admit that his critique of psychologism and anthropologism in Logical Investigations does not get him out of the empirical world. As he writes in 1907, although his early underlying concern was theory of knowledge, LI left the validity of descriptive psychology intact. First presented in LI, Husserl’s insight is that “the possibility of analytic cognition” (§ 8, 47; italics in original) is important but is not enough to account for the knowledge of the world; that is, for the correlation between our subjective thinking and the world of objects.

In The Idea of Phenomenology, then, Husserl shifts from analytic reasoning to consider the problem of knowledge as such. His focus becomes “the relation of knowledge to what is transcendent” (IP, 60; italics in original), that is, the correlation between our thinking and the world.⁶⁴ He recognizes that descriptive psychology, that is, empirical phenomenology, must be distinguished from transcendental phenomenology.⁶⁵ Only transcendental phenomenology can solve “the great riddles” of “the correlation between being and consciousness” (ILI, § 5, 29). This is “the enigma of all enigmas,” mentioned earlier. How do I know that a thing in the world is the same as the one that I am aware of? This riddle leads also to the question: “How is it that I experience what is seen again as the same? How can it be experienced as the same?”⁶⁶ These questions cannot be answered by comparing the object in the world with its “image,” which supposedly appears in my consciousness. The answers cannot rely on the law of causation; the object cannot cause the image in my consciousness. How can my one-sided perception, which I supposedly have in my consciousness as an image, do justice to my experience of the object in the world with all its “sides,” in its totality? The object and the mental state belong to different categories; the law of causation is useful to explain events in physical nature, but the extramental object cannot cause any “mental image.” When we pay attention to what we are aware of, we realize the enigma that phenomenology discloses: we always see more than what is “given” to us. The “mental image” cannot be the replication of an object from the world into my consciousness, so to speak; the object is irreducible to the image. We are always aware of the object in the world, and not only of the one side of it that we literally see. We always anticipate the sides of a thing that we cannot possibly see unless we move around the object; we assume that we see the object in its entirety.

Husserl’s insight is that to understand this enigma of meaning—this correlation between the worldly object and our knowledge of it—the phenomenological investigation has to leave behind the transcendent world of res extensa and pay attention to “the phenomenologically reduced consciousness in its individual flow.”⁶⁷ It has to abstract from the actual world. Husserl’s proposition is the phenomenological reduction, or ἐποχή (epoché), which he introduces in IP.⁶⁸ As Mohanty explains, “The epoché is not an expression of suspicion in the veracity of the given, it is rather a methodological step needed for understanding the sense of the world precisely as it is given, i.e., as a unity of sense that is achieved.”⁶⁹ To express it differently, Husserl’s investigation is not into objects as they are in themselves, but into our meaningful experience of them.

The phenomenological reduction is Husserl’s response to the problem of psychologism and anthropologism. He considers the problem from a different point of view by showing that our knowledge of an object cannot be reduced to our subjective mental states.

For Husserl, “psychology is an experiential science,” while phenomenology is “a science of essences,”⁷⁰ or, we might say, of typicalities. We can attend to the meaning of a thing if we bracket out everything that transcends our awareness and begin to pay attention to what we are aware of as it appears to us; that is, if we bracket out res extensa and concentrate on cogitationes. This does not mean that the world ceases to exist. If we experience something, it must exist in the world, but what we are attempting to do is to describe our awareness only. What becomes apparent is the fact that our consciousness is intentional.⁷¹ We always experience something as something; we are always aware of something as something.⁷²

To investigate this constitution of experience, a phenomenologist must pay attention to the immanent flow of cogitationes revealing that we always see “more” than we actually see. The issue is how to describe this “seeing.” My perception of a tree in a garden is relative to my position in relation to that tree. The question is: How can I see this tree as a three-dimensional object standing in the garden when I really only see one side of it?⁷³ How do I constitute the meaning of my experience from this one side that is perceptually given to me? How can I extrapolate from this one side and experience it as a tree blossoming in my garden? How do I constitute the cognitive meaning of my experience?⁷⁴

According to Husserl, the sensations that constitute my experience of a tree are “moments of experience” that contribute to my meaningful constitution of this tree; but they are, by definition, not a tree. As Dan Zahavi explains, only by interpreting sensations do “we have an object-directed perception. It is [. . .] because the sensations are in themselves nonintentional [. . . that] they lack an intrinsic object-reference.”⁷⁵ What is needed is the understanding of a synthesis: of how those sensations come together to form my experience of an object. How can I see the tree in my garden? I cannot explain my perception as meaningful experience if I posit sensations as primary. To account for my perception of the tree, I have to account for the synthesis through which the object becomes constituted. I have to abstract from this tree, this time, this place, and my empirical awareness of this tree. As Husserl explains, if I do not abstract from my particular “I,” I am still on the ground of natural science, in this case psychology, which investigates the mental processes of an individual consciousness. To understand the meaning of experience is to pay attention to the constitution of any and every experience. How does it happen that, in normal circumstances, we constitute the meaning of this one-sided percept as the tree standing in the garden, persisting through space and time?

We can attend to the phenomenon of a tree only if we perform a reduction; that is, if we pay attention only to “the sphere of pure self-givenness” (IP, 45; italics in original); if we pay attention to the constitution of meaning. For Husserl, “every act of thinking [. . .] ‘has’ phenomenally in it what it thinks.”⁷⁶ To reflect on thinking, on the constitution of meaning, we have to pay attention to the pure immanence of consciousness by excluding all that is transcendent to it.⁷⁷ We have to bracket out the world in order to consider how meaning is constituted in this pure immanence. As Husserl puts it: “The whole trick here is to let the seeing eye have its say and to exclude all transcendent reference that is interwoven with seeing, those things that are ostensibly given or thought along with what is seen [. . .] those things that in subsequent reflection get imputed to what is given” (IP, 47). This means that for Husserl in IP, only knowledge based on “absolute givenness is ultimate” (45).⁷⁸ “Absolute givenness” becomes the touchstone of truth because it is free of the riddle of transcendence.

In order to investigate the appearance of a tree, we must assign the epistemological index of dubitability to the “real” tree in the garden, to the space and objective time and to the empirical “I” (IP, 34). To reflect on my perception as a perception, “a reflection that simply ‘sees,’” we must restrict our investigation to the cognitive side of appearing (i.e., to the act of knowing), “the pure cogitatio.” We consider the constitution of meaning only. By this act, we disclose “the phenomenon of this apperception: the phenomenon [. . .] of ‘perception apprehended as my perception.’” As Husserl puts it: “A pure phenomenon that exhibits its immanent essence (taken individually) [is] an absolute givenness” (IP, 34; italics in original). The eucalyptus tree in my garden can burn or decay, but the “pure phenomenon” of a tree—the immanent quiddity of a tree—is indestructible, and it is given as the tree itself.⁷⁹

The key term is a “tree itself.” It is a tree that we are aware of and not the singular perception of one side of this tree. Husserl warns us against the misconception of the atomistic understanding of perceptual data. There is no singular cogitatio that can account for our perception of a tree; “the self-givenness” of the pure phenomenon is always “bound to the sphere of the cogitationes” (IP, 46). We are aware of a tree because it is constituted through a synthesis of many sensations, but those sensations cannot be accounted for outside of the bestowal of meaning that we understand as a tree.

This investigation can also be described by analogy with the method practiced in natural science.⁸⁰ Galileo did not posit the law of gravitation as applying to those two particular cannonballs that he is said to have dropped from the Tower of Pisa. He did not perceive this experiment as his own singular observation. He abstracted from the time and space of the experiment, from his own person as the one who was conducting this experiment, and from the actual falling cannonballs, and formulated the law of gravity, which would apply to any object whatsoever, at any time and place. Similarly, the investigation of “this” tree as a phenomenon, constituted through the act of knowing, for example, will reveal that there are other “typicalities” in the life-world that can be made clear. By abstracting from the world, we ostensibly discover “typicalities” that reveal certain basic structures that constitute every possible experience of any object whatsoever; present, future, or nonexistent but imagined. As Husserl puts it, “This goes together with the problem of recognition of the concrete typicality of the objects, and of the objects themselves in their type.”⁸¹

Husserl’s further insight is that the empty generalization of a “type” can be abstracted only from the particular “moment of experience.”⁸² I can reflect on the appearance of the red roof I see from my window. I am aware of this distinct red roof. By bracketing out the world, I pay attention to the appearance of this red roof as I am aware of it. However, this is still transcendence, since I pay attention to the cogitationes of my singular consciousness. I have to abstract from my singular “I” and attend to a pure phenomenon: the pure seeing abstracted from the world and from my empirical “I.” This particular then appears as this individual red roof, but by abstracting from this singular roof, it is an instance or a type of redness per se. So I “see” the redness in two ways, so to speak: either as an instance of this particular red roof, or, by abstracting from the world and my particular “I,” as an instance of redness in general—in other words, the type or eidos of redness that embraces all possible appearances of red color.

But how is it possible to see red in two different ways? Where does the “generalization” come from? It cannot be given to me as pure self-givenness. There is nothing in the world of objects that is redness in general. My intentional awareness can be only of the particular, but never of the general. As Husserl notes, generality transcends the pure phenomenon, the pure givenness.

THE APPEARANCE AND THAT WHICH APPEARS

So, when we reflect on the pure phenomenon, we realize that the cogitationes are not pure givenness, as we assumed at the beginning, but they already “conceal all sorts of transcendencies” (IP, 67). Husserl realizes that “the appearance and that which appears stand over against each other” (67; italics in original). We tend to focus on the thing, forgetting that no thing is ever given to us at once and in its entirety. As already noted, the thing that we experience is not something in the world that we see at once. In a way, “we have two forms of absolute givenness, the givenness of the appearing and the givenness of the object” (67). As Husserl explains, using the example of a tone, “The phenomenon of tone perception, even the evident and reduced phenomenon, requires a distinction within immanence between the appearance and that which appears” (67; italics in original). In The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness,⁸³ Husserl describes this distinction as “a fixed continuum of retention [that] arises in such a way that each later point is retention for every earlier point. And each retention is already a continuum.”⁸⁴ We simply cannot experience a thing in the singular point of time designated as a “now.” The tone, for example, is never given to us separate from the melody. A tone in the proverbial now-point is “the head attached to the comet’s tail of retentions relating to the earlier now-points of the motion”;⁸⁵ in our case, of melody. Husserl explains in IP that the object within this immanence “is not a part of the appearance, for the past phases of the tone duration are still objective, and yet they are not really [reell] contained in the now-point of the appearance” (67; square brackets in translation). Each tone carries with it, so to speak, the previous tones that we synthesize into one melody, and the singular tone disappears in the overarching musical piece.

This transcendence is comparable to that of the case of generalization. Melody, as such, is not in the world; only tones are (if we can put it this way), just as redness is not a part of the world in the same way as the red roof is. Redness and melody are constituted by us: “It is a consciousness that constitutes a self-givenness which is not really [reellen] contained in it and it is not to be found as a cogitatio” (IP, 67; square brackets and italics in translation).

In the “Preparatory Notes for the Course of Lectures (1910–1911): Pure Psychology and the Humanities (Geisteswissenschaften), History and Sociology,” Husserl notes that the consideration of the thing and its appearance—how it appears and how we posit its lawful appearance by bracketing out its transcendent existence—is not a question of the “real” existence or nonexistence of the object. Husserl’s key strategy is to consider “the thing’s real existence in some philosophical scheme.”⁸⁶ In other words, it is his answer to Descartes and Locke, and, later, Mill. Husserl’s point is that “regardless of how skeptically I proceed as a philosopher, and even if I want to deny the thing as an existent entity ‘in itself,’” he can demonstrate the way the thing is constituted.⁸⁷ The thing-experience always proceeds according to ordered perceptions: we always experience the thing in the world as meaningful. Our experience of any and every object is not haphazard but uniform. We know that the cube has other sides, even if we do not really see them. There is no possibility of skepticism in this domain. As Husserl notes in Formal and Transcendental Logic, by bracketing out the world, we do not deny it; rather, we investigate the way of its positing by showing the lawfulness of its constitution (see, e.g., § 104, 275).

Husserl’s quest is to understand and describe our way of experiencing the world by showing the inadequacies of theories of empiricism; it is to return to things themselves by showing how our experience of the world is constituted.

In Experience and Judgment, Husserl points out that logic, or our formal knowledge, is based on prepredicative experience, our everyday living. As he puts it, “All predicative self-evidence must be ultimately grounded on the self-evidence of experience”; the task is to show that the origin of formal predicative logic is nothing but “the world of experience immediately pregiven and prior to all logical functions.” It is the world in which we live that “furnishes the ground for all cognitive performance and all scientific determination.”⁸⁸

Proceeding from this understanding of the constitution of the world, Husserl shows not only the original ground of formal knowledge but also the constitution of positive sciences.⁸⁹ As he suggests, philosophical considerations are different from theoretical reconfiguration of the world in natural science, because physicists “have a completely different attitude”;⁹⁰ yet the basis for both is the life-world.

LEBENSWELT

In ordinary life, we have nothing whatever to do with nature-Objects. What we take as things are pictures, statues, gardens, houses, tables, clothes, tools, etc. These are all value-Objects of various kinds, use-Objects, practical Objects. They are not Objects which can be found in natural science.⁹¹

Husserl recognizes that human experience is based on the particular finite experience of the world in which we live. We experience things in the world and our experience is always already based on our previous experience, even before we reflect on our understanding. So Husserl brings to the fore our experience of the life-world by showing that it is based on “seeing” and understanding things according to “types.” This experience of typicalities growing out of particularities is a basis for the possibility of knowledge, but this typicality is not thematized. It is not a theoretical insight. In other words, despite the fact that the life-world is perceived as nothing but many typicalities that we encounter in our everyday living, we are not aware of this. Our experience of the life-world is unreflective. Once we realize this, we can reflect upon these “types”; understanding experience by investigating and abstracting from particularities to discern the typical structures that illuminate them. When we bring this latent understanding, or, as Husserl calls it, prepredicative experience, into relief, we can thematize those typical instances—eidetic structures—on which our understanding is based.⁹²

As Husserl writes, “Thanks to [the] recoverable past given through memory and also to expectations which predelineate the living future for us it is a thoroughly typified world. All that exists within it, whether known or unknown, is an object of experience with the form: an A, and, this A”⁹³ (i.e., a house per se, and this particular house in which I live). Schütz puts it this way:

The unquestioned pre-experiences are [. . .] from the outset, at hand as typical ones, that is, as carrying along open horizons of anticipated similar experiences. For example, the outer world is not experienced as an arrangement of individual unique objects, dispersed in space and time, but as “mountains,” “trees,” “animals,” “fellowmen.”⁹⁴

Husserl suggests that although these types are played out differently in different human communities in different periods, their essential structures are independent of any and every culture. Phenomenology, by the bracketing out of the world, discloses these “typicalities” that can be discerned across different surrounding worlds.⁹⁵ When these structures are revealed and described, they can be understood by anyone practicing phenomenology, anywhere, independent of the “time and place” of our own lives. Once revealed, they can serve as “templates” to help us understand other typical instances of phenomena in different surrounding worlds. By transcending our particular position, we can understand the experiences of others.⁹⁶ Landgrebe speaks of the basic description of “our immediate way of having the world [as] the distinction between near and far, between near-world and far-world, though these concepts at once involve more than spatial relations.”⁹⁷ From this basic structure, we can imagine the extension of this opposition to variants such as the “home-world” as opposed to the “alien or foreign world.”⁹⁸ According to Husserl, the typical structure is the “essential difference between familiarity and strangeness.”⁹⁹ This difference can manifest itself in many guises, but it is typical for human communities through their different ways of living.¹⁰⁰

For Husserl, then, the world is the horizon to all of our positing acts; as Landgrebe puts it, the world is “the doxic basis persisting throughout all experiences.”¹⁰¹ Things always manifest themselves against the background of the world. It follows, then, that if the world is “the universally fundamental doxic thesis,” it cannot be construed simply “as a blind ‘prejudice.’”¹⁰² We need to rethink this understanding of the world. Rather, as Landgrebe shows, our thinking about the world, based on the doxic thesis, “is not a definite act, explicitly performed at some time or other, but rather the foundation for every definite act.” We live in the world and our understanding is based on it, or, rather, drawn from it. We do not reflect on this fundamental starting point, and, when performing theoretical acts, we forget that they are couched in this originary encounter with the world that is always the backdrop to our experience of things themselves. Our “belief in the world” is the basis from which our theorizing begins.¹⁰³

As Husserl affirms, things themselves are the primary guide that will lead us to knowledge in general. We need to recognize that our knowledge is based on our experience of the life-world. Duc Thao Trân states: “The truth of predicative forms is founded on the movement of antepredicative experience.”¹⁰⁴ Epistēmē is always already based on doxa.

DOXA AND EPISTĒMĒ: “BACK TO THE THINGS THEMSELVES”—ZU DEN SACHEN SELBST!

Profound thought is an indication of chaos, which genuine science aims to transform into a cosmos, a simple, entirely clear, dissolved order.¹⁰⁵

In his 1917 inaugural lecture in Freiburg im Breisgau, Husserl affirms the recognition of the primacy of the world with his call to return to things themselves when he says: “Natural objects [. . .] must be experienced before any theorizing about them can occur. [. . .] There is consciousness of the original as being there ‘in person.’”¹⁰⁶ As we live in the world, we pass judgments about things according to our “natural attitude”:¹⁰⁷ we simply take for granted that the world is outside us, and we encounter it unproblematically as being simply there. Yet, as Husserl notes also, natural attitude is ignorant of the “bestowal of sense.”¹⁰⁸ That is, we are ignorant that it is we ourselves who constitute the world’s meaning. It is this attitude that Husserl challenges by showing that “the objects would be nothing at all for the cognizing subject if they did not ‘appear’ to him, if he had of them no ‘phenomenon.’” In other words, only by disclosing the constitution of meaning of the world we live in, only by showing the lawful structure of our experience, can we confront not only the charges of relativism and skepticism,¹⁰⁹ but also our own human participation in the erection of the mathematized structure of the world of positive sciences.

So, if Husserl is right and doxa is the stepping-stone toward epistēmē—knowledge—there must be a way to account for this progression. This is the problem that Husserl tries to confront in his last work.

Husserl’s conception of truth changes between the writing of LI and the writing of Ideas and FTL. In LI, Husserl speaks of truth-in-itself. The idea of truth is the idea that truth is a property of judgment. In his introduction to the revised version of LI, Husserl notes that “theoretical thinking and cognition are accomplished in statements,” hence the need for the “epistemologically clarifying efforts” that take as their starting objective “the essence of ‘expressing.’”¹¹⁰ This idea is dealt with in Expression and Meaning, the first volume of LI. However, as Husserl notes, the problem is the “imperfect conception of the essence of ‘truth in itself’ in the Prolegomena,”¹¹¹ because “the concept of a ‘truth in itself’ [. . .] is too one-sidedly oriented to vérités de raison”—or, pure logic unconcerned about things themselves. It is the sixth volume of LI that “brings in necessary clarification in this respect.”¹¹² The only way to reach “an absolutely justified knowledge” is to go back to “original sources,”¹¹³ that is, “back to the things themselves”; in other words, back to the world. Husserl’s shift from LI’s truth-in-itself to his call “back to the things themselves” is a shift from formal principles of knowledge to a consideration of “the sense or essence of knowledge” (IP, 25). As Thao points out, “‘That of which we speak,’ the upokeimenon, is not a simple indeterminate and empty substrate: it is the object itself, just as it presents itself in the antepredicative evidence of perception.”¹¹⁴ It is the thing itself, in other words, the meaningful thing, that we experience and that is the starting point for the way we arrive at knowledge of it.

Based on prepredicative experience, this new conception of knowledge is not reduced to truth-in-itself, which is the property of a judgment alone. Rather, evidence is based on the “originary presentive intuition.”¹¹⁵ As Husserl says, “Evidence is [. . .] not some sort of consciousness-index attached to a judgment [. . .] calling to us like a mystic voice from a better world: Here is the truth;—as though such a voice would have something to say to free spirits like us and would not have to show its title to legitimacy.”¹¹⁶ Knowledge is not based on some mysterious process that aligns the thing itself with our knowledge of it. We must reflect upon evidence, work hard to understand its structure and discern the typicalities that are hidden at the first unreflective understanding. Evidence is not something that is freely floating in the world. It is based on our freedom as thinkers who can reflect; distancing ourselves from immediate experience to discover its structural underpinnings. Only by way of reflection can we disclose the structures that can illuminate other instances of our experience. Human freedom means that we can transcend the immediacy of our perception and see beyond the given. By way of phenomenological analysis, we can show that our experience is not reduced to the here and now but is structured by past experiences. Truth is something that guides our thinking, but it cannot be reduced to the predicative judgment. It is the world of our living, the life-world, that informs our judgments.

Yet, if our experience of the world is subjective, “how can singular judgments of fact be valid at all? How can the experienced world even be in truth?”¹¹⁷ As Husserl suggests, it is the case that our experience of the world changes; we need to reflect on how we nevertheless take the world for granted, how it forms the backdrop to our experience and how we anticipate the things we encounter in the world. As he also explains: “Real truth is the correlate of real being, and just as real being is an infinitely distant idea, the idea of a pole for systematic infinities of appearances, of ‘experiences’ in constantly legitimate presumption, so real truth is an infinitely distant idea.”¹¹⁸ It is not the case that truth is somewhere in the world where we can “discover” it once and for all. Truth is a regulative idea that will guide our understanding toward “what is identical in the agreement of experiential judgments” by making us see how “in each [. . .] truth ‘appears,’ [and] achieves legitimate subjective givenness.” Our experience is based on “the pure form of generality which contains all possibilities.” We know that things can deceive us because they show themselves one-sidedly, but we also know that we can approach them, look with more attention, and confirm or disprove our initial beliefs about them.¹¹⁹ Husserl’s insight is that our intuition of a thing is, at first, empty. Only through evidence can we reach a fulfilled intuition and become certain of the thing’s being as we think it is.¹²⁰

Husserl’s call to return to the things themselves leads him to formulate the principle of all principles.¹²¹ As he says in IP, “The proper sense of the principle lies in the constant requirement of sticking with the things that are put in question [. . .] and not [confusing] the problems brought up here with entirely different problems.” He insists that “the clarification of the possibilities of knowledge does not follow the ways of objective science.” It is not “a matter of deducing, inducing, calculating, and the like; and it is not a matter of deriving in a reasoned way new things from things already given, or from things that count as already given” (IP, 64). As he says, to see something is to know, but “seeing cannot be demonstrated or deduced. It is a manifest piece of nonsense to try to clarify possibilities (and immediate possibilities at that) through a logical derivation from non-intuitive knowledge.” His example is of a deaf man. Someone born deaf is told that “there are tones, that harmonies are based on tones, and that a splendid art is derived from them,” but how could he know how those tones lead to something that others call musical compositions? He has never heard any of it; how can he even imagine what music is? To know that there is something that others call music is of no help in considering what this “thing” called music is. “Knowledge of existence would be of no help here; and it would be absurd to propose to deduce the ‘how’ of music” from knowledge that music exists. “It will not do to draw conclusions from the existence of things one merely knows but does not see” (IP, 30).¹²² Either we know what music is because we have experience of it or we do not. It is not possible to deduce knowledge from somebody’s explanation of music’s existence without my own experience of an opera, for example. No mathematical system can produce knowledge from something that one does not see for oneself.

For Husserl, we can live in truth only if we can reflect on—that is to say, understand—meaning bestowal; if we can see things themselves. Things themselves are the touchstone of truth, the only guarantee that can lead us toward knowledge. To know does not mean to give the ultimate explanation of the world. Knowledge of the world cannot be final: it is always open to corrections, refutations, and reaffirmations. As already pointed out, because formal knowledge is free of experiential content, it is true in itself. By contrast, knowledge of the world cannot itself be reduced to such unchanging truths. However, from this recognition, it does not follow that everything is “true”; that everything goes. Our prepredicative experience shows that we always know that things change; they can delude us, but in the end, by getting closer, by looking from different perspectives, we can correct our judgments about them. Why should it be different in our theoretical considerations? There is a lawful structure to our experience, and, by phenomenological investigations that reveal the lawfulness of our awareness of the world, we can show how our experience of the life-world is made possible.

MATHEMATIZATION OF NATURE: THE SCIENCE OF REALITY

The European nations are sick; Europe itself, it is said, is in crisis. We are by no means lacking something like nature doctors. Indeed, we are practically inundated by a flood of naïve and excessive suggestions for reform. But why do the so richly developed humanistic disciplines fail to perform the service here that is so admirably performed by the natural sciences in their sphere?¹²³

In his later work, Husserl extends the critique of reason beyond the psychological relativization of logic and questions the mode of scientific, formal knowledge that constitutes another metabasis. The early focus on logic is not abandoned, but is extended to consider the formal knowledge of natural science, which is taken as nature itself.

The metabasis mentioned is the substitution of method for the world. We methodically “construct numerical indices for the actual and possible” res extensae, which we then take as a better rendering of the world in which we live and which is unpredictable by definition. Yet this mathematical manifold proceeds only from “the concretely intuited shapes of the life-world.” Once we transform nature into “a well-fitting garb of ideas, that of the so-called objectively scientific truths” (Crisis, § 9h, 51; italics in original), we can hypothetically predict, and therefore master, natural processes. We believe that we are the “regnum hominis,” as Bacon dreamed, and feel like “maîtres et possesseurs de la nature,” as Descartes announced.¹²⁴ In the process, as Husserl stresses, science is transformed into a “purely theoretical-technical accomplishment” (Crisis, § 12, 66) preoccupied with a mathematically ideal world instead of the world we live in. It gives us the illusion of mastery, not only of a physical nature but also “a mastery over mankind as belonging to the real surrounding world, i.e., mastery over himself and his fellow man, an ever greater power over his fate, and thus an ever fuller ‘happiness’—‘happiness’ as rationally conceivable for man” (Crisis, § 12, 66)—as if happiness could be transformed into a set of numbers and then turned into a controllable process regulated by rational method; changing human fate into a predictable and thereby controllable event.

The problem is that all this euphoria about the possibility of rationally understanding nature and mastering the world of our living has proved to be a mirage. But does it mean that the problem is rationality? This is the fight that Husserl undertakes. As he says, we must “carry out a responsible critique” by becoming the autonomous thinkers (Selbstdenker) (Crisis, § 15, 72; italics in original) who show that this technical mastery is an abomination of the original Greek insight as to what epistēmē—rational knowledge—is.

Husserl wants neither to condemn the sciences, nor to have recourse to “mysticism.” He wants to show “to what extent the sciences are one-sided, [by] giving theoretical formulation only to certain sides of actual reality.” For Husserl, this substitution of the world with “a well-fitting garb of ideas” needs to be revisited by showing how it is based on our originary experience of things themselves, which are then transposed into the mathematical manifold and manipulated as being separate from, and somehow “more true” than, the world of our living. In Husserl’s view, we must be responsible for our knowledge by showing both the ground from which our knowledge is constituted and how “the primal ground of Intuitive givenness” can lead to “an all-round and complete knowledge.”¹²⁵

In order to understand Husserl’s analysis, let us reconsider Aristotle again. For Aristotle, physical objects are irreducible to mathematics. In the words of Aristotle, “The more physical of the branches of mathematics, such as optics, harmonics, and astronomy,” cannot be reduced to geometry. The ancient Greeks’ understanding of optical reflection was derived from the observation of physical bodies. As Aristotle writes, “Optics investigates mathematical lines” not as mathematical, but rather as physical, as belonging to the body.¹²⁶ He says that “‘flesh’ and ‘bone’ and ‘man’” are described by physical attributes and not geometrical ones. Socrates’ nose was a “snub nose”; however, we moderns reduce a snub nose to geometrical language, speaking of a “curved” nose. Not so Aristotle: Aristotle insists that the line of the nose is curved but not the nose itself.¹²⁷ Formalization is not an abstraction of something in general but relates to and considers the things in the world. It would not make sense to him to abstract from the world as we live it.

“KNOW-HOW”

Following Galileo’s inauguration of modern physics, the transformation from the idea of wisdom, as the ancient Greeks understood it, into technical “know-how” was completed. This transformation, in effect, was a move from the world that we live in to the mathematical manifold that science can account for without ambiguity. According to Husserl, “The essential process of the new constitution of strict science” is defined by a transformation of knowledge from “the intuitions of profound thought into unambiguous, rational configurations.”¹²⁸ This is why Husserl insists that “true science, as far as its teaching reaches, knows no profound thought. Every piece of completed science is the total of steps of thinking each of which is immediately transparent; and hence not profound at all.”¹²⁹ As already noted, for the ancient philosophers this way of thinking was not a possibility, since their θεωρία (theoria) was the contemplation of nature in which they lived.¹³⁰

By contrast, in our time, “the emergence of algebra [. . .] made [. . .] possible for the first time the advance to a purely formal logic” (FTL, § 12, 49); that is, logic free of empiricity. The merger of mathematics and logic is the Leibnizian idea of mathesis universalis (FTL, § 24, 74, 80; see also § 34, 49). Husserl suggests that mathematical sciences became “the garb of symbols of the symbolic mathematical theories,” shrouding the life-world under the notion of “‘objectively actual and true’ nature.” The problem is that “we take for true being what is actually a method—a method which is designed for the purpose of progressively improving, in infinitum, through ‘scientific’ predictions, those rough predictions which are the only ones originally possible within the sphere of what is actually experienced and experienceable in the life-world.” For us, the methodological garb of ideas represents the life-world; in the process, the life-world itself disappears. Husserl identifies a further problem. The “formulae, the ‘theories,’ remained unintelligible” because ideas were disguised as the world, obscuring “the true meaning of the method.” Moreover, this “naïve formation of the method, was never understood” (Crisis, § 9h, 51–52; italics in original).

Hence, Husserl shows that the relationship between the method and the world was never clarified. He notes that this new mathematics becomes “a theoretical technique,” giving rise to “the new problem—that of a formal ontology” (FTL, § 24, 76; italics in original).

On the one hand, Husserl is adamant in preserving the idea of formal knowledge, which will keep at bay skepticism and relativism; at the same time, he recognizes the other side of this problem, that is, the reduction of the world in which we live, the life-world, into a pale reflection of the mathematized, formal world of science. According to Husserl, the problem is that the idea of formal ontology, derived from Leibniz’s idea of mathesis universalis, lost its formal character and became “a merely empirical technology for a sort of intellectual productions [sic] having the greatest practical utility and going by the name ‘science’—a technology adjusted empirically to practical results” (FTL, 16).

The result of the never-clarified idea “of a formal ontology” (FTL, § 24, 76; italics in original) is the forgetting of the natural world in preference to mathematical hypotheses, leading to “The Crisis of European Sciences and Psychology.”¹³¹

GALILEO: A DISCOVERING AND A CONCEALING GENIUS

Husserl points out that this is not a fortuitous development, and he traces his historical analysis back to Galileo, “a discovering and a concealing genius.”¹³² In a sense, Galileo reversed tradition; until then, although no longer commonly remembered as such, geometry took as its basis intuited nature, and defined certain privileged shapes—line, point, square—as ideal shapes that could be understood by everybody. Yet nature was still understood as the basis for these ideal shapes. In answer to the Sophists, Plato’s search for the certainty of knowledge led him to base it on the model of geometry, as it was in his time. To recall Plato, if I can draw a line in the sand, I can imagine that if I do not stop, if I am not bound by the finite world of my everyday living, the line can go on and on forever. From this insight, I can imagine the idea of infinity. If I draw a triangle, none of the ones I draw are perfect, but I can imagine one that is absolutely perfect and that will become the form of a perfect triangle in which all the finite triangles thought or drawn by humans will participate. The ideal triangle will be a model that cannot ever appear in the world but that will guide our finite thinking from then on. It is then possible to show that there must be a domain that is guiding our finite human thinking: the domain that is a foundation of epistēmē, knowledge, as opposed to doxa.

The Platonic answer was still derived from the world in which he lived. His perfect “reality,” the domain of Ideas or Forms, was immaterial. Material nature participated in the immaterial Forms. By contrast, by the time this tradition reached Galileo, it was already sedimented. Geometry was refined and he simply turned it around, declaring that nature is written in triangles and circles.¹³³ For Galileo, immaterial Forms become the matter: nature is essentially mathematical.¹³⁴

Galileo “divorced” nature from geometry and posited the ideal shapes as primary: “The geometrical ideal shape [. . .] functions as a guiding pole” (Crisis, § 9b, 29). By the same token, if nature is mathematical, then our everyday intuition of cause and effect can be idealized as well. In the Galilean universe, it becomes “the law of causality, the ‘a priori form’ of the ‘true’ (idealized and mathematised) world, the ‘law of exact lawfulness’ according to which every occurrence in ‘nature’—idealized nature—must come under exact laws.”¹³⁵ As Husserl declares, “The whole of infinite nature, taken as a concrete universe of causality—for this was inherent in that strange conception—became [the object of] a peculiarly applied mathematics” (Crisis, § 9c, 37; italics in original; square brackets in translation).

Thus, by the reversal of the tradition, Galileo transgressed the finite world of our lives. From then on, atoms, rocks, pendulums, and heavenly bodies are all subject to the one law—the law of causality. Transforming the idea of Aristotelian nature, Galileo’s two revolutionary ideas were the idea of the precise causality of mathematical nature, and the idea of indirect mathematization. The ancient Greeks were familiar with measuring bodies; but how can one measure, for example, smell, sound, warmth—except to say something like “more or less,” “louder,” “warmer.” But if nature is mathematical, we must be able to turn these qualities into mathematical formulae. Thus indirect mathematization overcomes this “vagueness,” inaugurating modern physics.

We are so accustomed to this way of thinking that it is difficult to imagine the revolutionary impact of this idea. We now take for granted that we can measure nearly everything by transposing the qualitative properties of objects into quantitative properties. If I “have a temperature,” I use a thermometer. A thermometer represents nothing but the alignment of warmth with a tube of mercury that expands under its influence, so that I can state, in a (nearly) precise sense, a numerical index of temperature. For us, this relation/causality between two separate domains—qualitative and quantitative—seems obvious. It is this hypothesis that allows sciences to predict and to interfere with many natural processes. For Galileo, it was not a hypothesis; he simply assumed that nature is mathematical. “For him physics was immediately almost as certain as the previous pure and applied mathematics.” As Husserl explains, through “this by no means obvious hypothesis,” Galileo connected the formerly unpredictable “factual structure of the concrete world” to mathematical reckoning (Crisis, § 9d, 39). From Newton onward, the idea of the mathematized world became understood as nature given a priori in “its way of being”; yet this being must be “unendingly hypothetical and unendingly verified” (Crisis, § 9e, 42).

The final outcome of this inversion of tradition is “the consistent development of the exact sciences in the modern period,” which would be impossible without turning the world into mathematical, hypothetical structures. This transformation of nature into symbolic equations “was a true revolution in the technical control of nature.”¹³⁶

CONCLUSION: PHILOSOPHY AND THE CRISIS OF EUROPEAN HUMANITY

Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people. (Crisis, § 2, 6)

One should note Husserl’s motive for doing philosophy. It is not primarily a theoretical motivation, but a practical one, or more precisely an ethical one—the ethical striving for a life in absolute self-responsibility.¹³⁷

Despite the general feeling of skepticism of his time, Husserl strives to affirm the idea of rationality as we have inherited it from the ancient Greeks. As he points out, it is important to show that there is a domain of truth that can guide us in our search for knowledge; his commitment is to give reasons for our beliefs instead of accepting blind prejudices without thinking. For Husserl, it is this commitment to truth and knowledge that underlies our striving to confirm rational meaning in our human existence.

As he consistently shows throughout his oeuvre, if we mistakenly accept that the only truths are empirical, based on our experience only, the gate is opened to a flood of skepticism and relativism that denies the possibility of knowledge. In a certain sense, we deny the human capacity to reason. By denying the possibility of formal laws, we affirm changeable truths, deriving them from empirical laws that are part of the natural world. As already noted, empirical laws cannot be apodictic: by definition, they are only probable. They are dependent on further observations through which we can institute a further probability that might explain better or more simply the succession of experienced events. However, without the formal a priori notion of probability and the a priori idea of causality, as David Hume asserts, the meaning of empirical events and their succession is a mystery.¹³⁸ Rationality is declared misplaced.

The next step is more insidious: the meanings of “probability” and “relativity” are taken as equal. The equivocation of these two different states leads, then, to the conclusion that our belief in reason is an antiquarian prejudice. By this seemingly innocuous move, the notion of “truth” is reduced to empirical truths that are changeable by definition. The “final” conclusion seems to follow without any further reflection: there is no truth; there are only particular truths, dependent on our thinking (psychologism) and our human species (anthropologism). The acceptance of this conclusion leads to relativism without any possibility of assessing different claims; without any possibility of accounting for our claims; without any possibility of invoking a rational basis for our inconsistent claims. It is to declare that doxa—that is, claims made without giving reasons for their validity—is here to stay. However, as Husserl points out, probability and relativity are different ideas. The idea of probability is one of the modalities of truth; probability cannot be equated with relativity, the idea that supposedly defines our changeable human experience (see FTL, § 35, 101n1).

After all, the only self-evident insight is knowledge expressed by formal laws that are the foundation of our empirical judgments. As Husserl shows, formal laws express only the relations of concepts, and not relations between existent things in the world and their predicates, because formal laws are free of existential content. The earlier example of swans demonstrates this difference between empirical and formal laws. Formal laws can only guide our thinking; they cannot guarantee the correctness of it. We can always be mistaken, inconsistent; our thinking can be erroneous. Formal laws are necessary not only for our account of empirical laws, but also for the constitution of meaning, as Husserl points out; they are valid all the time because of their form. They are not based on our thinking—which is an event in the world—but guide it. Formal laws express truth in itself; truth being the ideal limit that, in the empirical domain, we can approach only asymptotically.

If we deny the possibility of formal laws, which are the only laws that we can know apodictically and that are the foundation of empirical sciences, there is no possibility of knowledge. Our empirical judgments are by definition only probable. They are derived from many singular observations, from which we inductively formulate natural laws that will help us to predict other instances of similar happenings. Moreover, the formal law of induction is not based on experience, but guides it.

However, as Husserl argues, we cannot think, and by implication live, without certainty of knowledge. Yet what knowledge is cannot be reduced to the formal knowledge of sciences. His whole career was devoted to this problem. On his journey, starting from the consideration of Philosophy of Arithmetic and continuing to his last work, Crisis, Husserl realizes that once questions concerning humans as they live in the natural world are excluded from sciences, which have become the domain of technical thinking instead of responsible practice, the formal questions—the hallmark of natural science—will lead to existential crisis. As he notes, “The questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity,” that is, “questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence” (Crisis, § 2, 6), cannot be answered by formal knowledge. But neither should those questions be left to “scientists, who, in the specialized business of the positive sciences, [are] fast becoming unphilosophical experts” (Crisis, § 4, 11). As he notes in FTL, “Apriori sciences, by virtue of being apriori, always function normatively and technologically” (§ 7, 31; italics in original), yet they do so as “sciences and not technologies.” The reason is that there is a difference between a priori sciences and positive sciences.¹³⁹ Positive sciences became techniques geared toward the mastering of nature. As Hannah Arendt points out, for the scientist, nature is not the world in which we live, because the things we encounter in our everyday living are very different from the things that sciences deal with. Scientific “things” “are not phenomena, appearances, strictly speaking, for we meet them nowhere, neither in our everyday world nor in the laboratory; we know of their presence only because they affect our measuring instruments in certain ways.”¹⁴⁰ Through technology, we have become distanced from the world of our living. We think that we can master nature, but we have ceased to understand it.

Since sciences are very successful in manipulating nature, the question is: How does Husserl justify his claim concerning the crisis of the sciences as such if, as he himself notes, they include mathematics and pure physics, which are supposedly “models of rigorous and highly successful scientific discipline?” (Crisis, § 1, 3–4). One of the reasons that Husserl presents is his acknowledgment that sciences cannot provide answers concerning human existence (Crisis, § 2, 5). Positive sciences cannot consider “in principle precisely the questions which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence” (Crisis, § 2, 6). These are questions that cannot be turned into mathematical formulae, and therefore cannot be “mastered” by the thoughtless manipulation of symbols. Yet these are precisely the questions that we are seeking answers to, and they cannot be left at the margins of our inquiries. They press for “universal reflections and answers based on rational insight.” After all, existential questions, questions about our existence in the world, “concern man as a free, self-determining being in his behavior toward the human and extrahuman surrounding world [Umwelt] and free in regard to his capacities for rationally shaping himself and his surrounding world.” These are questions that concern us as responsible human beings living in the world. As Husserl asks, “What does science have to say about reason and unreason or about us men as subjects of this freedom?” (Crisis, § 2, 6).

The problem is twofold and can be stated thus: In the first instance, because scientists became technologists with “a practical and not a theoretical attitude,” their approach is not based on their own responsibility for the theories they introduce to control nature; rather, they take theories as a simple means toward the manipulation of nature “in the interest of technology.” Their “theorizing is then but a means to some (extra-theoretical) practice” (FTL, § 7, 32). The result is the reduction of the life-world to a collection of things that it is possible to master by means of technological science; they forget that “what is first for nature is not at all what is first for us.”¹⁴¹ In the second instance, given the equation of science with objectivity as the only framework for the consideration of the world, it is not possible to turn human existence into a mathematical set; therefore, it remains outside of the scientific domain, which considers only a formalized, mathematized nature that can be predicted through the manipulation of symbols.

According to Husserl, by living through “this development, we find ourselves in the greatest danger of drowning in the skeptical deluge and thereby losing our hold on our own truth” (Crisis, § 5, 14). Countering this trend, Husserl suggests that the meaning of “the supreme and ultimate interests of humanity” cannot be illuminated from the domain of positive sciences, which have become “mere theoretical techniques” (FTL, § 71, 181). As Fink writes, Husserl’s endeavor was to tear himself “free from the power of one’s naive submission to the world”; it was “the stepping-forth from out of that familiarity with entities which always provides us with security.”¹⁴²

As Husserl shows, we bear responsibility for the mathematical mastery of nature. This construct has risen from our life-world; it is not a separate and better rendering of reality. It is our achievement, which might give us certain advantages in understanding the processes of nature, but it is not nature itself. Only through responsible reflection on the way we use our knowledge can we again recover rationality and reinstate it to its proper place as a self-responsible attitude that takes into account the life-world as the only world we have.

But is it possible to inquire about the world as such, without taking into consideration the historicity of the way that our world is given to us? Is it possible, as Husserl asks, “to inquire after a theory of the essence of spirit purely as spirit which would pursue what is unconditionally universal, by way of elements and laws, in the spiritual sphere, with the purpose of proceeding from there to scientific explanations in an absolutely final sense”?¹⁴³ If “typicality” displays to us the phenomenon of any object whatsoever (i.e., the structure of appearing of any object), the question is: Is our understanding of what an object is unchanged throughout the ages? In other words, does the object appear in the same manner to a traditional Papuan and to a modern European person? Or, to put it differently: While scientific “objectivity” “assume[s that we are] experiencing the same things,” which we can all understand as the same despite the different times and spaces of “observing” them,¹⁴⁴ do people living in different times and in different cultures in fact experience things in the world differently? This is the starting point of Martin Heidegger in his lecture course held in the winter semester of 1935–1936, titled “Basic Questions of Metaphysics.”¹⁴⁵