The topic of chapter 3 is the work of Arendt, who provides a different assessment of the changes to our understanding of the world, informed by Heidegger’s thought, which she constantly problematizes. Nevertheless, she retains Heidegger’s commitment to ask questions of “the tradition that is broken,” as she puts it.
In chapter 4, I consider Patočka. By renewing Husserl’s original “phenomenological motives,”12 Patočka provides a critique that can help us understand not only his own phenomenology, but also the manner in which the Husserlian critique of formal knowledge and the associated concept of the “Lebenswelt” continue in his work and are developed there in important ways that continue to have contemporary relevance. Patočka retains the Husserlian commitment to the importance of critical and honest responsibility for one’s own thinking, supplementing his reflections with Heidegger’s notion of the importance of a questioner who lives in the world. Husserl’s and Heidegger’s considerations are merged into Patočka’s own conception of asubjective phenomenology and his three movements of existence.
The nineteenth century brought to the fore disenchantment with the new natural science. Humans became aware that scientific objectivity brought many inventions that made human life easier, but they also realized that science is not equipped and does not aspire to solve the existential human problems that God had answered previously. Humans found themselves in the world without secure, transcendent meaning. Many writings document this disenchantment. It was Husserl who pointed out the problem of the sedimentation of knowledge, the substitution of formal reasoning for existential questions, and the shift in our perception of the world by addressing the reversal in our understanding of nature brought about by Galileo.
The path from Husserl to Heidegger and beyond blazed a trail for subsequent thinkers, who took up seriously Husserl’s critique of the formalization of sciences, turned into methodological techniques. In this book, I deal with three thinkers directly or indirectly influenced by Husserl’s work and its changed focus: Heidegger, Arendt, and Patočka. I will argue that despite seemingly different projects, the initial driving force of phenomenology—to examine taken-for-granted theses by going back to the things themselves—underlines all four philosophers’ undertakings.
CHAPTER ONE
CRITIQUE OF THE MATHEMATIZATION OF NATURE—FROM PHILOSOPHY OF ARITHMETIC TO THE CRISIS OF EUROPEAN SCIENCES
Edmund Husserl
The Logical Investigations signify [. . .] a beginning or rather a breakthrough. They were not written for anyone who is satisfied with his prejudices, for anyone who already has his philosophy, his psychology, his logic, his epistemology. For such a one they are a hollow “scholastic logicism” or some other sort of “ism.” They differ, however, essentially from other philosophical proposals through the fact that they have no intention of being anything more than probes which attempt to get at the primary presuppositions of the sense of the Logos and thereby of all science, and to clarify these presuppositions in specific analyses. The Logical Investigations are [. . .] far removed from any attempt to persuade the reader, by way of some sort of dialectical tricks, to accept a philosophy that was for the author already an accepted fact.
—Edmund Husserl1
I seek not to instruct but only to lead, to point out and describe what I see. I claim no other right than that of speaking according to my best lights, principally before myself but in the same manner also before others, as one who has lived in all its seriousness the fate of a philosophical existence.
—Edmund Husserl2
The purpose of this chapter and the following chapter is to establish a background to my discussion of Arendt’s and Patočka’s critiques of science, which is, according to them, one of the sources of existential crisis in today’s societies.3 In this chapter, I will consider Edmund Husserl’s critique of the natural sciences. In order to understand the trajectory of Husserl’s thinking, I will start with his critique of psychologism and anthropologism and end with his critique of the mathematization of nature as he formulates it in his last published work, The Crisis of European Sciences. I do not claim to evaluate Husserl’s phenomenology and his attempt to establish philosophy as a rigorous science.4 My purpose is to concentrate on Husserl’s critique of science, which is, at the same time, a critique of reason. For Husserl, reason is a bastion against the flood of skepticism and relativism. Reason, however, is not something “in the world”: “Reason itself, including theoretical reason in particular, is a form-concept.”5 For Husserl, then, to clarify the idea of reason is “the general task that I must accomplish for myself if I am to call myself a philosopher.”6 A caveat is necessary in any discussion of Husserl. So, I might say with Alfred Schütz, “An attempt to reduce the work of a great philosopher to a few basic propositions understandable to an audience not familiar with his thought is, as a rule, a hopeless undertaking.”7
I will argue that Husserl’s critique of sciences is an underlying motif from the beginning to the end of his career.8 My claim is that Husserl’s critique of natural science as he outlines it in Crisis is a continuation of his critique of “the present state of the science”9 that he first considers in Philosophy of Arithmetic. No doubt, his thinking and the focus of his critique changed, but not this principal motif: a critique of science as having become blinded by its own technical mastery rather than as a responsible practice aware of its own foundation. As he writes in Ideas III, “The sciences become [. . .] factories turning out very valuable and practically useful propositions [. . .] in which one can work as laborer and inventive technician [. . . and] from which, as a practical man, one can without inner understanding derive products and at best comprehend [their] technical efficiency.”10 Following from this insight, Husserl’s critique of science is tied to his thinking concerning the primacy of the prescientific life, or, as he calls it later, the Lebenswelt—the life-world.11 We cannot understand the world constructed by sciences unless we show that scientific explanations of the world grew out of the world in which we live; that the origin of formal knowledge is based on our experience of the life-world. For Husserl, “the world is the horizon of our total attitude” and “our belief in being is a belief in the world”;12 there is no other world than the one we live in. As Ludwig Landgrebe reminds us, for Husserl, the philosophical foundation must be based on “absolute responsibility.”13 Hence, in order to be responsible for our knowledge about the world we live in, we must acknowledge the primacy of the life-world. It is the foundation from which all our knowledge proceeds.
Husserl’s initial endeavor to inquire into the problem of meaning that underlies the possibility of knowledge, and his concomitant effort to secure knowledge from the “skeptical quagmire,” underlies his whole oeuvre. It is a journey that proceeds from investigations of mathematical concepts, through questioning the psychological basis of logic, and, later, extending his inquiries from formal logic to the problem of knowledge, as such—as when he considers the problem of “the relation of knowledge to what is transcendent” (IP, 60; italics in original); that is, the relation between our thinking and the world. Finally, he broadens his phenomenological investigations to consider the life-world.14
We might agree neither with Husserl’s claim that the crisis of the modern age is contemporaneous with the crisis of sciences, positivism, and the consequent decapitation of metaphysics;15 nor with his observation that “the crisis of philosophy implies the crisis of all modern sciences” leading to a “crisis of European humanity itself in respect to the total meaningfulness of its cultural life, its total ‘Existenz’”