If we deny the possibility of formal laws, which are the only laws that we can know apodictically and that are the foundation of empirical sciences, there is no possibility of knowledge. Our empirical judgments are by definition only probable. They are derived from many singular observations, from which we inductively formulate natural laws that will help us to predict other instances of similar happenings. Moreover, the formal law of induction is not based on experience, but guides it.
However, as Husserl argues, we cannot think, and by implication live, without certainty of knowledge. Yet what knowledge is cannot be reduced to the formal knowledge of sciences. His whole career was devoted to this problem. On his journey, starting from the consideration of Philosophy of Arithmetic and continuing to his last work, Crisis, Husserl realizes that once questions concerning humans as they live in the natural world are excluded from sciences, which have become the domain of technical thinking instead of responsible practice, the formal questions—the hallmark of natural science—will lead to existential crisis. As he notes, “The questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity,” that is, “questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence” (Crisis, § 2, 6), cannot be answered by formal knowledge. But neither should those questions be left to “scientists, who, in the specialized business of the positive sciences, [are] fast becoming unphilosophical experts” (Crisis, § 4, 11). As he notes in FTL, “Apriori sciences, by virtue of being apriori, always function normatively and technologically” (§ 7, 31; italics in original), yet they do so as “sciences and not technologies.” The reason is that there is a difference between a priori sciences and positive sciences.139 Positive sciences became techniques geared toward the mastering of nature. As Hannah Arendt points out, for the scientist, nature is not the world in which we live, because the things we encounter in our everyday living are very different from the things that sciences deal with. Scientific “things” “are not phenomena, appearances, strictly speaking, for we meet them nowhere, neither in our everyday world nor in the laboratory; we know of their presence only because they affect our measuring instruments in certain ways.”140 Through technology, we have become distanced from the world of our living. We think that we can master nature, but we have ceased to understand it.
Since sciences are very successful in manipulating nature, the question is: How does Husserl justify his claim concerning the crisis of the sciences as such if, as he himself notes, they include mathematics and pure physics, which are supposedly “models of rigorous and highly successful scientific discipline?” (Crisis, § 1, 3–4). One of the reasons that Husserl presents is his acknowledgment that sciences cannot provide answers concerning human existence (Crisis, § 2, 5). Positive sciences cannot consider “in principle precisely the questions which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the most burning: questions of the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence” (Crisis, § 2, 6). These are questions that cannot be turned into mathematical formulae, and therefore cannot be “mastered” by the thoughtless manipulation of symbols. Yet these are precisely the questions that we are seeking answers to, and they cannot be left at the margins of our inquiries. They press for “universal reflections and answers based on rational insight.” After all, existential questions, questions about our existence in the world, “concern man as a free, self-determining being in his behavior toward the human and extrahuman surrounding world [Umwelt] and free in regard to his capacities for rationally shaping himself and his surrounding world.” These are questions that concern us as responsible human beings living in the world. As Husserl asks, “What does science have to say about reason and unreason or about us men as subjects of this freedom?” (Crisis, § 2, 6).
The problem is twofold and can be stated thus: In the first instance, because scientists became technologists with “a practical and not a theoretical attitude,” their approach is not based on their own responsibility for the theories they introduce to control nature; rather, they take theories as a simple means toward the manipulation of nature “in the interest of technology.” Their “theorizing is then but a means to some (extra-theoretical) practice” (FTL, § 7, 32). The result is the reduction of the life-world to a collection of things that it is possible to master by means of technological science; they forget that “what is first for nature is not at all what is first for us.”141 In the second instance, given the equation of science with objectivity as the only framework for the consideration of the world, it is not possible to turn human existence into a mathematical set; therefore, it remains outside of the scientific domain, which considers only a formalized, mathematized nature that can be predicted through the manipulation of symbols.
According to Husserl, by living through “this development, we find ourselves in the greatest danger of drowning in the skeptical deluge and thereby losing our hold on our own truth” (Crisis, § 5, 14). Countering this trend, Husserl suggests that the meaning of “the supreme and ultimate interests of humanity” cannot be illuminated from the domain of positive sciences, which have become “mere theoretical techniques” (FTL, § 71, 181). As Fink writes, Husserl’s endeavor was to tear himself “free from the power of one’s naive submission to the world”; it was “the stepping-forth from out of that familiarity with entities which always provides us with security.”142
As Husserl shows, we bear responsibility for the mathematical mastery of nature. This construct has risen from our life-world; it is not a separate and better rendering of reality. It is our achievement, which might give us certain advantages in understanding the processes of nature, but it is not nature itself. Only through responsible reflection on the way we use our knowledge can we again recover rationality and reinstate it to its proper place as a self-responsible attitude that takes into account the life-world as the only world we have.
But is it possible to inquire about the world as such, without taking into consideration the historicity of the way that our world is given to us? Is it possible, as Husserl asks, “to inquire after a theory of the essence of spirit purely as spirit which would pursue what is unconditionally universal, by way of elements and laws, in the spiritual sphere, with the purpose of proceeding from there to scientific explanations in an absolutely final sense”?143 If “typicality” displays to us the phenomenon of any object whatsoever (i.e., the structure of appearing of any object), the question is: Is our understanding of what an object is unchanged throughout the ages? In other words, does the object appear in the same manner to a traditional Papuan and to a modern European person? Or, to put it differently: While scientific “objectivity” “assume[s that we are] experiencing the same things,” which we can all understand as the same despite the different times and spaces of “observing” them,144 do people living in different times and in different cultures in fact experience things in the world differently? This is the starting point of Martin Heidegger in his lecture course held in the winter semester of 1935–1936, titled “Basic Questions of Metaphysics.”145
CHAPTER TWO
THE SCIENCE OF λόγος AND TRUTH—WHAT “THINGS” ARE
Martin Heidegger
Human behavior and human being first become conspicuous in and through speaking, and so in their early, pre-scientific characterization of human being, the Greeks defined human being as ζωον λόγον εχον [zoon logon echon]—the living being that can speak and that co-defines its being in and through speaking. [. . .] Λόγος [logos], then, is what reveals an ontological connection between the other two universal regions [. . .]: human being (ἦθος [ethos])