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

book, Nazism was coming to power. For Husserl, this was a victory of irrationalism at the heart of Europe: despite a long European history of rational inquiry, most spectacularly embodied in natural science, irrationalism was rising. Yet the problem that he addressed in his book is still with us. Irrationalism—and Husserl’s concern that the reason admired in science is mistrusted and discarded in other domains—is as valid now as it was in his time, going back to the nineteenth century at least. What is the root of this splitting of reason? Why do we distrust reason while we accept scientific reason as the highest achievement of rationality, which began in ancient Greece? It also seems that, more and more, the scientific explanation of meaning—which reduces meaning to an investigation of the material components of the human brain—is not questioned at all. Hence, Husserl’s crisis is still with us, and in need of rethinking.³

      This book, then, is the continuation of a debate both with Husserl and against him. Husserl presented his thinking about the life-world (Lebenswelt) in lectures in Vienna (7 and 10 May 1935) and Prague (12–15 November 1935); eventually the Prague lectures were posthumously published as Crisis.⁴ Yet it is an extension of his early work on the problem of scientific formalization embedded in scientific method, as I discuss in chapter 1. We can formulate the problem as the problem of modern mathematical science, which we accept as the only adjudicator of what constitutes objective knowledge. The problem lies in the question of what constitutes knowledge and how objective knowledge relates to the meaning of the world and human subjective existence.⁵ There are two interrelated issues. One is the question of meaning; hence the title of Husserl’s work, which could be formulated as the crisis of meaning. The other is the trajectory of how the modern conception of nature came about. These issues are related, but they do not overlap in the consideration of the thinkers whom this book presents.

      This problem can, of course, be traced back to the beginning of philosophy in ancient Greece, and could be expressed, paraphrasing Patočka and harking back to Pascal, in this way: “How can we procure meaning from this mute, scientifically conjured-up universe, which is indifferent to our lived experience of the world; which is indifferent to what makes us human?”⁶

THE QUESTION OF MEANING

      This book, then, presents a history of problems related to the human constitution of meaning and the scientific formalization of nature that overrides human experience. The unresolved issue is the transition from understanding nature in a qualitative sense to mathematically mastering it, thereby putting aside questions relating to human existence. The division between nature and humans was conceptualized by René Descartes with his separation of res extensa and res cogitans. The legacy of this reconceptualization of nature is still with us. I offer four different approaches to this quandary. First, I present an outline of Husserl’s work in relation to the problem of the objectification of meaning. Then I consider the continuation, appropriation, and transformation of Husserl’s project by three later thinkers. This debate is bound to continue indefinitely, but my hope is that the clarification of certain presuppositions embedded in the work of these thinkers can help us to reinvigorate our investigations, in what seems to be a debate without answers. Philosophy always strives to present problems that we can all think about and, perhaps, through the debate, shift the ground of those problems. The most difficult thing is our ability to see past the problems and our historical situatedness, to reformulate what is at issue: that is the aim of this book.

      The methodological departure for this project was puzzlement concerning the term “crisis” in the title of Husserl’s book, which seems to refer to a “crisis of meaning.” The problem is that, originally, for Husserl, “meaning” is related to the constitution of meaning; in other words, his insight is that we cannot understand meaning, on the model of British empiricism, as following from the ideas of objects that are imprinted on our minds. Phenomenology discloses that we always see more than is given to us. Ideas are not the intermediary between meaning and things. We do not see ideas but, rather, things themselves. In many ways, acknowledging our participation in the constitution of meaning is the Kantian project. Our mind is not a tabula rasa on which ideas are imprinted from experience. As Leibniz pointed out, there must be something else to “combine” those ideas.⁷

      In Logical Investigations, Husserl starts with a critique of psychologism to show the difference between formal logic and empirical logic—at this point he does not yet address knowledge but considers logic only. We need formal logic to make sense of empirical laws. Expanding his observation to account for knowledge in The Idea of Phenomenology, he introduces his notion of epochē to show that there is a difference between an appearance (a particular appearance of something as something, or noema, as he calls it later) and that which appears (noesis—in other words, adumbration of noema). It is we who, through a synthesis, constitute the meaning of a phenomenon. Phenomena are the meaningful things themselves, as we constitute them. Here there is no crisis of meaning. The project of phenomenology is, as Steven Crowell sums up, that “one simply ‘lives’ in the realm of meaning without ‘knowing’ it as such.”⁸ The issue is to describe how we constitute the meaning of things.

      Husserl’s later insight is to acknowledge prepredicative experience, which is the route to his reflections on the life-world. He extends his investigation into the constitution of meaning to account for the life-world, where we already encounter typical instances of things. We already “objectify” imprecise experiences to constitute meaningful things. Husserl moves from the constitution of things to the outer horizon of meaning: a meaningful thing leads to another meaningful thing and so on, until the external horizon of all objects is disclosed. The move is from things to the horizon. Presumably if we go back to the things themselves, stripping away the garb of ideas and considering them without the overlay of scientific hypotheses, we will be able to change that outer horizon, recovering the life-world that is the ground of formalization, as Husserl argues. Husserl attempts to clarify the problem of modern epistemology. How do we know things, and what is the ground of our constitution of meaning? His answer is the transcendental ego. Since Husserl starts from things, the meaning of the whole—as later addressed by Heidegger and Patočka—is not a part of his project.

      Heidegger moves away from Husserl’s solution to the constitution of meaning in transcendental subjectivity but retains his insight that we typically encounter things in the world. Heidegger’s change of focus is to account explicitly for a questioner—Dasein—who understands things, prior to any theoretical reflections, by simply dealing with and using them. In Heidegger’s formulation, we do not understand things in their singularity; rather, we understand the project that we are involved with. Here the meaning of things is not primary. Heidegger’s focus is, of course, different from that of Husserl: he is interested in Being. It is a shift from epistemology to ontology: not “How do we know the meaning of things?” but “What are things and what is the Being of a questioner?”; he explores how the Being of a questioner is different from the Being of things. Heidegger starts by rethinking logic as logos, speech, and considering the Being of a questioner who is a speaking being living in and understanding the world already. He claims that by rethinking logos, we realize that the meaning of things is constituted by “freezing” our initial understanding of them—imprecisely revealed through our engagement with words in our projects—into words that we can then use to communicate with others via language. Language is similar to theorizing: we consider things outside of our lived experience, outside of their initial context, when we use words. This reconsideration of logos as speaking leads Heidegger also to rethink the concept of truth; from the correspondence of propositions and things to aletheia—unhiddenness—or showing something forth. Heidegger is not concerned with meaning constitution but with the meaning of the whole, the question of Being.

      The difference is in their respective understandings of the life-world. Husserl’s life-world is structured as an everyday world that the formalization of science has obscured with the garb of ideas. By questioning this formalization and returning science to its original impulse to understand the world, instead of structuring it through this garb of ideas, we can recover the human understanding of things and reinstate science as a responsible