Husserl lecture

Historicism

Husserl: two arguments against historicism:

1) The assertion that truths of the past have proven to be historically relative is not

only bad induction when taken to hold for future assertions, but is self-refuting.

2) The meaning of ideas such as “truth” and “science” are completely independent of

the empirical conditions which govern historical humankind. They are a priori and thus

outside history’s cognitive ambit and historicism’s cognitive pretensions.

Historicism is structurally similar to psychologism. Any psychologistic, naturalistic account

leads to the history of human development and thus historicism.

Crisis

Contemporary mood (in 30’s): sciences’ concern with objective truth is unable to address

meaningfully mankind’s vital needs. Breakdown of European culture, previous war and

looming war. Scepticism about reason.

Result: science as a discipline is renounced, including Husserl’s scientific philosophy.

Husserl’s response: confidence in his method, but admits a lack of satisfaction. Modern

philosophy has failed to realize its idea of universal science (most notably regarding the

human being). Modern science cannot address mankind’s existential concerns. But according

to Husserl this is not because science and reason are intrinsically incapable of doing so.

Husserl’s diagnosis of what is responsible for the crisis:

1) Modern “rationalism” consists in an unclarified faith in pure reason to form anew

the true being of humankind.

2) European science’s turning away from the soul (from the subjective) as an object of

knowledge.

Husserl’s task: to restore faith in reason itself and its (object) ‘that which is’.

Science

Meaning of mathematical and scientific objects: Husserl’s transcendental inquiry into the

origin of these meaning formations discloses that their meaning paradoxically appears almost

devoid of meaning.

Unintelligibility of modern sciences: referential obscurity of the formalized meaning

structures that make them possible.

1) What in the world these structures refer to is not at all clear.

2) In so far as these structures also refer to themselves as self-enclosed mathematical

structures “mathematical manifold” that seem to exclude – in principle – all relation

to the natural world, how in the world it is even possible for them to be applied to the

natural world is likewise unclear.

3) Though that the formalized meaning structures that characterize physics must refer

to the natural world is never in doubt for Husserl, what is in doubt, is the foundation

that makes possible both this reference and application.

Husserl traces the obscurity of the sciences to the fact that their formalized meaning in

modern mathematics is made possible by the progressive emptying of its meaning in relation

to the real, i.e., the intuitive givenness of the things manifest to everyday sense experience in

the surrounding world. The meaning formations of mathematics that make physics possible

are themselves made possible by their being liberated from all intuited actuality.

Mathematical science goes beyond idealisation through arbitrary transformation in fantasy.

This is because transformation yields ideal possibilities in a certain sense, but these remain

tied to sensible shapes which can only manifest their transformation into other sensible

shapes and thus not the truly ideal possibilities in question.

First step: mathematization

Second step: arithmetization where algebraic terms make this mathematization symbolic and

thus separated from all sensible givenness. Emptying of meaning.

Scientific knowledge is grounded in the evidences of the life-world, but this presupposition is

forgotten.

Result: The “ineradicable illusion of a pure thinking which concerned in its purity about

intuition, already has its self-evident truth, even truth about the world – the illusion

which makes the sense and the possibility, the ‘scope’, of objective science

questionable”.

Yet: The constitution of these ideal intentional units presupposes the whole complex of

experiences leading to the situation in which the sciences become possible.

The sciences rely on a passive understanding of meaning formations. Because they do not

reproduce the cognitive activity that originally produced their meaning, the original meaning

becomes diminished and in some sense forgotten, though it does not disappear completely.

Sedimentation: describes the superficial and passive understanding of the significance

of a science such as geometry that accrues to its meaning formations as a result of a

‘forgetting’ of the original evidence that produced those formations. Implicitly,

passively present. Like words which we habitually use without calling forth their

originary meaning each time.

History

Husserl’s last works overcome the problem of history that leads to historicism by showing, in

effect, that the disclosure of the “historicity” of knowledge does not lead to an opposition

between the contingency of history and the universality of knowledge. 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 he will refer to as the “historical a priori. Original formations and

sedimentations of meaning. The failure of empirical history to address on its own terms the

origin of an ideal object does not, however, rule out this origin having a history.

Husserl’s articulation of the phenomenological problem of history therefore does not lead to

the problem of the opposition between the “facticity” of history and the “apriority” of

essences, but uncovers their essential connection.

The link in between the genesis of meaning and its historical development in consciousness

is extended to include events and texts whose essential meaning is datable to an origin in

actual history. The reflection that drives the phenomenological method thus comes to assume

in its final phase the character of an explicitly historical reflection, albeit one that is qualified

phenomenologically by its being concerned with history understood as a chain of meanings

proper to transcendental subjectivity and therefore not as empirically relative events.

Meanings in this sense are equally responsible for and hidden from the cognizance of the

meanings that are taken for granted by contemporary thought as determining the basic

principles of philosophy and natural science. Nothing less than the monumental task of

reawakening these hidden and therefore “sedimented” meanings, to the end of discovering

heretofore unrealized possibilities contained in them that will allow European science to

address the most basic concerns of humanity (as the science of its ancient Greek predecessor

once did): that is the goal Husserl sets for the final stage of his transcendental

phenomenology.

Self-criticism of phenomenology: static/genetic phenomenology

Prior to the criticism of transcendental knowledge, phenomenology is still in a way naïve:

naïveté of apodicticity. Static analysis becomes genetic. Static analysis treats meaning

formations as something “finished”. According to this analysis, the transcendental

legitimatization of this meaning as objective, ideal, transcendent is accomplished when the

constitution of the intersubjective availability of the objective world is accounted for. In

contradistinction to this in the Crisis texts Husserl clearly recognized that the objective world’s

intersubjective availability has a deeper source than that of its genesis as an intentional

modification of the concrete transcendental Ego, namely, its source in historicity. Husserl’s

‘historical’ works emerge within the context of a call for an epistemological grounding of the

sciences. Problem of historical explanation becomes intertwined with epistemological

grounding or clarification.