Husserl and Heidegger use the notion of “meaning” differently. Heidegger’s consideration is with the overall meaning of the world, being already scientific, enframing us all in its design. For Husserl, the lived understanding of the world can be recovered from scientific misconceptions if we pay attention to the constitution of the meaning of things, recognizing that even scientific formalization is based on our human experience of the “typicality” of objects that we encounter in everyday life.
Arendt accepts Heidegger’s reading of Dasein. Human beings are not the same as things that we encounter. However, the structure of Dasein is not adequate to account for our understanding of the world. She posits the human condition in order to historicize Dasein,9 yet she proposes a different structure to account for the constitution of meaning. Using the history of events, as she would say, in a very idiosyncratic manner, she critiques the privileging of contemplation over action. In her narration, it seems as if homo faber and animal laborans drove the transformation of action from ancient Greece to the modern age. Meaning is subsumed to either the means-ends categories of homo faber (i.e., utilitarianism) or the categories of animal laborans (i.e., the consumption [or modern destruction] of the whole world). For Arendt, it is not ideas but events that change the world: her distrust of philosophy leads her to this path. She shows the problematic nature of consumer society as well as the inadequacy of scientific speech, yet the transformation of the conception of nature from the ancient Greeks to the modern scientific construction of the world is not accounted for in its own right.
Patočka accepts Husserl’s theory of meaning constitution, but he objects to the transcendental ego as the space where meaning is constituted. He also accepts Heidegger’s critique of the structure of the life-world, agreeing that we live in a world we understand via a scientific model whose basis is already mathematical. In order to rethink the life-world, or, as he calls it, the natural world, Patočka addresses the meaning of the “whole”; not as the outer horizon of things (as in Husserl) and not as a history of Being that swallows up the Being of a questioner (as in Heidegger). He returns to the Greeks to consider the way the idea of nature has changed throughout history. He credits Husserl with the discovery of “objectification” in our everyday encounters with things (not just in the sphere of ideas); and he credits Heidegger with his proposal that modern science, being mathematically based, is already uncovering “mathematical” processes rather than things. Patočka also applauds Arendt for pointing out that, initially, we do not use things (as Heidegger would have it), but we are born into a community that teaches us about the things we use and our way of life. He then offers different approaches to thinking about the changes instituted by modern science.
THE PROGRESSION OF BEING
In a very schematic way, following Patočka’s exposition, we can say that in the mythological world, myths explain everything by relegating all meaning to a primordial past. When this world collapses—when myths cease to explain why things are—the pre-Socratics attempt to confront the mystery of the world through Kosmogony, and the mystery of the world becomes a mystery of Being, of why things are. Moreover, a new question comes to the fore: If gods do not rule the world, who does? The ancient Greeks, addressing this second mystery, disclose the problem of human participation in affairs related to their Being in the world.
Socrates takes over these two aspects and brings Being and politics into mutual relation. Politics is now a part of being human, as Socrates notes. His knowing that he does not know discloses that we simply cannot know why things are and how they are. We are finite human beings whose knowledge is always situational. We cannot know what justice and good are. The only way to gain knowledge and meaning in the world is to keep asking questions in relation to the historical situation of humans.
Plato, distraught by Socrates’ death, attempts to secure the space of questioning by positing the unchangeable realm of Ideas, thus providing a stable basis for the human quest for knowledge.10 Aristotle, already schooled in the Platonic solution, realizes that Plato does not explain the terrestrial realm. Platonic ideas are unchanging, but phusis (translated today as “nature”) changes. Aristotle’s solution is to conceptualize change as change-in-the-world. For Plato, this is precisely what we cannot account for, since we live in the world of the Heraclitean flux. Yet Aristotle introduces the idea of motion and change that he can theorize about. Change is conceived in terms of movement within bodies: the process of generation of plants, humans, and animals and their movements from one place to another are explained by his conception of dunamis, the inner motion of each body according to its nature. Being—why things are and how they are—is explained by this capacity to change.
Christianity provides another answer to the mystery of why things are and how they are. Saint Paul conceptualizes the solution in terms of God’s being as the ground of all because he creates the world. God creates and knows, and he communicates this knowledge to humans. Modern science offers another solution to this mystery of Being by mathematizing motion while ignoring processes. Processes, in terms of why they are as they are—the generation of plants, animals, and humans—are excluded from modern mathematical science, which deals only with mathematized processes that it can account for in the sense of how they “proceed.” Only mathematizable “motion” can be dealt with by mathematics. Modern science does not deal with nonmathematizable domains. Hence there is no possibility to account for human meaning, which cannot be integrated into the mathematical scientific project.
Once again, we are back where we started. In the current dominant view, we are aware we cannot understand the mysteries that science excludes from its sphere of investigation, and we also cannot know “nature” in terms of why things are as they are if we accept that scientific explanations are the only way to disclose what nature is. We can know nature only as a mathematical manifold; in other words, through only those aspects that science considers. Moreover, the progression of knowledge is relative to the methods of investigation. Science never pretends to disclose the meaning of the whole; it is interested in an accumulation of knowledge that gives scientists glimpses into the vast universe from its own methodological framework. As Werner Heisenberg expresses it, “We invariably encounter structures created by man, so that in a sense we always meet only ourselves.”11
To deal with the human questions that science excluded—in other words, questions regarding humans’ meaningful relation to the world, others, and their own Being—the Socratic questions—“What is justice?”; “What is human meaning?”; “What is good?”—became topics for the rational theology that Kant exposed as untenable. We are living in the world, where, once again, we cannot provide answers to the quandary of human existence with the methodology of modern science, and there is not any other “method” available.
Patočka’s suggestion is: If there is only situational human meaning, then meaning will have to be constantly reaffirmed through the Socratic elenctic and protreptic methods; through searching for new questions and answers with others by providing reasons that we can give an account for. In other words, to avoid the positing of an absolute meaning—be it via Platonic Ideas, God, history, or the eternal recurrence of the same—human finite meaning can only be situational, in other words, relative to the human finite situation.
OUTLINE OF CHAPTERS
In chapter 1, I discuss Husserl’s discomfort with the way formalized science is applied as “technique” without reflection upon the ground of this formalization. Husserl is concerned with this problem from the beginning of his work, and this concern continues as a leitmotif throughout his whole oeuvre. In his final work, he suggests that Europe is suffering from a profound confusion between method and the object of its investigation. Consequently, what is forgotten is the life-world; the ground from which generalization and subsequent formalization proceed.
In chapter