What can be said of Husserl’s struggle? Aron Gurwitsch reminds us that, in 1922, Max Weber also developed a critique of science. However, “whereas Weber is prepared to resign himself to the given state of affairs, Husserl holds out the prospect of a regeneration of western man under the very idea of philosophy, into the unity of which the sciences have to be reintegrated.”16 As Husserl notes, sciences “require such criticism and grounding under the guidance of the idea of a philosophy, in which they must find their places” (FTL, § 104, 277; italics in original).
Husserl’s struggle (ILI, § 8, 45) against the disciples of psychologism, anthropologism, and naturalistic relativism is but another replay of the struggles undertaken by Socrates and Descartes. To be sure, neither historical setting nor society is the same, but the old struggle upholding the claims of reason against the general climate of skepticism seems to be unceasing. This is why Husserl, in his last work, insists:
The history of philosophy [. . .] takes on the character of a struggle for existence [. . .] between [. . .] the philosophy of naïve faith in reason [. . .] and the skepticism which negates or repudiates it in empiricist fashion [. . .] until finally the consciously recognized world-problem of the deepest essential interrelation between reason and what is in general, the enigma of all enigmas, has to become the actual theme of inquiry. (Crisis, § 5, 13; italics in original)
The problem can be stated thus: if experience, as skeptics and relativists decree, is the only basis for our reasoning, then it is difficult to see how we can explain the meaning of “what is in general,” in other words, the meaning of the world. The correlation between our reasoning and the world becomes “the enigma of all enigmas.” As Husserl mockingly puts it in The Idea of Phenomenology, “What do the things themselves care about our ways of thinking and the logical rules that govern them? They are laws of our thinking, psychological laws” (61). To put it differently, thoughts and things in the world have nothing in common. So, if we think that reasoning is “inside” us (immanent), so to speak, and the world is “outside” us (transcendent), how can we know that the things in the world are as we think they are? This puzzle can lead to a mistaken belief that “knowledge as such is a riddle” (IP, 27). This riddle contains the problem of correspondence and transcendence. Do the things in the world correspond to our knowledge of them? Or, as Husserl asks, what could it mean “for a being to be known in itself and yet be known in knowledge” (IP, 23; italics in original)? This is the problem of the correlation between our subjective thinking and the world of objects. The correspondence between our thinking and the world implies the problem of transcendence. According to Husserl, “Transcendence remains both the initial and the guiding problem for the critique of knowledge” (IP, 28). How can we know that we know the world that is outside us? For Husserl, it is phenomenology that can account for our knowledge of the world. Husserl’s many introductions to phenomenology document his unfailing belief in the ideas of truth and reason that will guide us toward knowledge.
In his review of Husserl’s Crisis, Patočka remarks that to charge Husserl with the claim that his many introductions to phenomenology prevent him from finally getting to his philosophy is to miss the point: it is to blame him for something that is implicit to his project.17 Husserl does not want to present ready-made concepts that we can use as tools, without question.18 On the contrary, he wants to show the way toward phenomenology. Husserl speaks of a “zigzag pattern” of investigation (Crisis, § 9l, 58), leading Eugen Fink to describe phenomenology as an “open system.”19 Husserl’s different investigations are paths that each of us must take in order to see “things themselves” and, in the spirit of scientific community, to contribute to the overall advancement and improvement of phenomenological investigations. As Lothar Eley remarks: “Husserl conceived of phenomenology as a working philosophy”;20 or, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, philosophy is “a continuous beginning.”21 For Husserl, the idea of philosophy is “the idea of an infinite task.”22
Not only are many researchers needed to carry phenomenological investigations forward; one’s own personal journey is also required, and this intellectual journey must be based on a constant critique of one’s own achievements. Only by traveling many paths can one grasp the idea of phenomenology as being based on personal responsibility.
It is not the case that ready-made rules will lead us into the paradise of things themselves.23 The philosophical manual cannot help us to answer questions such as: Why do we take for granted the transcendent world? How does “this ‘idealization’” come about, and why do we not “wonder about the origin of things”?24 In the end, Husserl notes, these questions lead to further “wonder”: How did it come about that science posits the knowledge of mathematical nature as primary? Why do we take for granted that the scientific conversion of “sensible causalities into mathematical causalities” gives us “mathematical, true nature,”25 which “becomes” the true world while the world of our living is relegated to its fuzzy manifestation?
For Husserl, then, to understand the correlation between our subjective thinking and the world is to reflect on the nature of knowledge. It is to show that we can know objects in the world; and, further, that the transformation of the world as it was performed by modern natural science is based on things in the world, on the life-world. To grasp the meaning of the world and our existence within it, we have to go back to the beginning. Phenomenology, by going back to the things themselves, can show us not only that “the enigma of all enigmas” is merely apparent, but also that scientific mathematical knowledge does not precede our knowledge of the world; its structure is erected from things themselves. Finally, as in Husserl’s last writing, phenomenology can make clear why the idea of modern science based on the mathematization of nature is problematic: it fails to account for our existence in the world.
Thus, according to Husserl, the phenomenological method is the way toward things themselves. Yet we need to understand the method first. Otherwise, it would be like explaining Pythagoras’s theorem that a2 + b2 = c2 without knowing that it expresses a relation concerning the sides of the right-angle triangle in Euclidean geometry.26 Likewise, we cannot pass judgment on phenomenology if we do not know what phenomenology actually is. As Husserl warns, “Phenomenology is not ‘literature’ by means of which one goes riding for pleasure, as it were, while reading. [. . .] One must [. . .] work in order to acquire a methodically schooled eye and only thereby the capability of making one’s own judgment.”27 To do so, one must be able to give reasons for every step in one’s thinking; to validate judgments by enabling others to extend the method. Phenomenology is the continuation of the journey that began in ancient Greece, the journey from δόξα (doxa) to ἐπιστήμη (epistēmē).
DEFENSE OF REASON
By defending the idea of reason, Husserl fights to safeguard the European intellectual heritage. He fights to redeem “reason” from relativistic interpretations and to reinstate it to its proper place, which reason and reasoning has held since Plato and Aristotle. As Plato and Aristotle conceived of it, reason is an answer to wonder, θαυμαζω (thaumazo), leading to philosophy, love of wisdom.28 As Husserl explains, “In the breakthrough of philosophy [. . .] in which all sciences are thus contained, I see [. . .] the primal phenomenon of spiritual Europe.”29 Once established, “philosophy, science, is the title for a special class of cultural structures.”30
For Husserl, the idea of reason implicates logic as the domain of purely formal laws. The unacceptable alternative to a “pure” logic grounded formally would be the empirical logic of John Stuart Mill, for whom logic is nothing more than “a mere assemblage of psychological chapters, offered with the intention to regulate knowledge practically,”31 thereby making logic dependent on our thinking, instead of being its benchmark. According to Husserl, Mill’s account of logic—based on our mental states (psychologism) or our human biology (anthropologism)—becomes relative, supposedly dependent on the situation humans find themselves in. The foundation