The Crisis of Meaning and the Life-World. Ľubica Učník

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