The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology

by Edmund Husserl, David Carr (Translator)

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl's last great work, is important both for its content and for the influence it has had on other philosophers. In this book, which remained unfinished at his death, Husserl attempts to forge a union between phenomenology and existentialism.

Husserl provides not only a history of philosophy but a philosophy of history. As he says in Part I, "The genuine spiritual struggles of European humanity as such take the form of struggles between the philosophies, that is, between the skeptical philosophies--or nonphilosophies, which retain the word but not the task--and the actual and still vital philosophies. But the vitality of the latter consists in the fact that they are struggling for their true and genuine meaning and thus for the meaning of a genuine humanity."

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Science, Classics, German Literature, Psychology, Academic

405 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1954

About the author

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (Dr. phil. hab., University of Halle-Wittenberg, 1887; Ph.D., Mathematics, University of Vienna, 1883) was a philosopher who is deemed the founder of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, believing that experience is the source of all knowledge, while at the same time he elaborated critiques of psychologism and historicism.

Born into a Moravian Jewish family, he was baptized as a Lutheran in 1887. Husserl studied mathematics under Karl Weierstrass, completing a Ph.D. under Leo Königsberger, and studied philosophy under Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf. Husserl taught philosophy, as a Privatdozent at Halle from 1887, then as professor, first at Göttingen from 1901, then at Freiburg im Breisgau from 1916 until his 1928 retirement.

Reviews

[Steve]

A philosopher's desperate play for relevance in 1935/36.


Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) is regarded as the founder of (philosophical) phenomenology, an extremely influential development of modern philosophy which tries to capture the nature of the Subject through a combination of close description and transcendental theorizing.

The word "phenomenology" literally means the study of phenomena. When an elementary particle physicist speaks of phenomenology, what he refers to is a description of the experimentally observed behavior of elementary particles, already (necessarily) partially interpreted - for example, "when a proton collides with an antiproton, then this, this and this happens" - but without a thorough theoretical "explanation." The word is in use in a number of fields, including philosophy, though the resemblance of the various flavors of phenomenology is often hard to make out. Compare, for example, the physicist's phenomenology with Husserl's, for whom phenomenology was “the science of the essence of consciousness.” But all of them try to provide as minimally a theory laden description of "reality" as possible, at least in principle.

The phenomenologist reveals himself in his choice of fundamental phenomenon - in the near infinitude of phenomena, where does he focus his eye first, which is the key he uses to unlock the door of "reality"? Since it is our own conscious sensations to which we have the most direct access with the least amount of adduced concepts, in an attempt to strip away from "reality" the thick veneer of conceptualization, the many layers of intervening concepts and modes of regarding "reality" which have been built up over the ages by human beings trying to understand that "reality" and then to try to recognize "reality" for what it "really is," the focus of the philosophical phenomenologist is on various aspects of experienced consciousness in relation to that which is outside that consciousness. That, too, is a vast expanse.

Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (1936) (*) is the last text Husserl published, though much has been subsequently published from his Nachlass.(**) It provides a foretaste of a new turn in his thought, which is developed further (but incompletely) in posthumously published texts. I'm in no position to give an overview of Husserl's oeuvre here, so I'll just try to cast an idea of what Husserl does in this piece.

Subtitled "An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy," Krisis begins with a picture of the history of philosophy in which, for the Greeks, philosophy was a unity that contained all subfields of knowledge, a unity that was regained during the Renaissance's attempt to resurrect antique thought and was still maintained through the 18th century's Enlightenment. However, the contrast between the cumulative successes of the hard sciences (still called natural philosophy in the 18th century) and the apparent lack of progress with the metaphysical and ethical problems left in philosophy's hands became hard to overlook for the few true philosophers who remained. Indeed, the prospect, the ideal of a universal philosophy that could provide mankind with all the answers began to crumble, and though this did not directly affect the practical and theoretical successes of the hard sciences, it threatened their deeper, original purposes. Husserl claims, in fact, that since the Renaissance "European mankind," after discarding the message of value, sense and purpose provided in the Middle Ages by Christianity, was obliged to seek the same in this universal philosophy. And since the latter was crumbling, European mankind was itself in crisis.

Horrified by the growing irrationality, mysticism and violence around him, Husserl tried to find a solution (or at least tried to suggest to the despairing a possible solution in the very, very long term) in a modification of his own philosophical phenomenology. In an attempt to return to a totalizing, universal philosophy that includes all branches of knowledge as subfields and that again privileges reason, Husserl spends almost all of the text reviewing the development of philosophy and the sciences since the Renaissance while emphasizing his view that the sciences, in their specialized and undeniable successes, had become a technical art alienated from its roots and had, in effect, thrown the baby out with the bath water in their emphasis on objectivity, on eliminating the Subjective from their domains. In the process Husserl tries to motivate the ineluctable necessity of what he calls a "radical transcendental Subjectivism," which, however, he does not describe in this text...

We'll see how much of his vision of a radical Subjectivism he was able to work out in the year or so of life that was left to him; for this it will be necessary to read the posthumously published works. What is certain is that (1) his earlier works on the transcendental Subjectivism which is his philosophical phenomenology have been extremely influential, and (2) this particular text, this introduction that only alludes vaguely to the topic being introduced, this particular text I take to be Husserl's defiant pledge of allegiance to the hoary Western philosophical tradition based on reason, a pledge cast into the face of a world swiftly going mad and preparing to tear the flesh off its own body in the name of ideologies of power and hate.


(*) Available in English translation under the title The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.

(**) Because the Nazis had forbidden him to publish in Germany, Krisis first appeared in a journal based in Belgrade. Though baptized as a Lutheran in 1886, Husserl was born to Jewish parents, and that was more than sufficient for a Publikationsverbot.

Rating

http://leopard.booklikes.com/post/118...

[Kamakana · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you like this review i now have website: www.michaelkamakana.com

260616: this is a later addition: looked at this review and realized i have once again relayed more 'how' i took it, why i liked it (phenomenological judgement), rather than 'what' it is (positivistic assertion)... i do not know how often i will apologize for not being a philosopher... this is not an error. though hs is more 'style', more 'how', than some positivistic argument, it is possible to see how his insights animated so many other thinkers. hs is of his time, is concerned to delineate his thoughts eg. phenomenological 'bracketing' (epoche), eidetic reduction, as born of long engagement with traditional european, first greek then german and french thinkers, though he has little on scots/anglo 'empiricists'. but he does not come out of nowhere, he does offer some commentary against the sort of 'existential phenomenology' of Heidegger, but the most powerful, fruitful, concept he uses here is the 'lifeworld', and through it feels he escapes threat of solipsism... it is wonderful that even now in the 21st century, his thought can be so inspiring...

first review 260616: i am not a professional philosopher. in the sense, that is, of someone whose close inspection of this or any other text, whose deconstruction, whose guiding passion, is to examine and logically explicate or argue with given ideas. on the other, i do like to read philosophy texts- mostly 'continental', mostly 'phenomenology', such as Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy so far often on (2015) rather than by the big names, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty... and perhaps prefer having their ideas explained sympathetically more than logically dissected...

i think i can follow and understand critique resonant in this text, can find here and there what i had previously read in books on hs- but would hesitate to first here find these thematic areas myself, to decide he is saying this or that idea, to decide he means specific lines of thought, to decide i could create one of those books on hs. i enjoy not entirely closed or systematic reading. having read several books previous to this, rather quickly as a piece of literature, my 'philosophical/logical' impression is probably lacking, but this reflects why i read this or any philosophy...

it has been many years since i took a survey philosophy course at u, and when i continued later i started at the difficult and somewhat modern end with Being and Nothingness by Sartre, only then turning to rather more introductory texts of various subjects philosophy of... language, religion, mind, art, science. then i read the series by COPLESTON that presented a historical overview of western philosophy. then i read intros to big names eg. kant, descartes, hegel... then i read an introduction to- and read a reader of phenomenology, by moran. then i read and continued the continental european philosophers series by mcgill-queens. by this point i had started to read texts on chosen thinkers, eventually by chosen thinkers. i am not studying philosophy. nobody marks my reading. this is for me 'fun'...

'fun'? well i might have a different conception of 'fun'. this work by husserl surprises me- i had read a little by him that was very dense and possibly inaccessible to 'cold' readers, i had heard hs was particularly difficult to read of all phenomenologists, i had the idea hs was better as inspiration than reading. and of all of these i was surprised. perhaps it is having read so much phenomenology, so much of the 'epoche', so much on his ideas, so much that i read this in a 'literary' manner and not directly as a 'logical' text, and maybe this last great work by the man is actually most accessible of all his work... but i found this work lucid and fascinating. if you want long, long, complex sentences that often wander through clauses, through time, through this sense, that emotion, the answer is simple: read marcel proust...

maybe it is the translation? this was great to read: hs investigates, thinks over, questions not rhetorically but earnestly- never abandons thinkers, never refuses questions. offers not necesarily a 'system' but a 'style', where it is not 'what is' in any 'positivistic' way, but 'how is' in conscious ways. so he is not as fluid a writer as say Henri Bergson or Being and Nothingness... but the ideas are great. had the idea 'phenomenology' is supposed to be independent of time and place, well this might have been originally so, here hs gives the history of philosophy, his sense of how it is greek and 'european', his certainty there is a crisis particular to its history, his certainty of logical, rational validity over purely existential, irrational, thinking ascendent in his times (mid 1930s Germany)...

as mentioned i am not a philosopher. as mentioned i have read on if not by a lot of philosophers. so i can follow the history of philosophy hs offers: i can see once again the importance of descartes' original technique but also how it did not go far enough for hs. i can understand dismissal of extreme skepticism and the creation of 'fiction' by empiricists such as hume, the inadvisable 'sham' philosophy of certain logical positivists, all the ways the 'world' is 'real' but this is only the beginning, how there are in the 'real' in all of us humans not merely 'idealistic', not finally 'materialistic', how intersubjectivity is basic to human being... there are many great ideas and once again, the author did not live to complete it...

text is about 265 pages, useful appendices about 135 pages... so there are a lot of texts to integrate in texts read, and you cannot help but be sad hs never finished it, sad for its incompleteness, but truly inspired by what is there... it is not surprising 'phenomenology' became such a major 'style' of thought in continental philosophy of the 20th century... this is a great book...

rec this to start:Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks

020220:
more
Husserl
Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks
Husserl's Phenomenology
Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology
The Ethics of Husserl's Phenomenology
Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Husserl thinks the crisis transpiring in his world in science and psychology can be resolved if we can only discover the unknowable thoughts between our thoughts and reconcile the ontological difference between what��s inside us and outside of us.

For Husserl there is only one world and cogito ergo sum is the starting point for how to get at its meaning. Descartes assumes the world away to get at his ground of being as truth and Husserl embraces that also, therefore assuming the real world away to get at a universal world.

Husserl does not walk away from his seminal phenomenology book Ideas and continues to bracket the world such that our conscious experiences are our intentionality about the thing under consideration, all of our reality is hidden behind our hopes, fears, wishes, desires or angst about the thing under consideration, we never see a train, we only experience its effects as it affects us through our intentionality.

This book, and due to the nature of it not being completed and sometimes cohering oddly, I hesitate to call it a book, but, nevertheless, most of what the author is getting at overall comes across, and is an easier read than Ideas which is a devilishly difficult book to understand. I had once made the mistake of believing somebody when they told me that Husserl had walked away from phenomenology. After having read this book, I definitely know that is not true since this book at its core assumes phenomenology. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit which is not about phenomenology despite its title is also a key book for getting at what Husserl means.

Husserl thinks that science will know itself even with an infinite horizon and infinite progress going forward, for contrast Heidegger believed ‘science will never know itself’. There are truths that are within us through our intuitions which we all have embedded and get revealed through the pre-given life-world experiences as long as we are aware of the crisis that we brought onto ourselves. Three key words from this book: pre-given, life-world and intuition.

Husserl bemoans the fact of a crisis by criticizing the process of science for rigorously objectifying the world into things and forgetting the human part of the equation that goes into the understanding and its meaning.

As math is to science, he wants to make phenomenology to psychology and return the intuition by understanding the pre-given of our life-world into a universal understanding across all time and space such that science and psychology will understand itself beyond itself. In his struggle for warning against the crisis, he gives too much credence to mathematical certainty.

Husserl wants a transcendental phenomenology to replace Kant’s transcendental deduction. Before Kant all philosophy put truth outside of us and made it potentially knowable, Kant through his Copernicus Revolution hides truth within us, and Husserl through his phenomenology wants to make our subject the object and not prioritize either by also making the object the subject never realizing that he’s assumed the world away, the world we actually live in. He is dangerously close to making the world into the silliness of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism with A=A, but Husserl is a philosopher of the first rank and includes the German Idealists into his world view.

Husserl understands that Kant synthesizes the experiential Hume and the idealism of Leibniz. Husserl makes it more complicated than that, but he does go from Galileo to Kant through Hume, Berkeley and Leibniz and then follows through with the German Idealist. He doesn’t mention Bergson at all in this book, but I felt a lot of Bergson within Husserl. Read Bergson’s Creative Evolution to see if you agree, at least you’ll understand why Bergson earned the Nobel Prize for literature.

I never can get at my thoughts between my thoughts and the ontological difference between what’s inside me and what’s outside of me, the harder I search the further away I seem to get. At times and especially when I reflect beyond the moment, I feel separated and alienated and isolated, and I think that’s part of the human experience and that Husserl take on the European crisis (he does focus on Europe and USA) is only exasperating the real crisis that is going on in Europe in 1936. He makes European understanding about itself special and universal and gives unknowingly an opening for those who want to sublimate themselves as part of the self-selected privileged class for the nation, or in a word, Fascists.

The real crisis is unfolding right in front of Husserl’s eyes and he misses the object for the subject while staying within a cogito ergo sum reality that assumes away the world in order to get at truth. According to him, truth has a receding horizon as we continually approach it and is approachable but each step forward opens up other paths.

Husserl thinks the Enlightenment went too far with its brand of rationalism while at the same time he wants to preserve rationalism in his on way (intuition, pre-given, lifeworld through transcendental phenomenology). He thinks humanism is misguided and needs to focus beyond humans in order to correct the crisis of the modern. Fascists and modern-day Republicans would align with that, but I know Husserl would be neither even though he is opening up a door for them to slither through.

I understand why this book is in the curriculum for St. Johns College (that’s how I found it). Husserl is not really seeing the crisis that is going around him and is even opening up doors accidentally that should have remained closed. Phenomenology was dying a slow death and will die with Gadamer’s 1960 book Truth and Method, and despite its death I still enjoy reading these kinds of books. I have a similar kind of feeling for this book as I did to his Ideas, both books are excellent philosophy books and clearly have influenced 20th century philosophy, but fundamentally I think each book is flawed with its premises to the point of being the causes of the real crisis in today’s world.

[Rhonda]

Critically important book in the foundation of phenomenology. It is hardly hyperbole that Husserl recognized the profound crisis of European sciences. However, it is even more profound as to why he sees phenomenology as a method for extricating said sciences from their own ridicule.
Historically speaking, it is also profound that while many may have taken Husserl's advice and built on methods of phenomenology, the sciences themselves have become more abstracted in their searches for meaning and interpretation. They have developed models of consistency, but their functionality depends, almost exclusively, on hypotheses which, like the evanescent Higgs-Boson particle, seem as elusive as 19th century aether.

[Alina · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was the first work of Husserl's I've read. I'm not sure whether this played a role in my dislike for this book. Overall, there seem to be very few ideas presented, and they are presented in awful ways. Firstly, Husserl just asserts these ideas in extreme repetition; there is very little positive argumentation, and these repetitive assertions rarely clarify these ideas in further detail but are literal restatements in fancy new phrases. Secondly, Husserl seems to go on at length in certain quasi-historical narratives that supposedly support his point; either he does not articulate these narratives well enough to make their supporting role clear, or they really are just tangential.

Here are the few ideas I could pick up from the text. Husserl starts off the text with describing this crisis that he takes natural sciences to be in. This crisis is something science was fated to encounter, given the foundational assumptions and structure of explanation that sciences take as valid. Particularly, the predecessors of enlightenment science (Husserl focuses on Galileo as a case study) assumed that the perfect geometric forms that they could study in mathematics were more real than the actual shapes found in nature. (This seems to be a Platonic worldview, so I'm not sure why Husserl doesn't start off with Plato as culprit of this essence of science). More generally, science assumes that perfect or ideal laws and other scientific explanatory entities (geometric forms, masses, gravity, etc.) are more fundamentally real than the perceptual world we encounter, and only those can be relied on for explaining this world we encounter.

Moreover, our modern culture has fallen in love with the scientific image. Laypeople regard the fact that has been 'confirmed by science' as equivalent to it being absolutely true; and other types of explanation (e.g., philosophical or poetic explanations) are deemed as fanciful. Laypeople have incorporated scientific talk into their everyday speech; think of how some of us refer to our happiness as "dopamine rushes," or think about making life decisions in terms of probabilities.

Natural sciences, however, cannot explain anything that has to do with our human subjectivity. This is not an accidental fact; it is essential to the structure of scientific explanation itself. (I really wish Husserl examined this claim in more detail; it is a fascinating one. Alas, he does not). So there is something fundamentally deficient, incomplete, misleading, or wrongheaded about scientific truth and pursuits. And this is where the crisis emerges.

Husserl, after setting out these points mainly through stipulation, then presents a bit of his own solution to this crisis. Husserl claims that the only method that can get at the nature of our subjectivity is his method of transcendental or phenomenological reduction. This involves attending to our first personal experience while "bracketing" off the natural attitude. This attitude consists in our assumption that whatever identity and meaning we make of objects that are encountered are factual; for example, I stretch my hands out in front of myself, and in the natural attitude, I take these to be just human hands that belong to me. In this bracketing, we cannot help but still see the world with this natural attitude (I cannot stop seeing my hands as hands), but we choose to form the subsequent judgment that reality is a more complicated matter than this, that the story does not stop here.

Husserl thinks we can get at a lot of truths about the nature of our subjectivity through such skepticism. He thinks that we discover that perceptual forms are interdependent on our actions (my hands show up as bigger or smaller relative to my distance from them; and depending on my activity, they show up as having a practical role relative to that activity). We discover that our lifeworld (the phenomenal world that shows up for us) has a horizon, that is a limit on the possible perceptions and actions that can be taken in this world. This horizon is malleable; as we commit new actions and gain new perceptions, this set of possibilities adjusts accordingly. We discover that our lifeworld is an intersubjective phenomenon; the perceptions and actions available to us are socionormative, or are constrained by our relationships to one another.

Husserl claims that this lifeworld is the fundamental starting point for any natural science: any of the observations, thoughts, data-collection that a scientist can have are constrained by, or found in, this lifeworld. Husserl is not clear on what he means to imply or draw out from this. It might seem that he means this as an epistemological point: we can evaluate natural scientific knowledge well only if we first have a grasp on the lifeworlds that the scientists who produced that knowledge encountered. Or, it might be that Husserl envisions his phenomenological method to be an important accompaniment to any scientific endeavor: philosophers should be employed because they are needed for scientists to do better science!

Overall, one could say this book consists of two parts: Husserl does a bit of philosophy of science, giving a critique on the limitations of scientific methodology; and then he does a bit of proposing his own philosophical method, which he thinks can account for those phenomena that spill over those limits of science. Husserl would've made his points much more forcefully if he could distill his major points and put them in 2 neat papers. It might look like Husserl has made a lot of points, given my summary above. But beware: these points are diluted and scattered throughout a confusing 400 pages; they are written about in a convoluted way; and they are barely defended or analyzed.

I'd recommend potential readers to instead look into Feyerabend's Against Method; that's an engrossing, intense treatise on the limits of science. It makes all of Husserl's phil sci points and more, and with much better argumentation and historical analysis. Regarding the phenomenology part, I'd recommend potential readers to read Zahavi's work on Husserl and phenomenology instead (he's written Phenomenology: The Basics and Husserl's Phenomenology).

[Jake · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm probably an idiot, but to me this book was just everything at the moment I read it. I had read Ideas I -- or some part of it -- as an undergraduate and it made no impression. But now in my middle age I read somewhere that Husserl had a critique of positivism that was clutch, and lo and behold...

Sad digression: Undergraduates are idiots, and that those of us who didn't understand that we hadn't really learned anything in undergraduate school, no matter how much money it cost (and goddamn did it cost a lot), were the worst off of the lot. I spent most of my life thinking I knew what it mean to be educated, that I was, in fact, educated. What a goddamn shame.

Anyway, that's nothing to do with the Crisis. I think it's awesome, it reignited my appetite for philosophy and learning in general, but if you are reading this you already probably know enough to know whether you care about Eddie Husserl, and don't need me to tell you. And if that's not the case, there's someone smarter than me on this website who can tell you whether this is a good Husserl book to dive in with. For me, it was exactly the right thing at the right time; and I hadn't read a book in 20 years when I picked it up, and it spoke to me pretty quickly, so I think you just might enjoy it too.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although it's certainly an important work it's probably better to know about than to have read. Husserl is more of a thinker than a writer. But, hey, if people see it on your coffee table they'll think that you're smart.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like Descartes' Meditations, Husserl's attempt to establish a fundamental ground for philosophy is a glorious failure, well worth the read both as a precursor to Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau Ponty and as the last great attempt to establish a foundation for scienctific investigation.

[Seppe]

Een eerste lezing van een werk dat heel wat meer voorkennis verwacht. Ik haalde vooral iets uit het eerste hoofdstuk filosofiegeschiedenis over de crisis in de wetenschappen zoals Husserl die zag.

De crisis van objectivisme in de Europese wetenschappen was een appèl voor verandering, Husserl reageert op het afdoen van de filosofie als rationalistische methode om op zoek te gaan naar De waarheid. Zijn kritiek op de geesteswetenschappen die zich voordoen als verklarende natuurwetenschappen (Dilthey) zoals vroeg 20ste-eeuwse psychologie en hun objectiverende neigingen zijn uiterst actueel. Geschreven net voor WOII (1936) focust hij zich met 'crisis' niet op activisme voor een politieke reden, maar wijst hij eerder op decadentie en teloorgang van de wetenschappen als producenten van kennis. Wellicht voor deze actuele resonantie dat deze uitgave in het Nederlands werd vertaald in 2018. In de toevoegingen door de redacteur is bij goede keuze ook de lezing "De crisis van de Europese mensheid en de filosofie" toegevoegd, waarin de kern van het boek zelf is te lezen.

Om iets van steek te krijgen uit Husserls (toch wel gefaalde) methodiek om een principe en fundament te creëren met zijn transcendentele fenomenologie (hoofdstukken 2 en 3) lijkt het me meer dan noodzakelijk om eerst vertrouwd te zijn met zijn andere werken, zoals Ideeen en Logische Untersuchungen.

[Cameron · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one ended up a bit of a slog. Husserl's writing has a way of oscillating between lucidity and near-incomprehensibility, often multiple times within a single paragraph. There's no way around it; this guy is hard to read. Which is really saying something coming from a Heidegger enthusiast.

Husserl is most compelling with his historical analysis of the positive sciences as a misguided offshoot of philosophy. For Husserl, philosophy began to lose its way during the Renaissance with the Galilean mathematical idealization of natural phenomenon. But things really got off track with Descartes, who represented a objectivist turn to the question of how the mind can possibly know the world, effectively disclaiming the possibility of a pre-scientific subjective experience of the world.

From Descartes to Hume and later Kant, Husserl believed that philosophy continued to meander further from the unclaimed truth of the transcendental subjective experience and towards a scientific empiricism and a rationalist proto-scientific experience of the world. Of the former truth he spends much of the book crystallizing in a powerfully difficult concept of the "lifeworld" that I would not dare pretend that I understand. All said, some interesting stuff to chew on but the price of admission is high.

[David M · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is probably the most accessible book Husserl published. That doesn't mean it's easy, but compared to Ideas I think most would agree it's relatively readable. He lays out pretty clearly, I thought, what phenomenology is and isn't (not an empirical psychology, most definitely).

Different varieties of primitivism gained ascendance in twentieth century art and philosophy. See, most obviously, Husserl's chief apostate Heidegger. Husserl stands in an interesting relation to this strand of counter-Enlightenment thinking. On the one hand, he never tired of proclaiming that phenomenology was a rigorous science that would provide an ultimate, rational foundation for all knowledge. But then we also see, particularly in this work, a growing disenchantment with the ontology inherited from Galileo and all subsequent mathematical/empirical sciences. Phenomenology ultimately became a project to restore a certain dignity to being, against the prevailing notion that only what can be quantified and manipulated is real.

[Kantor · Rating 4 out of 5]

He llegado hasta unos escritos complementarios que están incluidos en mi edición para complementar el texto original.

Creo que este libro da una introducción a la fenomenología más completa que los otros dos que me he leído. No solo se explican sus detalles más concretos (como en las Lecciones) sino que también se la muestra como consecuencia natural de la historia de la filosofía. Por otro lado, me ha faltado ver una 'puesta en marcha' del método fenomenológico (como en las Meditaciones Cartesianas).

Pese a todo, es muy interesante cómo Husserl trata de hacer una lectura coherente de las supuestas crisis de las ciencias contemporáneas (sobre todo la de la psicología) y de dar una solución a través del análisis fenomenológico.

Le doy un 4 porque ocasionalmente a Husserl le gusta escribir páginas enteras repletas de términos técnicos (y alguna que otra frase-párrafo).

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb. Sometimes very hard to follow, sometimes clear as day. Worth every minute spent.

[Xander · Rating 3 out of 5]

Die Krisis der europaïschen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänemonologie (posthumously published in 1954; written in 1935-1936) is the last work Edmund Husserl ever wrote. Or rather: he wrote the first two parts of the book and was planning to write three more, but he passed away due to illness before being able to finish the book. This fact is in important, since his unfinished manuscript for the third part was collected and integrated with some personal notes, and then – together with the first two finished parts – published by Walter Biemel as one work.

This leads to the unavoidable problem of reading through a work that was still in progress and missing two fifths of its intended content. Add to this the fact that Husserl himself was a philosopher who radically developed his own ideas over a decades long career, and understanding the true intentions and meaning of Husserl’s final work becomes somewhat problematic. Then, why read it? Because Husserl went through a series of temporary philosophical phases over his career and hence picking up where he finished is the best way to understand both his ideas and the reasons why earlier ideas were replaced or modified. Also, it is (presumably) one of Husserl’s more readable works.

In order to understand the book, one has to understand Husserl’s career, which is not hard but it requires some familiarity with the historical tradition within modern philosophy (from Descartes onwards). Husserl, himself educated as both astronomer and mathematician, pretty soon switched to philosophy. This had to do with the radical breakthroughs in philosophy by the end of the nineteenth century: this was the time when both logic and mathematics were deepened by new philosophical discoveries. In Husserl’s time one of the more intriguing questions was the status of numbers, and this is where we have to start our trail.

In general, Husserl’s career can be divided into two phases. The first phase occupies itself with the development of phenomenology as descriptive psychology as a means to deal with the questions: What is a number? And, what is proposition? In short: Husserl delves into the status of the fundamental objects of mathematics and logic. The second phase occupies itself with the transformation of this descriptive psychology into a transcendental philosophy with accompanying method (transcendental phenomenology). Here, Husserl tries to analyse the status of the fundamental objects of the sciences (including both physics and psychology). In the end, Husserl stumbles onto a whole new method that allows him – or so he claims – to re-establish philosophy as a strict science, as the foundation of all of the other sciences (and the whole world – more on that later).

Now, first things first. At the end of the nineteenth century Bertrand Russell offered his own theory of numbers as an answer to the Platonism in mathematics (the notion of numbers as absolute existing ideas). Russell claimed numbers are nothing but sets of sets of concrete worldly objects – i.e. numbers are physical objects. Husserl (around 1891) disagreed and claimed numbers are properties of sets – i.e. sets are not physical objects (their elements are) but psychological activities. For Husserl, analysis of sets had to focus on the psychological act of ‘gathering together’ and reflection upon this collecting. In this, Husserl was influenced by his former inspiratory, Franz Brentano, a philosopher who founded the field of descriptive psychology as the foundation of scientific psychology (i.e. the description and classification of the fundamental objects that psychology then has to explain).

In short, for Husserl the foundation of mathematics consists in (1) clarifying the objects of the mathematical axioms – the task of the psychologist – and (2) deducing theorems from these axioms – the task of the mathematician.

An important contemporary logician, Gottlob Frege, rejected Husserl’s claim that numbers (as fundamental objects of mathematics) are psychological acts. According to Frege, if numbers are pure subjective psychological constructs; and if we have no access to other minds; then mathematics is not an objective but a subjective science (each mathematician constructs his own numbers). Frege’s solution: numbers objects existing apart from subjects, which are studied by the mathematician – i.e. numbers are platonic ideas that the mathematician contemplates

So here we have a curious circle. Russell couldn’t stand the notion of numbers as platonic ideas and claims numbers are logical constructs; Husserl claims this cannot be true since numbers don’t exist spatiotemporally and hence are psychological constructs; and Frege rejects this on the basis of the subjectivism of mathematics and returns to the concept of number as platonic idea. This interaction and unsatisfying conclusion illustrates the intellectual climate someone like Husserl started from.

Husserl, moving on from his analysis of numbers, proceeds to investigate the objects of logic, to try to get a deeper understanding of what’s going on. The central question: If logic is not an empirical science (i.e. based on experience), then what is the status of logical objects? The contemporary main perspective on this was John Stuart Mill’s conception of logical objects as psychological experience – logic occupies itself with self-experience of its own thinking acts, hence logic equals psychology.

In his Logical Investigations (1900/1901) Husserl destroys this view. According to him, Mill’s psychologism is faulty: logical laws are strict while psychological laws are statistical; logic does not operate on experimental data, psychology does; logical laws cannot be falsified empirically (someone just thinks fallacious – this doesn’t falsify the logical law), psychological laws can; and valid logical conclusions cannot be denied without a contradiction, while this isn’t the case in psychology. So logic isn’t psychology – what is going on here? Husserl concludes that logic is an a priori science and we should distinguish between the thinking act and the contents of the thought. When someone reasons, the content of his/her thoughts is a spatiotemporal, worldly realisation of some ideal species of this particular proposition. And to analyse a particular thinking act, especially the relationship between all the different instances of the act and its content, one has to – again – resort to descriptive psychology – also called phenomenology.

This might sound abstract, but it is fundamental to all of Husserl’s work. He basically claims that the meaning of a proposition is determined by (1) the subject (2) thinking (3) this particular content. The material in which this proposition is communicated is irrelevant – the phenomenologist should just study the subject, the thinking act and the content of the thought. So me claiming ‘it rains’ gets meaning from me thinking that it rains. This can only be analysed through reflecting on my own thought process. So on one hand we end up (again) with Platonism: logical propositions are worldly realizations of ideal propositions as such; and on the other hand we end up with a very traditional theory of language: words get meaning through our mental life.

Let’s take stock of all the above – the first phase in Husserl’s thinking. Through analysis of numbers and propositions Husserl finds a new method, descriptive psychology (reflection on psychological acts) and understand these objects as ideal objects (in the platonic sense).
The next phase in Husserl’s career was the development of this method of descriptive psychology, or phenomenology, and in so doing he stumbled onto a whole new philosophical question: the existence of the material world.

This problem is much easier to understand than all of the above. On the one side we have our everyday life of experiences (senses, motion, etc.) and on the other side we have the physical world as described by mathematics. Ever since the seventeenth century (starting with Descartes) the question arose how the physical world causes our experienced world. John Locke was the first to analyse our senses in order to understand how we process the sense-data and form concepts and conceptual relations. This started of the tradition of empirical psychology, which studies how the objective world causes impressions in our minds, which we experience.

For Husserl, the question becomes: What is the status of these experiences? To answer this question, he relies on René Descartes, who claimed that besides all the worldly material, the mind is another substance that exists. The mind receives all these incoming impressions and orders these according to a priori principles (like pre-existing categories). This theory of knowledge is something that Immanuel Kant would later offer as an answer to Hume’s scepticism that both experience and logic are subjective fictions. In the nineteenth century, this tradition culminated in theories like Helmholtz’s or Freud’s, who claimed that the world is nothing but a projection of our own a priori apparatus onto something that is unintelligible – i.e. the world is a construction of our own imagination.

Husserl claims ‘an unintelligible world, a world as such’ is meaningless. Since we have (by definition) no experience of it, there’s no reason to postulate its existence. No, we should analyse our personal experiences of the world, again using descriptive psychology (or phenomenology), and describe what happens when we think we experience things (without dealing with these things themselves or questions of truth). When we do so, we will realize that both the physicist and the psychologist – the one from a physical worldview; the other from a psychological worldview – presuppose an already existing, a given world. Husserl claims this proves that phenomenology shows that we first, a priori, constitute the given world of everyday experience, and we subsequently – when confronted by this world and reflecting on it – start to study it.

And now we have (finally) ended up with the core programme of Husserl’s later career. He transforms his phenomenology as descriptive psychology (as method to study experience) into a fundamental philosophical discipline. To understand why, one only has to connect the last two mentioned things: Husserl basically claims that human beings constitute the everyday world, the world that’s a priori given to us, and that all the objective sciences (including psychology) are founded on the presupposition of the existence of this world. So a philosophy that analyses and defines this a priori (or transcendental) world is a science that will lay the foundation for both our everyday psychological experiences and all other sciences.

What Husserl does is improve upon Kant’s transcendental idealism. He throws away Kant’s ‘world as such’ and puts our psychological life into its place. Next, we study the relationship between the psyche and the world, and we discover that the world is a representation based on mental experiences – i.e. psychology constitutes the physical world. A regularity in our psyche seems to constitute a stable, coherent and consistent world, a world in which experiences seem to make sense. We don’t encounter a world in which we touch a coffee mug but don’t see or smell it – all of our experiences seem to be stable over time and form a coherent and consistent unity.

But there’s a problem. All of our mental experiences – e.g. sensory experiences, kinaesthetic experiences, etc. – take place, through our own bodies, in the spatiotemporal world. But this world was constituted by our mental experiences to begin with. This is what Husserl calls the ‘paradox of human subjectivity’. Our experiences are dependent upon our psychological acts; our psychological acts are dependent on our bodily life; but our bodily life is dependent on our psychological acts. The solution to the problem lies, for Husserl, in recognizing that we have to distinguish between natural psychology (or consciousness) and transcendental psychology (or consciousness). We have a consciousness of our world – the domain of psychology – and we have a deeper, a priori, fundamental consciousness – the domain of transcendental philosophy.

And this, basically, is Husserl’s philosophical growth over a period spanning more than four decades. He started off by studying the fundamental objects of math (numbers) and logic (propositions); constructed a method to perform this feat (phenomenology, or descriptive psychology); and, through his study of the causal connection between the physical and our psychological worlds, transformed his method of descriptive psychology into a method (the transcendental reduction) that allows for a strict science of transcendental Being (transcendental phenomenology). To enter the transcendental state, one has to reduce the experiential world of one’s subjective psychology to the most abstract, general and most certain world. How? To throw all questions of certainty out of the window. Stop doubting your experiences and simply analyse how objects show themselves to you; perceive the perceiving; and try to discover, step by step, what it is that forms the foundation of this perceiving.

For Husserl, the study of the subject (me), the thinking act (perceiving) and the thought (the coffee mug) is the road to an understanding of the a priori state of consciousness. And this transcendental ego, ultimately, is what constitutes, through acts of intentionality, the world around us, and its derivative: the world of physics.

What has all this got to do with a book on the supposed crisis of the European sciences? A book written in the crisis of Nazi Germany, by a German Jew, who was forbidden to work as a professor and kicked out of the academy by one his former students, then rector, Martin Heidegger?

Well, the final step one has to take to answer this question, is to realize that the philosopher, according to Husserl, is the functionary of humanity. The philosopher is part of a historical process of understanding Being and in so doing, offer humanity a sense of meaning. This sounds overly pretentious – and, to me, it is – but one only has to realize that each of us, human beings, is – in essence – such a transcendental ego. And to reach this state, we all can use the transcendental reduction, reducing our psychological life to a transcendental ego, and in so doing we realize that all of our fellow human beings are both as much objects of our own making as well as transcendental subjects in themselves. This inter-subjectivity is an important part in Husserl’s plea and it allows us to understand his broader claim.

Now where does the philosopher, as functionary of humanity, fit in? The fundamental task of the philosopher is to converse with past philosophers, and to take philosophy to the next step. Husserl, in a Hegelian fashion, claims modern philosophy was invented by Descartes and was led astray by the objectivist/empiricist psychologists, and that he, Husserl, with his discovery of transcendental phenomenology has ended all the historical drama. He has discovered humanity’s destiny, or ‘telos’ (goal) – and this is nothing but realizing pure reason. Reason will form the foundation of both our everyday (psychological) world as well as the objective world of the sciences. Or at least in theory, since Husserl claims he is very pessimistic and he sees irrationality all around him. Anno 1936 this has to be seen in light of the Nazi’s, but more so in light of the underlying philosophical currents: Nietzsche’s existentialism (claiming any foundation of anything was impossible – the best you can do is act on your Will to Power) was particularly dominant, but one gets the feeling that Husserl primarily fulminates against the metaphysical pretensions of a Heidegger, who threw any scientific aspirations out the window and solely focused on the given world, the world of everyday, as basis for human existence. (And Husserl saw what that led to…)

So on the one hand, the philosopher forms a community with past philosophers and tries define Being in its transcendental pureness and in so doing offer humanity a meaning (‘Sinn’); and on the other hand, this whole road to salvation seems almost totally cut off from the current road of destruction and mayhem that European humanity is taking.

I used the word ‘salvation’ on purpose, since this leads me to the final remark of this review. Husserl sees the transcendental ego, as foundation of reality, as immortal. Almost by definition, since space and time only exist in the constituted, objective world – of which the pure subject is the main spring. It basically reproduces the old Kantian problems: since the subject is unbounded by both space and time, it is deemed to be infinite. From this it follows that we have an infinite consciousness as fountainhead for the finite world. Without putting words into Husserl’s mouth, I feel suspicious about this whole idea for two reasons:

1. An infinite consciousness, independently existing from the material world, doesn’t only sounds like Cartesian dualism (which is philosophically problematic: How does the immaterial mind interact with the material world?), but it also smells like the Christian concept of an immortal soul – some entity that is imperishable that remains after the material world is destroyed. Husserl’s whole attempt seems to me a neat way to re-introduce Christian metaphysics in the form of a rational theology.

2. Why a rational theology? Well, because Husserl’s whole metaphysical system leads to idealism à la Berkeley. According to Berkeley, an eighteenth century philosopher, all that is, is experienced. Yet, I do not experience everything (for example my laptop when I’m not looking). It exists as an idea, yet I can’t prove that it exists objectively. But luckily we have an infinite God, who is good and all-knowing, and hence guarantees us a stable, coherent and consistent world – a world in which my laptop remains objectively there even when I’m not experiencing it. To me such philosophy is rather absurd (although interesting), but with Husserl this absurdism is combined with theological notions.

First, he proclaims himself to be a functionary of mankind, someone who – through contemplation from behind his desk – will offer mankind a better, more nobler goal than the current road she’s taking. If this doesn’t sound messianic, then what does? Second, even if the whole system stands, the one thing that Husserl leaves unexplained is who or what causes this regularity in our psyche? The mechanism that constitutes the everyday world in such a fashion that we experience it in a stable, consistent and coherent way? I can imagine a world in which my experiences of the apparent world are inconsistent – for example I see my laptop but cannot feel it, or vice versa. So there has to be a reason the world is thus and not otherwise.

Husserl, being a converted Protestant, seems to have been unable – although he tries his best to work out a very interesting, metaphysically neutral edifice on which to build all of reality – to shake off his Christian feathers. But this is simply me, a layman, guessing and interpreting, so take it for what it’s worth.


----------------------------------

(My recommendation in the comments below)

[Xander · Rating 3 out of 5]

Die Krisis der europaïschen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänemonologie (posthumously published in 1954; written in 1935-1936) is the last work Edmund Husserl ever wrote. Or rather: he wrote the first two parts of the book and was planning to write three more, but he passed away due to illness before being able to finish the book. This fact is in important, since his unfinished manuscript for the third part was collected and integrated with some personal notes, and then – together with the first two finished parts – published by Walter Biemel as one work.

This leads to the unavoidable problem of reading through a work that was still in progress and missing two fifths of its intended content. Add to this the fact that Husserl himself was a philosopher who radically developed his own ideas over a decades long career, and understanding the true intentions and meaning of Husserl’s final work becomes somewhat problematic. Then, why read it? Because Husserl went through a series of temporary philosophical phases over his career and hence picking up where he finished is the best way to understand both his ideas and the reasons why earlier ideas were replaced or modified. Also, it is (presumably) one of Husserl’s more readable works.

In order to understand the book, one has to understand Husserl’s career, which is not hard but it requires some familiarity with the historical tradition within modern philosophy (from Descartes onwards). Husserl, himself educated as both astronomer and mathematician, pretty soon switched to philosophy. This had to do with the radical breakthroughs in philosophy by the end of the nineteenth century: this was the time when both logic and mathematics were deepened by new philosophical discoveries. In Husserl’s time one of the more intriguing questions was the status of numbers, and this is where we have to start our trail.

In general, Husserl’s career can be divided into two phases. The first phase occupies itself with the development of phenomenology as descriptive psychology as a means to deal with the questions: What is a number? And, what is proposition? In short: Husserl delves into the status of the fundamental objects of mathematics and logic. The second phase occupies itself with the transformation of this descriptive psychology into a transcendental philosophy with accompanying method (transcendental phenomenology). Here, Husserl tries to analyse the status of the fundamental objects of the sciences (including both physics and psychology). In the end, Husserl stumbles onto a whole new method that allows him – or so he claims – to re-establish philosophy as a strict science, as the foundation of all of the other sciences (and the whole world – more on that later).

Now, first things first. At the end of the nineteenth century Bertrand Russell offered his own theory of numbers as an answer to the Platonism in mathematics (the notion of numbers as absolute existing ideas). Russell claimed numbers are nothing but sets of sets of concrete worldly objects – i.e. numbers are physical objects. Husserl (around 1891) disagreed and claimed numbers are properties of sets – i.e. sets are not physical objects (their elements are) but psychological activities. For Husserl, analysis of sets had to focus on the psychological act of ‘gathering together’ and reflection upon this collecting. In this, Husserl was influenced by his former inspiratory, Franz Brentano, a philosopher who founded the field of descriptive psychology as the foundation of scientific psychology (i.e. the description and classification of the fundamental objects that psychology then has to explain).

In short, for Husserl the foundation of mathematics consists in (1) clarifying the objects of the mathematical axioms – the task of the psychologist – and (2) deducing theorems from these axioms – the task of the mathematician.

An important contemporary logician, Gottlob Frege, rejected Husserl’s claim that numbers (as fundamental objects of mathematics) are psychological acts. According to Frege, if numbers are pure subjective psychological constructs; and if we have no access to other minds; then mathematics is not an objective but a subjective science (each mathematician constructs his own numbers). Frege’s solution: numbers objects existing apart from subjects, which are studied by the mathematician – i.e. numbers are platonic ideas that the mathematician contemplates

So here we have a curious circle. Russell couldn’t stand the notion of numbers as platonic ideas and claims numbers are logical constructs; Husserl claims this cannot be true since numbers don’t exist spatiotemporally and hence are psychological constructs; and Frege rejects this on the basis of the subjectivism of mathematics and returns to the concept of number as platonic idea. This interaction and unsatisfying conclusion illustrates the intellectual climate someone like Husserl started from.

Husserl, moving on from his analysis of numbers, proceeds to investigate the objects of logic, to try to get a deeper understanding of what’s going on. The central question: If logic is not an empirical science (i.e. based on experience), then what is the status of logical objects? The contemporary main perspective on this was John Stuart Mill’s conception of logical objects as psychological experience – logic occupies itself with self-experience of its own thinking acts, hence logic equals psychology.

In his Logical Investigations (1900/1901) Husserl destroys this view. According to him, Mill’s psychologism is faulty: logical laws are strict while psychological laws are statistical; logic does not operate on experimental data, psychology does; logical laws cannot be falsified empirically (someone just thinks fallacious – this doesn’t falsify the logical law), psychological laws can; and valid logical conclusions cannot be denied without a contradiction, while this isn’t the case in psychology. So logic isn’t psychology – what is going on here? Husserl concludes that logic is an a priori science and we should distinguish between the thinking act and the contents of the thought. When someone reasons, the content of his/her thoughts is a spatiotemporal, worldly realisation of some ideal species of this particular proposition. And to analyse a particular thinking act, especially the relationship between all the different instances of the act and its content, one has to – again – resort to descriptive psychology – also called phenomenology.

This might sound abstract, but it is fundamental to all of Husserl’s work. He basically claims that the meaning of a proposition is determined by (1) the subject (2) thinking (3) this particular content. The material in which this proposition is communicated is irrelevant – the phenomenologist should just study the subject, the thinking act and the content of the thought. So me claiming ‘it rains’ gets meaning from me thinking that it rains. This can only be analysed through reflecting on my own thought process. So on one hand we end up (again) with Platonism: logical propositions are worldly realizations of ideal propositions as such; and on the other hand we end up with a very traditional theory of language: words get meaning through our mental life.

Let’s take stock of all the above – the first phase in Husserl’s thinking. Through analysis of numbers and propositions Husserl finds a new method, descriptive psychology (reflection on psychological acts) and understand these objects as ideal objects (in the platonic sense).
The next phase in Husserl’s career was the development of this method of descriptive psychology, or phenomenology, and in so doing he stumbled onto a whole new philosophical question: the existence of the material world.

This problem is much easier to understand than all of the above. On the one side we have our everyday life of experiences (senses, motion, etc.) and on the other side we have the physical world as described by mathematics. Ever since the seventeenth century (starting with Descartes) the question arose how the physical world causes our experienced world. John Locke was the first to analyse our senses in order to understand how we process the sense-data and form concepts and conceptual relations. This started of the tradition of empirical psychology, which studies how the objective world causes impressions in our minds, which we experience.

For Husserl, the question becomes: What is the status of these experiences? To answer this question, he relies on René Descartes, who claimed that besides all the worldly material, the mind is another substance that exists. The mind receives all these incoming impressions and orders these according to a priori principles (like pre-existing categories). This theory of knowledge is something that Immanuel Kant would later offer as an answer to Hume’s scepticism that both experience and logic are subjective fictions. In the nineteenth century, this tradition culminated in theories like Helmholtz’s or Freud’s, who claimed that the world is nothing but a projection of our own a priori apparatus onto something that is unintelligible – i.e. the world is a construction of our own imagination.

Husserl claims ‘an unintelligible world, a world as such’ is meaningless. Since we have (by definition) no experience of it, there’s no reason to postulate its existence. No, we should analyse our personal experiences of the world, again using descriptive psychology (or phenomenology), and describe what happens when we think we experience things (without dealing with these things themselves or questions of truth). When we do so, we will realize that both the physicist and the psychologist – the one from a physical worldview; the other from a psychological worldview – presuppose an already existing, a given world. Husserl claims this proves that phenomenology shows that we first, a priori, constitute the given world of everyday experience, and we subsequently – when confronted by this world and reflecting on it – start to study it.

And now we have (finally) ended up with the core programme of Husserl’s later career. He transforms his phenomenology as descriptive psychology (as method to study experience) into a fundamental philosophical discipline. To understand why, one only has to connect the last two mentioned things: Husserl basically claims that human beings constitute the everyday world, the world that’s a priori given to us, and that all the objective sciences (including psychology) are founded on the presupposition of the existence of this world. So a philosophy that analyses and defines this a priori (or transcendental) world is a science that will lay the foundation for both our everyday psychological experiences and all other sciences.

What Husserl does is improve upon Kant’s transcendental idealism. He throws away Kant’s ‘world as such’ and puts our psychological life into its place. Next, we study the relationship between the psyche and the world, and we discover that the world is a representation based on mental experiences – i.e. psychology constitutes the physical world. A regularity in our psyche seems to constitute a stable, coherent and consistent world, a world in which experiences seem to make sense. We don’t encounter a world in which we touch a coffee mug but don’t see or smell it – all of our experiences seem to be stable over time and form a coherent and consistent unity.

But there’s a problem. All of our mental experiences – e.g. sensory experiences, kinaesthetic experiences, etc. – take place, through our own bodies, in the spatiotemporal world. But this world was constituted by our mental experiences to begin with. This is what Husserl calls the ‘paradox of human subjectivity’. Our experiences are dependent upon our psychological acts; our psychological acts are dependent on our bodily life; but our bodily life is dependent on our psychological acts. The solution to the problem lies, for Husserl, in recognizing that we have to distinguish between natural psychology (or consciousness) and transcendental psychology (or consciousness). We have a consciousness of our world – the domain of psychology – and we have a deeper, a priori, fundamental consciousness – the domain of transcendental philosophy.

And this, basically, is Husserl’s philosophical growth over a period spanning more than four decades. He started off by studying the fundamental objects of math (numbers) and logic (propositions); constructed a method to perform this feat (phenomenology, or descriptive psychology); and, through his study of the causal connection between the physical and our psychological worlds, transformed his method of descriptive psychology into a method (the transcendental reduction) that allows for a strict science of transcendental Being (transcendental phenomenology). To enter the transcendental state, one has to reduce the experiential world of one’s subjective psychology to the most abstract, general and most certain world. How? To throw all questions of certainty out of the window. Stop doubting your experiences and simply analyse how objects show themselves to you; perceive the perceiving; and try to discover, step by step, what it is that forms the foundation of this perceiving.

For Husserl, the study of the subject (me), the thinking act (perceiving) and the thought (the coffee mug) is the road to an understanding of the a priori state of consciousness. And this transcendental ego, ultimately, is what constitutes, through acts of intentionality, the world around us, and its derivative: the world of physics.

What has all this got to do with a book on the supposed crisis of the European sciences? A book written in the crisis of Nazi Germany, by a German Jew, who was forbidden to work as a professor and kicked out of the academy by one his former students, then rector, Martin Heidegger?

Well, the final step one has to take to answer this question, is to realize that the philosopher, according to Husserl, is the functionary of humanity. The philosopher is part of a historical process of understanding Being and in so doing, offer humanity a sense of meaning. This sounds overly pretentious – and, to me, it is – but one only has to realize that each of us, human beings, is – in essence – such a transcendental ego. And to reach this state, we all can use the transcendental reduction, reducing our psychological life to a transcendental ego, and in so doing we realize that all of our fellow human beings are both as much objects of our own making as well as transcendental subjects in themselves. This inter-subjectivity is an important part in Husserl’s plea and it allows us to understand his broader claim.

Now where does the philosopher, as functionary of humanity, fit in? The fundamental task of the philosopher is to converse with past philosophers, and to take philosophy to the next step. Husserl, in a Hegelian fashion, claims modern philosophy was invented by Descartes and was led astray by the objectivist/empiricist psychologists, and that he, Husserl, with his discovery of transcendental phenomenology has ended all the historical drama. He has discovered humanity’s destiny, or ‘telos’ (goal) – and this is nothing but realizing pure reason. Reason will form the foundation of both our everyday (psychological) world as well as the objective world of the sciences. Or at least in theory, since Husserl claims he is very pessimistic and he sees irrationality all around him. Anno 1936 this has to be seen in light of the Nazi’s, but more so in light of the underlying philosophical currents: Nietzsche’s existentialism (claiming any foundation of anything was impossible – the best you can do is act on your Will to Power) was particularly dominant, but one gets the feeling that Husserl primarily fulminates against the metaphysical pretensions of a Heidegger, who threw any scientific aspirations out the window and solely focused on the given world, the world of everyday, as basis for human existence. (And Husserl saw what that led to…)

So on the one hand, the philosopher forms a community with past philosophers and tries define Being in its transcendental pureness and in so doing offer humanity a meaning (‘Sinn’); and on the other hand, this whole road to salvation seems almost totally cut off from the current road of destruction and mayhem that European humanity is taking.

I used the word ‘salvation’ on purpose, since this leads me to the final remark of this review. Husserl sees the transcendental ego, as foundation of reality, as immortal. Almost by definition, since space and time only exist in the constituted, objective world – of which the pure subject is the main spring. It basically reproduces the old Kantian problems: since the subject is unbounded by both space and time, it is deemed to be infinite. From this it follows that we have an infinite consciousness as fountainhead for the finite world. Without putting words into Husserl’s mouth, I feel suspicious about this whole idea for two reasons:

1. An infinite consciousness, independently existing from the material world, doesn’t only sounds like Cartesian dualism (which is philosophically problematic: How does the immaterial mind interact with the material world?), but it also smells like the Christian concept of an immortal soul – some entity that is imperishable that remains after the material world is destroyed. Husserl’s whole attempt seems to me a neat way to re-introduce Christian metaphysics in the form of a rational theology.

2. Why a rational theology? Well, because Husserl’s whole metaphysical system leads to idealism à la Berkeley. According to Berkeley, an eighteenth century philosopher, all that is, is experienced. Yet, I do not experience everything (for example my laptop when I’m not looking). It exists as an idea, yet I can’t prove that it exists objectively. But luckily we have an infinite God, who is good and all-knowing, and hence guarantees us a stable, coherent and consistent world – a world in which my laptop remains objectively there even when I’m not experiencing it. To me such philosophy is rather absurd (although interesting), but with Husserl this absurdism is combined with theological notions.

First, he proclaims himself to be a functionary of mankind, someone who – through contemplation from behind his desk – will offer mankind a better, more nobler goal than the current road she’s taking. If this doesn’t sound messianic, then what does? Second, even if the whole system stands, the one thing that Husserl leaves unexplained is who or what causes this regularity in our psyche? The mechanism that constitutes the everyday world in such a fashion that we experience it in a stable, consistent and coherent way? I can imagine a world in which my experiences of the apparent world are inconsistent – for example I see my laptop but cannot feel it, or vice versa. So there has to be a reason the world is thus and not otherwise.

Husserl, being a converted Protestant, seems to have been unable – although he tries his best to work out a very interesting, metaphysically neutral edifice on which to build all of reality – to shake off his Christian feathers. But this is simply me, a layman, guessing and interpreting, so take it for what it’s worth.


----------------------------------

(My recommendation in the comments below)

[S h a y a N · Rating 4 out of 5]

گزیده‌ای از متن را در کتاب «از مدرنیسم تا پست‌مدرنیسم» مطالعه کردم و اثر اصلی را نخوانده‌م.

نقد هوسرل معطوف به «تکنیکی شدن علم» و «فراموشیِ ریشه‌ها» است. هوسرل می‌پرسد: «آیا علم و روش آن شبیه ماشینی نیستند که آشکارا در انجام همه‌ی امور مفید قابل اعتماد است...؟»
او می‌گوید علم مدرن مثل یک ماشین کارآمد شده است. همه یاد می‌گیرند چطور با این ماشین کار کنند (فرمول‌ها را حل کنند، آزمایش کنند)، اما هیچ‌کس دیگر نمی‌پرسد این ماشین چطور کار می‌کند یا «ضرورت درونی» آن چیست. دانشمندان تبدیل به «اپراتورهای» این ماشین شده‌اند بدون اینکه «فهم فلسفی» عمیقی از کاری که می‌کنند داشته باشند.

متن اشاره‌ای می‌کند به: «استلزامات معنایی که توسط رسوب یا سنت... پنهان شده‌اند.»
منظور هوسرل این است که مفاهیم علمی (مثل مفاهیم هندسه یا فیزیک) وقتی اولین بار کشف شدند، برای کاشفشان زنده و معنادار بودند. اما با گذشت زمان، آن معنای اولیه ته‌نشین یا رسوب شده و زیر لایه‌ای از فرمول‌ها پنهان شده است. ما امروزه از قضیه فیثاغورس استفاده می‌کنیم، بدون اینکه آن «شهود اولیه‌ای» که فیثاغورس داشت را بازسازی کنیم.

هوسرل می‌پرسد: «آیا این روش به یک سیر قهقرایی نامتناهی نمی‌انجامد؟»
یعنی اگر ما فقط استفاده‌کننده از نتایج گذشتگان باشیم و ندانیم آنها بر چه اساسی این مفاهیم را ساخته‌اند، علم تبدیل به مجموعه‌ای از پیش‌فرض‌های کورکورانه می‌شود که ریشه‌اش گم شده است.

خلاصه‌ی نقد هوسرل در این چند صفحه‌ای که مطالعه کردم این است که علم مدرن دچار "تهی‌شدگی معنا" شده است. روش‌های علمی عالی کار می‌کنند، اما دانشمندان دیگر نمی‌دانند "چرا" و "چگونه" این مفاهیم به جهان واقعیت متصل می‌شوند. علم تبدیل به یک "تکنیک" شده است.

[Sencer Turunç · Rating 5 out of 5]

"İnsan, ruhsal olarak hiçbir zaman bitmiş bir ürün olmadı, hiç bir zaman da olmayacak, o kendini hiçbir zaman yineleyemez."

"Yozlaşmış yaşamın sayısız belirtisiyle kendini açığa vuran "varoluş bunalımı" belirsiz bir yazgı, yenilmez, değişmez bir kötü yazgı değildir."

Husserl'e göre böyle bir bunalımdan çıkmanın iki yolu var; ya yaşamın (akıl pusulasını kaybedip) duygusal hezeyanı içerisinde bir barbarlığa teslim olmak, ya da akılcı pusulayı sıkıca eline alıp yiğitçe ilerlemek ve yeni bir ruha varmak... Bu ilerleyişteki en büyük tehlike ise yorgunluktur.

[Silvester Borsboom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Het was een aardige grind om dit werk dit weekend nog uit te lezen, maar het is gelukt en ik geloof weer in de universele, rationele filosofie als hoogste wetenschap. Althans, als Husserl waar kan maken wat hij pretendeert... Probleem van dit boek is namelijk wel dat Husserl zegt van alles fenomenologisch te willen onderzoeken, zonder dat het daar ook echt van komt. Dat zal ook wel te wijten zijn aan het feit dat het werk nooit is afgemaakt, dus ik zal nog wat meer voltooide Husserl moeten lezen om te kijken wat ik nou echt van de fenomenologie vind.

[JobyC · Rating 4 out of 5]

The phenomenologically important concept, or, rather, phenomenon, of the life world is manifested here (this world being our originary, common world, the pregivenness of our milieu, which can only be regarded as what it is if one lets it be a presuppositionless phenomenon, taking no position regarding its being from any of the positive sciences, or from any everyday life understandings, making the life world truly bare of theoretical superstructures). Husserl's use of this world is meant to open a realm of original phenomenological analyses that would ground all of the positive sciences, as well as philosophy, to understand them in their most basic structures. All objective sciences for Husserl are no more than theoretical superstructures grounded on the life world, and are, strictly speaking, unable to be experienced rigorously, because they are transcendental epistemological frameworks instead of immediate phenomena. He deals here with the history of philosophy as a philosophy of history, the mathematization of nature, original intersubjectivity, the transcendental ego, phenomenological psychology, etc.

Definitely worth a patient reading, and a great clarification of Husserl's phenomenology (maybe only for the already acquainted reader, and not only because of Husserl's convoluted writing style), which he ultimately tried to make into the most basic ontology, perhaps grounding even the ontological analyses of Heidegger.

[Arkar Kyaw · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why read those dead ancient authors when you can just read textbook and listen to lecture? Because it is important to read original text. Maybe this book will answer why it is important to read original text.

[Ali Kasaie]

ترجمه ی کتاب بسیار بد است و بهتر است از متن انگلیسی یا آلمانی استفاده شود .
هوسرل در این کتاب به بررسی امکانِ داشتنِ یک فلسفه ی قاره ای در تقابل با روانشناسی و علوم مدرن می پردازد . بدون چنین مقدمه ای ، صحبت از فلسفه های قاره ای و در راس آنان اگزیستانسیالیسم بی معنا خواهد بود .

[Jorge · Rating 4 out of 5]

El positivismo es de los peores errores del ser humano

[Korhan Günsor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Metafizik fideizm-skeptisizm ikileminin geriliminde tüm nitelikleri tekil soyut bir noktaya toplayarak adeta buharlaştırır; geride sadece kuru tikel nicelikler kalır. Faşizm bol bol disiplinler arası metabasis yapar veya nitelikleri niceliklere indirger. Biyoloji en kapsamlı parçacık ilişkili ve sosyoloji en kapsamlı olgu ilişkili disiplinler olsalar bile matematiğe indirgeyemeyecekleri unsurları mevcuttur. Matematikse en kapsamlı ontolojik unsurları bile çözebilecek organikliĝe ulaşma dinamizmine sahiptir. Fakat arı bilim yani mantık bunların hepsinin aşkın sınırı seviyesindeki sezgi ufkuna sahiptir. Hayal gücü ise spekülasyon kapasitesi ile nicelikleri niteliklere öteler, sonsuzlukları önümüzde diz çöktürür. Çünkü hayal gücü, varlığın kendisini değil, varlığın ötesindeki imkânı yakalar. Sonsuzluk orada artık bir sayı değil, bir korku, bir arzu, bir aşk, bir isyandır.Bu yüzden en büyük devrimler, en büyük sanat eserleri, en büyük direnişler hep hayal gücünden doğar. Faşizmin en çok korktuğu şey de budur: hesaplanamayan, indirgenemeyen, diz çökmeyen insan hayal gücü.
Bu dünya nesnel-olgu dünyası değil, anlam dünyasıdır.
Bir masa bilimde “uzunluk × genişlik × yükseklik + madde yoğunluğu”dur.
Yaşam dünyasında ise “yemek yediğimiz, mektup yazdığımız, çocukken saklambaç oynadığımız, babamın öldüğü gün başımızı yasladığımız masa”dır.
Husserl’in kendisi yaşlandıkça “yaşam dünyası” (Lebenswelt) kavramına yönelmiş, bilimin unutmuş olduğu ön-bilimsel deneyimi yeniden merkeze almıştır (Bunalım kitabı). Neden hala çok önemli? Çünkü Husserl, niteliği niceliğe indirgemeyi reddeder. Pozitivizmin, davranışçılığın, yapay zekânın “bilinç sadece hesaplanabilir süreçtir” iddiasına karşı çıkar. Bilinçte her zaman anlam, öz, yaşanmışlık vardır ve bunlar matematiksel modele tam olarak indirgenemez. Bugün bilinç felsefesi, bilişsel bilimler, yapay zekâ etiği tartışmalarında Husserl’süz düşünmek neredeyse imkânsızdır. Kısaca: Husserl, hayal gücünün değil ama saf görmenin (intuition of essences) filozofuydu. Hayal gücü spekülasyonla sonsuzluğu diz çöktürürken, Husserl’in fenomenolojisi tam da olduğu gibi, saf halde sonsuzluğu görmemizi sağlar.
Husserl’in teşhisi: Galileo’yla başlayan modern bilim, dünyayı matematiksel idealizasyonla değiştirdi.
Gerçek dünyayı (yaşanmış, nitelikli, anlamlı olanı) paranteze aldı ve onun yerine formüller dünyasını koydu.
Bu işlem çok başarılı oldu: roketler uzaya çıktı, ilaçlar bulundu. Ama bedeli ağır oldu: İnsan kendisiyle, anlamla, nitelikle bağını kaybetti. Bilim “nasıl” sorusunu mükemmel cevaplıyor ama “niçin” sorusunu unuttu.
Sonuç: Avrupa uygarlığının krizi, nihilizm, faşizm, teknokratik totaliterlik.
Van Breda isimli Belçikalı bir rahip ve doktora öğrencisi, Edmund Husserl'in vefatından sonra, büyük çabalarla kapsamlı yazılarını ve el yazmalarını Nazilerin yok etmesinden kurtardı .
Doktora tezini hazırlamak için 1938'de Almanya'nın Freiburg şehrine gitti ve burada Edmund Husserl'in (1859–1938) mirasında 40.000'den fazla Gabelsberger stenografi el yazması ve onun tüm araştırma kütüphanesini buldu. O dönemde Almanya'daki siyasi durum onu ​​bu el yazmalarını ve Husserl'in özel kütüphanesini Leuven'e taşıması gerektiğine ikna etti .
Van Breda, Husserl'in eski asistanları Eugen Fink ve Ludwig Landgrebe'yi de bu belgelerin Leuven'de düzenlenmesi için iş birliği yapmaya ikna etmeyi başardı. II. Dünya Savaşı'nın başlarında belgeler, 17 Mayıs 1940'ta küle dönen Leuven'deki üniversite kütüphanesinde saklanıyordu. Neyse ki, yangından bir hafta önce Van Breda belgeleri Yüksek Felsefe Enstitüsü'ne götürmeye karar verdi.
1943 yılında belgeler, güvenlik amacıyla Leuven'deki farklı yerlere dağıtıldı; bunlar arasında Felsefe Enstitüsü'nün bodrum katındaki bir sığınak ve Postel Manastırı da vardı . Savaştan sonra belgeler Felsefe Enstitüsü'ne geri getirildi ve burada Edmund Husserl'in tüm eserlerini içeren Husserliana'nın temelini oluşturdular.
Profesör Edmund Husserl, 4 Mayıs 1933'te Almanya'daki son rejim değişikliğini ve sonuçlarını şöyle ele almış:
"1933'te gerçek Almanya'nın hangisi olduğunu ve gerçek Almanların kimler olduğunu, yani günün az ya da çok materyalist-mitolojik ırksal önyargılarına inananların mı, yoksa geçmişin büyük Almanlarının mirasçıları olan, geleneklerini saygıyla anıp sürdüren, kalbi ve zihni temiz Almanların mı olduğunu yalnızca gelecek belirleyecektir." - Richard Evans, Üçüncü Reich'ın Gelişi sfn. 421

[William Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was Husserl's last, finished in 1937, a year before his death and two years before Germany invaded Poland. The book was polished up by his assistant and clarified by various scholars and translators, resulting in the current version. Despite all the work that went into finishing it, the book is still somewhat chaotic, self-contradictory, and repetitive, but nonetheless it's the best statement of Husserl's final thinking on the phenomenological project.

This David Carr translation includes the Crisis, a lengthy and helpful translator's introduction, and nine short essays and lectures by Husserl that clarify some of his thoughts, and that includes The Vienna Lecture, a well-known lecture delivered in 1935.

So what is the crisis of European sciences (by which he means all Western science)? Having struggled through the book, filling the margins with notes, my summary of the crisis is this: Modern science has become totally objective, blind to its own subjectivity, resulting in a description of the world that has no place for consciousness. Why is that a problem? Because knowledge requires subjective judgment, but the scientific description of the world absurdly excludes the scientists themselves from it. It therefore cannot be correct.

How can this "absurdity" (a favorite word of Husserl's) be corrected? By using the epistemological method of transcendental phenomenology to "ground" scientific knowledge in consciousness and do away with the myth of absolute objectivity. In the phenomenological method, one studies the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity so that nominally "objective" science is no longer blind to itself.

I am totally on board with that suggestion in principle but only in principle. If the scientific method were actually revised that way, I fear the entire edifice would collapse, throwing us all back into a dark world of arbitrary opinion, superstition and magic. I'd rather have the absurdity.

Any scientist who does not automatically dismiss all talk of consciousness would say that the scientific method already accommodates the fact of subjectivity by deliberately excluding it from consideration. That is exactly what scientific control conditions are designed to do. Scientists do not want subjectivity in science. Subjectivity leads to bias, or worse.

But Husserl argues that the current scientific approach is "naïve" (another favorite word) because the job of science is to explain the world. Understanding the world necessarily entails subjectivity, because only subjectivity can "constitute" (define) what something means. Meaning is judgment. Subjectivity cannot be excluded from scientific observation.

Furthermore, meaning is ultimately defined in a community, which raises the question of how people agree on things. The answer: with inter-subjectivity. Therefore, scientists can't know anything without being grounded in subjectivity. A purely objective science is an oxymoron.

What about scientific psychology? Isn't that supposed to be the science of the mind? Husserl's scorn for psychology drips from the pages. Scientific psychology engages subjectivity, he says, about as much as statistics engages morality. As a cognitive psychologist, I have to agree.

While Husserl's elaboration of these ideas runs higher than the highest mountain and deeper than the deepest sea, that is roughly his argument, in my intimidated opinion. The book is highly rewarding for the persistent, but honestly, it is so dense that I cannot recommend it for the average reader. A better approach to Husserl would be to use secondary sources such as Smith, B., and Smith, D.W. (eds.), 1995, The Cambridge Companion to Husserl. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Husserl, Edmund (1954/1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. David Carr (trans.). Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 405 pp.

[Alan]

"un'umanità che si concepisce come un'umanità razionale, un'umanità che comprende di essere razionale nel voler-essere-razionale, che comprende che ciò significa infinità della vita e degli sforzi verso la ragione, che la ragione sta a indicare proprio ciò verso cui l'uomo, in quanto uomo, tende nel suo intimo, ciò che soltanto lo può pacificare, che può renderlo «felice», che la ragione non può essere distinta in ragione «teoretica», «pratica» ed «estetica» e simili, che l'essere-uomo implica un essere-teleologico e un dover-essere, e che questa teleologia domina ogni azione e ogni progetto egologico, che la ragione può riconoscere in tutto, attraverso l'auto-comprensione, il telos apodittico e che questa conoscenza dell estrema auto-comprensione non può assumere altra forma se non quella dell' auto-comprensione secondo principi a priori, di un auto-comprensione nella forma della filosofia."

[Libia Fibilo · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tratto da una serie di conferenze.

L'idea centrale del libro è quella di non allontanare la ricerca scientifica dall'esperienza che ne ha diretti i motivi e sostenute le forze.

Un libro prolisso, che non sa dove va né dove arriva, e riassumibile come sopra.

Deve essere stato difficile tentare di salvare un profilo accademico del tutto superato.

Nel panorama dei logici matematici la filosofia si è risolta in ricentramento ingegneristico (Turing, Von Neumann) o resoconto storico o brutta letteratura.

Questa è brutta letteratura. Bisogna accettare che molta filosofia è quello che si scrive cercando di avere un'idea chiara quando non c'è la abbiamo. Pubblicare le idee chiare così raggiunte va bene, ma pubblicare anche il modo più o meno confuso, più o meno prolisso con cui le si è raggiunte è uno spreco di carta e, al più, uno specchietto per le allodole.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

The full text of the Origin of Geometry included with the main text makes this worth taking a look at. As for the text itself, it's incomplete. Husserl himself was a perpetual beginner when it came to philosophy and funnily enough, said early in the text that every philosopher, in order to strike the philosophical gold, must make the Cartesian move and bracket their beliefs. This isn't to return to a sphere of pure immanence/interiority, but to as Merleau-Ponty later put it, "loosen the intentional threads
that connect us to the world in order to make them appear" and let the world appear as it does without science or our common-sense beliefs distorting it.

Two valuable concepts that come of this work are the "lifeworld" and "sedimentation", both of which later thinkers pick up and roll with. These 2 ideas alone are worth reading this for.

[James Millikan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Husserl's The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology is an ambitious and interesting work that makes a strong case for the extension of history, philosophy, and cultural studies beyond the limits of narrow scientism. This text applies many of the insights of the Cartesian Meditations in a way that illustrates what a healthy phenomenology (i.e., one that returns "to the things themselves" and "brackets" the distortions of logical positivism) looks like in practice. The book was unfinished, but nevertheless contains many polished observations that point the way towards a rich and interdisciplinary worldview. Recommended.

[Magnus · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most accesible books by Edmund Husserl (Maybe because Eugene Fink, who is known for expressing himself clearly, was kind of a collaborator?)

With usual detail, Husserl shows why the transcendental reduction is a necessity, and not just an optional tool, for seeing reality unconditioned and not pre-given. Unfortunately Husserl didn't complete the book. He passed away before it was finnished. Still, this book is one of the cornerstones of transcendental phenomenolgy.

(This was my second reading, and it was well worth it)

[Gwiezdzisteniebo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fatalny wstęp. Całe nieszczęście polega na tym, że ten rzeczony wstęp wypełnia 80% treści. Obsesyjne wywody na temat galileuszowskich dociekań, będące w większosci tautologicznymj parafrazami siebie samego uznaję za tę kiepską część. Krótkie przedstawienie teorii poznania Locke'a i Hume'a uznaję za tę dobrą część, której jednak, przy całej jej syntetycznej klarowności, daleko do czegoś wybitnego. Mało wniosków. Mało ciekawych refleksji. Ostatecznie może i dobre na początek, nie wiem.

Meh.
Zawód.