Elisabeth Ströker
In his work on Auguste Rodin, Rilke writes, “One day people will recognize what made this artist so great: that he was a worker who desired nothing more than to give himself completely, with all his strength, to the humble and difficult world of his craft. There was a kind of renunciation of life in this, but with patience he gained it back: for the world came to his work.”1 Fifty years ago, Ludwig Landgrebe used Rilke’s words at the academic memorial ceremony for Edmund Husserl—not in Germany, where a remembrance honoring the ostracized was not allowed in 1938, but in Prague, where the then famous Cercle Philosophique of the German and Czech universities commemorated its only honorary member, who had just found his final earthly resting place in Freiburg.
Landgrebe, one of the most faithful of Husserl’s students, saw in Rilke’s words the motto of the life and work of his great teacher. Landgrebe’s memorial address was directed toward the deceased for whom philosophy had been more than just an occupation and vocation—it had become fate in a trinity unique to him alone: (1) a constant, self-consuming work bordering on obsession; (2) a patience, never failing, with the matters that concerned him; and (3) a “renunciation of life” that, of course, did not correspond to self-denial in a narrowly eccentric scholarly world but to an unrelenting, impassioned will to objectivity, which is the most extreme self-discipline of the kind of thinking that understood itself as a tool, impersonal, and put into the hands of anyone who wanted to make Husserl’s questions her own.
What worried Husserl? And what tool was it with which he tracked these worries in ever new attempts, and in the process again and again remodeling, improving, and refining it the minute his mission compelled him to do so? Finally, what world was it that, in the unabbreviated sense of the phrase, “came to his work” [zu seinem Werkzeug kam] as though it wanted to reward him for what he had exacted of it by personal resignation?
Edmund Husserl was granted fifty years of a life of intense research. To the day, it is another fifty years that separate us from his death. One would need to survey a full century, then, just to pursue here the fundamental lines of Husserl’s vastly ramified research, and to construe April 27, 1938, as the caesura precisely in the middle of a century, a caesura that separates the genesis of Husserl’s works from the history of its impact for us.
Our reflection, however, must be modest. Thus, we look back, not to what determined Husserl’s work between the habilitation treatise at the University of Halle in 1887 and the last notes from Freiburg in the summer of 1937, but to what endures of that work for our generation. Rather than the dramatic development of his thought and its vast expanse, we should consider the driving and enduring fundamental motive of his philosophizing, along with the manner in which Husserl—step by step, doggedly, and with a steely consistency—pursued this philosophizing and ultimately, with full awareness, handed it over in its never-to-be-achieved final form to those who came after him.
Today, we find Husserl both more difficult and easier than did his contemporaries: more difficult, because we can no longer be the comrades of a philosopher whose uncommon formative power benefited a generation that he led to a novel and unprecedented way of philosophizing. Moreover, this generation found itself carried by an impulse that did not allow this way to be enshrined by a newly established system, but rather led into the middle of the open and interminable world of experience in the proper sense.
It is precisely this world, then, that requires those specific, new tools [Rüstzeug] that Husserl connected with the concept of phenomenology. According to this concept, phenomenology essentially was to be a determined philosophical method, a strictly ruled procedure that, according to its own claim, was to surpass even the positive sciences in conceptual and intellectual rigor. It was in this way that phenomenology commenced with Husserl. With Husserl’s first phenomenological work, Logical Investigations, it began—near the threshold of the twentieth century—its rapid triumph over expired “isms” of the past and philosophical speculations that had become brittle. It did this by letting it be known at the same time what this new philosophical tool was to be designed for. “Toward the things,” its motto resounded, or, even more emphatically, “to the things themselves.”
Whatever else was to be understood more precisely under this motto, it meant in any event that the “things” of this kind must first of all be uncovered once again from beneath the layers of theoretical, philosophical, and scientific construction of a centuries-old tradition in order to expose them at last without disguise to an unprejudiced view. And what this meant was taking the things and occurrences of the world plainly as phenomena, solely based on how they appear.
That was, as became apparent, anything but a trivial program. Viewed positively, Husserl’s firm renunciation of philosophical construction and deduction also contained phenomenology’s fundamental demand for the most extreme sensitizing and cultivation of seeing. For Husserl, the practice of seeing in the broadest sense not only needed to exhibit and show—and, later, increasingly disclose, reveal, and expose—it also needed to be disciplined into a determinate, analytic penetration into the internal structures of things. Husserl defined these “internal structures” with the concept of the “essence” of the thing—a concept that was at times open to misunderstanding.
Today, Husserl is more accessible than ever, and this cannot solely be because of the removal of certain misunderstandings over time. Rather, it is because we have an advantage greater than merely looking at Husserl from a historical distance.
Husserl published all too little of his work. The printed word was of little importance to him. To whatever considerable extent it was at his disposal, to the same extent he perceived the detailed literary elaboration of his work only as an irksome hindrance to his proper task: to research. Thus, what sporadically appeared, with its imposing intellectual precision and linguistic clarity, offered no concessions to readers’ desires for rapid appropriation. An austere rigor, occasionally perceived as dismissive, lies over these works. Husserl never penned a genuinely introductory or summarizing presentation of his views, let alone a popular treatise. Although collectively his published works were presented as “introductions” to phenomenology, they are scarcely anything more than the most extreme condensations of long, arduous investigations. Above all, they barely reveal that behind nearly every page that Husserl committed to print were dozens of others that he withheld. Who, apart from Husserl’s later coworkers and pupils, knew that his estate would bring to light over forty thousand stenographic pages? And the notes, some still in shorthand, concealed not only countless detailed phenomenological studies but also fundamental elaborations of the phenomenological enterprise as a whole: critical reflection on its objectives in general and self-critical reflections on Husserl’s own activity in particular.
Today, Husserl’s countless surviving elaborations and drafts are known, works from every phase of his creative work, including the final years of politically enforced silence. They have been made largely accessible in the intervening years through the four decades of archival research into his estate. We are thus better able to see what Husserl wanted and continued to want through all the transformations and advancements of his richly ramified research. These endeavors were directed toward a telos that could determine, admittedly only by way of perpetual approximation, Husserl’s own as well as future phenomenological research. According to Husserl’s conviction, however, this telos must determine phenomenological research, if philosophy as a whole was not to remain merely a clever intellectual game without commitment but was to achieve something in our world.
Here, an unmistakable trait of Husserl’s phenomenology comes to light: phenomenology is a philosophia perennis, a continuous exertion of thinking. Specifically, it is an exertion arising from out of the methodologically restrained force of seeing [Schauen], of insight [Einsehen] emerging from the inexhaustible sources of looking [Hinsehen]. It is, however, only with increasing insight into the whole of Edmund Husserl’s immense life’s work that we are capable of grasping in detail what constituted that telos, by what and from what it was determined for him at its core.
This core was imperceptible to the early Husserl. It could only emerge more distinctly before his own eyes to the extent that the tool of phenomenological seeing—accomplished step by step in the light of what was at any moment seen—became increasingly differentiated.
Husserl first sought and found his way in mathematics—that is, in the surest of all sciences, which preordains every step clearly and distinctly, leaves no place for personal caprice and playing around with uncontrolled thoughts, and which counts results as valid only on the strength of proofs that can be verified at any time. The rigor of mathematics—its complete objectivity and impersonality, in which not someone but thinking itself unfolds—was for Husserl a model for philosophical research that never faded. Seen in this way, Husserl always remained a mathematician.
Soon, however, following a dissertation that still pertained to a purely mathematical topic, Husserl posed to himself questions of a different kind. These focused on the validity of mathematical and—even more fundamentally and universally—of logical truths. How and whence could one grasp these, especially as they cannot originate in experience?
One must keep in mind that Husserl grew up in an age where the natural sciences had vigorously nourished the post-Enlightenment optimism concerning progress and the unbroken faith in the continuous improvement and expansion of the quality of human existence. The sciences achieved this not only through their own ever more powerful development but above all through their technical efficiency, which had become tangible since the middle of the nineteenth century. The scaffolding, however, to which these sciences owed their apparently unlimited load-bearing capacity, was mathematics and, ultimately, formal logic. It was not only the case that coming to grips with the problem of their validity and clarifying the sense of their validity was of interest to a philosophical penetration into the formal sciences. This endeavor would also lead to the “basis of the validity” of the mathematically structured empirical sciences.
Husserl recognized early on that he had stumbled into a domain of problems beyond which the sciences had advanced without being aware of doing so. He recognized that they had forgotten—and continued to forget in the efficacy of their constant progress—what the sense of their activity ultimately was and out of which origins it was drawn.
But was such forgetting of origins on the part of the sciences anything more than the dark side of their positivity, a darkness that clearly could not diminish the luster of their achievements even for a minute? Was this regressive inquiry into the sense and origin of the validity of the positive sciences really necessary? Was Husserl’s incessant drilling for “sources,” “beginnings,” “origins,” “ultimate grounds”—all of which appeared to be less important to the success of the sciences—necessary?
Husserl’s lifelong passion for clarifying the sense of the sciences certainly did not arise from a need to be original. If it was far from the mind of his fellow philosophers to want to appear effective by asking the most bizarre questions possible, so it was for Husserl. However, he was vigorously and unerringly animated by the conviction that, in the age of the expanding sciences, it was the undeniable task of philosophy to confront these sciences decisively, instead of avoiding them and fleeing to other topics in the comfort of the sidelines. Philosophy had to interrogate the sciences and their means with respect to what in them did not become questionable to the sciences themselves amidst the gleam of what is taken for granted.
Now, philosophy has always had all sorts of questions to ask, even of the sciences. But what was it that prompted Husserl to inquire in particular into the sense and ancestry of their validity?
Along with only a few contemporaries, Husserl recognized a danger that had already become apparent with the rise of modern science. For he saw—through all the advancing specialization and segmentation of the sciences, through all their organization and institution, their increasing assemblage of instruments and apparatuses—that there was no internal clarity corresponding to this external unfolding of the sciences and their technique. Husserl found the sciences—he sensed it at first more so than he skeptically perceived it—increasingly directed toward a praxis serviceable for life. This was by no means to be criticized, much less rejected. However, this orientation distanced science more and more from its original idea and the objective for which it had once arisen, and it exhausted the substance of science.
Husserl soon clearly expressed this, and more than two decades before taking up the thematic proper to Crisis, he had already written: “[T]he advances of science have not enriched us in treasures of insight. The world is not in the least more intelligible because of them; it has only become more useful for us.”2
Nothing wrong with this utilitarian view. Throughout his life, Husserl remained an admirer, as he repeatedly stated, of the “technical [kunstmässigen] invention” of scientific thinking and its ingenious “technique” [Technik], for science owed its success to both. However, scientific cognition is not what allows us to understand this cognition itself. Even if, admittedly, it is cognition, insofar as it instructs us in what is the case under determinate instrumental provisions, it is still not insight, which allows us to grasp what scientific cognition means for our world of everyday life and thereby for us. Husserl did not shy away from speaking of a “plight, grown intolerable, of reason.” His task was to put an end to this, specifically “through work that clarifies, makes distinct, and grounds ultimately.”3
To clarify, to make distinct, to ground—how can science thereby regain something of its intelligibility, which has been lost in science’s technical business?
Husserl’s first studies in pure logic already show that this could not be done with the customary attempts at conceptual clarification and the analysis of logical inference and discursive argumentation, the likes of which had been taken up anew by then contemporary positive philosophy.
By contrast, phenomenology’s fundamental imperative of exact seeing required viewing logical entities in such a way that the modes of cognition belonging to them could also be interrogated. For logical entities—as well as all objects of thinking and cognizing—are only given to us “in” acts of thinking and cognizing. Above all, however, they belong to such acts in such a way that it is only insofar as we relate to objects in these acts that we can investigate how and what these objects are.
Accordingly, it is not only the how of the objects of cognition (the question concerning the totality of their properties) but also the what (and thus the problematic of their modes of being) that falls into the investigative dimension of the modes of cognition of objects. This state of affairs not only became fundamental for Husserl’s phenomenology; it remained absolutely determinative.
With it, Husserl touched on the fundamental topic, which under the heading of intentionality initially concealed more than it disclosed: that subjective intuiting and thinking are capable of directing themselves to things that lie outside of them, that stand opposed to them, things that are objects [Gegen-stand] in the literal sense. They are not in consciousness but beyond it, present as objects in the world, and in such a way that we are capable of cognitively reaching them, of “meeting” them and, in the case where we do not meet them—that is, where we err—of cognizing this, too.
Husserl did not cease to see a wonder and a profound philosophical riddle in this intentional structure of our consciousness in which all problems of subject and object, thinking and being, reason and actuality are enclosed. It does not allow itself to be completely deciphered. However, to the extent to which it allows itself to be unveiled, one can at least clarify how our consciousness functions cognitively. And to that extent, at any rate, one can understand (1) what it means to cognize something and not merely to mean it; (2) what it means to say that something is or is not this as opposed to that; and (3) what ultimately is contained in our words when we speak of the being or nonbeing of things, or even of the being of the world and ultimately of our own being.
It was here, then, and nowhere else, that one would find those “matters” that were to be investigated for phenomenology: not in the things and affair-complexes of the world but in the modes of relation in which we, as subjects, make worldly occurrences—and among these ourselves too—into our objects.
With this determination of its material domain, however, Husserl had obviously taken phenomenology up on its promise in a much more fundamental way than first appeared to have been done in departing from the question of truth in formal logic. Phenomenology first of all had to attack much more basic modes of cognition than logical or other scientific ones and make them accessible to phenomenological analysis. These were modes of seeing and thinking in which the subject, prior to all science, relates itself to the world cognitively and does so very well, even if it knows nothing at all about science.
For the task of clarifying the sense of the sciences, however, this implies first and foremost the insight that the edifice of theoretical science is not something intelligible of itself and that the “world of science” is not something that—like a second world, so to speak—could be erected in detachment from the world of our everyday practical life, even if this is done for the purpose of allowing an otherwise absent kind of objectivity finally to enter into this world with the help of scientific formulas.
With this, then, Husserl sketched out a fully determinate regress for phenomenology, a recourse to the original modes of the encounter between subject and world. For it was only out of and from these modes of encounter that scientific acts of cognition were to be made perspicuous in their objectifying achievement.
Husserl’s endeavor to push forward to the final, attainable origins of our relations to the world—to grasp these purely and to keep our view of them free from everything that could tarnish it—ultimately forced him to that radical methodological measure that marks the turn to transcendental phenomenology: the transcendental reduction. Husserl thereby took up the customary transcendental problematic (which concerns the conditions of the possibility of cognition) in his own way. At the same time, he radicalized it in that he rendered inoperative the validity of all judgments about being and beings. Indeed, he “bracketed” our collective naive faith in the world in which we unreflectively presuppose the actuality of the world. In this much discussed reductive step, in the inhibition of all commonly executed validities, Husserl found the decisive means for making precisely these validities themselves into the object of phenomenological analyses of origin.
This is not the place even for a provisional elaboration of these analyses, or even to sketch in the coarsest of detail the microscopy driven ever further by Husserl (indeed, driven precisely in the direction of the question of sense and validity). Ultimately, the most important result of these analyses was this: in principle, subject and world do not relate to one another as though the one simply comes upon the other, as though the subject at best could set out merely to explore the world in passive reception and then merely discern ever more exactly how it is allegedly in itself. Husserl’s analyses culminate rather in an insight that we constantly keep concealed from ourselves as we unreflectively live in the world—that the world, with everything in it, is a world constituted by us; a world that does not possess its being-sense of its own accord but rather receives it in reference to us. What we in our usual looking in and at the world itself think we must find or even reject in the sense is in actuality our part: brought forth from the inexhaustible, infinite stream of subjective intentional life as an “ultimately achieving life,” there is sense, achieved and founded in multifaceted intersubjective interweavings. It is a sense that is posited and thereafter validated in experiences, struck out in the conflict of experience, critically corrected and only in this way accessible to rational legitimation.
The circumstance that, as Husserl pointedly said, “reason alone determines what actuality is” had many consequences for the further unfolding of his phenomenology. Above all, there was this one: the illumination of the sense of the truth of the sciences ultimately announces itself to be more than a self-appointed task within a limited epistemological problem perspective. The task was accordingly not merely to illuminate reason in all the attainable transcendental conditions of its possible achievements in order that anything like world and actuality can be understood at all; beyond that, reason was to be interrogated with respect to the way in which it operates as concrete reason while constituting a particular historical actuality.
I will not discuss here how Husserl—methodically and consistently exploiting his intentional-analytic tools—eventually also became aware of domains of phenomena such as history and tradition and not least in terms of their significance for the foundation of phenomenology itself. The fact that phenomenology finds itself in a tradition—and has to understand itself as a philosophical inheritance with a long past (a fact fiercely denied in the beginning)—opens up, however, not merely a new depth dimension for the problematic of its self-elucidation and self-grounding.
For Husserl, the problem of the clarification of the sense of the sciences thereby also moves into a new light: theoretical sciences were not simply there timelessly from the very beginning of time but rather arose at a particular time and entered into history—and not just sometime somewhere, but more than two thousand years ago in classical Greece as the original site of a philosophy that continues to be influential today. Clearly, these sciences would henceforth have to be followed back into deeper layers of their historical-genetic constitution with respect to that upon which the probing glance inquiring into their essence falls. In the process, the phenomenological glance also has to affirm its own historical contingency. It has to grasp itself as looking back from a concrete present situation that justifies this phenomenological glance in the first place and makes it urgent. Phenomenological seeing is henceforth also a “seeing” of one’s own historical situation, from which it acquires its perspective. With that, Husserl’s question concerning the sense and validity of the sciences also enters into a new initial position and into a new horizon of problems.
That Husserl registered the general situation of his time as a crisis situation by no means occurred merely from a vantage point partly determined by his personal life fortunes. Spiritual and political turmoil had already awakened in him an awareness of a crisis on our continent in the first decades of our century. Husserl merely shared this awareness with many of his contemporaries.
Thus, Husserl could quite rightly refer to the “frequently treated theme of the European crisis.”4 These remarks are found in the introduction to that much noticed Vienna double lecture from May 1935, which became the nucleus of a new work, the last from his own hand, titled The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy.
Husserl provided a fundamentally new aspect for the crisis-theme, however, by developing the historical-philosophical idea of European humanity and revealing in it the essential function of philosophy and the sciences that have emerged from it. For the crisis under discussion was, for him, essentially a crisis of European philosophy; and only from philosophy could one grasp what Husserl then analyzed as the crisis of the European sciences and, having said that, as the crisis of European culture.
Naturally, this crisis did not concern the scientificity [Wissenschaftlichkeit] of the sciences, which had never been in doubt, but rather “what they, or what science in general, had meant and could mean for human existence.” Husserl continues, “The exclusiveness with which the total world-view of modern man, in the second half of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined by the positive sciences and be blinded by the ‘prosperity’ they produced, meant an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity.”5 At stake are thus questions that concern the sense of human existence and its loss of sense, the reason and unreason of human beings, their freedom and responsibility. Reason, however, we later read, “allows for no differentiation into ‘theoretical,’ ‘practical,’ ‘aesthetic,’ or whatever,” but designates “that which man qua man, in his innermost being, is aiming for, that which alone can satisfy him.”6
From the beginning of modern times, scientific reason had been positivistically restricted to the mere exploration of objective facts, and in the process, all human evaluative opinions were excluded. This exclusion brought with it a loss of the vital significance of the sciences, something Husserl had identified early on as a disappearing of the intelligibility of the sciences. Now, interpreting this disappearance as a crisis of science meant, for Husserl, grasping it essentially as a symptom of an impotence on the part of the one science that was the common foundation for all positive sciences: philosophy. With the ascent of the modern sciences, philosophy had increasingly forfeited its own scientificity, even though it had once, through Plato, set the measure and guideline of scientific rigor. Of course, it had done this in such a way that all questions concerning the human being as a rational being were resolved in ancient philosophical science. Accordingly, what later came to light as a crisis was ultimately the decay of the unity of philosophy, science, and a truly humane form of human existence determined by rational insight.
It was precisely in this decay that Husserl saw the shortcoming of “a rational culture.” For him, however, it was not a dark fate, an impervious destiny. On the contrary, according to Husserl, it can be made “understandable and transparent against the background of the teleology of European history that can be discovered philosophically.”7
So as not to misinterpret this teleology in the sense of a dubious historical metaphysics, one must regard Husserl’s conception of history as it comes into play in the context of his transcendental phenomenology. One must also understand the concept of the “European”—in both the breadth and peculiarity of its meaning as intended by Husserl—from the perspective of questioning developed by him.
Here, of course, Europe does not designate a continent that could be geographically defined. Husserl explicitly includes within the concept the collective culture of the Western world. Europe—that is for him a determinate “spiritual shape,” a “unity of a spiritual life” that transcends national differences,8 decisively molded by science as the binding inheritance of Greek philosophy.
This does not entail any kind of privileging with respect to other peoples and human groups. All the same, there is something unique contained in this—Husserl also circumscribes it with an “entelechy”—which, once it had broken out in Greece, seems to be enacted in being human as such.9 Not, however, as though it were a question of a purposiveness in the manner of biological development. “There is,” Husserl writes, “essentially no zoology of peoples.” For they are all spiritual unities and as such they never have, not even in the European cultural sphere, an attained or attainable, mature, final shape.
When Husserl goes on to add that what is unique to spiritual Europe also becomes palpable to non-European human groups and a motivation for them to Europeanize, he is not thereby predicting a factical development, the likes of which has been distinctly on display only in recent decades with the globalization of science and technology. Rather, he saw the possibility of this development as having been given from the very beginning in the telos of Greek philosophy, in the primal phenomenon of spiritual Europe. It was the singular feature of Greek philosophy, however, that it posited a determinate idea of truth against the truth of prescientific life. It sought unconditioned, ultimately grounded truth—and, thus, a truth for which one could only recently be responsible.
However, this entails an infinity—not just of tasks but of infinite tasks. Greek philosophy broke free from the spell of the finite questioning of everyday life and put an “ideal praxis of pure thought” through idealization and construction in the place of real praxis, thus converting a prescientific-practical interest into a purely theoretical interest. In doing so, philosophy became a science of ideas: producing and examining ideas, yet, with every validation in the realm of facts, only ever approaching ideas and never attaining them once and for all.10
In mathematics—initially with the discovery of the infinite, then in the mathematization of nature since Galileo—this inheritance of ancient philosophy has remained operative. However, here—as distinguished from in philosophy itself—it has brought about something unusual. Husserl discovered that with mathematical science, “an entirely different temporality,” and with it a new form of historicality, had come into the world. For the insights of modern natural science do not consume themselves like other insights. After the method of successfully acquiring these insights (secured through critical controls) has been developed, they are imperishable in a unique way, and their production and validation through however many people, when and wherever, always brings forth identically the same thing so far as sense and validity are concerned. On the other hand, however, along with what is cognized in this way, new material for further research tasks is always also delivered.
Science, then, understood in this way, is an open infinity of tasks. At any given time, a finite number of these tasks has already been “settled” and their resolutions are preserved in enduring validity through all transformations of historical time—resolutions that nevertheless can continually be “superseded” by others in an interminable, open futural horizon. It is not only that the basis for the progress of the sciences is found here; Husserl also came across the concealed reasons for a noteworthy loss due to the sciences. For what is it supposed to mean that from now on methodological criteria for scientific rationality, objectivity, and truth sustain an advancement of insights among which one at least is neither found nor envisaged: namely, cognition of the human being as subject? For a subject as subject is simply not to be found among the objects of physical science. The world—as physicists describe it, if not profess truly to cognize it—is a world of pure objects. And yet, it is all the same not a different world from the one in which we exist as human subjects and in which alone we can exist.
How did this paradox remain unquestioned for so long? Husserl saw that the exact sciences, along with their grounding, had already arrived at the stage of a completed objectivism. For with the incipient quantification of the world of experience, scientists had understood the confirmation of mathematical-functional interconnections in experience as nothing other than the “discovery” of something existing in the world without the support of the subject. With that, however, a fundamental transformation of the sense of the world had taken place.
Since that time, this transformation has been taken for granted, a fact that must be accepted and that cannot be historically annulled. This transformation is also not a falsification of sense, as though it had to be unmasked as a deceptive semblance. (In contrast to this, should it then be possible to see through the true sense of the world as such?) If vague speculations were not to be given free reign, but rather phenomenological analysis were to be set in motion, then this analysis had to face the following assignment: to make intelligible this transformation of the sense of our world by objective science and to do this in such a way that it not only emerges as such a transformation of the sense of our world; rather, it must be done in such a way that at the same time the self-suspending of the subject within the mathematically physically objectified world can be grasped, specifically, as the subject’s own deed and achievement.
Where to begin with such difficult investigations? Was Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology even equipped for this task? Or was phenomenological seeing not overburdened here, if it was still the “given” in the “how of its being given” that was at issue? Did these questions posed by Husserl not already imply that phenomenological intentional analysis would here come to its limits? For it must surely encounter modes of consciousness here in which the subject runs up against the unfamiliarity and opacity of the things that increasingly confront it in a world more and more pervaded by science.
Here it is Husserl’s idea of the transformation of the sense of the world through modern European science in particular that contains the key to an attempt at a resolution, one that can be realized only in the mode of a phenomenological analysis of constitution. For it is not just that the transformation of the world through science falls, from a transcendental phenomenological perspective, within the jurisdiction of world-constituting subjectivity, and—trivially—must be recognized in its endowings of sense [Sinnstiftungen]; rather, it is decisive that, for Husserl, what previously had not been grasped and penetrated in our modern world needed to be grasped specifically as the sedimentation of multifaceted sense-endowments [Sinnstiftungen] that had led the way but were no longer perceivable in actual, everyday observation.
At any rate, for Husserl, there was only one way to offset the ever-growing deficit of sense of our modern world and our own human existence: through regressive historical inquiry into the problems of the primeval constitution of scientific objects; that is, through a sense-historical penetration (something admittedly quite foreign to conventional history) into the concealed depth-layers of acts of constitution that had previously been performed, ultimately leading right back to the recovery of the buried basis from which the sciences had originally grown. Only from this basis could the sciences first be made intelligible with respect to what once determined in detail the activities of their production; and only from this basis could it be made comprehensible what the sciences do to this basis—the “life-world,” as Husserl describes it—and what they do in continuously transforming it.
Accordingly, as intentional-historical analysis, phenomenological analysis demands nothing less than to work back from the multifaceted givennesses of our presently experienced life-world, through the manifold layers of sense of scientific constructs (their concepts, hypotheses, theories) to their constitution from prescientific, life-worldly givennesses. It was from these givennesses that the original sense of those constructs was once produced in vital activity, only then to be overlaid by later sense-formations and thus to be modified. Still, this original sense remained sedimented in all these layers of sense. To grasp positive science as a sedimented sense-history, and thus to learn to see its objectivities no longer as static constructs fashioned all at once and forever but as constructs that came to be in various tiered formations. To do this requires at once reactivating anew the thus sedimented layers of sense in order to make intelligible again from where we now stand how, in a former production, they came to be the kind of givenness that has today become strange for a way of seeing unmediated by phenomenology.
Husserl himself was able to illustrate this concept of a sense-genetic reconstruction of the sciences only exemplarily, as he did above all in exhibiting the individual steps in the constitution of geometrical magnitudes by means of operations from prescientific spatial formations, and in the progressive quantification of nature in Galilean-Newtonian mechanics. For the latter, he also drew on life-worldly givennesses in order to make visible through these examples how modern science had arrived at a knowledge of nature possessing a new kind of calculability and precision.
Furthermore, through a consistent manipulation and continuation of Husserl’s historical-genetic constitutional analysis, the sense-constitutive problematic of the life-world itself can be fundamentally unfolded. For this entails a world that, on the one hand, is to be exposed in a determinate phenomenological problem-perspective as the foundation of the validity of the sciences and, on the other hand, (especially in its respective historical constellation since the beginning of modern science) has also always been a life-world molded by science. Thus, it is fundamentally nothing other than the process of the technicization of the sciences that Husserl grasps as the modern transformation—and covering over—of the sense of the life-world. And Husserl saw perfectly well that this also entailed, in a certain way, a scientific constitution of the life-world. Because the results of scientific research gradually struck the life-world (namely, by converting it into objects and events serviceable for life and in this way assimilating it more and more), science in turn long ago obtained a “basic function” for the life-world, at least in its modern, European concretions.
With this alone, however, little would have been attained for the phenomenological mastery of the Crisis-thematic if a path did not make itself available for sense-genetic-constitutive analysis such that the subject, which subject is in the life-world in the same manner that the subject of science is) at the same time recognizes in this analysis its duplication and identity.
What Husserl—henceforth taking the life-world as a “guiding clue” for the transcendental investigation of subjectivity—analyzed in detail in this connection belongs to what is most difficult but also, ultimately, to what is most fruitful in what transcendental phenomenology undertook to illuminate. Here too, this is owing not least of all to the integration of the sedimented sense-history of the subject itself in its self-constitution.
Only with the two together, however—the clarification of the sense of the objective sciences through reactivation of their sense-sediments and the genetic-constitutive self-illumination of subjectivity, an “interplay” in which “the one must help the other”11—could Husserl see phenomenology approaching what he ultimately envisioned as the concrete goal of all research into the origins of modern science. It was a goal he had envisioned since he had taken the sciences into account as the essential and unifying molding force of spiritual Europe, and he also recognized the danger they presented to our experience of sense amid the dichotomy between science’s great usefulness and its deeply buried total sense.
The goal Husserl set was nothing less than restoring the original idea of philosophy through transcendental phenomenology. To renew (“quite earnestly,” as Husserl once affirmed) philosophical science in the manner in which it had been in Greek antiquity the guide to a successful life from well-rounded rational insight, and to do this specifically with respect to the fundamentally transformed conditions generated by the objective sciences for the European world at the beginning of modernity—could Husserl earnestly hope thereby to meet the crisis of European culture, which he grasped as a crisis of reason that had atrophied to merely scientific rationality? Was it possible in this way to recover that reason which, after the ancient model, would not allow a division into theoretical, moral, and whatever other kind of reason—when it was precisely this one reason itself that had produced this division with modern science, and indeed even, as it were, conceded it?
We cannot conclusively and honestly answer this question today. Too much of Husserl’s estate pertaining to this context remains undisclosed: too little has been made accessible from his (in the broadest sense) ethical studies, from his investigations of practical reason, and from the endeavors to embrace practical reason and theoretical reason (and with a methodologically restricted reason of scientific positivity in particular) in a unity that would be transparent to the last detail.
The cautionary judgment offered here, however, does not preclude Husserl’s availing himself for this last question what he had revealed concerning the cohesiveness, if not the unity, of theoretical and practical reason.
Husserl demanded for the sake of philosophy that we must “by radical reflections, seek for ourselves singly and in common the ultimate possibilities and necessities, on the basis of which we can take our position towards actualities in judging, valuing, and acting.”12
The fact that these words, alongside many others, are to be found in a passage in Husserl’s work where one might well be least inclined to look for them—namely, in the introduction to his transcendental-phenomenological groundwork of formal logic—seems to me to be illuminating in multiple respects, and especially for the cohesiveness of theoretical and practical reason as Husserl saw it. For it is not just that Husserl here led these “radical reflections”—namely, sense-genetic analytic reflections—into the field of formal logic, which he had chosen for his entry into phenomenology three decades earlier. Rather, it appears to be much more decisive that the radical reflections on “ultimate possibilities and necessities” are here supposed to be of significance for responsibly taking a position regarding our actuality.
Of all places, how could a postulate of this kind end up in the context of formal logic? If one surveys what Husserl had always understood by “ultimate possibilities” of this kind, these could be understood in the purely theoretical sense. For Husserl dedicated all his might to seeing and seeing into, to analyzing and clarifying the theoretical structures of subject and world. The ultimate possible insight—that was, for him, firstly and lastly, clear and distinct insight, insight into evidence in which, correctly understood, there lay for him at the same time the sole defensible sense of truth, and the one to be secured against every conceivable objection. But how should this kind of “necessity” of reflection reach beyond the theoretical-scientific field into practical necessity for our valuing, acting, and position-taking?
It could hardly have become clear in these brief remarks that in the course of time a noteworthy transformation took place in Husserl’s thought, one that concerned not just transcendental phenomenology (though it was executed in it) but ultimately the interpretation of the sense of philosophy as a whole.
Husserl had already altered his understanding of intentionality and constitution to the effect that present in all judging is “an acting, a practical directedness to aims or ends.” That is to say, in the formation of judgments of whatever kind, we are already “in all seriousness, productively active.”13 That implies, however, that philosophy itself is a fortiori not merely a matter of a theoretical interest purely living itself out. Rather, it is, in the broadest sense of the concept, a praxis, at any rate a “kind of praxis.”14 This insight of Husserl’s came into effect phenomenologically in connection with the Crisis-thematic in particular.
The enduring distinction between technological praxis in the broadest sense and that philosophical activity in which theoretical reason is operative under the idea of a theoretical interest that persists in the face of all technology aside, as Husserl repeatedly emphasizes, theoretical reason is an activity, and as an activity, it is in a position to encroach upon all other praxes as well. Of course, it does not encroach as though it could prescribe concrete maxims of conduct to praxis. As theoretical praxis, its concern is a different one, namely, that of delivering the means required for arriving at clarity in the presuppositions and the sense of technological acting and of rendering this acting accountable by means of insightful judgment resting on the ultimate grounds attainable.
It was not just casually that Husserl in the end, in self-critical reflection on philosophical praxis, bound his idea of ultimate grounding with that of self-responsibility. Indeed, he ultimately equated absolute, theoretical justification with self-responsibility, without thereby having executed a sudden metabasis eis allo genos [change into another genus] from his phenomenology of theoretical reason into that of practical reason.
It was precisely in this equation that Husserl sought to comply with the idea of reason that was to be opposed to—and, in turn, employed against—that “shortcoming of rational culture” in the modern Western world. The goal was thereby not to forfeit the field to a scientific, technically limited rationality, but rather to open the way for a new rational humanity [Humanität] and a humanness [Menschheit] that would first come of age by means of it.
Was this Husserl’s philosophical dream—a late, great hope? Was it a philosophical pioneering for those who were to come after him and who were to carry further a philosophy that was designed to be continued?
Husserl understood his phenomenology as nothing less than “fertile soil for a methodical working philosophy,” as an infinite “ground of experience.”15 And he regarded himself, right up to the end, only as a “beginner” in what he was pleased to designate as “work with the hands” on this fertile soil.
We know just how much of this soil—in spite of the not so small number who work it today in many parts of the world—still remains fallow and perhaps will remain forever uncultivated. And we also know that the trinity of work, patience, and sacrifice that constituted Husserl’s life cannot be repeated, and it cannot be repeated in a deeper sense, too, for every human life is unrepeatable.
Husserl often remarked that he could not live without clarity. It is only against the background of his collected life’s work that one can measure the weight of these words. Certainly, Husserl would not deny the title of true philosopher to those among us who endeavor to be—in Husserl’s most profoundly humane sense—incapable of life, and who strive to remain so for their entire lives.
Translated by Hayden Kee
NOTES
Lecture delivered on April 27, 1988, at Freiburg University at the memorial ceremony for Edmund Husserl on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.
1. Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, trans. Daniel Slager (New York: Archipelago Books, 2004), 66.
2. Edmund Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologische Philosophie, Drittes Buch, Die Phänomenologie und die Fundamente der Wissenschaften, ed. M. Biemel (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1971), 96 [translated by T. E. Klein and W. E. Pohl as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Third Book, Phenomenology and the Foundation of the Sciences, trans. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), 82].
3. Husserl, 96–97 [83].
4. Edmund Husserl, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie, ed. Walter Biemel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), 314 [translated by David Carr as The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 269].
5. Husserl, Krisis, 3–4 [5–6].
6. Husserl, 275 [341].
7. Husserl, 347 [299].
8. Husserl, 318–319 [273–274].
9. Husserl, 13–14, 320–321 [15–16, 274–275].
10. Husserl, 25–32, 324 [28–34, 278–279].
11. Husserl, 59 [25].
12. Edmund Husserl, Formale und Transzendentale Logik, ed. Paul Janssen (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 10 [translated by Dorion Cairns as Formal and Transcendental Logik (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969), 5–6].
13. Husserl, 175–176 [167].
14. Husserl, 9, 35 [5, 32].
15. Husserl, Krisis, 104 [100].