For us moderns, Aristotle’s explanation of the four causes seems strange. Our understanding has been shaped by the universal law of causality based on the mathematical hypothesis that stipulates that “every occurrence in ‘nature’—idealized nature—must come under exact laws” (Crisis, 53). This modern idea of causality is Galilean: only in the Galilean universe, our universe, does the hypothesis of perfect causality become a general law that supposedly “rules” all processes in the world. As Husserl notes: “With Galileo, then, begins the surreptitious substitution of idealized nature for prescientifically intuited nature” (Crisis, § 9h, 49–50). The law of causality governs the heavenly bodies, pendulums, rocks, and atoms. Since that historical time, a description of events that follow each other and that we encounter in the world is transformed into mathematical language and formalized as the law of causality. Its abstract formula ensures its validity and it is now considered a priori: prior to our scientific explanation of the world.
In connection with the four causes, as already noted, Aristotle’s theory applies to the world of our living. The same applies mutatis mutandis to Aristotle’s logic. Aristotle’s logic is not “pure” logic in the sense we understand it today. Husserl observes that “Aristotle relates his analytics to the real world,” thus his analytics contain “the categories of reality” (FTL, § 12, 49). So, Husserl notes, the Aristotelian formal system is not free of the things we encounter in the life-world, because Aristotle’s system “lacked formal ontology.” Strictly speaking, Aristotle was not aware, or rather did not recognize, that “formal ontology is intrinsically prior to the ontology of realities” (FTL, § 26, 80). His system is not reduced to a formal “anything-whatever.” The same applies to the Euclidean geometry: for Euclid, geometry was a “theory of intuited world-space” (FTL, § 29, 92).
Husserl points out that the Aristotelian and Euclidian systems do not, or, rather, cannot, account for the difference between things in the world and the objects in general that populate today’s domain of formal ontology. Formal ontology is essentially about “regarding the judgment sphere theoretically as a specific Objective field of apriori ideality, just as the geometer regards the sphere of pure geometrical shapes and the arithmetician regards the sphere of numbers” (FTL, § 26, 81). And it is exactly this confusion between formal ontology and the world in which we live that was to occupy Husserl in his last years.
ANTHROPOLOGISM
Husserl’s critique of psychologism applies, mutatis mutandis, to anthropologism. Anthropologism is for Husserl also a form of relativism (FTL, § 24, 76). The underlying claim of anthropologism is that what is true or false depends on our species. There might be other species and they might judge differently. What is true for us might be false for them.
As Husserl explains, this misconception is already based on our understanding of true and false; it is based on our categorization of judgment. Further, to use the true/false distinction and then claim that it might be different for other species means that we do not understand the meaning of true and false. There is also another problem. If we say that truth for a different species might be nonexistent, which means that there would be no truth per se, then this claim is a fallacy, sometimes called the liar paradox. The claim appeals to truth by declaring that there is no truth.
Finally, if anthropologism’s claim is that our truth is relative to our human constitution, then if there were no humans, there would be no truth.63 This claim, once again, surreptitiously relies on the notion of truth to assert itself as true. Husserl comments that “if we confine ourselves to the only species actually known to us, animal species,” then this claim amounts to two possible outcomes. The first possibility is that truth is dependent on us, humans, who “invented” truth; so if something happens to our species, then truth will mutate (“a change in [human] constitution would mean a change in the world”). This is already discussed above. Here, the concept of truth is relied upon to assert that “truth” is contingent on our species and, by the same token, that nature is dependent on us (if we change, the world will change with us)—which is again a misunderstanding of the meaning of the idea of truth. We assert something we deny. The second possibility is that despite the fact that we are “animal species,” we are also “evolutionary products of the world,” which can lead to the claim that “our truth” is the product of the environment and changeable with it (LI, § 36, 81; IP, 18). Once again, the same objection applies. As Husserl sums up, “We are playing a pretty game: man evolves from the world and the world from man; God creates man and man God” (LI, § 36, 81).
THE IDEA OF PHENOMENOLOGY
Natural thought in life and in science is untroubled by the difficulties concerning the possibility of knowledge, while philosophical thought is determined by the position taken with respect to the problems of the possibility of knowledge. (IP, 61; italics in original)
Husserl is the first to admit that his critique of psychologism and anthropologism in Logical Investigations does not get him out of the empirical world. As he writes in 1907, although his early underlying concern was theory of knowledge, LI left the validity of descriptive psychology intact. First presented in LI, Husserl’s insight is that “the possibility of analytic cognition” (§ 8, 47; italics in original) is important but is not enough to account for the knowledge of the world; that is, for the correlation between our subjective thinking and the world of objects.
In The Idea of Phenomenology, then, Husserl shifts from analytic reasoning to consider the problem of knowledge as such. His focus becomes “the relation of knowledge to what is transcendent” (IP, 60; italics in original), that is, the correlation between our thinking and the world.64 He recognizes that descriptive psychology, that is, empirical phenomenology, must be distinguished from transcendental phenomenology.65 Only transcendental phenomenology can solve “the great riddles” of “the correlation between being and consciousness” (ILI, § 5, 29). This is “the enigma of all enigmas,” mentioned earlier. How do I know that a thing in the world is the same as the one that I am aware of? This riddle leads also to the question: “How is it that I experience what is seen again as the same? How can it be experienced as the same?”66 These questions cannot be answered by comparing the object in the world with its “image,” which supposedly appears in my consciousness. The answers cannot rely on the law of causation; the object cannot cause the image in my consciousness. How can my one-sided perception, which I supposedly have in my consciousness as an image, do justice to my experience of the object in the world with all its “sides,” in its totality? The object and the mental state belong to different categories; the law of causation is useful to explain events in physical nature, but the extramental object cannot cause any “mental image.” When we pay attention to what we are aware of, we realize the enigma that phenomenology discloses: we always see more than what is “given” to us. The “mental image” cannot be the replication of an object from the world into my consciousness, so to speak; the object is irreducible to the image. We are always aware of the object in the world, and not only of the one side of it that we literally see. We always anticipate the sides of a thing that we cannot possibly see unless we move around the object; we assume that we see the object in its entirety.
Husserl’s insight is that to understand this enigma of meaning—this correlation between the worldly object and our knowledge of it—the phenomenological investigation has to leave behind the transcendent world of res extensa and pay attention to “the phenomenologically reduced consciousness in its individual flow.”67 It has to abstract from the actual world. Husserl’s proposition is the phenomenological reduction, or ἐποχή (epoché), which he introduces in IP.68 As Mohanty explains, “The epoché is not an expression of suspicion in the veracity of the given, it is rather a methodological step needed for understanding the sense of the world precisely as it is given, i.e., as a unity of sense that is achieved.”69 To express it differently, Husserl’s investigation