Edmund Husserl and the Crisis of the Sciences: A Phenomenologists Account of a World Forgotten
Have you ever felt like the what we now know of reality demystifies it in some unfair way, a way that we may not fully be able to articulate. Maybe modern culture conspires to take us out of our lived world increasingly into an ideal and abstract reality? If so, or if this only occurred to you now, perhaps it may be a worthy investment of your time to read this.
Scientific progress, we may be familiar with, has no doubt produced remarkable changes in the world. We now know things that extend far beyond what is experienceable. We speak of laws that are said to constrain us at every moment, and forces which are are ever present but never seen. Yet these realities, whatever we make of them, are inferred, not themselves physical substances like a rock or a body. Clearly, there are immense benefits here, nobody can doubt that. Modern medicine, engineering and technology are worthwhile achievements. But this immense story of progress we are telling ourselves is not entirely free of vice, there may be hidden costs in reaching further than one can grasp, to looking farther than one can see. As our descriptions of the world multiply, the possibility of getting lost in them, and forgetting what is simply given to our experience, is an ever present danger. But why is it a danger, and and what is given to our experience? The godfather of phenomenology, that is the philosophical study of consciousness, had something to say about this. Following Edmund Husserl, in ‘The Crisis of the European Sciences’, there is both a real and evident problem of privileging a worldview in which the subject, to which all this progress is for, so to speak, is somewhat absent in the explanation. In this short piece, I will attempt to clarify what the crises is, but in contrast to Husserl, I argue for an emphasis on the origin of the problem as lying primarily in Reason itself, and that it may actually, because of this, have impregnated much more of the world than European humanity.
Husserl situates the crisis in history. He asks us to first consider its emergence at the inception of the modern age, around the time of the renaissance when European civilisation underwent revolutionary change, turning its back upon the ancient ways of life.¹ We can imagine these ancient ways of life as one’s not yet impinged upon by the universal and impersonal claims of science and mathematics, one which still sought refuge in the lived experience of its inhabitants. Rather than think of space as this space here, for example, we now think of an abstract concept ‘space’ which contains all particular spaces— the same is true of time. Modern existence is classified, and seems classified at a distance from what is being classified. The crisis is not limited to the sciences, Husserl says, but is extended to European existence.² He thinks the problem began in Philosophy when it became a problem for itself, employing reason to make metaphysical claims, it then developed into the universal sciences as we now see them.³
What the problem seems to be, is that in heralding objectivity as our new way of life, and holding the universe up to a ruler, our experience becomes contracted and pre-defined. In the words of Oscar Wild, we become people who know “the price of everything and the value of nothing”.⁴ The sciences dismiss those existential questions that pertain to us as fundamental because of their un-objective nature as grounded in subjectivity. Though strangely this seems to contradict their birthplace as originating in philosophy, where these questions were once privileged.⁵ The crisis seems like an inevitable consequence of an insatiable drive to explain — that somewhere in time we mistook the value of human experience and its permanent novelty, for the dominion it gave us over the world — wielding familiarity. It is thus a spiritual struggle.⁶ However, Husserl is not against scientific progress and considers the rigour and achievements they profess to be compelling and unquestionable.⁷ The crisis is the forgetfulness of the lived experience.⁸ In the crisis, the subjective-relative intuited world as pre-scientific is what Husserl terms the lifeworld.⁹ In forgetting the lifeworld we now identify aspects of our experience with an ever-present ruler by which all things can be measured and explained.¹⁰ Also highlighting the problem of idealisation, William James writes,
“A bill of fare with one real raisin on it instead of the word ‘raisin’, with one real egg on it instead of the word ‘egg’, might be an inadequate meal, but it would at least be a commencement of reality”.¹¹
And this commencement, Husserl thinks, must acknowledge the subject to avoid a crisis within culture.¹² This quest of idealising the world is what Husserl will call the mathematization of nature. The Greeks, he says, had already begun to sow the seeds of this idealisation with mathematics, natural science and Euclidian geometry, but the lived experience was still present in their ideal.¹³ It was later transformed by Galileo, who did not pause to consider the origin or “how” of idealisation, and soon, as a result, “nature itself” became idealised.¹⁴ These “pure idealities” get inscribed onto the subjective world increasingly, and what begins as two separate realities — the intuited world and the idealised world, gets conjoined through the familiarity of their use in everyday life.¹⁵ This seems like an accurate diagnosis of the problem, for we generally do not recognise our own idealised experience — we do not notice that perfect shapes, colour and size are truly absent in our experience. The ideal world is not so much ‘out-there’ as it is ‘in-here’. We do well to remember, however, that the world of abstraction and idealities is not an evil that must be purged from our minds to avoid the crisis. The problem is in a forgetting of a world which is immanent, a world which exists prior to, and is the condition for, the world of abstraction.
However, there appears to be a problem in treating the sciences or philosophy as the origin of this crisis (the mathematization of nature being its hallmark). It seems to divert us from the rather human activity of reason , or reasoning— raised famously by Kant.¹⁶ Husserl may acknowledge this, but it is not entirely clear to what degree.¹⁷ Reason tends to reach right through the walls set by experience, imagining itself capable of speaking for every corner of the universe. If the sciences are privileging a tool that the human condition has long implemented, and which is the substrate of the crisis, then Husserl’s focus looks misplaced. Derrida raises a similar question too, and states that a teleology of reason was already present before philosophy awoke reason to itself.¹⁸ He elaborates by saying, “it is reason that throws reason into crisis”.¹⁹ Perhaps then, in employing the means to structure the world with our only tool, we become servile to the structures it creates — each new generation inherits a slightly further idealised world masquerading as ‘natural’. But we might defend Husserl and infer that what he has put his finger on is merely a modern instrumental and calculative conception of reason — which he understands as mathematical or calculative idealisation. Reason is itself an evolving process of human activity. And other philosophers, like Ernst Cassirer, still in the shadow of a Hegelian paradigm, will understand this evolution of thought as a gradual tendency to differentiate the world with ever more ideal tools of thought — in line with Husserl. This process is understood as a development of human consciousness throughout history, as it unfolds dialectically and develops universal modes of categorisation until finally arriving at the mathematical and law driven conception of reason.²⁰ The service of which can be attributed to mans need to control the untamed forces of nature. A need which seems to have the propensity to become blind to itself.
We can now see the renaissance ideal as a point in which reason had closed in on its zenith, but the climb had begun before science or philosophy, and perhaps started with the first ostensible pointing of a finger — carving grooves into reality. The seeds the Greeks had sown merely mark the start of a rupture, thinks Derrida.²⁰ What is now apparent — the all-encompassing nature of the sciences, may just be reason taken to its own desired conclusion.²¹ Reason taken to have finally conquered the mystery and unfamiliarity of the universe. Whilst the problem of idealisation is not only prominent in Europe, therefore, it cannot be limited to it, since reason does not limit itself to boarders. Derrida hypothesises that there may have been, and continue to be, a plurality of crises, all fashioned by reason.²² But Philosophers like Cassirer will understand this to be a product of the gradual unfolding of consciousness. So reason may yet be a much higher resolution technology of thought than the likely beginning of this story we have been discussing. Consciousness needs to impose these idealities on to nature, it needs to mathematise the universe, because only then can it succeed in explaining all particulars as cohering with universal law abiding relations — an all encompassing explanation. The question is whether or not this does amount to a more complete understanding if it excludes its own interpretive schema, that is subjectivity, in its explanations.
In sum, Husserl may have given a too narrow diagnosis of what caused the crisis, but an accurate account of the problems it brings — forgetting the questions that relate to our existence and to our lived experience. Seeing the problem of the crisis as unfolding with reason gives a more holistic explanation as to how we come to idealise the world in the first place — even if it is only a milestone and not the origin. Any origin would would seem to defy identification anyway, given the difficulty of where in causality to point to. Nevertheless, there are things we can know. And this looks like a particularly human phenomena which may be more widespread than Husserl seems to have granted. There are clearly societal effects here, of which pertain to people’s wellbeing and experience of themselves. Perhaps if we are alienated and estranged today, it is because the world itself is experienced through a restrictive medium, instead of a lifeworld that admits of varying ways of being. We don't need to throw our clearly hard won tools out of the window: we need to know them for what they are, and what we are, when using them — which may ultimately be the same thing.
Bibliography
Derrida, Jacques, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, Trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (California: Stanford University Press, 2005).
Derrida, Jacques, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, Trans. by John P. Leavey Jr (United States of America: University of Nebraska Press, 1989).
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Vol 2 Mythical Thinking (UK: Routledge, 2021).
Husserl, Edmund, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, Trans. by Quentin Lauer (United States of America: Harper and Row, 1965).
Husserl, Edmund, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Trans. by David Carr (United States of America: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
James, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (United States of America: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Lewis, Michael and Staehler, Tanja Phenomenology: An Introduction (London: Continuum, 2010).
Wilde, Oscar, The Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Planet Three, 2004).
References
[1] Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (United States of America: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 8.
[2] Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy (United States of America: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 191.
[3] Edmund Husserl, The Crisis, pp. 11–12.
[4] Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (London: Planet Four, 2003), p. 47.
[5] Edmund Husserl, The Crisis, pp. 7–8.
[6] Ibid. pp. 14–15.
[7] Ibid. p. 4.
[8] Tanja Staeler and Michael Lewis, Phenomenology: An Introduction (London: Continuum, 2010), p. 33.
[9] Ibid, p. 34.
[10] Edmund Husserl, The Crisis, pp. 24–25.
[11] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (United States of America: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 156
[12] Edmund Husserl, The Crisis, p. 59.
[13] Ibid, pp. 21–23.
[14] Ibid, pp. 23–29.
[15] Ibid, pp. 24–25.
[16] Immanuel Kant, Critique of, p.386.
[17] Edmund Husserl, The Crisis, p. 11.
[18] Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (United States of America: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 146.
[19] Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (California: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 127
[20] Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Vol 2 Mythical Thinking (UK: Routledge, 2021), p. 42.
[20] Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s, p. 146.
[21]Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two, p. 126.
[22] Ibid, p. 120.
