The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-World

Husserl, Heidegger, Arendt, Pato?ka

Ľubica Učník

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9780821445884
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-World, ?ubica U?ník examines the existential conflict that formed the focus of Edmund Husserl's final work, which she argues is very much with us today: how to reconcile scientific rationality with the meaning of human existence. To investigate this conundrum, she places Husserl in dialogue with three of his most important successors: Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Jan Pato?ka.

For Husserl, 1930s Europe was characterized by a growing irrationalism that threatened to undermine its legacy of rational inquiry. Technological advancement in the sciences, Husserl argued, had led science to forget its own foundations in the primary "life-world" the world of lived experience. Renewing Husserl's concerns in today's context, U?ník first provides an original and compelling reading of his oeuvre through the lens of the formalization of the sciences, then traces the unfolding of this problem through the work of Heidegger, Arendt, and Pato?ka.

Although many scholars have written on Arendt, none until now has connected her philosophical thought with that of Czech phenomenologist Jan Pato?ka. U?ník provides invaluable access to the work of the latter, who remains understudied in the English language. She shows that together, these four thinkers offer new challenges to the way we approach key issues confronting us today, providing us with ways to reconsider truth, freedom, and human responsibility in the face of the postmodern critique of metanarratives and a growing philosophical interest in new forms of materialism.

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 Euclidea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Back to the Things Themselves?
• 1. Critique of the Mathematization of Nature—From Philosophy of Arithmetic to The Crisis of European Sciences
• 2. The Science of Λόγος and Truth—What “Things” Are
• 3. Heretical Reading: With Her and Against Her
• 4. The Matter of Philosophy—Human Existence
• Conclusion: The Meaning of Human Existence
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index