The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy

Volume 1

Burt Hopkins, Steven Crowell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317401599
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy provides an annual international forum for phenomenological research in the spirit of Husserl's groundbreaking work and the extension of this work by such figures as Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Gadamer.

Jacob Klein and the Phenomenology of History Part I

Burt C. Hopkins
Seattle University

“The periods within which the origination [Entstehung] of number systems and number sign systems falls are unknown to any historical tradition. Therefore there can be no thought of a reproduction of the historical development. We nevertheless possess sufficient clues . . . in order to reconstruct the psychological development [Entwicklung] of such systematic formations in an a posteriori fashion that is still correct in all essential points.”

— Edmund Husserl, 1891¹

“Hence our object is not to evaluate the revival of Greek mathematics in the sixteenth century in terms of its results retrospectively, but to rehearse [vergegenwärtigen] the actual [faktischen] course of its genesis prospectively.”

— Jacob Klein, 1934²

“Certainly the historical backward reference [Rückbeziehung] [from present day geometrical knowledge to its genesis] has not occurred to anyone; certainly theory of knowledge has never been seen as a peculiarly historical task.”

— Edmund Husserl, 1936³

Introduction

§ 1. The Problem of History in Husserl's Last Writings

Some sixty years have passed since the first publication of two fragmentary texts written by Husserl in his last years,⁴ texts that unmistakably link the meaning of both the crowning achievement of the Enlightenment (the new science of mathematical physics) and the crowning achievement of his own life’s work (the rigorous science of transcendental phenomenology) to the phenomenological problematic of their historical origination. It is striking that in the years following the original publication of these works and their republication in the 1954 ^Krisis-volume edited by Walter Biemel, commentary on the phenomenological problematic of the historical origination of the meaning of these two sciences has, with one significant exception, universally passed over what Husserl articulated as the specifically phenomenological nature of the problem of history. It has been ignored in favor of mostly critical discussions of Husserl’s putative attempt to accommodate his earlier “idealistic” formulations of transcendental phenomenology to the so-called “problem of history.”

As it is typically understood, this problem begins with the notion of a contingent sequence of events that shape cultural formations and human experience in a manner that defies rational calculation. History in this sense becomes a "problem" when its "contingency" is understood to condition the intellectual content of cultural formations, such as philosophy and science. Specifically, the problem at issue here involves the influence of the historically conditioned heritage of taken-for-granted ideas, meanings, and attitudes upon the knowledge claims made by philosophy and science. When the intellectual content of the latter is understood to have as its insuperable limit the particular historical situation of the philosopher and scientist, as well as of philosophy and science, the knowledge claims of both are correspondingly understood to be incapable of ever achieving “universality.” Formulated in this manner, the “problem of history” assumes, as is well-known, the guise of what since the beginning of this century has been called historicism.

The "history" of the reception of Husserl's last works has been preoccupied with the story of their departure from his early rejection of histori cism—a rejection motivated by the goal of establishing phenomenology as a factically presuppositionless universal science of apriori meanings—and his late attempts to establish what by many has been deemed oxymoronic and therefore impossible: a phenomenology of the "apriori" of history.

§ 2. Jacob Klein and the Phenomenology of History

The following investigation will be concerned with the significant exception alluded to above, namely the work of Jacob Klein. Its twofold aim is to elaborate Klein's understanding of the phenomenological problematic of history sketched by Husserl in his last works⁵ and Klein's own contribution to the understanding of the problematic of the historical origination of the meaning of mathematical physics. The latter's contribution occurs in his little known but remarkable works on Greek mathematics and the origin of algebra.⁶ On the assumption that Klein's contribution to that understanding came after his appropriation of Husserl's formulation of the phenomenological problematic of history, the execution of this twofold aim would seem to be a fairly straightforward matter. One would need only to show how the method and content of Husserl's path-breaking investigations '"influenced" or otherwise provided the context for Klein's own research. However, Klein's work on the historical origination of the meaning of mathematical physics actually preceded Husserl's work on this same issue by a number of years.⁷ Thus Hiram Caton's felicitous characterization—in another context, and one that will be taken up shortly— of Klein’s relationship to Husserl as “a scholarly curiosity”⁸ proves apt here as well, since, as will be shown, Klein’s work on the history of mathematics represents an uncanny anticipation of Husserl’s own work.

In 1959 Leo Strauss characterized Klein's magnum opus, "Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra,” then still untranslated, as a work that is “much more than a historical study. But even if we take it as purely a historical work, there is not, in my opinion, a contemporary work in the history of philosophy or science or in ‘the history of ideas’ generally speaking which in intrinsic worth comes within hailing distance of it. Not indeed a proof but a sign of this is the fact that less than half a dozen people seem to have read it, if the inference from the number of references to it is valid.”⁹ Strauss’s characterization of this work as “much more than a historical study,” along with his comparison of it—without limiting it—to both the “history of philosophy” and the “history of ideas,” is instructive for our purposes. For while it claims that Klein’s treatment of his topic is of unparalleled historical import, its cryptic suggestions that its true significance transcends contemporary studies in the history of philosophy or science, as well as studies in the history of ideas generally, gives occasion to formulate a major thesis of the present study. Specifically, that both the methodology and the content of Klein’s mathematical studies fall outside of the traditionally distinct methodological approaches to the likewise traditionally distinct domains staked out by the “history of science” and the “philosophy of science,” respectively. Before developing this thesis in terms of what here will be argued to comprise the proper context for considering both the method and the content of Klein’s mathematical studies, a brief digression is necessary. The latter will situate this context with respect to the way in which the methods and the contents of the history of science and the philosophy of science are typically understood to differ. The goal thereby will be to provide a context against which the radicality of Klein’s approach to both “historical” and “systematic” issues in his mathematical studies may be drawn out.

With respect to method the difference in question here concerns the traditional contrast between the "empirical" approach to science characteristic of the history of science and the “epistemological” approach characteristic of the philosophy of science. Hence, on the one hand, the history of science is usually defined by its investigation of the contingent series of mathematical, scientific, and philosophical theories involved in the formation and development of a given science. On the other hand, the philosophy of science is usually defined by its investigation of the cognitive status of the philosophical problems posed by the employment of logic, mathematics, and metaphysics in the knowledge claims advanced by the systematic sciences. Corresponding to these methodological differences are the contentual differences between the domains typically treated by the historical and the philosophical investigations of science. Thus the content of the history of science reflects the changes over time that define the development of a science, whereas the content of the philosophy of science reflects the stability over time that defines scientific knowledge.

§ 3. The Importance of Husserl's Last Writings for Understanding Klein's Nontraditional Investigations in the History and Philosophy of Science

The guiding thesis of the present study is that, rather than work within the context of this traditional understanding of the difference and indeed opposition between these methods and their domains, Klein’s mathematical studies are characterized by a method—albeit one that largely remains “implicit”—that overcomes the opposition between the historical explanation and the epistemological investigation of science. His studies are thus historical without being limited to empirical contingencies and epistemological without being cut off from the historical development of scientific knowledge. In other words, Klein’s work overcomes the “problem of history” that leads to historicism by showing in effect that the disclosure of the “historicity” of scientific knowledge does not lead to an opposition between the putative “contingency” of this historicity and the universality of such knowledge. And his work shows this by uncovering the heritage of ideas, meanings, and attitudes that underlie the basic concepts of the modern mathematics that makes mathematical physics possible; that is, he uncovers aspects of what Husserl will refer to as the “historical apriori”¹⁰ of modern physics. Yet because it is Husserl who in his last works was the first to articulate explicitly the methodological issues involved in overcoming the opposition in question here, the assessment of both (i) the scope and limits of Klein’s implicit method and (ii) the cogency of its results must take Husserl’s reflections on this methodology as its point of departure. Thus in keeping with our guiding thesis, it will be argued that it is Husserl’s articulation in his last works of the “theory of knowledge . . . as a peculiarly historical task,”¹¹ a task he assigns to his final formulation of transcendental phenomenology and its now defining goal of overcoming “[t]he ruling dogma of the principial separation between epistemological elucidation and historical explanation,”¹² that provides the proper perspective for assessing Klein’s work. It is Husserl’s formulation of the “universal apriori of history”¹³ in terms of “nothing other than the vital movement of the coexistence and the interweaving of original formations and sedimentations of meaning”¹⁴ that provides the “guiding clue” for overcoming the “ruling dogma” in question. In addition, the methodology that is disclosive of this “vital movement” and thus of the guiding clue for properly assessing Klein’s investigations, is to be found in Husserl’s sketch of phenomenologically historical reflection. Husserl characterizes such reflection in terms of “the ‘zigzag’ back and forth [‘Zickzack’ vor- und zurückgehen]” from the “‘breakdown’ situation of our time, with its ‘breakdown of science’ itself,” to the historical “beginnings” of both the original meaning of science itself (i.e. philosophy) and the development of its meaning leading up to the “breakdown” of modern mathematical physics (cf. Crisis, 59/58).

§ 4. Klein's Commentary on Husserl's Investigation of the History of the Origin of Modern Science

Klein himself provides warrant for this thesis in his article "Phenomenol ogy and the History of Science" from 1940. After first explicating Husserl's articulation of the phenomenological problem of history in the original published versions of the Crisis and "The Origin of Geometry," Klein goes on to outline "[t]he problem of the origin of modern science" (PHS, 82) in a manner that corresponds to Husserl's formulation of the problem, save for one significant deviation. There Klein adds a third task to the two tasks Husserl articulates in connection with this problem. Whereas for the latter the problem of the origin of modern science involves the "reactivation of the origin of geometry" (83) and "the rediscovery of the prescientific world and its true origins" (84), according to Klein there is yet another aspect to this problem. He articulates this aspect in terms of "a reactivation of the process of symbolic abstraction" (83) whose "'sedimented' understanding of numbers is superposed upon the first stratum of 'sedimented' geometrical 'evidences"' (83-84). Klein therefore positions this additional task between the twin tasks articulated by Husserl in the Crisis.¹⁵

Klein’s introduction of this task is significant for a number of reasons, all of which will be taken up in due course in this study. At this point, however, only one requires comment, namely that the task of the “reactivation of the process of symbolic abstraction” had in fact already been undertaken and indeed completed by Klein himself in “Die griechische Logistik und die Entstehung der Algebra.” There can be no mistake about this. In the final section of his “Phenomenology and the History of Science” (cf. 79–83), Klein presents a synopsis of the development of the symbolic transformation of the traditional Greek theory of ratios and proportions, as well as of the ancient Greek “con-cept” and science of number, into François Vieta’s “‘algebraic’ art of equations” (80). In addition, he discusses the “formalization” of Greek mathematics that occurred with the “anticipation” of an exact geometrical nature by Galileo and his predecessors and the symbolic transformation of Euclidean geometry into Descartes’s analytic geometry—the latter being made possible by Vieta’s “in-vention” of modern mathematics. This formalization of Greek mathematics, upon which are “laid the foundations of mathematical physics” (82), is said by Klein to “have already lost the original intuition” (81) of the Greek mathematics underlying it. This loss is traced by him to modern mathematics’s technique of operating with symbols. As a result of this, the “reactivation of the process of symbolic abstraction” (84) that makes possible the f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Derrida-Husserl: Towards a Phenomenology of Language
• Jacob Klein and the Phenomenology of History, Part I
• As Fate Would Have It: Husserl on the Vocation of Philosophy
• Self-Identity and its Disruptions
• Reading Heidegger's "What Is Metaphysics?" (1929)
• Husserl and Heidegger: The Structure of the World
• The Phenomenological Semantics of Natural Language, Part I
• Gnostic Phenomenology: Eugen Fink and the Critique of Transcendental Reason
• Parts of the Fink-Husserl Conversation
• Husserl and Fink: Two Phenomenologies
• Personal Notes
• Conversations with Edmund Husserl, 1931-1938
• Husserl and Descartes
• On the Platonic Meno in Particular and Platonic Dialogues in General
• Limitations: On Steinbock's "Generative Phenomenology"
• The Transcendental Problematic of Generativity and the Problem of Historicism: Remarks on Steinbock's Home and Beyond
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS